I took another swig of beer. Then I said, "Where'd you get the taping equipment to record the therapy sessions, Grey? Did you steal it from the taxpayers of the State of New York? Was it from your office?"
"Jeez, Strachey. Do you think you can get me on petty larceny? Do you think I'm a damn thief? Really, my friend. I bought all my own equipment."
"Well, that clears that up, Grey. You're right, you won't be charged with stealing taping equipment in addition to your other crimes. By the way, are you recording our conversation today? Are you wired right now?"
"No, Strachey, as a matter of fact I'm not wired."
I said, "I am."
He looked at me, then at the bottles lined up on the shelf straight ahead of him. After a minute, he looked back at me. His hands were shaking. He said, "Too bad a beautiful hunk like you had to turn out to be such a flaming asshole, Strachey."
I shrugged.
He said, "Prison life. Yuck."
"It's undeniably a step down from Saratoga."
"How's the medical care in New York state prisons?"
"Variable, I suppose. Not the best, Grey."
"Jesus. I've got these lumps in my armpits and groin. I hope it's not what I think."
"You were fucking all those people and you've never even been tested?"
He only managed to shake his head twice before I got him by the collar and dragged him off his stool and out the door to the waiting police cruiser, where I was threatened with arrest for assault if I didn't release Oliveira immediately, which I did after hoisting him to a height of about five feet. end user
25
Timmy said, "You seem to have been shortchanged by Phyllis Haig."
He had his calculator and her check made out to me in front of him on the kitchen table, and he had concluded that the daily rate she had paid me came to about forty dollars.
"Although," he said, "since you're triple-billing people on this case, you'll still come out ahead."
It was Friday evening and we were celebrating the end of Timmy's work week with Indian take-out and Danish beer.
"I'm not actually that far ahead," I said. "I'm cashing Phyllis's check and billing her for the unpaid balance of many hundreds of dollars. And I'm cashing Bierly's check too-but not Crockwell's. I'm returning his check. I don't want his money."
"Sure you do."
"Nope."
"Why? It's ill-gotten, but better you than he should get to spend it. Better it should go toward our mortgage than Crockwell's."
"He'll need every dollar he's got," I said. "Crockwell is closing his practice and he's going back to school for retraining in a different field. I spoke to him this afternoon."
Timmy said, "I'm flabbergasted," and he looked it. Then, suspicion setting in, he said, "Why did he happen to confide in you regarding this major career change?"
"Cuz we're buddies."
"No you're not. What have you done?"
"This morning," I said, "Dody, Larry's assistant manager at Whisk 'n' Apron and Beautiful Thingies, called me and said she'd found an envelope stuffed in the back of a file at Beautiful Thingies. She opened it and it contained odd photographs."
"Uh-oh."
"Larry told her to show them to me, so I drove out and took a look. Some were copies of pictures of Oliveira on the loose in the Northway rest area. They were pretty murky, but collectively they did seem to be Oliveira, so my pretending to him that I had copies of the pictures, even when I didn't, wasn't quite as cheap a stunt as it seemed at the time."
"Not that it mattered," Timmy said in an uncharacteristic burst of moral relativism. "What were the other photos of?"
"Bierly, St. James and Crockwell all insisted to me that no one had photographed the aversion-therapy assault on Crockwell. But someone had taken pictures of the gross event, because that's what I found in the envelope. And when I asked him today, Bierly remembered that Paul did have a Beautiful Thingies box with him that night, and he could have had a camera concealed in it. Apparently he did, for I am now in possession of an envelope stuffed with inexpertly photographed but still decipherable images of Vernon Crockwell in alarming sexual proximity to the back end of a small-though presumably not underaged-ewe."
Timmy's jaw dropped, but not for long. "They brought an actual live sheep in there? Don, the poor sheep!"
"When I confronted him the other day, Bierly chose not to mention that particular aspect of the incident. And it's the one thing Crockwell couldn't bring himself to tell me until today. They didn't actually try to force the sheep on him
– or him on it. It was just there for atmospherics-aroma therapy and so forth."
"No."
"Yes."
"And you went to Crockwell with the pictures of all this and you-"
I nodded.
"No. No, you can't."
"I did."
"You blackmailed him into shutting down his program? Forever?"
"I negotiated a settlement in lieu of cash for my services rendered in getting him clean off the hook in Paul Haig's murder and Larry Bierly's shooting."
"But-that's appalling!"
"No it's not. You're appalled, but it's not appalling. Think of the hundreds of gay men I'm saving from Crockwell's torture chambers and his lunacy. I should get the Nobel Prize for mental health."
"But people go to Crockwell voluntarily, Don. It's education, education-education about the nature of sexuality and about homophobia-that will save people, not-not some sleazy type of blackmail."
"Both have their places," I said, "with people as dangerous and unsalvageable as Crockwell. Timothy, I fear we're never going to agree on these things."
He said, "No, Don. We're not." Then he sat quietly for a few minutes while he finished off the fish vindaloo.
Breaking his sulky silence, Timmy finally said, "So what's Crockwell's new profession? Or didn't you have the nerve to hang around and ask?"
"Oh, Vernon and I had a real nice visit," I said. "He grew up in Chicago, but he said he'd always had a hankering to head out west to the wide open spaces. His wife's from Wyoming originally, and she's talked for a long time about resettling there. So Vernon sees this move as an opportunity. He said he thought he might try his hand at ranching."
Timmy looked at me carefully. "You're making this up."
"I am not."
"Okay then. What kind of ranching?" He was starting to brighten up again.
"Llama," I said, and I could tell he didn't know whether to believe me or not.