CHAPTER

TWO

STEPHEN CROSS RANG MY BUZZER AT 10 A.M. MONDAY morning, June 26^th. I ignored the first two rings because I was sleeping with a young man I had picked up the night before at the Manhole. The third and fourth rings seemed urgent, and, on a persistent fifth ring, I pulled on a cream silk slip and leather boots and headed down from my third-floor apartment. I stopped behind the green, pockmarked metal door at the bottom of the stairs. My building was less than top-notch South End—this was no Union Park. The gay gentry, if they ever ventured this deep into the wasteland, would sneer at my wretched quarters. The building’s foyer was prison-like, small, cramped, dark, and with a cement floor that clicked loudly when traversed in heels. Any trace of the building’s former elegance had vanished—another Boston dwelling lost to neglect in a declining neighborhood.

I peered out the small rectangular window secured by chicken wire. I recognized Stephen Cross through the cross-hatching, looking tired and pale. At first, I couldn’t understand what he was saying. Then I figured out he was mouthing the word murder. We had last seen each other six weeks ago at Café Ole, our usual meeting spot. Stephen’s dark hair framed a milky face. He looked too serious, too ghostly for a beautiful June morning in Boston. I hadn’t invited him over.

A fire burned in my gut, ignited by a smoldering crush. Despite my romantic fantasies for the man outside my door, I wished Stephen would leave me the fuck alone with the man upstairs. At least I had a chance with my trick. My excursion to the Manhole had been my first night out in a month.

Stephen had never set foot in my apartment. Few had. But the word murder intrigued me, so I opened the door and waved him in. Dressed in khaki shorts and a white T-shirt, he looked as if he had just come from the beach. The slight heft in his face betrayed his age. He was over forty. He wasn’t what some girls would call handsome, but there was a gentle strength in the structure of his face, which was accented by waves of black hair and dark brows over blue eyes. Too Byronic for some. Just right for me.

I coughed.

“Smoking too much,” he said in a sotto voce delivery.

This from a fellow cigarette sucker.

“Please, don’t start. Social smoker, indeed.”

Thin lines leading back from the eyes, others, deeper around the mouth, traced his face. I had to pick at him, otherwise I might place him on the pedestal of perfection. I was tempted to shove him against the wall and get nasty in the foyer.

“Who’s dead?” I asked, my common sense getting the better of my fantasy.

“Like to invite me up, Des?” His voice echoed up the stairwell. “I’d prefer not to talk here, if that’s okay.”

As our friendship had developed, I allowed Stephen to use the shortened version of my female drag persona, Desdemona. Everyone else addressed me by my Christian name, Cody Harper. Considering our history—what had drawn us together in the first place—what was a name between friends?

I looked at him hard and caught him blinking. His eyes were adjusting from the brilliant ocean blue sky outside to the cave-like atmosphere of my building. The morning was cool and pleasant, the happy summer tourist kind that only a Bostonian could truly appreciate.

“Your makeup’s running,” he had the nerve to point out.

I looked like a bad night at the local drag bar. My hair was a mess. The ultra blue eye shadow and frosty red on my lips had turned my face into Ronald McDonald on Quaaludes. What did he expect? The trick in my apartment had smeared my drag with his kisses.

“The brand shall go unnamed, but you can get it at Walgreen’s.” I started up the stairs. “Did you come to talk or give me a makeover?”

“You look better without makeup,” Stephen said, offering an opinion that extinguished the embers in my gut.

“On some subjects, advice should be given with caution.”

“I guess I don’t understand it. You make a damn good looking woman. Damn good. The first time I saw you in drag I couldn’t believe it. You were spectacular in a gold, shimmering evening gown. I can appreciate drag, but you look better as a man. You might want to cut the ponytail, too.”

I scowled. “The cosmetics and the ponytail stay.” I could tell Stephen’s eyes were following my ass, taking in the slip and the black lace-up military boots. I was as sexy as any man could be in a Donna Karan undergarment. “I have to shave my chest today,” I added just to get a rise. “Décolletage.”

“Must be rough on the Lady Gillette.”

We climbed three flights of stairs stained with coffee, soda, and God knows what else. When we got to the landing outside my apartment, I reached for a spare pack of Marlboros I always kept on the hall window sill. I pointed to a hole in the glass, chicken wired as well, and to the cobwebbed pattern of fractures.

“The times we live in,” I said. “A bullet, more than a month ago. I think the assassin miscalculated, thought this window was in my apartment. The gun was fired from an angle, below and outside. Such are the hazards of my profession.”

