"Are they gone?" Sandifer said as we came in the front door.

"They're gone. Who was here?"

"John's sister Ann and Bub Bailey and another policeman." He fell back against the wall, buried his face in his hands, and heaved, up and down.

After a time, I said, "You'd better sit down, Eddie," and led him by the arm into the living room, where he collapsed in a chair, snuffling. The charred odor from the morning fire on the back porch filled the house, and it was as if it was the stench of Rutka's remains.

"I'm sorry, Eddie. What can I tell you."

"Nothing. What can anybody say? Maybe I shouldn't have gone to work tonight and left him alone. But he said I should go ahead. And there wasn't anything he had to worry about. Not really."

"There wasn't?"

He looked up at me and let loose with something that was half sigh, half shudder. "Well, you abandoned him, and you didn't even know."

"Know what?"

"I mean, you didn't know for sure."

"What? That you threw the firebomb today and shot John in the foot last night?"

He glanced at Timmy. "He's okay," I said.

Sandifer looked away. "It was John's idea," he said in a tremulous voice, "not mine. I always told him gay people didn't have to pretend to be under attack from homophobes. All we had to do was go out in public and not hide the fact we were gay and sooner or later we'd get our faces punched in, if that's what he wanted to prove. But he said there was never enough evidence, or gay people were afraid to report it, or the cops would ignore it-if they weren't the ones doing the beating themselves. So sometimes you had to do 'a little reality-based charade,' was how John put it.

Shooting him in the foot last night practically made me want to throw up."

"Staging a fag-bashing does seem a little redundant these days," I said. "And what was my role supposed to be in all this? Why was I lied to and manipulated and conned into the scam? To lend credibility?"

He flushed and couldn't look up at me. "That and to get feedback from the cops. John thought they'd tell you things they wouldn't tell him. And he thought all the people who had threatened him would really be freaked if they thought you might be coming after them."

I felt a rush of fury at Rutka for being dead and not available for me to get my hands around his throat. I said, "You two lunkheads sure botched the whole thing real good, didn't you? You got away with the shooting last night, so far, but your neighbor spotted you on your way to toss the bomb today. Have you confessed to the police?"

His head jerked up. "No! Jesus! I don't want to go to prison. Anyway, now there really is a killer."

"And once he's identified, he might as well take the rap for the two unsuccessful attempts, is that it?"

"Well-why not? Oh, I don't know. What difference does it make? What difference does anything make anymore!"

I said, "Have they identified the body? Are they sure it was John? What happened?"

He started to speak, then wept again. After a moment, he said, "They're pretty sure it's John they found. They'll know for sure tomorrow. Oh, God, it's real, this time! This time it's really real!"

"So you weren't here when it happened?"

He snuffled some more and then said, "I went in to work to finish up some things I didn't get to this morning when I was-you know-out for a while. It was around six-thirty when I went in. John had gotten a call earlier, the one he told you about, saying this time he was going to burn. And at first it freaked us both out, but then he said, shit, he'd gotten lots of threats and none of them ever amounted to anything, so let's forget it. So we did.

"When I got back from the shop a little after eight, I came in and John wasn't here and a chair in the dining room was knocked over and the table was pushed back with the rug all bunched up. It looked like there had been a struggle or fight and John had been kidnaped. I was really scared all of a sudden, and I called you and you weren't home, and then I called the police. They sent a cruiser out, but as soon as the cop got here he got a call on his radio about the fire and he just took off."

"You'd gone into Albany in your car?"

"In John's. It's the one we use. I don't have a car. It's the Subaru back in the garage."

"Where was the fire?"

"Down behind Pocketbook Factory Number Three," he said, and took out a bandanna and wiped his mouth and nose. "There are some abandoned houses down there that belonged to the pocketbook company. Whoever started the fire used a lot of gasoline or something and the place went up like a fireball, Bub Bailey said."

"And John's body was badly burned?"

Sandifer shook and started to lose it again. "They could tell it was John because his wallet was left on the curb out front with a note in it. And from his wounded foot and- they're going to check on other things, dental records and things like that. Ann told them which dentist." He blew his nose in the bandanna.

"What did this note say that was stuck in the wallet?"

"They showed it to me but they kept it and they kept the wallet. It was horrible. The note said-it was printed in big letters on a piece of typing paper-it said, 'This is what happens to assholes who invade people's privacy.' "

"That's plain enough. It tends to confirm the motive."

"Why else would anybody do it?" Sandifer said. "Who else would want to kill John?"

"Can you think of anyone?"

"No, it must have been one of the people he outed. Or more than one of them. They'd've had to drag John out of here. He had a gun and he wouldn't have gone without a struggle. Maybe there were two, or even three or four."

"Where is the gun now?"

"I haven't seen it. I'll have to look."

"Did the police question the neighbors?"

"Chief Bailey went around himself. He said nobody saw or heard any fight or anything violent."

I said, "What are these, pod people around here? Nobody comes or goes, or sees or hears anything."

"They're elderly," Sandifer said. "They stay in with their air conditioners and their televisions on."

"What did you tell Bailey about the threats John received? You can be sure he'll question everybody who ever threatened John to find out where they were tonight-and last night when John was shot in the foot, and this morning at the time of the fire. You might even get Bailey believing that the other so-called attempts were real. I guess I'm glad you told me the truth, but I'm not crazy about knowing your dirty little politically-far-too-correct secret and having to pretend to Bub Bailey that I don't."

Timmy, who had sat silently scowling through my en tire exchange with Sandifer, suddenly piped up. "I'm not crazy about being in on it either."

This was why I hardly ever brought him along on business. Tonight had been a lapse. I said, "But now you are in on it, so let's just get on with the more important questions."

He looked away in disgust.

I said to Sandifer, "What names did you give Bailey?"

"Just the ones on the list John made up of people who threatened him-Slinger and Linkletter and those. And I gave him a complete set of Cityscapes and Queerscreeds with John's outing columns. I didn't mention any of the anonymous calls though, or all the people in the files. Do you think I should have brought them up?"