by Gregory Ashe
“Ok,” Shaw said, rolling Percy off the mattress. “We’re done.
Percy lay on the ground and laughed harder.
“I want you to make that apology list.”
“Done.”
“I want you to say nice things about my clothes for a year.”
“A week.”
“A month.”
“Done.”
“I want you to act out an entire episode of I Love Lucy with me. Not the candy factory one. A sexy one. And you can’t be Fred or Ricky.”
“I don’t think they made any sexy ones. Maybe we can do the one where Lucy is pregnant.”
Shaw considered this. “You would look good in one of my maternity smocks.”
“We’ll talk about it.”
“Percy, get up,” Shaw kicked him, “and tell us about this trouble you’re in.”
More giggling.
“Did you have to get him high?”
“He was about to have a massive freak-out.”
“Did you have to get him this high?”
“I like high Percy.”
“Of course you do. If he’d turned around too fast, he would have put your eye out with schlongzilla there.” North toed Percy, who rolled onto his side, rubbing his face against the bristly carpet. “Really?”
“Ok, I might have gone a little over the top. But to be fair, I didn’t know he was a featherweight.”
“Percy,” North bellowed, leaning over their friend and potential murder suspect, “get your ass up.”
With some help, he got up onto the bed. “Oh man,” he whispered. “Oh man, I am really goddamn high.”
“Percy, what kind of trouble are you in?” Shaw asked. “What’s going on?”
Something clouded his visage for a moment. “I did something I shouldn’t have. I fucked up. I fucked up bad.”
“What’d you do?” North asked.
A stoner’s secret-keeping smile tightened his lips, but he spoke, drawing out the name: “Rik.”
“Did you kill Rik?”
“No, no, no, no, no.” Percy stared up at them. Then he started to giggle. “Oh my God, your face is a sad dog.”
Shaw glanced over. “I guess at a certain angle, it does kind of look like—”
“No, man. No. No. No, man, nuh huh. Not like. Not like. It is a sad dog. It totally is. It totally is.” Then, bemused, “Oh my God, did I shit myself?”
“What the fuck kind of weed did you give him?”
“I don’t know! Master Hermes said it was good stuff. Strong.”
“Did he tell you it was going to fry your brain, Barbara Bush style?
Percy was trying to pull down his shorts, apparently still concerned with his shitting problem, but he kept running his hand along the outside of the material. Every time his hand reached the hem, his face took on an expression of indignant frustration.
“God, he’s adorable,” Shaw whispered. “Can we keep him?”
“Two of you? I’d hang myself.”
They gave him an hour, which they spent watching a fuzzy broadcast channel that Shaw insisted showed a Puritan sex demon running for political office and North thought might be QVC with a special on shoes. When Percy started to come down, they made him wash his face and drink some water.
When Percy dropped down onto the bed again, North drew out his phone. “Percy, watch this.”
He played the video. The effect on Percy was instantaneous: the color drained from his face, and he turned away, burying his face in the bedding. When the video finished, Percy shook his head, still hiding himself against the coverlet.
“Yeah,” North said. “Now you’re going to tell us all about that.”
Percy shook his head again.
“You sure fucking—”
He cut off when Shaw laid a hand on his arm. Shaw tickled the back of Percy’s neck for a minute. Some of the lines of tension in his back eased. He snuffled against the polyester and shook his head a couple more times.
“You’re going to feel a lot better after you tell us,” Shaw said. “You tell us, and you can go home, and you can sleep in your own bed, and you’ll feel so much better.”
“Yeah, you can swim around in your percale sheets and drink your twenty-dollar-a-pound coffee and use the same fucking hair wax as Ryan Reynolds.” North made an irritated noise when Shaw pinched him, but the look Shaw directed at him made him feel oddly guilty, so he added, “And you really will feel better.”
After a moment, Percy flopped onto his back. His eyes were red, his nose was running, and he wiped his cheeks with slow, distracted movements, as though the signals leaving his brain were on a timer. “I sent it to him.”
