Third man out dsm-4 Page 3

  "But I could spend some time with you, become a known presence that would have the effect of unbalancing somebody trying to get at you. And I could advise you on precautions to take."

  "That could help a lot. And while you were around, I could fill you in on the people who would be the most likely to try to get at me. And naturally you could go through my research material and maybe come up with some leads on your own-stuff you could pass on to the cops without them having to go directly into the material, which I am not about to let the government see."

  I said, "Oh, your files, right." I looked Timmy directly in the eye and tried not to blink.

  "You might spot something I missed myself," Rutka said. "I've got tons of notes and letters and memos. Sometimes I can't even read the handwriting. Mine or somebody else's."

  "I could sift through it. It couldn't hurt. And if I ended up assisting the police in their inquiries in a small way, maybe they would appreciate it, if I was tactful."

  "I can't tell you how relieved I am," Rutka said. "You might think I'm dogmatic and overly aggressive, but I'm human too and you recognize that. Whatever some people think I have coming, I don't deserve to be shot dead."

  "No."

  "Can you come out here this morning and we'll talk? I'm supposed to stay off this foot."

  We set a time and he gave me the address.

  As I hung up, Timmy set down his mug. "Why are you doing this?"

  "Several reasons. Two, anyway. Three."

  "This guy has done things that turned your stomach."

  "He's also done things I approved of. Bruno Slinger, for one, had it coming." This was the state senatorial aide who had lobbied vigorously, and successfully, to have a hate-crimes bill killed. I said, "Having that low slug sauteed was a public service worthy of a Nobel Prize."

  "The Nobel Prize in outing?"

  "Biophysics, then."

  "Except the stunt backfired, because Slinger is a man comfortable with the big lie. He just denied it and said the fags were trying to smear him. What good did any of it do?"

  "It did some good," I said. "People believed it. They don't take Slinger as seriously anymore. His effectiveness could be cut down. People snicker at him behind his back."

  "Indeed they do," Timmy said, looking both smug and disgusted, one of his more practiced expressions. "But they don't laugh at him because he's a liar and hypocrite and probably borderline psychotic. They do it because he's gay. He's another wretched homo. See, that's my point: When Rutka outs the monsters, people start talking about monstrous homosexuals. When he outs nice guys who are just well-known, then people talk about gay people as pathetic victims. Either way distorts the truth and hurts the cause. Rutka is unfair and he's wrong and he's dangerous."

  I said, "I know. I mean, I agree with you up to a point."

  "Which point?"

  "Irrationality has its uses. Irrational people have theirs. They draw attention to a problem that's pretty much ignored otherwise, and then the more rational people on the same side of the issue move to the forefront and get taken seriously and the problem starts to get solved." Then I added, all too superfluously, "Sometimes you have to crack a few eggs to make an omelette."

  "Oh. Oh, please."

  I hardly believed I had uttered anything so callously puerile to Callahan, no matter how offhand. I knew that it would not have passed muster at Georgetown, to which Timmy returned every five years along with other alumni to have the gilt on his high moral tone freshly applied, and I doubted the argument would even get by at Rutgers anymore. But I played out my assigned role in our customary dialectic nonetheless, and said, "Progress is necessarily messy. Simply getting straight America's casual acceptance of gay people requires a lengthy battle in which collateral damage is inevitable. Some people are going to get hurt.

  But it's necessary and it'll all be seen to have been worth it in the end."

  He made a little explosion of air that sounded like "Sploooph." He said, "I thought you were in favor of the all-volunteer army.

  And I know you're against cruelly mindless euphemisms."

  "Yes, I am against conscription," I said, "unless people are routinely offered a choice to do something nonmilitary that will contribute to the common weal. And I'm not even so sure about that."

  "Right, you're not so sure. Because you believe that in a civilized society people should pay taxes-even plenty of taxes-to buy civility and to help out the unlucky, but otherwise people who obey just laws should be pretty much left alone. I've heard you say that."

  "Yup. Pretty much."

