“Not exactly. But I don’t wish to talk about my past. With you or with anyone else.” His face flushed, and he looked at me hard.

“How come?”

“It’s not nice. We’ll have to let it go at that.”

I said, “Is Barry’s past not nice too? Barry did not officially exist prior to six years ago.”

“You’d have to ask Barry about that.”

“Surely you know Barry’s life story. You’re planning on marrying the guy.”

“It’s not for me to tell. But this I can say. I’m telling you, Strachey, that Barry’s past is totally irrelevant to the Sturdivant situation.”

“And Bud Radziwill, so-called. He only came into existence when Barry did. What’s that about? You guys are three awfully mysterious fellows. Am I being yanked around here in some unfortunate way? I’m starting to have a nauseating feeling about all of this and about all of you.”

Moore thought hard about something for a long moment, and if he was getting the impression he might be losing me, that was fine. Because he was. Then he said, “I understand your frustration, Strachey. In fact, I’ve been there. Look, here’s the thing. I’m going to confide in you. This goes no farther than this room, right? Are you capable of discretion? I think you are. You must be bound by some kind of professional ethics.”

“Some kind, yes. But just spit it out, and then I’ll tell you which ethics might apply. It’s yours I’m worried about.”

“The thing is, I was FBI. Twenty-one years. Ten in the field, eleven at the bureau.”

“I see.”

“I prefer to keep this quiet.”

“Why?”

“People expect you to think and behave in a certain way. I don’t want that. I’m out of that.”

I said, “I know Great Barrington is some kind of hotbed of anti-Bush sentiment. There’s an equestrian statue of Dennis Kucinich as you ride into town. But you were a professional.

Most people respect that, even if they don’t like the politically appointed doofuses, no? Or is that not what you mean?”

Moore slumped back in his chair, raised his muscular arms, and put his big hands behind his head. He squeezed his eyes shut. He said, “I made some mistakes. I don’t want to go into it.”

“That’s up to you.”

“It’s just… hard.”

“Were you fired?”

“No. I resigned. Retired.”

“So it’s nothing criminal.”

He seemed to ponder this and said nothing.

I asked, “Does Toomey know about this?”

“No. It’s not relevant.”

“Does Barry know?”

“Sure. It’s one of the things we have in common. We’re different in a lot of ways. I’m older. I like computers and sports. Barry likes movies. But we both like the Berkshires, and the big thing is, we can understand each other because we both have pasts we want to forget.”

“Can you tell me what Barry’s past is that he wants to leave behind?”

Moore looked at me now and said, “Sorry, no. I swore I’d never tell a soul. Barry would be very, very upset.”

“He does have a temper. You told me on the phone that Barry came by his hot temper honestly. What did you mean by that?”

Moore seemed to consider his reply, and said, “Just that he comes from a long line of hotheads.”

“Uh huh. And what set off the confrontation in Guido’s market yesterday?”

“Don’t act surprised when I tell you it was you and your investigation you were doing for the toads – for Jim and Steven. Barry told me about his confrontation with you on Tuesday night after your dinner at Pearly Gates. Barry vented, and we smoked a joint, and he seemed to get over it. But then on Wednesday he ran into Jim and Steven in Guido’s, and he got mad all over again. Jim got Barry going with some bullshit about protecting his loan, and then he really set Barry off by saying that he was looking out for my interests by protecting me from Barry. Unfortunately, a big piece of cheese was within reach, and Barry threw it at Jim. It’s not a serious weapon, but under the law, assault is assault.”

I said, “Has Barry hit people before?”

Moore thought this over. “I don’t think so. He’s really not a violent person, despite his anger. His occasional rage tends to come out verbally.”

“What is Barry angry about?” I asked.

Moore said, “If I could tell you that – which I can’t – you’d never believe it. Not in a million years.”

I parked downtown off Main Street and made some calls from the car. I set up meetings with two of the four hot-tub borrowers – two others I was unable to reach – and with Bud Radziwill. I also arranged to meet Fields’ boss at the movie theater, Myra Greene, a woman Moore said Fields was close to. I needed to (a) track down Fields and get his complete story – it seemed too far-fetched that the Sturdivant shooting was totally unrelated to Fields’ altercation with him on the same day – and (b) get a clearer picture of the toads’ lives and anybody else who might have wanted Jim dead. The circumstances of Sturdivant’s death suggested not rage but calculation, and I needed to find out why that was so.

Moore had been meticulously unhelpful in speculating on where Fields had run off to. He said Fields had had no contact with his own family in years, and Moore stated implausibly that he didn’t even know where they lived. He said all of Fields’ current friends were in the Berkshires and each had told him that they had no idea where Fields went after he left in his car early that morning. Someone with a police scanner had tipped Fields off that Sturdivant had been shot, Moore said – he claimed not to know who – and Fields had sped off in his car at one in the morning, declaring that he would not return until the real killer had been caught. He had fled just in time, for the police came looking for him just twenty minutes later.

Moore had given me Fields’ cell number, and I called it and got no answer. I left a message saying I wanted his help in finding the real killer and to please call me, and I was on his side.

None of Moore ’s story quite added up – his knowledge and understanding of Fields’ behavior was far too selective – and on impulse I phoned an acquaintance at FBI headquarters in DC. I asked about the circumstances of William Moore’s retirement from the bureau five years earlier. My contact, a former Albany cop drawn southward by the cachet and the eventual good pension benefits of federal employment, called me back in ten minutes with this information: four men named William Moore had been agents at the bureau during the past thirty years. Two were long since deceased; one was currently a twenty-seven-year-old special agent assigned to the San Diego field office; and the other William Moore was a man in his mid-sixties working as a ballistics expert at Washington headquarters. My contact said he had seen this Bill Moore in the lobby of the FBI building just a few days earlier. There was no William or Bill Moore in his late forties who had retired from the bureau five years earlier.

I thought, Swell. I had a retainer check in my pocket from Moore, and I decided I needed to get it back to Albany and into my bank fast.

I walked across Main Street under a gauzy late summer sky. Only a few of the leaves had begun to turn, and it felt more like August than September – except for the absence of the tourist-season throngs, many of them New Yorkers, the visitors and second-homers for whom downtown Great

Barrington functioned as a kind of Columbus Avenue North. Though on this post-Labor Day lazy Thursday afternoon, the town felt more like a Truman-era burg, with maybe a car gliding by with its windows open and its radio tuned to a World Series with the Yanks and the Cards.

The Triplex Cinema, down a business-block passageway and out back beyond a parking lot, was plenty up-to-date. It looked like it had been smartly refashioned in recent years out of a warehouse or other non-artistic space. It was playing one pop hit of a not entirely repellent nature and two art-house features. A few customers had ambled in for the matinee showings, and I waited while Myra Greene sold them their tickets and gave the robot projectionists their orders.