North let out a breath. “And?”
“That’s all. I didn’t kill him. I swear to God!”
“No, Percy. That’s not all. Start at the beginning, all the way back, and tell us all of it.”
“You know. Rufus already told you. I know you know.”
“Sit up and tell me what happened,” Shaw barked. “I’m trying to help you, but I’m running really fucking low on patience.”
Percy looked at him.
North looked at him.
“You said it when I got stuck in my octothorpe dashiki,” Shaw said to North. “And when I sprained my ankle from trying to show Truck how to do the crane from Karate Kid. Oh, and when I fell off my skateboard and those teenagers—”
“Elementary school girls,” North put in.
“—laughed at me. Actually, you say it a surprising amount. I guess it got stuck in my head.”
North honestly didn’t know how to respond to that, so he said to Percy, “Go on, dumbass. What happened?”
Voice dull, almost affectless, Percy began to speak. “In college, we hooked up. Rik and me. I got wasted one night. He gave me—I think he gave me—something. We did some stuff, and he took pictures.” He wiped his face with those slow, disjointed movements again. “Do I have to tell you what we did?”
“Maybe. You can skip it now if you want.”
“He made me come back. We’d do it again. He could get rough sometimes. I heard that from other boys. If you did what he wanted, if you fell for the spell, if you didn’t make any trouble—well, in that case, Rik was a charmer. But if you didn’t play along, sometimes that didn’t matter. He did what he wanted anyway. He was like that with a lot of stuff—he did what he wanted, took what he wanted, and he didn’t care who it hurt. He did it with work.” Percy laughed, but even the laugh sounded planed down, stripped of emotion. “God, that’s how I got into this mess.”
“He blackmailed you into the job at Herbert and Galleli?”
Percy nodded. “He ended things when he got back together with his wife. His kid was in the hospital, and then he decided he was straight, and he started playing that hardline conservative angle. I heard later that he was still hooking up with guys, but I didn’t know about it at the time. I was so glad he was done—so glad we were done—that I tried to pretend it hadn’t ever happened. But it did happen. I think about it. At the most random times. No wonder I can’t keep a boyfriend.”
“After he got back with Jean, you didn’t have any more interactions with him?”
“God, no. I just about dropped out of school. Instead, I had to scramble my schedule and change my minor so I wouldn’t have any classes with him. Then, as soon as I graduated, the bastard moved to Chicago. He made a killing up there. I’d hear about him from time to time. He didn’t have a great reputation, but you couldn’t argue with the kind of money he was making. Then he contacted me. Totally out of the blue. I swear to God, I had a panic attack. I honestly did. He wanted a job. I gave him some line, I had to think about it, that kind of thing. I could barely put a sentence together. The son of a bitch didn’t wait two hours; an email just popped up in my inbox, my work email, and it had some of those pictures.” Percy let out a shuddering breath. “What was I supposed to do?”
“D
id you know about the pump-and-dump scams?” Shaw asked.
Interest sparked in Percy’s eyes. “Is that what he was doing? No, I didn’t know. Like I said, he had a bad rep, but nobody had come down on him yet. If I’d honestly thought he was running a scam with our clients’ money—well, God, I don’t know what I would have done. But aside from those transactions I told you about, right when he started, things seemed fine.”
“Now the rest of it,” North said.
A flush worked its way under Percy’s tan. “I thought maybe I could get him off my back if I had my own, you know, material. And he’d been talking about divorce at work. I thought maybe he was cruising guys again. So I followed him a couple of times. After work, that’s all. It’s not like I went to his house. And I was right. He was going to clubs. Gay clubs, I mean. I took some pictures. And then I realized if he was getting divorced, it didn’t matter, because nobody would care if he was fucking guys.”
“All his conservative business buddies might have minded,” North said. “All the people he’d shat on for being gay.”
