Richard Stevenson - Strachey's folly

I arrived in Log Heaven just after two on Friday afternoon and drove directly to the Krumfutz house on Susquehanna Drive. I saw the Chrysler in the driveway but no sign of the pickup truck with Texas plates. Five days earlier bagged leaves had been piled at the side of the Krumfutz lawn. Now the bags were gone, and the yard needed raking again. I guessed Mrs. Krumfutz had her yard crew in on weekends-both for tidying up outdoors and for heartrending rituals indoors and since it was Friday afternoon, I wondered if her crew might be showing up soon.

I parked in front of the house, walked up to the front entrance, and pressed the button next to a door with three small stepped windows in it. A face soon appeared at the lowest window, and then the door swung open.

"Oh, for heaven sakes, what are you doing back here? I thought I was rid of you last-when was it? Sunday? And now here you are deviling me again. Well, you can just tell Nelson that if he sends you down here one more time, he has had it! He's got nothing criminal on me, and I've got the pictures in my scrapbook of him committing a felony, and I'll use them if I have to, believe you me!"

Mrs. Krumfutz stood glaring out at me in her pale pink sweat suit, and while she did not appear Mayan-queen-like at all, she did look as if she might rip my heart out if I said the wrong word.

I said, "Mrs. Krumfutz, I left a wrong impression on Sunday. I don't work for your husband."

"How's that? Come again?"

"I am a private investigator, but I'm actually looking into the danger Jim Suter is in, which I mentioned to you, and into the shooting of a friend of mine in Washington. I'm no threat to you. I have no interest in your personal life. I just need more information about a couple of things. May I come in?"

Looking wary, she said, "Information about what?"

"About what you have on your husband that could send him to prison for life, as you put it to me on Sunday. Whatever you've got seems to be in addition to the campaign finance scam he's already been convicted of. Am I right?"

"You bet. Right as rain."

"Is it that you have evidence of the drug-smuggling operation your husband was running with Hugh Myers?"

She screwed up her face and said, "The what operation?"

"Are you going to tell me that you know nothing of an elaborate scheme that your husband and Hugh Myers concocted for smuggling narcotics into Central Pennsylvania from Mexico in the seat backs of the GM cars Myers imports?"

"Are you off your rocker!" Her eyes were bright with anger and her voice rose with indignation. "Why, Hugh Myers was a deacon in the Presbyterian Church! My word, don't be spreading a ridiculous story like that around Log Heaven, especially right now. Poor Hugh passed away this morning. He was hit by a car in front of his house on River Street, and the fool driver never even stopped. It was dreadful, just dreadful."

"I'm sorry to hear that. Were Mr. Myers and your family close?"

"No, not close. We're Methodist, and Nelson always bought Chrysler products.

But I've known Hugh and Edna for years, and my heart goes out to that girl. It's a tragedy, just a tragedy. Now, where in the world did you get the idea that Nelson and Hugh were drug traffickers? Hugh would never even have thought to do such a thing, and Nelson couldn't even organize some campaign-fund pilfering and get away with it."

"So if it's not drug dealing that you've got on your husband, what is it?"

She signaled for me to enter the house. I followed her in and she shut the door behind us. The place was hung with Yu-catecan landscapes, and the shelves were loaded with Mexican pottery and photographs of Mayan ruins. Chichen Itza, Coba, and Uxmal were the ones I recognized. The furniture was old, overstuffed pieces draped with colorful scrapes. The picture-window drapes were open, and the view was across the Susque-hanna to the autumn hills beyond.

"Make yourself at home," Mrs. Krumfutz said, indicating the couch, and she disappeared down a corridor. I leafed through a magazine called South of the Border Living, which was aimed at U.S. retirees who lived or planned on living in Mexico. There were pieces on property ownership, tax dodges, and on keeping the help in line. Nothing on the reenactments of Indian rituals that employed beef hearts from the A amp; P. Or could Suter have been lying about that, too?

Mrs. Krumfutz returned with a K Mart-style photo album done in pale green artificial leather with golden curlicues in the corners. She sat down beside me and said, "Are you squeamish?"

"Not especially." I hoped she wasn't about to show me her collection of aborted fetuses.

Not yet opening the album, Mrs. Krumfutz said, "I'm going out to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. Look through this, and then just holler when you're through.

Or when you've had more than enough. If you need to toss your cookies, the bathroom is down the hall. You wanted to know what I've got on Nelson? "Well, this is it." She looked over at me, her face sad and tired.

"Thank you."

"Don't look till I'm in the kitchen."

"All right."

"I'm showing this to you," she said, getting up, "even though I hardly know you from Adam, for the same reason I've started showing it to other people. If anything should happen to me, I want the truth to be known about Nelson.

Nelson has treated me no better than a dog, and I want the word out on what a big turd my ex-husband is."

"Why didn't you use what's in this album in Nelson's fraud trial, Mrs. Krumfutz?"

Looking weary and resigned, she said, "Because Nelson has a photo album, too, and I'd be pretty darned embarrassed if it got passed around the district."

"Oh."

"So, in that way, we're stalemated."

"I see. A sort of Mexican standoff." I hadn't meant that as a mean joke, but I realized it was one as soon as it came out. Mrs. Krumfutz forced a thin smile, then turned and left the room.

I opened the album and leafed through it. It contained page after page of color photographs showing a nude, middle-aged man, presumably Nelson Krumfutz, performing a wide variety of sex acts with a nude young woman many years his junior. Nelson was a wiry little man, and the young woman-Tammy Pam Jameson? — was slight also and, in many of the photos-which seemed to have been taken on a number of occasions over a period of years-just barely pubescent.

Nelson had begun to develop a paunch in the later pictures, and the young woman's hair color changed from mousy brown to auburn to blond. If it ever occurred to Nelson that the girl's age might have posed a legal problem for him, surely he erred when the two were photographed with the girl seated on a kitchen counter, grinning toothily, her legs spread, Nelson's head between them, and clearly visible next to the girl, just above a butter-yellow rotary wall phone, was a Hall's Beer Distributor's calendar whose current page located the event in April of 1985. My guess was, Tammy Pam was thirteen or fourteen at the time.

I closed the album and walked into the kitchen, where Mrs. Krumfutz was seated in the breakfast nook perusing the front page of the Log Heaven Gazette. "Who took the pictures, Mrs. Krumfutz, and how did you get hold of them?"

She looked up and said, "Tammy Pam's best friend, Kelly Bobst, took the pictures. For several years Kelly dated Floppy O'Toole, who runs O'Toole's camera shop in Engineville. Floppy developed the pictures and then kept the negatives. And when he fell out with Kelly in '93, he sent me these prints and asked me if I'd like to buy the negatives. I said no thanks. Floppy thought I'd like to use the pictures to put the screws to Nelson. But, as I say, I couldn't.

What I think is, Floppy then offered the negatives to Nelson, and Nelson bought them and paid a high price, using cash he diverted from the campaign fund.