Poor Timmy. Just once he had embraced in terror the ghost of the district poultry officer he had lain dreaming about uselessly long ago in Visakhapatnam, and in doing so had exorcised that ghost, and now he had his name on an overbearing twit's hit list in an attic in Handbag. This was not fair. My opinion of John Rutka, which had seemed to bottom out in recent hours, began again to slide.
I stuffed my notes in my pocket, put my still-damp shirt back on, switched off the fan and the lights, and returned to the second floor, careful to double-lock the attic door. I zipped the keys back inside the hippo's belly.
With the insurance agent on the way down the front walk toward his burgundy Lincoln, I said to Rutka in the front hall, 'My boyfriend's in your file.'
A little dry laugh. 'I thought you'd get a charge out of. that.' Sandifer stood at the end of the hall grinning nervously.
'I don't.'
'Oh, what the- It's just a fucking file!' He hobbled into the living room too fast, nearly stumbled, and went down hard on the couch. 'There's nothing in the file except that one fucking call. What was I gonna do with it, anyway? I can't out somebody who's already out, can I? You two are the most famous queer couple in Albany. In the paper they refer to you as 'the Albany private investigator and acknowledged homosexual,' and Callahan is almost as notorious as you are. So please don't go all self-righteous on me, Strachey, because I would find that very, very hard to take.'
I said, 'What if I hadn't known?'
He rolled his eyes and sighed grandly. 'Well, of course you'd know. Or if you didn't know, you wouldn't care. Hey, I know all about you, Strachey. You've been playing around on the side since day one, and it was only reasonable for me to assume that you and Callahan had an open relationship, and he was doing it too, and it was cool. Why are you making such a big fucking thing about this? I don't get it. I just don't get it.'
He looked genuinely mystified. Sandifer came down the hall now and stood listening.
I said, 'First of all, it's been years since I've had sex with men other than Timothy Callahan. For reasons of avoiding the plague, for Timmy's emotional well-being, and because it just doesn't seem to matter to me as much as it once did, I don't do it. And the fact is, he never did it. Emotionally it is not his style. But whatever the two of us do or don't do sexually, together or with others, John, the simple fact of the matter is, none of it is any of your goddamn business!'
I yelled the last part, and Rutka flinched.
Sandifer went and sat beside Rutka on the couch and took his hand and held it. Rutka's eyes were off in different directions; he began to shake his head from side to side. 'Now I'm really fucked. I've alienated you, and I am totally, totally fucked. Oh, shit.
Shit, shit, shit.'
I'd had enough. I said, 'I think I need to get away from you, John. Before I punch your face in.' Would I now have to add myself to the list of people who had threatened Rutka? 'I'm going over to talk to the Handbag police about getting you some protection. I do believe, John, that you make people want to kill you, and maybe somebody really is trying to do it. You should stay here because the arson squad will be here soon. Eddie, can you wait here until I get back?'
'I'll call in at work,' he said. 'I can finish up some things this evening.'
'Are you going to ditch me?' Rutka said, giving me the evil eye. 'Because I left your boyfriend's folder in the file? I could have taken it out, you know. I thought about that. I left it in because I thought the only way you'd work with me was if I was straightforward with you and didn't hold anything back or hide anything. I guess I should have been more devious.'
'Removing Timmy's file would not have been deviousness,' I said. 'That would be called tact-not giving offense when to do so would be petty or needless. But the real problem for me is, John, that there shouldn't have been a file on Timmy up there in the first place, and there shouldn't be a file up there on ninety-eight percent of those people. Just as if I'd wandered into J. Edgar Hoover's personal cache in 1965, your files make me want to throw up.'
He got a panicky look. 'Are you quitting? Are you abandoning me?'
'Not yet. But I'm close to it. A lot will depend on what I find out about you from the Handbag police.'
'Your mind is closed,' he said with a moan, and I left. end user
8
As I pulled out, the arson squad drove up, two guys in jackets in a state car. I left Elmwood Place and turned north out of residential Handbag and past the old brick lady's-pocketbook factories the town had taken its name from in the 1880s. Handbag's last handbag had been produced in July of 1968, when the stitchers and clampers struck for a dollar-and-a-quarter-an-hour raise over three years, and management didn't even schedule a bargaining session. A union leader claimed the managers just left the screen doors flapping and drove out to the airport. I've read there's now a town in Malaysia called Hahndoo-Bahgoo.
The factories I passed were boarded up, some with roofs fallen in. Now people worked down in Albany for the state or in so-called 'service industries,' some of which were doing something socially useful-fixing cars, deciphering tax forms, delivering pizza-and many of which were not. Employing fifty or sixty people in Handbag was a new outfit I'd read about called Sell-You-Ler Telephone, a telemarketing firm. The company was paid large sums by other companies to bother people at home. It seemed an unlikely way to try to restore American economic competitiveness in the world, but that's probably not what Sell-You-Ler's owners had in mind. As I rolled up Broad Street, there the damn place was. I thought about going in and bothering somebody, but figured they would have systems in place to prevent this.
I grabbed a quick burger at a drive-up window, and when they asked me if I'd like an apple pie for dessert, I asked them if they'd like to read my copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I said it was a wonderful novel.
The Handbag police station was in a wing of Town Hall, a two-story pale-brick and concrete-slab structure. Bland and easy to take, the building looked like a Jimmy Carter public works project. A clerk behind the counter had never heard of me, but she ushered me to a window-less room with a collapsible table and some folding chairs and asked me to take a seat. I started to count the pores in the beige cinderblock walls, and ten minutes later, at two- fifteen, the door opened and a man shambled in and shut the door behind him.
Chief of Police Harold 'Bub' Bailey nodded, shook my hand cordially, and said, 'Don't get up.' In his gray sports jacket, yellow polo shirt, and khakis, Bailey looked less like a police chief than the manager of a bowling alley, except less harried. Sixtyish, with receding gray hair and a round face with a droll, noncommittal look, he came across as a man alert to his surroundings but not ready to get too excited by them. He seated himself across the table from me and spread out some folders.
'You're a private investigator,' he said. 'That's the way to live. Take the ones you want to work on and let the rest go. I wish I could get away with that.'
'It has its advantages,' I said. 'Though the pension plan is poor.'
'That's something to think about, you bet.'
'If you could pick and choose your cases,' I said, 'would you have picked the one we're here to talk about?'
'I sure would've. Charlie Rutka was a friend of mine and he wouldn't have wanted anything to happen to his son. And I don't want anything to happen to young John, either. That's what I want to talk to you about.'
'Good. That's what I wanted to talk to you about.'
He fiddled with the folders on the table thoughtfully and said, 'How well do you know your client, Mr. Strachey?'
'I've known him casually for a year. This is our first close contact. Why?'
He looked at me somberly and said, 'I think that you're a professional and I've heard that you're an honest man.'
'I try to be both, but I have lapses.'
