by Josh Lanyon
“I don’t enjoy it. I’m a suspect, Guy. I can’t just sit here and --”
“Why not? That’s what normal people do. They let the police and the trained investigators deal with this kind of thing.”
He was perfectly right. That was what normal people did.
“I don’t want to argue with you,” I said at last.
“Well, we can add that to the list of all the other things you don’t want to do with me. Like getting married -- or even going away for the weekend.”
“Guy…” I didn’t know what to say to him. This outburst was so out of character, and I knew I was at least partly to blame. He already felt that I kept him at a distance, and my unwillingness to commit, to take our relationship to the next level exacerbated the situation -- and now this: the return of Jake and everything he represented -- probably the things Guy liked least about me.
He shook his head, closing the discussion, and resumed eating. We finished our meal in silence.
We recovered a little amicability during the course of the evening. Guy was grading essays and I was watching some cheesy flick on the Sci Fi Channel -- nothing like a little CGI horror to put your own problems into perspective -- but eventually he was lured over to the sofa by my commentary. Before long he was playing Siskel to my Ebert.
That was one of the nicer things about Guy: he didn’t hold grudges. My first adult lover, Mel, had been a gold medal winner in the long-distance silent treatment. And even Jake had a tendency to revert to terse monosyllables when he was really irritated with me. Guy fought like a civilized person. He didn’t shut me out, and he didn’t try to thrash me into submission.
When we finally went into bed, Guy leaned over me, his mouth finding mine. He tasted like toothpaste with a hint of the plum wine he’d had for dessert. His mouth moved over mine with more insistence than he’d shown recently.
I kissed him back. His long hair feathered lightly across my face and chest. It tickled a bit.
“What do you want?”
What I wanted was to go to sleep -- but I knew how that would go over after our earlier argument. I kissed him back, and tried to put a little energy into it.
His mouth delved mine, his tongue slipped inside, and he murmured something soft and urgent. I murmured in return, stroked his back. His cock pressed into my abdomen, and I reached down to fondle his balls. I could practically feel the rush of heat beneath his skin, and I began to consider strategies for brin,ging him off fast.
He thrust against me. His hand stroked my hip and groin -- and he’d have had to be fairly oblivious not to notice I wasn’t as interested as I ought to be. One thing Guy was not was oblivious.
His hand slowed. Stopped. He leaned back from me, staring at my face, trying to read my expression in the lamplight. He said, “We haven’t made love since you got out of the hospital.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” I felt his erection wilting against me, and felt worse. “I’m just tired.”
He said wearily, “I don’t want you to be sorry, I want you to want me the way I want you.”
“I do.”
He stared intently down at my face. I turned my head and coughed. “I do,” I said, turning back to him. “I’m just not back to normal yet.”
He raised his brows.
“Normal for me,” I clarified.
Finally he sighed, reached behind himself, and turned off the lamp.
We lay there side by side not speaking.
Chapter Eight
Supposedly the elegant entrance gates to Forest Lawn in Glendale are the largest wrought iron gates in the world. I’m not sure. I think the gates at Porter Jones’s Bel Air mansion might have given Forest Lawn a run for their money, but the cemetery entrance was admittedly impressive.
And brought back a number of memories. My father is buried at Forest Lawn; I actually remember childhood trips to the cemetery better than I remember him. Lisa tells me I’m a lot like him, although there were presumably a few crucial differences. In any case, when I attended Porter’s funeral on Thursday, I decided to visit my father’s gravesite.
The grave was on a hillside with a number of other graves marked “English,” and I realized -- belatedly -- that I had quite a bit of family interred in these stately green parklands. It was an odd feeling. So was staring down at the bronze memorial tablet and realizing my father had been younger than me when he died.
It occurred to me I should have brought flowers or something. I hadn’t been to his gravesite since I was small enough to play on the bronze statuary by the lake with the Heron Fountain -- Lisa strangely indifferent to decorum on those long-ago field trips.
