by Andrews
The show's theme was Things Are Not Always What They Seem, and in truth, they were not. It was easy to see how Elliot Traugh became the headliner for the show—perhaps not the female good looks, or the long graceful body, but Elliot Traugh had real talent. He was a masterful performer, morphing into characters. He turned his profile to us, facing stage right, a handsome John F. Kennedy embracing a gorgeous woman. As he spun to profile us, facing stage left, we saw that he himself was the beautiful woman and that woman was Marilyn Monroe. When he took his final bow facing the audience, his costume was half and half, and the audience went wild. The illusion was beautifully staged, timed, and executed. Callie and I giggled and oohed and aahed with the rest of the tourists over the show's brilliance. Just as soon as the audience felt comfortable that all the women were in fact men, the real women let them know they'd been fooled again. Gender-bender entertainment was always great when well done, and the Boy Review was among the best I'd seen.
After the show, Callie and I made our way backstage to see the performers, as we had promised Elliot Traugh we would. While the makeup room was crowded and noisy, the tone was more businesslike than joyous. An inexplicable pall hung over the air. Sophia was there along with two other biological females who were part of the illusion.
A drag queen wearing a bouffant wig yanked it off her head and ran her hands through her hair, the heavy makeup accenting her voluptuous lips and large brown eyes in stark contrast to her boyish haircut. We recognized her immediately as Marlena.
"You were wonderful," Callie said from the doorway, and Marlena caught sight of us through the large lighted makeup mirror in front of her and did not bother to turn around.
"Thank you," she said like someone used to compliments, while giving us the cold shoulder.
I caught sight of Elliot Traugh and told him what an amazing job he'd done. He arched an eyebrow and smiled at us, as if to say that perhaps we finally understood his importance. He was no mere drag queen.
"I miss Joanie," Marlena said suddenly, lowering her head into her hands, her shoulders shaking slightly as she cried. "She was wonderful!"
"We went to see Joanie. She had bruises on her neck, the kinds of bruises that occur when someone has you by the throat just before you 'slip and fall.' Someone must know what really happened. We need your help," I pleaded.
"This is a private dressing room. Show them out," Elliot ordered, and Sophia jumped to her feet and herded us out of the dressing area.
She followed us for several yards, then leaned in and whispered, "I warned you!" She ran her fingers along the strange symbols dangling from the strands of her necklace and then quickly moved on. I felt strongly that her warning went beyond this moment.
Several other theatergoers had made their way backstage and were hugging and congratulating the cast.
"What's up with the bug necklace? Sophia fingered it like a rosary," I said.
"Scorpions. She had a Stellium in Scorpio around her neck. She's saying she's the one who put the Stellium chart in your suitcase and the article under the lamp and she's the one trying to unravel what's going on," Callie said with great certainty. "Sophia is the Plutonian energy threatening to destroy this secret world."
Chapter Nineteen
I grasped the large brass door knocker in the shape of a cherub's backside and banged its cherubic cheeks up against Karla's front door. As far as I was concerned, we were here to get to the heart of the matter—the hotel's sanctioning a boy porn ring.
An intercom clicked on and Karla's voice asked who was at her door. I apologized for not calling in advance. The door swung open immediately.
"Gio's crying over that fag." Karla grimaced, already steeped in gin. "And I am once again alone. Come in, come in."
I had lost all sympathy for Karla in light of her handling of the sex video, so I canned the small talk, telling Karla we wanted to talk to her about the young boy in our hotel whom we'd rescued. As I described him and the incident, Karla still managed to stay a step ahead of me. "Must be the kid they found near the hotel half dead," she said.
I told her it couldn't be the same kid, although I didn't know whether it was or wasn't; I just didn't want it to be. Karla turned on the TV to a news channel and said the story had been broadcast all day. In minutes, there he was: Joey Winters, the young boy we'd rescued from Sterling Hackett's room. He'd been beaten to a pulp and scooped up off the pavement like roadkill. Callie and I were both in shock. Callie asked Karla if she could use her connections to help find the perpetrator, referencing her unspoken mob ties.
