“And so,” I asked Gaudios, “who, then, are these mob goons who have threatened to hurt me and Timmy if I don’t get off the case and quit trying to free Barry Fields?”

Gaudios was all serene now. “I really couldn’t begin to answer that question, Donald. Perhaps it’s something you stirred up or got into up in big, bad Pittsfield. It certainly has nothing to do with Sheffield, or with Jim’s death, or with me.”

He sat looking at me levelly, no longer frightened and teary.

I knew he was lying, but I didn’t know how or why. I told Gaudios I would be back, and I got up and went out. As I walked down the back porch steps, I thought I heard him sob once.

Chapter Twenty-five

I drove back to the motel and told Timmy about my meeting with Gaudios.

He said, “So if Steven is lying and he’s in touch with the mob guys, won’t he alert them that you’re still working on the case and you haven’t been frightened off?”

“This is possible.”

“All the more reason to wrap this one up fast.”

“Yes, I would say so.”

I told Timmy I was having lunch with slippery Bill Moore, and he said in that case he would accept Preston Morley’s invitation for a hike up Monument Mountain and a picnic there with Morley and David Murano. Timmy said this was the spot where Hawthorne and Melville once picnicked together and set off intellectual sparks that may have set the course of American literature for the next fifty years.

I said, “I’m sorry I can’t come too, but I’ve got a more immediate and up-to-the-minute bundle of sparks to set off.”

“I wouldn’t dismiss the relevance of Hawthorne and Melville to this case,” Timmy said. “Hawthorne was haunted by his family’s past in Salem, and Melville by what he had seen and done as a young man at sea. The Sturdivant murder seems to have a lot to do with the past catching up with people who thought they had outrun it.”

“Or who thought they could both escape the past and exploit it at the same time.”

We sat there, the Sunday papers spread out around us on the motel bed with the bedspread you didn’t want to get too close to. Did we know what we were talking about? As it happened, yes and no.

Moore’s Honda was parked in his driveway. I pulled in behind it and went up the front steps of his pleasant house on its pleasant hillside. Despite the strain he was under, Moore looked fresh and fit in clean jeans and a navy blue T-shirt. I followed him into the living room with the giant TV and the movie memorabilia. He offered me a beer, and when I declined, he said, “I guess I better stay sober myself. I’m seeing Barry at three, and he won’t appreciate it if I’m fucked up.”

“How is Barry doing? What have you heard?” I seated myself on one of the leather chairs. There was no sign of pizza – a relief – just some bar nuts in a dish.

“He’s okay, Ramona says, and they’ve got some good shrinks keeping an eye on him. But Barry really needs to get away from here as soon as he can. He is not a violent person, but I’m really afraid of what he’ll do if his family actually shows up here. What a fucking nightmare.”

“I know who they are,” I said.

“Yeah, Ramona told me you figured it out.”

“I understand why he doesn’t want to have anything to do with them, and why he would not want it known that he was a relative. What’s the relationship? Is Barry Reverend Felson’s grandson?”

Moore nodded. “Barry’s mom, Edna, is Fred’s third daughter. His dad is Warren Krider, one of Fred’s loony flock.

Barry’s real name is Benjamin Krider. Warren and Edna tossed him out on the street when he was seventeen after they caught him in bed with a kid in his Bible study class. They didn’t even try to have him de-programmed or exorcised. The nutty de-gaying approach is for the relatively more enlightened Evangelicals. The Kriders just told Barry he was an agent of Satan and to get the hell out.”

“That he is bright and decent didn’t figure in, it looks like.”

“No, bright and decent are not what Christianity is about with the Felsons. Dumb and hateful is the rule. How Barry survived his own family with nothing worse than a lot of anger is a mystery. He can’t explain it himself. He thinks he may have learned how to be human from a couple of teachers he had in school, and from old movies he rented and watched when Edna and Warren were out protesting against homosexuals. Some parents have to worry that their kids are home watching porn, but Barry once told me he was led astray from his family by watching M-G-M musicals, Frank Capra and Truffaut.”

“The Reformed Church of Arthur Freed. I’d have signed up for that. So Barry left Topeka when he was seventeen?”

“He hitched a ride to Denver, the gay mecca of the mountains and plains. He knew about Denver because the Felsons had picketed AIDS-victim funerals there, and Barry had gone along a few times and seen all the counter-protesters. So he knew right where to go. He shacked up with a guy he met in a park for a while, and then he met Bud Radziwill at a gay community center. Bud’s family hadn’t thrown him out, but they were so homophobic that he ran away on his own.”

I said, “Bud Radziwill is really Bud Huffler, right?”

Moore looked startled. “How did you know?”

“He’s from Oklahoma, I’ve been informed by an expert amateur linguist. I knew his story was similar to Barry’s because Bud told me his family were homophobic horrors, too. The most infamous public homophobe in Oklahoma is Republican Senator Elwin Huffler. He’s the man who, during a debate on the anti-gay-marriage constitutional amendment, stood on the Senate floor and bragged that no one in his family had ever been divorced or had ever been a homosexual.”

Moore said, “Yeah, that’s Bud’s granddad. A piece of work.”

“Isn’t Bud ever tempted to make a liar out of that awful clown?”

“I don’t think so,” Moore said. “Bud just wants a life. Like the rest of us.”

“So he and Barry met in Denver and became pals?”

“They were boyfriends for a week or so, but the chemistry just wasn’t there for that and they decided to be friends instead. They got restaurant jobs, and when they got worried about Bud being tracked down by his family, both of them decided to change their identities and make a complete break from their old lives. Some of the illegal Mexicans they met in the restaurant where they worked showed them how to get fake IDs.”

I said, “It’s ironic that Congress – including Senator Huffler – is beside itself over all the aliens with phony papers, when remaking oneself has always been the quintessentially American act. It almost ought to be a requirement of citizenship.”

“Yeah, well.”

“Oh, sorry, Bill. You must have to take the FBI’s line on illegal immigration, you being a former agent and all.”

Moore did not take this opportunity to enlighten me on his Washington career, and I let it go for the moment.

Moore smiled weakly and said, “Don’t worry. I’m not going to turn them in.”

“You’re a regular fellow.”

“Barry and Bud were very fortunate in Denver,” Moore went on. “Somebody in the gay movement there put them in touch with the Hemmings Foundation, which arranges for college scholarships for smart, gay kids who are alienated from their families. So they both went to the University of Colorado, where they really thrived. Bud calls Boulder the Emerald City.”

“It must have seemed magical after… where? Oklahoma City? Tulsa?”

“Enid. Not so cosmopolitan as Tulsa.”

“And after college they came to the Berkshires?”

“They met some people in Boulder who’d gone to Simon’s Rock College in Great Barrington, and this area sounded to them like a place that was both civilized for gay people and a long way from their families. So they just drove their old truck here after graduation, and you know the rest.”