Somebody’s trying to tell me something, he thought, picking up his darts again. He hit every number from twenty down to the bull’s-eye in thirty-four throws.
17
HE AND JEFFREY had to get it straight.
It had eaten at Cruz all day, from the early-morning jog along the Marina to brunch at Green’s. It had kept him from his Saturday nap, had even driven him from his house to the office in the middle of the afternoon. Now, after the late dinner and two bottles of wine, in the afterglow he saw no way to avoid it any longer.
Jeffrey lay flat on his back half covered with a pink sheet. He appeared to be asleep, but Cruz didn’t think he was. He was very much like the cats he loved so much. He just relaxed completely, with his pilot on slow burn. At the gentle touch, Cruz running a finger from armpit to nipple, he opened his fantastic eyes, visible as blue even in the half-light.
“Hi,” Jeffrey whispered. “I’m right here.”
This was the boy’s element. The trick, to Cruz, was to be happy with him here and to quit trying to turn him into something he wasn’t. He’d thought about it all day. Jeffrey wasn’t made for intrigue or business—he was made for pleasure, for relaxation.
“You are here, aren’t you?”
“Always.”
Cruz sighed. God, he loved him. “Can we talk a little?” Funny how he wasn’t really the boss here at home, and it didn’t bother him at all.
“Sure.” He sat up, pulling the blanket around his waist.
“I think we have to get clear between us that Ed Cochran never came here.”
Jeffrey cocked his head. “But he did, Arturo.”
“I know, I know he did. But our story, yours and mine, should be the same if anyone else asks about it.”
Jeffrey opened his eyes all the way. “But why shouldn’t we tell the truth? We talked to him. What’s wrong with that?”
“In itself, nothing. But there are people who might try to make it something.”
“But why?”
“Because, Jeffrey, he was killed in my parking lot.”
“But he wasn’t killed. He killed himself. You said he did.”
“Of course,” Cruz said, speaking slowly now. “I know that. That’s what I meant. But his death is connected to me by that very fact. And I think it would be smarter not to draw any further attention to it.”
Jeffrey reached out a long hand and drew his fingernail across Cruz’s jaw. “ ’Turo, you didn’t kill him, did you?”
Cruz folded his hands in his lap and forced himself not to lose his temper. Jeffrey tended to keep missing the essential point. “No, Jeffrey. I didn’t kill him.”
“But you did see him? That night, no? When you came home so late.”
“We agreed I came home before nine o’clock, didn’t we? We’ve already told the police that.”
“Arturo.” Jeffrey shook his head from side to side. “Yes. And I love you. For the world, you came home when? Around nine, right? But between us . . .” He let it hang.
“The police think it was a suicide.”
“You called the police?”
“I just happened to notice it at the office this afternoon. The daily police reports for the paper, you know.”
“That’s why you went to the office.”
Cruz hated that bitchy, petulant tone. But then the real hurt showed. “You could have let me know,” Jeffrey said, reaching out and touching his face. “You don’t tell me enough. We are together,” he said, “we share.”
“We do share,” Cruz said. “I want to share.”
Jeffrey got up and walked naked over to the window. “And you want me to say we never met Ed here?”
“Probably no one will ask. I just want to make sure.”
Jeffrey turned back toward him. “I think being honest is the best thing, Arturo. If you start telling lies, they tie you all up. You can even forget what the real truth is.”
“Jeffrey, I agree with you. I’m finding that out now. The only thing is, I already told the police I didn’t know Ed. If we just—on this one thing—agree, we won’t lie about anything else.”
Jeffrey sat again on the bed. “You promise?”
“Promise.”
How could he expect Jeffrey to understand? He sat on the brocaded couch downstairs, facing the fireplace. The vodka, which had once been iced, was nearly untouched and had now gone warm. Through the gossamer drapes, light from the street filtered into the living room, enough to make out the familiar outlines—the chandelier over the twelve-foot marble table, the twin sculpted marble pillars that bracketed the fireplace, the polar bear rug at his feet, the trio of original Gormans on the far wall bought long before his tiles had become available in every boutique in the West.
