Gossip (29 page)

The long stillness was broken by the sob of a pipe organ. The front doors opened and six men squeezed through with a glossy black box. The sight threw me. Everyone else I knew had been cremated, but Bill was being buried whole. The pallbearers stopped to reposition their grip of the heavy coffin, and it made death real. Again. Was that why I needed to come? For yet another fix of death to get my bearings in the confusion of lawyers and newspapers? Other mourners followed, including Bill’s parents. We were too far away to see the pallbearers’ faces, but, among the young men who must have been cousins and friends from school, I recognized the squat shape of Jeb Weiss. The coffin disappeared into the hearse. Gaudy sprays of flowers were placed inside, and I remembered a gift of roses.

“Seen enough?” said Nancy.

“No. Let’s go to the cemetery. Don’t worry. I won’t talk to anyone. I can pay my respects from a distance.”

There was no cortege behind the hearse and limo. We followed a car with two pallbearers and their girlfriends to a new cemetery five miles away. A treeless slope beside a golf course, it was barely distinguishable from the fairway, the lawn looped with lanes, the memorial stones in isolated patches. We parked a hundred yards uphill from the burial marquee. The hearse and cars gathered below. I got out and wandered to the nearest markers, pretending to visit my own family plot. Nancy joined me.

“Nothing to see, Ralph. Just another stinking funeral.”

“But at least there’s one homo saying good-bye to him today.”

I’d forgotten how formal and impersonal straight funerals can be. Generic organ music played on tape. I drifted down the hill to the next family of stones, then the next, bowing my head like a passerby paying his respects, clasping my hands exactly as I’d clasped them that morning in handcuffs.

Nancy caught up and wrapped her arm in mine, gently preventing me from going closer. We’d come down far enough to have a clear view under the marquee twenty yards away. The pallbearers had set the coffin in a bed of flowers, a black box like an idea of death, a geometry of death, Bill reduced to a piece of furniture. The priest in white smock and black skirt shook water from his fingers and delivered the last words. A trio of colored specks pursued their golf balls in the distance.

I noticed Ren Whitaker carefully tiptoeing behind the mourners outside the tent. A pack of men in similar haircuts and glasses must all have been from
American Truths.
I saw Jeb Weiss again, his arm around Bill’s mother at the coffin. She held her head straight, her gloved hands at her chest in a fist of prayer. Her pink suit and veiled hat suggested an ancient memory of Jackie Kennedy. Mrs. O’Connor’s grief was genuine, yet she displayed it as carefully as she displayed her living room at night in its open curtains. Weiss supported and comforted her, although Big Bill looked like he was in more need of consoling. He stood behind them, his shoulders shaking, his horn-rimmed face twisted with crying, as overly emotional as his son once told me he was. I was stabbed by the sentimental regret that Bill would never know how deeply his father mourned him.

A motor whirred; the casket sank in the flowers. Good-bye, I thought, but it gave me no release, no conclusion. My timing was permanently off. I could cry on a plane in FBI custody but not at a funeral. I seemed to have come today in hopes of finishing with Bill before I went on with my other wars.

Weiss steered Mrs. O’Connor out of the tent into the sun, her face dry, stony, stunned. Passing around the ropes supporting the marquee, they walked toward us for a few paces, and Weiss saw me. He lowered his bushy eyebrows and lifted his indignant chin beard. His eyes burned a hole in me.

I politely nodded.

He tightened his frown, signaling I was not to come over. Bill’s mother felt him staring and looked up. She gazed blankly for a moment, then sadly nodded and, before going the way Weiss turned her,
smiled.
She remembered me. She must not have known that the fellow her son had brought by the house one night was his accused murderer. Mr. O’Connor followed, too busy with horn-rims, handkerchief and tears to notice anything.

Nancy tugged at my arm. “Let’s go. This is creeping me out.”

But I remained there, shaken by a mother’s oblivious smile. Then I noticed Ren Whitaker looking at us as he strutted toward the cars. His mouth came open. He didn’t stop but changed course and swung toward us. “Excuse me! Excuse me!” he called out, although Nancy and I weren’t going anywhere.

“Yes?” I played impassive and innocent.

