Pretty Pretty Boys

by Gregory Ashe

  “You mean the marches?”

  “We’re not sure,” Hazard said. “The Volunteers aren’t exactly keen to give out details.”

  “Did she at least tell you why she thinks the victim is Armistead?”

  “She told us that Armistead has been missing since the fire,” Somers said.

  “And,” Hazard added, “she told us that Armistead had a confrontation with Lynn Fukuma. Conveniently enough, the Volunteers found the victim and the killer for us.”

  Cravens planted her hands on her hips. “And you believe this? I’ve read your report from yesterday, Somers. I know Lady Mabbe said she saw two Volunteers at the trailer. But she also said that one pointed a gun at her and tried to shoot her. And she probably believes she flies on a broom and spins her thread out of cobwebs and God only knows what else. Do you have any reliable proof?”

  “We’re working on it.”

  “Detective Hazard, do you have anything to say?”

  “Some of the pieces line up, Chief. Armistead owns a pickup that matches Lady Mabbe’s description, which is a nice specific detail. And there’s reason to believe that Fukuma is capable of what the Volunteers claim. For now, at least, she’s worth talking to.”

  “The Volunteers certainly believe it,” Somers put in. “This kind of display, a vigilante murder in broad daylight, that’s not something they’d do without cause.”

  “A few years ago, they wouldn’t have done it at all,” Cravens said. She suddenly sounded old and tired. “This county has been quiet for twenty years, and now it’s like the bad old days all over again.” She seemed to gather herself, and she shook her head. “All right. Hospital. Now.”

  “Sure, Chief,” Somers said.

  Hazard, however, grabbed his arm. “Chief, we’d like to talk to Fukuma right now.”

  “The woman just about got killed by a mob, Detective. I don’t think she’s in any condition to have a conversation.”

  “She’s off-balance, Chief. She might be scared. She might be worried. But she couldn’t have predicted this, and it’ll leave her open, without some of the defenses she usually has. If she is our killer, and if we give her time, we could be missing out on a real opportunity.”

  “And if she’s not the killer, you’re putting the screws to a reputable professor after a traumatic incident. The college will be screaming down my throat before dinner.”

  “Chief,” Somers said. “Hazard, he’s not wrong about stuff like this. This is why we hired him. He’s good at what he does.”

  “We didn’t hire him, Somers. I did.” Cravens sighed and waved a hand at them. “Fine. But keep it civil, detectives. Some of us serve at the mayor’s good graces.”

  Without waiting for an answer, Cravens turned and left.

  “You sure about this?” Somers said.

  Hazard nodded. He stood up, tried to roll his shoulders, and was reminded again of the cut on his chest—and of the constricting t-shirt. “If she is the killer—and even after what we learned about her today, I’m not convinced—then we can’t give her time to get her feet back under her. More importantly, now she knows that someone suspects her. Even if she only thinks it’s the Ozark Volunteers, that could be enough motivation for her to destroy evidence, fix her story, all of that.”

  “Maybe that’s a good thing,” Somers said, trailing alongside Hazard as he approached the Social Sciences building. “Maybe we should hang back, watch her, see what she does.”

  “See what she does in the privacy of her office? In the privacy of her home? We need a warrant for that, and we’re not going to get it with a newspaper article from the 1990s and Naomi Malsho’s expert testimony.”

  “But she could go somewhere, do something.”

  “You’re right. So we should keep an eye on her. But first, let’s talk to her.”

  “All right,” Somers said. “But Hazard?”

  “I know: you’re the one who’s good with people. You talk to her.”

  “That’s not what I was going to—”

  “Yes, it was.”

  Somers surprised Hazard by smiling. “All right, maybe I was. But I was going to say it nicer.”

  “Nice?” Hazard said. “Why bother?”

  WHEN HAZARD AND SOMERS stepped through the doors of the Social Science building, Hazard was surprised by the smell. He had expected the cool rush of air conditioning. He had, to a lesser extent, expected the dim lighting. He had even expected the mixture of memories; Wroxall College had not been a safe space for him as a boy, but it had been a good place, and it still held the same attractions. But the smell, the smell of old wood and floor polish and invisible mountains of dust, he had forgotten that. It washed over him, filling his nose, and awakening a pile of memories—endless summer afternoons in the student lounges, a book propped on his knees as he covertly, or so he hoped, studied the college boys—that he had forgotten.

