A Deadly Kind of Love

by Victor J. Banis

  Hammond took a sip of his coffee and glanced briefly sideways at him. “Do you feel that same energy working as a private detective?” he asked.

  Tom turned in the seat to look back at Stanley, who blinked owlishly at him. “Yes, and no,” Tom said. “I like working with Stanley, we make a good team, seems like to me, but we’re always on the outside of a case looking in, you know what I mean? Like this one. It’s your case. All we can do is sniff around the edges. Hopefully we’ll figure it out. Or more likely you will, but maybe, hopefully, we’ll get to add something to the picture. But it’s not the same thing either, not like working with a whole department.”

  Hammond thought about that for a mile or two. “Everything’s changed, though, the last few years. At least it has here. Nowadays, it feels more like you’re always working alone, in a sense. If you’re seriously trying to be a detective, anyway. I expect you were. I get that feel from you, but there’s not so many of them anymore, not real detectives. Take the Treasury boys, for instance, or the FBI, or, hell, most of the boys back at the station in the homicide division, when you come right down to it—they’re just glorified clerks. Most of them are practically kids. Sure, they know how to do a wiretap or work a crime scene, they interview somebody and take a lot of notes, they’ve got technology we never used to have, but they don’t know how to think things out. How to look at the clues and move them around until they come together to form a picture for you. You can’t teach somebody that in school.”

  “I never thought of it like that, but you’re right,” Tom said. “That kind of thing, you either have it or you don’t. That’s the good part about working with Stanley. He has this, I don’t know, this feel for things. Like pulling rabbits out of a hat. Sometimes it’s damned amazing.”

  “Is that so,” Hammond said, surprised, taking a quick look in the mirror. He drove in silence for a mile or so.

  “Well, still,” he said, “for an old-time kind of detective like me, in the end it always comes down to just you alone, trying to get into some killer’s head. And the work cuts you off from everybody else. People are uncomfortable around cops. And that camaraderie you talked about, even that’s not the same anymore.”

  “Maybe not,” Tom said. He was thinking of the guys he had worked with in San Francisco. At one time he had felt close to all of them, but that had begun to fade in his last few months with the department. Or was that only because he’d linked up with Stanley? Once he’d been assigned to a case with Stanley, the others had begun to look funny at him, act differently. It had never been the same afterward.

  At first, he had fought against that. He hadn’t wanted to be paired with Stanley. But working with him, sharing the same dangers, covering each other’s back, he had come to see Stanley in a different light. And, somehow, somewhere along the way, he had fallen in love. The kind of love he had never known before, or even imagined. It had necessitated his leaving the bureau. He couldn’t pretend, he couldn’t hide Stanley away somewhere, and he couldn’t work with the other detectives knowing that he and Stanley had hooked up—hearing them snicker, seeing the funny looks they gave him.

  It had come down to Stanley or them. He’d opted for Stanley.

  “It’s not just police work either,” Hammond was saying. “It’s the whole world, if you think about it. Take my oldest boy. He was the perfect son, did what he was told, played football—hell, he was the touchdown king—good-looking, smart. My youngest, the other one, he wears funny black clothes and his hair is braided. Goth, he calls it. Smokes too much weed, can’t hardly stay in school. Just lays around his room, listening to some god-awful music. Rap, he says. Crap, I call it. Won’t do anything I say. There’s no parental authority anymore.”

  “In my opinion, most of us never really grow up,” Stanley said. “We just learn how to behave in public.”

  Hammond might not have heard him. “Same with police authority, you ask me. That’s gone too.”

  “What happened to the older boy?” Stanley asked.

  Hammond glowered briefly over his shoulder. “What makes you think anything happened to him?”

  “The way you talked about him, in the past tense.”

  Hammond drove for a moment or two in silence before he said, “He’s gone.”

  “Gone? As in…?”

  “Signed up for the Marines. Got himself shipped to the Middle East. Wasn’t there any time at all before he got shipped back again. In a box this time.”

