"I'm flattered you recognized me."
"It would be hard not to recognize a celebrity," Cinder cooed.
"A what?"
"Well, maybe not here, but certainly back where y'all come from you're a celebrity," Cinder said, tossing the end of the boa over his shoulder.
Brad was perplexed. "Who is it you think I am?"
"Why, you're Hartford Coleman!" He faltered. "Ain't you?"
Brad laughed. Cinder had mistaken him for a hard-bitten New York theater critic with the power to put any stage performer squarely before the public eye. The only problem was, he recalled, Coleman seldom liked any of the performers he saw.
"No," Brad said. "I'm not. I think Ross dated Hartford a few years ago, but I'm not him."
Cinder pouted. "Are y'all sure you're not him?"
Brad nodded. "I'm sure."
"Then who are y'all?"
"I'm Bradford Fairfax," he said.
"Ahh!" The name brought forth a smile of recognition. "The bisexual golfing instructor and heir to a small chain of men's retail outlets from Seattle. Ross said you had multiple orgasms that were out of this world."
Brad flushed. At least the multiple orgasms part was correct, thanks to years of Tantric exercises and a mostly unintentional celibacy. The rest was a combination of personas Brad had developed over time. Despite a little bragging on Brad's behalf, Ross had kept his true identity a secret. He was safe.
"So y'all can't help me get famous and rich?" Cinder asked, clearly disappointed at having met yet another Miss Congeniality.
"I'm afraid not, but if I give any interviews to Golf World while I'm here I'll be sure to mention you. I thought your show was amazing."
Cinder's smile lit up the room. "Too bad you're not a critic," he said. "Or a crime writer. That wasn't true at all what they said about how Ross died."
"What do you mean?" Brad started. "Didn't Ross die of an overdose of Ecstasy?"
"Ross hated E. He said it robbed him of his erection. He couldn't luck when he took E, so he only took GHB and sometimes K or H or occasionally V, and from time to time even a little T or C. But never, ever E!"
Brad's mind leapt. "But the coroner's report showed that Ross was pumped full of Ecstasy!"
"That's just it, honey. He may have died of an overdose of E, but I know Ross Pretty and he sure didn't take it willingly."
Cinder moved closer, glancing warily over his shoulder and speaking in a stage whisper. "I think it has something to do with Hayden Rosengarten, his boss at the Not-So-OK Corral. At least that's what we all call it around here. It doesn't have a real name, so far as anyone knows."
"Tell me this again slowly," Brad said.
Five minutes later a picture had emerged of Ross's final months working for an egotistical power broker who sold sex-and-drug-sodden weekends to wealthy men and gay celebrities who wanted their party lives kept out of the public eye.
"Five thousand a night buys anything a body could want," Cinder explained. "And I do mean 'anything.' I know because I perform there sometimes. As an impersonator, I mean. I don't do sex for a living any more."
Brad watched Cinder carefully. "What was Ross's job there?"
"Pool boy and sex slave to anyone who wanted him. And believe me, there were plenty who wanted him!"
Brad could well imagine that.
"Do you have any idea why someone would want to kill Ross?" he asked.
Cinder shook his platinum locks. Suddenly his face took on a look of realization.
"What am I saying? Of course I do," he said. "It's like they take over me. When I'm Marilyn, I really am a ditzy blond."
"That's okay," Brad said. "Take your time."
Cinder frowned in a pantomime of concentration.
"Actually, I thought Ross might have pissed off some of the other boys by getting in a little too tight with Hayden. There was a real good-looking boy named Perry who used to be the boss's favorite, but something happened not long after Ross showed up. There was a fight and Perry left and never came back. Maybe he got even with Ross. I hear he works at Purgatory now."
"The Gifford House bar?"
"That's the one."
Brad made a mental note of it. "Anybody else?"
Cinder thought for a moment, and then snapped his fingers.
"There was a drug dealer," he said. "He got in a nasty argument with Hayden. I think Ross used to buy party favors from him now and then. Maybe he gave Ross an overdose of E to get back at Hayden. Kind of like a gang warfare thing, if you know what I mean."
