Red White and Black and Blue ds-12 Read online

  A blue Chevy Suburban was parked in the driveway in front of the Stivers' unopened garage doors. I pulled in next to it and made a dash through the rain for the front door.

  There wasn't much of an overhang, and after making a couple of noisy bangs with the knocker I stood as close to the door as I could without risking ending up nose-to-nose with whoever might suddenly appear. Nothing happened for the next two minutes, and my back and shoulders were getting wet. This was quite the passive-aggressive residential portal.

  I knocked again and tried the doorbell, too. The mailbox next to the door appeared to be empty, but I didn't go poking around in it.

  The door swung open, and a woman who looked unprepared for guests stood peering out at me. She looked more rained on than I did. Her pale gray eyes were soft, but the face around them was an Okefenokee of channels and rivulets, the uneasily-lived-in middle-aged face of a woman who was beyond vanity out of choice or otherwise. She had on a pink terrycloth bathrobe, with another pink towel wrapped around her head. A few strands of wet gray hair stuck out from under the wrap.

  "I thought this might be the cable people, or I wouldn't have answered it. You're not with Time Warner?"

  "I'm sorry, no. I'm here about your son. I take it you're Margery Stiver?"

  "About Hugh?" She looked frightened. "What about Hugh?

  Is he all right?"

  "Actually, Hugh is doing okay. I saw him yesterday. It's your late son, Gregory, I'd like to talk to you about if you have a few minutes. I apologize for barging in like this, Mrs.

  Stiver."

  She relaxed a little. "Where did you see Hugh? Did he say for you to come here?"

  "No, he didn't. I didn't tell him I would be talking to you. I was asking him some things about Greg. May I come in for just a few minutes? I know you're expecting Time Warner." I showed her my ID.

  "Oh. A private investigator?"

  "Licensed by the state of New York."

  "You saw Hugh. Yes, okay, you can come in. My husband is in the other room. He's busy."

  She led me through a foyer past a carpeted staircase and into what used to be called a den and maybe still was west of Crow Street. A flat-screen TV the size of a Caddie Escalade occupied one wall, and the bookshelves lining another held what appeared to be collectible plates with an early American motif on wooden stands and a couple of shelves of mystery novels that included the complete works of Margaret Truman.

  "I'm so glad you saw Hugh. I have to say I'm envious,"

  Mrs. Stiver added with a nervous laugh. "I haven't seen Hugh for going on fourteen years." She perched on the edge of a long low couch while I seated myself tentatively on a well-worn recliner I assumed was that of her husband, the child beater. The only printed matter on the coffee table was the Sunday Times Union TV listings. "I suppose Hugh told you that he's estranged from his family-from Anson and myself."

  "Yes, he did. That must be very difficult, especially for you." She didn't pick up on this.

  "How is he? What is he doing? Is he a mechanic? Hugh was the handy one with machines and engines."

  "He's an auto mechanic."

  "In Massachusetts?"

  "Yes."

  "A friend of mine, Cindy Visnicki, saw him there three or four years ago. I wrote to an address a friend of Cindy's got hold of, but Hugh never wrote back. He hates us." She didn't sob or tear up. She just looked at me, waiting, it seemed, to find out how much I knew.

  I said, "Hugh's childhood was pretty bad, is my impression.

  Apparently he prefers to leave it far behind."

  "I know. I understand. I don't blame him."

  "No."

  "I suppose I could blame myself."

  "Oh?"

  "But what's the point?"

  "It's hard to know."

  "You can do what you can do, but you can only do what you can do."

  "Mm."

  "Doctor Phil says self-reproach can eat you alive if you let it. Move on and get it right the next time. That's what I've tried to do."

  There seemed to be no point asking her if she planned on having three more children and raising them in a home without a sadist in it. "Does your husband also have regrets about the way the boys were treated?"

  She sniffed. "I really wouldn't know what Anson thinks about my children. Or about anything else."

  "He's the uncommunicative type?"