  "So if the government of a nation that calls itself civilized should let people alone, why shouldn't John Rutka let people alone?"

  He raised his voice, a rare occurrence.

  I'd had enough. "Well, on second thought, maybe you're right. As usual."

  He snorted and began gathering up the soiled china and utensils. "Donald, I cherish you." He snorted again and turned on the hot-water tap all the way, as his mother had taught him, to prepare for scalding the dishes and cleansing them of the Trichomonas, cholera, scurvy, and athlete's foot that surely were lurking there. He said, "So it sounds as if you're going to go to work for this man you disagree with and don't like. Why?"

  "I've worked for lots of people I disagreed with and didn't like. If I hadn't, I'd've starved."

  "But this is a special situation. And I know you don't need the money. What you made from the Hapgoods should carry you well into the fall." This was a recent case wherein I discreetly recovered a purloined family portrait-the grandmother of a Presbyterian grande dame from Latham in a pose startling even by present-day standards and barely imaginable in 1878, the year of its creation-and received for my efforts an appropriately obscene fee.

  "No, I don't need the money," I said. "Though Rutka claims he can afford it and he's paying me."

  The scalding process began; you could almost hear the little screams of the rinderpest. "Then why are you doing it?" he said.

  "Three reasons. One, I don't need the money now, but

  I might need it later. This is a chancy business. The second reason is, Rutka is in danger and he's frightened. He needs protection

  — not from criticism or maybe even from the odd sock in the jaw. But he does not deserve to be shot and killed."

  "That's two reasons. What's the third?"

  I knew he'd guess. "It's the least important of the three."

  "Uh-huh."

  "You don't know?"

  The faucet was shut off, the cloud of steam began to dissipate, and he looked at me. "You want to get a look at his files."

  "I'm curious. I admit it."

  He began to laugh. "People deserve their privacy. Except you'd like to get just one little peek."

  "Something like that."

  "I know what you mean. Naturally I recognize the impulse."

  "Except you would never act on it, would you?"

  He thought about this. "I can't say never. I'm not perfect."

  "Yes, but your imperfections lie in other areas."

  This was irrelevant and unfair and I wasn't sure why I said it. He knew exactly what it meant, and briefly he was struck uncharacteristically speechless.

  Timmy's imperfections had been a sensitive topic in recent months. The previous spring he had had a terrified hour-and-forty-five-minute sexual assignation with a diminutive huge-eyed Bengali economist who was passing through town. It had been Timmy's first lapse from his fourteen-year pledge of sexual fidelity. (I had made no such promise, and we had survived the onset of the HIV plague by the skin of my teeth.) Though health precautions were taken, he had done it, he immediately confessed, when he'd become unhinged, he said, by the little professor's uncanny resemblance to the district poultry officer Timmy had had the unrequited hots for in Visakhapatnam in 1968.

  It may have been the briefest midlife-crisis fling on record, and it was only minimally hurtful to me-except to the extent that the incident was so out of character I feared tha
t Timmy might be coming down with Alzheimer's, rare as it is among men in their forties. The event passed quickly by and was rarely referred to anymore, except on those occasions when I would get to point out that even a man educated by Jesuits could make a mistake. "Yes, every fourteen years," was the usual reply to this.

  This time he was late for work, he said, and didn't have time for a nervous jocular exchange at his expense. He trotted upstairs to finish getting into his legislative aide's duds. With an hour to kill before I headed out to Rutka's house in Handbag, I read the newspaper account of Rutka's run-in with "an assailant possibly angered by exposure of his homosexuality." When Timmy sped through, I kissed him, careful not to leave egg on his lip. end user

  4

  The first thing Rutka said was, "I want to write you a check for the retainer. Will two thousand be enough?"

  "We can work that out. Five hundred should do for now. Tell me about your visit from the Handbag police."