In the quiet house, Cruz took stock of what he’d acquired. It still felt like it was worth it. In fact, it wasn’t complete yet. The room was beginning to feel a little small, the house just slightly worn. He was ready to move up again.
Keep that in mind, he said. Comfort is stagnation. Keep wanting more, that was the key. Keep that sharp edge. If you weren’t expanding you would contract.
A car labored up the steep hill, and a minute later Cruz heard the soft plop as the Sunday paper hit his driveway. Morning already, the darkest hour before dawn, before the black began turning to gray.
No, it would be impossible for Jeffrey to understand. Jeffrey hadn’t come up the way he had. Cruz didn’t even have to try to remember: it was always with him. When he’d been Jeffrey’s age . . .
He was starting to think like an old man, sound like his father had sounded when he talked about the bracero life. “I used to be up by three, ’Turo, to work the fields before the sun got too hot.” Well, Cruz had done his own laboring, only in different fields.
No, Jeffrey could never understand what it was like to be Mexican, poor and gay. And Cruz was never going back to poor.
Even now, in San Francisco where the heteros joked about their minority status, in the Latino community to be gay was to be a leper. Macho still ruled—Cruz knew it would never change during his lifetime.
Every week or two he would come across a story about one of the Mission gangs or another beating, mutilating or killing some poor maricón. Long ago he had decided not to run those stories. People didn’t want to read them; they weren’t news—what happened to those pervertidos was not important, at least not among la gente, not among his advertisers and readers.
Cruz had learned well. No one could ever know about him. His parents had died never suspecting. At least his mother never stopped pushing girls at him, especially after La Hora had started to become successful.
So he’d simply done without sex, except for the vacations that had brought him back home disgusted with himself. He had done without—until he’d met Jeffrey.
And even with Jeffrey, even with love for him pumping so hard through his veins that he didn’t feel he could control himself, he had been cautious. First hiring him, getting to know him at the office—a joy just to watch him move. Then a late meeting or two, until the declaration.
And after that—bliss.
But still the need for secrecy, which Jeffrey didn’t really understand but respected. Gayness to Jeffrey had never had to be that big an issue; he was the type of boy who’d always known what he was and who was happiest in a relationship. They lived quietly, at home, a publisher and his employee, private lives discreetly handled.
The house creaked somewhere upstairs. Was he up? Cruz listened, but the place reverted to silence.
Even Ed Cochran’s visit—the most surprising thing that Cruz could remember in his business life—hadn’t started out badly. If both Jeffrey and Cochran hadn’t been so naive, so idealistic, it might’ve been okay.
He slugged at the tepid vodka, his face contorting into a grimace, remembering that Thursday night. It hadn’t yet gotten dark. They were finishing an early dinner when the doorbell rang, and Jeffrey had jumped up to answer it. Seeing the nice-looking kid in a coat
and tie, with a briefcase, Jeffrey had said, sure, they had a couple of minutes.
Cruz had wanted to scream, “No, Jeffrey, we don’t! Not here!” But Ed Cochran was already inside the house, shaking hands, and there was nothing to do but be polite and bluff it.
And they’d sat right here, in this room, as Cochran had explained that he hadn’t been sent by his boss or anything. He’d just done some figuring on his own and had devised a way to keep Army—Sam Polk’s company—in the distribution chain for another year, after which time they could be phased out and Cruz could have his in-house operation at no loss of profit.
See, he’d explained, it was more or less a loan situation that would enable Army to keep drawing income and stay in business while Polk set up some other networks to cover for the loss of La Hora. Cochran had had all the details right there on paper. He was sure that Cruz didn’t mean to wipe out all the families who worked at Army—especially when there was an alternative. And it was just a matter of a slight compromise on his part.
