Red White Black and Blue by Richard Stevenson

Author:Richard Stevenson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: mystery, detective, gay
ISBN: 160820362X
Publisher: MLR Press
Published: 2011-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

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Chapter Sixteen

Rain pounded down in drops the size of boccie balls. I cupped a hand over my injured ear and made it out to the car with my laptop and overnight bag. I got in and slammed the door.

Then I saw the note on the windshield. I climbed back out, grabbed the piece of sopping paper, and got back inside. The ink had run, but the handwritten two-word message was still legible. I'm sorry.

So Louderbush had shown up sometime during the night and left this apology? Presumably the note was his. Only two people knew where I was staying: Louderbush and Timmy. It seemed as if Louderbush had called off the Serbians, and he was trying to somehow deal with the repulsive mess he'd made, but he kept losing his nerve. I tried to work up some sympathy for him, but it was hard to find any.

I made a quick Dunkin' Donuts stop in Troy and headed back down the river to Albany, eating and drinking in the car, and trying to find any political news on the radio. WAMC had on a few local headlines; none mentioned Kenyon Louderbush or the gubernatorial campaign.

I thought about driving out to Hall Creek Community College, where Paul Podolski said Stiver had had a teaching job lined up, but I decided to wait until Monday. It seemed unlikely I'd find anybody out there willing and able to talk to me on a Saturday morning in June.

Instead, I headed toward Schenectady. I had an address for Anson and Margery Stiver. I pulled into the breakdown lane and keyed the address into my GPS. Normally I would have done this while in motion—another distracted-driving asshole—but I still felt so crummy that I feared that any greater than usual distraction might end in calamity.

The Anson Stiver home in Schenectady was in one of the nicer neighborhoods in this sad-ass abandoned-by-GE old rust-belt town. Ridgemont Drive was probably where company managers and professional people had made their comfortable lives from the nineteen-teens up until the seventies, when the company moved south and way, way east. The Stivers' ample manse was fieldstone below, powder blue wood frame above, with white decorative shutters and a big white front door with a bronze knocker. The front lawn wasn't as well tended as others in the neighborhood, and the azaleas needed pruning.

A blue Chevy Suburban was parked in the driveway in front of the Stivers' unopened garage doors. I pulled in next to it and made a dash through the rain for the front door.

There wasn't much of an overhang, and after making a couple of noisy bangs with the knocker I stood as close to the door as I could without risking ending up nose-to-nose with whoever might suddenly appear. Nothing happened for the next two minutes, and my back and shoulders were getting wet. This was quite the passive-aggressive residential portal.

I knocked again and tried the doorbell, too. The mailbox next to the door appeared to be empty, but I didn't go poking around in it.

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