Death trick ds-1 Read online

  “Jesus, no kidding. You think he’s in Albany?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just starting.”

  “We should have known you’d get mixed up in that one,” Calvin said. “The weird people you hang around.”

  Timmy said, “Thank you.”

  “I mean his customers-clients, or whatever they’re called. Who was that one you were following around last month? The one with the pet pigs?”

  “He wasn’t the client. His wife was the client. She thought he had another woman he was sneaking out to meet. What he had was a small pig farm out in East Greenbush. A secret pig farm. I caught the guy in the act of feeding his pigs one night-got some nice shots with the Leica, too-and then I started feeling sorry for the guy and went over and talked to him. I asked him why he didn’t just level with his wife about the secret pigs, and the poor devil began to weep. He said she’d never understand, that it would destroy his marriage.

  He was an assistant commissioner in the Department of Mental Health.”

  Phil said, “Well, consensual pig farming is one thing, but getting involuntarily stabbed to death by your trick is definitely something else. A lot of the disco bunnies are scared shitless.

  Especially out at Trucky’s. Blount is the one who did it, isn’t he?”

  “I don’t know. It looks that way. How’s business at Trucky’s? Are people coming back? Truckman has had his hard times.”

  “Wednesday night was packed,” Calvin said. “It was two for one. And people aren’t going to the Rat’s Nest much anymore. Not with the cops still hassling them. I heard on Monday they arrested the bartender and two customers. In the middle of the afternoon they busted in, and there were fifteen people in the back room!”

  Timmy said, “It isn’t just for breakfast anymore,” and we groaned obligingly.

  The Rat’s Nest was a new place on Western Avenue about a mile beyond Trucky’s, just outside the Albany city limits in the village of Bergenfield. It was what the papers coyly called controversial and was the Albany area’s first “New York style” gay bar, with black lights, crumpled Reynolds Wrap on the ceiling, and nude go-go boys on a wooden platform that looked like an executioner’s scaffolding.

  In the back of the Rat’s Nest was a separate grope room with a bartender in a dirty jock strap and lighting that would have caused a wildcat strike by any mildly assertive local of the United Mine Workers. The advertising slogan for the Rat’s Nest was “Come in and Act Disgusting,” and when it opened in midsummer, there were those who predicted the place would be laughed out of existence.

  It was not. The Rat’s Nest boomed for nearly a month, drawing most of its hundreds of regular customers away from Trucky’s, where “acting disgusting” was much rarer, more random, and not so aggressively institutionalized.

  And then it happened. The Bergenfield police force began a series of raids on the Rat’s Nest, arresting employees for serving liquor to minors, which may or may not have been the case, and busting patrons on dope, drunk and disorderly, and, in a few cases, consensual sodomy charges.

  The crowds fled-most of them back to Trucky’s, where the death by stabbing of a popular disc jockey caused a dampening of spirits and a jittery watchfulness, but no mass move to a less tainted nighttime hangout.

  A couple of the Central Avenue bars, witnessing the unexpected popularity of the New Decadence, made gestures in that direction. One disco, teetering on the edge of extinction, changed its name from Mary-Mary’s to the Bung Cellar and regained its wandering clientele overnight. Another bar was less successful. The owner of the Green Room attempted a “Western” motif by hanging a child’s cowboy hat on a wall sconce, but this was not enough.

  We left the Terminal at ten and made our way up the avenue, hitting all the gay watering holes and discos except Myrna’s, the lesbian bar-an oversight that turned out to be a mistake on my part. I’d been an investigator for nearly fifteen years: army intelligence; the Robert Morgart Agency; four years on my own. But I was still learning.

  I talked to the doormen and bartenders in all the spots we hit, and while some said yes, they knew who Billy Blount was and had seen him around, none knew him except by name and none knew who his friends were. I did not speak with the disc jockeys-they were absorbed in their art, like marathon runners or poker players-but I collected their names and phone numbers so I could check them out later if no leads developed elsewhere.