Shaw gave him a warning look; Percy didn’t seem to see it because he kept talking. “I guess, but I mean, that didn’t matter. Not really. He hadn’t gotten into the social scene here yet, so he could be whoever he wanted to. I mean, there are definitely other LGBTQ people in finance here, and he would have been fine. No, the only person who would have cared was Jean, and they were getting divorced. Then I thought I needed to bide my time. He’d do what he did to me. Or what he did to other guys. And I’d get pictures of that. But—but I didn’t even have to. The whole thing fell into my lap.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was at the Royale one night. Following him again, obviously, because that place is gross. And I saw him get into this huge fight with another guy. The other guy threw a punch, and Rik knocked him onto his ass, and then it was over—Rik left while the other guy was still picking himself up. I went over to him. Spur of the moment. I don’t know why, I just thought this guy hated Rik, and I hated Rik, and maybe we’d have a drink or something.”
“Let me guess,” North said. “He hated Rik.”
“Hated him? North, he wanted to kill him. I’d had a few drinks, and this guy was talking a mile a minute. But he hated him; that came through clear. And at first it was kind of nice, somebody else who felt that way, and I told him about the pictures, the whole thing, what I was trying to do. But then it got…too much. It was intense. And scary. He scared me. So I got up, and he grabbed my arm. He asked me if I seriously wanted to fuck with Rik’s life, and I said yeah, but kind of like, I mostly wanted him to let me go. So he said, ‘I’ve got a video that’ll fuck his life up for real.’ Something like that. And I kind of laughed, but he stared at me until I was quiet and asked, ‘Do you want it?’ I said yes. I felt like I had to. So he sent me that, and he knew this other email that Rik used, this anonymous one, so I made an anonymous one, and I sent the email to Rik right there. He was watching me. I felt obligated, you know?”
“Yeah, sure. Blackmailing someone out of politeness is actually the most common reason.”
“Fuck you, North. You don’t have any idea what—”
“The guy,” Shaw said. “Can you describe him?”
“Tall. Thin. Young. He might have been mixed or just really light-skinned black. Young. Like the kind Rik went after in college. Like us, when we were that age.”
“Did he—” North began.
Shaw cut him off. “You didn’t run to Illinois because you sent a video to Rik. And you didn’t get those bruises falling down the stairs at work after a few too many drinks.”
Jaw set, Percy met Shaw’s gaze. He broke first, looking down at the coverlet to pluck at a loose thread. “At work, I could avoid him. Being around him at Teddi’s party, having to listen to him talk, standing there and pretending everything was normal and we were all friends, and Jean looking at me like she knew everything—it was too much. And I had too much to drink, again, so yeah, there was that.”
“You followed him.”
A miserable nod. “He went to this dump. Central City, I think. Near there, anyway. And he got a room, and I knew he was waiting for his hookup. He’d never responded to the video I sent him, never sent anything back. So I was going to confront him. Tell him that Tucker and I would talk to Jean if he didn’t, maybe it would be leverage in the divorce—Christ, I don’t know. I guess I wanted an apology. And the pictures destroyed. But mostly I wanted him to be afraid of me for once. Only then Tucker showed up, and I realized they were still together, even after what I’d seen in that video, and—”
“And you went in there and beat him to death with a golf club,” North said.
“No! Some wino attacked me. Tried to rob me. He beat the hell out of me,” Percy gestured along the length of his body, “before I got away. I thought he was trying to kill me. I drove home. The next day, I heard about Rik, and I just about lost my mind—I’d sent him that video, and now I looked like I’d been in a fight, and the police were going to pin it on me. That lasted about two seconds because then I heard about Tucker, and I knew.”
“Knew what?”
“That Tucker killed him. I mean, I know you guys are looking for somebody else, but I’m not going down for this. The only reason I’m talking to you is because Rufus already told you the worst stuff, and I figured you should hear the whole thing before you trying to set me up for this.”
“You think—” North started.
Shaw cut him off again. “Why do you believe Tucker killed him?”
“I watched the motel, Shaw. I was working myself up to go in there and, I don’t know, do whatever. And Tucker was the only one who went into that room.”
