"No. I'll deal with those."

This got Timmy's attention again. "What do you mean?"

"I'll use the files. There's no reason for the police to have to go into them if I'm covering that end of the investigation." He gave me a look. "The files are obviously the key to finding John's killer or killers. And since it's important that they not fall into the hands of a government agency that might misuse them-as police agencies almost inevitably will-then I'll just have to take possession of the files and use them to find the killer and turn him-or them-over to the police with enough evidence to convict."

"Will you do that?" Sandifer said, looking a little brighter. "God, that would be great."

"Don-" Timmy said, and then realizing he could not say what he wanted to say in front of Sandifer, he waved it away.

"I don't have any choice," I said, "as far as I can see. It's either turn the files over to the cops, which is out of the question, or use them as an investigative tool at least as effectively as the police would. What else can I do?"

"Maybe you should just turn them over," Timmy said uneasily. "It's the Handbag police who'd be looking at them, not the much more dangerous Albany cops. Anyway, anybody who's in those files must have done so many disgusting things that the police already have them on their lists of the region's most outrageous perverts."

"I can't believe you said that."

"Well, you know what I mean."

Sandifer said, "They do tend to be the biggest whores. Most of those people didn't get into the files without being real scuzzballs."

"Scuzzballs deserve their privacy too," I said, "the Burger Court's loony Five Stooges 1986 opinion to the contrary notwithstanding. Anyway, I happen to have read through those files this morning, and I can tell you that most of the people in there are simply gay men and women who live Ozzie-and-Harriet lives with their significant others, more or less, and a few of whom have strayed once in a while and their indiscretions happen to have been picked up and noted by some of John Rutka's informants. Should that information become official police information?"

"No," Timmy said, "of course not." He had on a distant thoughtful look, as if this were an interesting theoretical question concerning the abstract gay masses.

"John would be grateful," Sandifer said, and began to grow teary again. "He's always sort of expected to be disappointed in the people he's counted on. It was years before he even trusted me totally. It would have mattered a lot that you stuck by him, Strachey."

Timmy sat there with a quizzical look, as if unsure how I had managed to end up taking on work that would help serve as a memorial to a man Timmy had considered rotten to the core and whom I hadn't been too crazy about either. Whatever my degree of responsibility or lack of it in John Rutka's death-I didn't have the will or the energy to think about that quite yet-I was still obliged to stay on the case for one very good reason: as soon as I found the killer I could burn the loathsome files.

I said, "We'd better haul the files out of here and over to Crow Street, where I can lock them up." Timmy winced. "Eddie, maybe you'd better come too. You're probably in no danger, but you'll be able to feel secure in our spare room, and anyway I might need you to answer some questions about the files."

"Yeah, okay. I don't want to stay here alone tonight. I don't want to sleep alone in that room."

In the teenaged girl's bedroom on the second floor, Sandifer reached into the hippo's belly for the attic keys. He groped around, then shook the animal, vigorously, and then frantically.

"The keys aren't here."

We tore out to the attic door, which hung open. The keys dangled in the upper of the two locks. The light was on in the airless attic but the fan was off, as if someone had been there briefly and then left in a hurry. The desk and file cabinet appeared undisturbed, except that the top file drawer had been pulled out. It did not have a ransacked look, however. I said, "I suppose there's no way to tell if a file has been removed, or is there?"

"The index," Sandifer said, and opened the top drawer of the desk. He removed a bundle of papers clipped together and said,

"We'll have to go through both drawers and check the files against the list. Do you think whoever took John made him open the files first and took his own out?"

"His or theirs. That's what it looks like."

"Jesus. Then all we have to do to find out who did it is to see whose file is missing."

"Maybe. Though a killer who's playing with a full deck would have thought of the possibility of an index to the files and would have taken them all. Or he'd have taken someone else's file to aim the investigation in the wrong direction."

"Maybe he's not that smart," Sandifer said, and I hoped he was right. Although it was soon apparent that whether the pilferer of the files was brilliant or stupid hardly mattered at all. end user

There's no name on this entry," Timmy said. "It just says 'A for All-American Asshole Mega-Hypocrite.' "

"Who's that?" I asked Sandifer. "What does he mean by 'A for-whatever-it-is Mega-Hypocrite?"

" 'A for All-American Asshole Mega-Hypocrite,'" Timmy said again.

Sandifer looked baffled. "I don't know. I have no idea."

"All the other names in the index are spelled out," Timmy said. "Mega-Hypocrite is the only one that's coded like that."

We were back in Albany and had the file cabinet in the spare room in the second-floor rear of our house on Crow Street. The top drawer was open and I was checking the actual files against the index Timmy was reading from. The first name on the "A" page had been "Anderson, Cliff," and the file had been in the front of the drawer where it should have been. But when I looked for the second folder, for All-American Asshole Mega-Hypocrite, it was not in the drawer.

"All-American Mega-Hypocrite is missing. Or maybe it's misfiled."

"I would doubt it," Sandifer said. "There were some things John could be careless about, but not recordkeeping. He was meticulous."

I searched through the files, in case Mega-Hypocrite had slid down or been uncharacteristically misplaced somehow.

"How would anybody stealing the file know that All-American Mega-Hypocrite was his designation?" Timmy said. "Eddie doesn't even know what it meant."

"Dunno. He might have forced Rutka to tell him which one was his file. We can assume he didn't know about the index in the desk drawer or he would have taken it. Or, he might have checked the files for a folder under his own name and, when he didn't find one, started a random search. He'd have come to the All-American Mega-Hypocrite file right away, maybe seen that the shoe fit, and verified it by going through the actual contents of the file."

I kept flipping through the folders, eyes peeled for Mega-Hypocrite. I asked Sandifer if there were any of the outees or soon-to-be-outees Rutka considered to be especially repugnantly hypocritical. "Bruno Slinger maybe?"

"He considered them all sickeningly hypocritical," Sandifer said. "The worst one was always the one he was going after during whatever week it was."

Rutka's column in the next planned Queerscreed, galleys of which we had carried off from his desktop, outed an independently wealthy ACLU booster, not much of a candidate for Mega-Hypocrite.