P'town Murders: A Bradford Fairfax Murder Mystery

by Jeffrey Round

  Brad stepped gingerly across the oversized boulders, taking care to clear the dark crevices between them. He stopped to inhale the salt smell of clams and algae. High tide was approaching, the ocean reaching shoreward. Birds skimmed its surface in search of a flash of fin as the lighthouse scanned the waves. Across the harbor, the lights of town were coming on. The view was calm to the point of being blissful.

  He was halfway across when something caught his eye, a dark shape pooled in the windward side of the breakwater. It moved gently, playing hide and seek among the reeds and the in-rushing tide.

  He eased carefully down to the water's edge, pulling the shape back from the current that dragged and sucked at it as though reluctant to give up its prize. The body was that of a boy, probably in his early twenties. Alive, he would have been stunningly handsome. And judging by his condition, he hadn't been in the water long.

  Still, dead was dead.

  4

  The cop who answered his call was a tall dark bruiser. Identifying himself as Officer Tom Nava, he pulled out a badge and held it in the glare of a flashlight inches from Brad's face.

  "Yup, that's you all right," Brad agreed, looking from the ID photo back to the officer. He wasmestizo—part Mexican and part native—a look Brad found particularly appealing.

  They stood on shore at the near end of the breakwater. In the distance, the lights of a police boat flickered as the crew lifted the body from where Brad had secured it to the rocks with his shoelaces.

  "What relation were you to the deceased?" Nava asked, jotting in his notepad.

  "None," Brad said, wondering if the bristling tuft of hair at Nava's collar extended over his entire chest.

  The officer scowled. "Were you two having sex when he slipped in and drowned?"

  "I told you, he was dead when I found him."

  Nava grunted. "So I guess you can't tell me if he was on any sort of recreational drugs?"

  "Obviously not."

  Nava scribbled away. Thinking of Ross, Brad said, "Why do you think he was on drugs?"

  Nava shrugged. "Some bad party favors going around lately. And besides, it's not that deep here. I'm wondering what would make a healthy young guy like this take a one-way plunge off the breakwater at high tide."

  He finished taking down Brad's statement, and then asked the address of his guesthouse. Something seemed to twig at the name.

  "Fancy place, I hear."

  Brad shrugged. "It's cozy," he said.

  The cop had already assumed Brad was gay; the address had probably confirmed it.

  Nava put his notebook away. "I may be calling you with more questions," he said.

  He insisted on escorting Brad to his house, though it was only a block away. Brad guessed the officer wanted to see if he was telling the truth about where he was staying.

  Leaving Brad at his front door, the patrol car backed out of the driveway and down the road. Brad went upstairs and lit the fireplace, pouring himself another drink. He tried unsuccessfully to get the drowned boy's face out of his mind. Finally, he went out onto the upstairs deck overlooking the dunes. Beyond the street lamp all was blackness.

  In the morning, Brad called the coroner's office. He'd been right in assuming no one from Ross's family would show up to claim the body. He made an appointment and got dressed.

  Inside the building that housed the morgue, a young man with soft features greeted him and identified himself as town coroner. He showed no surprise as he glanced over the paper giving Brad power of attorney over Ross. Brad and Ross had each drawn up documents naming the other as executor of their respective estates. This wasn't done during their affair, but after, when Brad's had turned out to be the one friendship Ross could always count on. Back then dying had been the last thing on either of their minds. This wasn't how the story was supposed to end.

  Brad followed the man in his crisp white lab coat down a series of hallways. They entered a room buzzing with fluorescent bulbs. Brad tensed as a drawer was pulled forward, as if hope still remained that it might not be Ross inside. It was.

  "Such beautiful muscles," the coroner said, pulling the sheet down around Ross's waist. "He's really a lovely corpse."

  Brad ignored the strange remark.

  Lying there with his eyes closed, Ross looked sad and alone, as he'd often appeared in life when you caught him unawares. Had the eyes been open, though, they would never have accused Brad of abandoning him. Ross was a wandering soul who believed in the saying that for a bird to soar, the sky must have no boundaries. Brad just hoped Ross hadn't regretted the loneliness soaring brought.