He stood in front of us, looking me up and down. “Dear Lord. It really is you.” He glanced back to see where the others were. “What’re you doing here? You’re supposed to be in jail.”

“I posted bail this morning.”

He righteously drew himself up. “Do you have no sense of decency? Haven’t you brought enough pain to this family without coming here? Do you have to add insult to injury?”

“If
you
killed someone, would
you
go to their funeral?”

He gave me a startled, skeptical look. It was not just a rhetorical question, was it? He shook his head. “I just hope his family didn’t see you. Because they’re heartbroken.
Heartbroken.”
He stormed off, not toward the limo with Weiss and the O’Connors but toward his own car.

Nancy and I started up the hill. “Ren Whitaker knows you?” She sounded as if she’d been holding her breath. “Thank God he didn’t know who I was. Lucky for me no Senate people came. But I should’ve known this thing would be lousy with cons and fundies.”

I was still weighing the question I’d asked Whitaker. “Would the killer come to the funeral?” I asked her.

“Is that why you had to make an appearance?” she said scornfully. “To prove to those assholes you’re innocent?”

“Not me. One of them.”

Now it was her turn to stare. “No, Ralph. No. Forget it.”

And it was such a cold, cruel twist: the real murderer giving sympathy to Bill’s parents. Neither of us said anything until we got into the car.

“Look,” said Nancy. “I don’t like those people either. But I meet with them and know them and they’re not gangsters. They’re no more likely to kill in cold blood than we are. They kill with neglect or capital punishment, but they don’t do it themselves.”

“They could’ve hired someone”—my tired old solution.

She angrily started the engine and put it in gear. “Why? Because your pal came out?” she sneered.

“You’re the one who thought her life would be ruined by a footnote.”

“But I’d never kill for something like that. And neither would they. Jeb Weiss is a big game-player whose only concern is playing power broker and getting tax breaks for Texas billionaires. Ren Whitaker watches his ass so carefully he won’t even admit he works for Pat Robertson, much less risk his future by arranging a killing. And the Republican Party is full of homos. Nobody cares, Ralph. Being gay is not the sin of sins, the be-all and end-all.”

“Why’re you defending them?”

“I’m not defending them! I’m defending you. Because if you start hurling charges, you’re going to ruin your case and go to prison for sure. After seeing you dressed like a convict this morning, I can’t bear the thought of that.” She had to swallow a thickness in her voice. “You’re paranoid. Which is understandable after what you’ve been through. But it’s insane thinking and you have to let go of it.”

“So who killed him?” I demanded.

“I don’t know! All I know is you didn’t. You were with me. Why not a pickup? Like the police first said. Another trick. Is that it? You hate to think he was fucking someone else?”

“I don’t care who he was fucking. I just want to know who did it and stuck the crime on me.”

Nancy was silent for a moment. “They don’t have to be the same person. They don’t even have to be connected. Circumstance and bad luck, and you put yourself right in the middle of it. Would that be too hard to accept?”

“No. It’s too easy,” I admitted. “It feels cowardly to call it bad luck, like I got caught in the rain.”

“You want it to mean something, Ralph. You want it all tied up in a neat explanation. The chances of that are nil. Accept that or you’re going to make yourself crazy.”

“Maybe I am crazy. But maybe paranoia is wisdom here.”

“No. Your paranoia is only shock and grief and God knows what else. You saw them back there. Do you really think one of them engineered the whole thing?” I angrily turned away from her. “No. I don’t.” Because I’d looked into the eyes of two men I wanted to believe were responsible and had seen no guilt, nothing monstrous, only concern for the surviving family and shock with my bad manners. The They that had seemed so plausible my first night in jail became an It again in daylight when I couldn’t give the enemy a human face.

I
RETURNED TO NEW
York that evening. I wanted to get back to my life. The phantom machinery that had brought me here didn’t care how I got home. I had to borrow money from Nancy for the train.

An accused murderer had two seats to himself in a crowded Amtrak car; my first person now carried a third-person singular wherever I went.

The New York subway was loud and shrill when I arrived, like a knife factory, as if I’d been away for months. Coming up the stairs of my building, I expected yellow police tape on my door, but the door was blank. The apartment seemed changed, however, as if robbed. Everything was here but with its familiarity stripped away by the FBI’s visit. Strange voices filled my answering machine: reporters wanting to talk, a lawyer with an 800 number offering his services. The last voice sounded familiar: “Nick here. I just spoke to Nancy and heard the good news. You’re probably still badly shaken, but don’t despair. We’re all behind you. You have many options. Call when you get in.”

