Third You Die (kevin connor mysteries)

by Scott Sherman

  A group hug. Great. Just what I was in the mood for. I removed one arm from around my mother so Andrew could step in.

  “You’re like another son to me,” my mother said to him. “Or a son-in-law. Which I wouldn’t mind, if Kevin ever decides to stop waiting around while his idiot boyfriend decides whether or not he’s going to poop or get off the pot.”

  “Mom!”

  “I just want you to be happy, baby.”

  “Me too,” Andrew said, taking advantage of the moment to squeeze my ass. “Baby.”

  “Don’t think I didn’t see that,” my mother said to him.

  Andrew blushed. “Sorry.”

  “Not that I blame you,” my mother added. “He does have an adorable little tush.”

  “Mom!” I broke the hug.

  “What?” my mother asked. “I’m not allowed to love every bit of you? My own son?”

  I thought of Brent’s parents and the Merrs. A parent’s love was nothing to take for granted.

  “You’d better love every little bit of me,” I said. “Because I love every big bit of you.”

  38

  Family Secrets

  The Dawsons’ house was as Tony had described it. A well-maintained, single-family brick home like every other one on the block. The bushes were trimmed, the grass cut, and the garage door painted within the past year.

  But there were also three or four newspapers sitting on the porch that no one had bothered to pick up. They matched the overturned garbage can, its trash spreading across the lawn like the world’s ugliest confetti. The mailbox had been left open, revealing what looked like a few days’ worth of neglected correspondence. In the driveway, a late-model sedan was haphazardly parked at a careless angle. One tire pressed against the grass, having left a deep rut in the lawn on its way there.

  Overall, it felt like a place where, very recently, someone had decided it was no longer worth his or her time to Keep Up Appearances.

  I knew I should have called first. Unlike my mother, I did understand boundaries. No one wanted an unexpected caller-especially one sure to bring up painful memories. Showing up with no warning or invitation was rude of me.

  Good.

  I wanted to make this as difficult for the Dawsons as I could. Tony had told me they were both retired, and I was hoping to catch them by surprise.

  At least I’d brought a gift.

  The Dawsons’ doorbell played the first ten notes of “America the Beautiful.” The patriotic call was answered by a man I assumed was Brent’s father.

  He was of medium height, medium build, and a once-handsome face of no particular character. His thinning hair might once have been as blond as his son’s, but now was the most nondescript brown possible. He wore a NY Yankees T-shirt that hung over baggy sweatpants. He was unshaven and his hair hadn’t met a comb yet, even though it was well after noon.

  I’d been expecting a scowling scarecrow, an obvious villain of a man with the ungenerous features of an Ebenezer Scrooge. Instead, I found myself standing across from a man of stunning blandness. Even his expression was slack, as if his facial muscles couldn’t be bothered to reflect any particular mood.

  Until he looked at me. Then, I saw the same spark of “Could it be?” in his gaze that I’d gotten from everyone else who knew Brent when they first saw me.

  But where Charlie and Lucas were overjoyed that Brent might be back, the same couldn’t be said for his dad. His eyes widened in shock, then settled back to their normal size when he realized I was nothing more than a look-alike, then narrowed in suspicion.

  “Yeah,” he greeted me. “Whaddya want?”

  “Hello.” I extended my hand. “My name is Kevin Connor. I was a friend of your son’s.”

  I let that sit for a moment.

  “And?”

  “And… I wanted to stop by to offer my condolences.”

  “Okay, thanks,” he said dismissively. “Good-bye.” He started to close the door.

  I blocked it with my foot.

  “Wait,” I said.

  “What?” he said, his voice close to a snarl.

  “Harry?” A woman’s voice came from inside the house. “Who is it?”

  To her: “It’s no one. Don’t worry about it.”

  To me: “Get your foot out from my door, you little fairy.”

  Lovely.

  “I just want to talk,” I said.

  “I know what you want, ” he spat. “I know what you are. It’s because of people like you that my son is dead.”

