Strachey's Folly - Stevenson Richard - Страница 41

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"You're still quite lovely, Carmen," I said sincerely.

"Thanks, but I'll never be Liddy Dole again. Do you think Liddy Dole would leave her apartment looking like this? Oh, no. 'No. Thanks,' the great lady of the Red Cross would say, 'but no thanks.' I mean, did Clara Barton have herpes? I don't believe so."

"Don't cold sores tend to come and go?" Timmy said. "I know people with herpes of that type, and they'll sometimes go for months without a sore breaking out."

LoBello gave Timmy a duh look and said, "Timothy, honey, do you know what makes cold sores break out?"

"I've heard fatigue can do it. And of course stress."

LoBello grimaced theatrically and said, "Say no more. Also, it's not just that Suter gave me herpes. It's that, like everything else, he lied about the sore on his lip when we went to bed. He said it was just some dumb zit. I told him, 'Honey, you better stay away from those candy bars.' Later, when I broke out with this grotesque thing on my lip, and I caught up with Jim and made him admit to the truth, he not only confessed. He admitted to me that he himself had picked up the viais from rimming some clos­eted right-wing queen on Jesse Helms's staff who had anal her­pes. God, if I ever run into Helms, I'd love to plant a big, wet one on that ugly kisser of his."

Timmy was staring at my mouth. I said, "I can appreciate, Carmen, why you might be upset about this."

"Upset? That hardly describes how I feel about James Suter."

"And I can see why you're determined to track Jim down."

"My latest tactic," LoBello said, leaning closer to me and lowering his voice, "has been trying to smoke Jim out by using what I have to admit is a kind of tasteless stunt." He glanced quickly around the cafe and, his face flushed, said, "I know you know about a panel in the AIDS quilt with Jim's name on it, even though as far as I know he's not dead. He doesn't even have AIDS or HIV."

"We're aware of the quilt panel," I said.

"I know you are. I saw you looking at it on Saturday."

"Uh-huh."

"Well—I did it. I made and submitted the quilt panel in memory of Mr. Suter." LoBello grinned nervously and fluttered his eyelashes.

"You did this to smoke Jim out?"

"Yes, and it's been all over the media. I thought, if I can't find Jim, maybe the press can. Although they haven't so far ap­parently. Anyway, I knew he'd hear about it, and it was a way of telling Jim exactly what I thought of him. I'm sure he knows who did it."

I said, "Why is that, Carmen?"

"Because I took one of his old manuscripts out of his apart­ment the last time I was in it, and I kept it, and in May I sewed pages from the manuscript into the quilt panel. I took the man­uscript in the first place because I thought there was some dirt in it that I could use against Jim, though it turned out there wasn't. It was just his Betty Krumfutz campaign biography—a piece of cheap political hackery. But I stuck it on the quilt panel to humiliate Jim—and maybe to fuck him up professionally, the way he did me—and to lower him in the eyes of his good pal and onetime employer, that obnoxious right-wing Republican witch, Betty Krumfutz."

With a feeling that was not yet sinking but was poised to de­scend, I began to wonder why Suter had told me thirty-six hours earlier that he guessed the quilt panel had been a menacing stunt perpetrated by the drug gang to keep him in line. If he knew LoBello had possession of his Krumfutz campaign-bio manuscript, and Sweet and Heckinger were keeping him up-to-date on Washington developments, he would surely have fin­gered LoBello, the angry ex-lover with sewing skills who wanted to sue him, as the quilt-panel creep. Yet Suter had apparently lied to me about the quilt panel and what he must have known about it.

I asked LoBello, "What made you think the Krumfutz man­uscript might have had dirt in it that you could use against Jim? What kind of dirt?"

LoBello smirked, but uneasily. "This is quite intimate. It in­volves pillow talk between me and Jim. Can you take it?"

"Mm-hm."

"Right after Jim and I met," LoBello said, lowering his voice again, "when things were hot and heavy between us, we were in bed sharing a joint one night while I was running my fingers through that gorgeous head of hair of Jimmy's. Jim started to tell me how much our relationship meant to him because it took his mind off something big and important in his life that had been gnawing at him. He dumped me two weeks later—the big pud­dle of puke—but that night I had brought peace to his soul, Jim told me, and I helped him get centered at a time when he needed that more than ever. Jim said he knew things about cer­tain well-known people that would rock Washington and rock the country. That's how he put it: 'rock Washington and rock the whole country.'"

LoBello sipped his latte, dabbed his lips with a napkin, and as Timmy and I watched and listened with mounting interest, he continued, "Naturally, I asked Jim, what's this thing that's so earthshaking? But he wouldn't tell me. Which was unusual. Jim loved dropping names and dishing people on the Hill—who's fucking whom, metaphorically and actually and whatnot. This big thing was a Hill thing, he said, that might have changed the outcome of the '94 congressional elections if it had gotten out.

"I could tell that Jim was actually quite scared of this big, scandalous whatever it was, and he never brought it up again. But when I suddenly realized one night a couple of weeks later that it -was my turn to get dumped on my ass by Jim Suter, I re­membered this conversation, and as I was on my way out, I grabbed the first thing on Jim's desk that looked like some kind of Hill papers, and I stuffed it in my bag. I went over the damn thing with a fine-tooth comb, and all it was, was the stupid campaign-bio manuscript. What a waste of time, and what a bore. But I kept the thing, even after Jim called all irritated and indignant and demanded that I mail it back to him, and then in May I sewed a chunk of the stupid thing on the quilt panel. So I got to use it to stick Jim and give the knife a twist after all."

I said, "When did this conversation about the scandalous sit­uation take place?"

"In January of this year. Around the tenth or twelfth, it would have been. On the twenty-seventh I became another of Jim's ex-lover nonpersons. I guess you've heard about that cat­egory. There are hundreds of us. Thousands maybe."

"Did Jim give you any idea of when the shocking event, or events, actually took place?" I asked.

"Not really. Only that it was on his mind at the time, and he said he'd be lucky if he didn't come out of this one with an ulcer."

"You said, Carmen, that you were sharing a joint when this thing came up. Is it possible that drugs were involved in the scandalous circumstances? And that your smoking marijuana somehow triggered Jim's discussion of this large matter that was eating at him?"

LoBello gave me a don't-be-ridiculous look. "Honey, we shared a joint just about every night. Both before and after we made love. And making love with Jim Suter is about as good as making sweet love gets. You can take my word for that and put it in the bank. It's just too bad Jim was also a liar, an emotional sadist, and a morally empty shell. Except for those, he was the best. But he was all of the above, and worse. And for doing what he did to me, Miss LoBello regrets to say, Mr. Suter is going to have to pay. He's going to have to pay very dearly."

I said, "Carmen, among the Washington power-women you impersonated in your drag act—and impersonated quite bril­liantly, by all accounts—was one of them Betty Krumfutz?"

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