She waved her hand to dismiss us. "Too many kids and too much trouble. I ain't Mothah Teresa. They don't have to, if they don't want to, and they get paid to, don't they?" Karla said and took another shot of her gin and tonic. "Look, honey, sex with young boys has been happenin' since before the Greeks. How do ya think they came up with the Greek position, ya know? Boys are horny little bastards; if they weren't doin' it with some ole guy, they'd be doin' it with each other."
"You know," I said, mentally editing entire paragraphs from my reply in order to avoid shouting at her, "somebody at the hotel told me that there was a sex ring going on." Normally, I didn't shout unsubstantiated evidence at potential criminals, but Karla was pushing all my psychological buttons.
"Listen, chickie, it wasn't my deal. Big shots would fly in and want special services. Mo would get somebody to provide. Pretty soon word got around that if you wanted the hottest young hoofers, stop by the Desert Star Casino. I don't think they had any idea what people would pay. Ya know, Mo and Gio was mob guys, and hookers was hookers, and they didn't bring that much, but here these kids was bringin' a shitload. It got really big, and then some pervert offed one of the boys."
That’s what the old newspaper article said. That’s what Sophia was trying to tell us. Callie and I exchanged looks.
"Made the papers. Of course, not like it really came down, but cleaned up for citizen consumption, as Mo used to say. After that, I tried to stop it, but Mo wouldn't hear of it. He said the mob would kill him if he tried to break it up. After Mo died it all stopped. Those was the old days. Today, if Hackett had some kid in his room, his own people set it up. What's goin' on now is just the leftovers, ya know? Few clients probably still show up. Most of 'em probably can't get it up. What's a blow job for ten thousand bucks?" She shrugged. "Done it myself."
There was no point in arguing with Karla. Her background led her mind to its present position. She walked over to the bar and poured herself another drink.
"The ring isn't leftover; it's in full swing! Guys come up to a dealer—a dealer with a special ring on his finger—and they put 10K down and give him a number; it's always a number under seventeen, and a boy that age is taken up to the man's room." I paused, breathless, having blurted out my thoughts without editing them.
She turned and stared at us for a long moment and then abruptly laughed. "Now that'd be a trick, wouldn't it? Does the dealer stop dealin' right there and say, 'Sure, number seventeen, right away, sir. Would ya like a pizza with that?'" Karla could not have been more derisive, trying to embarrass me out of the notion of a porn ring happening out in the open, but I was convinced that was why it worked—because it did happen out in the open.
"That's just how they place the order. The delivery time is woven into small talk, stuff like, 'Front desk is so busy, I'll be lucky to get checked in by one a.m.,' or 'Think I'll hit the sack now and call it a day.' The dealer changes shifts right after the order and passes the word to someone in the hotel. We haven't figured out who that is yet," Callie said.
"Well, tell you what, Sherlock, you keep at it and you let me know. 'Cuz the minute I know, they'll be lucky to be fired instead of fired upon." She downed her drink, locked eyes with me, eyes that said she meant every word she was saying. "You think I don't get it. Well, I get it. I've tried to clean up this place from day one; constant battle since Mo died. It ain't worth it to me. Fucked-up boys, dead boys. Those are my choices. I'm don
e with it. So you have at it."
"And who do you think causes their deaths?" Callie asked.
"The cosmos." She smirked at Callie, and suddenly, the other Karla surfaced, the one who wasn't happy to see anyone, the one who wanted us to get the hell out now. We were on the street in no time.
"She talks in circles. How'd she know it was Hackett who had Joey in his room?"
"Because she owns the hotel?" I asked.
"So, someone at the hotel told Karla that Joey got sent to Hackett's room. Joey was in the same kind of trouble the kid in that old newspaper article was probably in. It makes sense. If the old energy is back, then it brings with it the same old issues," Callie said.
