Richard Stevenson: Death Vows

Moore looked at me and said, “I am not a felon. I was never tried and convicted. Nobody was.”

“Tried and convicted for what? We’re you some kind of assassin?”

“Yeah,” Moore said and clasped his hands together tightly as he seemed to shrink into his chair. “I was an assassin, all right. I killed three thousand people.”

It was the number. My breath caught. I knew immediately what he meant. We sat looking at each other.

I said, “It was the system, the cultures, the bad leadership. You were not responsible.”

He shook his head.

I said, “The FBI was there to prosecute crimes, and the CIA was there to gather intelligence, and the dolts in charge never cracked heads and demanded that the cultures merge and transform themselves to accommodate the new reality of international terrorism. No single person let nine-eleven happen, except maybe Clinton or Bush.”

Moore said evenly, “No, mistakes were made by individual people, and I was one of them. It could have been prevented. It should have been prevented. There were people in the bureau screaming for clues to be taken seriously. There was the supervisor in Phoenix who asked headquarters to check out Arabs with suspicious backgrounds matriculating at US flight schools. There was the Minneapolis agent who reported Zacarias Moussaoui’s weird interest in flying but not landing airliners, and then Washington declining a request to go into Moussaoui’s laptop because there was no probable cause. Then there were the CIA dickheads who knew that al-Qaeda operatives involved in the bombing of the USS Cole were inside the US and refused to modify their procedures and hand over the names of these characters to some of our guys who were actually hot on the trail of something big – something big which they didn’t know what it was until the day it happened.”

I said, “I’ve read about some of this. Some FBI people were suspicious, and they were thwarted.”

Moore said, “Well, take a good look at the man you’re sitting in this room with. I was one of the thwarters.”

“Jesus, Bill.”

“Checking out every Arab in a US flight school would have tied up hundreds of agents for months, or years.”

“And you didn’t have the resources?”

“Counterterrorism was way understaffed and underfunded. And the way up in the bureau was always to put crooks in jail – crooks who had already committed crimes. That’s what the bureau had always been for. Though basically the problem for me was, I was one of the people who thought, it can’t happen here. God will protect the United States of America.”

“Bill,” I said, “or Willis. You’re being way too hard on yourself. I’ll bet other people have said, yeah, we were wrong, but now let’s move ahead and get it right. That’s the important thing, getting it right the next time.”

“The other thing is, Strachey, I actually thought about taking some of this shit that was coming in more seriously and pushing harder. But I didn’t do that, because in my career at the bureau I was never a boat rocker. I was always Mister Go-along, Get-along. I didn’t dare be a troublemaker. I couldn’t afford to draw too much attention to myself. And I think you know why.”

“Oh. That again.”

“It’s ironic,” Moore said, “in an organization whose headquarters is named for that candy-ass closet case J. Edgar Hoover. But the FBI is not an institution where out gay people can expect to move up. Or expect to be taken seriously at all.”

I said, “But you must have been taken seriously enough – even though you’re out of the closet now – that you thought you could go down to DC on Friday and knowledgeable people there would be helpful with the Sturdivant murder investigation. Am I right?”

“Yeah, there are people who still talk to me, in the bureau and at Justice. And they did help me out. I can confirm to you that Michael Sturdivant is involved in sports betting and numbers in Providence. And while he’s never been convicted, Michael has probably badly injured a number of citizens in the course of his business activities. Michael is a baddie, for sure.”

“This is helpful. It confirms what I picked up in Pittsfield.”

“Our problem,” Moore said, “is that there’s nada on Jim Sturdivant and Steven Gaudios. I was pretty sure they were into something dirty, and that’s why Jim got whacked.”

“I thought so, too.”

“It turns out, however, that they are model citizens. They got rich the way most people get rich in the US of A – legally investing in the honest labor of others.”

“Which leaves us,” I said, “with no plausible motive for Jim being killed by the mob. Except, the evidence is piling up that that is exactly what happened.” I described to Moore my meeting with Thorne Cornwallis, my conversations with two Pittsfield hometown thugs, the apparent involvement with Michael Sturdivant of a Schenectady hit man, and the firebombing of my office and the attack on my car to warn me off the Sturdivant murder case.

Moore said, “Then they sure as hell did it. Those fuckers killed Jim. Christ, but why?”

“Maybe it was personal? Except, why would either of them have anything to do with these mob guys? Michael and Jim were brothers, and both of them seemed devoted to their mother, the sainted Anne Marie. But that seems to be their only current point of connection.”

“Maybe,” Moore said, “Jim did something to hurt Anne Marie and it set Michael off.”

“Like what? Jim basically indulged her every wish and need, I’ve been told by Pittsfield people, including staying basically closeted north of Stockbridge so she would not have to face the ignominy of having begotten a fag son. And he left her a million-five. How could he possibly have offended her at this late date?”

Moore said, “What’s a woman in her mid-eighties or older going to do with a million and a half dollars? That’s a lot of bingo cards.”

I pondered this. “So who is in her will? Is that what you’re saying? Like maybe Michael is her heir, and she’s in ill health, and if she died before Jim, the one-point-five would go to someone else, like Gaudios or the opera? But the way it works now, the money goes to Anne Marie and then, when she croaks, to Michael?”

“Maybe. Mob guys think that way. Even when family members are involved. Maybe especially when family members are involved.”

“So,” I said, “what we have to find out is, how healthy is Anne Marie, and who is in her will?”

Moore thought about this and said, “What else have we got?”

I thought about it too, and it just didn’t feel like the answer. It was too tidy, too small, too shabby. Not that people’s lives weren’t sometimes snuffed out by smallness and shabbiness. The horror of that ugly truth – that the Clutter family could be massacred by a couple of dim punks, that JFK could be deleted from the American landscape by a bitter and confused creep who got off a series of lucky shots – was why so many people chose instead to believe in fate, or divine retribution, or vast conspiracies that don’t exist. That people’s lives could be ended for dumb, trivial reasons was just too awful for some people to contemplate, even though it was all too grotesquely true.

And yet, I still felt this wasn’t about money. Jim Sturdivant’s life had been too complex, too fraught, and his killing too seemingly out of the blue.

I said, “Bill, I’m sorry I called you an assassin. I wish you had told me the truth. I’d have been understanding, as most people would be.”

He shrugged weakly. “I just don’t want to be the man that people look at and say ’that’s the man who… you-knowwhat.’ I don’t want to be that guy to anybody except myself. Which is hard enough, believe me.”