Brad wondered if he was dealing with the overactive imagination of a small-town drag queen, but Cinder's story had the salt air tang of truth. Brad thought again of the drowned boy and the cop's suspicion that he'd been on drugs when he fell in the water. Had the coroner been concealing something? He'd have to look into it quickly. Once Ross's body was cremated, there wouldn't be much call for anyone to investigate further.
"Cinder, are you sure of everything you're telling me?" Brad pressed.
"Sure as shootin', big guy," Cinder said, trailing off into a whispery Marilyn again.
"How can I meet this Hayden guy?"
"Honey, you don't want to meet him—believe me!"
"All the same, I need to," Brad said.
"Well then, you need to spend a night at the Not-So-OK Corral," Cinder said.
"Can you arrange it for me? I'd like to see for myself where Ross worked."
"Uh-huh. Sure I can set it up for you. I'm performing there for the next few nights after my show, but it'll cost ya."
"I'm good for it."
Cinder smiled and blew back a platinum lock. "I've heard," he cooed.
Cinder's fingers crept up Brad's thigh, making his crotch stir. He hadn't dated a woman since Leslie Anne Morphy in grade six, but then it wasn't every day that Marilyn Monroe gave him the eye.
"And now, Sugar, Marilyn would like to give y'all a private performance y'all won't evah forget!"
6
During the night Brad dreamed he was making love to a blue-haired alien with a spectacular erection. As he gazed into the creature's eyes, he felt as though he were looking into the very depths of the ocean.
The dream was a recurring one, but it never made much sense. He always started out alone, but soon became conscious of being drawn toward the alien who smiled down at him from somewhere high above. Eventually, the distance between them shrank until they found themselves lying on a beach. At some point their clothes dissolved, the alien penetrated Brad with his erection and their bodies merged. That was usually where it ended.
Last night's dream had gone farther. They were riding a winged Lipizzaner stallion that climbed with them into the air over Provincetown. Clinging to the alien, Brad felt an indescribable sensation of pleasure overtake him and woke to find he'd drenched yet another expensive set of sheets with his wet dream.
Morning light filtered into the loft. Brad's heart ached at the memory of having been joined so completely with another being. It was something he'd never experienced in real life, not even with Ross, though there had been moments when they'd come close.
Except for his father, he had never trusted another man completely. He always kept a guard between himself and his lovers—a guard he couldn't drop. And as much as he'd wanted Ross to be free, Brad had been threatened by his desire to be with other men. Something in Brad wouldn't allow him to commit all the way with someone who still had so much exploring to do.
"I can't give you the kind of relationship you want," Ross told him candidly when they moved in together. "But I can tell you I'll love you for as long as I live. Even longer, if that's possible."
When they'd separated, Bradford had accepted the lifetime promise to love each other as friends. Now that was over too.
He looked out the window to the dunes. To some men, the dunes were Provincetown, that incredible swath of wilderness where you could just let go and shuck your clothes and explore your innermost self with a beautiful stranger. It was a
Gay Eden. He watched as two buff men cycled down the road past his house. The pair stopped at the edge of the salt marsh and dismounted, chaining their bikes to a wooden fence and walking hand-in-hand toward the beach.
Gays tended to collect lovers rather than cultivate relationships, Brad knew. Their lives often resembled an unplanned garden bearing an explosion of different flowers. Under such conditions nothing could really stand out, making the whole seem little more than a riot. And while riots might occasionally be useful for changing the social order, how cultivated could they be?
While many gay men looked down their noses at the traditional concept of marriage, Brad believed they could learn from their straight friends the simple doctrine that, to a certain degree, less is more. With relationships, as with gardens, a well-cultivated handful shows better than a hodgepodge, tilt-a-whirl of sexual theme-and-variations.
