Death Trick - Stevenson Richard - Страница 9
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I'd met Truckman on several occasions, most recently at an early summer National Gay Task Force fund-raiser for which Truckman had donated the drinks, and he remembered me. I told him what I was doing. He stared hard at me for a few seconds, then slugged down a couple of ounces of whatever was in the glass he held and signaled for me to follow him.
We made our way past the disc jockey's glassed-in booth, turned, and went into an office with a thick metal door marked Private. I shut the door behind me. Truckman had been a bureaucrat with the New York Department of Motor Vehicles
before he'd opened his bar two years before, and he'd brought his tastes, or habits, of office decor with him: gunmetal gray desk, filing cabinet to match, steel shelving along the wall. The bass notes from the speakers outside the door bumped and reverberated into the little room and made the metal shelves sing.
I said, "I feel like I'm in the basement of the Reichschan-cellery. I hope you're not going to offer me a cyanide tablet."
The crack was ill-timed, and Truckman did not laugh. He sat behind his desk, made further use of his half-full glass of what smelled like bourbon, and I hoisted myself onto a stack of Molson's crates.
"Whadda you wanna know?" Truckman said in a boozy-gravelly voice. I'm cooperating with everybody on this thing, but I don't know what the hell else I can tell you. Christ, this fucking thing is just dragging on and on. Christ, I dunno. What am I sposed to do? Christ, I dunno. It's just a tragedy, that's what it is, just a fucking terrible, terrible tragedy."
He was drunk, and it had changed his personality from the one I knew. I remembered Truckman as a serious man, and sometimes agitated, but never morose and confused. I doubted that he'd made a habit of this. People who ran successful bars stayed sober. He brought a dirty white handkerchief out of his back pocket and mopped the sweat from his forehead and neck. He had a big, craggy face with a wide, expressive mouth and would have been matinee-idol handsome if it hadn't been for his eyes, which were cold gray and ringed with puffs of ashen flesh.
I said, "I'm sorry, Mike. I'm sure this is rough. Were you and Steve Kleckner close?"
"Whaddya mean, 'close'?" A sour, indignant look. "Sure, we were close, that's no secret. Christ, Steve looked up to me, you know? What I'm saying is, Steve respected me for how I was so up front about being gay and how I always did so much for the movement—one hell of a lot more than the other bar owners did, the assholes. Steve thought I had—Christ, you know— principles."
He grimaced. A rick of milkweed-color hair stuck out over one ear, and I wanted to pass him my comb.
I said, "I didn't know Steve. What was he like?"
He squeezed his eyes shut with his free hand. "A nice kid," Truckman said, shaking his head. "Oh, such a nice sweet kid Steve was. But—naive. God, was that kid naive! Steve was naive, but he was learning, though, right? Steve was young, but he was catching on. We all have ideals, right? But you've gotta be tough in the way you go about it. A means to an end, right?"
He was beginning to slur his words. I said, "Right."
More bourbon.
I said, "Mike, you're drunk."
He shook his head. "Nah, I'm drinking but I'm not drunk. Anyways, Floyd's out there, the doorman. Floyd can run the place if I feel like taking a drink. Floyd can do it, right?"
I nodded. I asked him why anyone would want to hurt Steve Kleckner.
He rolled his eyes at some imaginary companion off to my right. "Christ, how would I know the answer to that? You'll have to ask the sonovabitch who did it, right? If the goddamn cops ever catch up with the little shit."
"You mean Billy Blount?"
"Hey, the Blount guy did it, dinnee? I thought everybody knew that—the kid Steve left with here that night. With here. Here with."
"Did you know Blount?"
"Nah, but I saw it happen—saw Steve and that little shit turn on to each other. I mean, don't get me wrong, right? I was glad to see it, honest to Christ, I was. I was glad to see Steve being so up for a change. Christ, moping around here the way he was, I just wanted to pick Steve up and shake him."
"How come he'd been down?"
Truckman emptied his glass and brought a new bottle of Jim Beam from his desk drawer. He kicked the drawer shut and filled his glass as well as a second one. He said, "Join me."
"I've got a stein of your fifty-cent horse piss outside. Thanks, I'll stick with that. Why had Steve been depressed?"
"Dunno. Maybe his rose-colored glasses fell off." He drank.
For an instant I wondered if Kleckner had actually worn rose-colored glasses, like Gloria Steinem's. It wouldn't have been unprecedented at Trucky's.
I said, "Had he talked about it?"
"Nope, unh-unh." He poured the drink for me that I'd declined.
"Had you ever seen Steve with Blount before?"
"Not that I remember. The cops asked me that. Fucking cops."
"Why 'fucking'?"
"Oh, you know, Don. You should know. Cops."
"Have they been hassling you?"
"Nothing to speak of. Drink up."
"Vigorish?"
"Nah. They fucking hadn't better try."
"What did you tell the cops about that night?"
"What all I knew, why shouldn't I? That Steve and the Blount kid danced, and horsed around, and left about an hour before closing. Shit, Steve could of done a lot better than that kid, a fucking lot better. And now look what happened! It's just a tragedy, that's what it is, a fucking terrible, terrible tra-guh-dee."
His eyes were wet, and he tugged out the hankie and wiped his face. Then, more bourbon. He said, "Don, you're not drinking."
I sipped. "Do you ever wish you'd stayed with the state, Mike? You had a nice neat, clean life down there."
He snorted messily. "Hah, that's all you know! At the department it was everything but murder. Hell, no! I'm doing what I wanna do, Don. And no way—no way—am I gonna lose it, right? You wouldn't. No way, baby."
I said, "Business looks good."
"Yeah. S'good." He gazed down morosely at his drink.
"I want to talk to your bartender after closing."
"S'up to them. Floyd'll be locking up. I'm cuttin' out at four."
"Heavy date?"
"H-yeah. Real heavy."
"The cute number in the witty jersey?"
"Nah," Truckman said. "Not him. He's for later." He shut his eyes and laughed bleakly at some private joke.
"Well, I suppose you could do worse." "Oh, I do-ooo do worse." He gulped down the rest of his drink. "I sho nuff do. Hey. Don. How 'bout a drink?"
I guessed Truckman knew more about Steve Kleckner's recent life than he'd told me, but he was in no condition to be reasoned with, or pressured, or led. After Truckman's office the stench of smoke, poppers, and hot sweat outside it was a field of golden daffodils. I found Timmy at the bar talking—shouting— to a sandy-haired man of about thirty in a plaid flannel shirt.
Timmy leaned up to my ear and yelled, "I've got one!"
"One what?"
"One friend of Billy Blount's. Don, this is Mark Deslonde. Mark, Don Strachey."
He had soft brown eyes, a fuzzy full beard, neatly trimmed, and a tilt to his head that was angled counter to the slant of his broad smile. I didn't know whether he practiced this in front of a mirror, but it was devastating, and if Timmy hadn't been there it would have had its effect on me. Not that it didn't, a little.
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