  A miniature cobra reared its head on Ross's left shoulder. Ross had got the tattoo when he'd converted to Buddhism the previous summer. As he'd explained during a late-night phone call, the snake was considered a protector of the Lord Buddha.

  "Buddhism? Won't you have to give up drugs?" Brad said. "The body being a temple and all that?"

  "Oh, no! This is a modern sect," Ross replied. "We believe in instant gratification and fast-tracking to enlightenment. It's all about pleasure. Partying is just another way of attaining Nirvana."

  Despite his flippancy, Ross was serious about his newfound beliefs. He insisted they were helping him become a happier person. Another time they'd had a long conversation about death. With his usual panache, Ross had made dying sound like an event to be looked forward to. On the way to Nirvana, he explained, all souls went through a transition state known as the bardo. Here, a soul encountered the forty-eight peaceful deities of the heart and the fifty-two wrathful deities of the mind.

  "Sounds like some circuit parties I've been to recently," Brad joked.

  "The first-stage bardo isn't that big a deal," Ross continued. "You simply start to lose touch with your physical sensations—kind of like getting drunk. But in the third-stage bardo it really gets wild. They say you see fireflies coming through smoke."

  "Fireflies?"

  "I think it'll be like our last night in P'Town."

  "Oh, right!" Brad said, recalling the final night they'd spent together on the Cape. "I'll never forget that!"

  Back then the conversation had seemed overly fantastic and a trifle silly. Looking down at the lifeless figure now, Brad wondered if Ross had seen fireflies as his soul left his body. He might never know.

  Other than his tattoo, Ross was exactly as Brad remembered. He didn't linger in the room, preferring to recall Ross in life rather than in death. He exited to the sound of a drawer sliding shut, and waited outside in the hall for the coroner to rejoin him.

  "Cause of death is listed as an overdose of Ecstasy. It's a fairly common party drug," the coroner answered in response to his question. "Perhaps not as common as cocaine, but preferred by the younger generation for its mood-elevating qualities. Unfortunately, it can have serious side effects, as in this case."

  Brad recalled Officer Nava's remarks about the young man whose body he'd discovered the night before. For someone to die in such a fashion in Provincetown probably wouldn't be given a second thought. On a whim, Brad asked, "Is Ross's the only body you've got?"

  The coroner smiled. "Oh, no. We've got a full house today. Evelyn Dover just passed away at 103. People said she stayed alive that long just to annoy her children. She told them she wouldn't give up her estate until they were mature enough for it. Well, they're all over eighty, so I guess she meant it."

  Brad grinned.

  "There's a heart attack victim in the second drawer. Your friend Ross is in three. Drawer number four is a bit of a mystery. Another healthy young man brought in last night—it appears to be a drowning. Odd though, given his physical state. He looked like he could swim for miles."

  "Any chance he was on drugs when he drowned?"

  The coroner gave him an odd look. "I'm sorry," he said, suddenly reticent, "but that's official business. I can't disclose that information."

  He placed a cremation authorization form on the counter.

  "And you said no one from the immed
iate family tried to claim Ross's body?" Brad asked as he looked it over.

  The coroner shook his head. "Funny thing, that. I phoned a number the police found in some personal papers left by the deceased. His family claimed not to be related to him."

  "Not so funny, if you knew them," Brad said. "That's why he gave me Power of Attorney. If I hadn't come, no one would have."

  "Well, there was that other guy," the coroner said.

  "Someone else tried to claim him?" Brad asked, surprised.

  The coroner nodded. "Oh, yes!"

  "I thought you said no one else had been by when I spoke to you on the phone this morning."

  "You said family. This guy wasn't related."

  Bureaucrats, Brad thought, rolling his eyes. "Who was he?"

  The coroner shrugged. "Didn't leave a name. Nice-looking guy, though. Late twenties. Soft-spoken. He had lovely muscles, too. I gathered he was a friend of the deceased."

