Pretty Pretty Boys

by Gregory Ashe

  “No.”

  “Sales?”

  “No.”

  Hazard frowned. “Freelance something? Journalism? Photography?”

  “God, will you drop it?”

  “I’m a detective. This is kind of my job.”

  Letting out a breath, Nico squeezed his eyes shut. “Anybody can just go home and google it, so I guess I’ll just tell you.” He drew in another breath, and Hazard was waiting for something jaw-dropping: hired hitman, U.N. diplomat, prodigy brain surgeon. “I model.”

  “Oh.”

  “See, that’s why I didn’t want to tell you.”

  Hazard made a noncommittal noise.

  “Because now you think I’m brain-dead, right? I speak five languages. I can read three more—Greek, Hebrew, and Latin. I’ve got an article coming out next month in a reputable scholarly journal.”

  Holding up both hands, Hazard fought a smile.

  “It’s easy money. And it’s good money.”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “No, but you’re thinking it: just another gay boy desperate for the limelight.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever used the word limelight in my life.”

  Nico didn’t answer; he just swirled his melting daiquiri and stared at the tablecloth.

  “It suits you,” Hazard said.

  “What?”

  “When you tell people you model, I bet that’s what they think. It suits you. You look like that’s something you’d do. That’s all.”

  “Yeah, right. I tell a woman, and they want to priss and preen and ask me about doing my hair. I tell a straight guy, and they want to get the hell away from me as fast as I can before I queer them. I tell a gay guy, and they get bitchier than hell, and I’m lucky if I get away without my hair getting ripped out.”

  “Is that before or after they try to pick you up?”

  “Both,” Nico said, flashing a small smile.

  “What did Chendo think about it?”

  “I’m not stupid. I see what you just did there. But I don’t care. It’s nice talking to you, and you obviously hate small talk more than anyone I’ve ever met in the whole world, so I appreciate the effort.”

  “Thanks,” Hazard said.

  Nico flashed another grin. “Chendo was like just about every other guy I’ve dated. At first, they think they’re incredibly lucky. I mean, they bagged a fucking model, right? And that’s a big deal for their egos. They don’t want to do or say anything that might irritate me, and that pisses me off more than anything, and pretty soon we start fighting. Then they figure out that I drop my clothes all over the house and that I don’t wash dishes and that I’m not some crazy sex demon that will bang them into some kind of supernatural ecstasy. And then we circle the drain for a few weeks, maybe a few months, sniping at each other until it all falls apart.”

  Sipping at his Schlafly, Hazard waited for more.

  “Sound familiar?”

  “Not really. I’ve only dated two guys. The first one didn’t end well. The second one’s still going.”

  “No fights?”

  “Of course there were fights.”

  “Are you in love?”

  Hazard sipped at the beer again. “Tell me about Chendo.”

  “I told you he was cheating on me, right? And I figured it out, and we fought, and he left.”

  “How’d you figure it out?”

  “I have the password to his phone. He gave it to me because I wanted some of his music, and then I started looking through his photos. Like I told you when we met the first time: he put his dick in just about anything still breathing. We had a fight. He left.”

  “But you said he kept texting you.”

  In answer, Nico pulled out his phone, tapped the screen and few times, and then slid it to Hazard. “You saw some of these on Monday, right?”

  With a nod, Hazard scanned the texts. He had seen the messages that Chendo had sent over the weekend: humiliating, vicious texts mocking Nico, detailing his personal and sexual inadequacies, and making a point of how happy Chendo was with anyone except Nico. A hot, tight knot closed in Hazard’s throat.

  Then he saw the messages that had been sent over the last two days. Unlike the weekend texts, these had a strikingly different tone: the messages were choppy, often fragmented in the middle of a sentence. The wording varied, but the general message was the same. Nico, help me. I fucked up. I think I made a really big mistake. I can’t come back. Jesus, I’m so sorry. Delete my number. You’ve got to forget you ever knew me. The last one was the most telling. If the cops come to talk to you, don’t tell them anything. I’m sorry.

