Death trick ds-1 Read online

  “We could call it that.”

  Blount pulled himself forward in a herky-jerky way and spoke the words. “Jay has mentioned to us that you are a, ah, avowed homosexual, Mr. Strachey, and that you can be counted on to be familiar with the, ah, gay life-style and, ah, milieu here in Albany.”

  “Yes, I’m gay.”

  “We’re broad-minded,” Blount said. He assumed a facial expression that resembled the work of an early cubist. “How you live your life, Mr. Strachey, is none of our business. How William lives his life is very much our business. He’s our only child, you see. He has no sisters or brothers.”

  Or siblings. “How old is your son?” I asked. “Mid-twenties?”

  “Twenty-seven.”

  “He sounds old enough to make his own decisions.”

  “Despite our disagreements with Billy,” Jane Blount said serenely, “he’s always considered Stuart’s and my opinions important. There’s always been a kind of bond.”

  Scanty as the evidence was so far, I figured she had something there.

  “You said you had words with Billy the last time you saw him. What did he say when he left?”

  “Well-in point of fact,” Blount said, shifting again, “Jane and I did the actual speaking. I did get a little hot under the collar, I have to admit. Billy did not express his feelings verbally. He simply walked out the door. With his houseguest.”

  Who probably never even sent a thank-you note. “Is that what Billy ordinarily does when he’s angry? Walks away?”

  Blount took on a martyred look. “Ah, if only he would! William’s silence in August was hardly characteristic of our son, Mr. Strachey. When William becomes angry, he generally makes a speech-gives us all his propaganda.” Or does a desecration number on the Blounts’ Phyfe sofa.

  “But of course we’ve never bought it, all the slogans and so forth. Don’t get me wrong, Mr.

  Strachey,” Blount said, giving me his Picasso face again, “we respect the activists’ positions, and we do not support legal discrimination against sodomites. But for William, it isn’t the thing, you see? Not the road to the fulfilling type of life that is available to our son.”

  If Billy Blount was not an extremely angry young man, then he had to be a turnip. “What happens when I locate Billy and he refuses to drop by and hash things over with you two? That sounds to me like a distinct possibility. Bond or no bond, he’s not likely to expect a sympathetic hearing from his family. Especially given the circumstances of the crime he’s accused of.”

  Jane Blount went for another cigarette. Her husband removed a sealed business-size envelope from his inside breast pocket and handed it to me. The printed return address was for Blount and Hackett, Investment Counselors, Twin Towers, Washington Avenue, Albany. “Give Billy this,” he said. “It should make a difference.”

  I slid the envelope into my own breast pocket and could feel it find the rip at the bottom and begin to edge down into the lining. I asked what was in the envelope.

  “That is private,” Jane Blount said. “Private and personal. If Billy wants to tell you about it, that’s his business. I doubt that he will. You just give it to him. He’ll come home.” She gave me a look that said, Understood?

  Maybe he’d come home or maybe he wouldn’t, but I didn’t doubt that whatever was in the envelope was going to make an impression on Billy Blount.

  I asked them to fill me in on their son’s whereabouts, activities, and acquaintances over the past ten years, and for half an hour they rambled around the surface of Billy’s social, educational, and occupational landscape. They offered little to go on.

  Billy Blount had been graduated from SUNY/Albany with a degree in political science and then had taken a series of menial jobs. Currently he worked in a record shop. He hadn’t lived at home since college, though his addresses were never more than eight or ten blocks from the family abode on State Street. This latter may or may not have meant something; Albany gays tended to live within walking distance of the bars and discos on nearby Central Avenue, and Billy Blount’s unbroken proximity to his parents could have been coincidental. I’d find out.

  The Blounts knew no names of their son’s friends. They said his social circle was, they were certain, made up of “gay individuals,” and they thought I might be acquainted with some of them. This was possible; gay Albany, though populous enough, was not so vast as San Francisco.

  The Blounts gave me a photograph of their son. He was good-looking in a lean-jawed sort of way, with a broad, vaguely impudent smile, shortish dark hair, deep black eyes, and the obligatory clipped British military mustache. I thought, in fact, that I had seen him around in the bars and discos. Given my habits and his, it would have been odd if I hadn’t.