  There was no telling who it might have been. Apart from that, everything was just as the mysterious voice on the phone had said. That reminded Brad that somebody in P'Town knew who he was. Make that two somebodies, he realized, recalling the drag queen on the ferry. What else might Marilyn Monroe have to tell him other than what he already knew, which was that Ross was dead?

  Brad signed the form, listing himself as an adopted brother, and prepaid the bill. He thanked the coroner and left. For the second day in a row he'd been preoccupied with helping the dead.

  Rather than give in to sorrow he headed out to Race Point, the place Ross had loved most in P'Town. The sun was still high, the sky radiant when he arrived. For a long while he stood looking out to sea, the waves and the wind his only company. Finally, he retraced his steps to town.

  5

  Evening was a pleasant reminder of the summer that had just passed. The air carried no hint of the bitter cold that would soon be all it held. Lighthouse beams flashed across the harbor and out to sea, bringing Bradford a memory of his father. When he was ten, his father had taken Brad on a fishing expedition. As the sun set, they sat and watched it silently without moving. Always stop to enjoy a beautiful view, his father instructed. You'll never have enough of them.

  Brad recalled a few other guideposts handed down to him. Along with the practical ones of looking both ways before crossing a street and not trusting strangers with candy, he counted other bits of fatherly wisdom among his inheritance. Everyone has a reason for the things they do, his father once said. You don't have to like or agree with it, but you'll be better off if you understand it. Another time he'd said, Good-looking faces come and go, but there'll always be a market for sincerity. They may not have seemed like much, but those words had proved useful to him over the years.

  His father would have enjoyed P'Town, he knew. The drag queens and leather bars might've needed some explaining, but then again a good tour guide would see to that. He just wasn't sure what his father would have thought of his choice of professions. It would have made for an interesting game of charades.

  As he strolled along Commercial Street Brad stopped to look at a colorful poster. It's My Party And I'll Sing If I Want To! it shouted, as a half-dozen faces stared at him. Here was a vamp Bette Davis, a kooky Liza, a manic Madonna, a soupy Peggy Lee, a pouting Marilyn, and a deranged Joan Crawford. The Whitman poem, Song of Myself, came to mind: I am large, its author proclaimed. I contain multitudes.

  Beneath the faces of the women, and sedate by comparison, was a picture of an attractive man with the name Cinder Lindquist. Brad stared. This was the man who'd pressed his face into his abs and whispered Ross's name to him on the Provincetown Fast Ferry!

  Cinder, he mused—a fitting tag for someone who erased his own identity to take on others'. He was curious to know exactly what Cinder, Marilyn, Norma Jean, and the rest of the multitude had wanted to tell him. He would take in a show that evening.

  A few doors down Brad found himself looking up at the cheery façade of a new restaurant boasting a sensational-sounding menu and an excellent view of the harbor from an upstairs patio. Buoyed by the promise of good food and a cheery atmosphere, he climbed the stairs and stood in the doorway like a pound puppy awaiting adoption.

  The maitre d' approached, all style and effervescence. He winked at Brad, who followed him to an understated little table for one, avec view. Promising to send his waiter right over, the maitre d' exited with genuine élan.

  Brad was charmed. That brief overture, however, was the extent of the restaurant's commitment to customer satisfaction. At that moment, an evening that had begun with such promise only moments before took a very wrong turn.

  Fifteen minutes elapsed before Brad set eyes on his waiter. The young man approached wearing a tank top and shorts that could only be described asnubbly. One look warned Brad that this song-and-dance number wasn't going to be about him, the customer. Rather, it was all about the server.

  The young man clearly felt he had better things to do than wait on tables. There was kitchen gossip to share, ex-lovers to dish, patrons to ignore and, somewhere in the midst of all that jazz, annoying orders to be handed over to supercilious chefs who didn't care that you might be hungry and paid the bills, because they had lives. The customer was merely a jail warden, while the unhappy staff were misfortunate prisoners of conscience near the end of their unduly long sentences.

  And so it went. Brad placed his order, fearing even to hope, and waited another half hour. Between occasional sightings of his waiter, he amused himself by listening in on a couple of dish queens two tables away.

  "What's your favorite song?" the first queen asked, playing straight man to the other.

