Richard Stevenson - Strachey's folly

He seemed more relaxed now, and I was a lot less apprehensive about his mental health than I had been a few minutes earlier.

Then someone knocked at the door.

We both started, and Timmy, big-eyed, whispered, "Who knows we're here?"

"Five friends of Maynard's I just phoned," I whispered back. "The two I talked to and the three I left messages with."

The knock came again, three quick, hard raps.

I got up, went over, and looked through the peephole. I said to Timmy, "Take a deep breath and let it out slowly."

I opened the door and there stood Ray Craig glowering in at us like some grade-B film noir house dick. "It wasn't easy tracking you two down. I had to check half the hotels on the Hill." He must have been upwind of us, for his nicotine stench again rolled into the room.

I gestured for Craig to come on in, and as my glance fell on Timmy, I could actually see his pulse beating in his neck.

Using the pretext of having to hurry back to the hospital and check on Maynard, we were able to extricate ourselves from Craig within twenty minutes. He told us he wanted to hear our narratives of the shooting a second time. He said sometimes details floated back into memory during the retelling of a traumatic event a day later. This was true, but with Craig the line sounded phony. Again, he sat jiggling his loafer and looking both suspicious of and mildly disgusted with everything we had to say. Then, with barely a word uttered, Craig got up and left. This time, he had asked about Mexico only twice instead of six times.

"What is it with that creep?" Timmy muttered after Craig shut the door behind him.

"I don't know," I said, "but I think it's time we talked to somebody we can trust who'll at least be in a position to offer an informed opinion on Craig-and maybe everything else that's happened. Don't you know somebody in Frankie Balducci's office?" Frankie Balducci was the openly gay congressman from Boston who'd been a relentless voice of sanity on gay matters in an institution where understanding of, and attitudes toward, homosexuality had not yet, as the twenty-first century approached, advanced far into the eighteenth.

Timmy said, "Bob Bittner. He was in my class at Georgetown."

"Can you call him? Don't tell him why, but just ask him if he can find a D.C. police officer who's cleaner than Mother Teresa."

"That treacherous, headline-grabbing, reactionary old crone?"

"All right, then. Cleaner than… than any other cop in D.C. Gay might help, too, closeted or not."

Timmy reached his old friend, who agreed to try to track down an indisputably clean cop, no questions asked, and he said he'd get back to Timmy in fifteen minutes. I showered and Timmy went downstairs for a newspaper, and then Bittner called back. The officer we should talk to, he said, was Detective Lieutenant Chondelle Dolan.

After he hung up, Timmy said, "Bob says she's gay, she's smart, and she's squeaky-clean. Dolan is disinclined to rock any department boats, and she goes along and gets along with the mayor and his crowd of leeches and scam artists. But Bob says a woman he knows, Rain Terry, was once involved with Dolan for several months, and Terry swears Dolan is both one of the most uncorruptible people she's ever met and one of the most discreet."

"That's our cop."

"Bob wasn't sure she'd talk to us. Dolan is one for going through channels, he said."

"But if she's that clean, I'll bet our story will pique her interest, at least."

While I dialed Dolan's number, Timmy walked over and yanked open the door to the corridor. Assured that no one was lurking there, he shut the door and came back and sat on the bed while I waited for an answer at Dolan's home.

I was about to hang up when a low, groggy voice came on the line. "Yeah, hello."

"Lieutenant Dolan?"

"Yeah?"

"I'm Donald Strachey, a private investigator, and a friend of a friend of a friend of Rain Terry, who suggested I call you."

"Oh, Rain did, huh?" She sounded as if I had wakened her from a long, drugged sleep.

"I'm looking for the cleanest, most discreet police officer in Washington to talk to about, among other mystifying events, the shooting last night of a gay man by the name of Maynard Sudbury on E Street, Southeast. There may be more to the attack than the police have been told, and I need to bounce some of what I know off somebody in the department I know I can trust. Rain told Bob Bittner, of Frankie Balducci's office, that you are that person. Can we meet somewhere and I can run what I know by you?"

A silence. "Give me your number. I'll call you back."

I recited our hotel and room numbers and hung up. I said, "She's checking on Bittner with Terry and on us with Bittner."

I glanced through the Post — Bob Dole was threatening to take off the kid gloves in his second debate with Clinton-and Timmy checked the corridor again and then looked out the window for suspicious characters two stories below on Second Street, SE.

Within minutes Chondelle Dolan had called back and agreed to meet Timmy and me at a Pennsylvania Avenue bagel shop in half an hour. Meanwhile, I checked GW again to verify that Maynard was still stable. He was. With Timmy's concurrence, I went ahead and phoned a number in Tilton, Illinois, and reached, as I hoped I would, old Peace Corps ties aside, May-nard's brother. Neither Timmy nor I wanted to be the one to notify Maynard's parents, if we could avoid it. Edwin Sudbury said he would do that, and he said he and his wife would leave for Washington as soon as they could make travel arrangements.

"Was it a mugging?" Sudbury asked anxiously.

I said the motive for the attack had not yet been determined, but that given Washington's robbery rate, a mugging was what a lot of people seemed to suspect it might have been. Seated nearby, Timmy rolled his eyes.

"You got ID?" she said.

"Sure." I showed her my New York State PI license, and Timmy presented his card identifying him as the chief legislative aide to New York State assemblyman Myron Lipshutz.

"Bob Bittner says you guys have your idiosyncrasies but I hat you're responsible enough citizens, and I should take you seriously even if what you have to say might sound a little gonzo at first."

"That sums us up," I said.

Dolan looked at me with no hint of enthusiasm but with large dark eyes that were interested and alert. In her midthirties, she had a big, handsome Ibo face with the kind of sharply ridged, ample lips that I'd always found deeply erotic on black men and pleasing in a less hormonal way on black women. Dolan's shoulder-length hair, done in a near-flip, was black and gleaming, and her eye shadow was the same shade of cobalt blue as her two-piece silk suit and blouse. Had it not been for her bulky muscularity, she'd have looked less like a cop than a prosecuting attorney, or a regional administrator of the Department of Labor. She was both cool and formidable-I guessed that even in Marion Barry's age of racial payback in Washington, her rise through the police ranks had not been easy-and it looked as if we had lucked out in hooking up with Chondelle

Dolan.

Timmy fidgeted with his bagel and said, "Do you mind if we look at your ID, too, Ms. Dolan?"

"No problem," she said, and flipped open a black leather wallet so that we could examine her name and badge.

"Thanks," Timmy said. "We're nervous-I am, anyway- and — when you hear about all this grotesque stuff, I think you'll understand why."

"Uh-huh. Well, you go ahead and tell me your story. I've got plenty of time. I've got a lunch date at one, but till then I'm interested to hear what you got to say about this shooting you mentioned."

I began to speak, but Timmy's eyes darted quickly around the bagel shop at the other customers, and he cut me off with, "You used to date Rain Terry? I just met her a few times and she seemed awfully nice."