He started to get up, and I shoved him down on his stomach and fell on him. My mouth was at his ear, and I gasped into it "You stupid shit, I'm trying to get you out of this fucking mess! They want to put you back in Sewickley Oaks, and they're using this thing to do it to you, and since you acted like a damn fool and ran away, the only way you're going to stay out of that place is to help me find out who really killed Steve Kleckner!"
I yelled it and he wrenched his head away, but he'd understood me. He stopped squirming and lay unmoving except for the heaving of his back as he struggled to get his breathing under control.
After a moment he turned his face toward mine and said, "I don't even know who the fuck you are!"
"Didn't Chris tell you?"
He looked like his photograph, except he'd shaved his mustache, and the old black-and-white photo the Blounts had given me hadn't brought out the high color of his smooth skin or the depths of his black eyes. As we lay there panting together, our faces nearly touching, I thought: Shit-again. I thought about getting up and walking away and phoning Timmy to ask him if he'd go away with me to an island somewhere where we'd be the only men for hundreds of miles around. Then I could do it- thought I could do it.
Blount said, "Chris told me you were probably okay, but she didn't actually know you, and anyway you're working for my parents, who are a menace to civilization. Isn't that the truth? Isn't it?"
"The menaces hired me, yes, but I'm using their money to work for you." A faint private smile on his face. I'm damned if I know what your parents believe, but I do not believe you killed Steve Kleckner. Did you?"
He looked as if he'd have swung at me if I hadn't had his arms pinned down. "Of course I didn't!"
He spat it out.
I relaxed my grip, and when he didn't move, I rolled off him and sat up. I said, "Then who did?"
"How the fuck would I know? Was I there when it happened?"
"I don't know, I wasn't there either. If you weren't, then where were you?"
"In the shower. You knew that. I heard Chris tell you Sunday night."
"And I believed it," I said. "I'm familiar with your after-sex habits. I know Huey Brownlee."
"You know Huey? Is he okay?" He rolled onto his side and studied me, his breathing coming back, the tension draining.
I said, "Huey's fine, no thanks to you. Huey and I were acquainted prior to all this. He's a good man."
A wistful look. "Yeah. He is."
"I've met Mark Deslonde, too. And Frank Zimka."
He looked at the ground and picked at a clump of grass. "Oh. How's he doing? Old Frank."
"He misses you quite a bit. I've got a letter from him in my car. And I've got some questions about old Frank."
The sound of voices calling. I looked up over the shrubs we'd tumbled down beside and could make out two forms moving across the park from where Blount and I had come in. "Bi-l-l-y Bi-l-l-l-yy-"
"Your friends are here." He started to stand, and I took his arm. "Look, why don't we check in with them later. We'll talk first, and then I'll drop you back at Zinsser's apartment. We'll go to a bar I heard about. Ted's. It sounds nice."
"No. You know Ted's? No-anyway, no. They'll be worried." He got up. "It's okay. You'd just better be straight- what's your name?"
"Don Strachey."
"Well, Don Strachey, if you're a cop or something-if you're fucking me over-Kurt has a lot of friends who won't take shit-"
"Am I alone, or am I alone? If I were a cop, would I come after a murder suspect with the Hundred and First Airborne or alone in a rented Bobcat? Which makes more sense?"
He waved and shouted, "We're over here."
They came trotting. They stopped about ten feet away, watching Blount for some signal.
"He's okay," Blount said. "It's cool. He'd better be." They all looked at me.
We were just twenty feet away from the street that paralleled the bottom edge of the park. I'd seen people stand up around the pavilion when I chased Blount across the grass, and one of them must have phoned the police. A cruiser pulled up.
"Everything okay here?"
I noticed that my jacket was ripped, and I gestured with my eyes to Chris Porterfield. She glanced at Billy, who nodded. She said to the cop, "Yes, is there some problem?"
"Somebody reported a fight. You see two guys run by here in the last ten minutes?"
"We just arrived, officer," Zinsser said. "There's no curfew, is there?"
The cop said, "Eleven o'clock. I'd watch myself in here, though. Lotta fags."
"Are they dangerous?" Zinsser said.
"Only if you bend over." We could see him shaking with delight. "I'd say you're safe, Miss." We guffawed heartily.
He drove away.
Zinsser said, "The law." He spat.
Back in front of Zinsser's apartment, I retrieved the two letters to Billy Blount from the glove compartment of the Bobcat. I'd retaped the flap shut on Zimka's note and carefully glued the one from the Blounts. I'd tell Blount, in due course, that I'd read the letters, but just then I needed to solidify his trust, misplaced as it may have been in that particular matter.
Chris Porterfield was in a snit. Her strong, big-boned face frozen in hurt anger, she stomped up the stairs to the apartment 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.