  We lost Phil and Calvin at the Bung Cellar, then headed out Western and hit Trucky’s, the bar where the murdered DJ had worked, at two-fifteen, when the disco night was peaking. Debbie Jacob’s “Don’t You Want My Love” was on when we went in. The place was jam-packed and smelled of beer, Brut, fresh sweat, cigarette smoke, and poppers. The dance area at Trucky’s, in the back beyond a big oval bar, had flashing colored lights on the walls, on the ceiling, under the floor. It was as if Times Square of 1948 had been turned on its side and people were dancing on the neon signs. The music, pounding out of speakers the size of Mack truck engines, was sensuous and ripe, with its Latin rhythms and funky-bluesy yells and sighs, and the dancers moved like beautiful sexual swimmers in a fantastic sea.

  Timmy and I made our way through the crowds along the walls, stopping to shout into the ears of people we knew, and danced for six or eight songs. We bought draughts then, and I made arrangements to talk to the bartenders after closing at four. Timmy headed back to the dance floor with an assistant professor of physics he knew from RPI, and I went looking for Mike Truckman.

  The owner of Trucky’s was not hard to spot. He’d been a famous football tackle at Siena College in the early fifties, and at six-three or ��� four and a mostly well distributed two-ten, he still cut a formidable figure in his pre-Calvin Klein white ducks and a bulky-knit black sweater that almost concealed the beginnings of a paunch.

  I found Truckman in a corner uttering sweet nothings to and massaging the neck of a notorious hustler I’d seen on the streets but rarely in the bars. He was a smooth-skinned, athletic-looking young man with a smug, sleepy look and a green-and-white football jersey with the number 69 stenciled on it. Cute. I didn’t feel bad about interrupting.

  I’d met Truckman on several occasions, most recently at an early summer National Gay Task Force fundraiser for which Truckman had donated the drinks, and he remembered me. I told him what I was doing. He stared hard at me for a few seconds, then slugged down a couple of ounces of whatever was in the glass he held and signaled for me to follow him.

  We made our way past the disc jockey’s glassed-in booth, turned, and went into an office with a thick metal door marked Private. I shut the door behind me. Truckman had been a bureaucrat with the New York Department of Motor Vehicles before he’d opened his bar two years before, and he’d brought his tastes, or habits, of office decor with him: gunmetal gray desk, filing cabinet to match, steel shelving along the wall. The bass notes from the speakers outside the door bumped and reverberated into the little room and made the metal shelves sing.

  I said, “I feel like I’m in the basement of the Reichschan-cellery. I hope you’re not going to offer me a cyanide tablet.”

  The crack was ill-timed, and Truckman did not laugh. He sat behind his desk, made further use of his half-full glass of what smelled like bourbon, and I hoisted myself onto a stack of Molson’s crates.

  “Whadda you wanna know?” Truckman said in a boozy-gravelly voice. I’m cooperating with everybody on this thing, but I don’t know what the hell else I can tell you. Christ, this fucking thing is just dragging on and on. Christ, I dunno. What am I sposed to do? Christ, I dunno. It’s just a tragedy, that’s what it is, just a fucking terrible, terrible tragedy.”

  He was drunk, and it had changed his personality from the one I knew. I remembered Truckman as a serious man, and sometimes agitated, but never morose and confused. I doubted that he’d made a habit of this. People who ran successful bars stayed sober. He brought a dirty white handkerchief out of his back pocket and mopped the sweat from his
forehead and neck. He had a big, craggy face with a wide, expressive mouth and would have been matinee-idol handsome if it hadn’t been for his eyes, which were cold gray and ringed with puffs of ashen flesh.

  I said, “I’m sorry, Mike. I’m sure this is rough. Were you and Steve Kleckner close?”

  “Whaddya mean, ‘close’?” A sour, indignant look. “Sure, we were close, that’s no secret. Christ, Steve looked up to me, you know? What I’m saying is, Steve respected me for how I was so up front about being gay and how I always did so much for the movement-one hell of a lot more than the other bar owners did, the assholes. Steve thought I had-Christ, you know principles.”

  He grimaced. A rick of milkweed-color hair stuck out over one ear, and I wanted to pass him my comb.

  I said, “I didn’t know Steve. What was he like?”

  He squeezed his eyes shut with his free hand. “A nice kid,” Truckman said, shaking his head.

