“Yes, hello.” She sounded out of breath.
“Hi, Jean. This is Don Strachey. I’m sorry we got off to a bad start the other day – ”
“Don,” she cut in, “I’m so sorry, but I can’t talk to you right now. I have to go out of town unexpectedly.”
“I’m calling about Barry – and Bud Radziwill. Bud apparently has disappeared – ”
“Gotta go. I’m really sorry.” Click, and she was gone.
“Oy vey.”
Timmy said, “She hung up?”
“‘Called out of town unexpectedly. Sorry, gotta run!’ Timothy, why did these people hire me if none of them can bring themselves to trust me with the facts? If they just wanted to go through the motions, why not hire someone incompetent? Somebody who they knew would stumble around and, if serious trouble turned up, cut and run?”
“Some wussy defeatocrat.”
“It’s all too strange.”
Timmy said, “Maybe they thought you were that incompetent person. If so, the joke’s on them.”
“Is it? I’m starting to wonder.”
I phoned Joe Toomey on his cell and told him I was more convinced than ever that Jim Sturdivant was the victim of a mob hit, and I explained why I thought so. I told him about Sturdivant’s father and brother and my conversations with Cornwallis, O’Toole and Montarsi. Toomey was amused that the DA had sent me chasing after men the state cop said were well-known Pittsfield thugs. But Toomey could not imagine why the mob would have it in for Jim Sturdivant – except for the ethically challenged but perfectly legal hot-tub loans, his record seemed spotless – and I had to admit that neither could I.
Toomey had not heard of Cheap Maloney but said he would do his own checking and meanwhile advised that I watch my back. I said I planned to. I told Toomey about Johnny Montarsi’s interest in my whereabouts, and this made Toomey grow thoughtful. He said mob enforcers were not the kinds of people with whom I should reasonably expect to have a productive exchange of views, and I told him, yes, I had heard that.
Timmy and I picked up a rental car at a Subaru dealer near the motel, and I parked it in a shady spot across from my own car and the room I had rented. We had an early dinner at an excellent Japanese place on Railroad Street, and then Timmy headed back to Albany. I walked over to the Triplex, where the Saturday night throngs were converging. Myra Greene was in the lobby greeting fans, so I went in to say hello.
When she saw me, Greene looked apprehensive, even frightened. She cut off a conversation with a group of moviegoers and beckoned for me to follow her to a less crowded corner of the lobby behind a display of film noir memorabilia. A blown-up photo showed a blond Barbara Stanwyck with that seductive ankle bracelet marching down the stairs toward Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity.
“Donald the gumshoe, oh, am I glad to see you!”
“I’m happy to see you got sprung, Myra. Thorny didn’t hang you, but I guess he did rough you up a bit. I’m just glad you didn’t have to blast your way out of the Great Barrington police lockup.”
“Oh, I’m not worried about any of that, Donald. Cornwallis is just showboating – he’s up for reelection in November – and that’ll all blow over.” Greene tried to gesture toward the “that,” as if Cornwallis might be out in the parking lot surveilling the Triplex from his Berkshire DA’s armor-plated Humvee, but her neck did something painful and she grimaced.
Then she said, “Barry’s mother called him. I think this is gonna be trouble.”
“In jail? She knew where he was – and who he says he is these days – and his real mother called Fields at the Berkshire County jail? I’m amazed.”
Greene leaned my way, her old-time nicotine aura reaching up to me. “Barry called me a while ago. He called Bud first and told him to get out of town, and he said maybe I should take a little vacation too, because things were going to get ugly around here.”
“Did he say who these problematical people were and how they were going to make their trouble?”
“Nuh uh. Listen, dear, now I’m just as curious as you are about who these pishers could possibly be.” Greene waved to a couple of ticket-buyers she knew, and they waved back and each waggled a vigorous thumbs-up. It looked as if Thorny would not be collecting a lot of votes in Great Barrington come November.
I said, “What would you say was Barry’s state of mind when he called? I saw him this afternoon, and he was despondent.”
“Oh, he was angry when he called, Donald. Not gloomy, just fit to be tied. And kind of desperate to get out of the clink. That’s why I’m telling you this, even though Barry said I should keep it under my hat. I’m worried about him, I have to tell you.”
I said, “I’ll alert Ramona Furst. She can call the jail psychologist, and they can keep an eye on Barry. He should have called Ramona himself, but I don’t think he sees his family as a legal problem. He seems to regard them as something worse than that, a kind of moveable catastrophe, like war or global warming. Did he say he thought they might show up here in the Berkshires?”
“Donald, that’s exactly what Barry’s afraid of, that they’ll come here and… do whatever it is they do.”
“How did they locate him? Did he say?”
“On a gay-news Web site, he said. Barry’s picture was on this Web site in a news report about him being accused of murdering Jim Sturdivant. His real name wasn’t there, but he said his mother recognized his photograph.”
“Barry’s mother looks at gay Web sites? What’s that supposed to mean?”
Greene screwed up her face, and I screwed up mine, and we just stood there.
In my car, en route back to the motel, I phoned Ramona Furst. I described my conversation with Myra Greene, and Furst said she would phone the jail and find out what she could. Furst said, “Why would Barry’s mother be looking at gay-news Web sites? That’s weird. Maybe despite being an arch homophobe, according to Barry, she was secretly proud of him, and she thought he might have become some kind of commendable gay personage, a young man of accomplishment. Is that possible?”
I said, “Not according to Barry, it isn’t.”
Chapter Twenty-two
The night was warm for the Berkshires in September, and I sat with the rental-car windows open. The Boxwood Motor Inn was bordered by actual boxwood near where I had parked, and I was counting on its vaguely repellent perfume to help keep me awake as long as was necessary. The odd smell was actually an improvement over the new-car scent of the Subaru, which had eight thousand miles on it but must have been sprayed regularly with the stuff my Albany client used on his Washington Park rent boys. A complex engine is the human libido.
A vivid half-moon hung over the one-story motel, and bright, good-humored clouds moseyed by every so often. My view of my own car and motel room was clear, full and head-on. I had closed the drapes in the room and turned off all the lights. A nightlight burned above the door to my room, unit eight. A minivan was parked by the room to the left of mine, and just before midnight a car drove in and parked in the space to the right. A middle-aged man and woman let themselves into unit seven, and the lights stayed on until 12:40.
I had a big cup of good coffee with me, and it seemed that if I didn’t really think about it much, a cigarette would have been nice. I had been off that ambrosial toxin for a long time, but on semitropical Nights in the Gardens of Great Barrington like this one, those old yearnings hung in the air mockingly. Of course, if I had actually smoked, I’d likely have projectile vomited the maki sushi I’d enjoyed several hours earlier across the parking lot onto the rear window of the shiny Lexus in front of unit seven.
I played the car radio quietly for a while, listening to the old jazz on WAMC. Some wonderful Coleman Hawkins numbers from the ‘40s gave me that wish-I’d-been-bornsooner feeling jazz from that era often does. Though if I’d been born sooner I’d be dead sooner and maybe already up in my mother’s Presbyterian heaven, where all they played were Leroy Anderson favorites, a harrowing eternity of Bugler’s Holiday.