  “Sounds like he’s sorry.”

  “Sounds like he’s scared out of his fucking mind. That doesn’t sound like Chendo, that sounds like a guy who’s trying to get the hell away from a big mistake.”

  “This last one, about the cops. Did he know you reported the vandalism?”

  “I have no idea. I left the townhouse on Monday and I didn’t go back. But I don’t think so.”

  “Then what did he mean?”

  “What I told you, about having his password.” Nico licked his lips. “I checked his phone. After he started all these weird texts. I just wanted to know where he was, if he was ok.”

  “And?”

  Nico took back his phone, tapped something, and passed it back. “The sound is shit. The whole thing is shit, really, but look.”

  It was a video. Hazard pressed play. As Nico had said, the quality was poor: the sound hissed with background noise, barely audible over the restaurant’s hum and clatter, and the video was grainy. It began at a strange angle, and Hazard realized that the phone being held in someone’s hand. A man’s voice was saying, “You think you can threaten me? You think you can—hey!”

  “That’s Chendo,” Nico said. His face was pale under his dark tan, and his eyes looked strangely hollowed.

  On the video, a struggle had begun. After Chendo’s first words and his shout of surprise, no one spoke. There was only furious labored breathing—the sounds of two people engaged in a silent, vicious struggle. The camera whipped and flailed, and then it went still. The phone had fallen, Hazard realized, and the camera was buried in what looked like grass. Someone made a high-pitched whimper, and then all noise cut off. A moment later, the camera shifted, catching a wide angle of grass and darkness and what might have been a streetlight, and then the recording cut off.

  “Holy fuck, right?” Nico said.

  “When is that video from?”

  “It was uploaded Monday night.”

  Hazard thought through what he knew. “So, on Friday night you and Chendo have a fight. He leaves. Why?”

  “Because we had a fight.”

  “No, why does he leave and not you? It’s his place, right?”

  Red infused Nico’s cheeks. “He told me he was going to find somebody. Somebody who could take care of him.”

  “That sounds like the insults in the texts, but it also sounds like the truth. He goes out to find a guy.” Hazard hesitated. “Did Chendo ever make risky decisions about partners?”

  “You mean, like protection? Stuff like that? God, I hadn’t even thought about it.”

  “Well, there is that, but I meant the people he chose.”

  “Oh. Like, bad boys?”

  “I mean genuinely dangerous men that Chendo approached under risky conditions. Truck stops, Craigslist meetups, like that.”

  “I don’t think so. Why?”

  “Back in September, Chendo called the police and said someone was trying to kill him. When the officers arrived, he described a bald man with a swastika tattoo. Chendo said that the man had asked for oral sex and that he had agreed, but when they had gone somewhere more private—a back alley with no lights or cameras—the man threatened him and then left.”

  “That fucking prick. He was a total whore, do you realize that?”

  “That’s not really the issue.”

  “No, it’s exactly
the issue. All those nights I was studying, all those nights I had to write a paper or work on my thesis, he was out screwing his way through Wahredua’s gutters.”

  “You think this was a pattern, then?”

  “Of course it was a pattern,” Nico snapped, loud enough to draw the attention of people at the table next to them. Nico gave a chagrined smile, waved, and after a moment they went back to their dinner. At that moment the waiter arrived with their food, but Nico didn’t even look at the plate. The smell of garlic and cheese and fried meat filled Hazard’s nose, and his stomach grumbled again, but he didn’t dare risk eating, not when he was finally getting information out of Nico.

  As soon as the waiter had left, Nico said again, “Of course it was a pattern. And what you’re trying to get at, even though you haven’t said it outright yet, is that you think that’s what happened: Chendo picked up some closet case, and then the guy freaked out. They struggled, and—”

  Hazard could fill in the rest of the story himself; it wasn’t really that uncommon. Guys who had considered themselves straight their whole lives, guys who might even legitimately believe, in some twist of mental acrobatics, that they really were straight, cruised gay bars and gay scenes, picking up guys for easy, anonymous sex. And sometimes, those encounters didn’t go well. Sometimes the guy freaked out. Chendo and his hook-up had gone to a park for a quick bang; something had happened—Chendo had pressed too hard, or the sex had been particularly good, or particularly bad, or a million other things—and the straight guy had flipped and started a fight.

