Strachey's Folly - Stevenson Richard - Страница 28

Timmy said, "Clinton will win, but the voters will punish him for his endless parade of dreary misdemeanors by giving the House and the Senate to the Republicans again."

"No, people are sick of conflict and divided government. The party will not only retake both houses but Newt will even lose his own congressional seat. He'll abandon Georgia in a fit of pique and move to Absecon, where he'll finish out his career as a southern New Jersey late-night talk-radio host."

"Sure, and when John Sununu is on vacation, Newt will sub for him on Crossfire, and his liberal antagonist on CNN's holler­ing contest will be Carmen LoBello doing G. Gordon Liddy Dole."

"I hope I can track down LoBello soon. He's as likely a can­didate as anybody to be the Jim Suter quilt-maker. I'll bet he sews."

After our Thai dinner the night before with Martin Dormer and Peter Vicknicki, the two ex-Suter boyfriends had accompa­nied Timmy and me to Starkers, the Fourteenth Street gay club where Carmen LoBello had performed for several years. We lo­cated a number of LoBello's acquaintances there, but none had been in touch with him in recent months. And everyone who knew LoBello, including the club manager, described him as all but deranged by his brief affair with Jim Suter.

Soon after that romantic debacle, LoBello turned into G. Gordon Liddy Dole, a character unwanted by Starkers' cus­tomers, or by those in the few other D.C. drag venues where— as Hillary or Nancy or Judy Woodruff—LoBello might have been welcomed. We had struck out at Starkers, but my plan was to try to track LoBello down later that morning at his secretarial job at the Bureau of Mines.

"The thing I don't get," Timmy said, "is how Carmen LoBello could possibly be connected to Betty Krumfutz."

I said, "Maybe he isn't. There are connections so far either between or among Suter, Mrs. Krumfutz, Jorge the boyfriend, Alan McChesney, the dead Bryant Ulmer, probably Maynard, and maybe somebody in the D.C. Police Department. But so far Lo­Bello is just another enraged Jim Suter dumpee."

"One of a cast of thousands apparently."

"There is a possible connection, of a sort, between LoBello and Mrs. Krumfutz. Which is, the Betty Krumfutz Maynard be­lieves he saw at the quilt display on Saturday wasn't Mrs. Krum­futz at all. It was Carmen LoBello."

All in a fraction of a second, Timmy grinned, gasped, and winced. "Oh, good grief!"

"It makes sense."

"It does? I guess it could."

"Betty Krumfutz convincingly denied to me that she was anywhere near the quilt on Saturday. Nor is she, I think, a woman who goes around on a fall afternoon in Washington wearing shades and a trench coat, like some character out of Godard."

"She might if she wanted to examine the Jim Suter panel for whatever was typed on it about her, and she didn't want to be recognized."

"This is true. Still, I want to find out where Carmen LoBello was Saturday afternoon. And, if I can, what he was wearing."

Timmy was looking doubtful again. "But why would Lo­Bello do that? What would he get out of it?"

"Good question. Maybe LoBello had spotted, or he had been told about, the Suter quilt panel—or he was the one re­sponsible for getting the panel put into the quilt—and he wanted to hurt and embarrass Suter additionally by associating Jim's old employer and ideological cohort with this shocking fraud. Or Lo­Bello could have had other strange reasons. Remember, by all ac­counts LoBello was driven pretty crazy by the collapse of his affair with Suter."

Timmy stirred his cappuccino thoughtfully. "I don't really understand that part—I mean, why LoBello was so traumatized by his breakup with Jim Suter that his life all but collapsed. Re­jection is painful, yes, but this was not a ten-year relationship that fell apart overnight. It was a fling that had lasted a couple of weeks. No matter how shabbily they may have been treated, people tend to bounce back from disappointments of that lim­ited magnitude. Whether or not he's responsible for the Suter quilt panel, and whether or not he did a Betty Krumfutz drag number at the quilt on Saturday, it's plain that LoBello did not re­cover normally from his affair with Suter. And I think knowing why would help us understand a lot of what's going on here." "I think you're right, Timothy. Assuming, of course, that Lo­Bello has anything at all to do with the quilt, or Mrs. Krumfutz, or any of the other awful events that we are currently so preoccupied with. Maybe Carmen LoBello has nothing to do with any of it."

Timmy grunted and glanced around the cafe. Ray Craig was nowhere in sight, so we assumed someone else from the DCPD was watching over us. Trying to pick out our minder had be­come a mordant game we played whenever we moved around Washington by cab or on the metro, and while we dined out or stopped for our morning coffee or a late-night beer.

Timmy had even brought up the possibility that our hotel room had been bugged. I considered that far-fetched. I did not go along with Timmy's request that we discuss my investigation and our respective plans only in the hotel bathroom with all the sink and bathtub faucets running loudly. Instead, I suggested that while in our hotel room we hold confidential conversations only when our voices were muffled and our words distorted by our lying on the bed with our pants down or off and with our mouths stuffed with each other's genitalia. Timmy said I wasn't taking our situation seriously enough.

Chapter 16

The Bureau of Mines, now an office of the United States Department of the Interior, on C Street, NW, seemed like an unlikely spot for a terrorist attack. But after the Oklahoma City catastrophe, any U.S. government agency had to be considered fair game for ideological mad bombers, so the Interior building was well guarded. I never made it past the uniformed security detail in the lobby, but I was permitted the use of a phone to speak with the department's personnel office—"human re­sources" in the current puffed-up lingo of big government and big business.

Carmen LoBello was employed by the Bureau of Mines, I was told, but when I dialed LoBello's extension a woman an­swered and said Carmen wasn't in. He had taken a "personal day"—not yet labeled a "human needs day"—and he was ex­pected back at work the next day, Wednesday. I'd be en route to the Yucatan then, but now, at any rate, I knew where to find LoBello when I got back, should I still think I needed to, after I had met with Jim Suter.

It was midmorning, and Timmy had taken the metro out to National Airport. He was to pick up my passport, carried down from Albany by a USAir flight attendant who was the boyfriend of a colleague of Timmy's at the legislature who had a key to our house. Then Timmy was headed over to GW, where he hoped Maynard would be in good enough shape for his first conversa­tion since the shooting on Saturday night.

I was to meet two of Jim Suter's friends for lunch—the ones whose names I'd gotten from Bud Hively—with the hope that I might gather information about Suter's whereabouts in Mexico that was more specific than what I had pieced together from Hively and via Timmy's telephone trickery with Betty Krumfutz.

First, though, I figured I'd drop by Congressman Burton Olds's office and see what I could find out from another Suter ex-lover whose name kept cropping up, former Betty Krumfutz chief of staff Alan McChesney.

Unlike the Capitol and other nearby government edifices, the Sam Rayburn House Office Building wasn't so much monu­mental as monstrous. This big gray, graceless heap of marble slabs on Independence Avenue was about as welcoming as a federal penitentiary, and its immense, bleak corridors suggested not democratic representation but crude authority. I made it through the metal detectors and followed a guard's directions up to Congressman Burton Olds's suite of offices on the second floor, where, when I asked for Alan McChesney, the reception­ist asked if he was expecting me.