On the Other Hand, Death - Stevenson Richard - Страница 5

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"This Trefusis asshole sent a crew over earlier to repaint the barn," McWhirter said sourly. "Dot told them to fuck off. But she says she knows you, or heard of you or something, and she's surprised you're working for Millpond."

"That makes two of us," I said. "Life gets complicated sometimes. On the one hand this, on the other hand that."

He peered at me stonily. "You sound to me like a rather indecisive person to be doing the kind of work you claim you do. I can't actually see how you're going to be any help around here. Dot and Edith need protection, not a lot of bullshit existential angst."

"Maybe I won't be much help," I said, seized by a fit of free-floating perversity. "Or maybe I will." I wished somebody would offer me a cold Molson's.

McWhirter was supposed to burst into laughter at this point, and I'd laugh too, and we'd immediately become great pals. But he didn't laugh. He just shook his head incredulously and made a little astonished sound with his breath, like "eeesh." Revolution was a serious business. I hadn't made a hit.

"What do you mean, 'protection'?" I said, trying to meet him on his own terms, of which I'd run into worse. "Has something else happened since last night? Have there been more threats?"

His look hardened and he was about to reply, when another figure appeared from around the back corner of the house carrying a gallon can of paint and two brushes.

"Peter, come over here and meet the gay James Bond," McWhirter said loudly. "He says he's going to catch the assholes who are after Dot—except he's also on their payroll. He's a little confused, but he says not to worry."

I recognized Peter Greco, McWhirter's lover, an Albany native who'd been in California or on the road with McWhirter since I'd come to Albany eight years earlier, so we hadn't met. He was short and fragile-looking in jeans and no shirt, with shiny olive skin and a frail boy's thin arms. He had an open, quietly cheerful face, curly black hair on his head and chest, and placid dark eyes. I'd always thought poets were supposed to be pimpled and funny-looking, but I'd read some of Greco's verses and he, unhappily, was no Auden, so maybe that explained it.

"Hi," he said, smiling easily despite McWhirter's sarcastic, and possibly accurate, introduction. "You're a gay detective? I don't think I've ever met one before."

"Of course you have," McWhirter put in emphatically. "You just didn't know they were gay. That's the whole point."

"I'm Don Strachey," I said, offering my hand. There was a brief tussle of fingers and thumbs while we found the old movement handclasp of the '60s. "I am a private investigator, yes, and more or less coincidentally gay, and it's also true that I'm being paid by Millpond. But I'll be working for Dot, if she's agreeable. I'd have done that anyway."

"Why don't you come in and talk to her?" Greco said,

cheerfully accepting me at my word. Was he an instant judge of good character, or a dangerously vulnerable naif? "Dot won't admit it," he said, "but she's really pretty upset, and she can use all the help and support she can get right now. And Edith's not making things any easier."

I thought at first that "Edith" might be a pet name for McWhirter, but then I remembered.

I said, "Fine, I'd like to talk with Dot. When did you two arrive? Were you here last night when it happened?"

"No, we just got into town this morning, but we were here when the letter arrived. It really shook poor old Edith up. At first Dot wasn't even going to show it to her."

"What letter was that? Trefusis didn't mention a letter."

McWhirter snapped, "Why should he? He wrote it, didn't he? Or his Mafia goons did. Or maybe you wrote it yourself, Strachey. I've heard all about this Trefusis gangster, and I wouldn't trust anybody who had anything to do with him."

Greco and I went on with our exchange of information while McWhirter stood there adding to the humidity. "It was in the mailbox when Dot went out around three this afternoon," Greco said. "Dot called the police right away, and they said they'd send a detective out, but he hasn't shown up yet. It's just a plain piece of notebook paper with printing that says, 'You're next. You got three days. Saturday you die.' It was addressed to both Edith and Dot."

I said, "Today's Friday. The letter arrived in the regular mail?"

Greco nodded. "It was postmarked Wednesday in Albany. Whoever sent it must have thought it would be delivered the next day."

"Could be," I said. "Somebody who doesn't patronize

the Postal Service regularly and doesn't know how slow it can be. Or someone who can't add, or use a calendar."

"I am going to demand," McWhirter said, eyes flashing, "that the police provide round-the-clock protection for Dot and Edith. And if those assholes aren't out here within half an hour, I am notifying the media and driving straight in to city hall and the mayor's office. It's been two fucking hours since Dot called them!"

"Ask nicely and the Albany cops might be helpful," I said. "Demand anything of them and they'll vanish without a trace. Or worse. They're a sensitive lot." McWhirter glowered. "As for the mayor," I went on, enjoying myself a little, "I'm fairly certain it's already past his bedtime. Not that he's all that alert and responsive during his waking hours. I'm not saying, Fenton, that municipal government in Albany functions exactly the same way it does in, say, Buenos Aires. It's more benign here—slower and sleepier than in the tropics. But don't get your hopes up. To a very large extent, if you're gay in Albany you're on your own. I'm a little surprised at your expectations. Surely you must have run onto similar situations elsewhere."

McWhirter scowled at me with disgust, as if I were a prince of the local machine instead of one of its taxpaying reluctant benefactors. "And people like you just sit around and take it," he said acidly, then abruptly picked up his ladder and stalked off muttering.

Greco frowned after him for a moment, then shrugged and smiled, his most natural expression. I thought it would be nice to go lie down with him in some shady spot. He said, "Poor Fenton. He's having a hard enough time getting the campaign off the ground, and then when he comes here he runs into this awful mess. It's been a rough year for him, believe me."

He set down the paint cans and brushes and we

walked toward the back of the house past a bed of nasturtiums that looked like cool, soft fire. I said, "There's been no mass of recruits signing on for the gay national strike?"

A weary laugh. "No, no masses. If the GNS is going to work there'll have to be millions, of course. But so far the people who've pledged to come out of the closet and join the strike can only be numbered in the hundreds. Or maybe tens," he added, shaking his head dolefully. "We've only been to nine cities so far, and we've got almost another year—ten and a half months—to get people committed. But so far it's been pretty discouraging. A joke, really. I mean, it's partly because it's summer, don't you think? People are more interested now in cultivating their tans than they are in social justice. Maybe in the fall ..." He turned to me with a tentative smile. "So, how do you think we'll do at the center in Albany tonight?"

"Hard to say," I lied, having a good idea of what was going to happen. Which was too bad, because McWhirter's notion of a national coming-out day as the first event of a week-long gay national strike seemed to me a wonderful piece of whimsy—which, if it ever somehow actually happened, could make a real difference in the way American homosexuals were thought of and treated.

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