http://www.mlrbooks.com/Bookstore.php?bookid=T38MILSM
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/The-38-Million-Dollar-Smile/Richard-Stevenson/e/9781608200139/?itm=1&usri=1

Gadfly scion of Albany old money Gary Griswold goes missing in Thailand, and his ex-wife wants him found – with his 38 million dollars. Soon Albany’s only gay PI, Don Strachey, is out of his element, and lover Timmy is out of his comfort zone combing the Land of Smiles for a man with unerring weakness for the poorest possible choice and a daft plan to buy 38 million dollars worth of good karma.

*****************************

Chapter One

“Mr. Strachey, do you believe in reincarnation?”

“I’ve never given it much thought.”

“So you won’t mind my telling you, I think the whole idea is perfectly absurd.”

“Go ahead.”

It had been Ellen Griswold’s idea to meet in the bar at the Albany airport at six thirty. She was picking her husband up from the US Airways flight from Washington that theoretically got in at seven forty but sometimes arrived around nine or ten. So we had plenty of time for going over the mysteries of life.

“I know you’ve spent time in Southeast Asia,” she said. “So I assume you know something about Buddhist philosophy.”

She was nicely turned out in a beige linen suit, the sea green silk wrap she had been wearing against the early April chill now slung over the chair next to her. Still on the underside of fifty, I guessed, Mrs. Griswold was raven haired, with clear dark eyes, a handsome beak, and apparently had had some minimal cantilevering and other structural work done on her chin and cheeks, though nothing that would have overtaxed Le Corbusier.

I said, “I was in the war there, so I know a little. But even in Army Intelligence, my thinking was focused and practical. The larger questions relating to the Asian psyche were left to the deep thinkers at the Pentagon. How did you know I was in Vietnam?”

“Bob Chicarelli told me.”

A lawyer I knew. “I’ve done work for Bob.”

“And have played squash with him. He also says you’re gay. That’s good, because so is my ex-husband, who is the problem here, I think.”

“Ah, the problem.”

I liked that she drank beer. She had a large bottle of Indian Kingfisher she was working on, savoring each sip but without making a spectacle of it, like Timmy’s and my lesbian friends who drink beer while they inexplicably watch men play football on television.

Mrs. Griswold said, “My ex-husband, Gary, believes that in a previous life he was Thai. What do you make of that?”

“Thai, as in a person from Thailand?”

She sipped her Kingfisher, and I sipped my Sam Adams.

“Gary not only believes that he was Thai, but that he will be Thai again in his next life. This is a man I was married to for six years.”

“It sounds as though he may have been problematical for you on multiple fronts.”

This got a little half smile. “Well, yes. We were married on January seventeenth nineteen eighty-one. I should have known. It was three days before Ronald Reagan was inaugurated.”

“An auspicious week, as a sometime-Thai like your former husband might say.”

A curt nod. “I think he would say that, yes. Not back then necessarily. But now Gary would think of it in exactly those terms. Astrology, numerology, karma, reincarnation, the whole nine yards. All that new age hooey. It’s really disappointing. When I married Gary, he had his obsessions, which were generally harmless — bicycle racing, and so on. But he was also one of the most rational people I knew.”

I said, “East Asians don’t think of karma and reincarnation as new age hooey. They think of them as the way the universe is ordered.”

I meant this as a point of information, not a lecture, and she seemed to take it that way, unperturbed. “That’s fine if it works for the Asians. I’ve lived and worked abroad, and cultural relativism is fine with me. But for Gary, Eastern ideas turned into a kind of trap, I think.”

“How so?”

“As a way of avoiding responsibility.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I don’t think of myself as an overly materialistic person,” she said. “But I do believe in managing the assets you have like a grown-up. Whether you earn it or you inherited much of it, as Gary and Bill did, flushing your money down the toilet I find totally incomprehensible.”

“Who is Bill?” I asked.

“My husband, Bill Griswold. Gary’s older brother.”

This was getting complex. I said, “What did the Reagans make of all this?’

She smiled rather sweetly. “Around the time Gary’s and my marriage was unraveling — largely because of his coming to terms with his being gay — Bill’s fell apart, too. He had married a Long Island jap of a certain type when he was nineteen — a looker, a serious shopper, and not much else — and Bill needed somebody more stimulating. We had always liked each other, and we both liked to read and travel. For fun, we took a trip to Budapest together, and that was it. It’s been as good a marriage as anybody could hope for, overall.”

“And your husband’s first wife was not Japanese?”

“Jewish American Princess. You’ve heard the term, I’m sure.”

“It could have been another Asian in the picture.”

“I would not have used Jap that way.”

Her cell phone played what Timothy Callahan might have identified as the opening strains of Gluck’s overture to Orpheus and Eurydice, but for all I knew could have been Andrew Lloyd Webber. She flipped it out of her handbag and told me with an apologetic shrug, “It’s either one or the other.”