I wondered if my old man and I would’ve got along -- if he’d have been all right with the fact that I was gay. I wondered in what ways I’d have been different if he had lived -- besides my sexuality. Jake had been convinced my pop’s premature departure from the mortal coil during my formative years was responsible for my inverted orientation, but I’d known I was different before I was an adolescent. Nor did I consider my orientation inverted. But that was just one of many areas in which Jake and I disagreed.
* * * * *
I couldn’t help but think of Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One as I stood near the back of the Wee Kirk o’ the Heather and listened to Porter Jones’s nearest and dearest send him off with fond recollections and anecdotes.
From the jolly time everyone was having, it sounded like Porter was headed for that grand Opening Night in the Sky, and although he was not precisely a celebrity, he drew a reasonably full house. I recognized more than one familiar face -- not including those cast and crew members I’d already met.
Paul Kane was there, naturally, and he spoke eloquently and amusingly about Porter and their long association. They had apparently met through a mutual friendship with Langley Hawthorne. I recalled Ally mentioning something about Langley Hawthorne, and I made a note to see what I could find out about him. He sounded like another Hollywood mogul.
I had to admit -- grudgingly -- that I learned more about Porter Jones from Paul Kane’s eulogy than I did from anyone else’s reminiscences. Kane managed to cover the fact that Porter donated to numerous charities, gambled on small, noncommercial but deserving indie projects, and served on many industry committees and scholarship boards -- while poking gentle fun at Porter’s passion for deep-sea fishing, modern art, and gourmet cooking. According to Kane, Porter had his sensitive side: he had always wanted to write, and penned terrible screenplays in addition to several attempts at writing his memoirs -- but he had also been loud and crude and more than capable of drinking anyone or anything under the table. But most tellingly, in Paul Kane’s opinion, was the fact that Porter stayed friends with everyone.
Porter’s first wife, Marla Vicenza, was a well-preserved sixty-something. She looked like a bargain-brand Sophia Loren; I recognized her from too many late nights spent watching TV. She confirmed that Porter was a hard man not to like. Even when he had broken it to her that he was ending their thirty-year marriage and replacing her with a blonde trophy wife, he had apparently done it in the most charming way possible. By which, I gathered, he’d given Marla one hell of a generous settlement.
Marla seemed pretty easygoing herself. She sat next to Ally in the front pew of the chapel, and they seemed -- from where I stood -- to be on friendly terms.
Ally was apparently too overcome with grief -- or guilt -- to speak. She wore one of those flimsy black dresses that looked like it was designed for use while consuming apple martinis and bacon-wrapped scallops, and she leaned heavily on the arm of a short, brawny, and very good-looking young man. Maybe he was her brother. Because showing up on the arm of someone who wasn’t her brother was surely flying right in the teeth of LAPD -- and the teeth were very much in attendance.
Both Alonzo and Jake stood in the back of the Wee Kirk o’ the Heather -- on the opposite side of the door from me. Alonzo kept grimacing and tugging at his tie. Jake looked grave and distant in a well-cut dark su
it, although I knew he was observing closely and taking mental notes on the mourners and homicide suspects. Even so, I couldn’t help but notice he smiled frequently during Paul Kane’s eulogy.
Not that I was watching him or anything.
I nodded hello to Al January, who also did not choose to reminisce in public about the good times with Porter. He paused long enough to invite me to lunch the following day, so Kane had been as good as his word.
I recognized a few other faces from Kane’s party -- or from television and film roles. Valarie Rose didn’t recognize me when I said hello after the service finished and we all filed out into the little courtyard. Paul reintroduced us; she was friendly, if preoccupied.
“I’ve told Valarie you’ll want to talk to her,” he said.
“Oh. Right.” I smiled at Valarie and she smiled politely back. I could see she thought this idea of Paul’s was lunacy. I was beginning to think she was right, though not for the same reasons.