  It was mid-morning, cloudless and heating up fast, and we were seated on the screened-in back porch of the old Rutka home on Elmwood Place, a short street of angular frame single-family homes separated by narrow lawns and driveways leading to small garages at the rear of each property. The elms of the street name apparently had succumbed to blight, but young maples lent some shade to the well-kept houses, whose cozy front porches were fortified by puffy hydrangea bushes and bosomy heaps of respectable shrubs. It felt like an unlikely locale for a Queer Nation headquarters, but maybe that was the point.

  Each house had a concrete walk leading down to the street, like a tasteful necktie. Some were lined with zinnias and marigolds in lurid full bloom. The flowers lent a note of welcome to the neighborhood, though as I'd driven up no human being was visible. Up the street a gray cat had scratched a hole in a garbage bag left at curbside and was rummaging through the spillage. The only sound was from a dozen or so air conditioners scarfing up what was left of the Mideastern oil reserves in atonal tandem.

  Rutka, pale but otherwise shapely and fit in cut-offs and a tank top, was sprawled along an old metal fifties-era porch glider on a bed of cushions that looked as if they'd been dragged down from the attic every summer since the glider was purchased. His wounded appendage lolled over the side of the glider below a sinewy leg and well-turned, muscular thigh that was not the result of a health-club regimen, I guessed, but of a decade of plowing up and down hospital corridors eight to twelve hours a day.

  I sat in a metal rocker and helped myself from time to time to an M amp;M from a large dish on an end table next to Rutka. He ate them by the fistful, as if the medical advice he'd received had been to stay off the wounded foot and eat plenty of candy. My peripheral vision searched his torso for love handles but none were visible. I chewed and swallowed my own M amp;M's slowly so as to distribute their effects evenly.

  "The stupid cops thought what I thought they would think," Rutka said. "That I shot myself, or Eddie shot me, for the publicity and the martyrdom. God, I'm mad but I'm not crazy."

  "They said that straight out?"

  "They didn't have to. They asked me if either Eddie or I owned a firearm, and they kept asking me to repeat the story of what happened, over and over, as if they couldn't quite believe it, or they were trying to trip me up."

  "Did they trip you up?"

  "Look, I know what happened. No, they did not trip me up." Rutka's left eye wandered off to take in the old grape arbor, heavy with bird-pecked pale produce, that extended down the backyard away from the porch, and his right eye peered at me beadily. "I went outside, somebody shot me, and a car drove away. How could anybody trip me up? Even if I was making it up, it's too simple."

  "Tell me again everything that happened from beginning to end. Start when Eddie came home from work. Is he at work now?"

  "He works every day, including Saturday, from seven-thirty to four, later when they get busy. Yesterday was slow and Eddie was home by four-thirty." He repeated the story he had told me the night before in the Albany Med parking lot: Eddie's arrival home; the plan to walk down to Konven-You-Rama; stepping off the front steps; bang; car with bad muffler speeds off; Eddie comes out, finds Rutka sprawled; cops, ambulance arrive; shell found in gutter by patrolman.

  Rutka's story sounded identical to the narrative I'd heard the night before. A new detail cropped up here and there; others were dropped. It sounded real, natural, truthful.

  "You said the cops asked if you own a firearm. Do you?"

  "I told them I didn't. But I do. I guess I can tell you."

  "Oh, great."

  "Here," he said, and slid a. 38 Smith and Wesson revolver out from under the cushions.

  I examined the weapon, which was fully loaded, and said, "Where did this thing come from?"

  He was nonchalant. "Around the corner from my old apartment on a Hundred and Sixth Street in New York.

  I bought it retail, I guess you could say. These things are easier to come by in that neighborhood than take-out Szechuan."

  "It's not registered anywhere?"

  A mirthless laugh. " 'Register criminals, not firearms,' right, Strachey? How could I be a First Amendment purist and scoff at the Second?"

  "You're right. Criminals should be required to register their crimes in advance and observe a seven-day waiting period before committing them." I returned the revolver and Rutka stuffed it back under the cushions. "How come you felt you needed one of these?" I asked.

  "In New York," he said, "I was mugged twice by gangs of kids. After the second time, when they threw me in the gutter and hit me on the neck with a chain, I bought this gun from a guy I knew at the local bodega. Of course, it didn't do me any good. It was too much trouble to drag it around and I always left it at home. You can't hide a shoulder holster under a nurse's uniform."

