Late Sunday night, back on Crow Street, barely un-bitten by dogs and still bordering on the desperate, I considered how the precious little I had left to go on was Vernon Crockwell himself. Vengeance had been done to him
– "tortured" was one word St. James had used-and it was so awful (so humiliating?) that Crockwell didn't dare report the incident, even though it was a crime, an imprisonable offense.
So Haig had tried to blackmail Crockwell? And Crockwell, whose reputation was everything to him, killed Haig?
And tried to kill Bierly? And did that mean St. James was next? I'd forgotten to warn him. Though all that seemed less and less likely now anyway. Approached with a blackmail attempt, Crockwell probably would simply have told Haig to buzz off. And Bierly, of course, had been telling me all along that I was off base and on the wrong track connecting the St. James-Haig-Bierly-Crockwell incident to Haig's death, or even to any blackmail attempt at all.
Yet Bierly did try to implicate Crockwell himself in Haig's death. That's what he had tried to hire me to prove.
Timmy was asleep when I climbed into bed, and I wanted to chew it all over with him. But he needed his rest on account of working for a living, unlike me, so I lay for some hours going over it in my mind and awaiting a blinding insight. But by three A.M., the last time I checked the clock, the only thing I had produced was some drool on the pillow.
Monday morning, first thing, I called Crockwell's machine-I had nowhere else to turn until after I met with Paul Haig's Ballston
Spa psychiatrist that evening-and left this message: "Hi, Vernon, Don Strachey here. I know about your evening with Bierly and Haig and Steven St. James in January. You have my sympathy, but we do need to talk. You talk to me, or I talk to Al Finnerty. Take your choice. Call me."
Timmy, just out of the shower, said, 'You were a little bit abrupt with Group Commander Crockwell. What was that about?"
I described my evening with Steven St. James and its tantalizing, incomplete revelations.
Timmy said, "I wonder what they did to him. Do you think they could have raped him or something? That's what it sounds like."
"St. James says no, they'd never do a vicious thing like that. Anyway, rapists tend to have histories of being violent, and none of these guys do, that I know of."
"I'll bet it had something to do with their being gay, though, and the psychotherapy group. Let the punishment fit the crime."
"Whatever it is, Crockwell is apparently so determined to keep it from coming out that he'll risk being charged with Bierly's shooting, or even Paul Haig's murder."
"You're not still planning on ruining Crockwell, are you? Even if he wasn't mixed up in Haig's death or Bierly's shooting? It does sound as if he may have suffered enough."
"Suffered, yes, but he's still operating his rotten, destructive business. Anyway, no. I'm beginning to suspect that there may be ways other than ruination to remove Vernon T. Crockwell as a social menace."
"Just to be on the safe side, maybe you'd better run those ideas by me first."
He ambled by me, naked, en route to his outfit-of-the-day, nicely laid out the night before across his personal ironing board.
"Maybe I will run my ideas by you, or maybe I'll just run them up your leg. Like this."
He hated being late for work, but once in a while he made an exception. He hopped off the bed half an hour later, reshowered, and sped off to the office of Assemblyman Myron R. Lipshutz (D-New York City), for whom Timmy was chief legislative aide. And I drifted off and slept till one. It was lucky I woke up then, for I had slept through a call from Vernon Crockwell. His message on my machine said he could see me at three in his office, and I called his machine immediately to confirm the appointment.
"I hope you're not going to mention this perfectly idiotic blackmail business to the police, Donald. It will just fuel their misguided suspicions that I was involved in Larry Bierly's shooting or even Paul Haig's death. My attorney has managed to convince the district attorney that the evidence against me is entirely circumstantial and it's obvious that someone who doesn't care for me or my principles is attempting to frame me. But the blackmail idea will only get the police stirred up again, and that would be to the advantage of no one except the vicious deviant who is behind all of this."
"But Vernon," I said, "what we've finally come up with is a powerful and entirely plausible motive for Paul Haig's murder. Blackmail makes sense. And Paul's mother says he admitted to her-rubbed her nose in it, actually-that that's what he was attempting just before he died: the blackmail of somebody with enough money to pull Paul back from the brink of bankruptcy."
Crockwell sniffed. He was seated across his desk from me before his framed certificates in normalcy studies and his library of sexual normaliana. Both his hands were up within sight, a sign maybe that I had earned a degree of trust.
He said, "But I was not the person Paul was blackmailing. I repeat, I was not the person Paul was blackmailing.
Once again: I was not the person Paul was blackmailing. Can you grasp what I am saying, Donald?"
"Yes, Vernon, but the question remains, Were you the person Paul was blackmailing?"
He wasn't used to this, it was obvious. One hand went back down behind his desk, and I doubted he was reaching for his checkbook. He said, "Donald, you obviously have nothing to offer me in this matter, or to the cause of truth. I agreed to see you today only because you claim to have some information about me that you seem to think I may consider embarrassing. I suppose you think you're blackmailing me. Perhaps that's it-perhaps you are involved in some type of odious blackmail scheme."
