by David Stukas
“Well, one out of two ain’t bad,” Monette commented.
6
The Law of Falling Bodies
We spent the rest of the night talking to the police, including Detective McMillan, who was very understanding for two-thirty in the morning.
We told the police and the forensic technicians everything—so much so, that by the time the majority of them had left, the sun was coming up. I decided that I might as well go back to my apartment, shower, shave, and go to the gym. I know, I know, you would think that the last place I would be seen was in the gym, but I had worked my tail off to get my body lean and mean for my boyfriend, and no ski-masked bandit was going to stand in my way of that.
McMillan suggested that I be driven back to my apartment by one of the policemen standing in the hallway, where I would be escorted up to my place and seen in the door safely. I didn’t have much to say to the policeman who drove me home, but I couldn’t help think that if Michael had been in my place, he would’ve been raging with lust right now. Michael had a thing for men in uniforms—especially police, military, and firemen, in that order.
I was seen up to my door by the policeman through a crowd of reporters that had, amazingly, started to dwindle somewhat. I turned the key in the lock and was about to dismiss my protector when I realized that my apartment had been broken into again. All my tidying up had been a waste of time.
More cops again—and Detective McMillan. More of the same. More questions, more racking my brain trying to remember “anything that might help.” More shit.
I showered and dressed for work. When I got to my office (a windowless telephone switching/computer server room), I launched into the first order of the day: begging Michael for a place to stay until this whole thing blew over.
I dialed Michael’s private number. (He had one number for his intimate friends, one for tricks, and one for the rest of the world.)
“Yes?” came the sleepy answer.
“Michael?” I asked because I wasn’t sure.
“Robert?”
“Michael, it’s ten o’clock! What are you still doing in bed, you whore?”
“I was up all night ... I was staying up with a sick friend.”
I felt guilty right away.
“Michael, I’m sorry about the joke. Is your friend all right?”
“Oh, he’s fine. In fact, I just sent him home.”
“Michael, do you think that’s wise? I mean, maybe he shouldn’t be outside.”
“Robert, what the hell are you talking about?”
“Your sick friend.”
“Dearest Robert, I said he was sick.”
“Yes, well ... ?”
“I said he’s sick. He likes to make love through a piece of uncooked liver, then fry it and eat it.”
“Michael, why do you do this with him?”
“Because he’s hot. But I have to put a stop to it.”
“Because it’s unsanitary?”
“No, I hate liver, Robert. It’s a filter organ.”
“Michael, I have something to ask you.”
“You want to borrow my pair of Frank Addams leather shorts?”
“No. I need a place to stay until this is all over.”
There was a long, pregnant silence on the other end of the line.
“Oh, Robert, you know how I would love for you to stay with me, but I’m full up here.”
“Michael, you have dozens of rooms in your penthouse.”
“Yes, but most of them are full of my hobbies.”
“You can’t have all of your rooms filled with welding equipment. Michael, tell me what this is all about. I would let you stay in my apartment as long as you had to.”
“Yes, Robert, but I wouldn’t want to stay in your apartment.”
“No, there’s some reason you’re not telling me why you don’t want me there.”
“Well ...” Michael hesitated. “For one, it would cramp my style.”
“You mean you would feel funny dragging home a trick in front of me?” I suggested.
“Exactly,” Michael replied with a sigh of relief.
“Michael, you have never let me stand between you and a hot date. Remember that time you had sex with that military guy while I was still in the cab? You didn’t even wait to drop me off at my apartment.”
Even over the phone line, I could tell Michael was staring dreamily off into space.
“Yes, he was good, wasn’t he? And that high-and-tight haircut! Let it never be said that I don’t support our troops!”
“Michael, the point is why you don’t want me to stay at your apartment.”
“Oh, that. I don’t want you to bring me any more bad luck.”
“Bring more bad luck? What have you done now?” I asked, knowing full well that Michael had done something very illegal or highly offensive.
“You know those fuckin’ rocks I brought back from Maui?”
“The ones you said would look good on your terrace garden? You didn’t tell me they were from ... oh no ... Michael, you didn’t desecrate some ancient Hawaiian burial ground, did you?”
“Not exactly.”
“What did you do?”
“The Hawaiians believe that spirits inhabit the rocks, and if you remove them from the islands, the spirits inside get angry and fuck up your life until you return them.”
“And how, pray tell, did they screw up your life, Michael?”
“The day after I got back from Maui, I was dancing at the Metal Club and my leather pants got torn on a loose nail. The next morning, I spilled coffee on myself at Starbucks. See?”
I failed to see the connection between ancient Hawaiian spirits and tearing pants at an attitude-filled dance club, but I let Michael continue or there would be no end to it. Michael, more than anything, loved to talk about himself and, even better, to draw people into his misery, no matter how trivial.
“I know you don’t believe that this is all connected because you’re not spiritual like me. I won’t even bother to tell you about the person who stole my cab from me.”