One thing he knew for sure through conversations with his own friends, it's not more that gay men wanted, but better. Still, the straight camp could stand to learn a thing or two from his tribe. With a divorce rate of something like thirty-percent, the hetero dream of suburbia was largely hollow, not to mention undecorated. Land of bad perms and ski jackets, there were no fireflies coming through the smoke in any stage of the suburban Afterlife. Their Nirvana had failed them.
That, Brad knew, was because straights dreamed exclusively of the pleasures of idleness while gays dreamed of a never-ending circus of delight. To the gay man the suburbs are death, an endless desert of nothingness, but the straight man often doesn't figure this out till it's too late and his life has turned to dust. Nevertheless, one must consider the alternative: drowning in a sea of mediocrity.
That was why The Life needed a cutting edge, and that edge was constantly moving. Who would choose to become the victim of social decline like the procreating hordes that married and moved to the suburbs, never to be heard from again except at Christmas? To do so was to declare oneself Out! Passé! Over! Yet a cutting edge is best danced upon with friends and lovers of some standing, not mere addins to the wedding scene in a mural of jolly peasants frolicking on a pig farm in Lower Bohemia. After all, Brad thought, it's better we want, not more.
Besides style, the most important thing straights could learn from gays is choice. Straights will tell you that deciding when and whom you marry is a choice. Wrong! That's simply a rose-colored view of the assembly line. But for a woman to choose to live with her husband and her female secretary while cultivating relationships with one or two others is a choice, because it's not a given.
So often choice means going against the grain of expectation, yet it doesn't mean simply inventing bizarre alternatives to the norm. That's merely being different for the sake of being different, which is mere reaction and ultimately a bore. Marrying an orangutan is not a choice, unless you're Michael Jackson, in which case it might be. No—choosing means considering the alternatives and perhaps creating a few for yourself.
So many unimaginative people think of striking out on their own as being something akin to "celebrity."Oooh! they say. She's so different! Meaning bizarre, rather than unique. Meaning Christina Aguilera or some such, with braids and a quavery voice. But that's not really different. It's just more variety. Being Christina Aguilera or Britney Spears is not a revolutionary act. But being Che Guevara or Harvey Milk is, for the very reason that leading the revolution is hard work. For another thing, you may be the first to be shot.
So for gays, choice is at the root of everything. Brad was acquainted with one young man of an exotic sexuality who found it exceedingly hard to stay with his lovers after capturing them, but even harder to give them up. More than once the young man—Justin—faced an It's me or him! imperative delivered by a jealousy-stung boyfriend. Eventually, he instituted a friends-first policy to his encounters, taking great pains to bring all his former and current lovers together two or three times each year.
To his delight, Justin discovered that everyone got along splendidly once they realized each was as heart-achingly beautiful as the next. There was no need to feel left out, for there would always be a succession of lovers in Justin's life, like a rotating royalty policy. Many of them even found eventual long-term happiness in pairing with one another.
Unlike Justin, however, Brad found himself alone as he entered his thirties, the decade all gay men dread as a threshold to diminishing dates, shrinking hairlines, expanding waistlines, and a time of swapping disco for karaoke.
Brad recalled another friend, a neurotic writer much concerned with aging. To stave off the inevitable, this friend had thrown himself a fortieth birthday party to mark the passing of his thirtieth year. That, he declared, had given him a decade of grace and moisturizing lotions, at the end of which he would hold his thirtieth birthday and declare himself thirty-something for ten more years.
Still, it wasn't age Brad feared so much as growing old alone. Watching the couple trudging over the dunes made him acutely aware of his loneliness. Something deep within him made Brad long to share his life with another, even while he realized he might spend his remaining years on his own. Who really wanted to be the partner of a secret agent for a nameless security organization? No one he'd ever met. It demanded too much.
In the first place, there was always the possibility that Brad's life might end suddenly, leaving his partner to deal with the loss. In the second place, there was an additional risk to the life of any potential partner. Often the families of such agents were easier targets than the agents themselves. Risking their lives to have sex was already daring enough for most gay men.