Ellen Griswold’s end of a brief conversation included the words please don’t more often than I normally use them on the phone.

“That was Amanda,” she said, putting her phone away. I noted a diamond on one finger that, while not quite ostentatious, did not hide its light under a bushel, as well as a demure ruby on a nearby digit.

“Amanda is thirteen,” Mrs. Griswold said. “Mark is fifteen. They’re both good kids, but they are kids. They pretty much have their feet on the ground, but there are times when I have to try hard not to scream.”

“These are Bill’s children, not Gary’s?”

“That’s right. Do the math.”

“Gotcha. But we’re not here to talk about Amanda and Mark, apparently.”

“No.”

“On the phone, you said you believed that a family member was in trouble, and you wanted my help in getting him out of it. So we’re talking about your former husband and current brother-in-law?”

This was the moment when, in the olden days, Mrs. Griswold would rummage in her handbag for a cigarette, and I would light it for her and then fire up one of my own. Now we both had to make do with a barely perceptible tightening of her facial restructuring and a swig of beer for me.

Watching me with no particular expression, she said, “Gary has vanished in Thailand with thirty-eight million dollars. I’d like you to find him, check to see if he is all right, and help him out if he isn’t. And if Gary is alive and hasn’t gone completely around the bend, help us talk some sense into him.”

I said, “That sounds simple enough.”

“Look, don’t laugh. I know it’s a big job. Bob Chicarelli said you could do it.”

“Okay.”

“I could hire an international private investigations agency. I know that.”

“You could. It’s what most people would do.”

“Or, Bob told me he could locate some reputable private detective in Bangkok, if such a thing exists.”

“I’ll bet such a thing does.”

She thought for a moment and said, “You could farm out some of the work to people there. That would be up to you. But I’m more comfortable paying someone who is known and trusted by someone Bill and I know and trust. And since you’re familiar with that part of the world, it’s a huge advantage, no? Plus, of course, you presumably would have easier entrée to the Thai gay scene, a good place to start looking for Gary. He went over there on vacation two years ago, and in addition to reincarnation, apparently discovered some gay Shangri-La. He never really came home, except to sell his condo in Key West and then fly straight back to Bangkok. But Thailand has not turned out to be a paradise for Gary. At least not from where I’m sitting, it hasn’t.”

Where she seemed to be sitting was pretty. A second portion of a sizable family fortune remained intact if I was hearing her correctly. I said, “Please tell me (a) about the rather large sum of money Gary took along — can I assume he didn’t earn it over there? — and (b) about his vanishing, as you put it.”

This got a look of mild surprise. “So you’re interested in taking this on?”

“Maybe.”

“I was beginning to think you wouldn’t. You seem so skeptical about everything.”

“Not everything. My, no.”

“But,” she said, “I think you’re skeptical about me.”

“A little.”

“Why would you be?”

I noticed that the flat-screen television set over the bar was tuned to cnbc, where a reporter who looked something like Mrs. Griswold was mouthing words that I supposed concerned the day’s main news topic, the crashing dollar. If I had been able to read lips I might have phoned my bank immediately and converted everything into Burmese kyat.

I said, “Mrs. Griswold —”

“Please call me Ellen. I think we’re more or less contemporaries.”

“Yeah, more or less. Ellen, this thirty-eight million dollars — which, by the way, might now be worth somewhat less than it was worth ten minutes ago — this thirty-eight million your ex-husband has or had in his possession — to whom does it belong?”

“To Gary, of course. But the point is, there are indications — and I’ll get to those — that Gary is throwing his money away. That’s the issue.”

“Well, it is and it isn’t. That’s where a lot of my skepticism — you’re right about that — comes in. Your gay ex-husband-brother-in-law may well be over in the Land of Smiles, as the brochures call it, spending thirty-eight million dollars on things you would not necessarily spend thirty-eight million dollars on. Beach houses, money boys, dried squid on a stick, who knows what. But spending money foolishly is what some people do. And while the spectacle can be upsetting to others, nauseating even, especially to the spendthrift’s loved ones, there’s rarely anything anybody can do about it. Or needs to. Hiring a private investigator is seldom called for — even when it’s a family member who appears to have gone off the rails, fiscally speaking.”

She was looking increasingly unhappy. “So Bill and I should just — sit back?”

I said, “When you say your ex-husband has vanished, what do you mean by that?”

“It means what it sounds like. No one has heard from Gary for nearly six months. He doesn’t respond to e-mails. His snail mail letters don’t get answered. His home phone and Thai cell phone accounts have both been shut down. He just seems to have — you know.”

“I know.” Fallen off the face of the earth. She heard herself thinking the cliché and decided she was not someone who would use it.