"But it didn't make the papers—that's what was written on our article—yet she said it did make the papers." I thought about that. "I guess a cleaned-up version for 'citizen consumption' got printed."
"She also said it was ten thousand for a blow job. How would she know that unless she's seeing the profits from a porn ring?" Callie wrinkled her nose in distaste.
"Like the lady said, done it herself."
Callie insisted we head for the hospital. We might have gotten Joey into a situation that caused him to be beaten. After all, he'd left Hackett's room, but only after the fake vice squad presumably appeared.
How would anyone have seen or known that? There was no one in the hallway, no one in that linen room.
Once we'd made our way to the ICU, I adopted a calm but concerned demeanor with the nursing station.
"We're his aunts from Pittsburgh," I told the nurse.
"He's very ill. Only one of you at a time," the nurse said.
"You go," Callie said, unable to bear looking at him.
A nurse sat beside Joey. He had tubes in him and his face was blackened nearly beyond recognition.
"I'm his aunt," I said to the nurse at this bedside.
"He can't talk," she said.
One look at Joey, and it wasn't hard to pretend to be grieving over him. This kid had been done in, and from the looks of him, who knew if he'd ever get out of this hospital alive.
"Joey, who in the world did this to you, baby?" I exclaimed.
"The police came but he couldn't talk any," the nurse reiterated.
I looked into Joey's eyes and I knew Joey wasn't trying to communicate, because he didn't trust anyone. His eyes connected with mine. I gave him a slow, knowing wink.
"Joey and I have always had a special communication, haven't we, honey? I wish I knew who did this to you. I would box their head for them!" I said like a kindly old aunt.
Joey raised his small, frail hand and brought two fingers together against his thumb, once, then twice and then dropped his hand to the bed, unable to exert any more energy.
"I think he's saying goodbye. He's tired," the nurse said.
"Joey, remember what your other aunt Callie told you. By the time you're eighteen, you're going to meet someone special and your whole life will change for the better, which means, young man, that you will be alive and well at eighteen. So you'd better get out of here." I kissed him on the forehead and left the room.
I stopped by the waiting room and got Callie, who was squirming over the dark energy in the hospital. "People die and don't move on. They wander the corridors, and it just leaves you open to walkins and attachments." I apparently gave her an odd look because she added, "Walkins and attachments easily access weakened energy fields... that's why drunks and drug addicts and even the terminally ill can have someone take over their bodies."
I raised my hand in the air to signify that I couldn't take any more.
She'd have to save some of her way-out-ness for later. I was depressed over something more tangible—Joey Winters.
"How is he?" she finally brought herself to ask.
"I think we got him beaten up. He talked to us and someone knew," I said.
"Who knew we were talking to Joey?" Callie seemed to be asking the cosmos.
"Maybe the room is bugged," I said. "But then how much more bugged can you get than people videotaping you? Besides, Joey was never in our room."
"Maybe we talked about him after we got back to our room."
"I feel like my freakin' underwear is bugged! Everybody seems to know everything we say or do. Let's go back to the room and take the place apart just to make sure we haven't missed anything."
We drove back across town to the hotel in a depressed state and went up to our room. We clicked open the hotel door and said nothing to Elmo, but merely patted his head. Whoever was listening might think it was merely a maid entering to clean. Carefully, we began looking in drawers, under beds, along window ledges, inside phones, overhead in vents, and finally in the pockets of the clothes we were wearing the night we'd talked to Joey. Elmo watched us with intent interest. We sat down on the edge of the bed, our eyes scanning the room for anything that might have been moved or added, anything we'd missed, any place where a microphone could be concealed.
