I wondered about something. “Barry, if Jim is onto what he thinks might be a mob connection to Sturdivant’s murder, why doesn’t he just pursue that himself? Why spend money on me? Why bring me into it at all?”
“Because,” Fields said without hesitation, “I don’t think he wants to solve the murder. He wants you to do it.”
“Why?”
“If he solves the crime, people will wonder how he did it and ask a lot of questions about Bill’s past. And that is exactly what he doesn’t want to happen. But if you solve the crime, he can resume his life as William Moore and I can resume my life as Barry Fields. It will be almost as if nothing ever happened.”
“What’s your real first name? Does it start with a.?”
Fields smiled. After a moment, he said, “Benjamin.”
“Do you and Bill call each other by your real names sometimes?”
“Yes. Those are our affectionate names for each other. Our former names. We use them when we make love, and other times too, sometimes, when nobody else is around.”
“And does your former last name start with an.?”
Fields grinned again. “Nope.”
“Barry… I mean Benjamin…”
“No,” he said, “you have to call me Barry. That’s really who I am now. To you, and even to myself. I really have reinvented myself, Donald, and you have to respect that. As for my family, and any possible connection to Jim’s death, I’ll have to think about that. If it makes any sense at all, I’ll tell you what you’d have to know to check it out. But I have to say, I doubt that’s the answer. These people are worse than mere homicidal maniacs. And if you never have to get anywhere near them, be grateful. Just be grateful for that.”
“I hope I don’t have to meet them, Barry. But you should know, I will do what I have to do to get you out of here.”
Fields suddenly teared up and looked away from me. In a thick voice he said, “Good. There’s no time to waste. This place is starting to get me down.”
Chapter Seventeen
I met Timmy at the Starbucks where I’d dropped him off in a shopping center down the road from the jail. He was going at the Times crossword puzzle, all his mental resources cocked, loaded and firing sporadically. To see Timmy attack the Saturday or Sunday puzzle was like watching Washington commanding his troops at Yorktown. Timmy was barely aware that I had entered the coffee shop, and while he dealt decisively with some linguistic threat on his left flank, I looked over the day’s Berkshire Eagle.
The Fields arraignment made page one, with a color photo the size of a beach blanket above the fold showing Fields being led into the Great Barrington courthouse. A smaller picture of Cornwallis bloviating on the courthouse steps bore the caption “DA Thorne Cornwallis called the murder of a Sheffield man on Wednesday ‘heinous.’”
The accompanying story contained no new information, but the reporter had dug up several witnesses to Barry Fields’ assorted outbursts of temper. One woman said she had seen Fields “drag an old lady” out of the Triplex one time for talking. The old lady was not named. A separate story on Myra Greene’s indictment on harboring-a-fugitive charges centered on the popular local woman’s overnight incarceration. Three of Greene’s friends said this time Cornwallis had gone too far and he would surely pay at the polls in November. There was a photo of Greene in chains entering the courthouse, an unfiltered cigarette dangling from her lips.
Timmy gradually became aware that he was in a room with other people, one of them me, and I described my visit with Barry Fields. I said I was pursuing two angles now, the mob-hit possibility, and the long-shot chance that some member of Fields’ horrible family had set him up.
Timmy said, “How can you look at Fields’ family when you have no idea who they are?”
“I might be able to persuade Moore or Radziwill to tell me who Fields really is – or used to be, as he thinks of it – if I can convince them it will help get Fields out of this fix he’s in. Or maybe Jean Watrous can be brought around – even though I did not win her over with my characterization of Moore as an assassin. That really sent her into a swivet, and I wish I knew why.”
“Maybe because it’s true.”
“I doubt it. Fields just told me Moore really did work for the FBI, but changed his name when he left the bureau and moved up here. If it had been the CIA, I’d have to wonder what violence he might have perpetrated in the name of Jesus and George Tenet. But post-Hoover-era FBI agents tend to be law-abiding citizens. One possibility, of course, is that Moore killed somebody accidentally, and that’s the source of his terrible shame and regret. Anyway, Fields says Moore is in DC digging into Sturdivant’s family now, so we’ll see how that goes.”
Timmy said, “Maybe you could find out who Fields used to be by ID-ing his fingerprints. It’s old-fashioned and low-tech. But I’ll bet it would work.”
I helped myself to a sip of his tepid latte. “Maybe. I could easily get his prints on something. And now the Great Barrington cops must have his prints on file too, if I could get hold of them.”
“And your old flame Lyle Barner at NYPD could run the prints through the national data center.”
“The DA here has probably had Fields’ prints checked. Anyway,” I said, “it’s possible Fields – or whatever his name used to be – was never fingerprinted. If he was never arrested or never served in the military or worked for the government, he might not have been inked.”
“Sometimes elementary school children are fingerprinted now. Though you have to wonder if Fields’ family would have allowed that. Anyway, maybe to the rest of us Fields’ allegedly vile family wouldn’t seem so rotten. Maybe they’re just eccentric.”
“No, Radziwill knows about Barry’s family, and he told me they are truly wicked. Much worse than his own family, he said, and apparently the not-really-Radziwills are bad enough. And Moore doesn’t dispute it either.”
Timmy said, “I wonder what the Republican family-values crowd would make of Fields’ family.”
“Maybe they’d approve. They’re often pretty daffy.”
“Or maybe the Republican family-values crowd are Fields’ family.”
“Don’t think that hasn’t occurred to me.”
“Li’l Barry Falwell.”
I said, “Timothy, I want you to go to Virginia and get me a sample of Jerry Falwell’s DNA.”
“Okay. Will a strand of hair be okay?”
“No, I want one of his jowls. Or a couple of hemorrhoids. Are you up to it?”
“As soon as I check my appointment book. I have a busy schedule.”
“Meanwhile, let’s have lunch with somebody who might actually be forthcoming with useful information instead of acting cagey and evasive.”
Timmy said that sounded refreshing.
Preston Morley and David Murano lived in a pleasant, maple-shaded, two-family Edwardian frame heap on Gordon Street, not far from Pittsfield High School. Their side of the house had a yard sign for a candidate in the upcoming primary election, and the other side of the house had a sign for another candidate. The non-Morley-Murano section of the house also had a sign in the window that read Jesus is Coming Soon. It felt a little like Sunnis and Shias trapped in the same dwelling, though as Timmy and I walked up the porch steps a middle-aged woman emerged from the Shia side and offered a smile and a hearty “G’morning.”
Morley greeted us on the Sunni side and led us through rooms full of theatrical posters and memorabilia to the kitchen, where we met Murano, who was fixing lunch. He was large and dark-eyed, with a bushy black mustache, and the nimbleness of the dancer Timmy said he once had been. Morley, Timmy’s old classmate, was, like Timmy, not much changed from their track-and-field Georgetown days, except for their matching extensive bald spots. They chortled over their missing-hair situations, and Morley led us to the back porch, where a table had been laid with cheery care, including a centerpiece of many-colored nasturtiums from the flower garden below us. Here was the Massachusetts gay-marriage hell over which much of the nation was at that time clutching its head and recoiling in horror.