Phil said, "That's the most touching coming-out story I've ever heard. Where has sophistication gone?"

'To Schenectady, I think. A man was arrested in the bus station over there last week for impersonating Monica Vitti. Don't get me wrong, I mean I love trendy Albany, but really, I think you have to concede that progress is a very mixed blessing."

We conceded this unenthusiastically and drank our beer. Calvin came back. The juke box was playing "Good Times" by Chic.

I asked what anyone had heard about the Kleckner killing.

"Just what's in the papers," Phil said. "The cops still haven't found the Blount guy. They sure as hell better catch up with him fast and get him locked up. A lot of people are damn nervous with a gay psychopath running around loose, me included."

I asked Phil and Calvin if they had known Billy Blount.

"I remember when he used to come to the center," Calvin said. "He was kind of snotty and always going around acting like he was better than you were. Most people weren't too crazy about him."

"A lot of repressed anger," Phil added.

"Who are Blount's friends? Do you know anybody who knows him?" They thought about this but couldn't come up with any names. I said, I'm looking for him, too. Blount's parents have hired me to find him."

"Jesus, no kidding. You think he's in Albany?"

"I don't know. I'm just starting."

"We should have known you'd get mixed up in that one," Calvin said. "The weird people you hang around."

Timmy said, "Thank you."

"I mean his customers—clients, or whatever they're called. Who was that one you were following around last month? The one with the pet pigs?"

"He wasn't the client. His wife was the client. She thought

he had another woman he was sneaking out to meet. What he had was a small pig farm out in East Greenbush. A secret pig farm. I caught the guy in the act of feeding his pigs one night— got some nice shots with the Leica, too—and then I started feeling sorry for the guy and went over and talked to him. I asked him why he didn't just level with his wife about the secret pigs, and the poor devil began to weep. He said she'd never understand, that it would destroy his marriage. He was an assistant commissioner in the Department of Mental Health."

Phil said, "Well, consensual pig farming is one thing, but getting involuntarily stabbed to death by your trick is definitely something else. A lot of the disco bunnies are scared shitless. Especially out at Trucky's. Blount is the one who did it, isn't he?"

"I don't know. It looks that way. How's business at Trucky's? Are people coming back? Truckman has had his hard times."

"Wednesday night was packed," Calvin said. "It was two for one. And people aren't going to the Rat's Nest much anymore. Not with the cops still hassling them. I heard on Monday they arrested the bartender and two customers. In the middle of the afternoon they busted in, and there were fifteen people in the back room!"

Timmy said, "It isn't just for breakfast anymore," and we groaned obligingly.

The Rat's Nest was a new place on Western Avenue about a mile beyond Trucky's, just outside the Albany city limits in the village of Bergenfield. It was what the papers coyly called controversial and was the Albany area's first "New York style" gay bar, with black lights, crumpled Reynolds Wrap on the ceiling, and nude go-go boys on a wooden platform that looked like an executioner's scaffolding.

In the back of the Rat's Nest was a separate grope room with a bartender in a dirty jock strap and lighting that would have caused a wildcat strike by any mildly assertive local of the United Mine Workers. The advertising slogan for the Rat's Nest was "Come in and Act Disgusting," and when it opened in mid-summer, there were those who predicted the place would be laughed out of existence.

It was not. The Rat's Nest boomed for nearly a month, drawing most of its hundreds of regular customers away from Trucky's, where "acting disgusting" was much rarer, more random, and not so aggressively institutionalized.

And then it happened. The Bergenfield police force began a series of raids on the Rat's Nest, arresting employees for serving liquor to minors, which may or may not have been the case, and busting patrons on dope, drunk and disorderly, and, in a few cases, consensual sodomy charges.

The crowds fled—most of them back to Trucky's, where the death by stabbing of a popular disc jockey caused a dampening of spirits and a jittery watchfulness, but no mass move to a less tainted nighttime hangout.

A couple of the Central Avenue bars, witnessing the unexpected popularity of the New Decadence, made gestures in that direction. One disco, teetering on the edge of extinction, changed its name from Mary-Mary's to the Bung Cellar and regained its wandering clientele overnight. Another bar was less successful. The owner of the Green Room attempted a "Western" motif by hanging a child's cowboy hat on a wall sconce, but this was not enough.

We left the Terminal at ten and made our way up the avenue, hitting all the gay watering holes and discos except Myrna's, the lesbian bar—an oversight that turned out to be a mistake on my part. I'd been an investigator for nearly fifteen years: army intelligence; the Robert Morgart Agency; four years on my own. But I was still learning.

I talked to the doormen and bartenders in all the spots we hit, and while some said yes, they knew who Billy Blount was and had seen him around, none knew him except by name and none knew who his friends were. I did not speak with the disc jockeys—they were absorbed in their art, like marathon runners or poker players—but I collected their names and phone numbers so I could check them out later if no leads developed elsewhere.

We lost Phil and Calvin at the Bung Cellar, then headed out Western and hit Trucky's, the bar where the murdered DJ had worked, at two-fifteen, when the disco night was peaking. Debbie Jacob's "Don't You Want My Love" was on when we

went in. The place was jam-packed and smelled of beer, Brut, fresh sweat, cigarette smoke, and poppers. The dance area at Trucky's, in the back beyond a big oval bar, had flashing colored lights on the walls, on the ceiling, under the floor. It was as if Times Square of 1948 had been turned on its side and people were dancing on the neon signs. The music, pounding out of speakers the size of Mack truck engines, was sensuous and ripe, with its Latin rhythms and funky-bluesy yells and sighs, and the dancers moved like beautiful sexual swimmers in a fantastic sea.

Timmy and I made our way through the crowds along the walls, stopping to shout into the ears of people we knew, and danced for six or eight songs. We bought draughts then, and I made arrangements to talk to the bartenders after closing at four. Timmy headed back to the dance floor with an assistant professor of physics he knew from RPI, and I went looking for Mike Truckman.

The owner of Trucky's was not hard to spot. He'd been a famous football tackle at Siena College in the early fifties, and at six-three or -four and a mostly well distributed two-ten, he still cut a formidable figure in his pre-Calvin Klein white ducks and a bulky-knit black sweater that almost concealed the beginnings of a paunch.

I found Truckman in a corner uttering sweet nothings to and massaging the neck of a notorious hustler I'd seen on the streets but rarely in the bars. He was a smooth-skinned, athletic-looking young man with a smug, sleepy look and a green-and-white football jersey with the number 69 stenciled on it. Cute. I didn't feel bad about interrupting.