"That's a whole new slant, Vernon. Maybe it's me I should be sniffing around. You're a genius."
"Well, you'll not blackmail me."
"What was it like?" I said gravely, and watched him.
He reddened and looked away. After a moment, he said, "Well, what do you think it was like, Donald?"
"They did it right here in your own office?"
"Of course. The equipment is here."
And I thought, Oh, the equipment, yes, the equipment. I said, "It was a Thursday night, right, Vernon? So Paul and Larry both knew you would be here alone."
"Yes." He was unable to look at me.
Now the question was, Who or what had they tried to turn him on to? I said, "Did they bring their own-what?
Photos? Slides?"
He glanced at me quickly and seemed to relax a degree or two, as if I had missed something critical and especially humiliating. He said, "Steven St. James provided the slides."
Of course. Mellors. I remembered a visit Timmy and I had made to the Hudson Valley Game Farm several years earlier with Timmy's sister and her children. Recollections of the petting zoo came flooding back.
I said, "What were the the pictures of? Sheep?"
Crockwell shuddered violently once, then gave me a despairing little nod.
"They tied you up? Gagged you?"
"Yes," he squeaked.
"They wired you into your own setup-where is it, down the hall, behind those closed doors?"
"Yes."
"They wired you into your own Frankenstein's lab setup for zapping the bejesus out of men when they respond sexually to other men, and they-what? Zapped you when slides of Playboy bunnies came on and then they shut off the juice when slides of sheep came on?"
Now he looked up at me desperately. "Female sheep," he bleated.
"Well, sure. They knew you weren't a pervert."
"No. No, the whole thing could have been worse." At this, he quickly looked away, and I began to wonder.
I said, "It was a brutal thing for them to have done to you, Vernon. Whatever foul deeds you may have committed against gay men in that room over the years, none of it was as vicious as what was done to you by Bierly, Haig, and St. James on that night last January."
"No, no. You can't even begin to understand what it was like, Donald."
"But were you…? You know."
"Was I what?"
"Weren't you turned on, Vernon, just a little?"
"Of course not!" he snapped.
"My God, Vernon," I said, "do you mean to tell me that your system doesn't work? That in fact you can't change a man's sexual orientation with dirty pictures and electrodes and lightning storms? Wait till this gets out."
"Don't be absurd. Sexual reparative therapy using aversion techniques requires dozens of hours over a long period of time to achieve lasting results. Moreover, having intercourse with a sheep is not a natural human desire."
"I've heard from friends who grew up on farms that it can be quite pleasant, though."
Being a town boy, I guessed, Crockwell just glared.
I said, "Why didn't you call the police? After they left, I mean. How long did this go on, anyway?"
"From 10:40 P.M. until 1:45 A.M. It was endless, endless."
"I'm sure it was, Vernon. You must have been both mortified and terrified. What was done to you was a felonious criminal assault. So, why didn't you have the three of them prosecuted?"
He glowered and even shook a little. "Can you imagine the- the television coverage of such a trial?"
"Yes, I can."
"I would have been a laughingstock. My patients would have-lost confidence in me."
"It's like the old joke," I said. "A man running for sheriff in Texas wants to spread the rumor that his opponent fucks pigs. A campaign worker says, 'Why do that? It's not true.' 'No, it isn't,' the candidate says, 'but let's make him deny it.' Just being mentioned in a conversation about bestiality is bad for business, and being mentioned in this regard every night at six and eleven between the killer-mom stories and the Lotto drawing would pretty much end a man's professional usefulness in Albany, I would guess. I can understand your reticence, Vernon-although I'm not sure I would have been so forbearing in the matter myself. In fact, I'd have been left with feelings that were downright murderous."
He said, "Of course you would. I had such feelings too. I'm only human."
"But you didn't act on those feelings, Vernon?"
"No, Donald," he said. "I am not a murderer." He looked me in the eye when he said it, and he looked to me as if he either was telling the truth or was a total psychopath.
"You say Haig never tried to blackmail you. What would you have done, Vernon, if he had? What if Paul had come to you and said, 'Pay me sixty thousand dollars or I'll spread pictures around of you involved in what will look to a lot of people like some kind of ritual involving sadomasochistic bestiality'?"
"I'd have told him to take his sordid business elsewhere. First, there are no pictures. No one had a camera that night.
Second, if Paul had spread the story of the incident, I would simply have denied it."
"That would have damaged your campaign for sheriff, Vernon."
"I wasn't running for sheriff, Donald. I'm a respected psychotherapist and Paul Haig was an alcoholic and a sexual deviant. In any case, I can't imagine Paul Haig attempting to blackmail me by threatening to make public an incident in which his-not mine but his -involvement was criminal."