“Gary was never much for staying in touch,” she said. “Even during his Key West years, he rarely e-mailed or phoned. Business matters with Bill, but little else. And after his and Bill’s parents died, we saw very little of Gary. Even though I think he was basically happy that Bill and I had gotten together — at some level, relieved even — he seemed to feel awkward around us. He had a couple of boyfriends in Key West — one of them fairly long-term — but we never met them or knew exactly who they were. Whether it was internalized homophobia or something else, I don’t know. What I do know is, Gary didn’t seem to fully come out and grow up as a gay person until he went to Thailand.”

She blinked a couple of times, realizing she may have blundered.

“So your ex-husband is not a grown-up, and at the same time he is a grown-up?”

“What I meant,” she said, recovering handily, “was that on the one hand Gary seems finally to have found a way of being comfortably gay. While on the other hand, his long-term happiness and well-being have been seriously jeopardized by his fiscal irresponsibility, his susceptibility to Eastern religions — there was at least one sizable investment decision Bill and I learned was suggested by his astrologer — and by his choice of boyfriends over there. The last one he mentioned to me — in a short note about some estate business before we stopped hearing from him — was a Thai man named Mango.”

“That’s vivid.”

“You’ve been there, and you may know better. But I would find it very difficult to take seriously a man named Mango.”

I said, “On some Bangkok R and R from Saigon, I once spent a pleasant weekend with a Thai man named Bank. He had a brother named Book. Thais sometimes give their children English nicknames of objects they value. So I wouldn’t make too much of that.”

Mrs. Griswold took a good swallow of beer and said, “Well, then, Don, let me run a very different name by you, and let’s see if this gets your attention.” She waited.

“Ready when you are.”

She said, “Algonquin Steel.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Max J. Griswold.”

“Oh, so you all are those Griswolds. If you were Thai, you might have named your son Blast Furnace. Or your daughter.”

“The company Gary and Bill’s grandfather founded is publicly traded now,” she went on. “But Gary and Bill both retained substantial holdings. Last August, Gary sold his shares for thirty million dollars and change. Bill learned this from Alan Rainey, the company treasurer. Alan also told Bill that when Alan questioned him, Gary said he had been offered an investment opportunity that was too good to pass up and would lead to his recouping his investment many times over in a short period of time. It was easy enough, also, for Bill to learn from Angie Hogencamp at Hughes-Weinstock, our brokerage, that Gary had liquidated all of his remaining eight million in assets and had all of it — thirty-eight million in toto — wired to a bank in Bangkok.” She eyed me coolly and waited for my reaction.

I said, “Remind me never to do business with Hughes-Weinstock if I want my portfolio activity kept confidential.”

She ignored this and added, “All of this bizarre and potentially disastrous financial activity coincided with the arrival of Mango on the scene and came a little less than a month before Gary…”

She waited and I said it. “Seemed to fall off the face of the earth.”

“And by the way,” Mrs. Griswold said. “Blast Furnace would not be an appropriate Griswold name. The company has steel wholesale and fabricating facilities in eleven states — plus, of course, the nationwide Econo-Build home and building supply chain of stores — but no actual steel mills. Anyway, most of the steel sold and used in the United States these days comes from Japan, Korea, Russia and Brazil. I think it’s safe to say few Griswolds have ever laid eyes on a blast furnace.”

I did not reply that Bill and Ellen Griswold might then have considered naming their only son Middleman. I thought about it quickly and said, “I guess I have to agree, Ellen, that the situation you have described to me does sound worrisome.”

A long-defunct gay activist group seems to be threatening radio shock jock Jay Plankton. As The J-Bird, the man’s hate-filled rants offend Strachey deeply. Among the subjects Stevenson tackles in this series entry is homophobia in modern police services like the NYPD, where coming out carries more than its usual share of costs.

***********************************

Chapter One

The 24-across clue was “‘The Oblong Box’ writer,” and the answer was looming just over the hazy horizon of my Friday-morning mind when the man in the Amtrak seat next to me whipped out his cell phone, punched in some numbers, and announced, “Ed, it’s Al.”

I looked up from the folded-in-quarters arts section of the Times and said to the back of the seat ahead of me, “Ed, it’s Al.”

Missing just a fraction of a beat, Al said, “I’m on the train. I’ll see Quinn when I get there, and I’m having lunch with Margaret Wills.”

While Al listened to Ed’s reply, I said, “I’m on the train. I’ll see Quinn when I get there, and I’m having lunch with Margaret Wills.”

Al peered over at me, and I peered back. Then he told Ed, “Listen, there’s a guy in the seat next to me who…”

Like a simultaneous-translation whiz at the UN, I was right behind him. “Listen, there’s a guy in the seat next to me who…”

I grinned as I said it, and Al’s look of annoyance was turning to apprehension. This would make a good story when he met Quinn and then when he dined with Margaret Wills —”Would you believe, I was sitting next to this prick on the train who…” — but for now it must have been starting to seem to Al that I could be dangerous.

