Death Trick - Stevenson Richard - Страница 41

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ment and charged into the bathroom, slamming the door. She'd asked how I'd found them, and when I said through a friend in L.A. who knew friends of Zinsser's, she didn't believe it. She thought Margarita Mayes had betrayed her.

Kurt Zinsser was still nursing the bruises I'd left on his tailbone and ego, though by the time we were seated in the apartment, he'd accepted me enough—he knew of Harvey Geddes—that he was lecturing me on the necessity of a reborn and expanded Forces of Free Faggotry. I couldn't disagree with him. Of all the radical movements that formed in the sixties, the FFF had to be among the bravest and most just. Zinsser talked about regrouping and mounting a "spring offensive." Meanwhile he was doing the work he'd been educated to do, as a data analyst in the computer section of a large hospital.

The apartment was spacious and calming, with high ceilings, lots of polished dark wood, and a fine parquet floor. The bookshelves were stacked with revolutionary literature from Marx to Fanon to Angela Davis. The more recent volumes were by authors of a milder outlook, and when I remarked on this, Zinsser muttered that not much else was available. New times.

Blount went into the bathroom with Chris Porterfield, and I could hear them talking but couldn't make out the words. From time to time she wept. I tried phoning Margarita Mayes, but when she didn't answer, I remembered she'd gone off to stay with a friend and I didn't know which friend. Maybe Porterfield knew, but she was the one who was pissed off and incommunicado. I decided to butt out; it was their problem.

Porterfield came out with wet eyes and began rummaging through the suitcase beside the daybed I was stretched out on while I waited for the household to regain its equilibrium. Blount stayed in the bathroom, and soon I could hear the shower running. I felt it happening again and casually rolled onto my stomach. Showers now. Hopeless.

Porterfield found a little vial of something-or-other. She said, "Who did you say you talked to in L.A.?"

I explained again.

She took the pills into the kitchen and I heard her turn on

the faucet. Sound of a glass filling, faucet off. After a moment, a phone being dialed. The kitchen door eased shut.

While Zinsser told me anecdotes of FFF exploits, Blount came out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist and went into the bedroom. I gave him time to dress, then excused myself from Zinsser, followed Blount into the bedroom, and shut the door behind me. I saw the two letters, from Zimka and the Blounts, lying on the East Indian print bedspread, unopened.

I said, "Let's talk."

"Beg your pardon?" He was standing barefoot in fresh jeans and a white T-shirt, noisily blow-drying his hair in front of a dresser mirror.

"Go ahead," I yelled. "I'll wait."

I sat in a wicker chair and read The Guardian while Blount groomed himself. After the dryer came a hot-comb, then some touching up with a pocket comb. Che Guevara at his evening toilet.

I said, "You're not going out tonight, are you?"

"No, why? I've gotta work tomorrow."

"Where do you work?"

"A record shop. Gay-owned, a friend of Kurt's. It's all under the table. I can't use my real name or Social Security number or I could be traced. Kurt knows about all that."

"What's your new name?"

"Bill Mezereski. Kurt picked it. Like it?"

I hoped Billy Blount was cleared soon, because I couldn't wait to tell Jane Blount of her son's Polish alias. I said, "Sounds workable."

"I'm just getting used to it."

"It looks as if you're cutting yourself off from your past entirely. Except for Chris and Kurt. That's too bad. I've gotten the idea there've been some good things in your life in Albany."

"That's true." He came over and sat on the edge of the bed across from me. "But do I have a choice? I'm never going to be locked in an institution again, ever, and I'll do anything I have to to avoid that. I mean anything." I looked at him. He said, "Well, almost anything."

I said, "You have a choice. Once we've found the person who killed Steve Kleckner and turned the Albany cops around and pointed them at the obvious, you'll be free to do anything you want with your life. You're twenty-seven, and if you've committed no crime, your parents can't touch you."

He sat back against the headboard. He said, "I've committed crimes."

Uh-oh. "Which?"

"Consensual sodomy. A class-B misdemeanor in the state of New York that'll get you three months in the county jail. For me that's three months too long."

"Don't be an ass. Let anyone try to prove it."

"I thought you'd been around, Strachey, but I guess not that much. It's been done."

He was right. And I thought I knew Jane and Stuart Blount well enough that I wouldn't put anything past them. There were others in my profession who'd take on the job of gathering evidence. It was rare, but it happened, and you always had to be a little afraid. Especially if you had people in your life like the Blounts.

I said, "There are plenty of people around who'll help you stay out of jail, me among them. My first concern, though, is keeping Kleckner's murderer from killing again. You can't argue with that, and you've got to help. You're the only living person who can."

His face tightened and he sat looking at his lap for a long time. Finally he said, "I know. I've thought a lot about that. Especially after Chris told me what happened to Huey. Chris and I talked about it. Kurt, too." He gazed at the bedspread.

I waited.

"I'm not going back," he said. He looked up at me. "Of course I want the killer caught, and I'll help you as much as I can. I'll talk to you. But I am not going back. Is that understood?"

I said, "Okay."

He fidgeted with the cuff of his jeans. He swallowed hard and said, "What do you want to know?"

"You're doing the right thing," I said. "You won't be sorry. The night it happened—begin at the beginning and tell me the

whole thing. Minute by minute. Take your time, and don't leave anything out."

He reached for a pack of Marlboros on the night table and offered me one. I said no thanks. He lit One. I said, "I've been checking up on your habits, but I didn't know you smoked."

"I don't. Except about once a month."

One of those.

I asked him again to tell me the story of that night in Albany twelve days earlier. I wanted him to relax, so I suggested he begin with the events in his life that had led up to that night, and he did.

20

"By the time i met steve kleckner, i wasn't tricking a whole lot," Billy Blount began. "Maybe once every five or six weeks. I used to, when I first came out in Albany. I was nineteen then, and God, in the summertime when SUNY was out, I'd be in the park almost every night. I was really man-crazy then, and pretty reckless, and some of the people I went home with you wouldn't believe—kids, old guys, married guys, anything male. Sewickley Oaks was supposed to turn me straight, but when I came out of that place, I had the worst case of every-night fever you ever heard of.

"It wasn't just sex. At first it was, and I guess that was the most important part of it—I loved sex then, and needed it, quite a bit more than I do now—but after I joined the alliance in seventy, a big reason I wanted to meet people was to recruit them into the movement. That was probably part rationalization, I know—don't laugh—but at the time I was very serious about it. All the alliance people ever did was march up and down State Street, and I had this idea there were other gays in Albany who were ready to do more—maybe something like the FFF—and I was going to find these guys and get something

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