The accused murderer called nobody that night. He opened his windows to air the strangeness from his room, then sat on a sill to assure himself that interiors and exteriors connected here. I looked out on the Gothic twists of ailanthus trees not yet in bud, the half-moon over the chimney pots and water tanks, the bright windows ranged up and down the alley with security bars that made each home look like a cell.

I went to work the next day, walking the long blocks I’d walked a thousand times. I entered the store with a casual, ironic lope, sarcastically pretending nothing had happened. Erica snapped to attention at the cash register; Robert and Lucy did a frightened double take across the room. People couldn’t have been more startled if I’d returned from the dead.

Striding toward the back of the store, I saw Peter look up in his cubbyhole. He sat very still, his gaze softening as I approached. He jumped up, threw back the counter and came out. “Oh baby,” he said and embraced the murderer.

Of course. Peter would understand. A murder charge was like illness. I held him for a moment, feeling the poke of the catheter in his chest, like a spigot in his heart.

“I was afraid we’d never see you again.” He brushed his hand down my spine and patted my ass. “But here you are.”

“I gather word is out.”

“Oh yeah. You better believe it.” He led me downstairs, as if I might have forgotten the way. “Look who’s here,” he announced.

“Hey hey!” Alec cried. “The man! Free at last. Free at last. Back from the room with striped sunshine,” he laughed.

“Back from the gulag,” I said, trying to joke with him, surprised by his ability to find humor here, wondering at his sudden fondness for me.

“Saved you something,” he said, reaching into his nook under the worktable. He proudly slapped down two
New York Posts.

No wonder people knew. I was half of Tuesday’s front page. The grim airport photo appeared beside the headline “Pundit Killer Nabbed.” Death had promoted Bill; “pundit” had fewer letters than “journalist.”

I never dreamed the story would reach New York. It was the same story as the one in the
Washington Times,
shortened, paragraphs reshuffled. I rated only a box on Wednesday’s front page, but inside was a news feature titled “Strange Bedfellows.”

“Your fifteen minutes,” said Peter dryly.

“You got thirty seconds on CNN,” chirped Alec. “I taped it if you’d like to see it.”

The Wednesday piece included a college yearbook photo of Bill, wholesome and insipid, alongside a close-up of my airport photo, more sinister than ever when enlarged. “Eckhart: ‘A queer and present danger,’” said the caption. The pun that was dumbly funny when Nancy and I coined it months ago had been recoined by Rush Limbaugh on the radio; the
Post
found it too clever not to repeat.

Again, what facts they cited were true—my City Hall arrest, my Southern origin, my blue-collar-sounding job—yet the absence of so many other facts—my English degree, for one—suggested an uneducated, redneck queer. There were more quotes from Nick, and even one from Alec. “Alec Stevenson, a co-worker at Left Bank Books, said Eckhart seemed normal enough. ‘A serious worker whose only real interest outside his job was sex.’”

“I said
‘books
and sex,’” Alec insisted. “Honest. And other stuff, but they didn’t use it.”

“What’s in today’s paper?”

“Just a teeny item about you being let out.”

“Your fifteen minutes are up,” Peter noted.

“So it’s over? You’re free?” said Alec.

I explained how I was only out on bail but that my lawyers hoped to get the charges dismissed.

“Great,” said Alec. I couldn’t tell if he was pleased I wouldn’t go to prison or that it wasn’t quite finished. He treated my fame as an exciting diversion, a harmless farce.

Peter leaned against the worktable on one elbow, his long hand drooped over the edge, looking concerned.

“They didn’t interview
you?”
I said.

“They tried. But I told them to get lost.”

I felt grateful for his simple no. “You still think murder is more human?”

He frowned guiltily. “But it is. For us jaded bystanders.”

The office door at the rear of the basement suddenly opened. Elaine had heard us. “Ralph?” she said. “You’re back?”

“That’s what they tell me.”

She offered awkward condolences, then asked me to step into her office. Peter made a face, wondering what this was about.