“Nice lunch,” Chris said.
“The macaroni and cheese was good,” Tom agreed. “But that Nakamura is a funny kind of guy, isn’t he? I think he’s got his eye on Stanley.”
“I don’t think Stanley would…,” Chris started to say, and stopped. He’d been about to say that Stanley wasn’t likely to cheat on Tom, but Stanley had come very close to doing that not so very long ago, as they both knew.
“It’s okay,” Tom said. “We’ve talked about it. We’re getting things worked out. It’s a lot harder than I thought, this business of having a relationship. You know, in the past, I just came and went.”
“You’ve got a heart of ice—except where Stanley is concerned.”
“Not true. You and I are friends.”
Chris looked him in the eye, started to say something, and again thought better of it. At one time, if fleetingly, he’d imagined them as something more than just friends. Luckily for everyone concerned, it had gone no further. Stanley was his oldest and best friend. It would have been a messy situation. He was glad after all that it hadn’t happened.
“Okay,” Tom said, “I guess I am a coldhearted bastard.” He took a long chug of beer.
“No, I was out of line,” Chris said. “Oh, don’t pay any attention to me. I am glad to see you and Stanley working things out, really. Stanley is such a dizzy, but he needs someone. He needs you.”
“I need him too. It’s changed my life in ways I couldn’t have imagined, having Stanley beside me. I still don’t understand it, but I know that he is a big part of me.”
Chris was looking past him, though. “Now that’s interesting,” he said.
Tom glanced over his shoulder. “What is?”
“That’s our security guard, Mario, the one Larson said he saw giving Barry Palmer a blow job.”
“Ah.” Tom nodded and studied the Latino youth standing at the far edge of the dance floor. Mario was in a brown security uniform. He was small, round-faced, maybe five pounds over his ideal weight. Anywhere else, he’d have probably looked pretty good, but here he was outclassed.
“He must be on break,” Chris said. “I’ve never seen him in here.”
“Appears like he’s looking for somebody.” Mario’s eyes were searching among the dancers on the floor.
“I wonder who?”
“Yeah, me too. Excuse me a minute.”
Tom elbowed his way through the crowd and approached the young Latino. At the moment, Mario was standing alone.
“Got a minute?” Tom addressed him.
Mario turned large dark eyes on him and smiled expectantly when he saw Tom. “For you? Sure,” he said.
“You’re Mario, right?”
The smile faded a bit. “You know my name?”
“I’ve heard it, is all. I’m Tom Danzel.” He extended a hand.
Mario stepped back as if he’d been stung by a hornet. “The detective,” he said. “The guy looking into Barry’s death.”
“Well, Christ, yeah.” Tom was getting tired of hearing that everybody in town already knew about them.
“Excuse me,” Mario said.
“Wait,” Tom said, but to no avail. Mario was gone, weaving his way hurriedly through the crowd.
Tom watched him, wondering if he should follow. Mario gave one last furtive look over his shoulder and disappeared through a door that led, Tom thought, to the kitchen.
“Now what was that all about?” he wondered aloud. For sure the kid had been spooked. And who had he been looking for?
He went back to Chris at the bar. Chris raised a questioning eyebrow. “Skittish,” Tom said. “Doesn’t like detectives, seems like.”
Stanley came back then, smiling warmly at both of them, and took his drink from the bar. “If you were talking about me,” he said, “I hope you said something nice.”
“No, it was all vicious,” Chris said.
“Well, what are friends for?” Stanley asked, taking a generous sip of his drink.
EDDIE AND Larson joined them shortly, both of them with a glow that suggested things might have progressed beyond casual acquaintance. The five of them drank and danced and made small talk until time to move to the dining room for dinner. This time, Pauli, the waiter, was ready for them, and he served Tom a burger without asking.
After dinner they went back to the bar. Some early arrivals were dancing already. The deejay was on a romantic music kick—at the moment, Dinah Washington, being unforgettable. Tom and Stanley danced together, a two-step, Tom holding Stanley close, Stanley resting his cheek against Tom’s broad shoulder. People were invariably surprised to see what a good dancer Tom was. His hip with the steel plate in it sometimes gave him a slight limp when he walked, most of the time not conspicuous, but it disappeared altogether when he was dancing.