  “Oh, such a nice sweet kid Steve was. But-naive. God, was that kid naive! Steve was naive, but he was learning, though, right? Steve was young, but he was catching on. We all have ideals, right? But you’ve gotta be tough in the way you go about it. A means to an end, right?”

  He was beginning to slur his words. I said, “Right.”

  More bourbon.

  I said, “Mike, you’re drunk.”

  He shook his head. “Nah, I’m drinking but I’m not drunk. Anyways, Floyd’s out there, the doorman. Floyd can run the place if I feel like taking a drink. Floyd can do it, right?”

  I nodded. I asked him why anyone would want to hurt Steve Kleckner.

  He rolled his eyes at some imaginary companion off to my right. “Christ, how would I know the answer to that? You’ll have to ask the sonovabitch who did it, right? If the goddamn cops ever catch up with the little shit.”

  “You mean Billy Blount?”

  “Hey, the Blount guy did it, dinnee? I thought everybody knew that-the kid Steve left with here that night. With here. Here with.”

  “Did you know Blount?”

  “Nah, but I saw it happen-saw Steve and that little shit turn on to each other. I mean, don’t get me wrong, right? I was glad to see it, honest to Christ, I was. I was glad to see Steve being so up for a change. Christ, moping around here the way he was, I just wanted to pick Steve up and shake him.”

  “How come he’d been down?”

  Truckman emptied his glass and brought a new bottle of Jim Beam from his desk drawer. He kicked the drawer shut and filled his glass as well as a second one. He said, “Join me.”

  “I’ve got a stein of your fifty-cent horse piss outside. Thanks, I’ll stick with that. Why had Steve been depressed?”

  “Dunno. Maybe his rose-colored glasses fell off.” He drank.

  For an instant I wondered if Kleckner had actually worn rose-colored glasses, like Gloria Steinem’s. It wouldn’t have been unprecedented at Trucky’s.

  I said, “Had he talked about it?”

  “Nope, unh-unh.” He poured the drink for me that I’d declined.

  “Had you ever seen Steve with Blount before?”

  “Not that I remember. The cops asked me that. Fucking cops.”

  “Why ‘fucking’?”

  “Oh, you know, Don. You should know. Cops.”

  “Have they been hassling you?”

  “Nothing to speak of. Drink up.”

  “Vigorish?”

  “Nah. They fucking hadn’t better try.”

  “What did you tell the cops about that night?”

  “What all I knew, why shouldn’t I? That Steve and the Blount kid danced, and horsed around, and left about an hour before closing. Shit, Steve could of done a lot better than that kid, a fucking lot better. And now look what happened! It’s just a tragedy, that’s what it is, a fucking terrible, terrible tra-guh-dee.”

  His eyes were wet, and he tugged out the hankie and wiped his face. Then, more bourbon. He said, “Don, you’re not drinking.”

  I sipped. “Do you ever wish you’d stayed with the state, Mike? You had a nice neat, clean life down there.”

  He snorted messily. “Hah, that’s all you know! At the department it was everything but murder.

  Hell, no! I’m doing what I wanna do, Don. And no way-no way ��� am I gonna lose it, right? You wouldn’t. No way, baby.”

  I said, “Business looks good.”

  “Yeah. S’good.” He gazed down morosely at his drink.

  “I want to talk to your bartender after closing.”

  “S’up to them. Floyd’ll be locking up. I’m cuttin’ out at four.”

  “Heavy date?”

  “H-yeah. Real heavy.”

  “The cute number in the witty jersey?”

  “Nah,” Truckman said. “Not him. He’s for later.” He shut his eyes and laughed bleakly at some private joke.

  “Well, I suppose you could do worse.” “Oh, I do-ooo do worse.” He gulped down the rest of his drink. “I sho nuff do. Hey. Don. How ‘bout a drink?”

  I guessed Truckman knew more about Steve Kleckner’s recent life than he’d told me, but he was in no condition to be reasoned with, or pressured, or led. After Truckman’s office the stench of smoke, poppers, and hot sweat outside it was a field of golden daffodils. I found Timmy at the bar talking-shouting- to a sandy-haired man of about thirty in a plaid flannel shirt.

  Timmy leaned up to my ear and yelled, “I’ve got one!”

  “One what?”

