Williamson.'
'I met McChesney in Burton Olds's office on Tuesday,' I said, 'and Williamson was there, too. McChesney spoke poorly of Suter-as so many men do-and told the usual story of ecstasy with Jim and then a sudden nothingness.
McChesney also said he wouldn't be surprised if Jim was mixed up in a drug operation with Jorge-yet another vote for that scenario.'
'I wonder what made Alan think that. Jim was never involved with out-and-out crooks before, that I ever heard. Did Alan mention that he saw me on Saturday, not long before I got shot?'
'No, your name never came up in our conversation. Following Suter's instructions, I was still being cagey on Tuesday as to what I was investigating and for whom.'
'That's funny. I saw Alan at the quilt display near Jim's panel, and he might reasonably have connected any investigation of Jim with me, since Alan knew we were friends, and he would surely have read or heard about my getting shot down on E Street later on Saturday. McChesney must have seen you and Timmy at the quilt, too. I was going to say hi and introduce you, in fact, but Alan was talking to some other people, and then we came to the quilt panel with Jim's name on it, and soon after that he was gone.'
At that moment, an idea that had been vague in the back of my mind moved forward and began to take on an actual shape. But I did not yet recognize the exact shape of the idea, and I said only to Maynard, 'It is odd that McChesney didn't make the likely connection and maybe even ask me if you were my client.
But he didn't.'
'McChesney is not famous for being dense.'
'What's he famous for? Besides after-dinner spankings?'
'For thoroughness and decisiveness. And, I guess I should add, ruthlessness.'
'Oh, ruthlessness, too.'
Mrs. Krumfutz had not yet emerged from her bedroom, where she had gone to change clothes, but a knock came at the front door now, probably, I figured, Mrs. Krumfutz's good friend Marion Smith. Before answering the door, I spoke briefly with Timmy again, assuring him that I would soon head back toward Washington. I advised him to remain in Maynard's room with its police guard outside, and without hesitation he said he would.
A small female face was now peering in through the bottom stepped window in the Krumfutz front door. As I moved to open the door for Mrs. Smith, I decided that when I found a pay phone on my way out of Log Heaven, I would not call Heckinger or Sweet or Alan McChesney or even Jim Suter. I would phone the airline and make some necessarily convoluted arrangements for a fast trip back to the Yucatan.
Chapter 26
Just before noon on Saturday, October 19, a week almost to the hour from the time Maynard had stared in amazement at Jim Suter's panel in the AIDS memorial quilt, I pulled off Highway 307 onto the beach road at Los Pajaros.
I had spent the previous evening, on my return from Log Heaven, checking in on Timmy and Maynard at GW, then shaking any tail Ray Craig might have still had on me by slipping on and off a variety of subway trains at D.C. Metro Center and other nearby stations. I ended up at the Farragut West station, near the White House, where I caught a cab to National Airport.
I had booked the first leg of my journey under the name of Cray Mameluke, paid cash for the ticket, and arrived un-interferred-with in Miami soon after midnight. There I reserved a seat on a 7 A.M. flight to Cancun under the name Donald Stra-chey, the name the airline would see on my passport. If my movements were being monitored, I guessed, this would be done at the Washington end, rather than in Cancun, and surely not in Miami, a mere transit point that was one of several to the Yucatan.
From my hotel near Miami International, I phoned May-nard's hospital room and woke him up so that I could be reassured that he was safe. He was, as was Timmy, asleep on a couch in the nearby visitors' lounge. I also phoned Chondelle Dolan at home, woke her from a sound sleep, too, and described what I had learned over the past four days from Carmen LoBello, Betty Krumfutz, Maynard Sudbury, and-for what it was worth-Jim Suter. I said I might need her advice and help when I got back to Washington, and she said fine.
Dolan told me, 'It looks like maybe your boyfriend the conspiracy nut wasn't such a nut after all.'
'Could be, but I'm still having a lot of trouble believing that a Catholic schoolboy's lurid fantasies about what makes the world go round might actually exist in modern-day reality. The evidence, however, does seem to keep pointing that way.'
Dolan said, 'The world we live in isn't the same world it was just ten years ago.
Nowadays they don't call these things conspiracies, though. Now it's called synergy.'
Dolan soon hung up to resume the night's sleep I'd interrupted, and I, too, caught a few hours of restless semicon-sciousness, before heading to the airport and the flight to Cancun, my second in three days.
When I rounded the first bend in the Los Pajaros beach road, I saw not one but three vehicles in the driveway of Jorge Ramos's house. The big mud-spattered Suburban was there, along with a couple of Jeep Cherokees. I drove on, glancing at the house in hope of catching a glimpse of Suter. All the louvered windows were open, but I saw no one inside moving about.
Walking up and boldly knocking on the front door would have been macho in a way that might have been appreciated locally, but it might also have been suicidal. So if Suter was inside the house and still alive, I knew I'd have to get to him in some other way. I turned around at the next driveway, maneuvered my rental car through the mud and potholes back out to the main highway, then drove back up 307 to a hotel near Yalku.
I rented snorkeling equipment, reluctantly leaving my passport as collateral, and returned to the beach road, parking at a closed-up and apparently unoccupied house a third of a mile up the beach from the Ramos house. I changed into my bathing suit, and ten minutes later I — was floating twenty yards off the Ramos beach, interested in the gray ray that flopped across the sandy seafloor six or seven feet beneath me, but even more interested in the scene on the Ramos terrace. Two large, muscular, dark-haired men in chinos and polo shirts were seated in the shade of the house, one on a chaise and one in a deck chair, and a third man in a skimpy bathing suit-I recognized him from the now all-too-familiar head of hair-sat stretched out on a chair in the sun.
For fifteen minutes I swam slowly back and forth, like a U-boat off Scotland, hoping the two guards, if that's what they were-was one of them Jorge? would go inside the house. Finally one of them did get up, but the other one stayed put. The one who went inside, however, returned shortly with a couple of bottles, it looked like, and another object. The second man then joined him at a round table where they both seated themselves and began to do something with the unidentifiable object. A deck of cards? No, the motions were not card-playing motions. When the two seemed to become more deeply engrossed in their activity, I moved in closer to shore. Suter now seemed to be looking my way, so I lifted my mask, pointed theatrically at my upper lip, then vigorously and repeatedly shot Suter the finger. When I saw him stiffen and continue to stare at me, I pulled my mask back down and resumed an easy breaststroke in a northerly direction.
A moment later, when I glanced his way, Suter stood up, slipped out of his bathing trunks, and headed toward me in a leisurely way. With the sun above him, he was magnificent to behold. But now his beauty kindled not appreciation or desire in me, just sudden anger. What a careless, destructive man he was.
And when he reached me and chimed, 'Strachey, I thought you'd never show up!' it was all I could do to keep from swatting him with my snorkeling mask.
I snarled, 'You are getting people killed! Do you know that?' Startled, Suter said,
'Who? Now who's been killed?' 'Why, Nelson Krumfutz and Tammy Pam Jameson and Hugh Myers! Suter, you dumb fuck! What did you tell Jorge that you told me?'
Suter lost his coordination for an instant and nearly slipped under the water. He recovered, gestured urgently toward the north, and as we both began to swim that way, he said breathlessly, 'They knew you were here on Wednesday.
They asked me what I told you. I told them I made up a story to throw you off.'
He watched for my reaction as he swam.
'You made up the drug-smuggling story? All of it?'