  "Uncommunicative? With the boys, Anson communicated with his fists. With Jennifer and me-Jennifer is my daughter-he didn't have much to say, no. What Anson was, was a good provider. I never had that as a child, and my husband Jim was also a disappointment in that way. He died at age thirty-one when he spent a good part of his paycheck one Friday night on beer and on losing at poker and then driving a company pickup truck into a bridge abutment.

  Snyder Construction didn't only refuse to pay for the last 146

  Red White and Black and Blue by Richard Stevenson three days Jim worked. They thought I should also reimburse them for the truck. Can you believe it?"

  "You were in a fix."

  "Anson was just coming out of a divorce, and we were both feeling incredibly lost and needy, and he had his engineering job at GE. And of course he never told me why his first wife had left him and moved to California along with their two little boys. I only heard about that later on."

  "I see."

  "Hugh knew you were from Albany, I guess?"

  "Yes, I told him I was."

  "Did he ask you anything about me?"

  "No, I'm sorry to say he didn't. He seems to have moved on, too."

  "I see Jenny once in a while. She's strong like Gregory was. Hugh was the cutie, but Jenny would never take any guff from anybody. And Greg-that boy always knew exactly what he wanted. He seemed to end up with Anson's brains and determination even though Anson was not his biological father. I really thought Gregory would go far. When he died, I was so, so torn up. It wasn't just that he was gone, but I really didn't believe he was someone who would take his own life. It made not one shred of sense to me. It just wasn't who Greg was. I kept saying, no, they must have him mixed up with somebody else who would commit suicide. I mean, somebody who survived Anson Stiver would then just give up? It drove me crazy trying to figure it all out. And I never did. I never ever understood why Greg died the way he did."

  "Some of his friends say he had been depressed in the weeks leading up to his death. This was possibly related to his not landing a teaching job. Though someone else has told me he did eventually find a position at a community college near Rochester. Did you know about any of this?"

  Her voice wobbled. "No. By that time, Greg wasn't in touch with us a whole lot. Jenny was, but Anson and I weren't in touch with him at all, really. Jenny was on Greg's life insurance policy, as you know. So is Shenango finally going to pay Jenny what they owe her? She has all those student loans, and Anson says we can't help out because we only just get by. The one good thing about Greg not being here now is he doesn't have to see what Obama has done to the economy."

  "I'm not involved with Shenango Life, Mrs. Stiver. But my client is very sympathetic to Greg and wants some kind of justice done regarding his death."

  "Oh, I assumed you were an insurance investigator. You're not?"

  "No. Anyway, once a death has officially been ruled a suicide, insurance companies are generally off the hook.

  Otherwise, people planning on killing themselves could just take out big life insurance policies before dying and all but bankrupt the industry."

  She rolled her eyes. "The insurance companies won't get any sympathy from me. They're all just greedy. And now they're going to make out like bandits with Obamacare."

  I said, "I know you knew that Greg was gay."

  "Oh yes. How could we not know it? The whole world knew it. Greg saw to that. I was accepting, of course. I believe that some people are born that way. My first husband Jim had a brother we all wondered about. Anson was not accepting, though. He thought Greg became gay just to get e
ven with him, but that's just foolishness. For an engineer, Anson has a few strange unscientific opinions."

  "Was it your husband who requested that donations in Greg's memory be made to something called the Eddie Fund?

  That was listed in the newspaper obituaries."

  She turned as pink as the towel on her head. "I did not know at the time what kind of organization that was. Anson knew I would not have approved. He said it was something about orphans. Then Jenny found out what it really was, and she had a fit."

  "Were you aware of any of Greg's gay relationships? Who he dated?"

  "Just in high school. An effeminate boy named Bootsy was always coming over and spending time in Greg's room with him. But then Anson caught them doing something, and that was the end of that. In college, Greg was off on his own. I thought maybe he had a boyfriend who would show up at the funeral and I would get to meet him. But that didn't happen as far as I know. I was disappointed. I always hoped that unlike myself, Greg would find real love with another adult person."