  They provided me with Billy’s current address on Madison Avenue, and a check for one thousand dollars, which I stuffed deep in my pants pocket. I said I’d report back to them within a week but that I had a few fiscal loose ends to tie up in mid-afternoon before I began work on their case.

  Stuart Blount walked with me to the door, shook my hand, made a point of squeezing my shoulder as he did so, and wished me “all the best of luck.”

  I had the feeling I was being used by these people in a way I wasn’t going to like once I figured out what it was. Outside, the cold wind felt good. I ambled down State, turned the corner away from the park, and made for the bank.

  2

  Back on Central I checked my service, which had a one-word message from Brigit: “books.” I flipped through my desk calendar, picked a page in mid-December, and wrote: “Brigit-books.”

  The Times Unions for the past four years were stacked on the floor next to my file cabinet, and I hefted the top unyellowed half-dozen onto my desk. Starting with the Sunday, September 30 edition, I clipped all the stories on the murder of Steven Kleckner, which had been discovered on the morning of the twenty-ninth, and which now, six days later, Stuart and Jane Blount’s renegade son stood accused of having committed.

  The discovery story rated two columns on page one, a photo of the deceased, and a picture of two detectives standing in front of a house. Kleckner was clean-shaven and done up in a suit jacket and tie-in what looked like a high-school-graduation photo-with a bony, angular face and a big, forced, toothy smile. He had a look of acute discomfort; maybe he’d hated high school, or maybe the photographer had just said, “C’mon, son, smile like your girl friend just said she was ready to go all the way,” or maybe his shirt collar was too tight. High-school photos were always hard to read. The police detectives in the other photo looked grave, and one was pointing at a doorknob.

  No mention was made in either the caption or the story of the significance of this gesture. I made a note to “ck sig drnb.” It was possible the doorknob was simply thought by someone to have been vaguely photogenic and redolent of criminal activity.

  Steven Kleckner, aged twenty-four, the main story said, had been discovered stabbed to death in his bed at 7:35 the previous morning by Albany police. The department had received an anonymous call from a man who’d said only: “He’s dead-I think Steve is dead,” and given the address. Police had been admitted to the basement apartment on lower Hudson Avenue by the landlady, who lived on the first floor of the rundown brick building, one of the few in the neighborhood that hadn’t yet been urban-renewed.

  A long kitchen knife, its blade blood-soaked, had been found on the floor beside the bed on which the victim lay. There was no sign of a struggle having taken place or of forced entry into the “inexpensively furnished apartment.”

  Kleckner was identified as a disc jockey at Trucky’s Disco on Western Avenue who had come originally from the village of Alps in Rensselaer County. He had lived in Albany for six years and was “a bachelor.” The article did not mention that Trucky’s was a gay student hangout near the main SUNY campus and that Kleckner was well known and well liked among the regulars there. Twenty years earlier the headline would have been YOUTH SLAIN IN HOMO

  LOVENE
ST, but discretion to the point of uninformativeness had set in at the Hearst papers. Or maybe it was just indifference.

  The article did reveal that Kleckner, who had not worked at Trucky’s on the fatal early morning but had spent most of the night there dancing and drinking with friends, was last seen leaving the bar around three A.M. “with a male companion.”

  A small sidebar contained remarks from people who knew

  Kleckner back in Alps. His basketball coach said Kleckner was “a nice kid, polite, and kind of shy” who “didn’t fool with drugs and didn’t date much.” The manager of a Glass Lake super-market where Kleckner once bagged groceries called him “sort of bashful” but “reliable and well brought up.” Kleckner’s older sister, Mrs. Damon Roach, of Dunham Hollow, spoke for the family: “He was just a mixed-up kid, and he didn’t deserve a thing like this. It’s too late for Steven, but maybe other boys will learn a lesson from it.”