  “Right,” I said, all at once filled with an anger that surprised me, “because I threw my vulnerable teenaged son out of his home to fend for himself because I was such an ignorant, hateful bigot. Oh, wait, that wasn’t me.”

  It hadn’t been my plan for things to get this ugly this quickly. Another one of my schemes gone wrong.

  “It can’t be ‘no one’ if you’re still talking to him,” the woman’s voice called. “Who is it?”

  “I said don’t worry about it, Claudia. Mind your business.”

  “Her son isn’t her business?” I asked.

  “She doesn’t have a son anymore,” he barked. Spittle flew from his mouth in an ugly spray.

  I had to hand it to Mr. Dawson-he’d made the transformation from sleepy old dog to rabid pitbull in record time.

  “Thanks to you,” I prodded.

  “Either get the fuck away from this door,” Mr. Dawson hissed, making a fist, “or-”

  He was interrupted by his wife, who squeezed in beside him. It was closer to dinnertime than breakfast, but she wore a fluffy pink robe with matching slippers. Her hair was pulled into a sloppy, slightly greasy bun, from which stray locks had limply escaped. She wore no makeup. Good bone structure and the same luminous quality to her skin that I’d observed on Brent couldn’t hide the bags under her eyes or the deep furrows between her brows.

  “Claudia,” Mr. Dawson growled. He stepped forward, trying to keep himself between her and me. But she’d already gotten a look at me. With surprising confidence, she pushed him aside and stood before me.

  It was her turn. The confused moment of impossible recognition, followed by the reaction that revealed the person’s true feelings toward Brent.

  What showed on her face was both familiar and unexpected. It hit me like a slap of sunshine.

  A flush of hearts.

  A mother’s love.

  Her hand reached out to me instinctively and then pulled back to cover her mouth. She made a tiny, muffled squeak upon realizing her mistake. Her eyes filled with tears.

  “I told you, you didn’t need to see this.” Mr. Dawson grabbed his wife’s arm.

  Again, she surprised me with the strength with which she moved. She pulled from his grip as if he weren’t there, stepping forward and cradling my face in her hands. Her eyes met mine with an intensity and tenderness that I knew weren’t meant for me. “Who are you?” she asked in a husky whisper.

  “I’m a friend of Richie’s,” I said. “I just want to talk.”

  “A faggot friend,” Mr. Dawson muttered.

  “My god,” Mrs. Dawson exclaimed, turning to face her husband with fire in her eyes. “Will it ever end? You’ve already taken my son from me once.” She gulped back a sob. “Twice.

  “I let it happen,” she said, sounding furious and sad at the same time. “Now, it’s too late. But if this young man knew our boy, if he can tell me about our son, I want to hear what he came here to say.”

  She took my hand in hers. “Don’t you?” she asked her husband. “After everything that’s happened, if there’s anything of a father left in you, anything of a man, don’t you? ”

  Apparently, the bitter shell of Harry Dawson contained neither father nor man. After giving his wife a disgusted grunt he grabbed his keys off a hook by the door and “accidentally” bumped into me on his way to his car. Real mature, asshole.

  He got into his automobile and slammed the door shut for emphasis, just in case we hadn’t figured ou
t he was pissed. He peeled out recklessly, swinging in a too-wide arc out of the driveway, leaving new tracks in what was once a nice lawn.

  “I’d apologize for him,” Mrs. Dawson said to me, “but I don’t think I’ll be doing that anymore.”

  She stood up a little straighter and ran her hands down her robe. “I’m a mess. So’s the house. Now, for that, I’m sorry. I usually believe in keeping a neat home.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” I said. “It’s must have been a difficult week for you.”

  “It’s been a difficult twenty-five years,” she said, regarding the damage left in the grass by her husband’s hasty departure.

  “Maybe it’s about to get better,” I offered.

  She was still looking at the damage to her yard. “Everything grows back,” she said, wistfully. Then, remembering what had brought me there, she added, “Except for the things that don’t.