“They’re sweet together, aren’t they?” Larson said.
“Yes,” Eddie and Chris agreed, neither with enthusiasm.
Stanley was surprised anew each time by what a smooth dancer Tom was. It was old-fashioned dancing, but very sexy. Stanley knew that others watched them with appreciation and envy, and he liked the feel of Tom’s arms around him, Tom’s hard body pressing close against his. Cheek to cheek, they used to call it, head to toe. Sarah followed Dinah. Tom nibbled his ear. Stanley giggled in response and pressed closer.
After a bit, Tom said, “You know what, Stanley? I think I’m ready to make an early night of it.”
Stanley arched a glance up at him. Tom’s eyes gleamed with a dark light. “Sounds like a plan to me,” Stanley said, smiling, suddenly feeling shy in his lover’s arms.
Both of them knew that this meant sex. And both of them were happy with the knowledge.
STANLEY HAD been in more than a few relationships. Despite the starting-out expectations, they had all turned out to be short-term, until this one. He and Tom were a year and counting now.
What surprised him as much as anything was how much their sex life varied, especially surprising because, until they had met, Tom had been straight—still was, maybe ninety-nine percent—but once he had accepted his relationship with Stanley, Tom had proven not only adaptable, but with astonishingly few inhibitions. There wasn’t much he hadn’t tried, and most of that he had quickly mastered.
Sometimes when they did it, Tom was incredibly romantic, even whispering sweet nothings in Stanley’s ear while they made tender love. Other times, it was hard, pile-driving sex, grunts instead of words, just two sweaty bodies crashing together at a relentless and ever increasing pace.
Tonight was grunt night. Tom rode him like he was breaking a difficult pony. It was borderline painful and yet exciting too. Stanley had never known anyone who pursued his own pleasure with such single-minded determination.
Tom was in fuck mode, period. If, while he was at it, he felt any concern for the violence with which he was ravaging his lover, he gave no sign of it. Just, “Uh,” and “uh,” and “uh,” with each long violent thrust, and the occasional low moan in answer from Stanley. Part agony, part delight. Stanley could never quite decide which part was paramount. Most likely that was because he didn’t think too clearly while it was happening. He liked to just surrender himself to the assault.
Afterward, though, after Tom had sworn once aloud and slammed the considerable length of himself into Stanley’s by-then-aching bottom, his juices spurting like a volcano erupting—why, then, he became gentleness itself, cradled Stanley in his arms, kissed him repeatedly and tenderly, nipped at his ear and, finally, slipping down on the bed, took Stanley into his mouth and gave him head with such skilled and delicate use of his lips and his tongue that it was all but impossible to believe that it was only a few short months before when he had done this for the first time.
When they had both come, Tom lasting out Stanley’s orgasm until the last bead of juice had been drained from him, when their breath had returned to normal, Tom slipped up on the bed again, took Stanley in the curve of his arm, pulled him into a warm embrace and, with surprisin
g suddenness, fell asleep.
Leaving Stanley to lie in the warmth of Tom’s body, to drink in the odors from it—sweat and man-body scents and the sweet-sour reminders of the sex they had just shared. He drifted, half-asleep, half-awake, thinking about the whirlwind Tom that had just blown through their room, about their relationship, about all kinds of things, but mostly about the two of them.
He thought, not for the first time, that passionate sex, once satisfied, leaves in its wake a peculiar innocence. It seemed to Stanley they might have been two children lying abed together now for no purpose more needful than sharing their warmth. It was moments like this when he felt closest to Tom, when he most enjoyed, as Marguerite Yourcenar had so aptly put it, “the strange felicity of being loved.”
But it was fragile, that innocence. All of it was fragile, he knew that now, their entire being together, fragile enough that it scared him. Tom’s love shone on him like a star from above, but like the star, it made the surrounding night darker.
