Richard Stevenson - Strachey's folly

Dolan said all this nonchalantly, but I could all but hear Timmy's sphincter squeaking as it tightened. My own bloodstream was on the move, too.

"What reasons can you think of," I asked, "why Timmy and I might be under surveillance by the Metro Police Department?"

"Craig might suspect strongly that you had something to do with the shooting. Is there any reason he should?"

"Of course not," Timmy said. "That's just wacky."

"No, not wacky, just not real smart. Ray is one of those guys out of another age who think that if you are homosexual, you are, ipso facto, mentally impaired and possibly dangerous. Ray and I have talked about his old-fashioned opinions, which for some reason he seems to want to hang on to."

"Have you been to law school?" I asked Dolan.

"I went to Howard prelaw for a year. I learned a lot of history and a lot of law, and I learned to speak standard American English. But I knew all I ever really wanted was to be a cop, so I switched to an M.A. program in criminal justice. I had an uncle who was an officer in the department until a sociopathic child shot him in the heart in 1989. James Dolan was the kind of man who made police work look like a noble calling. For him, it was a noble calling, I still believe, although for me it's been quite a bit more complicated than that."

"Because you're an African-American lesbian?" I said.

"No, because I'm a woman."

"Oh."

"And now my life is about to become even more complicated in the division on account of you two. I'm not complaining," Dolan said, and hoisted herself, one ham at a time, onto the stone balustrade beneath what must have been the House Speaker's office. "I'm glad you called me. What you told me is interesting.

Maybe I can help out a little bit-I don't know yet. But word'll get back to Ray Craig, if it hasn't already, that you guys are talking to me. So we better get our stories straight, right?"

Timmy said, "Absolutely."

"Let's say you heard about me from Bob Bittner, over at Frankie's office-which is true-and you wanted to check in with a gay cop and tell your story to somebody who'd lend a more sympathetic ear than Ray did. That's true, too, and even more important than being true, it's plausible. Ray'll probably just say,

'Oh, they have to go and be PC What we don't need to repeat to anybody at this point is all that interesting stuff you told me about this Jim Suter, and the quilt panel, and Betty Krumfutz. Let's keep all that amongst ourselves for now. If there is somebody in the department who is criminally involved, we don't want it to get back, okay?"

We both said no, we didn't want that.

"See, the thing of it is," Dolan went on coolly, "I made a couple of calls before I met you at the bagel shop, and early this morning Craig came up with two witnesses to your friend getting shot. A man and a woman were sitting in a parked car- sharing a joint, it sounds like-about forty yards down E Street. And they saw the whole thing: Sudbury come out his door and walk to his car, a white Honda with Maryland plates roll down the street, stop beside him, and then gunfire. Then the car- which probably was a white Honda stolen earlier in the evening in Kensington-proceeded at a high rate of speed down E Street and turned left at First. The witnesses got a quick look at the driver-who was probably the shooter-and at his front-seat passenger. Both of them, the witnesses said, looked Latino, they thought. Central American, Indian-looking, not Spanish. What the witnesses actually said was, the perpetrators looked Mexican."

Timmy shook his head in amazement. "This is all for real."

I asked Dolan, "If I can locate and talk to Jim Suter and get his story, can you help me find a way to protect him?"

Grimly she said, "Look, this whole episode has drug-operation turf war written all over it. If that's what Jim Suter is involved in, maybe nobody can protect him and you will want to do one thing and one thing only, and that is, stand way clear. You mean this didn't occur to you, Donald? Mexico is now a key transit point for South American narcotics entering the United States. Mexican officials, police agencies, often the narcs themselves, want a piece of this billion-dollar pie. It's a poor country where a lot of people just go ahead and grab what they can. You didn't consider that that might be the source of Jim Suter's troubles?"

"It occurred to me," I said. "But what's a former Republican congresswoman from Central Pennsylvania got to do with it? That part of it makes no sense."

"I guess that's a question you'll have to ask Jim Suter."

"Will you help me investigate?" I said. "I'd like to do what I can to bring in the people who shot Maynard, and to do it without hurting Jim Suter, if that's possible. That's the way Maynard would want me to do it, I think-not that he has any real idea of what Suter's involvement is. The one thing that's certain in all this is that Maynard had no known connection to whatever is going on here, and he does not deserve to be lying shot up in a hospital bed struggling to stay alive."

"Yeah, that's usually the way it goes," Dolan said. "No, I won't help you investigate the case. I haven't been assigned to it, and I won't be, and I've got another six or eight dozen cases open at the moment. What I will do is: I'll keep you up to speed on the department's progress on the case as well as I can without actually doing anything that might jeopardize my job. I'll also try to find out who else in the department is keeping close track of the case, and why.

That should help out."

Timmy said, "What if you find out a lot of people in the department, especially higher-ups, are keeping close tabs on the case?"

Dolan shrugged. "What if I do?"

"But wouldn't that be significant?" Timmy was pale and looked a little woozy.

"I guess it would be," Dolan said, and caught my eye. She seemed to be thinking what I was thinking, that maybe it was time for Timmy to head back to Albany.

I know why you're doing this," Timmy said. We were back in the hotel room, where a call to GW had just confirmed that Maynard was unconscious but still in stable condition. "You're acknowledging that there's at least a possibility that some well-connected gang of some type thinks it needs to kill Maynard for whatever weird reason. And you're showing by your actions that the only way to guarantee Maynard's safety-or at least ease my mind about it-is either to disprove a conspiracy, or to expose it and end it. Is that right?"

"Not exactly."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean what you say is partly true, but-Timothy, while the size of my ego may fall within the upper midrange of normal, I do not suffer from delusions of grandeur. I can poke around and try to come up with an educated guess as to the nature of this-thing. But if it's extensive at all, there's precious little I'll be able to do about it. Especially if it's a Mexican drug-gang operation. To those people, I'd be gnatlike, an insect they'd swat. I'm selectively ambitious, yes, but I'm not suicidal."

"Do you think it is a drug operation that Suter's mixed up in?"

"I know too little to have formed a strong opinion, but right now I'd say probably not."

"I don't think so either."

"It's the involvement of the quilt," I said. "And Betty Krum-futz." Timmy nodded enthusiastically. "What could they possibly have to do with drug gangs?"

"A lot of religious-right types are hypocrites," Timmy said. "But their hypocrisies are usually more mundane-sexual or un-sensationally financial. Nobody ever suspected Pat Robertson of running a drug cartel."

"He does have ties with Mobutu in Zaire. Robertson controls mineral concessions there, and he's an apologist in Washington for the tyrant. But, as I understand them, Betty Krumfutz's misdeeds were of a more parochial variety. Or, to be more accurate, her husband's transgressions were. He was actually the only one charged and convicted of the fraudulent use of campaign funds."