I didn’t know who had fired the shot. I had a few suspicions, but nothing I could prove, and I wasn’t about to go to the police. The bullet hole made for good effect, but I doubted it was fired to do me in, despite my off-and-on work as a bodyguard. It was more likely another random shooting in the city battleground. Stephen studied the powdery blotch on the ceiling.

I lit a cigarette with a flame-thrower of a Bic. “Fag? I asked.”

“Later. I’ve been smoking too much lately.”

I shrugged and opened my door. “Enter at your own risk. Just so you know, there’s a man in my bed. And watch the records.” To cross the room, Stephen had to walk around a few of my long-playing discs I’d tossed casually on the floor. Way too many books, Broadway cast albums, and theater posters crowded my studio apartment.

My homme du jour slept under the leather showcase tacked to the wall behind my bed: a collection of whips of various sorts, some ending in feather lashes, others stricter and less pliable; a cat-o-nine tails; chest harnesses with silver O-rings; leather collars with D-rings; Chaps; Jock straps; And an array of cock rings and dildos of various sizes.

Stephen gazed upon the slight young man with dark hair and smooth chest who slept in my bed. His thin wrists were secured by leather straps to the posts above his head. Danny was covered with a sheet from waist to feet, his legs splayed under the covering, his ankles tied to the bottom posts by straps as well. My trick showed an ample bulge that rose under the sheet at crotch level.

“Is he alive?” Stephen asked. “And legal?”

At times, I allowed my coarser incarnation to spring fullblown to the fray. People like Stephen brought that out in me. I got a perverse thrill not only from taking him down a notch now and then, but by pushing the boundaries of our relationship. I pursed my lips and hissed out a puff of smoke. I pulled down the sheet with a flourish and exposed the naked body under it. Danny’s penis, at first asleep, pulsed into an erection.

“Look’s alive to me,” I said. “Of course he’s legal. What kind of fool do you take me for? I picked him up last night at the Manhole. Have to show ID there. Great fuck, big dick. He snorted a little too much powder, but not enough to damage the plumbing.”

Stephen didn’t flinch. Or maybe he wasn’t paying attention. I’d given him enough of a show, along with free admission. I pulled up the sheet and sat in the overstuffed chair that took up the corner across from my bed.

“Throw me a fag,” Stephen said.

I tossed him the Marlboros.

“You doing coke again?” he asked.

I huffed in disgust. “I’m clean and you know it. Nothing’s changed since that deranged queen fired the .38 at my head.” Fortunately, the bullet had only traveled through the fleshy part of my left arm. Never trust a drag queen with a gun. “She’s still working the streets. We exchange cordial greetings now and then, like ‘Hello, motherfucker, been to target practice lately?’ Honestly, I don’t think she remembers shooting me.”

The memory made me itchy and irritable. Suddenly, I wasn’t in the mood for company. I wanted to be alone with my thoughts and my books, my silence restored. I looked at Stephen like a cat about to snag a mouse, intent and deadly. He caught my irritation.

“I came by to talk,” he said in a tone as timid as I could remember. “That okay?”

His question ended in a slight drawl. At times, I could hear Kansas all over Stephen. His years in New England had obliterated all but a trace of his dialect, usually his voice sounded as flat as a prime-time newscaster. But he would sprinkle his speech with “boys”, or “damn good”, or “put up”, instead of put away, his unconscious journey into regionalism. At times I’d think Ma and Pa Kettle were lurking around the corner about to crank up the jalopy.

“In the two years I’ve known you, we’ve never been in each others’ apartments. You can see I’m busy. What’s the emergency?”

His face darkened. “There’s been a murder.”

I was quite certain that Stephen, the good boy political writer from Kansas, had not killed his lover, John Dresser, the handsome, wholesome pin-up boy from Vermont.

“So why come to me?” I asked. In fact, I knew the answer— our strange, symbiotic relationship with violence.

“You know who’s out on the street, Des.”

“Hustlers, dealers, bad boys, small-time cons, grifters, yes. Murderers, no. Who was snuffed?”

“A nice boy from Dorchester. Garbage men found him under trash bags on Providence Street—where the hustlers hang. I’ve been to District already to get more information. This kid wasn’t out for money. Strictly middle class. No history of hustling.” Stephen tilted his head back and puffed smoky O’s toward the ceiling.

“People get killed all the time. What makes this one so special?”

“This one is different. The kid’s throat was slashed. The murderer left a signature—a swastika carved into the thigh. And, just to make sure everyone got the point, genital mutilation.”

“Nasty.” I crossed my legs and my slip bristled against my thighs. “How do you know the killer’s a man?”

