CHAPTER

TWENTY

ABOUT 10 A.M. THE NEXT MORNING, I PLACED A CALL to Chris Spinetti.

I called from a pay phone at Logan International where I’d ditched the Cavalier in the general parking garage. The day was hot and windy and the airport was filled with summer travelers. I wanted to escape in drag, but my face was still too bruised and swollen and I suspected a man with a shiner would attract less attention than a woman with the same injury. I covered the bruises as best I could with makeup and hoped my efforts would be sufficient. The rest of my disguise consisted of my baseball cap to hide my hair and some cheap sunglasses purchased at an airport gift shop.

The payphone was in the High Flight Lounge. I watched an Aer Lingus 747 taxi down the shimmering runway. The lounge looked anything but high this morning. A few subdued patrons picked at their breakfast. The liquor bottles lined up behind the bar called seductively to me. I had a sudden thirst for gin, the devil of all spirits. Instead, I took a bite of a mushy bagel.

“District Four,” a polite female voice answered.

“Detective Spinetti, please.”

The phone clicked and after what seemed like hours, the voice I knew blurted into my right ear, tense and annoyed. “Spinetti.”

“Spaghetti?” I let the word drool from my mouth.

There was a long pause and then the phone slammed hard onto something on the other end. I assume it was Chris’s desk. The line buzzed and I thought I’d lost the connection.

“You little fuck.” The words sounded as if they had been plucked from hell, pronounced by the Furies.

“That’s no way to address a gay brother, Chris.”

“I’ll kill you.”

“Nice dick. The doctor did a good job on the circumcision.” Chris bayed like a hound.

“Calm down,” I said, after his anger lessened from nuclear to boil. “You can always make porn if you lose your job on the force.”

He swore at the phone. “I need a trace,” he yelled to someone at District.

“Don’t bother. I’ll tell you exactly where I am. Logan.” I stuck a cigarette in my mouth, but didn’t light it. He stopped screaming. “I’m not going to be here long, and anyway, I don’t think you really want to send any of those straight cop friends of yours to come get me, if you think about what I’m carrying.”

“What do you want?” The question was cautious, but filled with anger.

“Answers. In person.”

“You broke into my apartment.”

“The door was open.”

“Where? When and where?” He sounded cornered, like a man forced at gunpoint to walk off a cliff, and I shook a little at the danger I’d created; yet, I knew I had to meet it head on.

“The sooner the better. Someplace we both know and love.”

“Where’s that?” he snapped.

“Thank about it. Give me an hour to get there.”

I hung up the phone and caught the subway into Boston.

For the second time that morning, I considered falling off the wagon. I ordered a corned beef sandwich at a deli on the edge of the Zone and thirsted for a tall glass of pilsner beer. The beer would give me the added strength I needed to face Chris. One might lead to another, until I’d be so shitfaced, I’d walk away from this madness and everybody would be better off. Or, I’d be so drunk, I’d shoot the bastard on sight. However, under the consideration that Chris—surely homicidal by now - might shove his Glock in my face when I walked in the door, I reconsidered the drink. The days of wine and roses would have to wait. My lips remained chaste.

Just before noon, I walked into the netherworld of the Déjà Vu with my black bag in hand. The attendant was a dark-skinned woman in a blue suit and red gaucho hat. Her perfume masked the musky smells of the theater. She smiled, wished me a good day, and went back to reading her People magazine. She didn’t give my duffel a second glance; apparently, management accepted patrons who carried in toys, liquid lunches or whatever other accessories they might need to enjoy the show, including guns.

My eyes needed to adjust, so I waited in a dim corner of the lobby. Once inside, I watched fifteen minutes of an orgy in Chateau de Passion, before attempting a look around. I had to admit the French men were hairy and handsome and the women were in the range of a gay man’s acceptability, thin with small breasts, but for me the film might as well have been Bambi. Sex really wasn’t on my mind.

I took a seat in a dark last row, which was protected from behind by a high wooden divider separating the theater from the lobby. The seat I chose gave me an unobstructed view of anyone entering or leaving from either the left or right aisles. I opened my bag, took out the .357, loaded it, and rested it on my lap.

Even in this relatively early hour of porn-sex, I counted at least 50 men in the house. A smoker hacked several rows in front of me. My seat was central enough no one approached me and that was the way I wanted it. The French video ended and Dressed to Thrill, a poorly made S&M fetish reel, flickered on the screen.