They, too, were mired in the commonplace, the same as others. Whenever Tom looked at him, he saw the love in Tom’s eyes, but he could never quite shake the knowledge that the magic would one day inevitably wear off, and Tom would look at him with, if not quite indifference, certainly with no passion either. And he was just as certain that no one would ever look at him again the way Tom did now.
Like Tom’s arm lying across him in the darkness, great love can grow heavy too.
THE FIRE was everywhere. He had been shot. There was a door in the distance, and Tom staggered toward it, knowing as he did so that he was never going to make it that far, not in his weakened condition. Had Stanley made it? The heat was so intense, it felt as if his entire body was on fire. His trousers were burning, his hip literally aflame.
Only one chance. His truck was inside the garage, ten, fifteen feet from the open door. He dropped to the floor, crawled under it, just as the world exploded.
Stanley? His eyes flew open. For a moment he was disoriented, the dark room alien and unfamiliar, the terror of the dream clinging to him like the sweat-dampened sheet.
He put a hand to his left, touched Stanley’s back. In his sleep, Stanley murmured something and rolled over toward him, snuggling against him. Tom slipped his arm around him, breathed a sigh of relief. It was okay. Stanley was here with him. The fire hadn’t gotten him.
His hip hurt like hell. That’s what had brought the dream on. It always did. He remembered waking up in the hospital later, after the explosion, his hip burning as if the flames were still eating into it. Sometimes even now, after all this time, it still felt like that, a memory that came at him always in the dark of the night.
He lay for a long time, holding Stanley close, staring up at the ceiling, content just to feel him there. The pain kept him awake.
Sometime close to morning, he finally drifted off to sleep. The phone woke him. The clock by the bed said it was nearly noon. He groped for the telephone. Next to him, Stanley stirred, mumbled something. Stanley could sleep through the end of the world.
Tom recognized Hammond’s voice immediately.
Chapter Fifteen
CARLO TOZZI ran every morning—just as the sun came up, when night was turning into day but everything was still cool. He and Gretel, a half-Shepherd half-anybody’s-guess, usually ran the bike trail behind the Tahquitz Creek Country Club, and at that hour, they pretty much had it to themselves. Shadows were still deep but fading in the little wisps of ground fog that would themselves vanish soon in the heat of the sun. The yellow sage was in full bloom, the sand changing colors with the approach of day, but he could still see the red lights on the towers atop Mount San Jacinto. The nighttime breeze was dying down.
Carlo was an unenthusiastic runner. He did it purely to keep in shape, and at a pace that qualified as aerobic without really pushing himself. A mile and a quarter down, a mile and a quarter back, cool off, and home to the apartment for a hearty breakfast, pancakes and eggs, which he could then consume in clear conscience.
Gretel, who could have outdistanced him with no effort, mostly stayed with him, but she was wont to go exploring now and again, on the trail of a rabbit or a lizard, though she was careful about snakes. A desert-wise dog.
At some point in their run, she went off on her own. Carlo had continued along the path for maybe a quarter mile before he realized she wasn’t with him. He stopped, running in place, and looked back and around.
“Gretel,” he called. “Hey, girl. Where’d you go?”
No response. He looked down the path the way he’d been going. He was almost to his turnaround point anyway. He decided he might as well start back a little early and find her on the way. She never strayed far afield.
He went another quarter mile without seeing her and began to get just a trifle worried—usually, the desert rattlers did their searching in the cool of the night, and by this time, with the sun now definitely above the horizon, the air already warming rapidly, they were mostly looking for shelter from the sun. And Gretel definitely avoided them if she spotted one.
Still, if she carelessly crossed path with a green Mojave…. They were mean; they could be defensive of their territory.
He stopped dead, looking and listening, and heard her nearby, chuffing as if she were having a conversation with herself. He jogged up a slight rise to his left and found her, digging frantically at the sand with her front paws, tail swinging wildly. Something had excited her curiosity. Carlo wrinkled his nose. A faint breeze carried an odd rotting smell with it.
