Strachey's Folly - Stevenson Richard - Страница 15

"I didn't say I wasn't afraid."

"No, but you keep acting as if I'm the Grady Sutton charac­ter to your Joel McCrea. I saw the way you and Chondelle were looking at me a while ago—as if I were a small child who would probably have to be sent to the countryside until the war is over. Yes, I am afraid, and I guess I show it, but—I've made a deci­sion about something."

"About what?"

"I'm staying in Washington until Maynard is safe. I'll call Myron today. It'll screw things up in the office, but he'll under­stand, and Fred Ginsburg can cover for me. I've got three weeks of vacation time coming, and I'm taking it. I'll stay with May­nard—if he lives—and if I have to, I'll hire a private security ser­vice to keep us both secure. Also, if you're going to go ahead and investigate Jim Suter and the mysterious quilt panel—which it looks as if you're going to do, because you're a good guy and because you're hopelessly nosy and curious—then I'm going to pay your expenses."

"I guess you have made a decision. More than one decision. For both of us."

"No, I've just decided what I'm going to do. You have to make your own decisions."

"You Peace Corps guys stick together. I've noticed that."

"That tends to be true."

"When we go back to the hospital, we'll probably find Sar­gent and Eunice Shriver kneeling in prayer at Maynard's bed­side."

"I wouldn't be surprised."

Timmy had my number, as always. "So okay then. I'll never be a full-fledged member of the Peace Corps club, but I'll do my bit for the cause, and for Maynard—and of course for you. I'll follow the question wherever it leads. My belief is, it won't lead far. But we'll see."

"Thanks, Don."

Then came a sudden sharp rapping at the hotel-room door. Timmy started, then quietly moaned, "Oh no, oh no."

I didn't want to believe what I thought Timmy was thinking. But as I approached the door, even before opening it, I thought I caught a whiff of Ray Craig's nicotine aura.

We let him in. He sniffed the air. He glared. Without being invited to do so, Craig took a seat. I thought, he's going to light a cigarette. He didn't, but he fiddled with the pack in his jacket pocket. I wondered if a map was in the packet in the pocket of the jacket—a routine from an old Red Skelton movie—but I de­cided that mentioning it was unlikely to bring a chuckle to Craig's lips.

He said, "You two had coffee with Detective Chondelle Dolan this morning and went walking around with her. Why?"

"How do you know that?" I said.

His ordinarily dead eyes flashed at my insolence. A Ray Craig of fifty years earlier would have pulled out a sap and worked me over while his goonish partner held me in a head-lock. But the times had changed enough for me—if not for every U.S. inner-city resident—and Craig apparently felt not only con­strained by the law, he was even unable to avoid answering my question.

"I've had you two under surveillance."

"Why?" I asked.

"For your own protection."

"I doubt that we need protection. What makes you think we might?"

He eyed me coldly, glanced at Timmy, then looked back at me and said, "Washington can be a dangerous place."

"Your decision to have us followed was based on local crime statistics?"

Craig snapped, "I use my professional judgment. If you think I'm some fucking incompetent with shit for brains and my head up my ass, I'd like to hear about it."

This produced a long, strained silence. I knew Timmy would be considering, as I was, Craig's vivid but visually con­fusing metaphor.

Craig himself finally broke the tension. "Let's talk about Chondelle Dolan."

"Sure. Let's."

"You people stick together, don't you?"

"Chondelle was never in the Peace Corps. For that matter, neither was I."

"You know damn well what I mean. She's a lesbo. She's a big nigger lesbo."

Timmy said evenly, "I'm requesting that you do not talk like that."

"Come again?" Craig eyes were blazing.

"Never mind."

"What do you want with us this time?" I said. "We were just on our way out."

"I've got news concerning my investigation. You'll be inter­ested in this. I've got two eyewitnesses to the E Street shooting. My witnesses say the perpetrators were Mexicans."

Timmy and I feigned surprise. "Oh?"

"Did Sudbury use drugs?" Craig said.

Timmy said, "No."

"Do you?"

"No," Timmy repeated.

I said, "We get high on life. How about you? What do you get high on?"

Craig was seated on the desk chair and I was on the edge of the bed. He flushed and spasmed once, but he didn't lunge at me. Instead, he clapped his notebook shut violently, stood up, and tramped out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

Chapter 8

Log Heaven, Pennsylvania, was up in the thinly populated central part of the state off Interstate 80. The autumn foliage was at its brilliant peak under a high blue sky criss­crossed with big, floating jet vapor trails that looked like ancient glyphs above the earth. I wondered what they meant. Probably Scranton-Pittsburgh, Baltimore-Toronto. The broad highway swept between and sometimes up and down the state's old, worn, friendly mountains, and I wished Timmy were along to enjoy the scenic ride.

He was back in Washington, where we had met some of Maynard's friends when they converged on GW University Hos­pital. Some of them were going to maintain a watch at the hos­pital—Maynard's condition was unchanged when I left early Sunday afternoon—and others planned on cleaning up May­nard's house in hopeful anticipation of Maynard's recovery and eventual return.

Neither Timmy nor I told Maynard's friends about Jim Suter's mysterious quilt panel or the letter from Mexico full of warnings. So everyone who knew Maynard remained baffled as to why he might have been shot down in the street and his home ran­sacked. Some of them speculated on a book or an article he might have been working on that exposed foreign criminality of some sort, but no one could recall Maynard's mentioning any such project. On the contrary, everyone said, Maynard had been doing relatively undemanding straight travel writing since he'd picked up his stomach ailment.

A couple of times I referred to Maynard's recent trip to Mexico. I thought it might jog someone's memory of any remark Maynard might have made about Jim Suter. But Maynard either never told anyone of the odd meeting in Merida, or none of his acquaintances considered it worth mentioning now.

Chondelle Dolan was able to use her GOP Capitol Hill con­tacts—she'd once been involved, she had told me that morning, with the first black female member of the Log Cabin Club—to track down former congresswoman Krumfutz. On the staff now of the conservative Glenn Beale Foundation, Mrs. Krumfutz kept an apartment in Washington as well as her Log Heaven home, which she often visited on weekends. She had driven up to Pennsylvania Saturday evening with a friend, Chondelle said, several hours after Maynard had pointed her out to Timmy and me at the Jim Suter quilt panel.

I'd made a plane reservation for a flight to the Yucatan on Tuesday morning. I figured twenty-four hours in Log Heaven would give me enough time to confront Mrs. Krumfutz and ex­tract from her what was extractable concerning her examination on Saturday of the Suter quilt panel and her subsequent pan­icked, hasty departure from the quilt display and then from Washington. I knew I ran some risk of tipping off the people who had shot Maynard—whoever and whatever they were— and of further endangering Suter. But I convinced myself that the risk was slight and worth taking.