"Who," I said tightly, "is Grey Koontz?" My head had been feeling hot and greasy on the outside and now it was starting to feel hot and greasy on the inside, too.
"Koontz is one of Slinger's tricks and a dirtbag from the word go. He looks a lot like Eddie, except maybe younger, maybe twenty-four or — five. From a distance, or even in a dark bar or someplace, people sometimes get them mixed up. Slinger must have planned the whole thing after I outed him. He's one of the ones who threatened me and he is absolutely ruthless, ask anybody. It was probably Koontz or Slinger who shot me last night, and now they're trying to frame Eddie, the fucking degenerates!"
I looked into the one of Rutka's eyes that was looking at me and said, as calmly as I could, "Are you using me?"
"No. Not underhandedly, if that's what you suspect."
"Don't. I'll catch on. And then you'll have another enemy."
"I wouldn't. I know you're sharp, Strachey. That's why I hired you. If I wanted to run a con on somebody, I'd do it with those stupid Handbag cops. Trust me."
I said, "The Handbag cops aren't doing badly at all, so far. And it strains credulity way past the limit that the famous senatorial aide you outed should have a boyfriend who looks just like your boyfriend and would be in a position to frame you. That's quite a coincidence."
"They're not boyfriends," Rutka said, and turned to snatch a Snickers bar from the sideboard behind him.
"Koontz is an occasional trick, that's all. It's in the files-you'll see it. Slinger's current boyfriend is Ronnie Linkletter. I can't imagine that wimp Linkletter coming after me. But Slinger and Koontz-those two douche-bags are capable of anything."
He went to work on the candy bar and I sat there watching him eat. "Are you hungry?" he said. "Help yourself."
"No."
He finished the sweet. "You don't believe me, do you?" he said, giving me his poor-misunderstood-thing look.
I said, "It's about the dumbest explanation I ever heard."
"No, it's not," he said, looking bitter now. "It's the obvious explanation. Just because you've never seen Grey Koontz, you don't believe it. What kind of solipsistic bullshit is that? If you have no personal knowledge of something, then it can't be true? I thought you were smarter than that. What other explanation could there be, anyway? Eddie was at work. He was there when you called."
"I called half an hour after the fire started. It takes twenty minutes from here to Kopy-King. Eddie could have been back with plenty of time to spare."
He waved this away. "All right, he could have done a lot of things, but he didn't. Look, the cops will check Eddie out, and where he was at the time of the fire, and then you'll be satisfied. In the meantime, who knows what that fucking Slinger has in store for me next. If you want to be skeptical, be skeptical. I don't care. Spend as much time investigating Eddie as investigating me. Just help protect me, will you? If you want to think of it as protecting me from myself, go ahead and think of it that way. I'm going to write you a check right now." He pulled out a checkbook from under the stack of documents.
I said nothing and watched him write the check, and I thought about it. Then I made a decision. More out of curiosity over what I had come to see as a fascinating disturbed personality with a tiny role to play in gay history-more for that than for any other reason (such as my wanting to get a longer, closer look at the despicable files), I said, "John, I'm willing to work for you for the next twenty-four hours."
He said, "That's a start."
"I'm not going to cash the check," I said. "And if at the end of twenty-four hours I have concluded that you have lied to me and involved me in an elaborate hoax, I'll return the check personally and I'll stomp on your shot foot. How's that?"
He handed me the check. "I understand your position," he said. "You have a reputation to protect and you have to do what you have to do. But I'm not worried. I don't have much to fall back on, but I do have my personal integrity. And if that's your only concern, I'm on firm ground. Just let me know when your belief in me has been restored."
Restored? I said, "Do you want to stay at my place overnight? You'll be safe there, I'm certain."
"That's not really necessary. Eddie will be here and we can take turns sleeping. I think my gun was damaged in the fire, but Eddie has another one."
"Registered?"
"No. From the bodega, like mine."
"I'll try to get the Handbag cops to increase their coverage of the house. After the fire, that should be no problem."
He agreed and I phoned the Handbag police station. I reached Octavio Reed, who said, "Before we do anything at all out there, you should talk to the chief. He knows of you and he wants to meet you. Don't say anything about-you know."
"No way."
"Chief Bailey wants to see you this afternoon if you can make it. He's out right now. Can you come at two?"
"I'll be there."
"Just don't trust those two," he said, and rang off.
"I'm meeting the chief this afternoon about arranging additional protection," I told Rutka, and could see him working up to a fit over the delay, when Sandifer walked in.
"Oh, jeez, look at the porch! This is- Oh, jeez!"
"It's a mess," Rutka said.
"Are you okay?"
"Yeah, but there's a ridiculous new development that I should tell you about."
"What?"
"Vera Renfrew told the police she saw somebody suspicious go down her yard and up ours before the bomb was thrown."
Sandifer stared. "She did?"
"She said she saw you."
Sandifer's face fell forward, along with much of the rest of his upper body. "Oh, that's just great," he said finally. "Jeez, why would she say a thing like that? That's crazy."
"I guess it was somebody who looked like you," Rutka said.
After a brief, frozen instant, Sandifer said, "Oh, no, not-"
"It makes sense, doesn't it?"
"Grey Koontz."
They went on in this vein for some minutes, and I kept thinking, They had a scam worked out that went awry and now they're making it up as they go along. end user
7
The insurance agent soon showed up, trying to look delighted about shelling out a few thousand of the home office's zillions, and while he and Sandifer and Rutka surveyed the reeking and charred mess on the back porch, I went upstairs.
En route to the attic I looked into Rutka's and Sandifer's room and spotted the telephone answering machine Rutka had mentioned earlier. The message light was blinking. This had to have been the call Rutka and I had heard from the attic a few minutes before the fire broke out, and which Rutka had said not to bother with.
I pushed the playback button. There were a couple of clicks and that was it. The caller had hung up.
In the attic the sauna heat hit me again. It was hard to imagine that men paid large sums of money to join fashionable clubs so that they could sit around in places like this and perspire recreationally. I peeled off my sopping polo shirt and hung it over the front of the whirring box fan.
The file I pulled out first, on Bruno Slinger, was thicker than most. It contained press clippings on the Republican state senator Slinger worked for, and Slinger, as the senator's occasional spokesman, was quoted from time to time, always in support of conservative causes: anti-abortion, anti-social services, and, amazingly, antigay. News photos of the senator in groups often included Bruno Slinger in the background.
Slinger had an easy, smug look in his press clips, but in his other photos he was more somber. In one Polaroid his cheek was bulging with the erect member of a physically fit Caucasian male whose bare upper body was out of the shot. The member was condomless, not a good idea anymore. The notation on the back said "Slinger and G. Koontz" and gave a date from the previous fall.