"No, I have a feeling I'll be home in plenty of time to tuck you in. Or to get tucked. Though I've drunk so much coffee I may be circling the house at six thousand feet for most of the night."
He said, "I'll dream of you up there."
I said I'd try to beam friendly messages down to him.
By seven-thirty the Northway commuter traffic had thinned out and I cruised unimpeded up through the spring evening. To the commuters in Clifton Park and the other northern suburbs of Albany, I-87 was something of a daily drag. But to Timmy and me, all of its associations were happy: It was the way to summer concerts at Saratoga, camping in the Adirondacks, weekends in Montreal for jazz and blanquette de lapin. I'd have been relaxed and eager driving north that evening if I hadn't been going to see a man about a murder, and if I hadn't drunk too much coffee and needed very badly all of a sudden to urinate.
I knew there was a Northway rest area above Clifton Park, and when I came to it I pulled in. The I-87 rest areas, in keeping with the intentionally woodsy, nature-friendly character of the highway, had no restaurants or gas stations, just restrooms, lawns, picnic tables and parking.
There were plenty of cars angled along the sidewalk leading to the restroom building, and I soon became aware of why some of them were there. My gaydar was rusty, but not so out of whack that I didn't instantly appreciate that this was a busy gay cruising area. After I peed, a number of pairs of eyes followed me outside, and I noted that men were coming and going behind the rest-room building. A hole had been ripped in the wire fence at the rear of the rest-area clearing, and a path led away into the woods. In fact, this rest area had been notorious in fast-lane gay Albany for years, I remembered. And that's when it all came together. end user
23
The meeting with Dr. Glen Snyder was underly helpful but not a washout. He had no knowledge of any blackmail attempt by Paul Haig, he said, but he did know from his own sources that Paul's father had once been accused of trying to blackmail a state official and had barely escaped prosecution. Snyder knew too of Paul's desperation over his financial situation and his fear that he might lose his business. In fact, Snyder had prescribed the Elavil to alleviate what he called the "severe anxiety" brought about by Haig's financial crisis and the fact that his personal life was pretty much of a mess.
Snyder said the last time he'd seen Haig, Haig had seemed less stressed out. But Haig had made no mention of his money worries being over, and Snyder just thought the Elavil had begun to do its work. Snyder said he was saddened and surprised to learn in March that Haig had killed himself, and Snyder wondered at the time if either Haig hadn't gone off his medication for a reason unknown to Snyder, or some new crisis hadn't come along that sent Haig tumbling over the edge into hopelessness. The likelihood of murder came as news to Snyder.
I asked him whether Haig had ever discussed the other members of the Crockwell psychotherapy group. He said only in a general way. Haig talked about Larry Bierly, Snyder said, and how wretched Haig had been over losing Bierly, and how he attributed this loss to his alcoholism, which he feared he might never control. Snyder didn't say anything about a Haig family history of untreated alcoholism and I didn't bring it up. Snyder said Haig's bitterness over being subjected to Vernon Crockwell's homosexuality-cure regimen was deep, but Haig's bitterness over, and inability to accept, his own unconventional sexuality ran deep too, and Snyder considered Haig a deeply damaged man.
No doubt he had been, though he needn't have died young. Paul Haig had survived AIDS, and gay bashers in high and low places, and Vernon Crockwell, and to some extent even his family. But in a moment of terrible weakness and probably self-destructive revenge against his mother-Haig had reverted to a despicable practice his father apparently had originated in the family. The second time around, the act's consequences were even more dire than they had been the first time. Trying to blackmail a man hadn't just left an ugly cloud over Paul Haig's life; it had ended it.
Tuesday morning I called my credit-checker friend and said I would pay top dollar if she let me jump the queue in her work day and receive, at the soonest, all the financial dope she could come up with on these people: LeVon Monroe, Walter Tidlow, Eugene Cebulka, Roland Stover, Dean Moody and Grey Oliveira. I said I was most interested in Oliveira. I was told to call back in the early afternoon.
At ten A.M., I walked into Larry Bierly's room and said, "I know about the assault on Crockwell. Phyllis Haig was right when she told me you were a violent man. Paul must have told his mother some half-truths-a family custom among the Haigs whenever they weren't telling bald-faced lies to each other. It sounds like Paul made a habit of badmouthing you around Phyllis because that's what she liked to hear. But when he told her you had assaulted a man, he omitted the fact that he was there at the time and he was involved himself. And of course he left out the part about the electroshocks and the pictures of the Playboy bunnies and the sheep."
Bierly's little red numbers started going crazy, but he didn't call for the nurse. He looked at me big-eyed and said,
"Did you tell the police?"
"No."
"Are you going to?"
"I doubt it. That's up to Crockwell, and he seems disinclined to have word of the episode bruited about the Capital District broadcast-ad market at six and eleven."
"We should never have done it. It was wrong. I know that."
"No, Larry, you should never have done it. Why did you?"
He tugged at the IV tubing leading into his arm and shifted his muscular bulk. "Drugs," he said.
"Right, the devil made you do it."
"I'm really not a violent person," Bierly said, almost plaintively. "It was some kind of bad acid or something that Steven and I got hold of. And of course Paul was drunk. He hardly knew what was going on, I have to admit. I was the one who made it all happen."
"You could serve time for it."
"I know, I know, I know."
"And that's why you tried to dump me from the case, isn't it? You suspected Crockwell had killed Paul and tried to kill you in revenge for the late-night aversion-therapy incident, but you couldn't even fill me in on Crockwell's only genuinely plausible motive, because it would have implicated you in a felonious assault. Then when I stumbled on St. James and started getting close to that unpleasant part of the truth, you wanted me out of the picture-even if it meant Crockwell would get off scot-free."
He nodded and looked away morosely.
I said, "Larry, if you thought Crockwell had killed Paul and shot you, weren't you afraid that Crockwell would go after St. James too? You didn't even warn him."
"But Crockwell didn't know who Steven was."
"Surely he knew Steven's first name from the night he met him," I said. "And I knew a man named Steven St. James was involved, and you knew I knew it, and you knew I was talking to Crockwell."
Bierly sulked guiltily. "Who told you about the-incident? Did Steven tell you?"
"No, he refused. I extracted it from Crockwell."
"Oh. So now are you going to be able to nail Crockwell?" Bierly asked, brightening a little.
"He didn't do it," I said. "Crockwell didn't kill Paul, and he didn't shoot you."
"How do you know?" He looked badly disappointed.
"Because I believe I know who did do it. I want you to think about something, Larry. After Paul died, did you mention to anyone that you thought he had been murdered and that Vernon Crockwell had done it?"
He chewed this over. "A couple of people, I guess."
"Who?"
"Dody, my assistant manager."
"Uh-huh."
"Ed Chartrand, who I have running Beautiful Thingies."
"Right."
"Probably a few others."