I brought the Times Union in from the front stoop. Because of the paper's earlier deadline, its report on Rutka and the fire was even sketchier than Channel Eight's had been. In the T-U, Rutka was a CHA, a 'controversial homosexual activist.'
I drove Sandifer out to Handbag so that he could check in with Bub Bailey and tell him some lies. We coordinated our stories on the way out. I would not have thought of myself as so skillful a dissembler as John Rutka, but it was I who took the lead in contriving a scenario for the loss of the files. The well-practiced Sandifer slid right into the routine.
Five messages were on Rutka's answering machine when Sandifer checked it. Bub Bailey asked Sandifer to phone him as soon as Sandifer got in. A Times Union reporter asked for a callback. Ann Rutka informed Sandifer that the funeral would be in two days, on Saturday, at nine-thirty, at St. Michael's in Handbag. There would be no calling hours at the funeral home. And two Queer Nation friends of Sandifer's and Rutka's phoned, both angry and distraught. One suggested an action to protest 'gay genocide.'
Sandifer reached Bub Bailey, who said he'd like to speak with Eddie and would drive over to the house. I listened while Sandifer ranted on cue to the T-U reporter. He managed to bring Ronald Reagan into his remarks about Rutka's murder in Handbag, as well as George Bush, and of course the fiend Ed Koch. It was as if Sandifer was trying to say what Rutka himself would have had to say about his own murder but he couldn't get it quite right. Or maybe he duplicated exactly what Rutka's spiel would have been. There wasn't any way to know.
At eleven-thirty I was back in Albany. I left the car in Washington Park and hiked over to State Street and the row of elegant turn-of-the-century manses that lined the northern edge of the park. Like most of the houses in the row, the big redstone Victorian castle I approached had been cut up into apartments for the bureaucrats and professionals who had long since replaced the rich merchants and Democratic machine hacks as Albany's life-blood. The rents were high, the address correct, and the view splendid, of the leas and copses in Frederick Law Olmsted's upstate vast green gem.
The park was lovely and enduring, having survived even Nelson Rockefeller's attempt in the 1960s to run an interstate highway through it, and so detracting in a small way from the late governor's success as the Godzilla of urban design.
I pressed the button over a name in a recessed entry-way that once must have been the servants' entrance.
'Yo?'
'It's Strachey.'
A buzzer sounded and I pulled open a heavy oak door with an etched-glass window. I slid the gate open on the ancient two-passenger Otis, shoved it shut behind me, and pushed the button for four. The door to the sole top-floor apartment had been left open a crack and I went in and shut the door behind me.
'Hey, Strachey.'
'Scotty.'
He motioned and I followed him through the apartment with its marble and mirrors and silk flowers and gray leather couches.
Scott S. Scott was barefoot and otherwise clad only in blue nylon running shorts and red suspenders-his brunch costume, I guessed. His classically proportioned physique was flawless except for a barely perceptible incipient bulge at the sides, and his tan had been evenly applied, the kind you might expect to see on a movie star of the 1950s or a Kennedy.
I said, 'I thought only Larry King wore suspenders like that anymore.'
'Well, I get a lot of customers who are nostalgic for the eighties.'
He led me out onto a rooftop garden that was shielded from sight by high hedges, and we sat under a honeysuckle-covered trellis alive with bees slurping nectar.
'Can I get you a Bloody Mary? Some blow?'
'Is that iced tea in that pitcher?'
'No, I think that's beer from last night.'
'Thanks, I'll pass.'
'The kid who cleans up hasn't come in yet.'
I said, 'Any problems with the help these days?'
I had met Scott S. Scott four years earlier, when he hired me to look into allegations by several of his customers that one of the male prostitutes he employed was attempting to blackmail well-off, deeply closeted customers. I identified the self-starter and arranged for his transportation to Southern California, where he later became vice president of a television home-shopping network.
Scott said, 'No, the boys are cool. They know I won't put up with shit. And I'm more careful now who I hire. I run background checks. I want guys from stable homes who preferably attend church. Would you be interested in doing some background work? I use the Fricker Agency, but sometimes they get sloppy.'
'Backgrounders are a little unexciting for me at this stage of the game, Scott. I guess not.'
'Of course, so much of my business now is electronic. And for that you don't need good character. The business is changing.'
'You mean phone sex?'
'I have a suite of offices over in Corporate Woods. You should drop in sometime, Strachey, and see my operation. I advertise in Outweek, the Native, the Advocate, and the rest. The color glossies of the hunks come from an agency in L.A. and cost me an arm and a leg. But I've got this roomful of trolls over by the interstate I pay six bucks an hour to, while the callers cough up a buck a minute. You don't need choirboys for an operation like this. Just some horny old farts who'll show up on time and talk dirty for eight hours. With the labor surplus around here, it's like printing money.'
'I don't suppose you have to worry about the Japanese competition.'
'Hey, don't bet the farm on it. I was up to tar and feather my broker the other night and he was telling me how the Japs are getting into female retail sex in Mexico now. They've got whorehouses in Baja and Guadalajara where you can go down in the early evening and see the women doing calisthenics and marching up and down and singing the company song.'
'I guess you were speaking metaphorically when you said you went up to tar and feather your broker. Or were you?'
'I do it at his place in Saratoga. He has a pool, and a grill where we can heat the tar. Not to boiling, the way they used to in the olden days. Just so it's soft enough to apply. Weird, huh? It's how he gets off. I go up once a week when his wife's down shopping in the city, and I bring a crew and tape it. Hey, it's getting hot out here. Are you sure I can't offer you a drink or a line or something?'
I said, 'No, it's a little early in the day for my glass of port. But you can be your wonderfully hospitable self by telling me something.'
'Maybe.'
'Without mentioning names-I know you don't do that-were any of your regulars people who were outed by John Rutka?'
He stood up now, casually adjusted the organs inside his shorts, and sat down again. 'I can answer that, yes,' he said. 'Two were outed and about ninety-two were scared shitless they were going to be next. For a guy who thought it was so great to be gay, Rutka was some pain in the ass to gay people, that's for sure.'
'Did any of your customers seem especially unhinged by being outed, or by the prospect of being outed?'
'I know what you're thinking. When I heard Rutka had been murdered, I wondered the same thing. Who hated him so much or was so afraid of him he'd kill him to shut him up? I don't know. Like I say, every gay person in the closet in Albany hated Rutka's guts. But I never heard anybody say they were actually going to do anything. I'd remember.'
'What about this? Have you or any of your staff run into customers who were violent, or seemed capable of great violence?'
'Two,' he said without hesitation.
'Can you give me the names?'
'Sure. Fortunately, they're both in prison. Lars Forrester, the Troy bank exec they nailed for embezzlement. And Nelson Lunceford, the state insurance regulator who strangled his valet in the locker room of the Fort Orange