I sat for five hours, half-watching the porn double bill and scrutinizing the men who glided like ghosts down the aisles. The onscreen sex bored me, and, after a time, white dots danced before my eyes. I had to go downstairs to piss. I grabbed my bag and headed to the toilets from hell.

Activity was light in the bathroom. Three men crowded into one of the stalls in a cramped union of cock sucking. One, a fortyish man with a bald head and gray mustache, waved me in. I politely declined, but admired his democratic principles, and stood next door at the toilet while they happily carried on, pushing and straining against the green metal.

After several more hours, I was getting a complex, not to mention hunger pangs. No one had even looked at me. I knew the situation was getting desperate when I started analyzing the reasons for my unattractiveness: age, beauty, disgusting bruises, etc. Maybe it was the vibes I was throwing off.

Finally, a pleasant grocery store manager from Newton, who said he only wanted to talk, crawled into the seat next to me. At first, I welcomed the company, but after an hour of inane conversation, I politely told him I wasn’t interested and he skulked off.

A few minutes later, the man I was looking for sauntered down the right aisle. He was dressed in a dark shirt and jeans and walked casually, with the ease of a veteran cruiser—more like the ease of a veteran cop—but I could have been overestimating his nonchalance in the gloom. I wondered if my impulsiveness to get into Boston might have been a strategic failure. Chris held the advantage. I was tired, hungry, and edgy after an eight-hour stay in the Déjà Vu. Chris, on the other hand, looked focused and confident. I turned away from him and ducked as low as I could go as he passed. I didn’t want to give away my advantage.

The detective slid into a seat next to a man about ten rows in front of me. They turned their heads toward each other and then turned away. They stared at the screen for about five minutes. Chris lit a cigarette and the smoke curled up into the hazy flicker of light. The detective slid his left arm around the other man’s shoulders and then nuzzled against the man’s neck. He shifted slightly and moved his right arm toward the other man. The cop’s head disappeared into the man’s lap. The recipient of his service relaxed and stretched back in his seat.

Spinetti had balls. He was acting like nothing mattered but his own sex drive. Anger surged through me.

I could kill him and splatter his brains over the other man. The .357 would make quite a mess. The blowjob was over, I decided. Coitus interruptus. I hitched the duffle over my left shoulder and sprinted toward the two men. The detective’s head bobbed in short strokes.

I stopped Chris with the muzzle of the .357.

He gagged.

“Holy shit,” the other man said. It was the Newton grocer.

“It’s okay,” I said. “We’re lovers and we play this little game all the time. He tricks out and I catch him, and, in a jealous rage, I rape him in front of the assembled crowd. He loves it. We’ve done it for years. Want to join in?”

“Jesus, no,” the grocer replied.

“Well, honey,” I said to Chris, “time to go home. Nobody wants to play. Might as well stop getting your throat swabbed.”

Chris raised his head slowly off the rather thick piece of meat. This grocer’s basket was ample.

“Game’s not over, Des.” Chris’s voice was resigned, flat.

“Could you excuse us, please,” I said to the grocer. “I think we’re about to have a lovers’ quarrel.”

“Gladly,” the grocer said. He zipped up his fly and darted off in the darkness.

I shielded the gun with my left hand, pushed it into the nape of Chris’s neck and maneuvered my way to the seat behind him. “I say the game’s done, Chris.”

“I’ve been a fool, Des. This goes deeper than you know. More than you or I can handle. I knew you’d be here. I thought I might as well enjoy myself one last time before looking for you. I mean, what’s the rush? You hold all the cards now.”

“Where’s Stephen?”

Chris laughed.

“No laughing matter,” I said. I pushed the gun deeper into his neck and he pushed back hard, as if he relished the feel of it on his skin. “I look at it this way. You broke into Stephen’s apartment after you found out he was missing. You wrote the message on the screen. He told you too much. He came to you for help and you used everything he told you against him. You called Rodney Jessup to let him know about Stephen’s speech. Let me use my psychic gifts here, Chris. Let me divine the answer. You would deliver Stephen Cross to the devil for half-a-million dollars.”

He shook his head and I told him not to move.

“You have no fucking clue, Des. Half-a-million is small time. Half-a-mil is what some anonymous nutcase made up to put the fear of God into Stephen Cross. Try four times that.”

“Jessup’s the only one who could come up with that kind of money. Jessup paid you two million dollars for Stephen? That’s a nice take. Sure beats a detective’s salary.”

He laughed again and my trigger finger got itchy.