“Hang on a second,” Al told Ed. He gathered up his laptop, flipped up and secured his tray table, stood, retrieved his nicely folded suit jacket from the overhead rack, and looked my way but avoided eye contact. He muttered, “Asshole,” and strode up the aisle with his belongings.

Al found an aisle seat near the front of the car, where he disappeared from view if not entirely from earshot. Over the next few minutes, I still caught a word from time to time over the train’s low whoosh and steady clickety-clack, although now Al was another unlucky passenger’s voluble neighbor.

I went back to the crossword puzzle, but “The Oblong Box” writer’s name was still beyond my reach. It was just three letters and should have been obvious. Amy Tan? Carolyn See? It didn’t sound like either one. Myrna Loy? Eddie Foy? Not writers. I jumped down to 26-across: “spawn.” Again, three letters. Kid? Doubtful. The Times puzzle makers could be slangy, but never imprecise.

I gazed out the window at the broad Hudson flying by, the blue Catskills hazy beyond the far shore. We sped south past a tanker pushing upstream to Albany, fuel for the state office workers’ Subarus and minivans and the Pataki administration limos. A shirtless man and a woman wearing a green halter and red headband paddled downriver in a yellow canoe closer in to the near shore. The mountains across the water lolled like hippos in the July sun.

Another couple of words flew back from noisy Al, and I wondered how long it would take before Amtrak felt enough customer pressure and segregated cell phone yakkers the way it once had smokers. Would mounting numbers of letters and phone calls do it, or would a media-worthy “incident” trigger the regulations? Poughkeepsie — A Schenectady man was roughed up by three Amtrak passengers, and his cellular telephone flushed down the lavatory toilet by a fourth.…

Or would public cell phone high-decibel palaver come to be seen as a First Amendment issue, with the Supreme Court forced eventually to rule on what ought to be a question not of constitutional law but of manners, and with the ACLU left in the awkward position of defending not endangered free speech but mere pains in the ass?

The question of genuine social harm versus simple obnoxiousness was of more than passing interest to me, for I was about to — maybe — take on as a client a man six or eight million Americans considered an exhilarating breath of fresh air, while others — I was one — thought of him as, if not a social menace, then certainly a tiresome gasbag.

Like cell phone boorishness, the caustic iconoclasm of Jay Plankton —”the J-Bird” to his radio fans — seemed to me a social phenomenon to be avoided but no threat to the republic. I even knew intelligent and perfectly sane people who found Plankton delightful — none of them black or gay, although more of them women than I could readily comprehend.

And unlike Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh, both basically entertainers with crude gimmicks — bathroom and sex jokes in the one case, inflaming hinterland right-wingers in the other — the J-Bird actually seemed to hold convictions, however confused and ill-informed. He regularly lured public figures, sometimes elected officials, onto his seven a.m. to ten a.m. show, where they spoke more candidly — or at least with a more shrewd approximation of candor — than they did in other public venues. And they engaged in the uniquely American form of humor that’s the democratic alternative to Shavian wit, guys joshing one another.

Plankton did, however, maintain such a gift for sour invective — people he didn’t like were “diseased toads” and “maggot mouths” and “lying sacks of bull puke” — that some of his targets or their admirers occasionally became furious. And his rants, egged on by an on-air claque of like-minded but less talented men whose job opportunities elsewhere might have been limited, sometimes even triggered physical threats against the J-Bird.

That’s where I came in. Plankton’s producer had learned of a minor encounter I’d once had with a radical group, the Forces of Free Faggotry, that had been making the J-Bird’s life miserable for several months and now threatened to make it even worse. Would I, could I, go to work for this man? Maybe not, although I was curious to learn what the FFF was up to, and of course to get a firsthand look at a widely popular man I couldn’t stand. So here I was, headed south at seventy-eight miles an hour, eight seats back from Al, and flummoxed by 24-across.

The FFF, I thought, had fallen apart sometime in the seventies. And yet apparently it was back, a band of self-described queer revolutionaries in the era of Will & Grace. The cognitive dissonance was considerable — or would have been if I hadn’t listened to the J-Bird’s show the day before and renewed my appreciation of how this guy might inspire violent rage in some people.

The FFF had not been violent in its earlier incarnation; in the late sixties and early seventies the group specialized in rescuing young gays and lesbians from mental institutions their parents had put them in to have them “cured” of their homosexuality. The FFF had employed brash and sometimes illegal methods, but all the viciousness had been on the other side. It seemed unlikely that the old FFFers had at this late date turned into cryptoterrorists — most revolutionaries mellow in middle age — but the J-Bird seemed to think they had.

I gave the crossword puzzle a rest from its exertions, and by the time I made my way back to my seat with a foam cup of Amtrak’s extraordinarily rich and flavorful coffee, the train, due at Penn Station in forty minutes, was close enough to the city for me to pick up the J-Bird’s show on Timothy Callahan’s radio.

