by Jane Haddam
Dennis was just thinking that Pat Robertson, or Jerry Falwell, or whoever it had been, had been right for once, AIDS was God’s way of punishing homosexuals, when he realized that somebody was staring at him. The stare was calm and straight and unwavering, and Dennis was suddenly sure that this was going to be somebody who understood him. He could always tell the ones who understood him. They could always tell him, too. It was a secret bond, more secret even than the one between men and boys.
The store fronts were full of pornography. In smaller towns stores didn’t put their stuff right in their display windows for anybody to see from the street. A lot of them didn’t have display windows. They blocked their windows up with plain brown cardboard, lettered all over to let you know what they had inside. ADULT BOOKS! MOVIES! MAGAZINES! With all the windows open like this, Dennis didn’t know where to look. The store he was standing next to had a display of equipment that made Dennis feel a little sick, even though he had used some of it some of the time. When you dealt with boys you had to use some of it. Boys were wild. They were born untamed and undisciplined, like young horses. And like young horses, you had to train them to control themselves. It was a fern-bitch lie that you could do that by talking to them or making them sit in a corner. Boys were men. They didn’t respond to that kind of soft, suffocating ooze, except by dying inside and becoming fags. That was why there was so many fags. There were more and more each year. The prisses had gotten hold of the schools and the social service agencies. They had banned and outlawed all the natural, normal ways to bring up boys. They had made pariahs not only of men like him but even of ordinary fathers who only wanted to use the strap a little to bring their boys into line. What they got were fags, or boys who wouldn’t deal with them at all, criminals, violent and bloody for all the world to see.
The man really was watching him. He really was. Dennis looked carefully behind him to see who it was. He was not a stupid man. He knew how to take precautions. One of those precautions was never to go anywhere, in a district like this one, with a black person. Dennis would have avoided going anywhere with a black person under any circumstances, if only because so many of them were either drug criminals or related to drug criminals, but very few black men were gay, and even fewer were mentors. That, Dennis decided, was what he should call himself. He was a mentor. Men like him were mentors. When he put the palm of his hand on the inside of a boy’s thigh, he was . . . he was . . .
Something in his head had fuzzed out. His balls hurt. Every part of his body hurt. He turned around to look at the man who was looking at him. He was glad at what he saw. This was not a middle-aged troll. This was not the kind of man you saw on American justice, beard grown out for a day and a half, Polo shirt stained down the front by beer. Dennis looked quickly at his reflection in the window with the leather equipment in it and felt immediately better. He didn’t have a half-grown-out beard. It was too difficult to tell if he had stains on his clothes. He had to be careful. Being on the run did things to you. You began to fall apart.
The man was young and tall and muscular, and unlike everybody else on this street he was dressed like a preppie on his way to a fraternity meeting. Dennis liked his clothes. There was a certain kind of man who looked especially good in an expensive Polo shirt, and this man was wearing a very expensive polo shirt. The Polo shirt was white, and dazzlingly clean. The trousers under it were stone chinos and also dazzlingly clean. If the Angel Gabriel could have appeared in New York on an ordinary day, Dennis thought he would look like this.
There was no way anymore to ignore the fact that the man was looking at him. Dennis wandered over, doing his best to make it look causal. “I don’t like this street,” he said, when he got close enough for the man to hear. “I’m not from New York. I don’t know how I ended up here.”
“I know what you want,” the man said.
Dennis tried to place the accent, but couldn’t. It was not an accent from the Northeast, but it was nothing so simple as “Southern.” He rubbed his hands together. The man was wearing loafers under his chinos. They were Brooks Brothers cordovans and shined so well, they gleamed.
“They’re going to be lost if we don’t save them,” the man said. Dennis’s head snapped up. “They’re going to end up on drugs, or something worse. They’re going to end up in the kind of life that isn’t worth living. The dull life. The suburban life. The life of ‘quiet desperation.’ I like Thoreau, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Dennis said. “Yes, I like Thoreau a lot.”
Dennis wasn’t completely sure who Thoreau was, but he didn’t care. This was good, too. This man was literate. And he wasn’t coming on to him. There was that, too.
Of course, there was the question of what the man was doing down here. There was that. Dennis wasn’t worried. He was down here, too. They were both down here because the prisses and the fags and the queers and the feminists had driven them down here. They’d taken a noble thing and forced it to hide in garbage dumps.
“I have a place,” the man said. “I rescue them, and then I bring them to my place. I hide them from the people who want to hurt them. But I can’t do it alone. They deserve individual attention.”
Careful now, Dennis thought. If you’re not careful, you’ll get caught. “They deserve the best in life, too,” Dennis said. “It must cost a lot of money.”
“Oh, I’ve got money,” the man said. “Can’t you tell that? I don’t need anybody else’s money. What I don’t have is time.”