  Mrs. Stiver showed no emotion when she said this. It was just a fact of her life, one of a number she had accepted before mentally moving on.

  I pondered telling her that Greg had in fact found a kind of intimacy with another man. And although this intimacy was mixed with love, it was also twisted and masochistic and almost certainly directly related to the abuse Stiver had suffered for years at the hands of his stepfather. I decided not to drop this on her for the time being. My dredging up all the ugliness she preferred not to think about was enough for one day. If the Louderbush-Stiver relationship soon became public knowledge, Mrs. Stiver would learn about it, and it would hit her hard. She was resilient, though-if you could call semi-denial and TV-shrink bromides resiliency.

  I said, "Most of the information I have is that Greg was struggling to make a life for himself that eventually you would have been happy to know about. But that struggle was hard and complicated, and he had a ways to go. And you should know that others who knew him share your view that Greg didn't seem like someone who would take his own life. Other people have also told me about his strength of character and strength of purpose."

  "So is it possible," she asked, leaning toward me, "that Greg's death was not suicide? That it was an accident somehow? Or even-I gives me the heebie-jeebies just to think about it-that Greg was murdered? Pushed off that SUNY building or something?"

  I said, "An accidental fall from a SUNY roof seems unlikely.

  Homicide is unlikely too, but of course not out of the question. All of that is what my client has me looking into."

  Now I bit the bullet. "In my attempt to gather as much information as I can on Greg and his life, I'm trying to talk to everyone who knew him. Would it be possible for me to ask your husband a few questions? I'll definitely try to avoid provoking him."

  She slumped a bit. Then she looked at me closely. "What happened to your ear?"

  "It's a rugby injury."

  "Oh, that's too bad."

  "You said your husband was busy, but I wouldn't take up very much of his time. I promise I'll be out of your family's hair in no time at all."

  Was this really necessary? I knew it wasn't. I already had as clear an idea of Anson Stiver as I was likely to get short of psychoanalyzing the terrible man. Had he been beaten as a child, too? Probably. But all I really wanted was to form a firsthand impression of the beast who had set so much of this sad dysfunction-and worse-in motion, and here was my chance.

  Mrs. Stiver said, "Anson is in the living room-it's his bedroom now-working on his transformers. He designs and builds miniature power transformers. But since his stroke last fall his speech is difficult to understand, and you might have a hard time getting what he's trying to say. Anyway, I wouldn't mention Greg to him if I were you. That would just set him off. And since his stroke, he's been forced to give up smoking.

  So Anson has been a bit hard to live with. I look after him as well as I can, and we have Filipino girls who come in three days a week. That's when I get to go out and do something I love to do."

  "What's that, Mrs. Stiver?"

  "I work in a daycare center. Lively Tots, in Amsterdam.

  I've always loved children, and people say I'm good with the kids, and they love me back."

  She looked at me to gauge my reaction to this information, and I obliged by saying that that all sounded like a fine idea.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Louderbush had not called back. I drove through the onrushing downpour back toward Albany, picking up my phone and putting it down more than twice, thinking maybe if I jiggled it, it would show a missed call from the assemblyman.

  My visit with Anson Stiver had been brief and unhelpful in any important way. The retired engineer was slouched in his wheelchair, a portable oxygen unit at his side, his big frame a collapsed wreck. His speech, to the extent he had anything to say to me, wasn't just hard to understand; it was largely indecipherable. Was there a book? When Bad Things Happen to Bad People.

  Stiver wasn't happy that I was not from Time Warner-a block of programming had gone out that included CNBC and the Fox Business channel-and he was even more put out when Mrs. Stiver introduced me, at my suggestion, as someone interested in establishing a kind of memorial for Greg. Stiver was immediately suspicious, and he seemed to be asking why it had taken five years for anyone to get around to this.

  "His many friends have been so busy with their academic careers," I said. "But Greg's sad passing haunts us all."

