Handwritten notes by Rutka paired Slinger's name with those of a dozen or so other men, with dates and locations noted, most of them motels in the Albany area. The name Grey Koontz did crop up several times. I reexamined the photo with "G. Koontz" on the back to see if the man in it resembled Sandifer, and while their builds were similar, the focus on the man's organ rather than his face made evaluation difficult. Still, it occurred to me that Rutka and Sandifer might actually be telling the truth about a Slinger-Koontz frame-up attempt.
Several handwritten letters were in the Slinger file, each in a different script. One, dated the previous October, began: "Hi, John.
Just thought you'd like to know that Bruno Slinger is a cocksucker." It was signed "A. Friend." There was no return address; the mailing envelope stapled to the letter was postmarked Albany.
Another note read: "Bruno Slinger is gay. Check it out." No signature or return address on that one either. A third, also unsigned and from Albany, informed the reader that "Bruno Slinger goes for boys." This could have meant underage youths or boys of thirty-five; the rest of the letter described in unoriginal language Sling-er's sexual practices and gave no further clue to his age preferences.
There were several similar letters offering firsthand knowledge of Bruno Slinger's homosexuality, and there were fifteen or twenty letters-often typewritten and literate-lacking evidence of personal experience but insisting on the fact of Slinger's queerness just the same. Many of these ill-wishers were especially venomous and used words such as "twisted" and "monstrous" and "evil" to describe Slinger's hypocrisy.
The Slinger file also included a note in Rutka's handwriting describing an anonymous phone threat, which Rutka speculated had come from Slinger. The caller had said, "You're going to get your balls ripped off for this one," and the call had come just a day after Slinger's outing in Cityscape.
I flipped back to the file for Ronnie Linkletter, the Channel Eight weatherman Rutka said Slinger was now involved with.
Linkletter's file was a thick one too. It contained a multicolor promotional brochure put out by Channel Eight detailing the weatherman's part in the station's "We're Hometown Folks" campaign. This was where the station's news "personalities" went out into the community and showed, a tad superfluously, that the news broadcast by Channel Eight's newscasters existed in a context not of history but of themselves. They looked happy about this, and according to the ratings, the station's viewers seemed satisfied too. Ronnie Linkletter's part in the "We're Hometown Folks" effort was to go into clubs and schools and relate odd facts of meteorology.
Linkletter also was as comfortable in front of a Polaroid as he was on the Channel Eight news set. Ronnie was belly down in his single blurry snapshot, butt raised for the insertion of a sizeable organ whose owner's face was above the frame.
Linkletter, too, had been tattled on by anonymous letter writers. One began: "Dear Mr. Rutka-I have been reading your column and agree with you one thousand percent that queer people have to rise up or die. A life of oppression is no life at all…" The writer went on to proclaim his philosophical fraternalism with Rutka and then offered the name of a "media celebrity who has not accepted his own queerness but should be made to do so because he is well-liked in the community and would further establish queer omnipresence in the public mentality." The name was Linkletter's and the writer asserted that he once spent a night with Linkletter in the Fountain of Eden Motel on Route 5.
There were other, similar letters-Linkletter attracted a more casual, less incensed type of snitch than Bruno Slinger did-and an assortment of dated notes in Rutka's handwriting describing phone calls about Linkletter. One sheet of paper labeled "From JG Linkletter at motel with A" consisted of a long list of forty or fifty dates, each of them a week apart.
Linkletter's file also included an issue of the February third Cityscape in which Linkletter was outed, and a memo to the file on a phone call from Linkletter to Rutka after the outing, in which Rutka described Linkletter's rage and his stated intention to "bash your brains in." Rough language for a Hometown Folk.
I got out the list Rutka had given me with the names of the other people he claimed had threatened him. Besides Slinger's and Linkletter's, seven threats had been received. The two face-to-face encounters had been with the Times Union editorial writer, who met Rutka at Queequeg's restaurant and screamed, "You oughta have your black heart ripped out!" — no Pulitzer material in that-and with a Colonie auto-parts-store manager, who ran into Rutka in Macy's just before Christmas and told him he wouldn't be alive six months from then. Rutka had outlived that prediction already by more than a month.
The other five threats by identifiable people all came by phone. All threatened violent acts, even death; they were from a Schenectady orthodontist, an Albany court bailiff, an elementary-school principal in Troy, a state university physicist, and a retired professional hockey player.
I went through the files and took copious notes on all nine of the men who had threatened John Rutka-for what it was worth.
The attacks on Rutka could as easily have been made by one of the "countless," as he'd put it, anonymous callers who'd threatened him. Or by someone who had never threatened him at all. There was always that.
I flipped through a sampling of the other files. Some of the names I recognized from Rutka's columns in Cityscape and Queerscreed. Others, unouted as yet, were men and women I knew. My stomach began to churn, partly from hunger and partly from disgust, and my impulse was to alert these people immediately that they were on Rutka's list of possible outees. The ethical ramifications of my position with Rutka were becoming more complex by the minute.
That complexity was not lessened when I flipped through the front of the file one last time in search of a name that might mean something to me. I came to another one I recognized and gawked at for some seconds. Here was a file labeled "CALLAHAN, TIMOTHY."
The little bio note attached to Timothy Callahan's folder described him as an Albany man in his forties who worked as the chief legislative aide to New York Assemblyman Myron Lipschutz, and who resided in a house on Crow Street with his lover of fourteen years, private investigator Donald Strachey. The only piece of paper in the folder was a single phone memo dated April 25th: "Parmalee Plaza Hotel informant IDs Callahan entering room with guest who informant says he had the night before."
Poor Timmy. Just once he had embraced in terror the ghost of the district poultry officer he had lain dreaming about uselessly long ago in Visakhapatnam, and in doing so had exorcised that ghost, and now he had his name on an overbearing twit's hit list in an attic in Handbag. This was not fair. My opinion of John Rutka, which had seemed to bottom out in recent hours, began again to slide.
I stuffed my notes in my pocket, put my still-damp shirt back on, switched off the fan and the lights, and returned to the second floor, careful to double-lock the attic door. I zipped the keys back inside the hippo's belly.
With the insurance agent on the way down the front walk toward his burgundy Lincoln, I said to Rutka in the front hall, "My boyfriend's in your file."
A little dry laugh. "I thought you'd get a charge out of. that." Sandifer stood at the end of the hall grinning nervously.
"I don't."
"Oh, what the- It's just a fucking file!" He hobbled into the living room too fast, nearly stumbled, and went down hard on the couch. "There's nothing in the file except that one fucking call. What was I gonna do with it, anyway? I can't out somebody who's already out, can I? You two are the most famous queer couple in Albany. In the paper they refer to you as 'the Albany private investigator and acknowledged homosexual,' and Callahan is almost as notorious as you are. So please don't go all self-righteous on me, Strachey, because I would find that very, very hard to take."