Strachey's Folly - Stevenson Richard - Страница 42

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LoBello affected a poker face and said, "Oh, yes. I did Betty." He was both trying hard not to grin and obviously en­joying letting us know that he was trying hard not to grin.

"And did you reprise your Betty Krumfutz routine Saturday afternoon at the AIDS quilt display? Maybe to draw extra atten­tion to the Suter quilt panel you sewed and submitted to the Names Project in order to embarrass Jim among his Capitol Hill friends, acquaintances, and colleagues?"

LoBello beamed. "Am I good, or am I good?"

Timmy and I looked at each other. I thought, yes, LoBello is an accomplished actor—as is Jim Suter.

Chapter 24

I needed to speak with Betty Krumfutz fast. I called her office at the Glenn Beale Foundation and was told that she had left Washington Thursday night for Log Heaven and would not be back in her office until Monday morning. I could have phoned her in Pennsylvania, but a face-to-face meeting was what I wanted. I needed to question her in depth, if I could, on what­ever it was that she had on her husband, Nelson, that would put him away "for the rest of his life," as she had worded it to me during my visit to Log Heaven, but which she had held back at his trial.

Did Mrs. Krumfutz hold incriminating evidence of the car-dealer-drug-smuggling scheme? If she knew about an illegal nar­cotics operation and didn't report it, that was obstruction of justice, at least. Although any knowledge Nelson Krumfutz had of his wife's variations on Mexican Indian rituals might have kept her from hitting him with a full legal whammy. But why, then, would it not have kept her from hitting him with any whammy at all?

Jim Suter had insisted to me that Mrs. Krumfutz knew noth­ing of the drug scheme. But now I knew that Suter had lied to me about the origins of the quilt panel—attributing it to the drug gang, even though he knew Carmen LoBello had made off with the Krumfutz campaign-bio manuscript—just as Suter had lied to me about the "zit" on his upper lip, a matter that Timmy had agreed to postpone discussing until the arguably larger ques­tions surrounding an attempted murder and a major drug-smuggling operation had been cleared up.

There was also the puzzling matter of the scandalous goings-on that Jim Suter had alluded to when he'd gotten high with Carmen LoBello. Revelations of a drug gang involving the husband of a Pennsylvania congresswoman would have made headlines certainly, although such news would not, as far as Timmy or I could judge, "rock the nation" or alter the outcome of the 1994 congressional elections. So, I figured, maybe the scandal was something else entirely, or even that it was just some weird type of inside-the-Beltway braggadocio on Suter's part.

Timmy was even more intrigued by the historic-scandal possibilities than I was, for they fit his theory of a large, many-tentacled conspiracy. I had been unable to persuade him that the D.C. police had us under clumsy surveillance simply because they were poorly led and lacked imagination, and that neither hospital personnel nor bagel-shop cashiers were threats to us. I agreed with him that drug gangs were ruthless forces to be reck­oned with, but that in Washington, unlike in Tijuana and Mexico City, the gangs' reach did not extend into every facet of official and private life. Timmy told me I was naive and I told him he was paranoid, and for the time being we decided to let it go at that.

I arrived in Log Heaven just after two on Friday afternoon and drove directly to the Krumfutz house on Susquehanna Drive. I saw the Chrysler in the driveway but no sign of the pickup truck with Texas plates. Five days earlier bagged leaves had been piled at the side of the Krumfutz lawn. Now the bags were gone, and the yard needed raking again. I guessed Mrs. Krumfutz had her yard crew in on weekends—both for tidying up outdoors and for heartrending rituals indoors—and since it was Friday after­noon, I wondered if her crew might be showing up soon.

I parked in front of the house, walked up to the front en­trance, and pressed the button next to a door with three small stepped windows in it. A face soon appeared at the lowest win­dow, and then the door swung open.

"Oh, for heaven sakes, what are you doing back here? I thought I was rid of you last—when was it? Sunday? And now here you are deviling me again. Well, you can just tell Nelson that if he sends you down here one more time, he has had it! He's got nothing criminal on me, and I've got the pictures in my scrapbook of him committing a felony, and I'll use them if I have to, believe you me!"

Mrs. Krumfutz stood glaring out at me in her pale pink sweat suit, and while she did not appear Mayan-queen-like at all, she did look as if she might rip my heart out if I said the wrong word.

I said, "Mrs. Krumfutz, I left a wrong impression on Sunday. I don't work for your husband."

"How's that? Come again?"

"I am a private investigator, but I'm actually looking into the danger Jim Suter is in, which I mentioned to you, and into the shooting of a friend of mine in Washington. I'm no threat to you. I have no interest in your personal life. I just need more in­formation about a couple of things. May I come in?"

Looking wary, she said, "Information about what?"

"About what you have on your husband that could send him to prison for life, as you put it to me on Sunday. Whatever you've got seems to be in addition to the campaign finance scam he's already been convicted of. Am I right?"

"You bet. Right as rain."

"Is it that you have evidence of the drug-smuggling opera­tion your husband was running with Hugh Myers?"

She screwed up her face and said, "The what operation?"

"Are you going to tell me that you know nothing of an elab­orate scheme that your husband and Hugh Myers concocted for smuggling narcotics into Central Pennsylvania from Mexico in the seat backs of the GM cars Myers imports?"

"Are you off your rocker!" Her eyes were bright with anger and her voice rose with indignation. "Why, Hugh Myers was a deacon in the Presbyterian Church! My word, don't be spreading a ridiculous story like that around Log Heaven, especially right now. Poor Hugh passed away this morning. He was hit by a car in front of his house on River Street, and the fool driver never even stopped. It was dreadful, just dreadful."

"I'm sorry to hear that. Were Mr. Myers and your family close?"

"No, not close. We're Methodist, and Nelson always bought Chrysler products. But I've known Hugh and Edna for years, and my heart goes out to that girl. It's a tragedy, just a tragedy. Now, where in the world did you get the idea that Nelson and Hugh were drug traffickers? Hugh would never even have thought to do such a thing, and Nelson couldn't even organize some campaign-fund pilfering and get away with it."

"So if it's not drug dealing that you've got on your husband, what is it?"

She signaled for me to enter the house. I followed her in and she shut the door behind us. The place was hung with Yu-catecan landscapes, and the shelves were loaded with Mexican pottery and photographs of Mayan ruins. Chichen Itza, Coba, and Uxmal were the ones I recognized. The furniture was old, overstuffed pieces draped with colorful scrapes. The picture-window drapes were open, and the view was across the Susque-hanna to the autumn hills beyond.

"Make yourself at home," Mrs. Krumfutz said, indicating the couch, and she disappeared down a corridor. I leafed through a magazine called South of the Border Living, which was aimed at U.S. retirees who lived or planned on living in Mexico. There were pieces on property ownership, tax dodges, and on keep­ing the help in line. Nothing on the reenactments of Indian ritu­als that employed beef hearts from the A & P. Or could Suter have been lying about that, too?

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