“Hurry up, Chris. Every second, I get closer to killing you.” I wanted to kill him, if not for me, for Stephen. I hoped he wouldn’t test me because the choice would be easy. However, the thought struck me that maybe the worst punishment for Spinetti would be to crash his gay closet—throw open the doors and fling him out. Sad to say, I could end his life with a couple of phone calls as easily as I could with a bullet. A few conversations with his District Chief, his ex-wife, mother and father in the North End would be enough, or I could pull the trigger. But what of all those years distinguishing myself? I was proud of the things that had been taken away from me: my book collection, my records, my leather. But I was even more proud of what couldn’t be taken away: good drag, my intelligence, my willingness to learn, my sexuality, my gayness. My previous lives of dealing and hustling had tarnished the me that Chris was so quick to see and judge. Why add murder to my small list of negatives?

“No, I didn’t deliver Stephen to Rodney Jessup,” Chris said. “All I wanted was the money. I believed Stephen from the beginning because he’s the kind of guy who doesn’t bullshit. He’s smart and honest. And if he was telling the truth, there was a lot of money to be made.”

“Stephen told a few lies. You read his diary.”

“Blackmail, brother. That’s all I wanted. A little payoff to destroy evidence. Rodney’s happy—he buys his candidacy. Stephen doesn’t get hurt—he comes off like some faggot crackpot. I just had to get my hands on the proof. That was all. I got close with the diary, but I couldn’t find the goddamn business card, the one with Jessup’s name on it.”

“Then who got to Stephen?” The face of a young tough, the soldier in my dream, rushed into my head.

“Who knows? Someone working for Jessup? The psycho who’s carving up hustlers? Stephen had enemies. That made the whole thing easier—why it was so easy to pin it on Aryan America. So many people had a reason to hate Stephen, the way they have so many to hate a fag.”

The screen went dark. Chris reached into his pockets.

“Keep it straight,” I said.

“A cigarette.”

I leaned to his left with the gun still pressed to his neck. The lighter flashed and the dark mustache and handsome profile came into view. A woman in a latex body suit holding a horse whip appeared on the screen and Dressed to Thrill came on for the fifth time since I had walked in.

“I wish I could have kept it straight,” Chris said with a deep exhale. He lowered his head and the .357 pulled away from his neck. “Jessup didn’t know who the hell I was, but the moment I called and said I wanted to talk about Stephen Cross, he knew. He knew things were going to get rough. Maybe he made one mistake—one that haunted him—and he believed, like a drunk who says one more before he gets behind the wheel, that the past doesn’t really matter. It was so long ago and he prayed the mistake would go away. Nobody would know. He really believed the Hercules wouldn’t come back to haunt him.”

Chris shook his head. “The trouble with you and Stephen is that you’re too much in-your-face homos for the rest of us. Jessup’s probably thinking, why for Christ’s sake didn’t that fag die of AIDS? Why not Stephen Cross? Think of the anxiety Jessup had to live with. His first time on television, always expecting the day a reporter would run over and say, ‘There’s a rumor about you, Reverend Jessup,’ and it would be over. He could deny it—there was no hard evidence—or he could confess, but that would kill him, too, because then he’d be one of those weak men who made a big mistake. Either way he’d be screwed. He’d jump awake at 4 a.m. with a scream and that lovely blonde thing of a wife would bring him cold compresses and change the sheets when his sweat would soak the bed. He could never be himself. Can you imagine trying to hide all those years?”

“Like you?”

He pushed his head back against the gun.

“You took the easy way out, Des. Guys like you have it made. You come out and you don’t give a fuck. I got a family, kids, a career. You don’t know the hell I’ve been through, pushing back this sickness I thought I had. It’s harder for us—the ones in the closet. The ones like me, the ones who have to keep it all inside. We make it safe for you because society can’t put its finger on us. Is he gay? Is he straight? The guys you take a shower with can’t call you a fag because they can’t tell. If they’re wrong it comes back so close it bites them in the ass. We keep those guys off you.

“But I can’t sit in a gay bar and talk about dance clubs and hair styles and Judy Garland. I don’t have that luxury. The Déjà Vu was the only place that was kind to me. In the dark, I could be the biggest queer on earth and nobody gave a fuck. I didn’t have to take faggot this and faggot that and all that ball-busting testosterone shit. I met Clay here. He was nice. I was sorry he died. I had to act like I wasn’t because of all my straight brothers would think I was queer. Hauling you in for the Combat Zone murders would get the news off Stephen, make my life a little easier. But now you know, Des. I’m a cocksucker and I’m dead.