Michael had a point there. In my memory, no one had ever stolen a cab from Michael and gotten away with it. I knew this for a fact since I’d witnessed an incident one Christmas season. Michael and I were shopping in the Village and we decided to take a cab to Soho for lunch. Some princess in a fur coat and expensive boots ran out and grabbed a taxi that was clearly ours. Michael confronted her, heated words were exchanged, and Michael put an end to the stalemate by dragging the girl from the cab and throwing the princess into a pile of slush at the curb, coat and all. His pièce de résistance was to throw her shopping bags into the slush with her. He pulled me into the cab and off we sped with the tempestuous tulip shouting obscenities at us until we were out of earshot. Merry Christmas!
“Well, Michael, just get rid of the stones and their bad luck,” I suggested. It was too simple of a solution, however.
“You can’t just throw them out!” Michael retorted. “You have to have someone of true Hawaiian ancestry take them back to Hawaii and restore the spirits to their resting places.”
“And how much did this set you back?”
“What makes you think money was involved?” Michael asked.
“With you, there always is.”
Michael hesitated, then volunteered the information. To most people, what he was about to tell me would make him look just plain foolish, but to Michael, he confessed because it made it clear that he had big sums of money to throw around.
“Eight thousand dollars.”
“EIGHT THOUSAND DOLLARS!” I almost screamed. “Let me guess, you had some guy in Hawaii offer to take the rocks back to Hawaii first class, then there was a fee for interring the rocks back to their proper settings.”
“You’re forgetting the hotel bill here in New York. He had to stay here for five days to draw up maps to determine from where I had taken the rocks.”
“And that cost eight thousand dollars?”
“Well
, the guy had to eat while he was here. You know how hard it is to find good Hawaiian fusion cooking here in Manhattan?”
“Let me make another guess, Michael. He just had to go to Paia, the most expensive and overrated fusion restaurant in town?”
“Well, I couldn’t send him to Food Emporium to pick up a can of pineapple and some mahi mahi.”
Sensing that Michael’s mind was possessed by Kalikakala, the goddess of stupidity, I played the only trump card I had left to play: I reminded Michael that I had once saved his life from a group of fag bashers. That seemed to do the trick. If there’s one thing that appeals to a narcissist like Michael, it’s the fact that you prolonged his life so that the rest of the world could be eternally grateful that they merely existed. What can I say? I was desperate.
I called Monette and told her to meet me at the Oyster Bar at Grand Central Station, a convenient meeting spot because it was roughly halfway between her office and mine. I said it was time to start interviewing suspects.
“Well, who do we start off with?” Monette said as I handed her the list of suspects.
“Monette?”
“Yes, Robert?”
“Are you sure this is such a good idea, questioning these guys at work and at home? What if they go after us with a knife or a gun?”
“Calm down, Robert! We’re holding the trump card here. We have the pictures. These guys will behave themselves because they don’t know what we might do with the pictures if they threaten us. Plus, I have another idea concerning the CD. It’s not just enough that we ask some questions. We need to lure the real killer into the open.”
“And how do you propose to do this? Handcuff me to a chair in my apartment and leave the door open for the killer to finish me off?”
“Close. No, while we’re questioning these guys, we drop the fact that we have the CD safely in your apartment.” Monette smiled demonically, pleased at something so simple and yet so clever.
“So that someone desperate enough to kill two personal trainers will break into my apartment and retrieve the CD? Of course, we know that the police are watching the apartment and they’ll be caught?”
“You forgot the most important part: without putting your safety in jeopardy.”
My eyes lit up like Times Square on New Year’s Eve.
“I like it, I like it!”
“Good.”
“So when are we going to visit these guys? I have a full-time job ... and so do you,” I reminded her.
“We do it on our lunch hour just like we’re doing now. Most of these guys have their work phone on this list. We just call them, say we’d like to discuss the pictures, and we see where it goes.”
“Okay, why don’t you come over tonight and we’ll do this—at Michael’s apartment. I’m staying there until things cool down a little. I should be safe in his penthouse, unless someone has the ability to climb up the wall like a spider.”
“Good idea, Robert, although with some of the trash Michael brings home, you might be safer off elsewhere.”
“Like where?” I asked.
“In prison.”
7
Nice Kayak You Have There!
I had slipped home through the reporters, who hounded me with questions as to where I was going, gathered up enough clothes for a few days, and headed downtown to Michael’s place, taking three cabs in order to shake any reporters who might be following. Monette arrived at Michael’s place at seven.
“He redecorated again?” Monette asked as I let her into the apartment.
“Two months ago.”
“So what do you call this look?”
“I think its post-communist-Metropolis-deco-minimalist.”
Michael changed the look of his apartment for three reasons: One, he could afford to. Two, he got bored easily. And three, he was afflicted by the one disease suffered by so many New Yorkers: chronic trendiness. These people had one motto and lived by it no matter how foolishly they dressed, how much they spent to stay current, and how long they waited in line at the restaurant de jour: Amaze me or I will dismiss you.
I led Monette down the hall to the smallest room in his penthouse, which Michael had begrudgingly turned over to me. Michael’s welding torches and acetylene tanks sat unused in a room next door, paneled in stainless steel and equipped with a king-sized bed. But no matter: My tiny room was a safe place to sleep.
