Richard Stevenson - Strachey's folly

About fifty thousand dollars is still unaccounted for, and my guess is, that's where it went, to Floppy. Though I can't prove it."

The teakettle on Mrs. Krumfutz's electric range began to whistle, and she got up and removed it from the burner. "Care for a cup of tea?"

"Thank you. Have you got coffee?"

"I've got Nescafe."

"I thought you might. I'll have a cup of that, please."

"Why, sure."

As she mixed the coffee crystals and hot water, I said, "I can see why you decided not to remain in Congress. Campaign fraud is one thing-that's as American as cherry pie. But these photo albums-that's something else."

"Yes, if the pictures had started coming out… I've got two grown daughters, Terri in Aliquippa and Hilaine in Frackville, and I wouldn't want them to be hurt, or their husbands or their kids. So I threw in the towel, despite my ongoing commitment to the rights of gun owners and the unborn."

Mrs. Krumfutz served my coffee in the breakfast nook and slid in across from me with her cup of tea. I said, "None of this may have anything to do with Jim Suter's current troubles. But it might. Either way, I'd appreciate your telling me what you know about Jim, Mrs. Krumfutz."

Apparently relieved by the change of subject, Mrs. Krumfutz spoke for several minutes about her onetime campaign employee and sometime professional acquaintance and casual friend. She described Suter as a committed conservative and an able — writer and political operative. She recited a long list of Suter's successes for a number of conservative causes, most of them election campaigns. Suter had also been involved, she said, in several lobbying operations on the Hill, including the campaign to prevent legalization of gays in the military. "Jim's a pansy," Mrs. Krumfutz said, "but first and foremost he's an American."

I let that go, and she went on to mention Suter's work on behalf of a right-to-life constitutional amendment and his pro-NAFTA organizing efforts with Alan McChesney for her and for her colleague Burton Olds.

I asked Mrs. Krumfutz straight out if she had ever doubted Suter's truthfulness.

After a long, thoughtful moment she said, "Not on matters that were all that earthshaking, if that's what you mean. Why do you ask?"

Before I could reply, the telephone twittered, and Mrs. Krumfutz excused herself and went to answer it. As she stood by the kitchen counter, I heard her cry out,

"Oh! Oh, my Lord! When?"

Mrs. Krumfutz fell back against the counter and shook her head in anguish. I quickly went to her side, for her face had gone gray and the hand holding the telephone receiver trembled.

Again, she cried, "Oh, no! No! Oh, no!" After a moment, she said, "I've got to hang up and call the girls. I'll call you back."

Shakily, she placed the receiver back in its cradle. She moaned, "Oh, my heavens! Oh, I can't tell the girls!"

"What happened?"

"Nelson is dead!" she cried out, and then she began to weep.

Between sobs, Mrs. Krumfutz told me that the caller had been Engineville police chief Boat Pignatelli. The chief told Mrs. Krumfutz that a few hours earlier an explosion had struck the house occupied by Nelson Krumfutz and Tammy Pam Jameson. Both had died in the fire that quickly engulfed the structure. The cause of the explosion had not yet been determined.

I comforted Mrs. Krumfutz as well as I could as she collected her wits and attempted to make a list on the kitchen blackboard of people whom she would need to notify. I suggested she phone a Log Heaven close friend or relative who could be with her. So before she called her and Nelson's daughters, Mrs. Krumfutz phoned her friend Marion Smith. Mrs. Smith said she would come as soon as she checked up on her dogs. She had only just gotten home, she said, after taking a casserole over to Edna Myers, whose husband had been killed earlier in the day in a hit-and-run accident.

Edna Myers's husband, Hugh, was the Log Heaven car dealer who, according to Jim Suter, had been involved in a drug-smuggling operation with Nelson Krumfutz-although Mrs. Krumfutz had found that accusation preposterous. It now occurred to me that both men had died violently on the same day in separate incidents. And they were the two men who could have confirmed-or denied-Suter's wild tale of drug smuggling in GM-product seat backs. Now, suddenly, both were dead. Had Mrs. Krumfutz not been so distraught, she might have noticed that now my hand was a little unsteady, too, and my need to place a phone call almost as urgent as hers.

