Richard Stevenson - Strachey's folly

"Maynard," I said, "are you suggesting there's a connection between the approval of NAFTA and Ulmer's murder more than two years later? Ulmer died in a street robbery-officially, at any rate. What could the connection be?"

"Timmy says your cop friend Chondelle Dolan told you there's always been doubt about Ulmer's homicide having been a simple mugging, on account of the type of weapon used."

"Timmy is right about that."

"But what the connection to NAFTA might be, I don't know. I was just thinking of Carmen LoBello's story about a scandal that would have rocked the country and maybe reversed the Republican congressional landslide in '94 if it had come out.

Suter got high and mentioned this awful thing that had been preying on his mind last January. That's when Ulmer was murdered. Then Suter dumped LoBello a few weeks later. Jim always dumped everybody a few weeks later. But still, the timing of all that struck me as interesting."

"It is."

"It's too bad you couldn't have asked Jim about it when you were down there."

"I may be heading back to the Yucatan. So I can still ask him. First, Maynard, I may phone Jim, if I can track down his number, which he wouldn't give me. He said if I ever called, Jorge might answer. But now I'm wondering if Jim might not be in immediate danger." I described to Maynard the violent deaths earlier in the day of Hugh Myers, the Log Heaven GM dealer, and Nelson Krumfutz and Tammy Pam Jameson.

"But," Maynard said, "those incidents would seem to buttress Jim's story of a drug-smuggling operation, not a NAFTA connection. Unless, of course, the NAFTA campaign and the drug cartel are somehow interrelated."

"Yeah. Unless that."

I told Maynard I guessed I'd have to speak again with Red Heckinger and Malcolm Sweet, who seemed to be Suter's eyes and ears in Washington, and his main local contacts. "Who are those two goons anyway? I had half a lunch with them the other day, and they're about as subtle as Willard Scott. They seemed to want me to think they were mob-connected, but it was all the worst sort of amateur theater and not convincing."

"They're lobbyists for the Pennsylvania Association of Broadcasters. One of them is originally from Log Heaven- Heckinger, I think. Jim has done some lobbying and PR work for the PAB over the years. In fact, that's how I think he made his first connection with Betty Krumfutz, who always looked out for the PAB's interests. They're a couple, and they've been known to give dinner parties at their place in Georgetown, where, following coffee and after-dinner drinks, the guests have been asked to move into the den and spank each other."

"Somehow I'm not surprised to hear this."

"In fact, Bryant Ulmer was part of that circle, and Alan McChesney, too, and McChesney's boyfriend, Ian Williamson."

"I met McChesney in Burton Olds's office on Tuesday," I said, "and Williamson was there, too. McChesney spoke poorly of Suter-as so many men do-and told the usual story of ecstasy with Jim and then a sudden nothingness.

McChesney also said he wouldn't be surprised if Jim was mixed up in a drug operation with Jorge-yet another vote for that scenario."

"I wonder what made Alan think that. Jim was never involved with out-and-out crooks before, that I ever heard. Did Alan mention that he saw me on Saturday, not long before I got shot?"

"No, your name never came up in our conversation. Following Suter's instructions, I was still being cagey on Tuesday as to what I was investigating and for whom."

"That's funny. I saw Alan at the quilt display near Jim's panel, and he might reasonably have connected any investigation of Jim with me, since Alan knew we were friends, and he would surely have read or heard about my getting shot down on E Street later on Saturday. McChesney must have seen you and Timmy at the quilt, too. I was going to say hi and introduce you, in fact, but Alan was talking to some other people, and then we came to the quilt panel with Jim's name on it, and soon after that he was gone."

At that moment, an idea that had been vague in the back of my mind moved forward and began to take on an actual shape. But I did not yet recognize the exact shape of the idea, and I said only to Maynard, "It is odd that McChesney didn't make the likely connection and maybe even ask me if you were my client.

But he didn't."

"McChesney is not famous for being dense."

"What's he famous for? Besides after-dinner spankings?"

"For thoroughness and decisiveness. And, I guess I should add, ruthlessness."

"Oh, ruthlessness, too."

Mrs. Krumfutz had not yet emerged from her bedroom, where she had gone to change clothes, but a knock came at the front door now, probably, I figured, Mrs. Krumfutz's good friend Marion Smith. Before answering the door, I spoke briefly with Timmy again, assuring him that I would soon head back toward Washington. I advised him to remain in Maynard's room with its police guard outside, and without hesitation he said he would.

A small female face was now peering in through the bottom stepped window in the Krumfutz front door. As I moved to open the door for Mrs. Smith, I decided that when I found a pay phone on my way out of Log Heaven, I would not call Heckinger or Sweet or Alan McChesney or even Jim Suter. I would phone the airline and make some necessarily convoluted arrangements for a fast trip back to the Yucatan.

Just before noon on Saturday, October 19, a week almost to the hour from the time Maynard had stared in amazement at Jim Suter's panel in the AIDS memorial quilt, I pulled off Highway 307 onto the beach road at Los Pajaros.

I had spent the previous evening, on my return from Log Heaven, checking in on Timmy and Maynard at GW, then shaking any tail Ray Craig might have still had on me by slipping on and off a variety of subway trains at D.C. Metro Center and other nearby stations. I ended up at the Farragut West station, near the White House, where I caught a cab to National Airport.

I had booked the first leg of my journey under the name of Cray Mameluke, paid cash for the ticket, and arrived un-interferred-with in Miami soon after midnight. There I reserved a seat on a 7 A.M. flight to Cancun under the name Donald Stra-chey, the name the airline would see on my passport. If my movements were being monitored, I guessed, this would be done at the Washington end, rather than in Cancun, and surely not in Miami, a mere transit point that was one of several to the Yucatan.

From my hotel near Miami International, I phoned May-nard's hospital room and woke him up so that I could be reassured that he was safe. He was, as was Timmy, asleep on a couch in the nearby visitors' lounge. I also phoned Chondelle Dolan at home, woke her from a sound sleep, too, and described what I had learned over the past four days from Carmen LoBello, Betty Krumfutz, Maynard Sudbury, and-for what it was worth-Jim Suter. I said I might need her advice and help when I got back to Washington, and she said fine.

Dolan told me, "It looks like maybe your boyfriend the conspiracy nut wasn't such a nut after all."

"Could be, but I'm still having a lot of trouble believing that a Catholic schoolboy's lurid fantasies about what makes the world go round might actually exist in modern-day reality. The evidence, however, does seem to keep pointing that way."

Dolan said, "The world we live in isn't the same world it was just ten years ago.

Nowadays they don't call these things conspiracies, though. Now it's called synergy."

Dolan soon hung up to resume the night's sleep I'd interrupted, and I, too, caught a few hours of restless semicon-sciousness, before heading to the airport and the flight to Cancun, my second in three days.

When I rounded the first bend in the Los Pajaros beach road, I saw not one but three vehicles in the driveway of Jorge Ramos's house. The big mud-spattered Suburban was there, along with a couple of Jeep Cherokees. I drove on, glancing at the house in hope of catching a glimpse of Suter. All the louvered windows were open, but I saw no one inside moving about.