On the Other Hand, Death - Stevenson Richard - Страница 25

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McWhirter was pacing again.

"I've got the money," I said. "Part cash and part in checks that I'll cash and get back here in plenty of time."

McWhirter stared at the bag With fear in his eyes, as if it might contain eight pounds of severed appendages.

Dot said quietly, "Thank you."

Bowman said, "Wish I had friends like yours, Strachey. Good work. Looks like we're all Set. I'll get a man out here to mark the bills and record serial numbers."

"What do we do now?" Timmy asked. "Just wait? I could use some sleep."

"Come on," I said, removing the checks from the valise and stuffing them into a bread bag I snatched from the kitchen counter. "You can sleep tomorrow. When this is all over. Right now we've got places to go, people to see."

"Where? Who?"

"You'll find out. We're both going to be busy. I've got a little list."

"Now don't you get in the way of my people," Bowman warned. "And if you hear anything I need to know, I want to know it goddamn quick. You got that, Strachey?"

I said, "Got it, Ned. You know me. For sure."

12

• Passing the Deems' house, I told

Timmy, "I'll stop back here later. I don't think the Deems are the main problem in all of this. Maybe none at all. But there's something I want to check. You can help me out by looking into another nagging matter."

As we bumped past the Wilsons' I explained to Timmy what I wanted him to find out about Bill Wilson.

"I'll do what I can," he said, "but this whole thing is starting to scare the hell out of me. I'm not sure I'm cut out for this rough stuff. It started out as some homophobic vandalism, which was sickening enough. And now people are actually getting hurt. Mutilated."

"I don't like it either."

"Imagine having your lover's finger arrive in a box. Of course, it could have been worse."

"It wasn't his," I said.

We turned onto Central.

"It— What wasn't whose?"

"That finger wasn't Greco's."

"Come on. Really? How do you know? I thought McWhirter told Bowman it was."

"Greco has thick black hair on the tops of his fingers. I know. He touched my face. It tickled a little. The finger in that box was slender like Greco's but practically hairless. And what little hair there was was lighter than Greco's."

"He touched your face? Kee-rist, Donald." He undulated awkwardly in his seat belt. "Do you want to describe the circumstances, lover, or should I just draw my own sensational conclusions and stick it all in your 'Seven Since June' file? Crimenee. You're just—incredible."

"He did it once standing in Dot's front yard and once standing in the parking lot outside the Green Room. It's a habit Greco has. Touching faces. He's a sweet, affectionate, uninhibited guy. It's no automatic High Homintern cocktail-party-kiss kind of thing. It's just something he can't help doing. Unconventional, but winning. Not that there's anything calculating in the gesture. You can't not like him."

"'Like.' Right."

I turned onto Colvin, south into the Pine Hills section of the city. I said, "Now who's not trusting whom?"

He threw his head around, sulked, threw his head around some more. Then he looked over at me in utter amazement. "But . . . McWhirter must have known!"

"Ah-ha."

"Presumably McWhirter is familiar with his lover's finger."

"A safe assumption."

"But then— Why did he lie? Dot told me McWhirter identified the finger as Greco's."

"Beats me. Before the day is over I'll ask him."

We swung left onto Lincoln.

"And you didn't say anything because . . . ?"

"I figured the news should be broken to the authorities by the loved one. The fact that it wasn't seemed to me a piece of information almost as fascinating as the fact of the finger itself. I think I know why McWhirter didn't speak up. But I'm not sure."

"I'm surprised Bowman didn't doubt his word. Press him on it. Maybe take him downtown for a lineup. 'Mr. McWhirter, is any of these eight fingers that of the man with whom you participate in an un-Godly relationship?'"

"Bowman will rely on the lab people," I said. "And they'll most likely come up with nothing, because I doubt that Greco has ever been fingerprinted. He hasn't been in the armed forces, and he's probably never been arrested. Even in demonstrations that turn messy Greco's not the type cops go after. Anyway, until I've discussed the matter with McWhirter, let's keep mum about it. If Ned knew, he might draw some hasty erroneous conclusions. To the effect, for instance, that this is some kind of scam McWhirter's cooked up."

"Or some hasty correct ones."

"There's that possibility. But I think it's something else."

"What?"

"Let me run it by McWhirter first. It's just a guess. It has to do with McWhirter's frequently justifiable glum outlook on the world."

Timmy sat sweating energetically and drumming his fingers on the dashboard as I turned onto Buchanan. "But if it wasn't Greco's finger," he said after a time, "then whose finger was it?"

"Good question."

Lyle Barner's living room, on the second floor of an old soot brown frame house, was full of dark oversized "Mediterranean-style" furniture with a plastic finish. Ischia via Dow Chemical. The gleaming leviathan of a bar was from the same discount house the couch and chairs had come from, as was the console TV set with an Atari hookup, around which the other furniture had been arranged. A carpet of dust covered everything except the center section of the couch and the midsection of the coffee table in front of it where Barner propped his legs. The only reading matter was the Times Union TV section. The room contained no decorative objects, artwork, or photographs. It was the room of a man with no past he wanted to remember and no future he could bring himself to believe in.

Ignoring Timmy, whom I'd just introduced, Lyle said, "You want a beer? Christ, I hate this fucking weather."

"Thanks, but we'd be blotto after half a can. We haven't slept."

"Uh-huh. Well, I'll have one."

Lyle Barner was a squat, well-muscled man with an incipient beer paunch and a lot of straw-colored hair on his shoulders. Both the mouth and eyes of his nicely arranged big-featured face slanted down at the corners with a kind of ferociously controlled tension, as if he were frozen in a pose for a Mathew Brady daguerreotype. Barner's curly hair was lush and full except for a half-dollar-sized bald spot on top, which I had once had the opportunity to observe for several minutes. He was clad, as he lumbered into the kitchen and then back to us again, in black nylon bikini briefs.

I was seated with Timmy on the couch. Dropping into an easy chair and slinging one leg over the armrest, Lyle looked over at me—only me—and said, "Been a while since I've seen you in the flesh, Strachey. Glad to see you're sexy as ever."

"What did you find out?" I said.

He swigged from the beer can. "You know, Strachey, I haven't had a whole lot of sleep either. Except I was out protecting the public last night. What were you doing? Out partying as usual, it looks like."

He glanced briefly, dismissively, at Timmy, as if to say, Where'd you pick this up? I'd had some half-formed

cockeyed idea that it might be helpful for Lyle Barner to observe two healthy, relaxed gay men more or less at peace with themselves and each other, secure in their loving relationship and in the knowledge that its evident riches were a goal nearly all gay men could aspire to and achieve. But I was beginning to suspect I'd picked the wrong day for an object lesson of this particular sort, or the wrong couple to employ in it.

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