want me go out and pick up some booze? We gonna get thirsty, I'm thinking.'
I said, 'Out,' and pointed to the open door.
Juan looked worried, but Ramon stood up, slithered out of his briefs, walked over and placed my hand on his unexceptional erection. 'I gone fuck you till you blow up, man. I gone fuck you till you the happiest man in LA. I gone…'
I led him away. He resisted when we came to the door-sill, but I had a firm grip and he yielded soon enough. As we emerged into the parking lot Timmy pulled up in the rental car, got out, and said, 'My little horse must think it queer to stop without a farmhouse near.'
'I found him and his friend in the room. They're just on their way out. They claim to be secular humanists, but I know a couple of Alexandrian Copts when I see them. I told that guy.'
Juan sidled out the door wearing pants now and carrying a distressed bundle of clothing and shoes. I released Ramon, who dressed rapidly, muttering and hurling imprecations at me in two languages. 'I gonna talk to Teddy, man! I don' like getting fucked over, and somebody gonna pay for this, man!'
I introduced Timmy to Kyle Toot, then went in and rang the desk. 'Is this Teddy?'
'Speaking.'
'This is Donald Strachey in one-oh-six. I said secular humanist twins and you sent me a couple of Aztec Jehovah's Witnesses. Now if you can't even come up with a pair of certified Unitarians, just forget it. I'm warning you, I'll want to see their ACLU membership cards. Do you understand what I'm saying? My friend and I have very specific tastes.'
'I'll have to make some more calls.'
'If we have to go back to Lynchburg horny, it'll be your fault.' I slammed down the receiver.
Timmy was shaking his head. 'Don, really.'
'You're making a big mistake,' Toot said. 'He'll have a set of hot Unitarians in here inside of an hour. This is LA.'
I said, 'No. It isn't possible.'
'You'll see.'
I rang Teddy back and said, 'This is Strachey in one-oh-six again. Cancel the Unitarians. We just heard about a Trivial Pursuit tournament at a bar in Westwood, and it's first things first.'
'Fuckin' eastern kooks!' Teddy said, and hung up on me.
TWELVE
We sat in the motel.Stapling Raffle tickets for an American Legion post in Pomona that was selling chances on a VCR, two cases of Johnnie Walker, and eighteen frozen turkeys. I brought Timmy up-to-date on the day's events, and he described his visit to the LA County courthouse, where he verified the legitimacy of Al Piatek's will. Kyle Toot told us more about Piatek's last days, including his dipping into Lenihan's millions-with Jack's permission- to throw a good-bye party for himself.
He invited twenty-three friends in the recording business; five showed up.
They consumed thirty-seven ounces of Beluga caviar spread on Nabisco saltines and six bottles of Clos Vougeot '64. At two in the morning Piatek passed out in his chair by the stereo, where he had been selecting the tapes to be played. He never regained consciousness and died in a hospital bed three days later. His last words, as far as anyone could recall, had been, 'My feet are cold.'
At 4:45 my contact at the investigating agency downtown phoned with the news that two toll calls had been placed from Joan Lenihan's phone the previous weekend. One, on Saturday, at 5:43 P.M., was to Jack Lenihan's Albany number, and the conversation had lasted for just three minutes. The other call, on Monday, at 9:12 A.M. was to a number in Troy, New York, listed under the name Florence Trenky. That call lasted twenty-two minutes. I thanked my friend and told him to bill me at my Albany address, thinking he'd say forget it, but he didn't.
I told Timmy and Kyle Toot what I had learned, and asked Toot, 'Did Jack ever mention a Florence Trenky?'
'No, I'd remember that one. Though Jack didn't talk much about his current life in Albany. He and Al mostly talked about the old days there, growing up and their secret life in the Piateks' attic. When he came here in October to bring the money out to Al, Jack did tell me about his recent separation from his lover, Warren something-or- other.'
'Slonski.'
'He didn't really want to leave Slonski, he said, but there was something important he said he had to do that Slonski wouldn't approve of and wouldn't want to be mixed up in. I guess that was the big money and the political wheeling and dealing, right?'
'Right. And he never gave you any clue about where he'd gotten the two and a half million?'
'He joked about being afraid the suitcases containing the money might break open in the plane's baggage compartment, though that hadn't happened. Otherwise, all he said was that what he was doing was completely moral. He kept repeating that to both me and Al, trying to reassure us.'
'Maybe he was trying to reassure himself too. Did you ever get that impression?'
Toot put down his stapler and considered this. After a moment, he said,
'No. I don't think there was any doubt in Jack's mind at all about the ethical correctness of what he was doing. In fact, he once said, 'Two wrongs can make a right.' He seemed to be certain of this, and very determined to right some kind of wrong. Whatever it was. Maybe Joan Lenihan knows all about it. I got the impression thajt they were quite close, that they confided in each other. Do you think she knows the whole story?'
'I think so, yes. The essentials, anyway. The question is, will she ever tell a living soul?'
'If she does,' Toot said, 'it will be Gail Tesney, not any of us.'
'We're back to Gail. I'd like to talk with her alone. Does she work on the AIDS unit too?'
'No, on the next floor up, cardiac care.'
'Can you find out when she's on today?'
Toot phoned the hospital where Lenihan and Tesney worked and learned that Gail had come on duty at four o'clock. 'She'll probably have her dinner break at seven or seven-thirty. If you go out there, I'd like to come along to keep you from asking too much of Gail, or pressuring her into something that'll make trouble between her and Joan.'
'She can say no to anything I ask her to do. She's a grown-up.'
'Yeah, she's a grown-up, but you're an arrogant, con-niving son of a bitch. I think I'm going to have to keep a close eye on you.'
Timmy, never happier than when playing the task-oriented monk, was sitting cross-legged on the floor stapling maniacally, complaining from time to time of lower back pains but not letting up in raffle-book production.
Now he set his stapler down and said, 'He s not always like that, Kyle. But when he thinks he can put one over on Albany municipal government, his brain sputters and shorts out. He turns into this one-man vigilante mob out to pour hot lead- metaphorically speaking, of course-into the corrupt guts of the Albany city fathers. If an innocent bystander or two gets in the way, tough luck.'
I said, 'I'm being ganged up on. I don't like that.'
'Rather than turning this whole business over to the police,' Timmy went on blithely, 'where a murder investigation properly belongs, he's got the both of us flying back and forth across North America-on my MasterCard, mind you; he's over his limit, as usual-trying to get hold of five suitcases full of money that belongs to God-knows-who. And it's all because I refused to run away to the Caribbean with him on a whim.'
'Not entirely true.'
'And,' he went on, as Toot listened gravely, 'this whole deal is predicated on the assumption that Jack Lenihan's two and a half million was legitimately obtained. Now that we know that Al Piatek was just a friendly conduit and not a wealthy philanthropist, we have to be highly suspicious of the money's origins. I think we're back to dopers' money, and that scares the hell out of me. People like that are not to be diddled with, as it appears Jack Lenihan learned too late.'