  A day later, on Monday, October first, the Times Union said police had identified the “male companion” as William Blount, of Madison Avenue, “son of a prominent Albany financier,” and were seeking his whereabouts so that he could be questioned. The same article said the medical examiner had estimated the time of Steven Kleckner’s death as five-thirty A.M. and had “stated his belief the victim died instantaneously from a single puncture wound to his heart.” Also, for the first time, word was out: traces of semen had been found in Kleckner’s rectum. No forthright speculation was offered on how the substance had found its way there, but Billy Blount, the murder suspect, was now identified as a “one-time gay activist” who had been chairman of the Albany-Schenectady-Troy Gay Alliance Political Action Committee in the early 1970s.

  Follow-up stories over the next four days offered no new hard news, except that the DA’s office now considered the evidence against Blount to be “conclusive,” and a warrant had been issued for his arrest. Blount was being charged with second-degree murder.

  The Times Union had not editorialized on the crime; moral inferences, for what they’d be worth, would have to wait. The paper did print a letter to the editor from Hardy Monkman, president of the Gay League Against Unfairness in the Media, taking the paper to task for its “insulting reference to a gay citizen’s body” and including a “demand for equal time.” Whatever that meant.

  The gay movement still had strength in Albany, but occasionally one of its leaders came forth with a public utterance espousing a notion and couched in terms of such sublime daffiness that gay men and women up and down the Hudson Valley cringed with embarrassment or, as might have been the case with Billy Blount, said the hell with it and dropped out.

  I slipped the clippings into a file folder which I marked Blount/Kleckner, then called Albany PD and learned that the detective handling the Kleckner murder was out of his office and wouldn’t return until Monday.

  I drove out Central to the Colonie Center shopping mall. At Macy’s I picked out a black lamb’s wool sweater and slipped it on under my jacket. I wrote out a check for forty dollars, signed it in a bold hand, and laid it on the counter in front of the bored clerk. He glanced at the check as if he’d seen one before, and then he glanced at me as if he’d seen one before. He looked familiar. I said, “Kevin-Elk Street?”

  “My name is Kevin, but I live in Delmar. I don’t believe we’ve met. No-no, I’m sure we haven’t.”

  Like hell. “Sorry,” I said. “I had you mixed up with a guy I once knew who’d drawn little valentines all over his buttocks with a ball-point pen. Inside the valentines were the initials of all the men who had visited there. It must have been another Kevin. Sorry. Funny story, though, isn’t it?”

  “H-yeah, ha ha.”

  The Music Barn record shop was along the main arcade of the shopping center, across from a long brick-and-blond-wood fountain that tinkled and hissed like an old toilet tank. Bernini in the suburbs. I spoke with the Music Barn clerk and was directed to the back of the store, where I found the manager opening up a carton of Donna Summer “On The Radio” LPs.

  “She is that,” I said.

  “Who? Beg your pardon?”

  “On the radio-Donna. Driving out here, I dialed around and picked her up on three stations.

  ‘Dim All the Lights’ once and ‘No More Tears’ twice. My own favorites, though, are ‘Bad Girls,’

  ‘Hot Stuff,’ and ‘Wasted.’ Donna always cheers me up.”

  “She’s okay, I guess, but she sure as heck isn’t Patti Page.” This was said with a straight face, no irony intended. He was losing his hair and looked to be a little older than I was, forty, and I guessed he’d had his good times twenty years ago and wasn’t living his life backwards.

  “I’m Donald Strachey and I’m a private detective.” I showed him the photostat of my license.

  “Billy Blount’s parents want to help him, and they’ve hired me to locate him.”

  He felt around inside his beige V-neck sweater, brought out a pair of glasses with pink plastic rims, and studied the laminated card. “No kidding, a real private eye! Jeez. I’m Elvin John, pleased to meet you,” he said and offered his hand. I wanted to say, Hi, Elvin, I’m Nick Jagger, but I supposed he’d heard it before. His moon face and blinky blue eyes showed confusion.

  “Billy’s parents are helping the police capture him? Golly, I sure don’t understand that.”

  I wasn’t certain I did either, but I said, “They think it’s best that he turn himself in and then let a good lawyer handle it. They’re probably right. Billy can’t have much of a life as a fugitive.”

