The Sins of the Fathers

WHEN you hit a gay bar in the middle of a weekday afternoon you wonder why they don't call it something else. In the evenings, with a good crowd drinking and cruising, there is a very real gaiety in the air. It may seem forced, and you may sense an undercurrent of insufficiently quiet desperation, but gay then is about as good a word as any. But not around three or four on a Thursday afternoon, when the place is down to a handful of serious drinkers with no place else to go and a bartender whose face says he knows how bad things are and that he's stopped waiting for them to get better.

I made the rounds. A basement club on Bank Street where a man with long white hair and a waxed moustache played the bowling machine all by himself while his beer went flat. A big room on West Tenth, its ambience pitched for the old college athlete crowd, sawdust on the floor and Greek-letter pennants on the exposed brick walls. In all, half a dozen gay bars within a four-block radius of 194

Bethune Street.

I got stared at a lot. Was I a cop? Or a potential sexual partner? Or both?

I had the newspaper photo of Richie, and I showed it around a lot to whoever was willing to look at it.

Almost everyone recognized the photo because they had seen it in the paper.

The murder was recent, and it had happened right in the neighborhood, and heterosexuals have no monopoly on morbid curiosity. So most of them recognized the picture, and quite a few had seen him in the neighborhood, or said they had, but nobody recalled seeing him around the bars.

"Of course I don't come here all that often," I heard more than once. "Just drop in now and then for a beer when the throat gets scratchy."

In a place called Sinthia's the bartender recognized me and did an elaborate double take. "Do my eyes deceive me? Or is it really the one and only Matthew Scudder?"

"Hello, Ken."

"Now don't tell me you've finally converted, Matt. It was enough of a shock when I heard you left the pigpen. If Matthew Scudder's come around to the belief that Gay is Good, why, I'd be properly devastated."

He still looked twenty-eight, and he must have been almost twice that. The blond hair was his own, even if the color came out of a bottle. When you got up close you could see the face-lift lines, but from a couple of yards away he didn't look a day older than when I'd booked him fifteen years ago for contributing to the delinquency of a minor. I hadn't taken much pride in the collar; the minor had been seventeen, and had already been more delinquent than Ken had ever hoped to be, but the minor had a father and the father filed a complaint and I had had to pick Kenny up. He got himself a decent lawyer, and the charges were dropped.

"You're looking good," I told him.

"Booze and tobacco and lots of sex. It keeps a lad young."

"Ever see this young lad?" I dropped the news photo on top of the bar. He looked at it, then gave it back.

"Interesting."

"You recognize him?"

"It's the young chap who was so nasty last week, isn't it? Ghastly story."

"Yes."

"Where do you come in?"

"It's hard to say. Ever see him in here, Kenny?"

He planted his elbows on the bar and made a V of his hands, then tucked his chin between them. "The reason I said it was interesting," he said, "is that I thought I recognized that picture when the Post ran it. I have an extraordinary memory for faces. Among other anatomical areas."

"You've seen him before."

"I thought so, and now I find myself certain of it. Why don't you buy us each a drink while I comb my memory?"

I put a bill on the bar. He poured bourbon for me and mixed something orange for himself. He said,

"I'm not stalling, Matthew. I am trying to recall what went with the face. I know I haven't seen it in a long time."

"How long?"

"At least a year." He sipped at his drink, straightened up, clasped his hands behind his neck, closed his eyes. "A year at the very least. I remember him now.

Very attractive. And very young. I asked him for ID the first time he came in, and he didn't seem surprised, as if he always got asked for proof of age."

"He was only nineteen then."

"Well, he could have passed for a ripe sixteen. There was a period of a couple of weeks when he was in here almost every night. Then I never saw him again."

"I gather he was gay."

"Well, he wouldn't have come here to pick up girls, would he?"

"He could have been window shopping."

"Too true. We do get our fair share of those, don't we? Not Richie, though.

He wasn't much of a drinker, you know. He'd order a vodka Collins and make it last until all the ice had melted."

"Not a very profitable customer."

"Oh, when they're young and gorgeous you don't care whether they spend much. They're window dressing, you know. They bring others in. From window shopping to window dressing, and no, our lad was not just looking, thank you. I don't think there was a night he came here that he didn't let someone take him home."