Richard Stevenson - Strachey's folly

With a feeling that was not yet sinking but was poised to descend, I began to wonder why Suter had told me thirty-six hours earlier that he guessed the quilt panel had been a menacing stunt perpetrated by the drug gang to keep him in line. If he knew LoBello had possession of his Krumfutz campaign-bio manuscript, and Sweet and Heckinger were keeping him up-to-date on Washington developments, he would surely have fingered LoBello, the angry ex-lover with sewing skills who wanted to sue him, as the quilt-panel creep. Yet Suter had apparently lied to me about the quilt panel and what he must have known about it.

I asked LoBello, "What made you think the Krumfutz manuscript might have had dirt in it that you could use against Jim? What kind of dirt?"

LoBello smirked, but uneasily. "This is quite intimate. It involves pillow talk between me and Jim. Can you take it?"

"Mm-hm."

"Right after Jim and I met," LoBello said, lowering his voice again, "when things were hot and heavy between us, we were in bed sharing a joint one night while I was running my fingers through that gorgeous head of hair of Jimmy's. Jim started to tell me how much our relationship meant to him because it took his mind off something big and important in his life that had been gnawing at him.

He dumped me two weeks later-the big puddle of puke-but that night I had brought peace to his soul, Jim told me, and I helped him get centered at a time when he needed that more than ever. Jim said he knew things about certain well-known people that would rock Washington and rock the country.

That's how he put it: 'rock Washington and rock the whole country.'"

LoBello sipped his latte, dabbed his lips with a napkin, and as Timmy and I watched and listened with mounting interest, he continued, "Naturally, I asked Jim, what's this thing that's so earthshaking? But he wouldn't tell me. Which was unusual. Jim loved dropping names and dishing people on the Hill-who's fucking whom, metaphorically and actually and whatnot. This big thing was a Hill thing, he said, that might have changed the outcome of the '94 congressional elections if it had gotten out.

"I could tell that Jim was actually quite scared of this big, scandalous whatever it was, and he never brought it up again. But when I suddenly realized one night a couple of weeks later that it — was my turn to get dumped on my ass by Jim Suter, I remembered this conversation, and as I was on my way out, I grabbed the first thing on Jim's desk that looked like some kind of Hill papers, and I stuffed it in my bag. I went over the damn thing with a fine-tooth comb, and all it was, was the stupid campaign-bio manuscript. What a waste of time, and what a bore. But I kept the thing, even after Jim called all irritated and indignant and demanded that I mail it back to him, and then in May I sewed a chunk of the stupid thing on the quilt panel. So I got to use it to stick Jim and give the knife a twist after all."

I said, "When did this conversation about the scandalous situation take place?"

"In January of this year. Around the tenth or twelfth, it would have been. On the twenty-seventh I became another of Jim's ex-lover nonpersons. I guess you've heard about that category. There are hundreds of us. Thousands maybe."

"Did Jim give you any idea of when the shocking event, or events, actually took place?" I asked.

"Not really. Only that it was on his mind at the time, and he said he'd be lucky if he didn't come out of this one with an ulcer."

"You said, Carmen, that you were sharing a joint when this thing came up. Is it possible that drugs were involved in the scandalous circumstances? And that your smoking marijuana somehow triggered Jim's discussion of this large matter that was eating at him?"

LoBello gave me a don't-be-ridiculous look. "Honey, we shared a joint just about every night. Both before and after we made love. And making love with Jim Suter is about as good as making sweet love gets. You can take my word for that and put it in the bank. It's just too bad Jim was also a liar, an emotional sadist, and a morally empty shell. Except for those, he was the best. But he was all of the above, and worse. And for doing what he did to me, Miss LoBello regrets to say, Mr. Suter is going to have to pay. He's going to have to pay very dearly."

I said, "Carmen, among the Washington power-women you impersonated in your drag act-and impersonated quite brilliantly, by all accounts-was one of them Betty Krumfutz?"

LoBello affected a poker face and said, "Oh, yes. I did Betty." He was both trying hard not to grin and obviously enjoying letting us know that he was trying hard not to grin.

"And did you reprise your Betty Krumfutz routine Saturday afternoon at the AIDS quilt display? Maybe to draw extra attention to the Suter quilt panel you sewed and submitted to the Names Project in order to embarrass Jim among his Capitol Hill friends, acquaintances, and colleagues?"

LoBello beamed. "Am I good, or am I good?"

Timmy and I looked at each other. I thought, yes, LoBello is an accomplished actor-as is Jim Suter.

I needed to speak with Betty Krumfutz fast. I called her office at the Glenn Beale Foundation and was told that she had left Washington Thursday night for Log Heaven and would not be back in her office until Monday morning. I could have phoned her in Pennsylvania, but a face-to-face meeting was what I wanted. I needed to question her in depth, if I could, on whatever it was that she had on her husband, Nelson, that would put him away "for the rest of his life," as she had worded it to me during my visit to Log Heaven, but which she had held back at his trial.

Did Mrs. Krumfutz hold incriminating evidence of the car-dealer-drug-smuggling scheme? If she knew about an illegal narcotics operation and didn't report it, that was obstruction of justice, at least. Although any knowledge Nelson Krumfutz had of his wife's variations on Mexican Indian rituals might have kept her from hitting him with a full legal whammy. But why, then, would it not have kept her from hitting him with any whammy at all?

Jim Suter had insisted to me that Mrs. Krumfutz knew nothing of the drug scheme. But now I knew that Suter had lied to me about the origins of the quilt panel-attributing it to the drug gang, even though he knew Carmen LoBello had made off with the Krumfutz campaign-bio manuscript-just as Suter had lied to me about the "zit" on his upper lip, a matter that Timmy had agreed to postpone discussing until the arguably larger questions surrounding an attempted murder and a major drug-smuggling operation had been cleared up.

There was also the puzzling matter of the scandalous goings-on that Jim Suter had alluded to when he'd gotten high with Carmen LoBello. Revelations of a drug gang involving the husband of a Pennsylvania congresswoman would have made headlines certainly, although such news would not, as far as Timmy or I could judge, "rock the nation" or alter the outcome of the 1994 congressional elections. So, I figured, maybe the scandal was something else entirely, or even that it was just some weird type of inside-the-Beltway braggadocio on Suter's part.

Timmy was even more intrigued by the historic-scandal possibilities than I was, for they fit his theory of a large, many-tentacled conspiracy. I had been unable to persuade him that the D.C. police had us under clumsy surveillance simply because they were poorly led and lacked imagination, and that neither hospital personnel nor bagel-shop cashiers were threats to us. I agreed with him that drug gangs were ruthless forces to be reckoned with, but that in Washington, unlike in Tijuana and Mexico City, the gangs' reach did not extend into every facet of official and private life. Timmy told me I was naive and I told him he was paranoid, and for the time being we decided to let it go at that.