Paul made one of those rueful, charming faces. “You’re not going to bail on me, are you?”
“No,” I replied.
“Paul, you’re putting Mr. English in a really awkward position,” Valarie said.
Something in the way she stood brushing shoulders and arms with Paul told me that they were -- or perhaps had been -- lovers. Kane had a reputation for playing the field, and certainly Jake was not in a position to complain about double-dipping, but I wondered as I saw him approaching us.
“Not at all,” Paul said. “Adrien and I are very much alike. We both enjoy puzzles.” He added, eyes on Jake, “And other things.”
My gaze met Jake’s -- locked -- and I felt a flush of heat. Then again, I was standing in a stone courtyard with the bright June sun beating down on my head. I deliberately moved my gaze to Alonzo, who was staring at me with that amorphous hostility. His suit was dark olive and the finish looked shiny in the bright sunlight; for some reason I found that comforting.
As Jake and Alonzo drew within earshot, Paul said conversationally, “Has anyone ever told you your eyes are just the color of the Mediterranean?”
I noticed, tardily, that he was speaking to me. I could feel Valarie, Jake, and Alonzo all gazing at me, and I realized that while Paul Kane and I might both enjoy puzzles, we did not share a love of all the same games.
“Yeah, I get that a lot,” I said, and I squeezed his arm in friendly farewell, moving away into the crowd.
“That dress. Oh my God. What was she thinking…?”
“He must have paid for his plot back in the seventies…”
“Please. Memorial Property…”
I stepped around the snickers and whispers, keeping an eye out for Ally and her stalwart escort as I listened in on the conversations floating around me.
“Sudoku? The New York Times provides all the mentalrobics I need…”
“Funny no one mentioned how he had no problem pulling financing when the mood suited him…”
As I joined the line of mourners straggling down the shady road to Porter’s gravesite, I zeroed on the dialog behind me.
“I’m surprised Valarie would work with him after the way her torpedoed her last project.”
“If Paul Kane told Valarie to jump, she’d be the first one on the ledge.”
I missed the next comment or two as a black limousine rolled slowly past and we all moved to the side of the road.
“It’s ironic, really. He had so little time left.”
That was the woman walking ahead of me. I considered the elegant line of her black-clad back -- the glossy brown bob -- and I recognized Marla Vicenza, the first Mrs. Jones. From behind she could have been a woman half her age. Like so many actors, she spoke in a slightly louder than normal voice.
I unobtrusively picked up my pace.
“Do the police know that he was ill? Maybe it was an accident?” Her companion was an older woman in a dark pantsuit.
“Apparently not. It was some kind of heart medication. Not the kind of thing someone takes accidentally. Anyway, Jonesy was always careful about things like that.”
“That alone should tell the gestapo that it couldn’t have been anyone who really knew Porter -- as if anyone who knew Porter would want to hurt him.”
“The whole thing is ridiculous,” the Vicenza woman said. “No one would want to hurt Jonesy. Jonesy was a lamb.”
“What about that slut?”
“What would the hurry be? She’d have had everything in a few months anyway.”
They nattered on, but after a bit I stopped paying attention. It was obvious neither of them had any idea who would want to kill Porter Jones. Just as it was obvious that there had been no need to kill him. He had already been dying.
So the question was: who couldn’t wait for Porter to die?
* * * * *
“How was your funeral?” Natalie asked when I got back to the bookstore later that afternoon.
“Well, when you put it like that, I was hoping for better music.” I popped open a can of Tab from the office fridge.
She laughed. “It can’t all be Verdi’s ‘Requiem.’ You should let Warren pick the music.”
Over my dead body. I took a swallow of Tab. Caffeine. Ah, yes. I remembered it well.
She asked suddenly, “Hey, what are you wearing tonight?”
“Is this a trick question?”
She gave me a look of sisterly exasperation. “The family portrait? The one Lisa’s been talking about for over a month?” She burst out laughing. “Oh my God, your expression, Adrien!”