“I got bills to pay, loans and debts to people you can’t even imagine. And the worst part is, I got two beautiful girls who can’t even stand to look at me because their mother tells them what a creep I am. And now, add insult to injury. I wanted them to grow up proud of me, proud because I was a cop. Proud because I was a man. You think dealing with Catholic parents is fun? And you think I can come out? I’d never see any of them again.” He sighed. “Two million dollars. A future for my girls. It would take me a long way from here, maybe somewhere where I could—”

“—You are a man. Hide and seek is a kid’s game, Chris. We can get up and go to the police, tell them what we know and maybe it won’t be too late for Stephen or for us. Your kids will still love you. Think of them. You can work this out.”

He lowered his head into his hands and sobbed. A woman moaned on screen.

“Jessup,” he muttered between sobs. “The thugs in New Hampshire. One of them will be out for me, and then you and the rest of us. They’ll kill me and then they’ll kill you.”

My heart softened a bit for him. “They can’t kill all of us.”

“Sure they can. It’s easy to find us now. Gay gyms, bars, magazine subscriptions, mail-order lists. They can round us up.”

“Closet’s getting to you, Chris. Let’s go.”

He shivered in the seat.

I let my guard down in a moment of sympathy. I thought he reached down for another cigarette—I was wrong. Before I knew it, he had knocked my hand away and he was standing in the row in front of me, the Glock pointed at my face.

“The game’s not over, Des,” he said. The sobs had turned to growls.

A man and woman exploded in an orgasm on screen.

I shrunk back in my seat, put the Magnum in my lap and said, “Think about this, Chris. Murder doesn’t become you.”

“It would be so easy to kill you.”

His voice chilled me.

“How lucky that I ran into the Combat Zone killer in the Déjà Vu. No one would question why I had to put a bullet in your head.”

“Well, probably no one, except for one small detail,” I said. “I gave your pictures, Stephen’s diary, and a note about what to make of this mess to a friend. I told him that if he didn’t hear from me within twenty-four hours to mail the whole package to John Dresser. I even provided the stamps.” I lied, but it was my only hope of getting out of the Déjà Vu alive. The pictures and Stephen’s diary were in the duffle next to me.

The breath drained out of Spinetti. “Well, it was worth a shot. You always were one step ahead. You see, Des, either way I can’t live like this—a fucking despised gay man—or a murderer. That’s why I needed to enjoy the Déjà Vu one last time.”

The Glock went up to his right temple.

A flash burned through the darkness; the retort deafened my ears. I heard garbled voices that said nothing and everything. My eyes swam in the light, then the light disappeared and I shook in the dark. Chris had fallen forward, his bloody head coming to rest on the back of the seat, not three feet from my lap.

Footsteps and men shouting. Warm, sticky liquid covered my face. The bullet had blown a hole through his head and blood was leaking from his nose and mouth. I stumbled out of my seat, my stomach convulsing. I drew in some slow breaths to calm my panic, to think. Chris’s blood had splattered into my mouth, filtered up my nose.

I heard sirens in the distance.

The handsome face was a black mass. The Glock had fallen underneath his feet. I rushed past him to an emergency side exit. The alarm wailed as I pushed open the door and stepped into the dark.

My black bag was my only friend.

I sprinted down the fire lane on my gimpy leg and made my way through the maze of alleys in Chinatown. I needed to get the blood off my body and clothes, and the only thing I could think to do was to throw myself into Fort Point Channel, a murky extension of Boston Harbor about ten minutes away.

The streets were mostly empty. If a car passed by, I held the bag in front of my body and lowered my head. I found a dock off a deserted pier. Behind me, the city skyline twinkled in the night.

I plunged into the dark water, as cold as slick metal, way too cold. The air fled from my lungs and my arms flailed against the surface. Chunks of ice floated around me in the vat and an arm from the deep grabbed my leg as I thrashed about. The arm pulled me under and I saw Chris, his face a bloody pulp, his skin shim mering with a purple wetness. He grabbed my throat. My lungs were bursting; my brain on the verge of a blackout.

I fought and kicked until I got his hands off my throat and my head above water. Then, I coughed out the foul liquid, grabbed the pier and held on. Beneath me, the hands slipped from my legs. I climbed up a rickety metal ladder and sat on the dock and rubbed my face hard to get the blood off. My cheeks were numb when I finally stopped and stared into the lights rippling across the water.

In a sparkling wave ten feet from the dock, a hand broke the surface like a hungry fish and then sank into the dark depths.