  “Some things are gone forever.”

  Mrs. Dawson ushered me into her home. She was right. It was a mess. Dirty dishes everywhere, jackets and shoes carelessly left wherever they’d been taken off, and it smelled: a bitter, rank smell like sweat and old age. Sorrow lived here, sorrow and regret.

  All the shades were drawn, and the living room where we sat was dark and depressing. The furniture had been ugly to begin with, and age hadn’t done it much good. Thin layers of dust coated everything. Nothing seemed less than twenty years old, except for an incongruously large flat-screen TV that dominated one of the walls. Across from it was the “man chair,” Mr. Dawson’s hideously oversized brown canvas recliner, which had drink holders built into the armrests. It was hard not to imagine him sitting there self-importantly, watching the Big Game, yelling at his wife to bring him another beer.

  I sat on an uncomfortable couch while Mrs. Dawson settled into a club chair to my left.

  “Thank you for coming,” she began. “You’re the only one who did. I know Brent had a life after he left here, but I don’t know much about it. Can you tell me…” She took a deep breath. Her hands fluttered in the air, looking for a place to land. They settled on her knees, where they clenched and released, clenched and released, like she was kneading.

  She was needing. Needing a connection with a son who, through malice or weakness or a combination of both, she’d abandoned when he was at his most vulnerable.

  I’d brought the card Lucas had given me from Brent-well, here it was probably better to think of him as Richie-to wound his parents. To pierce their hearts with guilt. Seeing her now, here, I realized she’d hurt herself more than I ever could. In fact, I thought that seeing her son’s final words to her might actually bring her some peace.

  “He wanted you to have this,” I said. “I think he was going to send it himself but never got the chance to.” A fib. The first of many, I suspected. There was no way I could tell her the truth about how I’d met her son, or how he made his living. I handed her the note he’d written, telling his parents that no matter what happened, he forgave and loved them.

  “You’d think,” Mrs. Dawson said, her gaze still directed down at the two-sentence note she’d spent several minutes reading and rereading, “that eventually you’d run out of tears.”

  She looked up at me, the water running freely from her eyes. “But you don’t. It seems like a well that never runs dry.” She took a used tissue off a table next to her and blew her nose as discreetly as she could.

  “I suppose that’s a good thing, too. Because I should cry. I deserve to cry. Every day. For my son. For what I allowed to happen to him.”

  “You loved him very much.”

  “Yes.” This brought on another wave of sobs.

  “Then… why?” The obvious question.

  “Oh, why? That’s the one I ask myself every day. I was raised very traditionally. Conservatively. There was right and there was wrong. Sin and godliness. A man’s role was to lead the family and a woman’s role was to serve. Blah, blah, blah. I could tell you that I married my husband too young, that I was afraid of him. That he… hit me. It would all be true.

  “He told me Richie would come back. That we had to be strong and wait out the devil. That the only way to save him was to… banish him. To hurt him a little now to save his soul for eternity.

  “Every cell in my body knew it was wrong. But I was weak. Weak and afraid. Everything else is just an excuse.”

  “He never stopped loving you,” I told her.

  “I know. He told me.”

  “In the note,” I affirmed.

  “No.” A small smile through her tears. The first time I’d seen her lips curl upward. “On the phone. About a month ago.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “I couldn’t take it anymore. I’ve been a stupid, frightened woman, but I was getting stronger. A few months ago, my husband came home with brochures from church. For a ‘conversion camp.’ ”

  “I know,” I said. “Richie told me about it.” Another bending of the truth. It was Lucas who’d relayed that story to me. But you figure out how to describe Lucas’s role in all this. Tell me a good way to explain Richie’s adulterous relationship with a guy he met while shooting skin flicks. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

  “I always suspected Ellen-his sister-was in touch with Richie. My husband had warned her not to be, of course, but she’s a grown woman now. Living on her own. And she is strong. Stronger than me. She confronted me about the camp. How could I even consider such a thing? she asked. She called it ‘torture therapy.’

