by Gregory Ashe
So North smiled. “You are a fucking dog.”
Shaw didn’t say anything.
North slid out of the chair, bent over Shaw, and peeled back his eyelids. Shaw grunted and slapped at North’s arm, but he didn’t really struggle. North made a show of examining first one dilated pupil, then the next, as though he were conducting some kind of medical exam. Then, still peeling back Shaw’s lids, he nodded. “You fucked. You went ahead and threw your skinny Protestant sausage link to that kid, didn’t you?” North was grinning. They were buddies. This was exactly what buddies were supposed to do. He let go of Shaw’s eyes and dropped back into the chair, kicked up his legs. “You are fucking incorrigible.”
Shaw’s gaze dropped. He played with the sheet, straightening the lines, drawing one corner out so that it hung off him like a pennant.
Leaning forward, North lowered his voice. “Is this like a client service we’re offering now? Because here’s the thing: if this is a client service, then either I’m a whore too or I’m a madame, and honestly, I don’t think I’d make a very good madame.”
A blush infused the sharp angles of Shaw’s face, and he spoke into the sheet. “Obviously Pari would be the madame.”
North burst out laughing. He laughed hard. He threw his head back. He just about fucking drummed his heels on the bed. “Oh my God, please tell me he read you some poetry first. You’re just such a fucking slut for poetry.”
The blush deepened, bright red points in the sharp triangle of Shaw’s face. “He’s right there. He can hear you.”
“Seriously, though, is this like a thing for you now? Do we need to start having them sign sexual harassment waivers?”
“North.”
“We could change our sign. And our ads. We could call ourselves a full-service, gay detective agency.”
“You’re really funny. We’re not a gay detective agency, we’re a detective agency for—”
“You owe me lunch.”
“What?”
“I told you that kid wanted to bone you. Or did you bone him? I told you. I fucking told you.” North’s grin felt like a Mr. Potato Head smile, felt like a big piece of plastic he’d pegged to the middle of his face. His cheeks hurt, fucking hurt from that grin. “A bet’s a bet.”
“But I didn’t bet anything, and it’s not like—”
“You owe me lunch, ok?” North got to his feet and tapped the center of Shaw’s chest, and he had this odd bubble of a thought burst inside his head, this odd pop of clarity that if things went well, if things went really well between Shaw and Matty, maybe this would be the last time North could ever touch Shaw, and suddenly it was all North could do not to cry, not to break down right there. Somehow he kept it together. Somehow he kept that plastic smile on his face. “I want to hear you say you’re buying me lunch because I was right.”
“You are really . . . up today.”
“I’m excited for you, man. Buy me lunch.”
“That is not your normal—” Shaw stopped. “You’re smiling a lot.”
“I told you I’m excited.”
“But, like, a lot.”
“Buy me lunch. Say it, or I’ll go in there and ask your boyfriend if he’ll buy me lunch instead.”
“Oh my God,” Shaw whispered, burying his head in the pillow. “Oh my God. He’s not—just get out. I’ll buy you lunch. I’ll buy you a restaurant if you’ll get out.”
“I might hold you to that.”
“Fine.”
“I’m going to need a business to provide for me if you two run off and get married and have a million babies.”
Shaw screamed into the pillow. Then he hurled it at North’s head.
Hands raised in surrender, North retreated to the stairs. As he pulled the door shut, he said in a mock whisper designed to carry, “Dude, those pants he was wearing were totally false advertising. For a skinny white boy, that kid has got one hell of a—”
Something clunked against the door, and North dragged it shut, laughing. He laughed on the first step down. He laughed on the second. He’d tripped acid one time, his second year of college, and that one time had been plenty, but he still remembered laughing and laughing and laughing, until it almost felt like the laughs were being dragged out of him. And this was like that only worse, only so much worse, because this wasn’t a trip, this wasn’t just the shitty acid that Tank Jessup had passed around. This was real. Upstairs, that was real. Shaw and Matty, that was real.