  “And you think Chendo killed the guy,” Nico said, as though finishing Hazard’s train of thought.

  “It sounds like that’s what you think.”

  “You don’t? You saw that video. You . . . you heard that sound at the end. And you just told me that story about Chendo at the bar. What if it was the same thing? What if he picked up some white supremacist, a real closet-case, who wanted sex but then got violent. And Chendo was just defending himself.”

  “I think we shouldn’t jump to any conclusions.” But Hazard was thinking of the fire at the trailer: Lady Mabbe had seen two men with swastika tattoos. Chendo had talked about a bald man with a swastika tattoo. And a bald man with a swastika tattoo was missing.

  “Friday night Chendo leaves,” Nico said, as though working out the timeline from scratch again. “He has a fun weekend. He’s texting me all about it, all the guys he’s messing around with, he’s happy he’s finally done with me. Then—then he makes a mistake on Monday night. That’s when the video gets uploaded, that’s when the texts change. Something terrible happens Monday night, and Chendo is freaking out. He knows he’s in deep trouble. He knows he has to run. He doesn’t want me to talk to the cops.” Nico rubbed at his eyes, and his fingers came away wet. “This is such a fucking mess. Why is he such an idiot?”

  “Like I said, let’s not jump to conclusions. I’d like to talk to my partner about this. If I could keep your phone for a few days.”

  Nico took back his cell, swiped at it for a few minutes, and then held it, screen out, to Hazard. Hazard was surprised to see a map on the screen. A map, he realized, that was covered with a trail of red pins. And that had a red pin moving slowly across it.

  “What’s this?”

  “This is everywhere Chendo’s phone has been since Monday.” Nico gave a wet, unhappy laugh. “Modern technology fucks us again, right?”

  With one hand, Hazard accepted the phone, and with the other, he scrolled across the map. He re-centered the map on Wahredua, where the trail of red pins began, and then he zoomed in.

  And there it was, as clear as day. It even had a time stamp for 11:27pm on Monday, October 24. The cross streets were Villanova and Brigade. The same cross streets where, on October 24, an abandoned trailer had burned to the ground with Charles Armistead’s body still inside.

  HAZARD THREW CASH ON THE TABLE and hurried out of Trattoria Mariangela. Nico followed on his heels. Outside, the night air was swampy, dampening the cotton of Hazard’s shirt and making his tie tight as a noose. Already he could feel sweat dampening his jacket under his arms.

  “I’m going to hold onto this,” Hazard said, waving the phone. “Thank you, I’ll be in touch.” He trotted towards his car.

  But Nico kept following. “You know something. What?”

  “Listen, I really appreciate what you told me. But I need to—”

  “I know, talk to your partner. That’s fine.” Nico jumped around to the passenger side of Hazard’s car and yanked on the locked door. “I’ll go with you. Open up.”

  “No. I’m sorry, but no.”

  “Then you can’t have my phone.”

  “What?”

  “That’s my phone. You can’t have it unless you let me go with you. I can fill you in on Chendo. I know where he’s going. I can help you, talk to him, maybe get him to come back.”

  Hazard hesitated. That made things a hell of a lot more difficult. If someone gave him their phone, he could use the information on it. If the phone wasn’t surrendered willingly, though, then there could be hell to pay unless Hazard went through the process of obtaining a warrant—which he might or might not be able to get. And by then, Chendo could have ditched his cell phone or destroyed key evidence or even hurt someone again.

  “This is evidence,” Hazard said. “Evidence that I need. I’m asking you to let me use your phone.”

  “Sure. As long as I get to come along.”

  “This isn’t a ride-along program. You can’t—”

  “I’m telling you, there’s more that you need to know. I’ll let you have the phone. I’ll tell you the rest of it. Let me go with you so I can talk to you and your partner.”