Elmo sobbed and clawed at his collar, as if scratching at a flea, and suddenly Callie knew. She grabbed a piece of paper and wrote a note to me: Elmo! They had Elmo for several hours downstairs, and he was with us in the linen closet with Joey! We both knelt beside him and felt his body everywhere, and then Callie unbuckled his collar. Right where all the dog tags hung and the collar got bulky, someone had sewn on a small directional microphone. I took scissors and started to cut it off but then stopped. I went over to the door and opened it loudly, then closed it as if we were entering and greeted Elmo.
"You know what?" I said out loud. "This hound of mine is starting to have a doggie odor. I think he could use a bath."
"Don't think the spa offers that service," Callie said.
"The tub. He'll love it! Come on, Elmo. Let me take your collar off. It's wet; did you put your head in the shower? I'm going to put it over here to dry." I wrapped the collar up in towels to muffle the sound. I looked at Callie, anger in my eyes, as I dragged the three of us into the bathroom and turned on the shower. "Okay, buddy, we're going to scrub you up and then let you air dry. That should only take a couple of hours with this thick coat." I closed the bathroom door loudly.
"What have we said in front of Elmo since we got him back from the manager's office?"
"Everything! I can't imagine anything we haven't talked about in this room," Callie said. "And if we haven't talked about it here, we've talked about it while we were walking him."
"A directional mike can pick up more than a hundred feet away if it's line of sight," I said.
"Wouldn't his jangling collar and his breathing drown out any conversation?" Callie asked.
"Elmo rests a lot so they've undoubtedly gotten plenty of conversation. They probably have people staked out with gear throughout the hotel, which means someone in Valet Park probably is in on it and they put the receiver into our car so they can hear us around town."
"Could they hear us on the road trip to LA.?" Callie asked.
"We'd be out of range after about a mile. We'd better check on Rose. Our conversations have probably put her in the same kind of danger Joey encountered," I said.
Callie rang Rose's number. No answer. She rang the theater, and they said she'd taken a few days off and her understudy would be performing tonight.
"So did she take a few days off, or are they going to off her in a few days? That's what we don't know and we've got to find out," I said darkly. "I think we have to use their own surveillance equipment to set a trap for them. We'll need to think about how that trap might work. We can leave that mike muffled for about twenty-four hours and get away with it. They'll think his collar's drying and we just forgot to put it back on him, but after that we'd better have a damned good plan or we're in real trouble and so is Rose Ross."
Chapter Twenty
“I should have remembered this," Callie said, slamming shut the book titled Rules of Ruler ship. "The Eighth House includes death and legacies of the grandfather of a woman." She examined the chart again. "But w
hat woman? And who is the grandfather? We need to go see the last place Mo was before he was killed." And with that, Callie took us back to the theater. I'd been in the theater so many times I was starting to get the itch to play a role.
"How do you know that he died in this theater?"
"Randall Ross told me. He said he died of asphyxiation. Some sort of carbon monoxide accident. Of course, the rumor was that he turned the gas on himself."
"How the hell do you get asphyxiated in a room the size of this theater?"
"I don't know," Callie said, looking around the room. Suddenly a small blue light appeared on the theater wall at the farthest point from the stage where we were standing. I glanced up at the projection booth to see if someone was inside, but it was dark. The light moved down the wall and then swung across the room, landing on the opposite wall. Callie's eyes followed it and she took a few steps toward it. Then the light traveled down the wall to the floor and came to rest at the edge of the circular stage next to the metal disk at our feet, as if someone were secretly watching and trying to point something out to us.
"Who the hell's doing this?" I asked.
Callie focused on the light. She sat down suddenly on the polished stage floor and watched the light as one would watch a movie. It flickered and then finally went out.
"He died right here," Callie said and then added, "But that just doesn't feel right."
I looked up at the booth again but couldn't see who the operator was. "We're sitting ducks out here. Let's get going," I whispered, but Callie looked up at me, offered her hand, and pulled me down beside her with exceptional strength. My eyes connected with hers. Life is short. Why can't she be mine—just mine?