  The main hall of the Social Science building held a scattering of people—some on the ground level, some lining the stairs, some looking down from the balcony above. It was a mixture of old and young, male and female, white and brown and black. Everyone had gone quiet when Somers and Hazard entered, and now they waited expectantly. There was, Hazard noticed, a lot less flannel being worn, in contrast to his memories of the days of grunge at Wroxall College. He did spy, though, a lot of hipsters, which he figured was this generation’s iteration of the same idea.

  “Everything’s under control,” Somers called, pitching his voice so it carried through the hall and flashing his perfect smile. “You’re all safe, nothing to worry about it. You can go back to whatever you were doing.”

  The last words were more a directive than a suggestion, and after a moment the onlookers in the Social Science building seemed to realize that Somers wanted them to leave. They began to drift away. Among them, Hazard spotted a small, dark-haired woman.

  “Lynn Fukuma,” he shouted.

  The words stopped everything. Even the hand of the clock, it seemed to Hazard, had paused. Faces peered back at him over shoulders. Then, slowly, the small woman separated herself from the crowd and moved to stand in a clearing on the ground floor.

  “That’s me. I’m Lynk Fukuma.”

  “Folks,” Somers called again, “go ahead and clear out of here. Nothing for you to see.”

  This time, the delay was palpable. People wanted to see what was going to happen. And, Hazard realized as he watched their faces, they weren’t curious about the police. They were curious about Lynk Fukuma. Or perhaps that wasn’t putting it correctly. They were curious, he could tell, about what Lynk Fukuma was going to do to the two white police officers who had called her out of a crowd.

  “Get moving,” Somers said. The boy-next-door smile had vanished, and now his voice had a trace of the drill sergeant in it. The crowd popped like a bubble as people slid away into lounges and offices and classrooms.

  Then it was just the three of them: Somers, Hazard, and Fukuma. Hazard studied the small woman. She was a lesbian, that much was obvious. She might be trans, but it was hard to tell. She wore her hair in a page’s cut, and she had earrings in both ears. Big deal. Plenty of gay boys Hazard had seen wore the same. Fukuma had on a pair of tight-fitting black jeans and a simple white T-shirt with the words Fuck Capitalism stenciled on the front.

  “Ms. Fukuma,” Somers said. “Is there somewhere we can talk in private?”

  “What’s this about?” She had a teacher’s voice: confident to the point of arrogance, well-trained for projecting and enunciating, and clearly used to being obeyed. Hazard detected a faintly British twang to her intonation—or was that Harvard that he heard?

  “It’s a bit delicate, Ms. Fukuma. It’s about an ongoing investigation—”

  “I don’t care about delicate. Before I go anywhere with you pigs, I want to know what you want from me. Details. Right now.”

  Somers’s face didn’t betray any anger, but Hazard could feel it radiating off his partner. Maybe that was because of the a
nger he himself felt.

  “Listen,” Hazard began, but he cut off when Somers slashed a hand at him.

  “This is about the fact that the Ozark Volunteers believe you are responsible for a murder. This is about the attempted murder that just took place here. Yes, Ms. Fukuma. That’s what just happened. Those men and women intended to break into the building and execute you for what they believed you did. I know that must frighten you, but—”

  “Frighten me?” Lynk Fukuma didn’t look capable of laughter, but this seemed to be as close as she came. “People have wanted me dead for thirty years, pig. This isn’t anything new. At least this time the Volunteers had the guts to come in the daylight, instead of attacking like cowards in the night.”

  “We’d like to talk to you about your history of encounters with the Volunteers, as well as their claims.” Somers tried another smile; he was obviously calibrating his effect because this time that one-hundred-percent-good-boy smile softened something in Fukuma’s expression. “We can also talk about offering you protection while we investigate the case.”

  At the word protection, Fukuma’s face closed off again. “I don’t have to talk to you. I don’t have to spend one more minute with you.”