This was the radio with earphones that Timmy used when he lounged on the deck behind our Crow Street house in Albany on warm summer Friday evenings to listen to the concerts broadcast from Tanglewood. He used the earphones because, he said, the neighbors might not be as crazy about Schumann as he was. In his consideration for others, an admirable anachronism was Callahan. Of course, he also relied on the earphones to mask the sounds of neighbors with stereos who were more in tune with the times than he was, and of the carrying-on around our kitchen table whenever I could lure in the elderly lesbian couple who lived two doors down the street for a raucous game of hearts.

“Gore is ridiculous, just ridiculous, and that… that smirking, no-good weasel Bush is no better …” The J-Bird was in hyperrant, his famous barroom-loudmouth-at-two-a.m. slurred snarl at full throttle. “I might not vote at all. I might just… leave the country before I pull the switch for either one of those two… sorry losers.”

To the approving chortles of his studio buddies — the newsreader, the sports reporter, and two other attendants whose roles were murkier — Plankton fumed on. He had supported John McCain and Bill Bradley in the spring primaries, and the J-Bird was beside himself with frustration over the electorate having been left to choose between the two unworthies, George Bush and Al Gore. That the policy ideas of McCain, a conservative on every subject except campaign finance, and of Bradley, the largely unreconstructed liberal, were diametrically opposed was of no concern to Plankton, who seemed to judge people not by their ideas, or even their behavior necessarily, but by their degree of “guyness.”

Guyness to the J-Bird mainly meant a style built around hurling insults, usually involving physical characteristics, at people who enjoyed the abuse — or at people who didn’t like it at all and when they said so could be called “politically correct” whiners. People like Bradley, who didn’t necessarily relish this form of discourse but good-naturedly went along with it, were okay guys too. It helped that Bradley was tall. Short was bad and fat even worse. Despite the antigay tone of the show — one of the hangers-on crooned and lisped whenever the subject came up — the weird obsession with weight and body shape on the J-Bird show was reminiscent of a bevy of West Hollywood gym queens. It was one of the show’s odder inconsistencies.

On this Friday morning, the J-Bird blustered on about the deficiencies of George W. Bush — who affected guyness but who was such a privileged brat that his guyness was inauthentic and therefore beneath contempt — and of Al Gore, who was regarded as plastic and slippery and not nearly rough-hewn enough, despite his having been to war and back, an opportunity for guyness that the J-Bird had chosen to forgo.

“Having to pick between these two sniveling pipsqueaks sucks, it just sucks!” the J-Bird sputtered on. “And Nader — he’s no better. That priss, that whiner. Although at least he’s got some guts. He did take on… back in the sixties… who was it? Was it Chrysler?”

“It was General Motors,” the newsreader put in.

“General Motors, then.”

“Rear-end collisions on the… what was it? The Corvair? The Pinto?”

“A pinto’s not a car; it’s a bean,” the J-Bird said.

“The musical fruit.”

“Like Elton John,” came another voice, one of the J-Bird’s Greek chorus.

“What?” The J-Bird didn’t get it at first.

“Elton John, the musical fruit.” More chuckles all around.

“Is he running for president? He couldn’t be any worse than the pathetic bozos we have to pick from now.”

“I do tholemnly thwear, Mary, that I will uphold the Conthituthun…”

This brought cackles, and I had just about decided to skip the meeting with Plankton, have a pleasant lunch in the park, and board the next train back to Albany, when the laughter on the radio suddenly stopped.

“Hey, what the eff…!” It was Plankton’s voice, but then it was gone too, and a commercial came on for a New Jersey Toyota dealer. This was followed by a short silence, then a second ad, and a third. Then the J-Bird returned briefly — from another studio, he said — to announce that the rest of the day’s show would be a recording of an earlier show, and he would explain it all the following Monday. It was hard to understand all of the J-Bird’s words, for he seemed to be choking.

Violence interrupts quiet reflection on tragedy when Donald and Timmy visit Washington to view the AIDS Memorial Quilt. Unexpected stories about a disgraced, conservative congresswoman, and a gay Lothario with designs on Strachey are catalysts for Donald’s investigation into a memorial to a man who isn’t quite as dead as he seems.

(Originally published 1998.)

*****************************

Chapter One

“This is screwy. This is nuts. This has to be some kind of pathetic, sick joke!” Maynard Sudbury unexpectedly blurted out.

Timothy Callahan and I stared at Maynard as he stared down with a look of shocked bewilderment at one particular panel in the AIDS Memorial Quilt.

“Jim Suter is not dead,” Maynard said, gawking. “I don’t think he’s even sick. I saw him in Mexico not more than two weeks ago.”

