Wearing Black to the White Party

by David Stukas

  “Oh boy, this movie stinks like the Salton Sea on a hot day,” Monette said as we half-watched the film and told Marc of our misguided cat burglary adventure.

  “So Michael is going into the wrong house in a wet suit in the middle of the desert!” I reported to Marc, who was holding his stomach and laughing hysterically. “The house we wanted to break into was actually next door! We were so close!” I said as I was hit by a bolt of lightning inside Marc’s den.

  At first I thought I had been hit by an assailant’s bullet, but it turned out to be a thought that had far more impact.

  “What—what is it, Robert?” Monette exclaimed, reaching over and shaking me.

  “I’m okay, but it was like . . . there, then it wasn’t there.”

  Marc stared at me, not knowing if I had snapped my cap or had suffered an epileptic fit. “Are you okay?” he asked, grabbing my hand and looking at me with deep concern.

  “Oh, I’m fine. It’s just something—like a great awareness that played hit-and-run with me. I guess I’m still a little dazed.”

  “I know exactly what’s happening, goddamn it,” Monette said. “You’re on the cusp of solving this whole damn mess! You’re going to figure it out before me!”

  “Oh, I’m not so sure about that. It was weird. Like I know what I was thinking, but it wasn’t completely clear. Like a foggy idea. It just didn’t crystallize yet.”

  “That’s how it happens for me,” Monette indicated. “You fill your head with all the facts, then you let it sit and stew, and whammo! It hits you. But you have to be careful and not disturb it while you’re in this state. Let’s just sit back and watch this stupid movie and maybe it will come back to you.”

  So we did just that. We watched Jackie bumble along as a photographer until she met Jack Kennedy and fell in love with the cheating scoundrel. Nothing. No solution came to my mind. Nothing. Jackie was just about to go down the aisle of the church to get married for the first time, when the screen froze and went to black, and up came the words that hundreds of faggots across America probably yelled in agony: To be Continued.

  “Oh, shit,” Marc said, thumbing through a TV Guide. “This is a two-parter,” he complained. “They get you hooked on the gloves and the hats; then they pull it away from you and tell you to come back tomorrow.” Marc turned off the television and asked what we wanted to do next.

  “I’m going to make a suggestion,” Monette said.

  “As long as it doesn’t involve breaking into a house,” I said, drawing a line in the sand.

  Monette smiled. “You two haven’t had much time together, so why don’t you go off and I’ll go take a swim in the pool or sit out and watch the stars or read a book. Don’t worry about me—I can entertain myself. Go, now, off with you two.”

  Marc looked at me. I returned his gaze. Wordlessly we grabbed each other’s hand and started down the hall to Marc’s bedroom.

  “Just remember one thing, Robert,” Monette’s voice came from behind us. “While Marc is handling the Red Party from here tomorrow, you and I are going for a hike. After all, we gotta start checking out some facts. So, Marc, make sure Robert can walk tomorrow.”

  14

  Happy Trails to You

  Unlike Michael Stark, I like to keep my sexual life private. So I’m not going to go into any detail about another night with Marc. Suffice it to say that when I got up in the morning, I felt like I could climb straight up to Mount San Jacinto’s 10,800-foot peak.

  In fact, I was beaming over with contentment and pride when Monette and I squeezed into our minuscule Metro, heading out for our hike. Already Monette had an ace up her sleeve.

  “Sergeant Big Dick—”

  “Sergeant Big Arms,” I reminded her.

  “What did I say?” she asked.

  “Big Dick.”

  “Oh, that’s not like me to be thinking about big dicks—or any, for that matter. Anyway, Sergeant Big Arms called me this morning, and you’re not going to believe this.”

  “Believe what?”

  “About the calls that came to Rex’s cell phone.”

  “Oh, yeah. And ... ?” I pleaded.

  “The first one came from his own house, Casa Rex,” Monette stated, knowing that this information would send my head reeling.

  It worked.

  “What?” I replied. “From his own house? You mean someone was there?”