He stopped laughing when he hit the bottom step. He walked through the kitchen. He walked through the front office. He passed Pari, still asleep in her chair, her long hair spilling like a wave, and he let himself out onto the street, and he made his way around the side of the brick house and tried to work the loose brick free from behind the downspout. His hands wouldn’t cooperate. He could toggle the brick back and worth. He could rock it side to side. But he couldn’t grip it, couldn’t slide it out, and then, just once, North screamed, and he started kicking, kicking the brick as hard as he could and still screaming that single scream until he’d burned through all the air in his lungs. Then he sagged against the wall, sweating, shaking, smelling the brick dust and the mortar. And then his hands were steady enough, and he wormed the brick loose and retrieved the smokes, and of course they were all smashed to hell now, but he smoked one anyway with the tobacco spilling out on his fingers. He barely felt it when the cigarette burned down to a stub and the tip scorched his fingers. He barely felt anything.
Chapter 21
Somehow, after all of that, North made himself go back inside. Shaw was up and dressed (in an electric blue rain jacket and capri pants with peace signs embroidered on the bottom) and waiting in the office. They talked. Shaw told about the events of last night—the phone call after they had left Pigs and Pups, finding Matty, and the information that Detective Jadon Reck had revealed.
“So there’s somebody blackmailing people with videos,” North said. “Not just Matty, and not just Lee Brueckmann. Somebody’s doing this on a wide scale.”
“Something Reck said, I don’t think he meant to let slip.” Shaw was frowning as he spoke, trying to put his hair up into a bun, exposing the long, pale lines of his neck. “I asked him if he was being blackmailed. You know what he said?”
“That’s a stupid question to ask a cop.”
“No, he said ‘My first time was in a hayloft.’ Or something like that.”
“Is that a thing? Like, a hay fetish? Or is that a subset of the cowboy fetish?”
“His first time. I just asked about blackmail, and he brought up his first time. Like Matty.”
Like you, North wanted to say. Like you, throwing that first time away on Matty, fucking throwing it away. But all that came out was, “Oh.”
“Yeah. Actually, Reck talked about it a lot. He made it sound like a lot of the blackmail videos are first times. Maybe all of them.”
“Ok,” North said. “But Brueckmann wasn’t a first time.”
“It was his first time in that scene, BDSM.”
“So there’s somebody taking advantage of people who are inexperienced. They lure their victims into a sexual encounter, knowing that the victim is likely to be vulnerable and worried about their first time, and therefore be less likely to notice things that are strange. Like, say, a videocamera.”
Shaw was nodding, but he didn’t really seem to be listening.
“Shaw?”
“Oh. Yeah? What?”
“You with me?”
“It’s just—I feel like I’m missing something.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Something. And Brueckmann, his whole story, it feels off.”
“You think he was lying to us?”
For another moment Shaw was lost in shawland. Then he shook his head, shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Well,” North said, “if all these videos are blackmail of guys having their first sexual encounter, I think there�
�s somebody we should talk to.”
Shaw frowned. “I already asked Matty about Regina, and he said he doesn’t know her. And the security footage from Allure—”
“I know. It’s Mark on the video. That lines up with what Matty told us. But I still want to talk to Regina.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t like coincidences.”
They drove first to the address that Teddi provided and found an apartment in a slouching brick walk-up in Dutchtown. There were needles on the ground, a ripped—and obviously used—condom, and the foil wrapper from a convenience store hotdog. Someone in the building was screaming for a goddamn glass of lemonade, and from one of the upper windows, a petite woman in a hijab hung wet laundry to dry. Regina didn’t answer the door, so they tried the second address Teddi had provided—Regina’s home away from home.