Maynard brushed away the shock of sandy-colored hair that had flopped across his ever-youthful Midwestern farmboy’s face. It seemed as if he needed the clearest vision possible in order to take in and try to comprehend this shocking sight.

Just a few cottony clouds were strung out across a pale sky, and the sun was surprisingly warm for DC in October. At midday the Washington Monument cast a short shadow, none of it touching any of the forty thousand-plus panels of the Names Project quilt. The tens of thousands of visitors to the Columbus Day Weekend Quilt Display were silent or spoke to one another in low voices as loudspeakers broadcast a solemn recitation by grieving survivors of the names of the AIDS dead. Every two or three minutes a jet en route to National Airport screeched down an electronic flight path above the nearby Potomac, but no one seemed to mind the noise. Most of the people were too absorbed in remembering – lovers, pals, sisters, brothers, daughters, sons, parents – or too caught up in one or another of the life stories, depicted or sketched, of people cut down by the plague.

A tanned, middle-aged woman with a bandage across the bridge of her nose and two younger women who bore what looked like a family resemblance to each other and to the older woman turned and peered at Maynard. They saw a short, muscularly lean, fifty-year-old man with a thick head of unruly hair, an open, expressive face, and intense brown eyes that were now full of angry perplexity.

Again, Maynard said disgustedly, “This is just so screwy. I can’t figure out what the heck this panel could possibly be doing here.”

Timmy and I, along with the three nearby women, looked down at the panel and then back at Maynard, whose outburst was not just out of sync with the sweet melancholy of the occasion but out of character for Maynard, one of the most subdued and even-tempered men I had ever known. Timmy had been Maynard’s friend since their Peace Corps days in India in the late sixties, and, during our twenty years together, Timmy had often spoken, when Peace Corps stories were told, of Maynard’s famous sangfroid.

Maynard Sudbury was a man who had once talked a small mob, one man at a time, out of beating an Andhra Pradesh taxi driver to death after the driver had struck and badly injured a cow. Maynard had accomplished this feat while employing no fewer than three languages: English, Hindi, and Telugu. The regional Peace Corps director had later admonished Maynard, telling him he had been lucky the mob hadn’t left him broken and bloody as well – or, if the mob hadn’t, then the police.

Maynard, Timmy said, had displayed the same equanimity with the Peace Corps staff man that he had with the street mob. He explained that it was not his rationality that had saved the driver, and certainly not his Peace Corps training, but that it had been his naïveté. He had been living in rural India only a few weeks when the incident took place, he said, and – having spent his entire life up until then in small-town Southern Illinois – he had acted on impulse, and at the moment of Maynard’s intervention the villagers had looked upon him as some kind of holy fool, and they let the driver go. Later, Maynard once told me, some of the same people came to regard him as an unholy fool, but that was another story.

“Maybe,” Timmy said to Maynard tentatively, “this panel is for another Jim Suter, not the one you know. Who is Jim Suter, anyway?”

As the quiet throngs continued to circulate among the maze of quilt sections, the three nearby women stood and watched us, and a burly young man in a University of Tennessee T-shirt, who had paused by the Suter panel, seemed also to be interested in our small drama.

“Suter’s a Washington freelance writer and conservative political operative,” Maynard said. “Jim and I had a brief, torrid romance about fifteen years ago that didn’t last. Jim was in his mid twenties at the time and still in his caveman mode of spreading his sperm around. I was old enough by then to want to start nest-building, and anyway, we had some serious political differences. It was a real Carville-Matalin match, except there was no way this one was ever going to last.”

The three women next to us walked on now, quietly murmuring to one another, and they were replaced by a young, whiffle-haired, apparently lesbian couple in huge farm overalls and with rings in their noses. The beefy Tennessean stayed on and gazed down at the Jim Suter quilt panel along with Maynard, Timmy, and me.

I said, “It does look, Maynard, as if this Jim Suter was a writer – like the one you knew.”

“Is
a writer,” Maynard said flatly, “like the one I know. Jim sure wasn’t dead when this panel was sewn into the quilt – the panel submission deadline for the main part of the display was last spring sometime. Jim wasn’t dead two weeks ago, and I’ll bet you he isn’t dead now.”

“And those look like his dates?” Timmy said. “Or date?”

“I think they are,” Maynard said. “The birth date anyway.”

The standard coffin-shaped, four-by-six-foot cloth panel with Jim Suter’s name and the dates “1956-1996″ on it was a plain black fabric with white Gothic lettering. Unlike so many of the colorful and even affectionately whimsical quilt panels spreading for acres around us, Suter’s panel was stark and funereal except for a sketch of a typewriter, encased in clear plastic and sewn on, with typed pages streaming out of the typewriter and up toward Suter’s name and dates.

Timmy got down on his hands and knees for a closer inspection and reported up to us, “These look like manuscript pages, but I don’t recognize what they’re from. What kind of writer was Jim Suter? Is.”