  “I don’t think a ghost made the call.”

  “Well, offhand, I would say that this would make Vince the number one suspect, but he was at the party with Rex that night.”

  “That’s right,” Monette agreed. “Are you confused enough, or do you want to hear where the second call came from?”

  “You’ve just blown all my shaky theories out of the water, but go ahead.”

  “Call number two came from Leo’s own house.”

  “None of this makes any sense.”

  “Yes, it does,” Monette said. “It means that there were two callers.”

  “Our double-murderer theory?”

  “Could be,” Monette said, squealing around a corner. “There’s still so much we don’t know. Plus, there’s something about those letters.”

  “Other than the paper?” I asked.

  “Yes, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.”

  “So why are we going on this hike? I suppose this has something to do with the first attempt on Rex’s life?”

  “You are correct-a-mundo. Plus, I’m stuck—we might as well start somewhere,” she said, flying down a rather desolate road and coming to a screeching halt off to the side of the road and raising a great cloud of dust that enveloped our tiny sardine on wheels. “This is it. Spitz Trail.”

  “Do you know where this leads?” I said, looking at the rugged terrain.

  “Hopefully, to some answers,” Monette responded.

  The trail was narrow, so I followed single file after Monette, hoping that if we chanced upon any rattlesnakes, she would know what to do. After hiking for about an hour, Monette turned to me and said, “Do you see what I see?”

  “Obviously not,” I said, trying to scan the landscape for the cougar or dead body that Monette had spotted but I had somehow missed.

  “Rex said that someone threw a boulder down on him when he was hiking. There’s not a hill overlooking this entire trail. It’s almost as flat as a pancake.”

  “There are some cliffs over there,” I objected.

  “Robert, if you wanted to kill someone, it’s a million-toone shot for anyone to roll a boulder from those cliffs, make it jump two deep washes, and just happen to roll all that way and hit Rex. George W Bush would have a better chance of getting a degree from Harvard.”

  I cracked open the trail guide that Monette had handed me earlier, and read again the description of the trail. “The trail guide categorizes the Spitz Trail as easy. It says there are no significant hills or inclines on the way. Maybe the evildoer didn’t want to kill Rex. Remember how they wanted money?”

  “It still makes no sense. If you wanted to scare someone into paying you off, wouldn’t you want to have a near miss with your intended target? The way this trail goes, you’d need a catapult to hit Rex from any of those cliffs. Plus, I want to add that I can’t believe that you’re huffing and puffing on a trail that a two-year-old could handle. You have to get out of smoky bars and out into the fresh air.”

  “I do the stair-stepper machine at the gym. Michael says it gives you buns like two cherry tomatoes,” I answered. “So what have we learned here?”

  “We’ve learned that none of this makes any sense.”

  “Maybe a boulder just kinda rolled by itself, and Rex, his mind already being in a suggestive state, imagined that someone threw the rock at him.”

  “Close, but no cigar, Robert. A more plausible theory was that the boulder incident never happened. In that case, where did Rex go instead? Or, another possibility is that Rex was on a different trail and got the names mixed up. Oh, fuck it all. I do
n’t know anything anymore. We might as well go.”

  We walked back toward the car, with Monette and me rearranging the facts of the case in our heads. Suddenly, a thought came to me.

  “Monette, I think we should find out from Vince who had keys to Casa Rex. If we could just find out who could have made that call, we might have our answer.”

  Monette turned around in her tracks and gave me one of her rib-cracking hugs.

  “Great idea. You’re learning, kiddo. Someday you’ll be almost as good as me.”

  The trouble with most theories is that they look good on paper, but when put to the acid test they fall apart faster than a set of Firestone radials. My great idea sounded terrific until Vince gave us the disappointing news that all the higher-ups had keys to Rex’s house office.

  “Leo, Marc, Colorado—even David McLeish—had keys. Rex holds his meetings here; the plans and most of the paperwork is here—so people need access to this stuff. Plus, Rex writes off part of the house on his taxes because of the home office. But no one comes here in the middle of the night, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Well, someone did,” Monette said, trying to set the record straight.