  But she stayed right where she was.

  “No,” Hazard said. “You don’t. But I hope you remember this when you’ve got a noose pulling tight around your throat, or when one of the Volunteers puts a gun to the back of your head, or when they drag you out of your bed and beat you to death. Right then, I bet you’ll be thinking how proud you are of how you talked to the cops, how proud you are that you called us pigs when we were trying to protect you. I bet that’ll make up for it when your ribs are cracked and you can’t breathe because those steel-toed boots keep connecting with the soft tissue-”

  Fukuma cut him off with a wild cry. Her eyes had gone huge, and they spun from Hazard to Somers and back to Hazard. “I don’t have to—I won’t—you’re commanding officer is going to hear about this.”

  She spun, moving towards the stairs. Hazard took a step after her; he wasn’t finished, and he had a lot more he wanted to say to her. Somers, however, grabbed Hazard by the t-shirt and said, “I thought we’d talked about this. Stay.”

  Then he darted past Hazard and caught Fukuma on the steps. For a moment, it looked like Fukuma would storm past Somers. Then Somers said something, and Fukuma hesitated. They spoke in low voices for several minutes. At the beginning, Fukuma was shaking her head and pulling away from Somers. By the end, however, she had leaned towards him and gave the occasional nod. Once, Hazard glimpsed a smile on her profile, but it vanished quickly.

  “All right,” Somers called down to Hazard. “Dr. Fukuma’s going to give us a few minutes in her office.”

  “Not him,” Fukuma said, leveling a finger at Hazard.

  “He’s my partner, Professor. He’ll sit there and he won’t say a word. That’s right, isn’t it, Detective Hazard?”

  Hazard nodded. After a short moment, Fukuma nodded as well and turned and led them up the stairs and deeper into the building. The smell of old wood, of lemon polish, of dust, was complemented here by the steamy aroma of tea that poured out of a student lounge, carrying with it the murmur of excited voices. One young woman with carrot-colored hair stuck her head out and stared at them. Today was probably the most interesting thing that had ever happened to most of the people at Wroxall College.

  All of that, though, remained at the periphery of Hazard’s consciousness. Most of his attention was on Somers and Fukuma. Fukuma’s stubbornness and aggressiveness he had expected. Somers, though, had surprised him. Again. Not with his ability to sweet-talk the older woman—Hazard knew firsthand how difficult it was to resist Somers’s charms—but because of the contrast between Somers’s behavior outside with how he carried himself now. Outside, after the encounter with the Volunteers, Somers had looked like a man slipping off a high-wire act. Here, though, he was back to his normal self: calm, cool, boyishly happy. Hazard was starting to think he had missed something outside. What had gone wrong? He didn’t know, but he was going to find out.

  Fukuma’s office was a cramped box with a window that, in the Middle Ages, would have been a hell of an arrowslit. Books lined the shelves; they made the room seem even smaller, and Hazard hunched his shoulders as he squeezed into the bare wooden chair in front of Fukuma’s desk. The only wall not covered by books was the wall with the window, and an enormous poster hung there, with the words Death To Our Enemies, Death to the Friends of Our Enemies, and Death to Those Who Are Not Our Friends. It seemed that Fukuma had all her bases covered.

  As Somers settled into the chair next to Hazard, he asked, “Dr. Fukuma, can you tell us about any interactions you’ve had with the Ozark Volunteers? Anything that might have prompted today’s assault?”

  Fukuma drew her legs up, crossing them under her, and propped her chin in her hands. Up close, Hazard noticed more details. She looked her age, he realized—forty, but a well-trimmed forty, slender and small, although her hair was starting to gray. Her eyes flicked to Hazard, as though sensing his attention, and a sneer covered her face.

  “Does your pet do other tricks?” she asked Somers. “Or does he just bark?”

  “First I’m a pig,” Hazard said. “Now I’m a dog?”

  “You are a dog,” Fukuma snapped. “You bark when your master says speak. You run and prance and piss on command. You wouldn’t believe the kind of buzz when some of the students heard about you. Finally. They kept saying that word, finally. Finally, we have a gay cop. Finally, things are going to change. I told them it wouldn’t be any different.”