  Stanley didn’t know what to say to that. He thought it best if he just said nothing. If Hammond noticed his silence, he didn’t show it. After a bit, he began to talk again, more now as if he were talking to himself than to them.

  “I tell you what, I think if I was to pick a job as the loneliest in the world, I’d say homicide detective.”

  “You think so?” Tom said, more to be polite than from any real interest. He was not much of a philosopher.

  “Seems like it to me. Think about it. In time the friends of the victim, the families, everyone gets over it, at least they go on with their lives. I can’t say they ever really forget, but they push it into a far corner, like the attic of their mind—but the investigating officer never really forgets an unsolved case. It haunts him forever. It always has me, anyway.

  “Which is why,” he said, looking sideways at Tom, “I want to get this one solved. I don’t want those boys haunting me.”

  He was silent for a few more miles. Then he said, out of the blue, “They want me to retire.”

  Neither Tom nor Stanley responded. Tom was thinking that probably this was where the whole conversation had been headed. Stanley was thinking about that bottle of bourbon in Hammond’s desk drawer. The result of them wanting him out? Or the cause of it?

  Chapter Sixteen

  DOCTOR MURPHY looked no happier to see them this second time—but for the immediate moment, in any case, they were with a detective from the Palm Springs Police Department, which apparently somewhat negated his disapproval of matters homosexual. He was certainly more polite than he had been before.

  “What have you learned so far?” Hammond asked when Murphy had escorted them to the autopsy room, seen them gowned and masked.

  “We haven’t opened him up yet,” Murphy said, withdrawing the sheet that covered the naked body on the stainless steel table—to reveal, in Stanley’s opinion, a young man who had been even more breathtakingly handsome than Barry Palmer, brunet where Barry had been blond, shorter, it looked, and a bit stockier. But his beautiful features were contorted in death, and accusations of sand clung to his nostrils, his hair, his lips.

  “The cause of death appears to be pretty obvious—strangulation,” Murphy said. “The finger marks at the throat indicate that quite clearly. The signs are that it was asphyxiaphilia. More commonly known as erotic asphyxiation.”

  It took Stanley a second or two to process that bit of information. “Are you saying he was a gasper?” he said.

  “What’s a gasper?” Tom asked.

  “Erotic asphyxiation is the intentional blockage of oxygen to the brain,” Murphy said. “Erotic, meaning, during sexual activity. Most commonly it is done at the time of orgasm, but it can be employed at any time during sexual congress.”

  “Wait—you’re telling me these people get off on being strangled?” Tom looked astonished.

  “Exactly. The carotid arteries, here and here”—Doctor Murphy pointed to either side of the throat—“carry the oxygen in the blood from the heart to the brain. When you compress the carotid arteries, say by strangulation or, alternatively, by hanging, the brain loses oxygen and carbon dioxide accumulates instead.

  “The result is giddiness, light-headedness, and for some at least, pleasure, all of which can heighten sexual sensations. Mountain climbers sometimes experience something similar at high altitudes. The individual goes into a semi-hallucinogenic state called hypoxia. In that condition, orgasm is said to be a powerful rush. And like other sexual pleasures, it can become addictive
.”

  “A habit?” Tom said.

  “Same as any other. In time, for some, the asphyxia becomes necessary to achieve sexual release.”

  Tom looked down at the boy on the table, at the dark bruises on his throat. “And you think that’s what happened with this kid?”

  “The evidence suggests so. Here, you see.” Murphy pointed with a scalpel. “These bruises, they’re new, probably what killed him, but these, here, are old scars. They’ve faded, and there are traces of makeup, which makes me think he tried to cover them up. But this was clearly not the first experience of erotic strangulation for this young man. I would suspect a long history of such activity.”

  “You said he was one of the rent boys up at the Inn?” Hammond asked Tom.

  “Yes. From what we’ve heard, he was the go-to for guys looking for kinky sex,” Stanley said.

  “Hmm. That fits for sure with what the doc is saying. Only this time, I guess things went a little too far.”

