'John would be grateful,' Sandifer said, and began to grow teary again. 'He's always sort of expected to be disappointed in the people he's counted on. It was years before he even trusted me totally. It would have mattered a lot that you stuck by him, Strachey.'
Timmy sat there with a quizzical look, as if unsure how I had managed to end up taking on work that would help serve as a memorial to a man Timmy had considered rotten to the core and whom I hadn't been too crazy about either. Whatever my degree of responsibility or lack of it in John Rutka's death-I didn't have the will or the energy to think about that quite yet-I was still obliged to stay on the case for one very good reason: as soon as I found the killer I could burn the loathsome files.
I said, 'We'd better haul the files out of here and over to Crow Street, where I can lock them up.' Timmy winced. 'Eddie, maybe you'd better come too. You're probably in no danger, but you'll be able to feel secure in our spare room, and anyway I might need you to answer some questions about the files.'
'Yeah, okay. I don't want to stay here alone tonight. I don't want to sleep alone in that room.'
In the teenaged girl's bedroom on the second floor, Sandifer reached into the hippo's belly for the attic keys. He groped around, then shook the animal, vigorously, and then frantically.
'The keys aren't here.'
We tore out to the attic door, which hung open. The keys dangled in the upper of the two locks. The light was on in the airless attic but the fan was off, as if someone had been there briefly and then left in a hurry. The desk and file cabinet appeared undisturbed, except that the top file drawer had been pulled out. It did not have a ransacked look, however. I said, 'I suppose there's no way to tell if a file has been removed, or is there?'
'The index,' Sandifer said, and opened the top drawer of the desk. He removed a bundle of papers clipped together and said,
'We'll have to go through both drawers and check the files against the list. Do you think whoever took John made him open the files first and took his own out?'
'His or theirs. That's what it looks like.'
'Jesus. Then all we have to do to find out who did it is to see whose file is missing.'
'Maybe. Though a killer who's playing with a full deck would have thought of the possibility of an index to the files and would have taken them all. Or he'd have taken someone else's file to aim the investigation in the wrong direction.'
'Maybe he's not that smart,' Sandifer said, and I hoped he was right. Although it was soon apparent that whether the pilferer of the files was brilliant or stupid hardly mattered at all. end user
12
There's no name on this entry,' Timmy said. 'It just says 'A for All-American Asshole Mega-Hypocrite.' '
'Who's that?' I asked Sandifer. 'What does he mean by 'A for-whatever-it-is Mega-Hypocrite?'
' 'A for All-American Asshole Mega-Hypocrite,'' Timmy said again.
Sandifer looked baffled. 'I don't know. I have no idea.'
'All the other names in the index are spelled out,' Timmy said. 'Mega-Hypocrite is the only one that's coded like that.'
We were back in Albany and had the file cabinet in the spare room in the second-floor rear of our house on Crow Street. The top drawer was open and I was checking the actual files against the index Timmy was reading from. The first name on the 'A' page had been 'Anderson, Cliff,' and the file had been in the front of the drawer where it should have been. But when I looked for the second folder, for All-American Asshole Mega-Hypocrite, it was not in the drawer.
'All-American Mega-Hypocrite is missing. Or maybe it's misfiled.'
'I would doubt it,' Sandifer said. 'There were some things John could be careless about, but not recordkeeping. He was meticulous.'
I searched through the files, in case Mega-Hypocrite had slid down or been uncharacteristically misplaced somehow.
'How would anybody stealing the file know that All-American Mega-Hypocrite was his designation?' Timmy said. 'Eddie doesn't even know what it meant.'
'Dunno. He might have forced Rutka to tell him which one was his file. We can assume he didn't know about the index in the desk drawer or he would have taken it. Or, he might have checked the files for a folder under his own name and, when he didn't find one, started a random search. He'd have come to the All-American Mega- Hypocrite file right away, maybe seen that the shoe fit, and verified it by going through the actual contents of the file.'
I kept flipping through the folders, eyes peeled for Mega-Hypocrite. I asked Sandifer if there were any of the outees or soon-to-be-outees Rutka considered to be especially repugnantly hypocritical. 'Bruno Slinger maybe?'
'He considered them all sickeningly hypocritical,' Sandifer said. 'The worst one was always the one he was going after during whatever week it was.'
Rutka's column in the next planned Queerscreed, galleys of which we had carried off from his desktop, outed an independently wealthy ACLU booster, not much of a candidate for Mega-Hypocrite.
Timmy said, 'If they weren't for the cause, they were against it, eh?' He was gripping the index sheaf tightly, and I was glad it wasn't a club.
'Sort of,' Sandifer said. 'I guess you could put it that way.'
'Righteous John Rutka and the unrighteous multitudes.'
'Timothy,' I said, reminding him with a look that it was all moot now.
'Actually,' Sandifer said, 'there was this one person, I know, who John had been working on for a long time trying to get the goods on. He knew the guy was gay but he didn't have the proof, or enough proof. He never told me who it was because he said I'd never believe it.'
'Why wouldn't you have believed it? Didn't you trust John?'
Sandifer flushed and gave a quick embarrassed shrug. 'John was sometimes loose with some of his facts.'
'Even with you?'
'He just couldn't help it. I realized this about him not long after we met. But it was just the way he was and I got used to it. He mostly just made things up about himself, not other people. I don't think he was ever dishonest in his work. He would never say it, but I think he knew he'd been able to maintain his professional integrity and he was proud of that. And he was always careful in his outing columns to get his facts right.'
'What else did he tell you about this special case? Could this be our Mr. A-for-All-American Asshole Mega- Hypocrite?'
'I can't remember. I don't think he said anything else about the guy. The only reason I remember at all,' Sandifer said, 'is because John got a kind of funny, intense look when he mentioned it. I can remember the day. We were in the car driving up the street in Handbag and he told me about this guy he said he was really going to fix, and he had this look on his face I'd never seen before. I can still see him.'
'Describe the look.'
'Just weird, intense. And I think he might have been blushing a little. Or maybe just angry. I don't know what it was.'
'Mega-Hypocrite is nowhere in the top drawer,' I said. I started through the bottom drawer.
Timmy had been flipping idly through the index sheets, perusing the names, and clucking in mild disgust.
'What!'
He'd been perched on the edge of the guest room bed and suddenly he rose straight up like a Looney Tunes character. He went into a swivet, hit the ceiling, went through the roof. 'Did you see this?'
'What's that?'
'I'm in here! My name is in the index!'
'Now do you agree it's better that I deal with the files and they don't fall into the hands of the police?'
'Let me see the file. Look in the C’s.'