“He’s a freelance, right-wing political hack,” Maynard said, as if this were a standard inside-the-Beltway job classification.

Maynard got down beside Timmy – we were all wearing khakis and light sport shirts – and I joined them as they examined the manuscript pages stitched to the panel and appearing to fly out of the picture of a typewriter. At the top of each page was the slug “Suter/Krumfutz” and a page number.

“This looks like Jim’s campaign bio of Betty Krumfutz,” Maynard said. “Jeez, what a cruel thing to do to a writer. We’ve all written things for money that we’d rather forget about. But congressional campaign biographies commissioned by a candidate represent about as low a form of literary endeavor as exists in the English-speaking world. Dead or alive, I don’t think Jim ever did anything bad enough to deserve to be remembered this way. Although I know from experience that Jim was what I would call ethically challenged in some areas of life, and I know there are people around Washington, mostly gay men, whose opinion of Jim is rather low, mainly for personal reasons.”

Maynard sprang back upright, and Timmy and I climbed back to our feet with more effort. He was the fittest of the three of us, although Maynard had joked the night before, when he met our train from Albany, that he maintained his youthful, lean physique with the aid of the intestinal parasites he picked up while writing the sixteen travel pieces that had been collected in Around the World by Yak and Kayak. Maynard had been doing more conventional, less adventurous travel writing over the past year, but he’d been unable to shake the bugs he’d picked up in – he thought – Zambia, Burkina Faso, or possibly Kyrgyzstan. He said he’d gladly learn to live with a nice set of love handles if he could rid himself of a persistent queasiness and regain his appetite for food that was spicier than New England boiled dinners or Congolese fufu.

Timmy said, “I suppose it would have been okay to be doing Republican campaign bios for, say, Abraham Lincoln or Teddy Roosevelt. But having worked for Betty Krumfutz certainly isn’t what you’d want in your hometown obituary. I mean, if you were actually dead. Which you say Jim Suter isn’t.”

“Are the Krumfutzes behind bars yet?” I asked. Betty Krumfutz had been a Pennsylvania Republican congresswoman who had run on a “pro-family, pro-gun” platform in 1992, and even as Bill Clinton carried the state, she had easily replaced the retiring incumbent in her conservative upstate district. It came out, though, a year after her reelection in 1994 that both Mrs. Krumfutz’s first- and second-term campaigns had been financed by illegal contributions from a Central Pennsylvania construction magnate, among others, and ineffectually laundered by the candidate’s husband and campaign manager, Nelson – who had in any case, secreted half the five hundred and sixty thousand dollars in donations in an account he kept under his mistress’s name, Tammy Pam Jameson, in a bank in Log Heaven, Pennsylvania, the Krumfutzes’ hometown.

“Both Krumfutzes are out walking the streets right now,” Maynard said. “Nelson was convicted in May but is free on bond while his conviction is appealed, and Betty was never charged with anything. She surprised everybody and resigned her congressional seat after she swore at a three-hour news conference last year that she’d been grievously wronged along with her constituents and she would never give up her seat. Then, when Betty quit abruptly, the speculation around town was that somebody had gotten the goods on her, too, and an indictment was imminent. None ever came, but people I know on the Hill are still waiting for the other Krumfutz shoe to drop. Nelson’s a crook and Betty could well be. It’s really an indication of how unprincipled Jim Suter could be – not just reactionary, but unprincipled – that he ever got mixed up with the god-awful Krumfutzes.”

“But maybe he didn’t know,” Timmy said, “that they were crooks – or Nelson was – when he signed on with them. Didn’t that all come out later?”

“Timothy, you’re as charitable as ever,” Maynard said. Then he went on gravely, “Jim didn’t know the Krumfutzes were crooks, but he knew they had won an election partly by smearing the moderate-Republican fish-and-game official who ran against Betty in the 1992 spring primary. I ran into Jim in a bar right after he signed up with Betty and Nelson, and he said one of the tactics they’d used against this hapless fellow was, the guy had accepted a campaign donation from a Penn State gay group, and Betty and Nelson ran television ads showing two male officers of the group chastely kissing at the end of a gay-pride parade in Pittsburgh. The ad asked if this was what parents wanted taught to their children in local schools – as if Betty’s opponent had come out for same-sex kissing instruction to be added to Pennsylvania’s public school curricula. Jim knew the Krumfutzes had done this, and he still went to work for them.”

Timmy said, “That does reflect poorly.”

The crowds viewing the quilt continued to move by and around us. Some people stopped at quilt panels nearby and spoke quietly. Some pointed, some gazed with fierce concentration, some people hugged one another and wept. The two young lesbians beside us moved on, as did the man from Tennessee. The recitation of the thousands of names went on and on.

