Richard Stevenson - Strachey's folly

I said to Timmy, "This job must have taken a couple of hours. I left for the hospital at about ten-forty. It's two thirty-five now. If the intruder was watching the house and waiting for us to leave, he could have jumped the fence early. But that would have involved a heavy risk of being overheard. If he'd waited for all the neighbors to go to sleep, after midnight, say-and on a Saturday night that would have been unpredictable-then he'd have run the risk of our coming back and catching him in the act."

"Unless, of course," Timmy said, "he or they were in touch with someone who could keep him or them informed about our location and movements. Then there'd be no risk at all of discovery."

"Uh-huh."

The middle bedroom, where Timmy and I were staying, had been ransacked just like Maynard's front bedroom. Our bags were open and our clothes strewn about.

"Jeez, I ironed that shirt myself," Timmy said. "Now look at it."

"You've had a rough night, Timothy. I just hope nobody went in the bathroom and sucked on your toothbrush."

"Look, you know what I mean."

I did. We went into Maynard's office in the small back room. File drawers had been yanked open and papers were everywhere. The disk boxes next to his computer were open and empty. Maynard's computer files were evidently gone.

The telephone answering machine on the desk was not blinking. I checked for the tape; it had been taken, too.

Timmy said, "It's a good thing you picked up Maynard's address book before you came to the hospital. I'll bet they'd have taken it."

"Maybe."

Timmy suddenly looked up from the debris around Maynard's Mac and said,

"The letter from Jim Suter! Do you think they took that? Where was it when we left the house?"

"It was right where it is now. In my pocket with the address book. I grabbed it just before the cab arrived."

"Good for you. Any particular reason you picked up the letter? Surely you didn't suppose for a second that Maynard's getting shot and that strange, turbulent letter with all the talk in it of murder and people on the Hill and death threats and the D.C. police-you didn't think all that suggested some kind of terrible conspiracy, did you?"

"No, I just did what I thought Maynard would have wanted me to do: keep that letter safe."

"Well, that's a good reason, too."

While Timmy changed out of his bloodstained clothes and went about straightening up the mess in the guest room, I walked down to the bathroom.

The medicine cabinet had been opened and most of its contents dumped in the sink. The magazines stacked on the shelf next to the toilet- The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Nation, Smithsonian, Blueboy — looked as if they had been rifled; several lay open on the tile floor. I flipped through the Blueboy, then resumed examining the scene. The toilet paper had not been unrolled, a sign, perhaps, that the intruder whose job it had been to search the bathroom was essentially anal retentive, despite the nature of his assigned duties that night.

Downstairs, the doorbell rang. I stepped into the hallway. Timmy appeared in the guest room doorway and stood very still. There was an alertness in him that I knew was partly caffeine and partly fear. He said in a low voice, "Should we answer it?"

"I guess we should see who it is."

I started down the stairs as the bell rang again, and Timmy followed me.

In the living room, I pulled the curtains aside and looked out the bay window at the front stoop. A man stood there, but it was his car, double-parked alongside Maynard's Chevy, that drew my attention. It was a D.C. police patrol car, its flashers flashing.

"It's a cop," I told Timmy.

I went around and unlocked the door, opened it, and stood face-to-face with Ray Craig.

Craig said evenly, "Somebody in the neighborhood reported a disturbance in this house earlier. The officers who responded to the call were called to a robbery over on Half Street before they could investigate. I recognized the address on the report and thought I better come over and see what the problem was." He peered over my shoulder at Timmy, standing perfectly still, and at the wrecked interior of Maynard's house. His nicotine stench wafted into the room, and Craig said, "Looks like you had a break-in. Anything missing that you know of? It's been a real pisser of a night for you and your buddy Sudbury."

"It has," I said.

"We were just about to call the police," Timmy said.

Craig stared at him hard, his face still devoid of expression, but with something in the set of his head on his narrow shoulders that suggested suspicion mixed with contempt.

Our wake-up call at the Capitol Hill Hotel, three blocks from Maynard's house, came at eight. I immediately got an outside line and phoned GW to check on Maynard's condition. An ICU nurse said he was "stable."

Death is the stablest condition of all, but I knew she didn't mean that.

"He's alive," I told Timmy.

"Thank God."

Ray Craig had left us at 3:15 A.M. He had noted the damage and remarked on how no valuables appeared to have been taken. He said the break-in did not seem to have been a burglary, and again he asked if we knew of any enemies Maynard had, in Washington or in Mexico. He inquired about Maynard's Mexican

"associations" half a dozen times. Again, we told Craig we didn't know of any enemies Maynard had in Mexico, which was true.

Craig also asked, "Did Sudbury bring men back here for sex?" This came just as Craig was about to leave. It was a reasonable question for an investigator to ask following an assault on an urban gay man in the nineties. But the faint trace of a leer on Craig's ordinarily blank face lent the question a quality that was both lubricious and gratuitous. Also, it seemed to come as an afterthought, a bow to investigatory convention.

Timmy had told Craig, "Maynard is a sexually alive adult male who dates from time to time. It wouldn't surprise me if some of his dates have spent the night with him. But Maynard is old-fashioned in some respects, and I think cautious.

He wouldn't have invited anybody into his house whom he didn't know reasonably well."

Craig sniffed and said, "Yeah, sure."

I told him, "We were lucky you had a chance to stop over here tonight, Lieutenant. This must have taken you away from more important cases."

"This is important," he replied, but added nothing more. He told us it would be a good idea if we did not spend the rest of the night in Maynard's house. He said he'd ask a patrol car to check the front and rear of the house periodically.

Craig recommended a hotel several blocks away on Pennsylvania Avenue, just east of the Capitol, and he offered us a ride. We declined the ride. We waited ten minutes after Craig had left, then hiked the three blocks up to the Capitol Hill Hotel on Second Street, SE. It was not the hotel Craig had recommended, just one we'd seen, while walking in the neighborhood, that looked quiet, comfortable, and, as Timmy had put it, "unthreatening."

In the morning, we'd slept but we did not sparkle. After I called GW, Timmy checked off the names of people in Maynard's address book who were friends Maynard had mentioned to Timmy, and while he showered, I made calls. It was an hour earlier in Southern Illinois on a Sunday morning, so I figured I'd phone Maynard's family last and let them know that he had been shot and badly wounded.

No actual human beings answered my first three calls, but I left messages explaining who and where I was and informed Maynard's friends of his misfortune. On the fourth and fifth calls, I reached a man and a woman respectively, and they turned out to be writers, too. The man was another freelancer, the woman, Dana Mosel, a reporter at the Post. I nearly asked Mosel how I could locate a D.C. police official of undisputed high integrity, someone I could confide in on a matter that law-enforcement higher-ups might refer to as