On the Other Hand, Death

Knowing too that none of it was going to work out anywhere near as simply as that, I still went ahead and said, "Fine. I'll take the case."
The brightness of his china blues intensified a degree
or two. "I'm pleased," he said, nodding once. "A meeting of minds. I thought we might come to an arrangement, Mr. Strachey, and we have succeeded. Let me write you a check for the five," he said, placidly smiling now and removing a cream-colored checkbook from his inside breast pocket. "Or would you prefer cash?"
"A check will be fine," I said, remembering the reports of Millpond's vaguely tainted capital. What was I getting myself into?
"And I've got one other thing for you, Mr. Strachey." He reached for a file folder on a shelf behind his desk.
"What's that?" I asked.
He said, "A list of suspects."
3• I turned onto Fuller Road and headed to-
ward Central. Bright heat undulated across the concrete pavement and traffic swam through it like schools of blue-fish. I stopped at a gas station phone booth, took a deep breath, and went inside. I phoned Timmy and told him it might be nine o'clock before I'd be able to meet him.
"Let me guess. You're having a drink with . . . Buster Crabbe."
"No, that's you, as I recall. I'm on my way out to Dot Fisher's." I described my meeting with Crane Trefusis.
"Dot's a real sweet lady," he said, "and I hope you catch the dementos who did it, even if Millpond shares the credit. Dot's a friend of Fenton McWhirter, did you know that? In fact, I think he's staying with her while he's in Albany."
"Dot gets around for such a late bloomer."
"You've met her, haven't you?"
"Once, briefly, at the demonstration after the baths were raided."
"She caused quite a sensation that day. The cops and the TV people thought she was somebody's grandmother. Of course, she is. So, where do you begin? If, by some crazy chance, Millpond is not behind what's happening out there, who might be?"
"Trefusis thoughtfully provided me with a list of suspects," I said, moving the door of the airless phone booth back and forth like a fan. "There are two other families on Moon Road with a strong interest in seeing Dot deal. It turns out Millpond has optioned their properties but won't buy outright until Dot's been lined up too. Both parties are hot to sell and don't like it at all that Dot is standing in the way of their windfall. They're very mad, maybe mad enough to provide Dot with some rude encouragement. That's where I begin."
"Millpond has set it all up with their characteristic finesse," Timmy said. "This way they let someone else do their dirty work without lifting a finger."
"I think I'll keep an open mind for a day or two on who lifted which finger for what purpose. Like you said, Citizen Crane is a fairly complicated guy. He tries to come across as Mister Hardnosed-but-Open-and-Direct, yet the whole time I was with him I felt as though I was in the presence of a rather extensive rain forest. I don't envy anyone who has to navigate his mind regularly."
"Better take along a machete on this one."
"My Swiss Army knife will have to do. And my heat-addled brain. See you around nine, then?"
"Oh . . . yeah. Around nine. For sure."
"Swell. See you."
For sure? In the six years I'd known him I'd never heard him use that phrase. Only twenty-year-olds said that. Where had he picked it up? From a twenty-year-old? Or from someone who spent a lot of time hanging around twenty-year-olds? The hell with it, I thought. Timmy and I were solid, a twosome. The heat was cooking my few million remaining brain cells, that's all it was. Marrakech-on-the-Mohawk. Ouagadougou-on-the-Hudson. For sure.
The two other homes on Moon Road were of more modest proportions, so Dot Fisher's farmhouse was not hard to pick out.
The first place I passed was an old two-story frame box with flaking tarpaper shingles. The place listed crazily to the southwest, and a newer freshly painted side porch sat partially detached from the sinking house, like a dinghy by a shipwreck. It was easy to see why the owners of this one wanted badly to take Millpond's money and run with it.
The second house, another fifty yards down the narrow rutted road, was a two-tone beige and electric blue 1950s ranch. It had a big picture window with a lamp in the middle, a double garage, and a long, fat Plymouth Fury wagon with a smashed taillight parked in the driveway. There was a green plastic worm with wheels and a seat lying on its side on the recently mowed lawn, and off to the left of the property, in an area where the underbrush had been cut away, a '68 T-bird was up on cinder blocks. As at the first house, I saw no sign of life.
Banging on ahead over the potholes, I passed a Channel 12 TV van lurching and swaying back toward Central Avenue. I guessed I had just missed a media event and had mixed feelings about what the report, once broadcast, was going to mean.
Moon Road dead-ended just beyond the Fisher house, so I bypassed Dot's driveway with two cars already in it and parked by a scraggly stand of sun-scorched sumac
trees where the pavement ended. A newly bulldozed dirt track ran off to the left. The foliage along it was wilting under fine brown dust. I could hear the roar of the traffic on the interstate a hundred yards or so beyond the trees, though not the heavy equipment building the new interchange—more canny planning by Millpond. It was after four on a Friday now and work had stopped for the weekend. I walked back toward the house.
As I moved up the fieldstone walkway past long, tall clumps of purple-pink phlox, a young man emerged from behind the house carrying an aluminum ladder. I recognized his face from news photos in The Native and Gay Community News, and I cut across the lawn under a big spreading oak tree to meet him. He was moving purposefully toward the carriage house, which still had the ugly slogans sprayed all over its side, like a Manhattan subway car lost upstate.
I called, "Hello . . . Fenton McWhirter?"
He turned abruptly and looked at me uncertainly for a few seconds, then set the ladder down and extended his hand. "Yes, how do you do? Are you a reporter?"
"No. Don Strachey. I'm a private investigator. That looks like a real job in this heat. Will the graffiti wash off, or will you have to paint over it?"
Looking harried and put out, he spoke to me impatiently in a raspy baritone. "Mrs. Fisher isn't sure whether or not she wants to talk to you, you know? You're the guy Crane Trefusis said he was sending out here?"
"I'm the guy, but I'd probably have come anyway. Try not to think of me as Trefusis's agent. It's true he's paying me, but what the hell."
He peered at me as if I might not be the most mentally stable person he'd met that day. In ragged cutoffs and a sweat-stained T-shirt, he was in his early thirties, slender but solid, with the sort of lean, exaggeratedly defined musculature and bone structure I'd always associated more with Renaissance anatomical studies than with real people. The lips of his wide mouth were severely ridged rather than rounded, a feature I'd always found erotic, but the mess of teeth beyond them was badly in need of tidying up. His strong face was all angles and planes, with a thick stubble of dirty blond hair that might have been meant as a beard, or could have been the result of his not having had the time, or the interest, to shave for a few days, or could as well have been the way movement people on the West Coast were wearing their faces these days and the fad would reach Albany in 1990. His deep-set gray eyes were smallish and bloodshot, and they looked at me with no pleasure.