Cruz couldn’t believe it. Here was some dumb kid asking him to forgo his entire reorganization to accommodate some businessman who’d gotten caught in the squeeze.
“But it won’t have any negative effect on your business,” he’d said after Cruz had said no.
“It will affect cash flow for a year, minimum.”
Why had he even argued with him? It was strictly a business decision, having nothing to do with the personal fortunes of another company’s employees.
“But you could survive that, couldn’t you? Wouldn’t it be worth a little sacrifice for the grief you’d save other people?”
Was this kid for real? No one, not even Cruz, could predict what his business would need to survive. What might El Dia do if he gave them a hole to crawl through?
Cruz had been about to toss Ed, but then Jeffrey had butted in: “He might be right, Arturo. It could perhaps be done.”
“It can’t!” It had been an outburst—atypical behavior for him. Normally, it would have rolled off him. But, he recalled, he had felt Jeffrey might be coming on to Cochran.
Well, in any case, he should have kept his cool, not started bickering with Jeffrey—and in front of Cochran, where, if the boy wasn’t blind, he would see that they were arguing not like employer and employee, but like lovers.
Even if it could be done he wasn’t going to do it. He had no investment in Army Distributing or any of the others. What happened to them was their own problem, and if they hadn’t planned contingencies for the loss of La Hora’s business, it just showed poor management and validated his decision to stop dealing with them in the first place.
Thank God he had realized what was happening in time. He’d smiled, pulled back into himself, and asked Jeffrey to go get a bottle of wine. When he was gone, he’d turned to Ed Cochran.
“I will meet with you after hours at my offices. I do not discuss business at home. And Jeffrey, though welcome to his opinions, does not help me make policy. Is that very clear?”
Cochran had nodded. “I appreciate it.”
“There will most probably be nothing to appreciate.”
Cochran gave him a warm smile. “Well, at least I’ll have tried.”
“Yes, you’ll have done that.”
And, before Jeffrey had come back, they’d agreed on Monday night at nine-thirty. Just the two of them. To talk.
18
THE MORE ALPHONSE THOUGHT about it, the more it didn’t hold up. He sat having early ribs and greens at Maxie’s on Buchanan, trying to figure how to keep himself alive until this deal went down.
James, his man, was losing faith in him. This being his—Alphonse’s—first pass at middleman, his credibility was low. It had taken all of his jive to persuade James to keep the buy happening. And even at that, he wasn’t certain any longer that it would come off.
If he couldn’t get the deal closed right now, it would be over. Everybody else would just walk from it. It would maybe take him some time, but Polk would find other buyers, and James would just write him off as a loser and go on to a better source, if he didn’t just off him. Meanwhile, Alphonse got no bread for all the hassle and wound up where he’d always been, on the goddamn street, unconnected and going nowhere fast.
He thought about it. The smart bloods made things happen themselves, didn’t wait around while everybody else figured how they were going to get their piece. And the more he thought, the more it felt all wrong.
I mean, Cochran for instance.
Nicest guy in the world, no two ways about it. But why had he been at the delivery spot? Straight Eddie must have been part of this thing. And that meant Polk was somehow trying to cross him.
He chewed on some gristle, trying to figure out these money guys. Outside, it drizzled through light fog, still as death. A dog peed on the building across the street, sniffed at one of the paper bags in the curb.
Everybody had gotten nervous when the money hit the table. That was the problem. Until last week, everybody’d been very cool, just putting together some times when the transfer could be made. And down at Army, with most of the crew laid off, with Cochran out trying to drum up new business and Sam gone half the time, there hadn’t been any work, so he and Linda had just hung out around the office getting high.
But then suddenly it wasn’t just talk, and everybody seemed to want to move very fast. And there had been nowhere to move to. Polk didn’t have the stuff. Sure, there was an excuse, about Eddie being killed there, but that smelled bad. That smelled really bad the more he thought.
Maxie was pouring some more chicory coffee into the cracked white mug. She was a good mama, black and fat as they come, but just hanging back, cooking her ribs, keeping cool.