Dennis relaxed a little. It was an incredible idea. Start a place for boys, a safe house where boys in danger of being prissified, or beaten up, or turned into drug addicts and juvenile delinquents, could be nurtured and educated, could be helped to mature into men. He wondered where the place was. It would be terrible if it was in a neighborhood like this, but it might have to be. The prisses policed everywhere else. He wondered how this man found the boys he helped and protected. Maybe he took them right off the streets, right away from the control of their negligent parents, who let them run in the park and paid attention only to their gossip and their newspapers.
“I could use somebody to help me with the time,” the man said. “I don’t know if you’re the one, but I could use somebody. You don’t look like you belong in a place like this.”
“No,” Dennis said, “that’s true. I don’t belong in a place like this. I’m an accountant.”
“Good profession. It requires an education.”
“It does,” Dennis said. “And an education is so important. It really is. People talk about education all the time, but they don’t really know what it means. They don’t understand what it requires to turn a boy into a man.”
“The marines can’t do it,” the man said.
“No, no, they can’t,” Dennis said. “Only mentors can do it. I’m a mentor, or I try to be.”
“I know,” the man said.
Dennis waited. He had no idea what was supposed to happen next. He had never been in a situation like this one before. The world around him seemed unreal. Who could believe that humans being lived the way the ones in this place lived? Who could believe that these people were really human at all?
“You could come with me,” the man said.
Dennis smiled.
“I’d have to be sure you could make a commitment,” the man said. “I can’t have men in my house who only want something for themselves. I’d have to be sure you wanted to give them your time. And your self. You’d have to give them your whole self.”
“I would,” Dennis said. “I’ve always wanted to.”
“We have to go around the back,” the man said.
I don’t know his name, Dennis thought. I should find out who he is. Dennis looked up, and the man was already disappearing down a side street. He picked up his pace until it was almost a run, then slowed down as the man did. The side street was even less appetizing than the main drag had been. The main drag had a kind of vitality to it. The shops and the crowds were evidence of its v
iability. The side street was not viable. Many of the buildings were boarded up.
“I don’t know your name,” Dennis said, coming to a stop where the man had.
“I’m Carter Michaelman,” the man said. “My mother named me after Jimmy Carter, when Carter was president. I don’t like Jimmy Carter.”
“Nobody likes Jimmy Carter,” Dennis said.
“My house is that way,” Carter Michaelman said. “Up that street and toward the middle. The houses on the sides of it are abandoned. So is the house across the street. You have to be so careful for this. People don’t understand. People think you’re hurting them.”
“Oh, I know,” Dennis said. “I know. They’ve taken something noble and beautiful and made it sound like a disease.”
Carter Michaelman sprinted across the street and then up the opposite block to the intersection. Dennis sprinted, too, but there was no need to. There was no traffic here. There wrere very few people. He caught up and looked around.
“Does anybody live here at all?” he asked. “It’s like an abandoned block.”
“It’s like us,” Carter Michaelman said. “You see the outside and it looks like trash. You see the inside and it’s a miracle. We’re miracles. Did you know that? We’re miracles. Because we weren’t taken in by it, and we didn’t succumb to the pressure to be like everybody else.”
“Oh, yes,” Dennis said. “Yes. Exactly.”
He hadn’t been aware of the fact that they had been moving, but they must have been. They were up on the top of the stoops to one of the houses, standing right at the front door. It was an odd kind of door for the city. It had glass in it, big ovals of glass as tall as a man, Dennis was amazed that nobody had broken those before this. Or maybe this was what Carter Michaelman meant. Maybe this was the miracle.
“You have to come inside,” Carter Michaelman said, pushing the door open,
Dennis stepped into a vestibule and looked around. The building still looked abandoned. The floor of the vestibule was littered with trash. Dennis tried to see in past the interior door, but he couldn’t. That door had only very small windows in it and those close to its top.
“Have you fixed this place up?” he asked. “If you have, you’ve done a wonderful job. It’s an incredible disguise. I don’t know how you manage it.”
“I manage it like this,” Carter Michaelman said, stepping just a little closer.
The vestibule was small. They were already close together. Carter Michaelman did not have far to step. It wasn’t until Dennis looked down that he saw the long knife in Carter Michaelman’s right hand, and when he first saw it all he thought was that it fit Carter Michaelman perfectly. It was a very clean knife. It had been sharpened and polished. It gleamed.
“It’s like this,” Carter Michaelman said.
Then Dennis Ledeski watched as the knife slid deep into his intestines and came up in one long widening gash of red through his stomach and toward his heart.
2
It was six o’clock in the morning, and Tyrell Moss was feeling very disillusioned—years ago, when he had first decided to remake himself into a solid and respectable citizen, he had been sure that time and habit would make him feel that waking up early was perfectly natural and perfectly right. Instead, it got harder to do every year. At least twice a week he found himself lying in bed, staring at the ceiling and contemplating escape to Mexico.