  “They don’t think Billy actually killed that guy, do they?”

  “Well-no. I take it you don’t either.”

  Elvin John set down the stack of records and shook his head. “Nope, I don’t. Billy’s a messed-up guy, I suppose you could say, and he was kind of mad at the world. But actually kill somebody?

  I’m no expert, but-holy cow, no. I don’t believe it”

  “You said Billy’s messed up. How so,”

  He gestured, and I followed him. We went into an alcove, where John slid onto a metal stool, retrieved a cigar from behind a carton of plastic bags, and unwrapped it. “When I say messed up, I don’t mean what you think I mean.” He gave me a knowing look and fired up the cigar, which definitely was not Cuban, though still possibly communistic. Albanian, maybe. “I don’t know how broad-minded you are,” John said, “but I’m tolerant of minorities myself, and I wasn’t talking about Billy being a homo or anything like that.” He said it with a trace of smugness, a challenge to my liberal sensibilities.

  I said, “Good, I’m gay myself.”

  His pale eyebrows shot up. “Oh yeah? Jeez, you don’t look it!”

  “Well, you don’t look Jewish either.”

  “I’m not. I’m Lutheran.”

  “Well then, you don’t look Lutheran. You look-Methodist.”

  “I’m half. My father’s a Methodist.”

  “I can always spot one,” I said. “There’s something about the way they move.”

  He gave me a wary look.

  I said, “In what way was Billy Blount messed up?”

  “Oh, just a little bit paranoid-well, not paranoid, actually-defensive. Always ready with some lip. Always thinking you were going to criticize him.”

  “Were you?”

  “Heck, no. Billy was always a good worker-clean, neat, polite. And always on time, even when he showed up looking a little the worse for wear, which he sometimes did on Monday mornings.

  I asked him once when he was looking like an old sleepyhead if he’d had a heavy date the night before, and he said yeah, the date’s name was Huey and he was a real hunk. Said it just like it was a woman, except he said ‘hunk.’ Lord, I didn’t know what to say.”

  “If it had been a woman Billy had gone out with, what would you have said?”

  “Oh heck, I dunno. ‘Get any?’”

  The quaint observances of the straight life. I said, “What was Billy defensive about? What
would set him off?”

  “Oh, just the one thing, really. The first time he told me he was gay, I won’t forget that. I made a crack about a swishy kid who came in-nothing derogatory, you know, just a joke-and Billy really lit into me. He said he was gay and he’d appreciate it if I kept my homophobic thoughts to myself. That’s what he called it, ‘homophobic’-I’d never heard that word before. I’m from Gloversville, and nobody back home ever uses that word. Anyway, I said I was sorry, but he thought I meant I was sorry he was gay. He started carrying on like I was some kind of Hitler and I started to get mad, but then some customers came in and we dropped it. The subject came up again every once in a while, and to tell you the truth, I was sort of interested in hearing Billy talk.

  He’s quite a speech-maker. Of course, I didn’t always agree with him. He’s just too much of a radical. Golly, I don’t think most people give a hoot about anybody else’s sex life, do they? C’mon now, admit it.”

  “Some don’t,” I said. “But you run into a surprising number who consider homosexuals as dangerous as the Boston strangler, but not as wholesome. This can make you edgy. Has Billy been in touch at all during the past week?”

  “I’ve got his paycheck, but he didn’t pick it up. He didn’t show up Monday morning, and at first I was plenty ticked off. I called his home and he wasn’t there, sick or anything. And then my wife called-she’d seen the paper-and she said Billy was wanted for murder. Gee whiz, I just couldn’t believe it!”

  “And you still don’t.”

  He flicked his cigar ash in a tuna can. “No, not hurt somebody like that. He wouldn’t, as far as becoming really violent. Billy’s a talker. If he got mad, he’d just make a big wordy speech.”

  “It runs in his family.”

  “‘Homophobic’ Whew.”

  “Did any of Billy’s friends ever come in? I’ve got to locate some of them. I need names.”