“You sure can, detective. I’m at your service. Yours and Thorny’s.”
Expressionless, Toomey studied me closely, and Steven Gaudios stood looking bereft and apprehensive.
Chapter Eight
Bill Moore’s house was set up on a hillside on the east side of Great Barrington, separated from the business district by the Housatonic River. The Housatonic’s pretty but modest flow would be labeled a creek or brook in New York State and most others, but in New England every topographical dribble was called a river, part of the region’s quirky old-country charm. Moore ’s white, wood-frame two-story house was identical to millions of others in the woodier regions of North America, and it was barely visible behind a profusion of bushes and trees. It seemed to be the abode of someone who preferred privacy or even anonymity, or maybe he just found it pleasant.
I parked in the driveway behind a beige Honda, climbed up six or eight steps, and rang the doorbell. There were some old green wicker chairs on the porch, but they looked dusty and unused. The door swung open.
“Donald Strachey?”
“Yep. Bill Moore?”
“Come on in.”
I saw why Fields had gone for a man twenty years older than he was. Moore was impressive to behold, with a middleweight college wrestler’s build and a green-eyed George Bellows-painting athlete’s mug. He had close-cropped light hair with some gray in it and rings of sleeplessness around his watchful eyes. Barefoot in old khakis and a faded red T-shirt, Moore carried just enough of an incipient paunch to suggest that although he liked to keep fit, he was not fetishistic about it.
“Have a seat,” Moore said. “Did you eat?”
“Had a sandwich in the car. Thanks.”
The living room looked disconcertingly like a straight guy’s bachelor pad, with a lot of nondescript black leather seating, most of it facing a TV set the size of a stadium scoreboard. The floor was not littered with Budweiser dead soldiers, but there was an empty pizza box on the coffee table. The only sign that homosexuals as we generally think of them might have lived here was a bookshelf against one wall that was stuffed with movie and movie-lore titles. There were screenplays, biographies of stars and directors, picture books, plus history and criticism, including what looked like the complete Pauline Kael. I guessed these belonged to Barry Fields, and wherever he had fled to – Colorado? Waziristan? upstairs? – he had not taken his movie books with him.
I said, “I was just down in Sheffield and met Detective Toomey at the crime scene.”
“Good. You’re getting right to work. I’m reassured already.”
“Toomey seems single-minded but not bull-headed. He’s after Barry, but if we can show that Barry could not have shot Sturdivant, Toomey is smart enough to grasp it. Don’t you think?”
Sitting across from me, Moore sighed and shook his head. “I don’t know about Toomey. He might be okay. It’s Thorne Cornwallis, the DA, I’m worried about. He’s unimpressed by facts if they look like they’ll get in the way of a slam-dunk prosecution. Anyway, proving that Barry did not do the shooting will be tough. He has no alibi, and he could have done it. Except he didn’t. For one thing, Barry has no gun. Barry hates guns.”
“Do you own a firearm, Bill?”
He looked at me and shrugged. “I do. Detective Toomey asked me that too. It’s a Glock-nine. It could have been the murder weapon. I keep it in the bedroom closet. When Toomey was here, I produced the weapon, and he took it in for analysis. It’ll come back clean, so we don’t have to worry about that.”
I said, “How come you own a gun? Great Barrington doesn’t feel much like Dodge.”
“I lived in DC for eleven years. It’s a dangerous place. A woman was shot in the lobby of my building. Killed for the eight dollars in her handbag.”
“Where was that?”
“Where I lived?”
“Yeah. I know DC a little. I like it. I like its cosmopolitan-ness. Even though it’s a cosmopolitan city that’s basically run by people from Kansas.”
Moore seemed momentarily startled when I said this, though at the time I had no idea why.
He said, “I lived in the Dupont Circle area, New Hampshire near Eighteenth. Very gay, even though I was not very out at the time. That took a while longer.” Remembering this, Moore looked sad.
“You retired from the federal government early, I was told.”
“Five years ago, yeah.”
“Which agency?”
“That’s another life.”
“I think Jim Sturdivant said you worked for the Commerce Department.”
“Yeah, well.”
“Did you and Barry meet in DC?”
“No, we met after I moved up here.”
“Uh huh.”
Moore sat looking at me, and then he seemed to realize he was talking like an anxious man with something to hide. He perked up a little and said, “I was attracted to Barry, but I thought he was Tom Weed’s boyfriend. Do you know about Tom?”
I nodded.
“So it wasn’t until Tom died that I made my move. And it turned out that Barry was attracted to me all along, but he had thought I wasn’t interested. We wasted a lot of time, but we finally got it right. We got it very right, in fact. I was never so happy or sure of anything in my whole life. And then you came along.” He looked at me, waiting for me to justify or explain my despicable interference.
I said, “Yes, Bill, I was hired by Sturdivant to check Barry out – because, Sturdivant told me, he was concerned that Barry was going to rip you off in some way. It sounded like a plausible enough story at the time.”
Moore leaned back and snorted. “What shit.”
“Apparently.”
“Barry told me Sturdivant told you I was his good buddy. But Barry told you the truth – what my real relationship was with Jim.”
“He did.”
“I only knew Sturdivant socially and didn’t particularly like him or Gaudios. But I borrowed forty thousand dollars from Jim at a better rate than I could have gotten at any bank. He offered this to me, ‘as a friend,’ he said at the time. The exact nature of the ‘friendship’ didn’t become apparent until the day I went over to pick up the check – after I’d already signed the purchase agreement on this house.” Moore shook his head dolefully.
“And then it was into the hot tub, with Jim and Steven?”
“It was never spelled out,” Moore said. “But when Jim said he’d give me the check after we relaxed a bit in the tub, and why didn’t I get naked, I knew immediately what was going on. My first impulse was to laugh, and my second impulse was to tell the toads to go fuck themselves. And then I thought, hell, what a quick and easy and totally uncomplicated way to knock half a point in interest off a major loan.”
I said, “What with Alan Greenspan not being available to do his bit.”
“So I asked, will I have to do this more than once? And Jim said, no, not unless you have such a wonderful time you want to come back for more. So – what the hell.”
“And you climbed in, and then you just closed your eyes and thought of… not England. Where are you from originally, Bill?”
“The Midwest. So anyway, I saved myself a few thousand dollars that day. And, I can tell you, it wasn’t the most humiliating thing I’ve ever done sexually.”
“We all have our stories.”
“And then, of course, I found out later that I wasn’t the only borrower with an unwritten hot tub clause in my contract. There are four other guys, and I’ll bet more.”