  “The law is the law. Doesn’t matter if the cop or the judge or the jury is gay.”

  “Spoken like a well-trained dog. I told everyone that’s what you would be: well-trained, well-groomed, butch. The kind of gay cop that wouldn’t cause any problems. That wouldn’t be threatening. Everyone could pat themselves on the back, so proud of hiring a gay cop—and when you aren’t around, they’ll whisper about how you really aren’t that gay, you’re actually kind of normal, and doesn’t that make things easier because he could have been so faggy. That’s what they’re saying right now back at the station, pigs slurping their coffee and donuts.”

  Hazard didn’t say anything; he wasn’t sure he could say anything because his throat was so tight.

  “You’re the worst kind of gay,” Fukuma continued. “You know that? The kind that wants so desperately to belong, wants to blend in, wants to hide. You’re setting everything back fifty years. Maybe a hundred. I hope you’re proud of that.” Her gaze moved to Somers. “What about you, detective? Are you proud of your trained faggot?”

  “That’s enough, Dr. Fukuma.” Somers’s voice was even. “You agreed to talk to us. I asked you about your interactions with the Volunteers. That’s what I want to hear about, not your views on queer identity politics.”

  “Queer identity politics?” Fukuma’s sneer had infected her voice. “You sound like a 1980s textbook.”

  “The Volunteers?” Somers said.

  “Fuck the Volunteers. They deserve to die. Each and every one of them. Every horrible way you can imagine. Bring back the Inquisition, bring back torture. They used to shove a glass rod up a man’s urethra and shatter it so he pissed glass and blood. Bring that back and do it to every man in the Volunteers.”

  “So,” Somers said, miming a fumble for pen and paper. “You don’t approve of them?”

  Hazard covered a snort of laughter by turning it into a cough.

  “I don’t approve of them. It’s my personal mission to see every last one of those bastards dead and rotting on the face of the earth, unburied because burial is for humans and not for pigs and dogs and beasts.”

  “Have you made threatening comments like that in public? Or have you made those kinds of statements to individual members of the Volunteers?”

  “I’ll tell anyone who listens.”

  “Can you think of any times w
hen you may have publicly stated your intent to harm members of the Ozark Volunteers, either individually or in general?”

  “What is this?” Fukuma’s gaze snapped to Somers’s face. “What are you asking?”

  “Do you need me to repeat the question?”

  “No. I heard you. You’re a self-satisfied straight boy. The town’s golden boy. Yes, I’ve heard about you too. I know all about your arrests. Persecuting the poor, the dispossessed, the homeless. So proud of how you put your boot on the neck of the weak, grinding the life out of Smithfield. You walk around here like you own the place because you’re straight and white and rich.”

  “It’s a simple question, Dr. Fukuma. There’s no need to resort to personal attacks.”

  “Most men,” Fukuma said, “are actually desperately bisexual. They crave a stronger man’s domination. They crave the feel of him between their legs, his strength, his control. Look at the Nazis. Look at how well the military follows orders.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Hazard muttered, but he swallowed the rest of his comment when Somers flashed him a glance.

  “I’m sure the military will be fascinated by your insights,” Somers said. “And it’s nice to know that some of the greatest evils in the 20th century were perpetrated because German men want to be rolled over a barrel and fucked by their neighbor. Unfortunately, this information isn’t relevant to our case. I think we’re done here, Detective Hazard.”

  Hazard followed Somers, and they had almost reached the door when Fukuma called after them, “At the march. A few months ago. Those bastards were parading along past the college, so proud of themselves, so proud of their bigoted, small-minded hatreds. I stood at the edge of the crowd. I told them.”

  When Hazard and Somers turned back towards her, Hazard was surprised by the ferocity in her face. Even after hearing her insane, hateful rants, Hazard felt his skin crawl as he witnessed the malevolence in her expression.

  “What happened?” Somers said.

  “One of the men approached me. He called me dyke, cunt, bitch, whore. I told him what he was: a flabby white man with a small penis. He took a swing at me. I broke his wrist and then I broke his nose.”