Richard Stevenson - Red White and Black and Blue

"No. Anyway, once a death has officially been ruled a suicide, insurance companies are generally off the hook.

Otherwise, people planning on killing themselves could just take out big life insurance policies before dying and all but bankrupt the industry."

She rolled her eyes. "The insurance companies won't get any sympathy from me. They're all just greedy. And now they're going to make out like bandits with Obamacare."

I said, "I know you knew that Greg was gay."

"Oh yes. How could we not know it? The whole world knew it. Greg saw to that. I was accepting, of course. I believe that some people are born that way. My first husband Jim had a brother we all wondered about. Anson was not accepting, though. He thought Greg became gay just to get even with him, but that's just foolishness. For an engineer, Anson has a few strange unscientific opinions."

"Was it your husband who requested that donations in Greg's memory be made to something called the Eddie Fund?

That was listed in the newspaper obituaries."

She turned as pink as the towel on her head. "I did not know at the time what kind of organization that was. Anson knew I would not have approved. He said it was something about orphans. Then Jenny found out what it really was, and she had a fit."

"Were you aware of any of Greg's gay relationships? Who he dated?"

"Just in high school. An effeminate boy named Bootsy was always coming over and spending time in Greg's room with him. But then Anson caught them doing something, and that was the end of that. In college, Greg was off on his own. I thought maybe he had a boyfriend who would show up at the funeral and I would get to meet him. But that didn't happen as far as I know. I was disappointed. I always hoped that unlike myself, Greg would find real love with another adult person."

Mrs. Stiver showed no emotion when she said this. It was just a fact of her life, one of a number she had accepted before mentally moving on.

I pondered telling her that Greg had in fact found a kind of intimacy with another man. And although this intimacy was mixed with love, it was also twisted and masochistic and almost certainly directly related to the abuse Stiver had suffered for years at the hands of his stepfather. I decided not to drop this on her for the time being. My dredging up all the ugliness she preferred not to think about was enough for one day. If the Louderbush-Stiver relationship soon became public knowledge, Mrs. Stiver would learn about it, and it would hit her hard. She was resilient, though-if you could call semi-denial and TV-shrink bromides resiliency.

I said, "Most of the information I have is that Greg was struggling to make a life for himself that eventually you would have been happy to know about. But that struggle was hard and complicated, and he had a ways to go. And you should know that others who knew him share your view that Greg didn't seem like someone who would take his own life. Other people have also told me about his strength of character and strength of purpose."

"So is it possible," she asked, leaning toward me, "that Greg's death was not suicide? That it was an accident somehow? Or even-I gives me the heebie-jeebies just to think about it-that Greg was murdered? Pushed off that SUNY building or something?"

I said, "An accidental fall from a SUNY roof seems unlikely.

Homicide is unlikely too, but of course not out of the question. All of that is what my client has me looking into."

Now I bit the bullet. "In my attempt to gather as much information as I can on Greg and his life, I'm trying to talk to everyone who knew him. Would it be possible for me to ask your husband a few questions? I'll definitely try to avoid provoking him."

She slumped a bit. Then she looked at me closely. "What happened to your ear?"

"It's a rugby injury."

"Oh, that's too bad."

"You said your husband was busy, but I wouldn't take up very much of his time. I promise I'll be out of your family's hair in no time at all."

Was this really necessary? I knew it wasn't. I already had as clear an idea of Anson Stiver as I was likely to get short of psychoanalyzing the terrible man. Had he been beaten as a child, too? Probably. But all I really wanted was to form a firsthand impression of the beast who had set so much of this sad dysfunction-and worse-in motion, and here was my chance.

Mrs. Stiver said, "Anson is in the living room-it's his bedroom now-working on his transformers. He designs and builds miniature power transformers. But since his stroke last fall his speech is difficult to understand, and you might have a hard time getting what he's trying to say. Anyway, I wouldn't mention Greg to him if I were you. That would just set him off. And since his stroke, he's been forced to give up smoking.

So Anson has been a bit hard to live with. I look after him as well as I can, and we have Filipino girls who come in three days a week. That's when I get to go out and do something I love to do."

"What's that, Mrs. Stiver?"

"I work in a daycare center. Lively Tots, in Amsterdam.

I've always loved children, and people say I'm good with the kids, and they love me back."

She looked at me to gauge my reaction to this information, and I obliged by saying that that all sounded like a fine idea.

Louderbush had not called back. I drove through the onrushing downpour back toward Albany, picking up my phone and putting it down more than twice, thinking maybe if I jiggled it, it would show a missed call from the assemblyman.

My visit with Anson Stiver had been brief and unhelpful in any important way. The retired engineer was slouched in his wheelchair, a portable oxygen unit at his side, his big frame a collapsed wreck. His speech, to the extent he had anything to say to me, wasn't just hard to understand; it was largely indecipherable. Was there a book? When Bad Things Happen to Bad People.

Stiver wasn't happy that I was not from Time Warner-a block of programming had gone out that included CNBC and the Fox Business channel-and he was even more put out when Mrs. Stiver introduced me, at my suggestion, as someone interested in establishing a kind of memorial for Greg. Stiver was immediately suspicious, and he seemed to be asking why it had taken five years for anyone to get around to this.

"His many friends have been so busy with their academic careers," I said. "But Greg's sad passing haunts us all."

He looked as if he wasn't going to buy that at all. He said something else I couldn't follow, but his hard gaze was on my bandaged ear, and I wasn't surprised when Mrs. Stiver said to him, "He hurt his ear playing rugby."

Stiver snorted at that and then made more noises that I couldn't make out and shook his head vehemently.

Mrs. Stiver translated this as, "If the memorial is some gay thing, no money. If it's not a gay thing, twenty-five dollars."

I told him it was a gay thing. I wanted to add Give me the twenty-five dollars anyway or I'll break your nose, but of course I didn't.

I left soon after.

I got Timmy on the phone. "Still no word from Louderbush.

But I've met Stiver's parents, and I can see how young Greg might have fallen into a self-destructive relationship with an older man." I described the unfortunate Margery Stiver and her hulking ruin of a bad-news husband.

"No surprises there, right? Did you learn anything at all?"

"No, but Stiver's mom is yet another character in this confused psychodrama who considered him a highly unlikely candidate for suicide. She said why would anybody tough enough to survive someone as awful as her husband then suddenly fall apart mentally in a situation where choices were available? She talked about how strong Greg had always been."

"Yes, but maybe that was the problem. Stiver knew he was a tough survivor, and yet here he was being worn down physically even-by yet another violent man. And he couldn't find the courage to put an end to a situation he saw as humiliatingly self-destructive. He couldn't face going on that way. It wasn't who he thought he was and who he wanted to be."