We crouched behind a pile of tires. Sixty feet away, in a pool of light outside the police station's rear door, Mike Truckman was standing alongside his Volvo gesturing animatedly and shaking his head at the two men who stood facing him. From my encounter with them six hours earlier, I recognized the Bergenfield chief of police and the clown in the windbreaker who had frisked me and spoken rudely. Timmy eased out from behind the tires, adjusted his telephoto lens and light setting, and repeatedly snapped the shutter of the camera.
I whispered, "How's the light?"
"Good enough," Timmy said.
Still shaking his head, Truckman slid something from his jacket pocket and handed it to the chief, who held the thing in one hand and flipped through it with the other. Timmy got that, too.
The chief counted out several bills and handed them to the guy in the windbreaker.
Truckman was saying something else, and now the chief was shaking his head. After a moment the police chief opened up his coat, and Truckman frisked him. The cop buttoned up his coat.
The plainclothesman was next. Then Truckman nodded. Okay. No wire.
Truckman climbed back into his car and started the engine. We crouched low behind the tires as his headlights arced above us. He passed us and turned. I raised my head and saw the Volvo move back down Western toward Albany.
A second car engine came to life, and we saw the chief's unmarked Ford pull onto the highway and head west, away from the city. After a moment the third car, a silver-gray Trans-Am with black stripes, roared onto the avenue and sped off.
We walked back to the Rabbit under the cold stars and drove into town.
Timmy said, "I may throw up."
I said, "I can relate to that."
"Okay," he said, "but what's Eddie-Frank Zimka got to do with it? Or Blount? Or Kleckner?"
I said, "I'm not sure yet. Maybe I'll know tomorrow, in Denver."
19
The red and orange Continental 727 From O'Hare climbed out of the rusty haze over the Chicago suburbs and banked west. The tourist section was only half-filled; I had three seats to myself and did not have to sit like a mannequin in storage. The cheap seats in the four or five back rows were thigh-to-thigh with students and families on no-frill tickets, and when I walked past them en route to the lavatory they peered up at me like kittens in a box.
Chicken in brown jelly over Iowa, watery coffee across Nebraska, then southwest over the faded autumn fields and foothills until the Rockies loomed up off the right wing like Afghanistan.
By two-fifteen I had my bag in hand, had rented a Bobcat, and was in the car studying a map of greater Denver. I wanted York Street, in what the car-rental clerk had called the Capital Hill District, "the part of town where the city people live." That sounded right.
I drove west into the city on Colfax Avenue, found its intersection with York Street, then doubled back up Colfax and checked into a motel four blocks away. I phoned Timmy at his office in Albany and gave him the name and phone number of the motel. I put on my jogging gear, consulted my city map again, and headed back towards York. Denver, Timmy had told me, was noted for its high, thin, filthy air. But on that day Denver was warm and odorless, and the mountains looked clean and serene off beyond the city skyline with its State Capital cupola and slab office towers a mile west of where I trotted along the sidewalk.
I turned up York, which was lined mainly with closely spaced, bulky old brick houses and, here and there, set close to the cottonwood-lined street, a newer three- or four-story apartment building of the California-nondescript style. The address for Kurt Zinsser was on a red brick Victorian manse with turrets and curved windows. I walked up the front steps and checked the big front door, which was locked. There were six mailboxes and buzzers, and I pressed the button under Zinsser's name. No response. I rang again. Nothing.
I jogged on up York, checking the parked cars along my route for Wyoming tags with a rental-car code. I saw none.
I cut right, then left up another street, and soon arrived at Cheesman Park, the big municipal swath of green I'd seen on my map. The still-fresh lawns sloped gradually down for a couple of blocks from where I stood, away from a granite neoclassical pavilion, from whose steps I had a dazzling view of the western sections of the city and the mountains beyond.
I rested for a while. I remarked on the weather to a chunky, sloe-eyed young Chicano, who walked me to his apartment, back toward York Street, and we had a Coors. He answered my questions about gay life in Denver-I wrote down the names of bars and organizations-and I told him about Albany. Our stories were similar, except homosexual Denver was much more populous, the gay mecca for all the Sneeds Pond boys from most of the plains states and half the Rockies. Boomtown.
In bed I became short of breath, and Luis said it was the altitude-it took a week or two to adjust. My inclination was to look for a calendar, but I didn't.
He said he hoped we'd run into each other again, and I said truthfully that I hoped so too but that it was unlikely, inasmuch as I'd be returning to Albany in a day or two. I gave him my Albany address, "in case you ever," etc. We kissed goodbye, and I jogged-ambled-back over to York Street.
I tried Zinsser's buzzer again, and again there was no answer. It was five-fifteen. I walked back to the motel and took a nap, after asking for a wake-up call at eight.
I halved my exercise routine, showered, dressed, dined at Wendy's, walked back to the motel, looked up Kurt Zinsser's number in my notebook, and dialed it.
"Hello?" Chris Porterfield.
"Hi-Don Strachey. I'm in Cheyenne. How long does it take to drive down there-two hours, three?"
She hung up.
I drove the Bobcat over to York Street and parked across from Zinsser's building. In twenty minutes they came out carrying three suitcases. They moved quickly up the street, and I had to walk fast. I caught up with them as they were opening the door to Porterfield's Hertz car with the Wyoming tags.
"Hi, gang. Say it now, say it loud, we're gay, and we're proud." They looked at me as if I were a creature that had dropped out of the tree we were standing under. "Look, I'm Don Strachey, and all I want to do is talk. Really-"
Blount dropped his bag and bolted up the street. Zinsser, short, a bit portly, with dark angry eyes staring out over a Maharishi-style face full of hair, flung his suitcase down and came at me, one hand pushing into my face, the other grabbing at the fake fur collar of my bomber jacket.
As we grappled, I caught glimpses of Chris Porterfield standing there, suitcase still in hand, looking fed up, as if her bus were late. I kneed Zinsser in the groin, and as he doubled over cuffed the side of his head. As he went down slowly, I got behind him and whomped him in the seat of the pants with my gay clone work shoes. He grunted, and I took off up the street after Billy Blount.
At the first intersection I looked both ways and caught sight of him off to my right, a block away.
I took off, gasping and wheezing and noticing a funny clamped feeling at the sides of my head.
Blount hung a sudden left, and I broke into a full sprint. By the time he reached Cheesman Park, he had only half a block on me. We charged across the grass under the stars; on the mountainside, off in the distance, I thought I saw a huge, lighted cross. I hoped it actually existed. My ears were screaming.
Beside some shrubbery at an exit on the far side of the park from where we'd entered it, I caught up with him. I lunged and brought him down. His fists flew, and he kicked and grunted,
"Motherfucker! Fucking asshole motherfucker!" He was strong, but frantic-too frantic to know what he was doing-and when I pounded my fist into his midsection, he curled up and concentrated on getting his respiratory system functioning again. I sprawled beside him and worked toward the same end.