'And his enemies?' I said.
Hively looked at me a little sadly now. 'The people I know who didn't like Jim and some of them loathed him deeply- were not political or professional or social enemies. They were all men who had fallen in love with him- which is the easiest, most natural thing in the world-and whom he had led on, and taken into his arms for a time, and then abruptly dumped. Jim seemed to take a kind of sadistic pleasure in doing that. Over the past twenty years, a lot-I mean a platoon, a battalion, a small army-of men have gone gaga over Jim Suter, and there were very few- only the dregs of the dregs really-that he ever turned away.
'But then, after a week or two, that was it. He wasn't a one-night-stand-then-never-again man, he was a two-week-stand-Ihen-never-again man, a very, very cruel thing to be. It was always a week or two of bliss, then suddenly nothing. You are among the disappeared. He doesn't return your calls, he ignores you in public. And I am speaking to you not just from hearsay- although that's plentiful-but from grim experience. I'm over it now, I think. But for years I despised Jim Suter because he did lo me what he always does to men. He wrecked my head and then he broke my heart.'
Mosel said, 'Doesn't word get around that guys should avoid this shithead?'
'Sure,' Hively said, 'but in a transient town like D.C. there are always new heads arriving to be turned. And Jim has always been such a hunk that even men who know what they're in for often can't resist him. And even some who've heard of his rotten habit have to see for themselves what the big attraction is, and the repulsion, too.'
Timmy said, 'Maynard doesn't seem all that bitter about his affair with Suter. He said it didn't work out because he didn't like Suter's politics and he thought Suter was emotionally erratic. But it sounded as if it was a mutual parting of the ways and that was all.'
'Maynard was a special case for Jim,' Hively said. 'Maynard is so self-confident and self-contained that as soon as Suter turned distant, Maynard just let it go.
He once told me that he began to lose interest in Jim as soon as Jim started ignoring his calls. Maynard said that in Southern Illinois people just don't treat each other that way. It's rude, he told me. But then Jim turned around and started pursuing Maynard again. He always had to be the one doing the rejecting. So Maynard came back for a while, and then Jim backed off again, and soon afterwards, that was that. They both saw the game that was being played, and soon they'd both had enough of it.'
'It sounds,' I said, 'as if Maynard came away from his affair with Suter uncharacteristically unscathed. So, who among Jim's long list of boyfriends that you know of was permanently embittered, even traumatized?'
Mosel still had her notebook on her lap, and when Hively glanced at it apprehensively, Mosel said, 'I'm just listening.'
'I hope so,' he said. 'If anybody asks, none of what I'm about to tell you came from me. I could probably name fifty gay men, if I really thought about it, who have been shit on by Jim Suter over the past twenty years. And most of them, if I asked them about it today, would probably chalk it up to experience and let it go at that. They'd just laugh it off and say, yeah, they had their own heartbreaker of a Jim Suter story, too. But four or five people that I know of were devastated by the way Suter treated them and are very, very angry. And one of them might still be mad enough to play a macabre joke on Jim, such as sending a panel to the AIDS quilt with Jim's name on it.'
Mosel had shut her notebook, but now she was flipping its cover up and down absently. Hively's refusal to be used as a source for anything he had told her was plainly driving Mosel nuts. She blurted out, 'Oh, come on, Bud. Let me have the names. I promise I'll keep you out of it and I can check them out discreetly.'
'You can? I doubt that that's possible.' 'All right, so maybe it wouldn't be so discreet. But I won't mention your name. I can just call these guys up and say,
'I heard you dated Jim Suter and it ended unhappily, and do you have any idea how a panel with Suter's name on it made its way into the AIDS quilt?' Maybe I won't find anybody who'll admit it, but I might come across a Suter hater who knows who did do it, and who's mad at that guy, too, and who'll rat on him to the Post.'
I said, 'That sounds like a promising approach to me.'
Hively slowly massaged his hairless head, as if to stimulate the cells responsible for decision making. 'We can't be sure, of course, even that it was one of Jim's wounded lovers who sent in the quilt panel. The quilt stunt could be totally unrelated. And if it was an old boyfriend who did it, why would he and somebody else then vandalize the panel at the D.C. display?'
'To call attention to it,' Timmy said. 'So nobody in Washington would miss the act of revenge.'
Hively let loose with a little sigh and said, 'I guess you might as well go ahead.
I'll give you the names. Just don't tell anybody the names came from me.'
'Agreed,' Mosel said. 'I'm wondering something, Bud. Is there any particular reason, other than mere privacy, why you don't want these guys to know it was you who ID-ed them as former Suter boyfriends?'
Hively laughed. 'It's not the ex-lovers I'm worried about. The problem is, I already gave the names to the Blade reporter covering the quilt display, and I don't want her to find out I also turned the names over to the Post.'
'I guess I'm going to have to work fast,' Mosel said dryly.
'Anyway, thanks.'
Hively grew serious and said, 'I'm telling you because I want to do everything I can to help expose the person who used the quilt in such a shabby way. I've got too many friends on there not to care a lot about this. I know that in the big picture the quilt is indestructible, and what it means is indestructible. But this was a miserable, selfish stunt, and it just hurts. I'm sure an awful lot of people have been sickened by it.'
'I think so, too,' Mosel said, 'and so does my editor. That's why it's news.'
As Bud Hively described the five men whose detestation of Jim Suter was, Hively believed, abiding and even potentially violent, Mosel took notes on-and I carefully memorized-the sketches of Jim Suter's attenuated love affairs with Martin Dormer, Graham Houston, Jason Leibowicz, Bill Walker, and Peter Vicknicki.
As Hively spoke, I listened for any biographical suggestion that any of these men might be connected, however slightly, to Betty or Nelson Krumfutz, to Maynard, or to Mexico. I didn't hear any. But I picked up plenty of data to serve as a conversational icebreaker with Jim Suter, well-known Washington writer, heart-throb, and-the word that came to mind was an oddly old-fashioned one cad.
Chapter 13
By four Monday afternoon, I was back in the hotel room working the phone.
Timmy had the list of Jim Suter's family and friends that Bud Hively had given Dana Mosel on Sunday, and I had the names of the five embittered Suter ex-lovers that Hively had described to Mosel earlier on Monday. After several unproductive calls-answering machines and services, or no answer at all-I reluctantly called the airline and postponed my reservation to Cancun from Tuesday to Wednesday morning. I immediately felt pangs of regret, even irritation-mixed with a strange but powerful sense of relief-that I would not be leaving for the Yucatan first thing in the morning. But at the time I didn't realize what those pangs meant.
I was able to reach two of Jim Suter's friends, as well as his mother and brother in Maryland. With the friends and relatives I identified myself as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun. This was a low subterfuge that would have disgusted my journalist friends but which I justified by Suter's own alleged precarious life-or-death situation. Admitting that I was a private detective might have tipped off one of the people Suter was afraid of that someone besides Maynard might be aware of Suter's terrible danger.
I guessed, though, that the angry ex-lovers would be unwilling to speak with a reporter, so I told the two I reached late Sunday afternoon that I was a private investigator employed by Jim's mother to look into the disturbing AIDS quilt panel.
Timmy termed this particular lie 'squalid,' but he couldn't come up with an approach that was morally superior.
Anyway, it worked. By 5 P.M. Monday, I had interviews lined up with Suter's mother and brother at six-thirty, with Peter Vick-nicki and Martin Dormer, two of Suter's angry former lovers, later in the evening, as well as two of Suter's friends at lunchtime Tuesday.
Timmy phoned his boss, state assemblyman Myron Lip-shutz, in Albany and requested several days off 'for
