Keystone State has been handed over to reliable outside individuals. And if anything bad happens to Jim Suter or to me or to Timothy Callahan, or if anything else bad happens to Maynard Sudbury, that information will move swiftly to (a) the Washington Post and (b) the U.S. attorney's offices in both Philadelphia and Washington.'
Heckinger and Sweet both sat stone-faced and silent. Just then the waitress showed up and made another tentative foray. 'Ready now?'
Heckinger gestured to Sweet, and the two of them stood up abruptly and walked out of the restaurant. I made a mental note to bill them later for the wine and the Sam Adams.
After lunch, I found a pay phone in the hotel lobby and tracked down Chondelle Dolan again.
'I had a quick look,' she told me, 'at the case file on the Bryant Ulmer homicide.
On the night the crime occurred last January the eighth, it did look to be a robbery. Ulmer's expensive watch was taken, and his wallet with cash and credit cards. But there was something a little bit different about this robbery that made the investigating detectives wonder about it. Ulmer was shot six times-a lot for a perpetrator who wants to gather up his loot and start running away with it. And the gun that killed Ulmer wasn't an MP-25 or some other piece of street junk. Ulmer was killed with a Cobray M-ll. This is a mean nine-millimeter firearm that's rare among everyday street thugs in Washington. Only the serious drug professionals carry M-lls-usually just to terrorize people they want to keep in line. And you know what else, Strachey?'
'What else?'
'I checked Ray's case file on the shooting of Maynard Sudbury. Your pal Maynard was shot with the same type of weapon.'
'Does Ray know this? Is he having forensic comparisons done on the bullets in the two shootings?'
'If he is, there's nothing in his file on it.'
'I wonder why.'
'Me, too.'
Chapter 19
In the icy depths of an abnormally frigid Northeastern winter in the mid-1980s, Timmy and I had fled Albany for the tropics and ended up spending ten mostly happy days exploring Mayan ruins on the Yucatan peninsula. We observed the cliche of tourism in Mexico and got sick. But that hadn't lasted, and as refugees from the glaciated Hudson valley, we found the Yucatan heat and dust as therapeutic as the sober hospitality of the Yu-catecan people.
Now I was on a plane on my way back. I was eager to revisit the big, flat limestone shelf that had been home to a pre-Columbian civilization that worshiped a rain god, ripped the hearts out of its enemies, excelled in stone architecture and astronomy, and understood the concept of zero when the Europeans, apparently working backward from ninety-nine, were still stuck at about six. The Yucatecan Caribbean coast had only in recent years been developed, and it lacked the charm of the inland colonial-era population centers such as Merida and Valladolid. But except for Canciin, a teeming monument to soulless industrial tourism, the coastal strip down to Tulum was still relatively un-Hyattized, I'd been told. And most of the beaches were so pure and sparsely trod upon that it was possible to imagine this turquoise coast as wild-eyed Cortes had first viewed it in 1519- I hoped my visit would be more congenial than his had been, and briefer.
I had in my possession on the flight from National to Miami, and then on to Cancun, directions to Los Pajaros, the small town where Betty Krumfutz had told Timmy that Jim Suter was living with his boyfriend Jorge. I also had a photo of Suter that Peter Vicknicki had provided, and a bathing suit, T-shirts, and sandals I'd picked up at a mall near the airport. Otherwise, I was traveling lighter than light.
The information from Betty Krumfutz was now suspect, of course. Why would she tell anyone where Jim Suter might be found if her thuggish employees Heckinger and Sweet (assuming they were Mrs. Krumfutz's agents) adamantly refused to do so? So I was as uncertain as ever what to expect in Los Pajaros, which in Spanish meant 'the birds.'
I wondered if, avianly speaking, I was in for some Audubon or Aristophanes or Hitchcock. I hoped it was Audubon. I knew Los Pajaros existed-I'd found it on the Yucatan road map I'd brought along-but I did not know if, when I arrived there, anyone would have heard of Jim Suter or Jorge Ramos. Before flying out early Wednesday morning, I asked Timmy to do some digging while I was gone on Heckinger and Sweet and to learn, if he could, from Maynard or Bud Hively or from Vicknicki and Dormer, who these two characters were, what they did for a living, and who they did it for. Timmy also planned on contacting Carmen LoBello at the Bureau of Mines and feeling him out on the quilt panel and the panel vandalism.
