Strachey's Folly - Stevenson Richard - Страница 16

Timmy's Capitol Hill friend Bob Bittner had briefed me on the Krumfutz illegal-campaign-fund scandal—at Timmy's re­quest, Bittner did not ask why I was inquiring about this—and I learned that not only had Mrs. Krumfutz been cleared of any involvement in the scam, but that she had been eager to disas­sociate herself from her husband, who had spent many tens of thousands of dollars of congressional campaign donations on the home and wardrobe of one Tammy Pam Jameson, of Engineville, near Log Heaven. Mrs. Krumfutz had eagerly testified against her husband at his trial, and I concluded that if she had more re­cently uncovered additional criminality—by way of the AIDS quilt or otherwise—she would be more inclined to talk about it to me or to the police than to anyone involved in the crime, es­pecially her low slug of a husband. And I did not plan on track­ing down Nelson Krumfutz—now residing in Engineville with Tammy Pam, I was told—just yet.

I pulled into Log Heaven in the black shadows of the sur­rounding mountains under a fall sunset that was a puddle of fire. The sky looked like a Jehovah's Witness's Watchtower magazine cover, and I remembered that the millennium was just a few years away. Maybe Armageddon would start off in Log Heaven. It seemed as likely a place as any, despite warnings from the TV preachers that when Good rose up and vanquished Evil, San Francisco would get it first. Then the West Village, the East Vil­lage, and Chelsea. Would a wrathful God spare SoHo? Park Slope? TriBeCa? This was unclear.

I cruised down Log Heaven's Main Street, with its three-block-long business district that looked half-dead and half-hanging-on-by-a-fraying-economic-thread. Most of the storefronts were vacant, and the few that weren't were occupied by social-service agencies and businesses with names like Natalie's Nail Heaven, Fenstermacher's Tanning Parlor ("Tan Yer Fanny by the Susquehanny"), and the Mattress Madness Outlet Store. Three big furniture factories I'd passed on the edge of town were dark and boarded up, and the only sizable employer I spotted was a mobile-home assembly plant. I doubled back up River Street. The Susquehanna, one of the loveliest streams in America, was no longer visible from the town that the river had apparently once made prosperous. Somebody—the Army Corps of Engi­neers, I suspected—had put up a thirty-foot-high, earth-and-stone dike-levee system, a flood-control solution common across floodplain America now, and in its unimaginativeness and inel­egance, worthy of the mind of Benito Mussolini. It looked as if in Log Heaven, the walled-off Susquehanna survived largely for the esthetic pleasure of an occasional small-plane pilot and in the minds of the old people.

Back on the outskirts of town, I pulled my rental car into the Bit o' Heaven Motel and checked in. The clerk, a stout, middleaged woman with a fresh perm and pale teddy bears on her pink blouse, smelled of Ivory soap and Kraft macaroni-and-cheese dinner. When I asked about getting a bite to eat, she suggested that I try Pizza Hut or Karen's Kozy Korner, both up the road. She said they were both good.

I checked the Log Heaven-Engineville phone book and found that Betty Krumfutz was not listed. I told the clerk I was a reporter with the Philadelphia Inquirer—it seemed like an ef­ficient enough little fib—and I asked for directions to the Krum­futz residence.

"I feel sorry for that woman," the clerk said. "Betty got a raw deal."

"Yes, her husband was the wrongdoer," I agreed.

"She's a celebrity, but it's taken a toll. Is the Inquire going after her now?" She pronounced Inquirer "IN-quire," which I'd never heard before, and she seemed ready to be annoyed.

"No, it'll be a favorable piece. Betty's had a tough row to hoe. And far be it from the Inquirer to add to her woes."

The clerk told me that her husband's mother "still reads the Inquire"—an eccentricity of the elderly, it was made to sound like—and she'd ask her to save my article. Then she told me how to find the Krumfutz house on Susquehanna Drive in Log Heaven. She said she thought Betty would be home; the clerk had a friend who was in Betty's target-practice group, which met on Sunday afternoons. So Betty always made it a point to be in Log Heaven on Sundays, "for church and target practice."

"What do they shoot?" I asked.

The clerk looked puzzled. "Bottles and cans and things like that, I guess."

"With guns?"

"Why, yes. It's the gun-club members."

"Who all is in the gun club? Hunters? Sportsmen?"

She nodded, beginning to look a little suspicious of this in-lerrogation.

I took a wild stab and said, "An American citizen's consti­tutional right to bear arms is the envy of the world. I was speaking to a Canadian recently who was thinking of emigrating to the United States so that he could keep his own firearm for self-protection. He drives down to Watertown, New York, once a week for target practice there. Are there any foreigners like that in the Log Heaven gun club? Or, I guess Log Heaven is too far from the border for that."

"Funny you should ask that," the motel clerk said. "Both Luis and Hector are in the gun club, I know. They work in the kitchen at the Kozy Korner. Karen's in the gun club and she got her two Mexicans to join, she told me. But she said they already knew how to shoot, and they actually taught her a thing or two. But I doubt if they came to America for target practice. They came to get work. Which I say, more power to them. You try to get our kids to wash dishes these days, and you might as well ask them to fly to the moon. It's even hard to get kids these days who'll rake and bag leaves. They might get their hands dirty. But Luis and Hector, why they'll even do yard work. As a matter of fact, they've been doing work lately around the Krumfutz place. Karen said Betty had hired Hector and Luis for some type of work she had, and Betty told Karen that she was quite satisfied with the good job they did."

Chapter 9

Mexicans with guns? I locked the door behind me in my room at the Bit o' Heaven and sat on the edge of the bed. I held my right hand out and checked it for steadiness. The tremor was minor but discernible. My Smith & Wesson was back in Albany—why would I have carried a firearm to a display of the AIDS quilt?—but suddenly up in Log Heaven what I was thinking hard about was protecting myself. Was I panicking, like Timmy? Was I reacting stupidly to an ethnic stereotype?

I made a credit-card call to Timmy's and my room at the Capitol Hill Hotel but got no answer. I guessed Timmy was off at GW with Maynard and his friends and, maybe by now, May-nard's brother and sister-in-law. I got hold of the hotel desk and left a message for Timmy, informing him that I would not be staying over in Log Heaven that night after all, but would be re­turning to Washington late. I did not explain that I was afraid of being unarmed in a town where two Mexican sharpshooters with connections to Betty Krumfutz were on the loose; I kept it vague. Then I called GW and learned that Maynard was still "sta­ble," a promising sign.

I showered, rumpled the sheets to make the bed look as if it had been slept in, repacked my bag, left the key on the desk, and went out into the cold, black Pennsylvania night. I threw my bag in the car and drove away from the Bit o' Heaven Motel. The next day, Monday, was going to be Columbus Day, but I figured that even if Betty Krumfutz remained in Log Heaven for the hol­iday, she would probably not run into Karen, of Karen's Kozy Korner, until the following Sunday at target-shooting practice and possibly learn that a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter had been in Log Heaven intent on interviewing her—a reporter who had then mysteriously failed to show up at Mrs. Krumfutz's door.