  “And I’m guessing his boyfriend, the Palmer kid, knew something,” Tom said. “Saw it or heard about it. Maybe his buddy told him all about it. Which meant Palmer had to be eliminated, but in a way that looks like something other than murder. So the killer makes it look like a snake got him.”

  “Chances are,” Hammond said, “it would have been accepted as an ordinary death from a snake bite, too, if he’d been found outside somewhere.”

  “If somebody hadn’t got screwed up about that empty room and stashed the body there for Chris to find,” Tom said.

  “Right. If we’d found him, say, out in the sand, on a trail in one of the canyons, which was probably where he was meant to be moved to, nobody would’ve given it a second thought. Snakes kill people. Part of living in the desert. All kinds of snakes.”

  Tom looked back at the body on the table. “But, Jesus, I gotta say, I never heard of this way of doing it.” He waved a hand in the direction of the corpse. “Getting strangled to get your rocks off? That’s sick.”

  “Maybe, but it’s not new,” the doctor said. “It’s been documented since the early seventeenth century. At one time it was used as a treatment for erectile dysfunction.”

  “Limp weenie?” Tom said, surprised anew. “You fix that by getting someone to choke you?”

  Murphy winced, but he nodded. “Yes. It was noted that at public hangings, male victims often developed erections, which sometimes remained after death—in medical literature, the so-called death erection. Hanging victims even ejaculated from time to time.”

  “I have heard of this kind of sex play,” Stanley said, “in the S and M crowd, though guys don’t talk about it a lot. But I never thought of it as manual strangulation. I had a notion they put plastic bags over their heads.”

  “They do that too,” the doctor said. “Or sometimes they do it by hanging themselves. There was an actor recently—”

  “But was that definite?” Stanley asked, remembering the news stories. “I mean, that it was sexual hanging?”

  “Probably it will never be declared one way or another. Homicide was ruled out, and suicide. Which leaves accident, but it’s hard to imagine how you could hang yourself in a closet, which is where they found him, without some intent.”

  “He just misjudged?” Tom said.

  “It’s easy to do. Supposedly when they do this, people think they can control it, can get out of the situation, remove the rope or the plastic bag in time, before it’s too late. The danger is that dizziness and even loss of consciousness can occur and lead to loss of control over the strangulation. In the case of this young man here, the intent may not have been murder at all, in the sense that you’re meaning it. This could have been a voluntary cooperation between two partners, and the strangler simply went too far, didn’t stop quite in time. Legally, it’s a gray area.”

  “The guy’s just as dead, though,” Tom said.

  All four of them looked down at the body on the table—that had not so long ago been a young man alive and in the prime of his life. Stanley felt a strange urge to brush those grains of sand from his lips, from his eyelids, but he kept his hands at his side.

  “Yes,” the doctor said. “He’s just as dead.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  “BUT WHO is our killer?” Stanley asked. Hammond had dropped them off, and they were in Tom’s truck, headed for downtown Palm Springs.

  “I don’t know yet who he is, but I know what he is,” Tom said.

  “Which is?”

  “He’s one of those snakes we talked about. Not just any snake either; he’s one of those green Mojave fuckers. You remember what Hammond told us about the Mojaves. Aggressive, he said. Most snakes will slide away when a man approaches, according to what Doc Murphy told us, but not the Mojave. He’ll come right at you. He’s the kind of creature who doesn’t just kill to eat, the way most wild animals do, or to protect his turf. He kills because he can, for the joy of killing. There are animals like that. The lion, say. They love to close in on their prey, love the smell of fear and the pain, and that moment of absolute power when the eyes go blank and the blood runs. It’s like being God for a moment. That’s our killer. The Jeff kid may have been an accident, but Palmer wasn’t. This guy enjoys the killing.”

  Stanley shuddered. Given his druthers, he’d just as soon have packed up and gone home to San Francisco. He didn’t like looking at dead bodies, and he didn’t like tangling with murderers. He would much prefer to have an ordinary queer-boy job as a decorator, at which he had sometimes worked and at which he was very talented.