  "What was the caliber of the slug the cops found yesterday?"

  He shrugged. "They didn't tell me. But it wouldn't have come from this gun. That I know."

  "Because?"

  "Because this gun was up on a closet shelf in our room. I brought it down this morning when Eddie left for work. I didn't really know how scared I was until Eddie left and I was alone. I have to admit, I really started to freak. That's when I called you. And I got the gun out and loaded it."

  Rutka was looking directly at me now with both eyes, though if a wild man suddenly arrived on the scene spraying hot lead it wasn't at all certain where an excited Rutka's gaze might land. I said, "You have one eye that wanders. If you had to shoot that gun, how would you aim it?"

  "With my right eye," he said. "It's the left one that gets away. That'd be no problem."

  "Makes sense. What about the actual bullet that nicked your ankle? Have they found it yet?"

  He took another fistful of candies, chomped on them, and said, "Two bozos were out here with tape measures and geometry-class instruments at six this morning, but they didn't find anything. They said they thought the bullet might have buried itself in the lawn. I got the impression that if I'd been shot through the pancreas they'd've dug up the lawn. But they said there was no reason to make a mess in the neighborhood if they didn't have to. They went through the motions."

  I asked him for the names of the investigating officers and he said, "Just the chief-Bub Bailey-and the patrolman who was here last night, Octavio Reed. They only have one detective in Handbag, and he's on vacation until Labor Day."

  The name Octavio Reed meant something to me, but I couldn't remember exactly what. I said, "They told you that?"

  "They were civil," Rutka said with what looked like a trace of disappointment. "The chief mentioned Dad, of course. It was obvious he wasn't going to tell me what he really thought of me in the presence of Dad's ghost. The reactionaries who control this country are right in one way-what they call family values are worth something. Just make sure you're a member of the family.

  And that you don't have one of those families that, when they find out you're queer, they kick you out on the street."

  "I
take it that wasn't the case with you."

  His face tightened and he said, "No. I was lucky in that respect. Actually, they didn't know. I was pretty fucked up as a kid. I kept everything hidden. My first experiences were not what you would call ideal. I didn't really come to terms with my sexuality until I was in nursing school in 1980 and met some gay people who had their shit together. And even then I didn't come out and start thinking of myself as gay until I hit New York.

  "I got down there just in time for the plague, which was horrible, but fortunately I met Eddie a couple of months after I arrived.

  He was just out of the Marine Corps and really ready to let loose too. We hardly got out of bed the first month we knew each other, we had so much sex and emotion pent up inside us. I brought him home whenever I came up, and everybody in my family just sort of knew. Ann said they figured it out when I decided to become a nurse. How's that for sexual-orientation stereotyping?"

  "Competent enough."

  "So they knew, and it seemed to be okay, just as long as nobody spoke the dreaded word."

  "And you never spoke it?"

  "Nah. Not in Handbag. Not until later, in New York, when I went to a couple of ACT-UP meetings and started to understand how all-pervasive homophobia is in this society and how it kills people. Then I spoke the word."

  "I suppose," I said, "Chief Bailey was forced to speak it when he was here, or at least to allude to it."

  Rutka sneered. "He said he thought the shooting might have had something to do with my being 'an activist.' That's all he said, 'an activist.' "

  "And you conceded there might be a connection?"

  "He asked me for the names of anyone who had threatened me in recent months, and I gave him my list."

  "You have a little list."

  "These are the ones who I know who they are. I've gotten so many anonymous threats in the past year I've lost count."

  He reached over the edge of the glider, retrieved from the end table a photocopied single sheet of paper, and passed it to me. As I read over it, Rutka scooped up another handful of M amp;M's and crunched on them noisily while I studied his list of names and brief biographical descriptions. The list had on it the state senate aide, the TV weatherman, and seven other names I recognized from Rutka's Cityscape outing column and from Queers-creed.