I’m heading back to Washington as soon as I can get out of here," I told Timmy,

"and then probably back to the Yucatan. Jim Suter's story about drug smuggling into Central Pennsylvania might be true or might not be true, I just don't know.

But if it is true-or something like it, maybe even worse is true-then somehow the Mexican gang found out that Suter blabbed to me about it maybe Jorge's house is wired-and now they are killing all the witnesses."

Timmy said, "Oh. Oh, no. Oh."

I described to him the mysterious hit-and-run incident that ended the life of the Log Heaven GM dealer that morning and the explosion that killed Nelson Krumfutz and Tammy Pam Jameson a few hours later. "I hate to say it," I added, "but now Jim Suter is probably dead, too, or soon will be."

This was followed by a tense silence at the other end of the line. While Mrs.

Krumfutz was off changing her clothes, I had reached Timmy in Maynard's room at GW. I could hear May-nard's voice in the background as he talked about a problematical IV with, I guessed, a nurse. Finally, Timmy said, "If some Mexican drug cartel is eliminating all the people who know about its Pennsylvania operations, where does that leave you? And, for that matter, me?"

"We know Suter's story, but we can't prove anything. If the story is true, the gang might think it has to remove anybody who might be in a position to describe the operation to us or to any authority we reported it to. But I doubt if they'd see any reason to actually eliminate us."

"You doubt it? Oh, good. Then, tell me this, Don. Why did the cartel try to kill Maynard? And why did they wreck his house searching for something? Maynard certainly knew a lot less about all this… this whatever it is than we do."

"What you say is true."

"Anyway, Maynard doesn't think it's drugs. He wants to talk to you as soon as you get back here-which, by the way, the sooner the better. I clued Maynard in on Carmen LoBello's story on some would-be-cataclysmic scandal Suter talked to LoBello about when they were high, and Maynard thinks he knows what it has to do with."

"He does? What? He can tell me now."

"Hang on."

Timmy put Maynard on the line. "It's the date." Maynard's voice was weak, but steady and clear. "When Timmy told me that this conversation took place in January of this year, I tried to think of what was going on then that might have involved scandalous secret machinations. I couldn't think of anything that was happening at the White House-a potential Jim Sutergate- or on the Hill that month that might have a potential Mexico connection. Which was a connection I assumed, based on subsequent, especially recent, developments. So I phoned Dana Mosel at the Post, and she called up a ll the paper's front pages and told me what made headlines last January that was Mexico-related. What Dana told me this morning sure was interesting. It had nothing to do with drugs though."

"What was it?"

"Bryant Ulmer's murder."

"Congressman Olds's chief of staff?"

"Yeah."

"What did Ulmer have to do with Mexico?"

"Olds was the nominal head of the GOP pro-NAFTA vote-gathering operation in the House, but it was Ulmer who actually ran it. Working directly with Clinton's people, he and Alan Mc-Chesney, who was then Betty Krumfutz's chief of staff, pretty much put together the bipartisan pro-NAFTA coalition in the House. Aid a nice job they did, too, for the free-trade-at-any-cost crowd. NAFTA passed the House 234 to 200. I agree with labor that it was a bad treaty. It cost jobs on this side of the border and is at this very moment no doubt poisoning thousands of underpaid workers on the Mexican side. But Clinton was a slick salesman, and NAFTA's most vocal enemies were an off-putting bunch, from Perot to Pat Buchanan. So Ulmer and McChesney were able to pull it off. The whole thing really made Bryant Ulmer's reputation on the Hill, and from that time on he was known as Mr. NAFTA. It's also the reason why his murder made the front page of the papers, not just the metro section."