“Hey, Maxie,” Alphonse said, “I ask you a question? I need a second opinion.”
Maxie stopped pouring, looked down at him. “Yep, you ugly.” She laughed and laughed. Alphonse smiled himself, waiting ’til she stopped. “Okay, honey, what?”
But suddenly, before he could even ask her, he saw it. It was so obvious he couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen it. He put his full mug down hard, spilling it out over his hand.
“Watch out, child. What you doin’?”
He smiled up at Maxie. “Thank you, Mama.”
He had to get away from it a little, maybe just far enough to laugh for a minute—to see it all clearly. Everybody was playing the same game. James had protection for his money—major-league protection—and still he was nervous. And Polk had the same case of nerves, which meant he had the same basic situation—his money was sitting waiting to move. It was on the table, out, but in Polk’s case it probably wasn’t protected.
The question was, where was the table?
Alphonse was surprising himself, and liking it. The thing with Linda on Friday had started it, when he’d been so uptight about James that he just couldn’t deal with any excuses about how her dad was having a tough time and couldn’t Alphonse wait ’til Monday for his check. He couldn’t have cared less about the goddamn check—what he wanted was to talk to fucking Sam Polk, who was stringing him out.
So he’d slapped Linda. Hard. The first time he’d slapped anybody. He didn’t think much of guys who slapped their women around before. And of course, Linda wasn’t his woman. But slapping her had gotten her attention.
Of course, she had known where her dad was. She just hadn’t wanted to tell Alphonse. But then, suddenly, they were allies of a kind. It was as though she looked at him now not as a jive-ass employee of her father, younger than she was, but a man worthy of respect—somebody who could get things done.
It was a good lesson.
He got off the bus and transferred to the cable car near Union Square. It took him up by the Fairmont and back down toward the Wharf. He jumped off without paying. The tourists, oohing and aahing, freezing their asses off, they paid.
He’d never been to Linda’s apartment before. Standing in the gusty alcove, he had a moment of doubt before he rang the bell. Wha
t if she wasn’t home, wouldn’t let him in, wasn’t alone? Maybe he should have called to make sure.
But then he remembered the slap, the power he was starting to tap into. He was on a roll. He had to go with the feeling. And Linda might know where her father was keeping the money. She might not even know that she knew. But Alphonse now had no doubts that he could convince her to talk, and if something was worth finding out, it would come out. He could make it happen whenever he wanted now that he knew how to go about it.
Damn. She should have fixed herself up. You just never knew what was going to happen.
Now here it is before noon on a Sunday and somebody’s at the door, and if it’s Daddy he’s going to see me in my robe and hair still uncombed and the place a mess and he’s going to think I’m a slob. When really I’m just alone and it’s hard to do all these things for yourself with nobody to care about it.
Pushing the voice button: “Who is it?” Pressing the door buzzer at the same time.
“Hey, it’s Alphonse.”
She had to stop doing that, letting people in before she knew who it was. But then, he was probably inside the door downstairs and there wasn’t anything she could do about it now. Besides, thinking about it, what a nice thing. She’d thought about Alphonse a couple of times this weekend, just spaced out watching the tube yesterday.
Sure, he was, like, pretty young and black and all that, but he did have kind of a cute face and a nice hard body, and it was a neat rush just to fantasize.
And driving home from Daddy’s, with Alphonse sitting so quiet next to her, she really had gotten the feeling that he was nervous, like he was thinking about them being together in the car at night. He hadn’t done anything, though. It was like other things were on his mind.
Over Saturday, maybe he’d been fantasizing a little, too. Maybe he really liked her a little. She’d studied him on Friday, after he’d hit her—it wasn’t any big thing, she knew. Guys just got riled up sometimes and had to make a point—Daddy would still do it, cuff her from time to time. But with Alphonse, it had kind of made her look at him differently. Like he was showing her this private part of him, opening up. Flattering, in a way.
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