“Have a seat,” Moore said. “Did you eat?”

“Had a sandwich in the car. Thanks.”

The living room looked disconcertingly like a straight guy’s bachelor pad, with a lot of nondescript black leather seating, most of it facing a TV set the size of a stadium scoreboard. The floor was not littered with Budweiser dead soldiers, but there was an empty pizza box on the coffee table. The only sign that homosexuals as we generally think of them might have lived here was a bookshelf against one wall that was stuffed with movie and movie-lore titles. There were screenplays, biographies of stars and directors, picture books, plus history and criticism, including what looked like the complete Pauline Kael. I guessed these belonged to Barry Fields, and wherever he had fled to – Colorado? Waziristan? upstairs? – he had not taken his movie books with him.

I said, “I was just down in Sheffield and met Detective Toomey at the crime scene.”

“Good. You’re getting right to work. I’m reassured already.”

“Toomey seems single-minded but not bull-headed. He’s after Barry, but if we can show that Barry could not have shot Sturdivant, Toomey is smart enough to grasp it. Don’t you think?”

Sitting across from me, Moore sighed and shook his head. “I don’t know about Toomey. He might be okay. It’s Thorne Cornwallis, the DA, I’m worried about. He’s unimpressed by facts if they look like they’ll get in the way of a slam-dunk prosecution. Anyway, proving that Barry did not do the shooting will be tough. He has no alibi, and he could have done it. Except he didn’t. For one thing, Barry has no gun. Barry hates guns.”

“Do you own a firearm, Bill?”

He looked at me and shrugged. “I do. Detective Toomey asked me that too. It’s a Glock-nine. It could have been the murder weapon. I keep it in the bedroom closet. When Toomey was here, I produced the weapon, and he took it in for analysis. It’ll come back clean, so we don’t have to worry about that.”

I said, “How come you own a gun? Great Barrington doesn’t feel much like Dodge.”

“I lived in DC for eleven years. It’s a dangerous place. A woman was shot in the lobby of my building. Killed for the eight dollars in her handbag.”

“Where was that?”

“Where I lived?”

“Yeah. I know DC a little. I like it. I like its cosmopolitan-ness. Even though it’s a cosmopolitan city that’s basically run by people from Kansas.”

Moore seemed momentarily startled when I said this, though at the time I had no idea why.

He said, “I lived in the Dupont Circle area, New Hampshire near Eighteenth. Very gay, even though I was not very out at the time. That took a while longer.” Remembering this, Moore looked sad.

“You retired from the federal government early, I was told.”

“Five years ago, yeah.”

“Which agency?”

“That’s another life.”

“I think Jim Sturdivant said you worked for the Commerce Department.”

“Yeah, well.”

“Did you and Barry meet in DC?”

“No, we met after I moved up here.”

“Uh huh.”

Moore sat looking at me, and then he seemed to realize he was talking like an anxious man with something to hide. He perked up a little and said, “I was attracted to Barry, but I thought he was Tom Weed’s boyfriend. Do you know about Tom?”

I nodded.

“So it wasn’t until Tom died that I made my move. And it turned out that Barry was attracted to me all along, but he had thought I wasn’t interested. We wasted a lot of time, but we finally got it right. We got it very right, in fact. I was never so happy or sure of anything in my whole life. And then you came along.” He looked at me, waiting for me to justify or explain my despicable interference.

I said, “Yes, Bill, I was hired by Sturdivant to check Barry out – because, Sturdivant told me, he was concerned that Barry was going to rip you off in some way. It sounded like a plausible enough story at the time.”

Moore leaned back and snorted. “What shit.”

“Apparently.”

“Barry told me Sturdivant told you I was his good buddy. But Barry told you the truth – what my real relationship was with Jim.”

“He did.”

“I only knew Sturdivant socially and didn’t particularly like him or Gaudios. But I borrowed forty thousand dollars from Jim at a better rate than I could have gotten at any bank. He offered this to me, ‘as a friend,’ he said at the time. The exact nature of the ‘friendship’ didn’t become apparent until the day I went over to pick up the check – after I’d already signed the purchase agreement on this house.” Moore shook his head dolefully.

“And then it was into the hot tub, with Jim and Steven?”

“It was never spelled out,” Moore said. “But when Jim said he’d give me the check after we relaxed a bit in the tub, and why didn’t I get naked, I knew immediately what was going on. My first impulse was to laugh, and my second impulse was to tell the toads to go fuck themselves. And then I thought, hell, what a quick and easy and totally uncomplicated way to knock half a point in interest off a major loan.”

I said, “What with Alan Greenspan not being available to do his bit.”

“So I asked, will I have to do this more than once? And Jim said, no, not unless you have such a wonderful time you want to come back for more. So – what the hell.”

“And you climbed in, and then you just closed your eyes and thought of… not England. Where are you from originally, Bill?”

“The Midwest. So anyway, I saved myself a few thousand dollars that day. And, I can tell you, it wasn’t the most humiliating thing I’ve ever done sexually.”

“We all have our stories.”

“And then, of course, I found out later that I wasn’t the only borrower with an unwritten hot tub clause in my contract. There are four other guys, and I’ll bet more.”

“May I have their names? They could be considered possible suspects in the murder. You don’t seem especially angry about the loan conditions, just mildly disgusted. But some people might get rattled by treatment like this, or even unhinged. Then there’s the question of repayment of the loan. I take it you’re not off the hook, and neither are the other borrowers. Or are you?”

“I assume I now owe thirty-four thousand three hundred dollars to Jim’s estate. I certainly don’t plan to welch on the loan. I don’t know about the other guys. You’d have to ask them.”

I said, “What was Barry’s reaction to the hot-tub incident?”

“He was grossed out, naturally. But this was before we were together. I told him later.”

“Detective Toomey didn’t say anything, but I got the impression he knows about Sturdivant’s lending practices. Was it you who filled him in?”

“You bet I did. I wanted him to know what kind of human being Jim Sturdivant was. I said if Sturdivant would pull crap like that, then he might be into all kinds of shit, and why were the cops just looking at Barry and not at anybody else?”

“What was Toomey’s reaction?”

“He didn’t seem all that interested. He never even asked me for the names of the other borrowers. I think I did get the point across that Sturdivant was a scumbag. But I got the impression that Toomey expected gay people to do all kinds of weird sexual stuff, and this was just par for the course, and he didn’t really want to look into it or even think about it. A lot of people in law enforcement are like that. You must have noticed this, being in your line of work.”

“I have, though in my experience there are fewer homophobes in the criminal justice system than there used to be. Albany has a long history of bigoted cops, and yet today the police chief is a PFLAG dad. Have you ever worked in law enforcement, Bill?”

“Why would you ask that?”

“You know guns. You slide right into cop terminology.”

Moore laughed. “These days everybody uses cop language. It’s all those CSI shows. I think it’s funny.”

“So you used to be in the police?”