“Hey, girl, you’re probably scaring the shit out of some harmless bunny rabbit. Why don’t we head for home, and I’ll get you a nice…?”
She was paying him no attention. He sighed and, coming closer, bent to take hold of her collar, meaning to pull her away from her task. As he did so, something flopped out of the crater Gretel had dug in the sand. Carlo stared at it. The sour smell got stronger. He took a step or two closer, not quite able to believe he was seeing what he was seeing.
Then, he bent over, away from the dog and the hole, and the coffee he’d downed before starting out came up in a violent heave.
“WE FOUND the missing boyfriend,” Hammond said into the telephone.
“Jeff? He’s dead, right?” Tom asked.
“Right. A runner found him in one of the canyons, buried, but not deep enough. Guy had his dog with him. The dog got all excited over a mound of dirt, started digging. Guy went to pull the dog off, and a hand popped out. Called us on his cell phone. At least he was smart enough to wait there till we arrived, or the coyotes would have been all over it.”
“How did he die? Any idea yet? Not another of those phony snake bites, I hope?”
“No. At a glance, I’d say he was strangled. He’s got bruises on his throat, look to me like finger marks. I’m on my way to Riverside now to meet with Doc Murphy. He may tell us otherwise, but I’d bet a wad on it. Want to ride along? I’ll swing by and pick you up.”
Tom glanced again at the clock, poked Stanley with his thumb. “Give us half an hour, okay?” He put the phone back on its cradle. Stanley blinked at him from the next pillow.
“Guess what,” Tom said. “We get to take a shower together.”
Stanley smiled back at him. This was his idea of water sports.
Tom correctly read the message in his eyes. “Not that much time,” he said, but not in a discouraging way.
“I can be quick,” Stanley said, throwing the covers aside. “If I have to be.”
HAMMOND PICKED them up in a department car, the traditional Crown Victoria, plain gray. He drove, with Tom in front beside him, and Stanley sat in the rear. They had gotten coffees to go from the Inn’s café and sipped them as they headed down the highway.
They rode for several miles in silence, nothing but disembodied voices coming at them from the police radio, when Hammond said abruptly, “Tell me something, do you miss it? Homicide detective?”
“Yes,” Tom said.
“I d
on’t,” Stanley said, but the other two didn’t seem even to hear him. Tom was like that, always quick to slip into cop mode with another officer, and Stanley knew Hammond didn’t really take him seriously.
“The impossible mystery,” Hammond said. “I always think of it like that.”
“But most of them get solved,” Stanley said, determined to wriggle his way into the conversation. He hated being shoved aside because he was, in anyone else’s opinion, too gay. In his mind, he was just gay enough.
“By which you mean,” Hammond said, meeting Stanley’s eyes in the rearview mirror, acknowledging him, if reluctantly, “the murderer gets caught. But that’s not what I meant. That’s not the great mystery. What I mean is, there’s always something that doesn’t make any sense, some question impossible to answer.”
“For instance?” Stanley asked.
Hammond considered for a moment. “For instance, why did the wife whose husband has been slapping her around for years decide to plug the guy now? What was it about this one night, this one beating, that changed everything for them? Or, this guy, he robs the corner liquor store, and then after he’s gotten the money, for no apparent reason, he shoots the clerk who wasn’t putting up any resistance. There’s always a question left that you can never put an answer to.”
“I hadn’t thought of it like that,” Stanley admitted, deciding maybe the policeman wasn’t as dense as he had heretofore suspected.
“You know what I miss?” Tom asked. “I miss the buddy thing, the other guys. I never thought I would, but I do.”
“Yes. I know what you mean. Only, it isn’t them, exactly, it’s the camaraderie.”
“Sometimes you don’t even like them as individuals,” Tom said, thinking it out as he spoke. “Hell, some of the guys I worked with were real jerks, but there you are, all of you working together to solve something, focused on the same goal. There’s a tension and an energy that you share, that you don’t get any other way.”
A Deadly Kind of Love Page 10