Richard Stevenson: Death trick

"What happened the last time you saw Billy? Tell me; maybe that will help me begin to understand your son." And his parents.

Blount sucked in the corner of his mouth and sat looking droll. His wife gave me a full frontal of her nostrils, sighed deeply, and spoke. "On the morning of August the eighteenth, Stuart and I drove down from our cottage in Saratoga. When we arrived, Billy was here in our house with-a man."

"Uh-huh. Then what?"

"If you've read between the lines of the newspaper accounts, Mr. Strachey, you must have deduced that our son has-homosexual tendencies. Billy is easily influenced, and he had spent the night on that sofa you're sitting on, Mr. Strachey, with a-a gay individual."

Tact. She went on. "Of course we had words with Billy about his behavior, and he-he simply walked out on us. Billy refused even to turn over his keys to the house, and Stuart was forced into having the locks changed. We haven't seen or heard from Billy since that day, despite our repeated messages offering to help him-as we've tried to help our son find his way on so many occasions in the past. We love Billy, you see, and we are not going to give up on him."

Tendencies. I remembered seeing Billy Blount's by-line on articles and editorials in the local gay community news bulletin a couple of years earlier-though not, I thought, recently-and I doubted he shared this assessment of his sexual makeup. Also, I tried to remember whether I'd ever run into him myself-I glanced down at the sofa, but it didn't ring a bell.

I said, "Billy was living here?"

"He has his own apartment," Stuart Blount said. "Billy has been on his own for several years now, but of course he's always been welcome here. However, you have to draw the line somewhere, am I right? I'm convinced I did the right thing."

I supposed he had, though the family dynamics here were starting to betray a certain complexity.

Jane Blount stabbed out her cigarette in the little dish in her palm. She gazed down at the butt and warbled, "Jay Tarbell tells us you may have-could we call it a "special entree"-with Billy's circle of acquaintances, Mr. Strachey?" She looked up at me with a clammy expectancy.

"We could call it that."

Blount pulled himself forward in a herky-jerky way and spoke the words. "Jay has mentioned to us that you are a, ah, avowed homosexual, Mr. Strachey, and that you can be counted on to be familiar with the, ah, gay life-style and, ah, milieu here in Albany."

"Yes, I'm gay."

"We're broad-minded," Blount said. He assumed a facial expression that resembled the work of an early cubist. "How you live your life, Mr. Strachey, is none of our business. How William lives his life is very much our business. He's our only child, you see. He has no sisters or brothers."

Or siblings. "How old is your son?" I asked. "Mid-twenties?"

"Twenty-seven."

"He sounds old enough to make his own decisions."

"Despite our disagreements with Billy," Jane Blount said serenely, "he's always considered Stuart's and my opinions important. There's always been a kind of bond."

Scanty as the evidence was so far, I figured she had something there.

"You said you had words with Billy the last time you saw him. What did he say when he left?"

"Well-in point of fact," Blount said, shifting again, "Jane and I did the actual speaking. I did get a little hot under the collar, I have to admit. Billy did not express his feelings verbally. He simply walked out the door. With his houseguest."

Who probably never even sent a thank-you note. "Is that what Billy ordinarily does when he's angry? Walks away?"

Blount took on a martyred look. "Ah, if only he would! William's silence in August was hardly characteristic of our son, Mr. Strachey. When William becomes angry, he generally makes a speech-gives us all his propaganda." Or does a desecration number on the Blounts' Phyfe sofa.

"But of course we've never bought it, all the slogans and so forth. Don't get me wrong, Mr.

Strachey," Blount said, giving me his Picasso face again, "we respect the activists' positions, and we do not support legal discrimination against sodomites. But for William, it isn't the thing, you see? Not the road to the fulfilling type of life that is available to our son."

If Billy Blount was not an extremely angry young man, then he had to be a turnip. "What happens when I locate Billy and he refuses to drop by and hash things over with you two? That sounds to me like a distinct possibility. Bond or no bond, he's not likely to expect a sympathetic hearing from his family. Especially given the circumstances of the crime he's accused of."

Jane Blount went for another cigarette. Her husband removed a sealed business-size envelope from his inside breast pocket and handed it to me. The printed return address was for Blount and Hackett, Investment Counselors, Twin Towers, Washington Avenue, Albany. "Give Billy this," he said. "It should make a difference."

I slid the envelope into my own breast pocket and could feel it find the rip at the bottom and begin to edge down into the lining. I asked what was in the envelope.

"That is private," Jane Blount said. "Private and personal. If Billy wants to tell you about it, that's his business. I doubt that he will. You just give it to him. He'll come home." She gave me a look that said, Understood?

Maybe he'd come home or maybe he wouldn't, but I didn't doubt that whatever was in the envelope was going to make an impression on Billy Blount.

I asked them to fill me in on their son's whereabouts, activities, and acquaintances over the past ten years, and for half an hour they rambled around the surface of Billy's social, educational, and occupational landscape. They offered little to go on.

Billy Blount had been graduated from SUNY/Albany with a degree in political science and then had taken a series of menial jobs. Currently he worked in a record shop. He hadn't lived at home since college, though his addresses were never more than eight or ten blocks from the family abode on State Street. This latter may or may not have meant something; Albany gays tended to live within walking distance of the bars and discos on nearby Central Avenue, and Billy Blount's unbroken proximity to his parents could have been coincidental. I'd find out.

The Blounts knew no names of their son's friends. They said his social circle was, they were certain, made up of "gay individuals," and they thought I might be acquainted with some of them. This was possible; gay Albany, though populous enough, was not so vast as San Francisco.

The Blounts gave me a photograph of their son. He was good-looking in a lean-jawed sort of way, with a broad, vaguely impudent smile, shortish dark hair, deep black eyes, and the obligatory clipped British military mustache. I thought, in fact, that I had seen him around in the bars and discos. Given my habits and his, it would have been odd if I hadn't.

They provided me with Billy's current address on Madison Avenue, and a check for one thousand dollars, which I stuffed deep in my pants pocket. I said I'd report back to them within a week but that I had a few fiscal loose ends to tie up in mid-afternoon before I began work on their case.

Stuart Blount walked with me to the door, shook my hand, made a point of squeezing my shoulder as he did so, and wished me "all the best of luck."

I had the feeling I was being used by these people in a way I wasn't going to like once I figured out what it was. Outside, the cold wind felt good. I ambled down State, turned the corner away from the park, and made for the bank.

Back on Central I checked my service, which had a one-word message from Brigit: "books." I flipped through my desk calendar, picked a page in mid-December, and wrote: "Brigit- books."