Reverend Felson and his gang left town on their own and returned to Kansas, declaring Berkshire County irretrievably in Satan’s grip. He declared to the Eagle, “You can smell the sulfur from Sheffield to Williamstown!” Cheap Maloney was convicted of murder, and Michael Sturdivant got forty years for conspiracy to commit murder. Thorne Cornwallis, who led the prosecution, was reelected in November with his usual seventy percent of the vote.
Steven Gaudios did testify against Michael and then went into the Witness Protection Program. He changed his name, and no one in the Berkshires ever knew where he went or what became of him. Jim Sturdivant was buried in his family’s plot in St. Joseph ’s cemetery in Pittsfield. At trial, Thorny did not mention his brother’s motive for having Jim rubbed out, and Michael wasn’t about to bring it up, either. Michael was convicted on Steven’s testimony and by Cheap Maloney’s ratting him out.
In the Eagle story on the Mount Carmel anti-gay demonstration and mobster round-up, the Jim Sturdivant is Going to Homo Hell sign was mentioned. But all the people quoted in the story – Sturdivant family members, Mount Carmel parishioners, a priest – said they had no idea what that sign meant, and they said Reverend Felson must have had Jim mixed up with somebody else.
Barry Fields regained his freedom and his equilibrium but never entirely lost the anger and fear that came from his being a renegade from the Felsons. He remained in Great Barrington and married Bill Moore, who paid me my fee. Moore was flush, for I had suggested to Gaudios that decency required his canceling Moore ’s hot-tub debt, and he did so. Moore kept his FBI secret, and he stayed sad and drank a little too much. But he and Fields had each other, and that was quite a bit.
Timmy and I joined Murano, Morley, Ramona Furst, Bud Radziwill, Jean Watrous, and Barry and Bill six months later at Myra Greene’s retirement party. She looked around the room at one point and croaked, “This looks like the cast of Casablanca . I’ve never seen so many people with secrets in one place before. God, I can barely remember who’s really who in here.”
People laughed nervously, and then Fields said, “I think it’s more like Meet Me in St. Louis, Myra – when the plans are canceled to move to New York, and the whole family gets to stay in St. Louis, and we know Judy’s going to hop in the sack with Tom Drake.”
“And marry him,” Timmy added, and we all drank to that.