I asked Maynard, “If Jim Suter was such a creep, what attracted you to him fifteen years ago? Or was he less of a reprehensible character back then?”

Maynard blushed faintly. “The attraction was mainly physical. I mean, it wasn’t just that. Jim is smart and knowledgeable and, despite a cynicism I eventually got pretty tired of, Jim can be fascinating on American political history and Washington history. He actually grew up here in the District. But I realize now that the attraction was mostly sexual. He had a great athlete’s body – he’d been a wrestling star at Maryland – and he has a wonderful face, bright and handsome and with radiant skin, and with piles of blond ringlets all over his head, like a kind of sensual Harpo Marx. It’s what’s inside Jim’s big, gorgeous head that sooner or later turns a lot of people off. It did me, anyway. And I’ve run into a couple of other people – or maybe it’s a couple of hundred – whose experience with Jim was similar, or worse.”

“When you saw Jim in Mexico recently,” I asked, “what was he doing down there?”

“I only wish I knew,” Maynard said, and pondered the question. “Here’s what happened. I’d gone down to the Yucatán for a quick go-round for a piece I did for the L.A. Times on touring some of the lesser-known Mayan ruins. None of it was terribly exotic, but I hadn’t been to the Yucatán for several years, so I went down mainly to update the hotel, restaurant, and other nuts-and-bolts stuff. I was in Merida walking across the zocalo one day when all of a sudden here comes Jim Suter, of all people, walking towards me. I said, ‘Hey, Jim!’ and I stopped. And what does he do? He pretends not to see me, and he walks right by me, eyes straight ahead. I stood there flabbergasted and watched him walk away, and he never looked back.

“I thought about running after him,” Maynard said, “but it was obvious he recognized me – or that he’d been aware that somebody had called his name – and he had been careful not to look my way and to hurry away from there as fast as he could without breaking into a full trot. I had an appointment to keep with a hotel marketing director a few minutes later, so there was no time for me to go chasing after somebody who – it soon occurred to me – probably didn’t want me to know he was in Mexico.

“Anyway, I couldn’t think of any other explanation for Jim’s behavior. When we broke up after our three-week fling back in eighty-one or eighty-two, we’d parted on basically friendly terms, and we always talked and caught up with each other whenever our paths crossed – which in gay Washington happens fairly often, especially if you’re both writers. Washington, this supposed great world capital, is more like Moline in that regard – very small-towny. Or so it seems, anyway, to gay New Yorkers who live here and tend to talk as if they’ve been exiled to Ouagadougou. As for me, the only other city I’d ever spent much time in was Vijayawada, so Washington has always seemed to me to be a pretty exciting place.”

A sturdy-looking woman in a trench coat, shades, and a golf-cart-motif silk scarf tied tightly around her head had stopped in front of the quilt panel with Jim Suter’s name and was looking down at it.

Timmy said, “Maynard, how can you be sure the guy you saw in Merida was actually Jim Suter? Couldn’t it have been some other gorgeous, beringleted, blond North American?”

“Timmy,” Maynard said, sounding faintly irritated in the casual and familiar way old friends can sound with each other without suffering any huffy consequences, “this is a very beautiful man whose very beautiful face I slurped on and chewed at rapturously nearly every night for three weeks. This was not an experience I repeated frequently in my life, it pains me to have to remind you. Do you think I might fail to recognize such a face if I saw it again?”

Timmy said, “You put it so vividly, Maynard, I can’t fail to see what you mean.”

“Anyway,” Maynard said, “it was plain that the man I called out to in the zocalo was determined not to acknowledge my presence. All he wanted was to get out of there as fast as he could. And if it wasn’t Jim Suter, then why would he? And, of course, if it was Jim – which I’m positive it was – why would he want to run away from me?”

We all puzzled over Maynard’s question, but none of us had an answer to it.

The woman in the trench coat and golf-cart scarf had gone down on her hands and knees and had been examining the manuscript pages on the Jim Suter quilt panel. She quickly got to her feet now and moved toward us as Maynard pronounced Jim Suter’s name aloud. We were unable to see her eyes behind the shades, but the woman’s round mouth was open and her face frozen, as if in fear.

The woman stared hard at us for a brief moment. Then suddenly she turned and moved quickly away, running almost. She jostled one knot of five or six middle-aged men in jeans and plaid shirts who were spread across the walkway between the quilt sections twelve or fifteen feet from Maynard, Timmy, and me.

Maynard said, “Hey, what the heck was she doing here!”

“The woman in the trench coat?” Timmy said.

“Yes. Jeez.”

“Who was she?”

Maynard said, “I’ve never actually met the woman, but a friend pointed her out to me in the lobby of the Rayburn building one time. And I’m reasonably certain that that rattled woman who looked like she was scared to death by Jim Suter’s quilt panel, or by something on it, was the unindicted former congresswoman from Pennsylvania, Betty Krumfutz.”