The Lucky Lindbergh Movie Palace had been one of the premiere structures of the late 1920s. Like so many of the buildings from that time, it showed an excess and architectural abandon that marked it as predating the crash in 1929: fluted columns, elaborate friezework, gilt and gold leaf on the walls, the ceilings, the chairs. And like so much from that time, the Lucky Lindbergh hadn’t fared well over the decades. North didn’t know all the details, but he knew that it had changed ownership multiple times, operating as a supply depot during World War II, then briefly again as a theater, then as a canned tomato warehouse, and then, according to urban legend, as the headquarters for one of the Irish mob bosses still lingering in the city—rumor differed as to which one.
Since 2010, however, the Lucky Lindbergh had simply been known as the Lucky and it had operated as the premiere drag club on St. Louis’s south side. North and Shaw tried the glass doors at the front, papered over with flyers for free kittens and banjo lessons and a babysitting service ad that looked like it had been made out of cut-up magazine letters, serial killer-style, and about two hundred LOST notices with a picture of a red Radio Flyer wagon hooked to a pony—it wasn’t clear whether the pony or the wagon or both had disappeared.
The front doors were locked, so they went around the side and found one of the Lucky’s service doors propped open by an aging queen in a red wig. The queen hit her cigarette once, then twice, holding the smoke with her cheeks puffed out, last night’s makeup flaking off. When North reached her, she blew it out and jiggled her falsies.
“Hi, sweetheart.”
“Is Regina here?”
“She’s here. Bitch.” Then she smiled at North. “You want to buy me breakfast?”
“Sorry, ma’am. I can’t today.” North tried to step past her, but she drifted into his path, taking up the doorway like there were two or three of her instead of just the one.
“Ma’am? Well, somebody’s mother raised him right. I’ll wait. You can buy me lunch.”
“Another time.”
“Dinner, sweetheart. I can do things to you after dinner that your jankety-ass boyfriend’s never even thought of.” She waved at Shaw with the cigarette, first at the electric blue rain jacket, then at the capris with peace symbols stitched on the cuffs, and then at his face. “If you think this bony-butt boy with a face like a—”
North’s fist connected before he even knew he was throwing the punch, and he tried, at the last minute, to pull the blow so that it didn’t land quite as hard. The queen still rocked backward, and the cigarette shot up out of her hand like an emergency flare, and then she came down hard on her ass, both hands clapping over her face.
“My node. You broke my node.”
Shaw leaned past North and tugged off the wig.
North glanced at him.
“This way, you don’t have to tell people you punched a lady.”
“I did it to defend your honor.”
“My node! Oh my God! Oh my God!”
“Right, I know. And I’m very impressed. It was like this quintessentially tough, very fifth-grade-playground kind of awesome.”
“Jesus, Shaw.”
“No, seriously. I mean, the only bad part is we won’t have time to hold hands while we swing on the swing set.”
“You are a total asshole sometimes. I don’t care about your honor anymore.”
“I just wanted you to know how impressed I was that you didn’t pull her hair or sit on her and shove grass down her dress.”
“Ok,” North stepped past the wailing drag queen. “I’m going.”
“But, see, people probably aren’t going to know the full context.” Shaw’s voice rose as he scrambled after North. “I’m worried people will just hear that you punched a lady, and that might ruin your reputation.”
North walked fast so that Shaw had to hurry to catch up. They were backstage, moving among a complicated array of curtains and scrims and pulleys and ropes, passing under catwalks and lights and weights and counterweights and a single, floating piece of scenery that North was pretty sure, even viewing it from below, was supposed to be the bedroom from Goldilocks and the Three Bears; he absolutely didn’t want to know what kind of shows they performed at the Lucky with that backdrop.
With only a few lights powered on, darkness pocked the space backstage, and North navigated as best he could, stumbling over a padded sawhorse with cuffs, painted on the front with red curlicue script that said This Bear is Too BIG!!!—Jesus, he’d never be able to read that story to his kids now, if he and Tuck ever even had kids, which was looking less and less like a possibility—before finally slipping free of the final, heaviest set of curtains and finding himself on stage, facing into a row of brilliant lights overhead and, beyond them, a wall of darkness.