  “What do you mean? The palm-tree incident?” Vince asked.

  “Never mind,” Monette responded so abruptly that I knew something was up. “Do you mind if we look around in Rex’s office some more?”

  “I don’t know what you’re going to find,” Vince added. “Just don’t disturb things too much, because Rex might want to come back, and he hates it when things are out of place ... from beyond, I mean.”

  Monette shot me a this-guy’s-cuckoo look.

  “Thank you, Vince,” she responded, grabbing my hand and tugging me down the hall into Rex’s office, closing the door, and locking it behind us. “Vince is really starting to give me the creeps.”

  “And you wonder why I don’t want to sleep here?” I said.

  “Do me a favor. Turn on his computer and let’s do some snooping,” Monette suggested.

  I did as I was told, and in few minutes we were sifting through what was left of dear, departed Rex. True to what Vince had predicted, his filing system was as neat as a pin. Everything was filed in tidy folders that ranged from Personal to Proposals. We searched every file and document we could, but we found nothing out of the ordinary. The file marked Personal was off limits to us and protected by a password.

  “What is that blinking light at the top of the screen?” Monette asked, pointing to a blinking icon off the side of the screen.

  “Let’s click on it and find out,” I said. “Oh, it’s a fax thing. He’s got messages in there he hasn’t read.”

  “And I guess he never will, unless we run an Ethernet cable into Heaven where he can download his messages,” Monette replied, dripping with sarcasm.

  “Oh, you are evil, Monette!”

  We looked at each other and laughed, two skeptics sharing a little joke.

  “Let’s look at the faxes. Maybe there’s something in there,” Monette prodded me.

  We did. Nothing. Just invoices, business correspondence, and a joke involving a man with a strawberry up his ass.

  Monette, not satisfied with what she found, studied the computer screen carefully.

  “Ah!” she exclaimed in triumph. “We were looking at the in box. What we need to look at are the sent faxes.” She clicked on the sent icon and the screen was aglow with a list of all the faxes sent in the last few weeks. “Bulls eye!”

  “I don’t see it,” I confessed to Monette. “It’s just a list of the faxes Rex sent, the phone numbers he sent them to, and when he sent them. What’s so special about that?”

  “Let me print out this list and I’ll bet that we find something highly significant—if my guesses are right,” she replied. “Okay, where do we look next?”

  “Oh, Monette?”

  “Yes?”

  “Marc wanted to know if you wanted to come over and watch the rest of that Jackie O movie. He’s going to order some wonderful food from a restaurant and have it delivered, champagne included.”

  “Champagne? Count me in,” she said, just before she got hit by a bolt of lightning.

  It’s one thing when people of my height, five feet eleven, get a breakthrough idea. We look surprised and may clap our hands. When a six-foot-four-inch Monette gets a eureka, she jumps up and down and dances around like a quarterback making a touchdown in the last few seconds of a game.

  “That’s it? Oh, goddess, I’ve been so stupid. It was right there all the time! And it was so simple! Thank you, Robert. Thank you, thank you, thank you!”

  This was it! The answer. I was about to explode, waiting to hear about the clue that would blow this case wide open. “What? What’s the answer?” I begged.

  “Jackie O,” she said, grinning from ear to ear.

  It was a while before I moved or even breathed.

  “This is one of our practical jokes, isn’t it?” I asked. “I know that you’ve been here about a week and you haven’t played one on me yet. And, I haven’t played one on you yet.”

  “You’ve been too busy falling in love,” she explained. “No, I’m quite sure about my idea; I just don’t know how to prove it yet. But I will. Do me a favor, will you? Turn Rex’s computer on again, and I want to make up a list of questions that I need the answers to. Then we can fax them to Sergeant Gorski.”