  “One friend of Billy Blount’s. Don, this is Mark Deslonde. Mark, Don Strachey.”

  He had soft brown eyes, a fuzzy full beard, neatly trimmed, and a tilt to his head that was angled counter to the slant of his broad smile. I didn’t know whether he practiced this in front of a mirror, but it was devastating, and if Timmy hadn’t been there it would have had its effect on me.

  Not that it didn’t, a little.

  I said, “Can we go somewhere?”

  He smiled again and said okay and slid off his stool, and as we turned toward the door, Timmy cupped his hand over my ear and said into it, “You can do me a favor one of these days.”

  I said, “See you around-Tommy, wasn’t it? I’ve really enjoyed myself and I hope we run into each other again sometime.” I kissed him on the forehead. He laughed lightly.

  Deslonde and I went out and sat in the Rabbit. The air was frosty, and a cold, luminescent half-moon hung over the motel up the road and across Western from Trucky’s parking lot.

  “You’re friend is nice,” Deslonde said, still grinning. “Is he your lover?”

  “Sort of,” I said. What the hell was I doing? “Well, yes. He is. We don’t live together.”

  “That’s smart. It makes discretion possible. I lived with my ex-lover for three and a half years. It was great for the first two. Until one of us started fooling around once in a while, and because we were living together, this was noticed. Nothing heavy, right? Just the occasional recreational indiscretion. But

  Nate was Jewish enough, or insecure enough, to believe in monogamy, and that was the beginning of the end.”

  I said, “Do you have regrets?”

  “Sure.”

  “Timmy says you’re a friend of Billy Blount’s.”

  “Yes, I know Billy. Your lover-whom you don’t live with-says you’re a detective. But not a cop, right?”

  “Right. Private.”

  “Then you’d have a license.”

  I stretched out and dug my wallet out of my hip pocket. He studied the laminated card, and I put it back.

  Deslonde said, “Smoke?”

  “Love it.”

  He took a joint from his shirt pocket and lit it. We passed it back and forth while we talked.

  “I’m working for Billy’s parents,” I said, determined to concentrate on something other than Deslonde’s face. “They want to help him.”

  “I’m sure they do,” Deslonde said evenly. I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic.

  “How do you know Billy?”
/>   “My old roommate and Billy were involved for a couple of months, before Dennis freaked out and took off for Maine. Billy and I kept running into each other in the bathroom in the morning, and one day I gave him a lift out to Colonie. I work at Sears.”

  “Sportswear?”

  “Automotive supplies.”

  Strachey, you ass. “Right,” I said. “Billy works at the, ah, Music Barn.”

  “I live right up the street from Billy on Madison, and he started riding out to Colonie with me regularly. Sometimes we went out together, or with other people, out here or to the Bung Cellar.

  We got to be pretty good friends after a while. Billy’s really one of the more stimulating people I know and quite enjoyable to be around. In fact, I’ve become very fond of Billy over the past few years. There’s nothing sexual in the relationship; it just didn’t work out that way. Billy and I talked about that once. We both found each other attractive, but sometimes the chemistry just isn’t there, right? And then other times it is.” He looked at me and grinned.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Funny how that works.” I could feel the damn thing stirring. I said, “Where do you think Billy might be?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Do you think he’s innocent?”

  “Yes. Of course he is.”

  “How can you be that certain?”

  “Because I know that Billy hasn’t got a violent bone in his body.”

  “Uh-huh.” I shifted, tried unsuccessfully to cross my legs. “I’ve gotten the impression that Billy is rather an angry young man. How does he let it out?”

  Deslonde laughed. “Yeah, Billy is not one of the more relaxed people I know. What he does with all that indignation is he runs off at the mouth a lot. He can bend your ear for days on end about the world’s four billion homophobes. I’m a realist myself-I told him maybe he ought to shop around for another planet.”

  “Maybe he’s the realist. We seem to be stuck on this one.”

  He rolled down the window and flipped the roach onto Trucky’s gravel drive. He exhaled and said, “For some of us the realistic thing is to find a way to eat and pay the rent. Try coming out as a radical faggot when you spend thirty-eight hours a week at Sears Automotive Center. I don’t mean to sound melodramatic, but I thought you’d understand that. Or are you independently wealthy?”