Richard Stevenson - Death Vows

I went up the back steps and banged on the screen door. Gaudios soon appeared, in Bermuda shorts and a fresh white polo shirt, and he looked annoyed, so very, very annoyed, to see me.

“You just don’t know when to quit, do you, Donald?”

“Did you think I was off the case, Steven? Is that it?”

“I can’t invite you in. I am incredibly busy.”

I tried to open the screen door, but it had been latched from inside. I drove my fist through the screen and unlatched the door. Gaudios fell back and went for a cell phone on the kitchen counter. I grabbed it from him and snapped, “Sit down.”

“You don’t know who you’re dealing with,” he said bitterly and flopped onto a kitchen chair.

“I’m dealing with the mob,” I said. “And you’re one of them.”

“Ha!” Gaudios snorted, and threw his head back like Tallulah.

“You and Jim were into something the mob didn’t like. The mob, in this case, being, among others, Jim’s brother, Michael, a wiseguy in Providence.”

Gaudios’s face contorted, and he looked away.

I said, “The hot-tub loans, they were nothing. Just a couple of obnoxious rich queens playing games with younger gay men who were poorer in wealth but often richer in spirit and integrity.”

“What a horrid thing to say!”

“But you two had some other racket going, with much higher stakes, that helped get you your houses in New York and Palm Springs and Ibiza and all the rest of it. Along the way, however, you were stupid and reckless enough to cross somebody – somebody treacherous and big and mean. And whoever it was that you fucked with had Jim killed and then ordered you to get lost before you were whacked, too. Am I right?”

Gaudios was slowly shaking his head as tears streamed down his face. “You’re wrong, Donald. You are so, so wrong!”

“Are you telling me that the goons who smashed up my car last night and threatened me and Timmy if I kept trying to clear Barry Fields were not mob guys connected to Michael Sturdivant? Don’t tell me that, Steven, because the evidence is mounting. And where I am treading, Thorne Cornwallis will follow close behind. You can partially redeem yourself by cooperating, and I’m sure you can get into the Witness Protection Program and still live like a prince on some tropical isle where you can resume your hot-tub operations and enjoy a long life of strong martinis and copious dick. But now, finally, you have to tell the truth.”

Gaudios sat transfixed by my monologue. Then he said quietly, “Jim and I both made our money honestly.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I can show you.”

“You’re lying. All the evidence – everything I know and have seen in the past three days – says you’re lying.”

“Come with me.” He got up, and I followed him closely through the dining room and into a small study.

I said, “If you’ve got a gun in here, forget it.” I produced my nine-millimeter and aimed it at him.

“You’re awfully melodramatic, Donald. I thought private eyes only waved revolvers around in cheesy TV shows.”

“Dealing with you represents a special occasion,” I explained.

Gaudios sat behind a beautiful mahogany desk with a tidy surface and retrieved some Smith Barney statements from a drawer. He spread them out for me to look at. I perused the documents and saw that Gaudios’s assets were diversified and his net worth, just from the accounts in front of me, totaled maybe thirty-five million dollars.

I said, “Money-laundering works wonders. Congratulations.”

He said, “I worked in financial-institution mergers and acquisitions for thirty years. My fees and commissions were generous. I was also both prescient and lucky. Note my one hundred Berkshire Hathaway shares. I purchased those shares in 1978 for a hundred and sixty dollars each. Today they are worth a hundred and eight thousand dollars each.”

I had watched CNBC for an hour once, and all of this sounded plausible. This was how capitalism worked for the people who had thought it up and had found ways to stay awake through Wall Street Week.

I said, “You called in the hot-tub loans, and when one of the borrowers protested, you threatened to break his legs. Did you pick that particular technique up in mergers and acquisitions?”

“Oh, that was just my anti-depressants talking. I could no more break anybody’s legs than spit nickels. Really, Donald, just how butch do you think I am?”

I said, “But gangsters killed Jim. Of that I am certain. Why?”

Gaudios looked me hard in the eye and said, “No, Barry Fields killed Jim. And you have been conned by a very disturbed but very clever young man.”

“No, Steven. Barry Fields is no killer. He is an angry young man with plenty to be angry about. And you’ll soon see up close why he is so terribly angry. But murderously violent he is not.”

“Really? How can you be so sure?”

I said, “Was Jim’s biological father a Mafioso?”

Gaudios was unperturbed. “He was. It was a terrible embarrassment for Jim, growing up in Pittsfield with people knowing his father had died in a jail-yard stabbing.”

“And Jim’s brother, Michael? Has he not carried on a fine family tradition?”

Gaudios was sweating lightly now, even in this exquisitely furnished room cooled by all-but-noiseless central air-conditioning. He said, “Jim had his suspicions, but he never really knew much about Michael’s life in Rhode Island. I think it’s fair to say Jim didn’t really want to know. Jim and I built a life far, far away from certain unhappy elements of our childhoods – criminality, yes, but not just criminality. The life we made together would have been even farther away had Jim been willing to live apart from his mother. But he was devoted to Anne Marie, and so here we are – or were – a stone’s throw from Pittsfield and all that old pain. It hasn’t been easy, in that respect. But I must say, in our own way, we’ve had our deep satisfactions. And our revenge.”

“Revenge?”

“Living well is the best revenge, as Abraham Lincoln said.”

“And so,” I asked Gaudios, “who, then, are these mob goons who have threatened to hurt me and Timmy if I don’t get off the case and quit trying to free Barry Fields?”

Gaudios was all serene now. “I really couldn’t begin to answer that question, Donald. Perhaps it’s something you stirred up or got into up in big, bad Pittsfield. It certainly has nothing to do with Sheffield, or with Jim’s death, or with me.”

He sat looking at me levelly, no longer frightened and teary.

I knew he was lying, but I didn’t know how or why. I told Gaudios I would be back, and I got up and went out. As I walked down the back porch steps, I thought I heard him sob once.

I drove back to the motel and told Timmy about my meeting with Gaudios.

He said, “So if Steven is lying and he’s in touch with the mob guys, won’t he alert them that you’re still working on the case and you haven’t been frightened off?”

“This is possible.”

“All the more reason to wrap this one up fast.”

“Yes, I would say so.”

I told Timmy I was having lunch with slippery Bill Moore, and he said in that case he would accept Preston Morley’s invitation for a hike up Monument Mountain and a picnic there with Morley and David Murano. Timmy said this was the spot where Hawthorne and Melville once picnicked together and set off intellectual sparks that may have set the course of American literature for the next fifty years.

I said, “I’m sorry I can’t come too, but I’ve got a more immediate and up-to-the-minute bundle of sparks to set off.”

“I wouldn’t dismiss the relevance of Hawthorne and Melville to this case,” Timmy said. “Hawthorne was haunted by his family’s past in Salem, and Melville by what he had seen and done as a young man at sea. The Sturdivant murder seems to have a lot to do with the past catching up with people who thought they had outrun it.”