  Hazard grimaced and punched the unlock button. “You can come talk to us. After you talk, you go home. I keep the phone.”

  “Yeah, fine, whatever.” Nico swung his lanky frame into the car, and the smell of his cologne—musky, smoky, cranking up Hazard’s pulse—filled the air. With a crooked smile, Nico added, “And just so you know, for the future, there are easier ways to get a guy’s phone number than taking his phone and claiming it’s evidence.”

  A growl was building in Hazard’s throat as he pulled away from the curb; he was starting to think he’d made a mistake.

  As Hazard drove across town, he pulled out his own phone and dialed Somers. When Somers answered, the thudding beat of club music filled the background of the call.

  “Hazard? What’s up?”

  “You still at the club?”

  “Yeah. What’s going on?”

  “Stay there. We need to talk.”

  “All right.”

  “Somers.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I need you thinking straight.”

  From the other end of the line came a laugh. “That’s not really SOP here, Haz—”

  Hazard cut the call.

  “Where is he?” Nico asked.

  “The Pretty Pretty.”

  “Huh,” Nico said. Hazard threw Nico a glance, and Nico shrugged. “That doesn’t really seem like his scene.”

  “It’s not.”

  “He’s asking for information.”

  “He’s making an ass of himself, I imagine.”

  With that, Hazard ended the conversation and drove. Wahredua wasn’t large, and in ten minutes he was parking at the northeast edge of town. The MP lines cut a swath through this corner of Wahredua; fifty years ago, rail traffic had employed hundreds of people in a variety of related services. As shipping shifted to highways, though, and passengers took to the skies, fewer and fewer trains came through Warhedua. Now the part of town that had once hustled to keep up with demand for cold drinks and soft beds, fresh water and a convenient place to dump sewage, and a million other things besides, was quiet, and dusty, and the railway shone in the dying light of day with the gleam of old scar tissue.

  Nico followed him down the block, not speaking, for which Hazard was grateful. It was going to be hard
enough dealing with Somers—and his jokes—without Nico making things worse by prying into the investigation. Hazard hoped Nico was telling the truth and that he still had valuable information, but even if that were a lie, letting Nico tag along was a small price in exchange for the information on his cellphone.

  The Pretty Pretty stood at the corner of the next block. From the outside, it was a gussied-up industrial skeleton: concrete pitted and stained with rust, panels of stainless steel bolted above the doors like a marquee, and neon pink letters that flashed and buzzed the club’s name. The velvet ropes that normally formed a queue had been pushed to one side; it was a Wednesday night, not the weekend, and Hazard was grateful that the crowd would be smaller than normal. The bouncer at the door looked like every bouncer from every club Hazard had been to: a low center of gravity cue ball somewhere between thirty and fifty. He waved them through; based on his decision not to card Nico, who could have passed for an easy eighteen, Hazard figured this was not his first time.

  Inside, the club was everything that the outside was not. Instead of the chilly, industrial practicality of the club’s front, its interior was decorated with lavish—and eclectic—abandon. Mirrors hung everywhere, causing a disorienting blur of reality and reflection and making the club seem more crowded than it was. Huge clusters of crystal had been worked into the walls, around the doors and mirrors and tables, and the crystals glowed from within with LED lights that cycled through pastel shades. The space was enormous, and a thousand different colognes and body-sprays had stained the air, giving the place a permanent mixture of sweat and the scents people used to cover it up. At eight o’clock, dance music was blasting, and a good number of men and women occupied the dance floor, some of them grinding hard, some of them looking bored, and some of them swimming like sharks.

  The chum in the water, Hazard knew, was John-Henry Somerset. Hazard’s eyes picked him out immediately; there had to be at least fifty other people in the club, but it was like someone had shut off everything except a spotlight hammering down on Somers. He sat with his back to the bar, a mixed drink in one hand. A crowd of gay boys pressed towards him, calling out to him, shouting questions, laughing at his answers, and generally making it clear that Somers did not have to go home alone tonight—or ever—if he so chose. Somers, for his part, looked like he was having the time of his life.