A familiar voice rang out. “No, no, no! For the last time, Minerva, you have to be in costume, and if you keep missing your cues—now wait a minute.”
Footsteps clicked from out in the house, and a moment later, hollow steps came from stage left. When Regina Rex emerged from the darkness, there was a single, spectacular instant when the overpowering lights and the shadows and the angle all combined to make the illusion perfect: the sharp brows, the platinum blond curls, the gleam on her dark skin, even the bounce of her falsies. Then she came closer, and the illusion fractured, but North still thought what he always thought: there were drag queens, and then there were drag queens, and then there was Regina Rex.
“Look what the cat dragged in. Or should I say, the pussy.” She swished her hips. “Hello, beautiful.” A peck on the cheek for North, and the overpowering aroma of sweat and cigarette smoke cloaked them both. “Hello, gorgeous.” A peck on the cheek for Shaw, a little longer, her body pressing a little closer. “What in the world are you wearing? Oh. What’s that? What did you bring me, child?”
“Oh.” Shaw held up the red wig, studied it, and then passed it to Regina. “I was safeguarding North’s reputation.”
Regina held the wig up at the level of North’s head, squinted, and shook her head. “Red really isn’t your color, beautiful. Besides, I have no idea what we’d do with that jaw.” She traced a nail under North’s chin. “You’d look like an absolute horse, darling.”
“Thanks.”
“I think that’s a compliment,” Shaw said.
“It’s not a compliment. She’s definitely not complimenting me.”
“Of course it’s a compliment. Have you ever seen a horse?”
“Have I ever seen a horse?” North batted away Regina’s hand to glare at Shaw. “Are you absolutely, totally, completely moronic?”
“You’re not answering the question, so I guess that means you haven’t seen a horse. So let me tell you: it was definitely a compliment. Horses are beautiful.”
“For the love of fuck, you stupid little shit, it was not a compliment.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. You’ve never seen a horse. You wouldn’t know. You wouldn’t have any idea that horses are majestic.”
“I’m not doing this.” North shook his head. “I’m not. Not today.”
“He’s just mad bec
ause there was this weird alternate universe where he punched a lady, and then I took off the wig, and that made everything all right, but he’s still mad about it.”
“Bring it up one more time.” North crossed his arms. “Go ahead.”
Regina was trying to smile, but it looked like she had fishhooks caught in her cheeks. “Boys, I like seeing you. I’d like to see even more of you. I’d love to see more of you together, if you understand what I mean. Two’s a party, but three can be heaven. But I’ve got a show to put on, and Mistress Minerva absolutely refuses to let the bears into her honeypot, and if I don’t—”
“How do you know Matty Fennmore?” North asked.
“What?”
“How do you know him? Where did you meet?”
Regina’s tongue traced her lips slowly. “I don’t know who he is. I’ve never met anyone by that name. What’s this about?”
“What about Mark Sevcik?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’ve got a lot of work to do. Is this important?”
“Tell me about the video recordings, Regina.”
This time, her eyes cut away when she said, “I don’t know what—”
“You’re a shit liar.”
“I don’t.”
“See, that’s really interesting because Matty Fennmore hired us to find a video that someone had taken of him. A compromising video. And we can’t find the son of a bitch who took the video. It’s like he vanished. Disappeared. And by strange coincidence, just yesterday you propositioned my partner—”
“Hi,” Shaw said. “Remember? At Teddi’s?”
“—and you told him you wanted to help him out. You told him you were an expert with virgins.”
“Which, just as a point of fact, I’m not.” His blush glowed in sharp triangles in each cheek. “Just, you know, for the record.”
“Here’s the thing, Regina: I don’t like coincidences. And so I want to know what you know. I want to know what’s going on.”
Regina’s lips had a certain chalkiness, and her eyes held a glassy sheen. For a moment, she wobbled on her heels, and it was like watching the Space Needle in a high wind. “I—” She shook her head. “I can’t.”