  Tom, though, loved all this. He loved matching wits with the killers, loved tracking them down, loved the action, the gore even. Tom would never leave Palm Springs now until he had nailed their murderer to the wall.

  Stanley sighed. When you married a man, you married the whole package. Tom had quit a job he loved with the San Francisco Police Department to be with him. How could he have said no when Tom wanted to open a detective agency? But it was not the future Stanley had dreamed of when he was younger, playing with his paper dolls. What would Betty Grable do?

  “It’s Thursday night,” he said aloud. “Chris tells me they have this street festival locally, Village Fest they call it, every Thursday on Palm Canyon Drive. Why don’t we check that out?”

  “Good call. I’ll bet we can get some food there—real food.”

  “Tom….”

  “I know, that Rim stuff is real food, just not my kind of eats. And I can’t count on that little waiter taking care of my meat every night. Nice of him, though.”

  “That little waiter definitely has his mind on your meat.”

  Tom looked surprised. “You think so? Huh.” He let that sit for a moment and decided maybe it would not be the wisest subject to pursue. “I’ll bet I can get a burger at this fair.”

  Which, Stanley thought, was his not very subtle way of changing the subject.

  AS IT turned out, almost every kind of food and drink imaginable was to be found at the Village Fest. The city closed the street to vehicular traffic for six blocks, and the people, locals and visitors alike, took it over, hordes of them. The result was sort of a carnival, a county fair, and Mardi Gras all rolled into one.

  The sun had gone down, and like desert animals coming out of the dens in which they had hidden from the day’s heat, the folks were out, savoring the night air, eating and drinking. And, Stanley noticed, a lot of them cruising. Which, as he saw it, always added a nice spice to an event. In his mind, cruising was de rigueur for a gay man, whether first degree, which was with intent, or second, without.

  They passed a Moonwalk tent where preteen kids were jumping around and pretending to be weightless. Vendor stands ran down the middle of the street, offering arts and crafts, fruit, vegetables, and all manner of prepared foods. The aromas of sausages and falafels, Philly cheesesteaks, and fried onions perfumed the air. It was not yet seven o’clock and already dark, but the mercury streetlights overhead and the endless strings of Christmas
lights made the street nearly as bright as day.

  They stopped at a booth for shaved ices, mango for Stanley and pineapple for Tom, and ate them as they strolled, enjoying the street performers, the displays of art and flowers and produce.

  The menu posted in the window of a small restaurant caught their attention. They paused to read it and decided it looked promising. Inside, a chatty host led them to a window table.

  “The best table,” he assured them, and Tom smiled at him and winked, which left the host so flustered that he forgot to leave their menus and had to come back with them. They ordered burgers and fries and drank ice-cold beers while they waited for their food, watching the passing parade on the sidewalk outside.

  “It’s funny to think about those two guys, isn’t it?” Stanley said, licking the grease from the french fries off his fingers. “Barry and Jeff.”

  “In what way funny?” Tom asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know. They were lovers, it seems like. Some sort of lovers, anyway. And there were all those clients of theirs at the same time. You’d think one or the other of them would have gotten jealous.”

  Tom thought about that. “Maybe one of them did. Maybe Palmer got sore and offed his boyfriend.”

  “And killed himself?”

  Tom thought some more. “He could have, maybe. The doc said the venom takes a while to kick in. So he could have injected himself.” He took a big bite out of his burger and chewed thoughtfully. “They were awfully close, according to what Larson told us. If Palmer killed his boyfriend in a fit of jealousy—it’s been known to happen.”

  “It might have been simmering for a long time.”

  “Where’d he get the venom?”

  “They have the reptiles bite on parchment paper. The snake handlers, I mean. Palmer could have done the same.”

  They were silent for a minute or two. “Did you ever think about cheating?” Stanley asked hesitantly. “You know, getting it on with someone else. Someone else male, I mean.”