  “She was right. I told my husband the idea was off the table. It was the first time in a long time I’d said no to him. But I insisted. I told him if he even called them, I’d leave and move in with Ellen. I used a word I’d heard on Judge Judy’s show. I said it was ‘non-negotiable.’

  “He spent a few days yelling, slamming doors, and grouching even more than usual. But eventually, he promised me to drop it.

  “I got Ellen to give me Richie’s number. She’d told me she warned him about the possibility of being abducted by the camp’s ‘counselors,’ and I didn’t want him to worry anymore. No, more than that. I wanted to be the one to take that burden off his shoulders.”

  The tears continued to stream down her face. The front of her robe looked like she’d spilled a glass of water on it, soaked as it was in her sadness. But her voice was even and clear.

  “I’d given him so little,” she said. “I’d failed him so. Having this one thing to offer him, this tiny piece of good news, was a start, I hoped. A chance for me to begin making it up to him.

  “We talked for hours. Hours. He was so happy to hear from me. So happy. As if I weren’t to blame. As if he didn’t have every reason to hate me.

  “But he didn’t hate me. I don’t know why, or how, but he said he understood. I’ve never been prouder.

  “He told me all about how he was trying to make it as an actor. About the temporary jobs he took to keep himself afloat. The office positions, the sales work. But his dream was to be on screen.”

  Of course he told her that. I used to tell my parents I made my living as a computer consultant. It seemed easier, and kinder, than telling them I earned my wages as a rent boy.

  You can only get away with that for so long, though. Like snow in the city, the lies start out white but get dirtier and uglier over time. Soon, you’re standing up to your ankles in nasty slush, your feet wet and cold. What you save in convenience you lose in integrity.

  It was a lesson Richie didn’t live long enough to learn.

  Mrs. Dawson’s call to Richie explained why he’d told Lucas he was no longer worried about his parents trying to “deprogram” him. I wondered if it also hadn’t been the catalyst in his telling Lucas he needed to take a break from seeing him for a while-at least until he made a decision about Charlie. Nothing like a call from your mother to get the guilt train running down the track. It was also around the time Richie was talking about getting out of the jizz biz. Maybe he was reevaluating everything.

  Whi
ch, as far as I was concerned, made it even more unlikely he’d killed himself while all doped up-whether by accident or on purpose.

  Mrs. Dawson encouraged me to talk. How did Richie look? Was he content with his life? Had he found friends? Did he have someone… special? Was it me?

  I stuck as close to the truth as I could. She accepted any evidence of Richie’s happiness with the joy of a person dying of thirst receiving a glass of water.

  She brought out pictures. Richie as a baby. Richie in the tub with his sister. Richie dressed like Batman for Halloween. Richie’s high school yearbook, where he appeared as a freshman.

  Wait.

  I looked at the cover of the yearbook.

  For a moment, it seemed to come alive, wriggling in my grasp like a magical tome in a Harry Potter novel.

  My hands were shaking.

  With excitement. With fear. With the shock of discovery.

  Tony was right.

  People kill for one of three reasons.

  Money.

  Sexual jealousy.

  Thrills.

  Now I knew which one got Richie murdered.

  “This may seem strange,” I told her, “but can I take this?”

  “My lord,” she said. “After all you’ve given me? The gift of your coming here? Showing me that Richie had friends who cared enough to reach out like this? You can have them all. Hell, you can have the whole fucking house!”

  Her eyes flew open in shock and she made a sound that scared me. A startled, staccato bray than soon turned to laughter. A lovely laugh at that, musical and joyous, which had me laughing, too, although I didn’t know why.

  “I’ve never,” she said, trying to get the words out between laughs, “used the… ‘F word’ before. In my whole… life! It feels… it feels like…” She couldn’t find the word.

  I could. Another “F” word. It felt like freedom. Freedom to do and speak as she pleased.

  But she’d have to figure that one out on her own.