I kept being reminded of that. I said, "You've got a point, Vernon. But Paul Haig was blackmailing someone, and then he was killed. The probability is high that the relationship between the two events is cause-and-effect."
"This may be true, but I think you need to look into Paul's life of depravity for your answers, not my life of professional integrity and Christian probity."
What a pill. I said, "How come for a while you were desperate to hire me, Vernon, to get you off the hook with the cops, and then you changed your mind?"
He blushed again. "I was acting irrationally for a period of time. I was too emotional." He blushed some more.
I said, "You were trying to buy me off. You knew Bierly was trying to sic me on you, and you knew I detested the savage things you were doing to men in your crackpot practice. So you thought that for money I could be turned into your ally instead of your adversary. But then you saw that my aim was to dig out the truth at any cost on Paul's death and Larry's shooting, and I wasn't going to care what I dredged up in the process-your going into training for sheep fucking and whatnot-and you decided you had better take your chances with mere legal representation and Norris Jackacky's chummy relations with the DA, and I could take a hike. Am I right?"
"Donald," he said mildly, "you could not be more wrong. My overture to you was sincere. I believed my best hope was to have Larry's assailant identified and charged-and Paul's, if there was one. And I believed, based on what Norris had told me, that you were the best man to do the job. The Albany Police Department is not as effective in these matters as it might be. It was as simple as that."
"Then why did you change your mind?"
"Well-on the advice of my attorney. He decided that your involvement was-redundant." He was blushing again, of all things.
I said, "I don't believe you, Vernon. Your suddenly distancing yourself from me had something to do with your night of woolly eroticism."
He shook his head. "No."
"Yes."
"No."
"What is it? There's more to the sheep story."
"No, there is not more to the sheep story."
"Anyway, how did they get up here that Thursday night? Doesn't the building have security?"
"There's no guard. I buzzed them in. Paul phoned me and feigned a mental breakdown. I was skeptical but let my compassion for a former patient whom I thought of as a lost sheep-lost soul-interfere with my better judgment.
And I buzzed the door open from my office without knowing precisely who was going to arrive. It was a very great mistake that I will never, ever make again."
"Not exactly, I suppose. I think there's still a part of this you're not telling me, Vernon. Something you badly did not want me to uncover, and that's why you left a message for me on Saturday telling me to piss off."
"Absolutely not," he said, bright as a tomato on Timmy's Aunt Moira's kitchen windowsill in August.
I watched him radiate red heat and light for a quarter of a minute. Then the thing that should have been obvious all along hit me, and I said, "If Paul Haig was not blackmailing you or either of the two others involved in the allegedly unphotographed episode of amour de brebis, then he was blackmailing someone else about whom he had information that that person would consider damaging or even incriminating. Prime candidates surely are members of the therapy group. Paul presumably knew many of their most intimate secrets. Is that correct?"
"I suppose that would be true. Most members of the group, however, tended to speak in generalities about their past unfortunate lives as sexual degenerates. So it would be hard for a blackmailer to come up with tangible or even specific evidence that could be exchanged for money."
"Were all the group members that discreet and closemouthed, or just some of them?"
"Two members of that particular group," Crockwell said, looking queasy, "were particularly graphic and loquacious on the subject of their own sexual perversions."
"Who were they?"
"You know I can't tell you that. But you can take my word for it, Donald, that for a variety of reasons neither man is a likely target in a blackmail scheme."
Moody and Stover. I said, "But some members of the group no doubt are likelier targets. And the incriminating dope Haig might have had on one of them could have come from a source other than a therapy session itself. Maybe a member wasn't succeeding in his de-queering nearly as well as he let on here, and he badly did not want that bad news to get back to-wherever. Whether or not any of that happened can be learned only by digging around extensively in the group members' lives, a project I might or might not have the time and resources to take on. I might have to leave it to the cops.
"The job can be narrowed down considerably, Vernon, if I know who in the therapy group might reasonably be expected to have the wherewithal to come up with sixty thousand dollars on short notice. If anyone knows who in that group has access to big bucks, it's you. You know who had a hard time raising the cash for treatment and who wrote a check without giving it a second thought. Are you going to help me out, or aren't you?"
He looked thoughtful, but it didn't last. "I can't tell you that, and I'm sure you can understand why, Donald. Patient confidentiality is paramount in my profession. The ethics involved here are clear."
"Yes, I know all about your ethics, Vernon. Look, I'm not asking about anybody's manatee fixation or whatever, only about their cash reserves, which is surely a fairly innocuous matter in the therapeutic context."
"Well, you are quite wrong about that."
"Oh. I beg your pardon. So you're not going to help me identify the person who killed Paul Haig and may have tried to kill Larry Bierly, two of your former patients?"
"No, I'm afraid that if it involves medically confidential information, I'm unable at this point in time to help you, Donald."
"Then you get no mercy from me," I said, and got up and went out. end user