Richard Stevenson: Death Vows

“And the sister threw you out soon after Tom died?”

“Margaret was nice about it, actually, despite her discomfort with Tom’s being single and gay and the fact that she barely knew me. She said I could stay until the estate was settled and the house went on the market. But because of the way Tom died, I was anxious to get out. Did you hear that he died in the garage while I was upstairs asleep with the TV on, and I woke up too late and found him dead with the engine running and the garage full of fumes?”

“I was told about that.”

Radziwill said, “And did you hear that there are people around here who think Barry basically murdered Tom? That he knew all the while that Tom was down in the garage passed out and dying, and Barry was upstairs enjoying Bringing up Baby ?”

They both watched me. “I heard some people were saying something like that.”

“It’s not true,” Fields said.

“Okay.”

“Tom Weed was a sweet man who was terrifically nice to me, and I wouldn’t have harmed him for the world. The night he died, I was tired from working a late shift at the theater the night before and then getting up early to meet the plumber who was installing a new pump in the basement. I just conked out while the TV was on, and Tom had had a few too many at a dinner party he went to, and… Life can be unfair and absurd. Death can be too.”

“I’ve seen it happen.”

“Luckily, the police saw exactly what happened.”

I wondered about that. The state police had ruled the death accidental, which was plausible enough, and there was no real evidence to indicate otherwise. But the police were not in Fields’ bedroom to see him nod off while watching a movie. They just took his word for that. Negligent homicide or involuntary manslaughter – the scenarios Sturdivant and Gaudios and their chums hotly chewed over – would have been far-fetched charges for any prosecutor to pursue.

I said, “So where did you go when you left the Weed house with all its unhappy associations?”

“I moved in here with Bud for several months. Luckily he didn’t have a roommate at the time.”

“And you met Bill Moore soon after Tom died?” At his funeral, for instance?

“I’d known him a little and always liked him, and I found him attractive. But he thought I was Tom’s boyfriend and so never showed any interest in me, and I perceived his distance as actually not being interested. But he was interested, and once Tom was out of the picture one thing quickly led to another, and the fireworks were spectacular once they went off.”

Fireworks? “You said you were not all that interested in older men romantically. What makes Bill Moore the exception to the rule?”

They both laughed with astonishment. “Bill is no old fart,” Radziwill said in his soft drawl. “What Bill is is a hottie. I might choose to be jealous if I didn’t have my very own cutie pie to snuggle up to every night.”

Fields said, “Josh should be home from work any minute now. You’ll meet him.”

“But isn’t Bill retired? From a Commerce Department job?” I had pictured Moore as resembling a cabinet member for Bush-43 or even Bush-41, if not William McKinley.

Radziwill looked over at Fields, as if this was his designated subject to address. Fields said, “Bill took early retirement. He wanted to get out of DC and have a less high-stress life here in the country. He’s only forty-eight and looks ten years younger. That’s twenty years between us – but it’s not a lot with life expectancies being what they are now.”

“Right,” I said. “Fifty is the new Prague.”

“How old are you, Don?” Radziwill asked. “By the way, we asked a friend in Albany about you. We know you’re one of us.”

“Oh, you mean an Inuit transvestite? You’re certainly resourceful, Bud.”

“Our friend said you used to look something like Tom Selleck but that you had outgrown that look.”

“It’s funny how that works. It happened to Tom Selleck too.”

“You look to be around Bill’s age,” Fields said.

“I am, more or less. If fifty is the new Prague, I’m somewhere between Budapest and Dubrovnik.”

Radziwill said, “I have relatives from Crakow. Are you Polish? Strachey sounds English.”

“It is. Are you related to Lee Radziwill, by any chance?”

“Yeah, Aunt Lee.”

“But you’re related, I guess, on the Radziwill side, not the Bouvier side.”

“Right. That’s why I have cousins in Crakow.”

“So, what’s it like being that close to the… you know?”

“Do you mean the Kennedys?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m not all that close. Oh, we used to go to the compound for holidays, or to Palm Beach. But a lot of those properties have been sold off or turned into museums. It’s not the way it used to be. The romance is pretty much gone and the family has drifted apart – as so many large, busy families do after a while.”

I was about to suggest that maybe in his next incarnation Radziwill could join a famous family with more current glamour and cachet, the New York Clintons or the Illinois Obamas.

But before I could, Radziwill’s boyfriend, Josh, came home from work and ambled in the door. It was the waiter from Pearly Gates. He exclaimed cheerily to Radziwill and Fields, “How did you ever let this guy in the door? He’s a friend of the toads!”

I knew immediately who “the toads” were, and so, by the way their eyes bugged out, did Radziwill and Fields.

“ They are your clients, aren’t they?” Fields said, in a tone and with a look that indicated I had been discovered to be in league with a well-known pair of local necrophiliacs.

“I don’t see how you can conclude that, Barry.”

“Of course they are! It all adds up. I’m marrying Bill, and Bill owes Jim and Steven money. And they’re afraid I’ll do to Bill what they enjoy thinking I did to Tom Weed – murder him, literally, or in effect – and I’ll get hold of Bill’s property, and they’ll never get their money back. They want to dig something up on me and scare me off. Or scare Bill off from marrying me. Now I get it! I’m right, aren’t I, Don?”

This was getting complicated, though it all had an elegant simplicity to it, too. Fields’ description of events so far had a ring of truth to it lacking in Sturdivant’s ever increasingly hokey-sounding tale of compassionate concern for his and Gaudios’s – the toads – “dear friend” Bill Moore. But there was a large complicating factor in this unfolding saga, and that complicating factor looked more and more as if it was me.

I said, “How come you refer to Jim and Steven as the toads? And in a tone that is, if I’m not mistaken, pejorative?”

Radziwill said, “It’s short for ’those poisonous toads.’ Not to put too fine a point on it.”

“Poisonous in what way?” I asked.

“Poisonous,” Fields said, “as in malicious, bitchy, meddling and treacherous. Jim and Steven see themselves as the reigning divas of gay southern Berkshire County. They’re both snobs and control freaks.”

“And lousy tippers,” Josh the waiter/boyfriend added.

“Jim became wealthy collecting stock options from the corporations he flacked for,” Fields said. “He’s given a lot away to the state Republican Party – he’s got a picture on his living-room wall of him standing with an ecstatic Mitt Romney – and locally he donates to respectable but homophobic organizations like the Boy Scouts. Jim also lends money at below-market interest rates to certain friends and acquaintances in need. Except, not everyone is eligible for this service. If you’re over forty, you can pretty much forget it – Bill was the only exception to this rule that we know of. And there are conditions attached that only become apparent just before Jim cuts the check for the recipient.”