It's so unlike you. Maybe I could cheer you up in some familiar way."
"Thanks, lover, but Tylenol will have to do. What I really need is to go right to sleep."
"Tomorrow then."
"It's a plan."
Except, when I turned the lights out, I couldn't sleep. The whole ugly mess kept sloshing around in my aching head. I could hear the housewives sniping and puling in the next room. Didn't anybody who stayed in motels ever watch the Hallmark Channel? I turned on the TV in my room while the eleven o'clock news was on but didn't see or hear a thing. I was aware enough to know there was no local political news 139
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on, just car wrecks, fires, cats with cancer stories, weather—
rain was on the way—and baseball. I shut off the TV when Jay Leno came on but still couldn't sleep.
At a quarter to twelve, I got up, fired up my laptop and went over my notes. They were blurry and indistinct. Had I developed an ear infection that had spread to my brain? I wasn't feverish but I still felt ill and impaired. I gave up on the notes, turned off the bedside light and opened the college wrestler download, Humpy Mat Humpers. That was good for about ten minutes, leaving me even more exhausted and still wide awake.
A cell phone whose ring tone was Queen's We Are the Champions went off in the room on the other side of me—the housewives on my right had called it a night—and a woman's voice cried out with delight, "Junior!" Then Junior got an earful. Mom had gotten her hair tinted and Midge had had her baby, and I got an earful, too.
I turned on Leno, switched to Letterman, then to TCM.
Casablanca was on, and I recited the lines along with the actors. I had read recently that Bogart and Ingrid Bergman hadn't liked each other. She considered him boorish, he found her haughty—and this sad thought left me even more anxious and depressed.
When the movie ended, I started channel surfing and was clicking by a couple of religious channels when a phrase snagged my attention and I stopped. A wizened preacher with tanning-booth skin and a gray pompadour was telling a blond lady with a painted smile about something he called the Eddie Fund. As I listened, it became clear that this was a ministry 140
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whose purpose was to turn gay people straight through counseling and prayer. When the phone number viewers could call in order to make a donation was shown, I made a note of it. Just twenty-five dollars would make Jesus smile, viewers were told. Old JC and his famous lopsided grin.
Soon the preacher changed the subject, and I turned off the set. As I drifted into a restless sleep, I wondered why, when out-and-proud Log Cabin Republican Greg Stiver had died, mourners were asked to donate to a religious crackpot cure-a-gay organization. This made no sense, unless of course the person in charge of funeral arrangements had been Anson Stiver, the evil stepfather. Him, I had to meet.
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141
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Chapter Sixteen
Rain pounded down in drops the size of boccie balls. I cupped a hand over my injured ear and made it out to the car with my laptop and overnight bag. I got in and slammed the door.
Then I saw the note on the windshield. I climbed back out, grabbed the piece of sopping paper, and got back inside. The ink had run, but the handwritten two-word message was still legible. I'm sorry.
So Louderbush had shown up sometime during the night and left this apology? Presumably the note was his. Only two people knew where I was staying: Louderbush and Timmy. It seemed as if Louderbush had called off the Serbians, and he was trying to somehow deal with the repulsive mess he'd made, but he kept losing his nerve. I tried to work up some sympathy for him, but it was hard to find any.
I made a quick Dunkin' Donuts stop in Troy and headed back down the river to Albany, eating and drinking in the car, and trying to find any political news on the radio. WAMC had on a few local headlines; none mentioned Kenyon Louderbush or the gubernatorial campaign.
I thought about driving out to Hall Creek Community College, where Paul Podolski said Stiver had had a teaching job lined up, but I decided to wait until Monday. It seemed unlikely I'd find anybody out there willing and able to talk to me on a Saturday morning in June.
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Instead, I headed toward Schenectady. I had an address for Anson and Margery Stiver. I pulled into the breakdown lane and keyed the address into my GPS. Normally I would have done this while in motion—another distracted-driving asshole—but I still felt so crummy that I feared that any greater than usual distraction might end in calamity.
The Anson Stiver home in Schenectady was in one of the nicer neighborhoods in this sad-ass abandoned-by-GE old rust-belt town. Ridgemont Drive was probably where company managers and professional people had made their comfortable lives from the nineteen-teens up until the seventies, when the company moved south and way, way east. The Stivers' ample manse was fieldstone below, powder blue wood frame above, with white decorative shutters and a big white front door with a bronze knocker. The front lawn wasn't as well tended as others in the neighborhood, and the azaleas needed pruning.
A blue Chevy Suburban was parked in the driveway in front of the Stivers' unopened garage doors. I pulled in next to it and made a dash through the rain for the front door.
There wasn't much of an overhang, and after making a couple of noisy bangs with the knocker I stood as close to the door as I could without risking ending up nose-to-nose with whoever might suddenly appear. Nothing happened for the next two minutes, and my back and shoulders were getting wet. This was quite the passive-aggressive residential portal.
I knocked again and tried the doorbell, too. The mailbox next to the door appeared to be empty, but I didn't go poking around in it.
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The door swung open, and a woman who looked unprepared for guests stood peering out at me. She looked more rained on than I did. Her pale gray eyes were soft, but the face around them was an Okefenokee of channels and rivulets, the uneasily-lived-in middle-aged face of a woman who was beyond vanity out of choice or otherwise. She had on a pink terrycloth bathrobe, with another pink towel wrapped around her head. A few strands of wet gray hair stuck out from under the wrap.
"I thought this might be the cable people, or I wouldn't have answered it. You're not with Time Warner?"
"I'm sorry, no. I'm here about your son. I take it you're Margery Stiver?"
"About Hugh?" She looked frightened. "What about Hugh?
Is he all right?"
"Actually, Hugh is doing okay. I saw him yesterday. It's your late son, Gregory, I'd like to talk to you about if you have a few minutes. I apologize for barging in like this, Mrs.
Stiver."
She relaxed a little. "Where did you see Hugh? Did he say for you to come here?"
"No, he didn't. I didn't tell him I would be talking to you. I was asking him some things about Greg. May I come in for just a few minutes? I know you're expecting Time Warner." I showed her my ID.
"Oh. A private investigator?"