Today, Mexico did not seem like such a good idea, since the news last night had been full of demonstrations and labor strikes in Mexico City. He turned his mind to Cancun instead. Then he saw the Bible sitting on his bedside table and sighed. His one good parole officer had told him it wasn’t true. You never got to a place where you found waking up in the early morning easy and natural. Some people did, but they were born that way. They never felt good sleeping in until noon. The rest of the human race just learned to live with being tired, at least for a little while. Once you got the day started, you felt better. This was true. Tyrell had noticed it many times. He made himself sit up. Then he made himself get to his feet. Then he went down the hall to the bathroom and made the shower a little colder than he liked. That always got the day off to a good start.
He was back in his bedroom, mostly dressed except for his shirt, and paging through the Bible to the place where the reading was for the day, when he heard his doorbell ring. He looked at the reading. He preferred to read in the mornings. No matter how tired he was from getting up early, his mind was more likely to be clear then than it would be after sixteen hours in the store. The doorbell rang again and he put the book down, still open to Matthew 6.
He got up and went out into the living room, grabbing the clean shirt he had laid out for himself on the way. He went to the door and looked through the spyhole at whoever was ringing for him. It was a necessary precaution in this neighborhood, where what was ringing for you could be very bad news at any time of the day. Today, it was only Claretta Washington, dressed to the teeth in spite of the time of day and complete with matching hat. Tyrell suppressed, as mightily as he could, his instant speculation about the hat. What was it about church women, his mind wanted to know, that they always had hats to match any dresses that they wore? They had to have dozens of hats. And not any hats either. Not little baseball caps with team logos on them or water-proof rain hats or little scarves to tie under their chins. Oh, no. These were architectural hats. They built up from the base like skyscrapers. They sprouted wings. They competed for height with the Eiffel Tower. Claretta’s, this morning, was in the shape of Vesuvius in mideruption, complete with feathers.
He opened up. “Good morning, Claretta,” he said. “Is there something—”
“The store’s been broken into,” she said, cutting in on him. “At the back. The door was open. I saw it first thing when I went around to put out the garbage from the adoption run—”
“Claretta, for goodness sake. You shouldn’t be out collecting garbage for the adoption run. That’s what we have the boys for, the boys are supposed to—”
“It doesn’t matter what the boys are supposed to do,” Claretta said, “they don’t always do it, and sometimes the schedule isn’t enough. So I picked up some trash and I went around back to throw it out and your back door was standing open. Pretty much all the way. I think you’d better come.”
“All right,” Tyrell said. It was true. He’d better come. Break-ins were endemic in this area. There was nothing you could do about them but be as careful as it was possible to be and never leave money lying around. He went back into the bedroom and got his shoes. Claretta came into the living room and sat down on the edge of the couch. He came out again and got his jacket from the back of the chair. “Did you see any damage? Was the window broken?”
“No,” Claretta said. “I didn’t see anything, and I didn’t go into the store. I left Mardella Ford and Rabiah Orwell out there to keep watch—”
“You had Mardella and Rabiah picking up trash with you?”
“You were the one who said we had to take responsibility for our own neighborhood,” Claretta said. “YDU were the one who said we couldn’t wait until the city got around to keeping us decent or we’d never be decent, never in a million years. You were the one who convinced us. Don’t squawk about it now.”
“The idea wasn’t to get a bunch of old women out on their hands and knees killing themselves at some godawful hour of the morning.”
“I’m younger than you are, Tyrell Moss, and you know it. You’d better get going. Rabiah and Mardella won’t wait forever. By the time you get down there, they’ll be pulling each other’s hair.”
Rabiah and Mardella were far too dignified to actually pull hair, but Tyrell knew what Claretta meant. He ushered her out into the hall and then locked his door behind him, not once but three times. He wondered what it would be like to live in the kind of place where people didn’t lock their doors at all. Moving to rural Indiana didn’t seem feasible, so he led Claretta down the hall and down the stairs. The elevator
s were out of order. The walls in the halls, though, were free of graffiti, because he had applied the same principle to this apartment building as he had to the street. You can’t count on other people to keep you decent. You have to be willing to do that yourself. He’d organized half the residents to paint and to watch for vandalism. It had taken a few months, but after that he had no longer had to look at squiggly notices for HOT PANTS 4447 every day on his way down to work.
They got out onto the street. Tyrell looked around. The neighborhood was nearly deserted. This was a place where few people had regular jobs, and so few people woke early and got on their way. There were a few, though, especially since welfare reform had put a five-year lifetime cap on benefits, and Tyrell always opened in time for those people to get their coffee to get on their way.
He didn’t bother to open the store at the front. Instead, he used the alley—the alley where Faith Anne Fugate had been found—and went to the back. Mardella and Rabiah were still there, standing carefully in front of the door, which was wide open. They weren’t fighting, though, because they were busy taking the hide off Charles Jellenmore.
Charles saw Tyrell come out of the alley and headed right for him. “This wasn’t me,” he said. “It wasn’t anything to do with me. If these two bitches don’t—”
“What did you say?” Tyrell asked.
“Don’t you do that,” Charles said. By now he was shouting. He had a good base voice. He could be heard at least a state or two away. “Don’t you damned dare fuckin’ do that. These fuckin’ bitch hos aren’t gonna pin no damned—”