“Until a mysterious wino attacked you, and nobody can track him down or verify that story, and you went home and spent the rest of the night alone, so you have no alibi.”
“What the fuck? I know you still have feelings for him, and yeah, good for you, you want to fix things and get him off for this, but I’m not the one they found in that room, covered in blood—”
“Don’t worry about my fucking feelings about Tucker,” North shouted over him. “My feelings haven’t got one goddamn thing to do with any of this. Worry about yourself. If you are fucking lying to me about one fucking word in this bullshit story I will fucking tear you apart, Percy. Limb from fucking limb. Whatever fucking game you think you’re playing—”
“This guy you met,” Shaw asked, holding out his phone. One of the candids North had snapped of Will appeared on the screen. “Is this him?”
In the silence after the shouting, North could hear Percy swallow.
“Is this the guy from the club?” Shaw asked. “The one who got into a fight with Rik? The one who gave you the video?”
“Yeah,” Percy said. “That’s him. Why? Do you know him?”
Chapter 25
AS SHAW DROVE ACROSS the Mississippi, he called Jadon. No answer, and it wasn’t the kind of information to leave in a voicemail, so Shaw settled for: “Call me.” After that, he tried to keep up with the GTO, although North wasn’t making it easy—he was driving even more like an asshole than usual.
Behind him, Illinois was already a bad aftertaste, the kind that was going to stick with him for a long time. A barge was making its way upriver, a slab of rust-colored metal almost the same shade as the muddy water. Ahead, heat waves shimmered on the asphalt. Beyond the warped air, the city glittered on the riverbank: the steel bow of the Arch, the buildings of glass or limestone or red brick, all of it hunkering under the sun’s unrelenting blows. A whipped-dog city, beaten but not broken. Shaw buzzed down his window, the air whipping his face with the smell of water and fish and diesel. He forgot Percy and all the ugliness with North. He took deep breaths and pounded his fist on the wheel a few times, goosing the gas for kicks, because they had something, finally. Because this was his city. And hell, hell, hell—all that light.
T
hey drove to Ladue. Shaw parked two streets away from the Slooves’ home, jumped in the GTO, and rode with North the rest of the way. They turned around at the end of the cul-de-sac and parked where they could see the house—the French country blue shutters, the dark gaping sockets of the windows, the teardrop driveway and the closed door of the garage.
North yawned; Shaw yawned in sympathy and checked the clock. Barely eleven.
“I’ll take the first turn.”
“I’m fine.”
“It doesn’t make sense for both of us—”
“I said I’m fine.” North rubbed his eyes. In a milder tone, he added, “Thanks, though.”
Shaw settled into the seat. He didn’t mean to, but his eyes closed. He jolted upright a moment later, or so it seemed, but the clock now read quarter to twelve.
North was watching him. Then, slowly, he reached out and touched a spot in Shaw’s hair at the front. He’d done it before, plenty of times over the years, although Shaw had never been able to tell—no matter how many times he checked himself in the mirror—what it was about that particular patch of hair. North stroked his hair back and let his hand drop.
“Is your head better?” Shaw whispered.
“It’s all right.”
“Good.” Shaw smiled. “You look like you’re feeling better.”
North’s hand came to rest on the passenger seat, and he gripped the back, fingers biting into the Morrokide. When he spoke, his words were neutral. Observational. “You seem happy today. You’re always so happy. When I’m not fucking things up, I mean. Most people aren’t happy.”
That was the conversational equivalent of Chutes and Ladders, and Shaw hated Chutes and Ladders. Had hated it every time his grandfather forced him to play it. Shaw had wanted to skip the pitfalls and jump right to the end. He had enjoyed how much that irritated his grandfather, hearing, when his grandfather thought Shaw was out of earshot, the list of moral failings that behavior displayed. So Shaw jumped to the end.
“We’re making progress on this case,” he said. “We’ve finally got something solid. We’re working together, and we’re doing it really, really well. I like what we do. I like working with you and spending time with you. So I’m happy.”