thought you were. It's nothing to be proud of, but it can come in handy, can't it?'
I said, 'So you are adept as a liar. This changes everything. I may never believe another word you say.'
'Neither of you two guys ever told a lie to the other one?' Chondelle asked.
Timmy said, 'No.'
I said, 'Not for many years, so far as I am able to recall.'
'It was amazingly easy getting the information out of Mrs. Krumfutz,' Timmy said.
'She asked me if our conversation would be off the record, and I said yes. She said she did not wish to be quoted in the Blade on anything having to do with the AIDS quilt, and she did not wish to have her name mentioned at all in connection with it. I said that was fine, that I just wanted to track down Jim Suter for a story I was writing about a quilt panel that had mysteriously appeared with Jim Suter's name on it, even though he is believed to be alive and well.
'She said wasn't that odd, as if she'd never heard of the Suter panel. Obviously, I didn't mention your encounter with her, Don, and I didn't say anything about pages from Suter's campaign biography having been ripped off the panel-Bud Hively wouldn't have known about the campaign-bio pages. But I did ask her if she had visited the quilt display. She said no, she'd never seen it, but she said she'd heard it was big and colorful. Then I thanked her and said I supposed she was enjoying the fall foliage up in Pennsylvania-nature's quilt. She said, oh, yes, she certainly was.'
I said, 'You actually called the Pennsylvania fall scenery 'nature's quilt'?'
Timmy smiled slyly.
Chondelle said, 'Timothy, it sounds to me like you're a natural at this. If I ever need somebody to tell a big fat lie for a good cause, I'm gonna call you.'
Still looking almost smug, he said, 'Don't bother. In the fu-lure, I'll only lie for Donald. This is something that's just be-iween me and my honey pie here.'
I said, 'What in God's name have I done? I may need to take you back to the priests, Timothy, and sign you up for an ethical lune-up.'
He chuckled, but then Ray Craig rolled slowly by, and Timmy's mood abruptly darkened again. He said, 'What does 11uit man want with us?'
Chapter 12
Bud Hively, the real one, was among Maynard's friends gathered at the ICU lounge outside the George Washington University Hospital unit where, by one o'clock Monday afternoon, Maynard was awake and answering yes-and-no questions by blinking. He had a black tube down his throat that looked like a creature from Alien emerging from his gullet, and so he was unable to speak.
Only immediate family members were allowed into Maynard's room, two at a time, but Edwin Sudbury told the nurse in charge that we were all Maynard's siblings. 'We're farmers,' he said. 'Big family.' The nurse looked as if she had heard this many times before and did not find it clever, but she let us go in.
A District of Columbia police officer was seated on a desk chair that had been wheeled over to the entrance to Maynard's room. He gave each of us who entered the room a quick onceover, but he made no body search and failed to conduct even perfunctory interrogations of Maynard's visitors. Were Maynard to be finished off by a visitor, the cop would be good for a vague description, I guessed, but not much more.
Timmy and I went into the room together for a brief stay. Timmy spoke reassuring and affectionate words to Maynard, who stared up at us weakly, quizzically. He obviously had questions but no way of asking them. When Timmy asked him if he'd like an explanation as to why he was lying badly wounded in a hospital bed, Maynard blinked furiously, yes, yes. Timmy gave him a quick rundown of the shooting and the confusing aftermath. Maynard shook his head in amazement at Timmy's story. Then, apparently exhausted by his attempt to make sense of what had happened to him, he drifted off again. We gazed at Maynard a moment longer, outraged and sickened all over again at what had happened to our friend.
Back in the ICU lounge, Timmy and I managed to maneuver Bud Hively, the Blade writer, and Dana Mosel, the Post reporter, into a corner and then brought the conversation around to Jim Suter and the mysterious quilt panel. Hively was interested in Suter's fate because he knew him, and Mosel had managed to wangle an assignment from the Post metro editor to follow up on the odd panel and the just-as-peculiar act of vandalism.
'I talked to a woman at the Names Project in San Francisco,' Mosel said, 'and she gave me the name and address of the man in D.C. who submitted the panel last May. But there's no record of a David Phipps in or around the District.
The phone number, which I called, is a fake, and the address is at a Capitol Hill Mailboxes, Etcetera. It would take a court order to find out who actually rented the box. Those private outfits contract with the Postal Service and they're subject to the same federal privacy laws that a post office has to observe.'
Mosel, a slender, pretty, auburn-haired woman in a linen suit and a pair of well-worn tennis shoes, had her notebook out and flipped through it in search of additional details she thought might interest us. She had told Timmy earlier that she'd been in the Peace Corps in Malawi in the midsixties, and she'd gotten to know Maynard through the former-Peace-Corps-volunteer writers' network. This was a web of several hundred people whose reach into U.S. journalism and letters seemed to resemble, as Mosel had described it, Pat Robertson's idea of the grip of the II-luminati on eighteenth-century Europe.
'Amy Chavez, the Names Project staffer,' Mosel went on, 'was as mystified as everybody else by the Suter panel, and she said a lot of their people are unnerved by this thing. But they've never asked for death certificates or other documentation in the past, and she doubts they'll start doing it now. This type of weirdness just hasn't been a problem.'
Bud Hively said, 'There's a respect for the quilt-a reverence almost-that's felt even by most of the people who think it absorbs angry emotions that should be fueling political action instead. There's one panel made by a dead man's friends who wrote on the panel, 'He hated this quilt and so do we.' But they're still part of it, even if they think it's wrong, and I don't think they would play games with the quilt or desecrate it.'
'No,' Timmy said, 'that would feel like an insult not to the quilt project but to all the people whose names are there.'
Hively, a muscular, pug-nosed man with a shaved head and a mustache the color and shape of the pyramid at Chichen Itza, said he thought whoever had sent in the panel memorializing a man who'd been alive when the panel was submitted must have been consumed with bitterness. Hively said, 'He must have hated Jim deeply to do a thing like that. And I guess he must have hated the quilt, too, to have used it so selfishly.'
I said, 'Do you know people who disliked Suter? Is he a man who makes enemies?'
Hively smiled knowingly and a little sheepishly. 'Jim Suter broke a lot of hearts in gay Washington over the years.'
'Yours included?' Mosel said. She still had her notebook out and added, 'This is all on background, of course.'
'Yeah,' Hively said, and laughed uneasily. 'I had a fling with Jim ten or twelve years ago. He was-to put it mildly-one of the most attractive men in Washington, Maryland, and Virginia back then. Really one of the most dazzling-looking men I'd ever seen. He still is, in fact-or was the last time I saw him. Jim was also smart, sexy, energetic, and he knew everybody and everything that went on in this town. And he wasn't shy about letting you know how popular he was either. I spent a night with him one time, and I wandered into Jim's kitchen around ten on a Sunday morning. He was there fixing breakfast while he was dishing the dirt on the speakerphone with-guess who? Nancy Reagan.'
Timmy said, 'God.'
I said, 'I don't suppose Suter is as wired into the Clinton White House as he was back in the Reagan era, or is he?'
'No, the Clinton gay mob-a large, moody, disappointed bunch of nice people, by and large-don't care much for Jim. His most intimate nonromantic ties have all been with Republicans,' Hively said. 'They knew he was gay, of course, but that didn't matter much to the Reagan crowd. These were Hollywood people. The Bush White House was stuffier, but even there Jim had his admirers.'