“I don’t. The cops suspect it from the crime, the strength required to make the wounds. There were signs of a struggle on Providence Street. A lot of blood spilled. A couple of not-so-reliable regulars saw the kid in the Combat Zone around midnight at the Déjà Vu Theater. The truth is he disappeared for five hours only to turn up in the trash. The family’s devastated and ashamed. They claim he wasn’t gay, just lonely. Straight movies at the Déjà Vu, you know. The mayor’s hell-bent, on a jag, clamoring to shut down the Zone. The usual political windfall.”

He took another drag on the cigarette and stared at me. “Have you been there?”

Stephen was fishing, but I wasn’t about to bite. “I haven’t been to the Zone since sobriety kicked in. When I go out, I drink mineral water with lime. If I have sex, it’s with someone I’ve known for more than three minutes—at least three hours. Very PC, you know.”

Stephen tilted his head toward Danny.

“Believe me,” I said, “we spent two hours in conversation. He’s from Ohio, lives in Back Bay, a grad student at Emerson. He likes club music, winter camping, Joyce Carol Oates and mild, kinky sex. He scored some coke—his mistake. Besides, I was at the Manhole, not an NA meeting. I like him. I’ll probably see him again. He won’t be doing drugs around me.”

Stephen looked away to the great altar of my room—a polished oak bookcase on the west wall. The case held my collection of American and English plays. The gold lettering on a few expensive leather bindings reflected the morning light that filtered through my windows. I knew what he was thinking: Who would believe he reads this stuff? It seemed there was always room for one more tragedy in my life. Some nights I fell asleep with Shakespeare and Arthur Miller on my stomach. God, what a threesome we made.

I caught the look in his eyes and said, “Everyone thinks hustlers and strippers are stupid—dealers, junkies, and pimps are morons. They may take the shaft in life, but they’re not all idiots.”

“I never said you were stupid, Des. If I felt that way I wouldn’t have come here in the first place.”

“So, I’m a little touchy. Degrees aren’t everything are they? Street learning means something.”

Stephen looked around the room with his reporter’s eye. He would inspect and file away in his analytical and conservative brain all he considered odd about my life. I valued what little I had: my collection of cast albums, my Broadway posters from the 1970s that hung on the walls, my leather. I had haunted Shubert Alley before I left New York City. I worked as a hustler and dancer in a club around the corner. Most of the stuff I found on the street or managed to get for a quarter. If Stephen didn’t like my taste, that was too bad. It was another reason for me to take him down a notch.

I returned to the bed and put my hand on Danny’s left leg. He shifted, still asleep, until the straps grew taut.

A cloud passed in front of the sun and the room darkened. Stephen looked blankly into the bookcase. Then he rubbed his palms together and bowed his head. I wanted to invite him into my arms because I sensed his sadness.

His voice came out in a thin whisper. “The night you saved me…I still have nightmares.”

While night’s black agents to their preys do rouse.

He had come a hairsbreadth himself of being killed. I had saved his life the night he was stabbed outside a bar on Tremont Street. I tore off his bloody shirt and made a compress to stop the blood gushing from the wound over his stomach. I pushed down with blood-soaked hands and screamed for help until someone called an ambulance. That was how we met.

“This murder brings it all up again,” he said. “The knife. The stabbing. I remember the heat, the emptiness. I knew I was going to die. I can’t shake that feeling.” He pulled at the leather strap which hung around his neck. At the end of the strap, concealed by his shirt, was the bullet the doctors had taken from my shoulder when Miss Deranged had tried to blow my head off. I had given the bullet to Stephen as a gift, a remembrance of our shared history with violence. He wore it every time we met, and I assumed he never took it off. I wondered what his boyfriend, John, thought when the cool metal brushed against him in bed.

“There’s something else.” Stephen’s brow furrowed.

I looked into his eyes and saw a spit of fear.

“John and I thought we heard something in the alley last night. I stepped out and thought I saw a figure behind the fence. I checked this morning. Someone scratched a swastika into the wood. The coincidence to the Déjà Vu killing is too close for comfort. Truth be told, I’m a little scared. I want to know what’s circulating on the street.”

“I’ll try, but I don’t get out much anymore,” I said. I didn’t know how to offer him more comfort.

Danny snorted and his eyes fluttered. Stephen made leaving motions.

Something was missing and it bothered me. “You’ve covered gay bashings and murders for years. Why is this queer from Dorchester any different? Is there some connection–”

He stopped me cold with his grin, like a Halloween skull, tortured and sardonic.

“Des, would you kill me for half-a-million dollars?” he asked flatly.

Danny’s eyes blinked open. He turned his head toward Stephen.

“Who the hell is he?” Danny asked in a sleepy drawl.

I clamped my hand over the kid’s mouth. “Who gave you permission to speak, slave?”