  He looked as if he wasn't going to buy that at all. He said something else I couldn't follow, but his hard gaze was on my bandaged ear, and I wasn't surprised when Mrs. Stiver said to him, "He hurt his ear playing rugby."

  Stiver snorted at that and then made more noises that I couldn't make out and shook his head vehemently.

  Mrs. Stiver translated this as, "If the memorial is some gay thing, no money. If it's not a gay thing, twenty-five dollars."

  I told him it was a gay thing. I wanted to add Give me the twenty-five dollars anyway or I'll break your nose, but of course I didn't.

  I left soon after.

  I got Timmy on the phone. "Still no word from Louderbush.

  But I've met Stiver's parents, and I can see how young Greg might have fallen into a self-destructive relationship with an older man." I described the unfortunate Margery Stiver and her hulking ruin of a bad-news husband.

  "No surprises there, right? Did you learn anything at all?"

  "No, but Stiver's mom is yet another character in this confused psychodrama who considered him a highly unlikely candidate for suicide. She said why would anybody tough enough to survive someone as awful as her husband then suddenly fall apart mentally in a situation where choices were available? She talked about how strong Greg had always been."

  "Yes, but maybe that was the problem. Stiver knew he was a tough survivor, and yet here he was being worn down physically even-by yet another violent man. And he couldn't find the courage to put an end to a situation he saw as humiliatingly self-destructive. He couldn't face going on that way. It wasn't who he thought he was and who he wanted to be."

  "That's an entirely plausible summary. But the way Insinger and Jackman described Stiver's last weeks seemed to suggest some particular deterioration in Stiver's circumstances that he was having a bad time coping with. The teaching job situation or maybe some new disturbing wrinkle that Louderbush had introduced into the equation."

  "I guess only Assemblyman Louderbush would know the answer to that question."

  The rain was easing off now, and I could make out misty sunlight up ahead over the western outskirts of Albany. "I'm assuming Louderbush will call back soon. He obviously knows what I'm working on, and now he knows I know he knows, so he has to believe I'll eventually track him down on my own terms. And he'd rather we met on his."

  "He should hurry up."

  "I think he will. He definitely does not want any of this to become an election issue. Though how he can avoid
it at this point beats me. The circumstantial case against him keeps building. One thing I'd like to know is, how come Louderbush's staff was making official inquiries out at SUNY about Stiver's suicide? Was Louderbush trying to scope out whether or not Stiver had mentioned Louderbush in a suicide note or elsewhere in an incriminating way? You don't happen to know anybody on Louderbush's staff, do you? I asked Tom Dunphy if he had a mole there and he didn't."

  "I only know Louderbush's people very casually. There's somebody I could ask though. Ann Holmes dated a Louderbush staffer for a while. I think the guy she dated no longer works there, but he might remember something."

  "Isn't Ann Holmes a Howard Dean fanatic? What was she doing dating somebody working for a reactionary like Louderbush?"

  Timmy chortled. "Well, if you really need to know…"

  "Know what?"

  "This guy, Frogman Ying, was famous for his incredibly long tongue. He was a Taiwanese Chinese-American who sort of got passed around among Ann and her gang for a year or so."

  "Frogman?"

  "His real name was Alex."

  "You think he's still in Albany?"

  "I've seen him around. He works for the taxation committee as I recall. He could work magic with numbers, Ann said. But not just numbers."

  I said, "Do straight women confide these sorts of things to their straight male friends or just their gay male friends?"

  "Oh, I think you know the answer to that one. It's one of the ten reasons we were invented."

  "What are the other nine?"

  Timmy said he'd have to consult Walter Scott's Personality Parade for the answer to that, and meanwhile he'd try to track down the gifted Mr. Ying.

  I decided that Louderbush had concluded that he didn't need the Serbians harassing me anymore and I could safely return home. Crow Street did feel cozy and secure when I found a parking spot with inches to spare and maneuvered deftly into it. One of the few useful things I had learned in high school was parallel parking-algebra is overrated as a 156