  I did as she wanted. The questions left me stumped when I saw them appear on the computer screen as she typed:

  1. What exactly did Martin Stevers see at The Zone bar the night of Rex’s death?

  2. What alibi did David McLeish give the night of Rex’s death?

  3. What was the result of Rex’s last physical?

  I couldn’t see her logic in solving this mess, but I was gaining some insight into how a good detective surmises what really happened and then looks for answers to questions that will prove his theory. The all-important skill is in coming up with the right theory—that’s the kicker.

  Monette printed out her list of questions and went over to Rex’s fax machine and faxed her list of questions to Sergeant Gorski. Or at least she tried to.

  “The thing’s broke,” she said, looking at the fax machine as if staring at it intently would fix it.

  She went to the door and shouted down the hall to Vince, “Vince, is there something about Rex’s fax machine that I don’t understand? It doesn’t seem to be working.”

  Seconds later, Vince popped his head in the door.

  “It’s not working because Rex threw it against the wall a week ago when the paper jammed. What do you want to send?” he asked, trying to see what was on Monette’s piece of paper.

  Monette’s hand flew behind her back, keeping her list of questions safe from Vince’s hands—the second time she seemed to be keeping something from Vince. She suspected Vince, and so did I—in a way, he had the most to gain.

  “Just one sheet of paper,” Monette replied.

  “Did you print that out on the computer?” Vince inquired.

  “Yes, I just printed it.”

  “Oh, you can fax it right from the computer. Just click on the ‘Just the Fax’ icon and follow the directions to send your document.”

  “Thank you, Vince,” Monette said, shooing him out the door and locking it quietly behind him. She sat down at the computer again and sent the fax to the phone number on Sergeant Gorski’s business card.

  “You don’t trust Vince, do you?”

  “No, Robert, but I don’t trust anyone until we have all the facts in the case.”

  “Everyone’s guilty until proven innocent.” I put on my sad cow eyes and tried to look pitiful. “And you’re not going to tell me who you think did it, are you?”

  “Nope. I want you to figure out what I’m doing and why. You need to guess if you ever want to become a first-rate armchair detective. I’ll give you a clue that will help and will make cases easier to solve: don’t spend your time watching the smoke
like most people do—keep your eye out for the fire.”

  “Thank you for that sage piece of Zen advice, oh, mistress of the sound of one hand getting the clap,” I responded. “Do you want me to visualize world peace, too?”

  “Don’t get smart with me, missy,” Monette said coyly. “Now, we have to get busy ourselves.”

  “So what are we doing next?”

  “Guess.”

  “You gave the sergeant a list of questions that you either can’t or don’t want to dig up, so we’re going to search for stuff we can find out for ourselves.”

  “Very good!” she replied, heaping praise on my first real step in the art of solving mysteries.

  “Don’t ask me what our next step is, because I don’t know,” I confessed.

  “We’re going to ask Vince the name of Rex’s travel agent.”

  “I see,” I said, lying through my teeth.

  “Then we’re going to grill Marc. First and foremost, we need to know if Leo Thomas had a boyfriend. Why would I want to know the answer to that?”

  “To eliminate the possibility that Leo was murdered for an inheritance by a lover.”

  “Very good!”

  “So even though Leo is dead, you suspect that he might have killed Rex?”

  Monette smiled. “I’m just trying to eliminate another theory. Soon we’ll be down to one. Let’s get the name of Rex’s travel agent from Vince and then head over to Marc’s house so we can grill him. Then we’re going to take an excursion down some remote roads.”

  “A desert scavenger hunt?” I suggested.

  “What I’m looking for is far from worthless. In fact, if I find what I’m looking for, I’ll have all the evidence I need.”

  15

  A View to a Kill

  We drove over to Marc’s house, where Monette made a quick call to Grayson.

  “Grayson, Monette here. I have the name of a travel agent here in town. John Haggerty. Do you know him? Vince said he’s the number one gay travel agent here in town.... You do? Good! . . . You use him? ... Excellent! Could you give him a call and ask him if he’s made any travel arrangements for Rex in the last year? ... You could? Good! As soon as you get the answer, call me here at Marc Baldwin’s house.... Yes, the number I gave you the other day.... Fine.... Okay, good-bye.”