Too bad the cameras weren’t clicking right then. I asked, “What time and where?”
“At the house. Seven o’clock -- but I think Lisa is expecting you to come for dinner.”
“I don’t know about dinner,” I said.
“We noticed! That’s why she wants you to eat with us.”
“Funny.”
Natalie seemed to think so. I left her chortling and went upstairs to change out of my funeral wear. I donned Levi’s and a black T-shirt from the Santa Barbara winery, which Guy and I had visited last year. For a moment I studied myself in the mirror behind the bedroom door. I looked all right. Thinner than usual -- okay, maybe my Levi’s hung loosely off my hips in disconcertingly gangbanger fashion -- and I definitely needed some sun. A haircut wouldn’t be a bad idea either. I’d totally forgotten about the damned family portrait.
I went downstairs and, for a change, it was halfway quiet while the construction crew knocked off for lunch. Natalie was special ordering some small press titles for a customer; I grabbed the phone book and settled down in the office flipping through, searching for Markopoulos Investigations.
They weren’t hard to find. The half page ad proclaimed Lying spouses? Spying Louses? We are discreet and diligent! There was a cartoon of a man who looked disturbingly like Luigi from Super Mario Brothers smiling through a spyglass at his prospective clients.
Me, if I was reduced to setting a shamus on my straying spouse, I’d go for a company that looked less…fun. I noted the Web site address and looked them up on my laptop. No goofy logo. Just a picture of a generic Los Angeles skyline and the information that Markopoulos Investigations was bonded, licensed, and insured -- with an “eleven-year track record.”
I phoned and asked for Roscoe. The secretary came back and asked who she should say was calling. I told her. She put me on hold -- treating me to some fuzzy local radio -- and then returned to ask what it was in regards to. I told her. Back on hold in time to hear Miley Cyrus -- a big favorite with Emma -- singing about having the best of both worlds.
Miley disappeared and a brusque male voice asked, “Markopoulos. Can I help you?”
I reintroduced myself. “I understand you were working for Porter Jones, the film producer.”
Silence. At last, the voice said grudgingly, “Maybe.”
“Then you’re probably aware that he was the victim of a homicide a couple of days ago.”
Another silence. Either Mr. Mar
kopoulos didn’t read the newspaper or he was processing very slowly.
“Maybe,” he said finally.
I said, “Would it be possible to meet and go over a few things?”
“Are you with the media?” he asked suspiciously.
“No. Absolutely not. I’ve been asked to look into a few things.”
“You another investigator?”
“Something like that.”
Silence.
“I’m going out of town this afternoon,” Markopoulos announced at last. “I’ll be gone for nine days. Call me in nine days.”
“If I could just have a half an hour,” I said quickly. I glanced at the astronaut clock hanging above the desk. “I could be there within the hour.”
Silence.
“If you can get here before three o’clock,” he said grudgingly.
I hung up and told Natalie I was going out.
“This is why we need help!” she called as I started up the stairs. I nodded distractedly, already dialing Jake.
My call went straight to message. I dialed again. Straight to message. I changed out my jeans and T-shirt into trousers and a tailored white shirt. I called Jake again. It went to message.
I opened my mouth, then rethought. If I was doing this -- and I obviously was -- maybe it would be a better idea to talk to Jake when my meeting with Markopoulos was a fait accompli. I settled for asking him to call when he had a chance -- and then I turned my phone off.
“Where are you going?” Natalie asked as I returned downstairs. “Are you working a case?”
The queen’s spies -- that would be the other queen -- were everywhere. “Don’t worry,” I assured her. “I’ll be back in plenty of time for my close-up.”
“Adrien!”
I closed the door firmly on her protest.
Chapter Nine
“Mr. Markopoulos will see you now,” recited the receptionist at Markopoulos Investigations. I tossed aside the copy of SC Magazine I’d been browsing, and she buzzed me into the hallway leading to the inner offices.