After joining Box 77 Brad thought he'd be fine on his own, but as the third year of loneliness wore on he found himself craving some sort of emotional intimacy. Of all the men he'd dated, there was one he'd found irresistible, someone so good and upright even Grace might have approved of him. Against all the rules, Brad had come close to disclosing his secret life to this man, a gentle, caring teacher of children with developmental problems. But after one-too-many broken engagements on Brad's part due to work complications, the man dropped him, suspecting he had commitment issues.
Brad was shattered. He did have commitment issues, but not of his own making. He just couldn't avoid the demands his work placed on him. Nor could he offer much of a home life to someone else when he might be sent off anywhere in the world at a moment's notice. It was better not to explain.
From that day on he'd resolved to walk a solitary path. He'd have no one to report to, no one's birthday to remember and no one to please. And on most days that was just fine—unless he thought about it too hard.
He watched the couple disappear over the dune on their way to the beach.
The phone rang. Brad sprang up, bumping his head on an exposed beam over the loft as he grabbed the receiver.
"Hello?"
"Hi, Mr. Multiple Orgasms," the voice gushed.
Brad blushed.
"It's me, Cinder. I can't talk long. I've arranged for you to come to a soiree this evening at the Not-So-OK-Corral. You can see for yourself what goes on there. Be sure to bring your spurs and lots and lots of cash."
Brad wrote down the address—or rather the lack of one, as Cinder said the house had no number. He'd know it when he got there from the widow's walk on the roof. It was also the oldest house on the street.
"Just a word of warning, cowboy," Cinder said. "It might be better for both of us if no one knew you were acquainted with either Ross or me. Mr. Hayden Rosengarten is one mean fairy godfather, as you'll get to see. He'd as soon shoot you as screw you out of a million dollars, which is apparently what he did to his last business partner."
On that curious note, Cinder exhaled a breathy farewell.
7
A little old-fashioned research seemed to be in order. Brad showered, then threw on his favorite Old Navy T-shirt and a pair of hiking shorts. He stuffed a bottle of Dasani water, some passionflower suntan oil, and a pair of binoculars into the bottom of his knapsack, then he step
ped into his sandals, clicked his heels, and set off for the dunes.
It was too early to check out the bars, but if anybody knew of Provincetown's notorious guesthouse it would likely be someone in the sandy playland at the ocean's edge. If he was lucky, he might even find a source that could tell him about the infamous Hayden Rosengarten.
Sure enough, a parade of able-bodied men strutted up and down the beach. A cautious few were fully clothed, while others wore only bathing trunks. Still others wore considerably less. Men of every age, size, and bandwidth were on the prowl. Here were circuit party boys, leathermen, cha-cha girls, divas, cowboys, twinks, opera queens, silver foxes, urban lumberjacks, preppies, young hustlers, old wolves, gym queens, muscle tykes, clones, devastatos, and even a few rare beach sightings of the mysteriously intense alternatives. Together they comprised the glories of the Rainbow Nation, and then some.
Brad noted the comely muscles and shapely dicks swinging back and forth as their owners strolled like proud dog walkers exercising their frolicsome pets. As he trudged along, he had to remind himself more than once to keep his mind on the job, recalling Grace's admonition to take his work seriously.
Up ahead on an open patch of sand, an accessories queen with spiked orange hair and green earrings sat perched on a portable chair beneath a multicolored umbrella. A Walkman emitted a frantic cancan from the center of a yellow Eminem beach towel where an assortment of tanning lotions, lip balms, toe creams, CDs, a cherry cola six-pack, four paperbacks, even more towels (that somehow managed to look oddly sinister), and three pairs of sandals completed the scene. The whole thing resembled an over-earnest lawn sale.
Brad looked up and down the beach. There was no one else within fifty feet of this circus act. Maybe he was expecting overnight guests?
Whenever he found himself alone in a town, Brad always looked for the loudest, brashest person he could find. That would guarantee direct access to the latest gossip, best dish, and seamiest invitations to be had. A loud queen is an all-knowing queen, and he'd just scored a bull's-eye.
P'town Murders: A Bradford Fairfax Murder Mystery Page 4