Richard Stevenson: Death Vows

Seffenfeffer from Harrisburg, or whatever – it’ll qualify as a Kennedy story, if only a faux-Kennedy story. And those can be replete with meaning about American life also.”

Apparently this explanation did not inspire confidence in Sturdivant, who after a moment said, “Well, I’m sure you’ll bring your full effort and all of your expertise to the investigation, whatever your interest in the situation.”

“You’re right. I will.”

“Thank you.”

We made a plan to meet in Great Barrington for dinner after I made some calls and did some Internet digging, and then rang off.

I phoned Timmy at his desk in Assemblyman Lipshutz’s office down the hill at the Capitol. “I won’t be home for dinner,” I told him. “You’re going to have to fix your own octopus a strascinasali. ”

“Well, I always do.”

“I’m dining in the Berkshires with a client. The guy wants a friend’s younger male fiancé checked out before they tie the knot later in the month. The client suspects a pecuniary motive, which of course is neither illegal nor unprecedented.”

“No, lots of people think I hooked up with you for your four hundred shares of Pennsylvania Railroad.”

I explained to Timmy how Barry Fields had raised suspicions about his past with his dubious biography and his murky connection to his last boyfriend’s death by carbon monoxide poisoning. I told him, too, that Bill Moore was unaware that I would be investigating the man he apparently loved and was planning to marry, and predictably Timmy didn’t like that.

“Why isn’t Moore being told? That sounds sneaky and presumptuous.”

“Sturdivant thinks Moore is so gaga over Fields – who is some kind of knockout looker and charmer – that he won’t even consider criticism of the lad or discuss Fields’ possible crass motives. Yes, Sturdivant is going behind his friend’s back, but he thinks he has no choice. Moore may have some dough, and once the two marry, Fields will become his sole heir.”

“This sounds treacherous, Don. Like some swamp of jealousy and petty intrigue. This Sturdivant sounds less like a concerned friend than a major troublemaker.”

“Oh, a swamp of jealousy and intrigue. Timothy, has it slipped your mind what it is I do for a living? There are clients, and there are clients. Anyway, this guy is Hello Kitty next to some of the people whose fees I have accepted over the years.”

“And lived to regret a few.”

“This is true. There’s another angle that’s tantalizing, though. Fields has a pal who calls himself a Kennedy cousin. Says his name is Bud Radziwill. Sturdivant thinks Bud the Kennedy Cousin is also a phony, and the two of them are up to something.”

Timmy laughed. “Bud Radziwill? Even if he’s somehow genuine, he’d have to be a Kennedy cousin eight times removed. I knew a Mario Cuomo staffer once whose name was Alan Kennedy, and whenever he went into a bar he’d tell women he was a Kennedy cousin. Over the years dozens of ‘amazing chicks,’ as he described them, fell into his arms. He’d always say he had just come from a gathering of the clan at Hyannis Port. And of course what he didn’t tell these ‘chicks’ was, he was a cousin of Wally and Angie Kennedy of Utica.”

“Timothy, you have all these Kennedy stories, and I have none. I want to meet this Radziwill guy, and then I’ll have a Kennedy story too. I hope you won’t mind. JFK was your president, you Peace Corps types. I know you’re proprietary about him.”

“But, Don, you had your president too – LBJ. And you’ve got plenty of Johnson stories. Or johnson with a small J. ” He chuckled.

This was an uncharacteristically crude remark from Timmy, and snider than I was used to. I said, “The Vietnamese word for penis is eunice . Did you know this?”

He laughed and hung up, and I got busy.

“I think you may have legitimate grounds for suspicion,” I told the two men seated across from me at Pearly Gates, Great Barrington’s only restaurant with LA-style valet parking. When my aging Nissan had been yanked from my grasp half an hour earlier, my impulse was to yell for the police. The place itself was the color of money, green and black, with gleaming napery and flatwear to which no bits of last night’s osso buco adhered. The maitre d’ was a bit Paulie Walnuts-like for “ America ’s Premiere Cultural Resort,” as the Berkshires had begun advertising themselves in recent seasons. But the overall feel of the place where Jim Sturdivant had suggested we meet was comfortable enough, and my Sam Adams had been well chilled but not to the point of hypothermia.

Sturdivant and his boyfriend, Steven Gaudios, gazed at me with anticipation across the bun basket. Both were tieless, but both wore perfectly rumpled seersucker jackets over soft white shirts of a style that men of a certain class had seen as essential to their presentations of themselves since the fall of Constantinople. In their mid-sixties, Sturdivant and Gaudios were both good-looking, dark-eyed men who seemed to be aging serenely in one of the several ways American money can buy. Their pleasant looks were both of the Mediterranean variety, a surprise in Sturdivant’s case, as his voice had suggested more of a Congregationalist background. Neither man had seemed to object to my more functional garb of khakis, T-shirt and leather jacket; this was the Berkshires, where dress codes did exist, even with Edith Wharton’s having departed nearly a century earlier, but they were not rigidly enforced.

“So we were right!” Sturdivant said excitedly.

“We knew it!” Gaudios said. “What did you find out? My God, that was quick!”

I explained that while neither Barry Fields nor Bud Radziwill had a criminal record, according to my preliminary inquiries, and that both had satisfactory credit records, neither man had seemed to exist at all prior to their arrival in western Massachusetts six years earlier. Neither had birth records I was able to locate in either Colorado or Massachusetts, or school or early work histories. I told Sturdivant and Gaudios that further Internet and other digging might turn up more recent good or bad information in those two states or others, but the fact that the two men seemed to have been created Adam-and-Steve-like out of the ether just six years previously was in itself a cause for concern.

It was possible, I said, that there was some legitimate reason for their identities being of apparent recent manufacture. It was just barely plausible that they were in the Federal Witness Protection Program, although their youth made that unlikely. They also could have been adopted as teens and changed their last names from something else, though the new identities seemed to have been taken on when the two men were in their early twenties, not several years before. They could, of course, have changed their names for religious or even political reasons, but those types of transformations tended to involve turning from Ed Jones to Ali Hassan Bab-el-Mandeb or Solstice Summerfallwinterspring, not to Barry Fields and Bud Radziwill. And there was also the interesting twist that the two young men’s identities apparently emerged at exactly the same moment.

I said, “I was surprised to discover that Bud is actually Radziwill’s real name. Bud is usually a nickname, but it’s on his driver’s license and car registration, it’s how he is registered to vote in Great Barrington, and it’s the name on his paycheck at Barrington Video. Have either of you ever heard him called anything else?”

“No,” Sturdivant said. “He’s always just been Bud.”

“Or ‘Prince,’” Gaudios said and rolled his eyes.

“How does Bud explain his Kennedy connection?” I asked. “People must be interested in that and ask about it.”