Linkletter's file also included an issue of the February third Cityscape in which Linkletter was outed, and a memo to the file on a phone call from Linkletter to Rutka after the outing, in which Rutka described Linkletter's rage and his stated intention to "bash your brains in." Rough language for a Hometown Folk.

I got out the list Rutka had given me with the names of the other people he claimed had threatened him. Besides Slinger's and Linkletter's, seven threats had been received. The two face-to-face encounters had been with the Times Union editorial writer, who met Rutka at Queequeg's restaurant and screamed, "You oughta have your black heart ripped out!" — no Pulitzer material in that-and with a Colonie auto-parts-store manager, who ran into Rutka in Macy's just before Christmas and told him he wouldn't be alive six months from then. Rutka had outlived that prediction already by more than a month.

The other five threats by identifiable people all came by phone. All threatened violent acts, even death; they were from a Schenectady orthodontist, an Albany court bailiff, an elementary-school principal in Troy, a state university physicist, and a retired professional hockey player.

I went through the files and took copious notes on all nine of the men who had threatened John Rutka-for what it was worth.

The attacks on Rutka could as easily have been made by one of the "countless," as he'd put it, anonymous callers who'd threatened him. Or by someone who had never threatened him at all. There was always that.

I flipped through a sampling of the other files. Some of the names I recognized from Rutka's columns in Cityscape and Queerscreed. Others, unouted as yet, were men and women I knew. My stomach began to churn, partly from hunger and partly from disgust, and my impulse was to alert these people immediately that they were on Rutka's list of possible outees. The ethical ramifications of my position with Rutka were becoming more complex by the minute.

That complexity was not lessened when I flipped through the front of the file one last time in search of a name that might mean something to me. I came to another one I recognized and gawked at for some seconds. Here was a file labeled "CALLAHAN, TIMOTHY."

The little bio note attached to Timothy Callahan's folder described him as an Albany man in his forties who worked as the chief legislative aide to New York Assemblyman Myron Lipschutz, and who resided in a house on Crow Street with his lover of fourteen years, private investigator Donald Strachey. The only piece of paper in the folder was a single phone memo dated April 25th: "Parmalee Plaza Hotel informant IDs Callahan entering room with guest who informant says he had the night before."

Poor Timmy. Just once he had embraced in terror the ghost of the district poultry officer he had lain dreaming about uselessly long ago in Visakhapatnam, and in doing so had exorcised that ghost, and now he had his name on an overbearing twit's hit list in an attic in Handbag. This was not fair. My opinion of John Rutka, which had seemed to bottom out in recent hours, began again to slide.

I stuffed my notes in my pocket, put my still-damp shirt back on, switched off the fan and the lights, and returned to the second floor, careful to double-lock the attic door. I zipped the keys back inside the hippo's belly.

With the insurance agent on the way down the front walk toward his burgundy Lincoln, I said to Rutka in the front hall, "My boyfriend's in your file."

A little dry laugh. "I thought you'd get a charge out of. that." Sandifer stood at the end of the hall grinning nervously.

"I don't."

"Oh, what the- It's just a fucking file!" He hobbled into the living room too fast, nearly stumbled, and went down hard on the couch. "There's nothing in the file except that one fucking call. What was I gonna do with it, anyway? I can't out somebody who's already out, can I? You two are the most famous queer couple in Albany. In the paper they refer to you as 'the Albany private investigator and acknowledged homosexual,' and Callahan is almost as notorious as you are. So please don't go all self-righteous on me, Strachey, because I would find that very, very hard to take."

I said, "What if I hadn't known?"

He rolled his eyes and sighed grandly. "Well, of course you'd know. Or if you didn't know, you wouldn't care. Hey, I know all about you, Strachey. You've been playing around on the side since day one, and it was only reasonable for me to assume that you and Callahan had an open relationship, and he was doing it too, and it was cool. Why are you making such a big fucking thing about this? I don't get it. I just don't get it."

He looked genuinely mystified. Sandifer came down the hall now and stood listening.

I said, "First of all, it's been years since I've had sex with men other than Timothy Callahan. For reasons of avoiding the plague, for Timmy's emotional well-being, and because it just doesn't seem to matter to me as much as it once did, I don't do it. And the fact is, he never did it. Emotionally it is not his style. But whatever the two of us do or don't do sexually, together or with others, John, the simple fact of the matter is, none of it is any of your goddamn business!"

I yelled the last part, and Rutka flinched.

Sandifer went and sat beside Rutka on the couch and took his hand and held it. Rutka's eyes were off in different directions; he began to shake his head from side to side. "Now I'm really fucked. I've alienated you, and I am totally, totally fucked. Oh, shit.

Shit, shit, shit."

I'd had enough. I said, "I think I need to get away from you, John. Before I punch your face in." Would I now have to add myself to the list of people who had threatened Rutka? "I'm going over to talk to the Handbag police about getting you some protection. I do believe, John, that you make people want to kill you, and maybe somebody really is trying to do it. You should stay here because the arson squad will be here soon. Eddie, can you wait here until I get back?"

"I'll call in at work," he said. "I can finish up some things this evening."

"Are you going to ditch me?" Rutka said, giving me the evil eye. "Because I left your boyfriend's folder in the file? I could have taken it out, you know. I thought about that. I left it in because I thought the only way you'd work with me was if I was straightforward with you and didn't hold anything back or hide anything. I guess I should have been more devious."

"Removing Timmy's file would not have been deviousness," I said. "That would be called tact-not giving offense when to do so would be petty or needless. But the real problem for me is, John, that there shouldn't have been a file on Timmy up there in the first place, and there shouldn't be a file up there on ninety-eight percent of those people. Just as if I'd wandered into J. Edgar Hoover's personal cache in 1965, your files make me want to throw up."

He got a panicky look. "Are you quitting? Are you abandoning me?"

"Not yet. But I'm close to it. A lot will depend on what I find out about you from the Handbag police."

"Your mind is closed," he said with a moan, and I left. end user

As I pulled out, the arson squad drove up, two guys in jackets in a state car. I left Elmwood Place and turned north out of residential Handbag and past the old brick lady's-pocketbook factories the town had taken its name from in the 1880s. Handbag's last handbag had been produced in July of 1968, when the stitchers and clampers struck for a dollar-and-a-quarter-an-hour raise over three years, and management didn't even schedule a bargaining session. A union leader claimed the managers just left the screen doors flapping and drove out to the airport. I've read there's now a town in Malaysia called Hahndoo-Bahgoo.