As the American Airlines 737 bumped across the top of some Gulf of Mexico fall thunderstorms, I got out the photo of Suter and studied his face. It was not hard to memorize. As had been widely attested to, Suter was a looker. In the head-and-shirtless-torso shot Vicknicki had lent me, Suter was muscular and trim in an appealingly natural way-both gym-slave obses-siveness and pectoral implants seemed unlikely-and he had a subtly sculpted Botticelli face topped with the notorious golden curls.
Maynard had referred to Suter's looks as those of a sensual Harpo Marx, and while I saw in his face the logic of the comparison-the gold, the glow, the obvious capacity for worldly delight-there was nothing shy about Suter's look, and no hint that, like Harpo, Suter might choose to express himself chiefly with a musical instrument or by honking a horn. Suter's gaze was direct and inviting, and in the photo his mouth was open slightly, as if he were about to tell you something you very much wanted to hear. What I wanted Suter to tell me was the truth, but I could not read in this single photograph whether I was likely to hear it from him or not.
The Yucatan's summer-fall rain-and-occasional-hurricane season was largely spent by mid-October, and as the plane came in low over the resort island of Isla Mujeres, the early-afternoon, mile-high, billowing clouds had spread apart and the sun was streaming through. This was off-season for tourism in the Yucatan, and the plane was less than half-filled. As the sixty or eighty passengers filed off at Cancun airport, I tried to spot Milton Kingsley, the D.C. police captain Chondelle said was traveling to Cancun around the same time I was.
I saw no one fitting Chondelle's description of Kingsley- 'George Foreman underneath a toupee that looks like a sleeping hamster'-and if Ray Craig had anyone else tailing me, there was no way of my knowing who on the flight it could have been. I half expected to detect Craig's scent in the airport, but had he been there, his odor would have been masked by the tobacco smoke in the poorly ventilated building, which could have been doubling as an air terminal and a Government of Mexico Ministry of Health emphysema research project.
I bought five hundred dollars' worth of the depressed local currency-NAFTA, a net plus for Mexican business, had not saved the peso from one of its periodic bungee jumps (the cord being the U.S. Treasury)-and stuffed the wad in my pocket. I picked up the rental car I'd reserved, a GM maquiladora assembly-plant product called, I think, a Chevy Outtie, and turned south. Making my way through the unmarked, chaotic road-construction area below the airport-driving in Mexico, as in Italy, Nigeria, and Boston, was not for the faint of heart-I headed down the Caribbean coast.
The air was heavy and hot, and my heart swelled with pleasure over being back in the tropics. Before I'd met Timmy in untropical Albany, two of my best love affairs had been with men in cities well south of the tropic of Cancer. The first was with sweet and exuberant Mike Akenjemi in Lagos, during a summer work-study program after my junior year at Rutgers. Two years later it was Ted Metzger, in that period when my government announced that it needed me and I concluded that two dangerous years in Saigon were preferable to any kind of a lifetime in Winnipeg.
I later heard from a decent and conscience-stricken friend who went there that summers on the Canadian plains were fiercely hot, too. But for me a hot climate was not a cultural advantage, just a circumstance under which I had twice somehow found romance and sweaty erotic joy.
None of that was about to be repeated, I was sure. For Jim Suter, despite his famous physical allure, sounded to me like a deeply problematical piece of work.
Also, I had long since ceased sexual meandering, much to Timmy's relief. Both of our rare ex-tramonogamous erotic adventures consisted of two-or-three-times-a-year, joint visits to far-from-home gay bathhouses-in Paris, Amsterdam, San Francisco-for some no-exchange-of-fluids, happy carnal comingling with others that was as harmful as a couple of farm boys in 1927 attending the hootchie-kootchie show at the Nebraska state agricultural