  "Favorite song? That's when my trick screams, 'Take it out I Take it out I Take it out!'" the second queen bellowed, followed by tears, and roars of laughter from the first.

  Apart from this blithe entertainment, the evening progressed like a sloth crossing a road and falling into a ditch. The meal arrived, a dollop of slop on a hand-painted plate, served with more than asoupçon of impatience from the waiter. Had blind Tibetan monks prepared the food, it might have been forgivable. It might even have been better. But in fact, it could not be forgotten soon enough.

  Brad attempted a few exploratory bites and draped his napkin over the remains. With nothing to lose, he lingered on the patio as he finished his gin and tonic. He was sucking on the ice at the bottom of his glass for the third time when the waiter's batteries clicked in, humming and bustling and making those Don't-I-Deserve-A-Really-Big-Tip noises all around Brad's table as he delivered the bill.

  No, you do not, thought Bradford, stealing another look at those terrifically gymmed legs. You absolutely do not, but you're... young, so I'll give you another chance.

  With a sigh, he penned in the substantial tip and signed the credit slip, then exited the restaurant wondering who in the world he had just reminded himself of. Grace? He couldn't place it.

  At twenty past nine, Brad entered the Post Office Cabaret. He purchased his ticket and took a seat as far from the stage as possible, which wasn't far in that tiny space. He found himself in the midst of an up-tempo crowd in lacey shirts and spandex biking shorts. Everyone seemed to be drinking some variation of the cocktail du jour, a debonair concoction of crème de menthe, tequila, and absinthe. The room was full to overflowing. Clearly, Cinder Lindquist claimed a solid following in P'Town.

  For the next hour and a half, Cinder and his many faces transformed with that Now-You-See-Me-Now-You-Don't appeal shared by magician's assistants, supercilious waiters, and female impersonators. All the usual suspects were there, doing somewhat more than the usual things: Liza strangled Judy, Marilyn pussy whipped Peggy Lee, and Bette Davis bonked Mae West. Meanwhile, Joan Crawford confided to an aging audience member: Don't die, dear. They'll dish you!

  With a turn of the head and a toss of the mane, the lives of the famous appeared and disappeared before the audience's eyes. Cinder concluded his act with a risque pastiche from Porgy and Bess, sung alter
nately by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. The audience was nearly gaga as he slipped offstage.

  So the boy's got talent as well as a physique, Brad thought, remembering the tantalizing display of muscle he'd witnessed on the ferry.

  The applause exploded as Cinder made a brief reappearance to bid his audience goodnight. Each curtain call brought back another celebrated face. Brad wasn't sure if Cinder had noticed him, but as the curtain fell Marilyn blew him a kiss.

  Finally, the clapping died out and the crowd stood to leave. Brad waited. When everyone else had gone, a head peeked out from behind the curtain. Still a fatuous Marilyn, Cinder rushed over and plopped himself down in Brad's lap.

  "Honey, was I fabulous?" he squawked.

  "To die for," Brad allowed.

  "You are too perfect!" Cinder proclaimed. "Now come backstage and help me out of these rags."

  In the dressing room, Cinder suddenly turned serious. "In case you're wondering, I recognized you from Ross's picture albums. He had dozens of photos of you!"

  "How did you know Ross?"

  Cinder looked to the mirror where his face assumed a mask of grief. "We were roommates a couple of summers ago. It's so terrible about his death, isn't it?"

  "Yes, it is terrible," Brad agreed.

  The expression vanished. Cinder's face resumed its telltale Marilyn skittishness, but his talk was pure Tallulah.

  "Anyway, that's how I knew who y'all were on the boat yesterday. And I knew ya'll had come about his death."

  Brad wondered just how much Cinder really knew about him and whether his identity might be in jeopardy. Ross could have revealed a bit too much about Brad's line of work, thinking that a little colorful gossip wouldn't hurt since none of his Provincetown acquaintances would ever meet him in the flesh. Anonymity was easy in a big city where new identities could be put on and discarded again in seconds, but in a small seaside resort people could know more about you than you knew about yourself.