'Never heard of it.'
'Now you have.'
'I would think rebec meant to bec again.'
He ignored this and moved on. I could see that he had about three quarters of the puzzle filled in, all of it in ink.
I said, 'Would you hand me the phone book, please?'
I looked up Stiver listings in Schenectady and found two: Anson on Ridgemont Drive and J Stiver on Pond Street. J for Jennifer?
I dialed the J number.
'Yes, hello?' Female, firm, clear.
'Is this Jennifer Stiver?'
The expected pause. Was I a telemarketer? 'Yes, I'm Jenny. And you?'
'I'm Donald Strachey, a private investigator, and I'm calling about a matter concerning your late brother Greg. I understand from friends of Greg's that you and Greg were close.'
I made out what sounded like a muttered oh shit before the line went dead.
Chapter Seven
Thursday morning my joints and muscles were still telling me Don't move, just don't move at all, and I had an enormous bruise on the side of my neck that Timmy said looked like a kind of evil hickey. The pain from my ripped ear felt as if I'd been gone after with a cheese grater, and something bad seemed to be going on with the five stitches under the bandage. My hearing was in fact impaired to a degree, but not so much that I couldn't hear Timmy's electric toothbrush buzzing in the bathroom as well as his nose-hair trimmer, his early-morning carbon footprint surprisingly sizeable for such a diehard environmentalist.
Still flat on my back, I phoned a friend at APD and asked him to e-mail me the Greg Stiver suicide police report. He said those files were on paper and he would fax the report when he got a chance later in the day.
I tried to recall who all I knew out at SUNY, preferably anybody with access to Stiver's academic and other records.
No one came to mind who would have had that kind of access. Instead, I phoned a brilliantly clever IT guy I knew named Bud Giannopolous who I feared would one day end up in either the federal penitentiary or the CIA, depending on who came to appreciate his computer hacking abilities first.
'Can you get into the SUNY system?'
'Which one?'
'Student records.'
'Piece of cake. But is this a grade change thing? I don't do that.'
'Even for five hundred thousand dollars?'
'You jest, do you not?'
'I do. It's not that. I just want a look at the records of a guy named Gregory Stiver, a master's candidate, who killed himself in April five years ago.'
'Jumped off a SUNY building, right?'
'You remember?'
'Sure. I'm acrophobic, so I always notice news stories about death by falling.'
'It's not how anybody wants to go. Some of the people who jumped from the World Trade Center towers leaped in twos, holding hands. I guess that would somehow make it easier. But this Stiver jumped alone, and I can't think of anything lonelier.'
'So you want his academic records?'
'Yes, including his master's thesis and who his advisor was. Plus the university's report on the suicide, as well as anything else that's in SUNY's records on Stiver. How long will this take?'
'I want to be thorough, so say an hour.'
'You can e-mail me?'
'Well, yeah. Did you think I might bring it over by oxcart?'
When Timmy emerged from the bathroom, I told him I was driving over to Schenectady later in the morning to talk to any of Greg Stiver's relatives I could locate and who were willing to talk to me.
'Why don't you take a health and beauty day-both your health and your beauty have suffered-and go back to work tomorrow? The primary's not until September, and twenty-four hours won't make any serious difference.'
'I'm okay. Just achy. It might be better if I keep moving.'
He was getting into his perfectly laundered and pressed go-to-work duds, which had been meticulously laid out the night before. 'Donald, somebody is obviously watching you, and they're going to know that you weren't scared off by the pounding they gave you on Tuesday. If the campaign is providing bodyguards for Insinger and Jackman, maybe they could also offer you a little help in that regard. Not somebody who would get in your way, but who could just tag along and serve as a deterrent. Or more than a deterrent if ever the need arose.'
He waited for my response and looked as if he knew what was coming.
'Timothy, who are you talking to?'
'Yeah, I know.'
'You're wasting your breath.'
'Right. Macho-macho-maa-haan.'
'No. It's not machismo. Alpha male strutting and posturing hold no interest for me. You know that by now, or should. I just work better alone. It's as simple as that. I need space and I need flexibility. Anyway, I'll be armed this time. I'll carry the Smith and Wesson.'
He shook his head and went back to elegantly armoring himself for a day inside one of the most dysfunctional legislative bodies in the western hemisphere. 'I guess I don't 66
Red White and Black and Blue by Richard Stevenson have to remind you of the statistics on people who carry guns around. It's nearly always the innocent that the weapons end up getting used on. With those innocent dead or maimed persons being the gun owners themselves, more often than not.'
'I've avoided shooting my own pancreas out for some years now. Trust me.'
'Of course I trust your judgment and your skills. But when guns start going off, luck is always an element. And you've been lucky in that regard for quite some time now.'
'Timothy, remarks about my number coming up are not helpful. Jesus.'
'Well, anyway it's all moot, since you stopped listening to me five minutes ago.'
'No, I didn't. I'm going to be careful.'
'Yes, I know you'll be careful, in your own particular way of being careful. Okay. Okay, okay.'
He had his necktie on straight now, and he came over and leaned down and-holding his tie against his chest with one hand-gave me a sweet lingering Colgate kiss. Inasmuch as I had not yet brushed my teeth, it was an especially large and loving gesture.
'Careful, don't touch my ear.'
'I should give it a good smack.'
'Oh, you will, you will, at least figuratively speaking. But make it later in the month.'
He pressed his lips against my uninjured, unbandaged ear and said into it, 'Have a safe, productive day, Detective Strachey.'
'That's what I aim to do, if at all possible.'
Bud's e-mail arrived just after nine. I had dragged out of bed, showered, pulled on some jeans painfully, and made it down to the kitchen table and my laptop. Timmy had made coffee for me-his own preference was for South Asian milky sweet tea-and he left one of his favorite mugs at my place, a battered relic of his Peace Corps days in India. The mug bore the image of Ganesh, the elephant god, helper of scribes and remover of obstacles. While I ate some yogurt and a banana, I looked to see what Bud the remover of privacy walls had sent along.
Greg Stiver's undergraduate academic record was solid but otherwise unrevealing. He had been a steady B-
