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 going. I never did, though. The people I met were too young, or too old, they thought, or too scared, or too fucked up. I did meet some nice people, though, and I had a couple of relationships with guys I saw pretty regularly until either the other guy moved away or one or the other of us just lost interest and stopped calling. You know how that works.
"Anyway, this went on for-God, five years. Almost every night I was on the phone to somebody, or in the park-or in the bars; I'd started hitting the bars pretty regularly by then, even though I'm not much of a drinker. One night the Terminal, the next night the Bung Cellar Mary-Mary's it was back then- and the next night back to the park.
"It was a pretty messy and wild kind of life, I know, and I didn't really wise up until after I picked up some weird, awful NSU and it took me nine fucking weeks to shake it! God, the VD clinic tried everything-tetracycline, penicillin, Septra DS, the works-but for nine weeks whenever I pissed, it was like pissing needles. I always had these little plastic vials of pills in my pockets, and when I went dancing it sounded like castanets.
"It was really a very chastening experience, and after the NSU went away, whatever it was, I slowed down quite a bit. Maybe it was for the wrong reasons, but anyway I decided to start paying less attention to gay men's bodies and even more attention to their fucked-up minds. I tried to get the alliance moving-I was chairman of the political-action committee by then-but those guys are such a bunch of old ladies, I couldn't get them to budge. I wanted to zap the State Assembly and they wanted to put on luncheons. I saw that I was wasting my time with that DAR chapter they were running over there, so I dropped out. I almost went to California to join Kurt and the FFF, but they were having their own troubles by then and splitting up, so I decided to stay in Albany for a while longer.
"I was glad I stayed. I met Huey around that time, and then Frank. Also, I had a hot thing going for a while with a guy named Dennis Kerskie. He was going to help me start an FFF branch in the East, but unfortunately Dennis freaked out and took off for Maine to cleanse his intestinal tract, or some weird thing. Actually, it was just as well. Dennis could be pretty flaky, and I don't think he would have had the discipline for the things I wanted to do. I did meet Mark through Dennis, though, and I'm grateful for that.
"Anyway, by the time I met Steve Kleckner that night, I'd pretty much settled down. I was seeing Huey once a week-we had a nice, relaxed sexual friendship, nothing heavy-and I was seeing Frank once a week, but not too much else. Well, actually there was this one guy from Lake George I met in the park one night in August. Mark was staying at my place with a friend, so I took a chance and we went to my parents' place, and that turned into a very bad scene. Stu and Jane came home the next day unexpectedly and caught us smoking a joint in the front room without the vent on, and it got pretty ugly. After that I sort of swore off having sex with people I didn't know-it was just getting to be too much of a hassle-when Mark and I went out to Trucky's that night three weeks ago and I met this really neat guy. That was Steve Kleckner.