Monette threw her backpack on the floor and followed me down the hall to Michael’s computer room. Monette gasped when I pushed back the sandblasted glass door to the room and revealed Michael’s latest makeover.
“My Goddess! It looks like a NATO control room buried under a mountain in Colorado. I can’t believe this!”
Monette wasn’t exaggerating. The room was nothing short of incredible. There was a stainless steel console table facing a huge plasma TV screen, which Michael had gotten rigged up to his computer. There was no looking at a tiny twelve-inch computer screen for Michael. No, you cruised the Internet on a forty-seven-inch screen TV with a sound system that probably rivaled Steven Spielberg’s private home movie theater.
“Is this all for the computer?” Monette asked in wonder.
“No, Michael has all his audiovisual equipment here too. He has a rack of twenty CD players that play music twenty-four hours a day. You don’t hear it now because he has it turned off. But when it’s on, you just have to walk into a room and a motion sensor detects you entering then switches on the music for that room. It’s all-trance, all-the-time.”
“Jesus,” Monette replied. “And I thought when I got my latest Apple computer, I was on the cutting edge.”
“Well, at least you have a computer. Mine is sitting in the hands of some murderer.”
Monette was still looking around the room in amazement when she seemed transfixed by something.
“Robert?”
“Yes. Monette?”
“Why are you and I looking up at ourselves on the TV screen?”
“Oh that! Michael has several webcams focused on various parts of the room.”
“For chatting, I suppose,” Monette said skeptically.
“That’s what he calls it. Chatting,” I said, putting vicious quotation marks around the word chatting with my fingers. “I call it lining up sex partners on the Internet.”
“And having online sex, too.”
“I’m sure of it,” I replied, clickety-clacking my way on the Internet.
Monette slowly rose from her leather console chair and inspected the seat for signs of, well, unpleasant stuff.
“Ah, here we go,” I said as I downloaded the pictures onto Michael’s computer. We had no sooner opened the first set of pictures on the screen than we both looked at each other and laughed. We had to—there wasn’t any other choice. When you stepped back and looked at the situation, it was like life: Truth was stranger than fiction. The best writer in the world couldn’t make this stuff up.
“Oh, I almost forgot,” I interjected. “Eric Bogert, the second trainer to play high-altitude leap frog, was planning on coming into a lot of money soon.”
“Never assume,” Monette reminded me.
“Yeah, but what do you think, Monette? I mean, the guy has a perfect piece of blackmail in his hands and, at the same time, tells his girlfriend that he has a rich aunt who’s going to die to cover his newfound money—not to mention drives a new Hummer.”
“It looks pretty incriminating to me,” she said, clicking on photographs. “I wonder why personal trainers have this in to people’s lives?” Monette pondered.
“The reason is simple, Monette. Personal trainers, after all, are like hairdressers: People tell them everything about their personal lives. The trainer, if he’s got anything on the ball, just sits back and waits for the right moment to pounce. You’ve got Mr. Uptight Wasp on Fifth Avenue, doing dead lifts with Cody or Eric, casually mentions that he was watching The Horse Whisperer the other night on DVD, and before you know it, Cody has the guy bent over a saddle with his
riding pants down around his ankles and is swatting his butt with a riding crop. You don’t have to give these clients a very big push because they want it so bad.”
“That happens with my hairdresser all the time,” Monette replied. “He’s working a machete through my hair and boom—I’m dressed in a French maid’s outfit asking him to paddle me with the backside of a hairbrush.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “I think licking honey off Ellen DeGeneres’s breasts while she sits on the back of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle is more your style.”
“You have no idea of what I’d do,” Monette replied. “Well, actually, I have no idea either—it’s been a long time since I had sex.”
Just then, a voice coming from behind us scared the bejesus out of Monette and me. “I’d go out of my fucking mind!”
“Michael!” I exclaimed, the adrenaline still pumping through my bloodstream.
“Hi, Michael,” Monette echoed.
“So what are you two up to?” Michael asked.
He sat in a chair and listened as we told him about our intentions to question the various suspects, starting with John Bekkman tomorrow at lunch. When we were done, he sat still as if drinking all the information in.
“You know, something like this happened with me a few years back. This guy was following me around town. It was fall, because I remember he wore a trench coat and a hat with a wide brim that almost hid his face in shadow.”
Suddenly, both Monette and I were intrigued.
“Well,” Michael continued breathlessly, “I leave Barney’s, walk a few blocks, and notice that he’s still following me. So I dash down this alley trying to lose him, only to find out it was a dead end.”
“Holy shit!” Monette exclaimed. Even she was on the edge of her chair. “So how did you get out of there?”
“I didn’t. He comes down the alley after me and I get into a corner and crouch down.”
“And?” I demanded.
“He walks slowly toward me, grinning this evil, sadistic grin. He opens his trench coat and pulls out a gun with a silencer the size of a rolling pin and aims the gun at me and pulls the trigger.”