Richard Stevenson: Death Vows

Sturdivant’s cell phone must have rung, and he spoke into it and then peered off to the right, down Fenn Street past the auto-parts store. Two dark SUVs rounded a corner a block east of us. They moved quickly up Fenn and pulled over in front of the rectory. I recognized the New York state license plate on the second vehicle. Five men wielding baseball bats got out of the two SUVs and went after the Felsons. The reverend took a blow to his right shoulder and went down, and the Kriders raised their arms to absorb the blows, but they were hit too. I saw Michael Sturdivant crossing the street and pointing at Timmy, David and me, and I thought, Where the hell are they?

Then the door to the Mount Carmel rectory opened, and a combined Pittsfield and State Police SWAT team of thirty or more officers poured out, their guns drawn, and began subduing and cuffing the thugs. The vehicle with the New York tags still had a driver behind the wheel, and he made a break for it. But police vehicles had rapidly blocked both ends of Fenn, and Third Street, too, and the driver was soon out on the pavement, down and cuffed.

Michael Sturdivant had begun to back away from the melee, but Joe Toomey, who brought up the rear of the fast-moving SWAT team, spotted Sturdivant and directed two officers to bring him back and hold him, too. He sputtered with indignation, but Toomey ignored him.

It was Toomey who led the search of the two SUVs. He was there when the glove compartment of the Explorer from New York State yielded up a Glock-9 which was, it would soon be established, the gun that had killed Jim Sturdivant.

All this commotion brought some of the mourners out of the church and onto the sidewalk, and crowds were gathering up by the post office and outside the taverns farther down Fenn. Reverend Felson was lying on the sidewalk, moaning and clutching his shoulder, and others in his flock had been bloodied. The Felson children had not been hit, but they were crying and looked dazed. I could hear ambulances approaching from up Fenn Street.

Joe Toomey walked over to me. He said, “I talked to Thorny. He’s releasing Barry Fields, withdrawing the charges. Myra Greene is in the clear, too.”

“Never too late,” I said.

“No, sometimes it is too late. But not in this case. Barry’ll recover.”

“What about this bunch?” I said, indicating the Felsons, as three ambulances cruised down Fenn and pulled in near us.

“What about them?” Toomey said.

“What can you charge them with? We’ve got to get them out of here if Barry is going to be able to stay in the Berkshires.”

“I can’t charge them with anything,” Toomey said. “They’re victims. As I think you can plainly see. In fact, they’ll need to be around here to testify against the people who attacked them.”

“Hell.”

“Hey, you got the guys who killed Jim Sturdivant, and you cleared your client. What do you want? You can’t have everything, Strachey. And I’ll bet you’re a strong believer in First Amendment rights, which these folks from the great American heartland were out here today exercising.” Toomey looked at me with an expression I couldn’t quite decipher.

As Michael Sturdivant and his marauders were carted off and the throngs of onlookers began to edge in closer for a glimpse of the lurid scene, I noticed an old priest walk out of the rectory, pick up the sign that read Jim Sturdivant is Going to Homo Hell, and carry the placard inside the building. I saw Timmy and David Murano take note of this, too. They came over, and Timmy said, “Old Pittsfield takes care of its own.”

Murano just laughed.

Reverend Felson and his gang left town on their own and returned to Kansas, declaring Berkshire County irretrievably in Satan’s grip. He declared to the Eagle , “You can smell the sulfur from Sheffield to Williamstown!” Cheap Maloney was convicted of murder, and Michael Sturdivant got forty years for conspiracy to commit murder. Thorne Cornwallis, who led the prosecution, was reelected in November with his usual seventy percent of the vote.

Steven Gaudios did testify against Michael and then went into the Witness Protection Program. He changed his name, and no one in the Berkshires ever knew where he went or what became of him. Jim Sturdivant was buried in his family’s plot in St. Joseph ’s cemetery in Pittsfield. At trial, Thorny did not mention his brother’s motive for having Jim rubbed out, and Michael wasn’t about to bring it up, either. Michael was convicted on Steven’s testimony and by Cheap Maloney’s ratting him out.

In the Eagle story on the Mount Carmel anti-gay demonstration and mobster round-up, the Jim Sturdivant is Going to Homo Hell sign was mentioned. But all the people quoted in the story – Sturdivant family members, Mount Carmel parishioners, a priest – said they had no idea what that sign meant, and they said Reverend Felson must have had Jim mixed up with somebody else.

Barry Fields regained his freedom and his equilibrium but never entirely lost the anger and fear that came from his being a renegade from the Felsons. He remained in Great Barrington and married Bill Moore, who paid me my fee. Moore was flush, for I had suggested to Gaudios that decency required his canceling Moore ’s hot-tub debt, and he did so. Moore kept his FBI secret, and he stayed sad and drank a little too much. But he and Fields had each other, and that was quite a bit.

Timmy and I joined Murano, Morley, Ramona Furst, Bud Radziwill, Jean Watrous, and Barry and Bill six months later at Myra Greene’s retirement party. She looked around the room at one point and croaked, “This looks like the cast of Casablanca. I’ve never seen so many people with secrets in one place before. God, I can barely remember who’s really who in here.”

People laughed nervously, and then Fields said, “I think it’s more like Meet Me in St. Louis, Myra – when the plans are canceled to move to New York, and the whole family gets to stay in St. Louis, and we know Judy’s going to hop in the sack with Tom Drake.”

“And marry him,” Timmy added, and we all drank to that.

Richard Stevenson is the pseudonym of Richard Lipez, the author of nine books, including the Don Strachey private eye series. The Strachey books are being filmed by here!, the first gay television network. Lipez also co-wrote Grand Scam with Peter Stein, and contributed to Crimes of the Scene: A Mystery Novel Guide for the International Traveler. He is a mystery columnist for The Washington Post and a former editorial writer at The Berkshire Eagle. His reporting, reviews and fiction have appeared in The Boston Globe, Newsday, The Progressive, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's and many other publications. He grew up and went to college in Pennsylvania and served in the Peace Corps in Ethiopia from 1962-64. Lipez lives in Becket, Massachusetts and is married to sculptor Joe Wheaton.