Then came a sudden sharp rapping at the hotel-room door. Timmy started, then quietly moaned, 'Oh no, oh no.'
I didn't want to believe what I thought Timmy was thinking. But as I approached the door, even before opening it, I thought I caught a whiff of Ray Craig's nicotine aura.
We let him in. He sniffed the air. He glared. Without being invited to do so, Craig took a seat. I thought, he's going to light a cigarette. He didn't, but he fiddled with the pack in his jacket pocket. I wondered if a map was in the packet in the pocket of the jacket-a routine from an old Red Skelton movie-but I decided that mentioning it was unlikely to bring a chuckle to Craig's lips.
He said, 'You two had coffee with Detective Chondelle Dolan this morning and went walking around with her. Why?'
'How do you know that?' I said.
His ordinarily dead eyes flashed at my insolence. A Ray Craig of fifty years earlier would have pulled out a sap and worked me over while his goonish partner held me in a head-lock. But the times had changed enough for me-if not for every U.S. inner-city resident-and Craig apparently felt not only constrained by the law, he was even unable to avoid answering my question.
'I've had you two under surveillance.'
'Why?' I asked.
'For your own protection.'
'I doubt that we need protection. What makes you think we might?'
He eyed me coldly, glanced at Timmy, then looked back at me and said,
'Washington can be a dangerous place.'
'Your decision to have us followed was based on local crime statistics?'
Craig snapped, 'I use my professional judgment. If you think I'm some fucking incompetent with shit for brains and my head up my ass, I'd like to hear about it.'
This produced a long, strained silence. I knew Timmy would be considering, as I was, Craig's vivid but visually confusing metaphor.
Craig himself finally broke the tension. 'Let's talk about Chondelle Dolan.'
'Sure. Let's.'
'You people stick together, don't you?'
'Chondelle was never in the Peace Corps. For that matter, neither was I.'
'You know damn well what I mean. She's a lesbo. She's a big nigger lesbo.'
Timmy said evenly, 'I'm requesting that you do not talk like that.'
'Come again?' Craig eyes were blazing.
'Never mind.'
'What do you want with us this time?' I said. 'We were just on our way out.'
'I've got news concerning my investigation. You'll be interested in this. I've got two eyewitnesses to the E Street shooting. My witnesses say the perpetrators were Mexicans.'
Timmy and I feigned surprise. 'Oh?'
'Did Sudbury use drugs?' Craig said.
Timmy said, 'No.'
'Do you?'
'No,' Timmy repeated.
I said, 'We get high on life. How about you? What do you get high on?'
Craig was seated on the desk chair and I was on the edge of the bed. He flushed and spasmed once, but he didn't lunge at me. Instead, he clapped his notebook shut violently, stood up, and tramped out of the room, slamming the door behind him.
Chapter 8
Log Heaven, Pennsylvania, was up in the thinly populated central part of the state off Interstate 80. The autumn foliage was at its brilliant peak under a high blue sky crisscrossed with big, floating jet vapor trails that looked like ancient glyphs above the earth. I wondered what they meant. Probably Scranton-Pittsburgh, Baltimore- Toronto. The broad highway swept between and sometimes up and down the state's old, worn, friendly mountains, and I wished Timmy were along to enjoy the scenic ride.
He was back in Washington, where we had met some of Maynard's friends when they converged on GW University Hospital. Some of them were going to maintain a watch at the hospital-Maynard's condition was unchanged when I left early Sunday afternoon-and others planned on cleaning up Maynard's house in hopeful anticipation of Maynard's recovery and eventual return.
Neither Timmy nor I told Maynard's friends about Jim Suter's mysterious quilt panel or the letter from Mexico full of warnings. So everyone who knew Maynard remained baffled as to why he might have been shot down in the street and his home ransacked. Some of them speculated on a book or an article he might have been working on that exposed foreign criminality of some sort, but no one could recall Maynard's mentioning any such project. On the contrary, everyone said, Maynard had been doing relatively undemanding straight travel writing since he'd picked up his stomach ailment.
A couple of times I referred to Maynard's recent trip to Mexico. I thought it might jog someone's memory of any remark Maynard might have made about Jim Suter. But Maynard either never told anyone of the odd meeting in Merida, or none of his acquaintances considered it worth mentioning now.
Chondelle Dolan was able to use her GOP Capitol Hill contacts-she'd once been involved, she had told me that morning, with the first black female member of the Log Cabin Club-to track down former congresswoman Krumfutz. On the staff now of the conservative Glenn Beale Foundation, Mrs. Krumfutz kept an apartment in Washington as well as her Log Heaven home, which she often visited on weekends. She had driven up to Pennsylvania Saturday evening with a friend, Chondelle said, several hours after Maynard had pointed her out to Timmy and me at the Jim Suter quilt panel.
I'd made a plane reservation for a flight to the Yucatan on Tuesday morning. I figured twenty-four hours in Log Heaven would give me enough time to confront Mrs. Krumfutz and extract from her what was extractable concerning her examination on Saturday of the Suter quilt panel and her subsequent panicked, hasty departure from the quilt display and then from Washington. I knew I ran some risk of tipping off the people who had shot Maynard-whoever and whatever they wereand of further endangering Suter. But I convinced myself that the risk was slight and worth taking.
Timmy's Capitol Hill friend Bob Bittner had briefed me on the Krumfutz illegal-campaign-fund scandal-at Timmy's request, Bittner did not ask why I was inquiring about this-and I learned that not only had Mrs. Krumfutz been cleared of any involvement in the scam, but that she had been eager to disassociate herself from her husband, who had spent many tens of thousands of dollars of congressional campaign donations on the home and wardrobe of one Tammy Pam Jameson, of Engineville, near Log Heaven. Mrs. Krumfutz had eagerly testified against her husband at his trial, and I concluded that if she had more recently uncovered additional criminality-by way of the AIDS quilt or otherwise-she would be more inclined to talk about it to me or to the police than to anyone involved in the crime, especially her low slug of a husband. And I did not plan on tracking down Nelson Krumfutz-now residing in Engineville with Tammy Pam, I was told-just yet.
I pulled into Log Heaven in the black shadows of the surrounding mountains under a fall sunset that was a puddle of fire. The sky looked like a Jehovah's Witness's Watchtower magazine cover, and I remembered that the millennium was just a few years away. Maybe Armageddon would start off in Log Heaven. It seemed as likely a place as any, despite warnings from the TV preachers that when Good rose up and vanquished Evil, San Francisco would get it first. Then the West Village, the East Village, and Chelsea. Would a wrathful God spare SoHo? Park Slope? TriBeCa? This was unclear.
I cruised down Log Heaven's Main Street, with its three-block-long business district that looked half-dead and half-hanging-on-by-a-fraying-economic-thread.
Most of the storefronts were vacant, and the few that weren't were occupied by social-service agencies and
