Vermilion

by Aldyne, Nathan

  Billy looked around at the bartender.

  “Your timing’s good tonight,” said the man dryly.

  “Who bought it?” demanded Billy.

  The bartender shrugged. “An admirer. Anonymous—at least for right now.”

  Billy drank this second beer much more quickly, and stared about trying to guess which man had sent it over. After a bit, he gave this over as not worth his trouble—it was unlikely the man would go away unintroduced.

  Three free beers later Billy was weary and woozy. It was past one; the bar would close in less than an hour. Before then he must secure a bed for the night and money for the following day.

  Billy looked around. The crowd was not larger, but was differently composed. Daisy Mae had left and returned with an undistinguished overweight man about fifty. He was now purchasing at least a third set of hard drinks. Daisy Mae sipped hers, and abandoned it half finished, while encouraging her companion to gulp his down. She coyly brushed her breasts against his chest while whispering—licking—in his ear. The man’s eyes were bright and distracted. He dragged Daisy Mae onto the dance floor and, ignoring the disco beat, held her in a slow embrace. She accommodated him, bending slightly forward and jutting her Parker House posterior far behind her. When her partner lurched drunkenly, Daisy Mae fell roughly against a drag queen who was impersonating a TWA stewardess. The stewardess turned heatedly on the comic-book hooker. Those around them left off dancing and grinned expectantly, calling for a fight.

  Billy wanted to move closer for a better view, but found he was now too drunk to stand easily. He leaned back and yawned, for the first time in the evening indifferent to how he ended up.

  “I don’t know if I should buy you another drink.”

  Billy looked to his side. His unfocused vision smeared white hair and a round pink-cheeked face across his brain. He turned back to the fight.

  The man signaled the bartender and received another beer. He handed it to Billy.

  “Drink up and we’ll go.”

  Billy took the sweating bottle and looked slowly up at the older man. Billy stared at his face and found it more unhandsome than he was accustomed to. The man wore a heavy overcoat over a dark brown double-knit leisure suit. Beneath the off-white dress shirt, a thin gold chain was hung about his wrinkled pink neck.

  “Thirty-five,” Billy said carefully, trying to sound sure of himself and sober.

  The thin-lipped mouth pursed. The bright eyes dropped down Billy’s body appraisingly. “Twenty,” the man said.

  Billy swiveled the bar stool around, and stared at the clock behind the bar. Nexus would close in twenty-five minutes. He raised the beer and drank it down in several long gulps.

  “All right,” he said. He dropped unsteadily to the floor and the man gripped his arm. Billy pulled away and struggled into his jacket.

  Above the disco version of “Auld Lang Syne” there was a hoarse shriek. The bartender rushed past Billy, leaping into the crowd on the dance floor. The man with the white hair and pink cheeks led Billy up the ramp.

  From the top, Billy turned and stared into the bar. The crowd in the center of the dance floor had pulled back a little. The bartender had been knocked to the floor. The TWA stewardess had ripped off Daisy Mae’s blouse, and tossed it to a girlfriend, who was dressed as a geisha. Daisy Mae shrieked in terrible anger.

  The man touched Billy’s arm and guided him out into the cold New Year’s night.

  Tuesday, 2 January

  Chapter Two

  PROFESSOR PHILIP Lawrence stood on his front porch and stared across the snow-covered street at the row of hemlocks that screened the house of his neighbors across the way. His breath crystallized in sharp puffs, and he squinted angrily in the cold glare. A pile of someone’s discarded clothing had been spilled out onto the side of the road. Mercifully, the heap had been dumped not onto his own lawn, but onto the property of Mario Scarpetti, fourth-term representative to the Massachusetts legislature.

  Pulling his wide-brimmed black felt hat down further and wrenching his collar up about his neck, Lawrence moved resolutely down the sidewalk. He was wrapped in a black greatcoat and carried a black leather attaché case in one kid-gloved hand. His full auburn beard was stiffening in the cold air. The marred landscape rankled him and he knew that if he did not retrieve and dispose of the trash it would be there to annoy him when he returned from a full day of classes. The Scarpettis had money and a certain peculiar prestige, but little sense of pride in the appearance of their neighborhood.

  As he crossed the road, powdery snow clouded up about his black boots. From his coat pocket he retrieved a pair of glasses, thin gold-rimmed spectacles with smoked amber lenses. As soon as he had them on, the lenses fogged. With well-practiced but grudging patience, he wiped the glass clear with a white starched kerchief. He stood on the sidewalk a few feet from the row of hemlocks, and looked down through the dense evergreen foliage. His mouth loosened and fell slightly open.

  “Jesus Christ…!” he exclaimed.

  The head of the corpse, its face turned modestly into the snow, was obscured by the deep-green branches of the hemlocks. Without hesitation Lawrence bent over and pulled back the foliage.

  The man was young, no more than twenty, Lawrence surmised. He was sprawled on his side, arms and legs tangled in the broken lower branches of two of the trees. Above the right temple, the thick blond hair was caked with blood. A thin stream had frozen like a bright red frame around the corpse’s staring clouded eye.

  Lawrence let go of the branches, sifting snow over the bruised head, and stood erect. The boy wore a too-large nylon football jacket, dark blue with yellow piping; the insignia was of a high school in Pennsylvania. A thin green sweatshirt was still tucked carefully into thin faded denim jeans. The corpse’s feet, in dirty white athletic socks and worn black sneakers, pushed against the black trunk of one of the hemlocks.

  Lawrence pushed aside some of the higher branches, and looked across the expanse of inclined whited lawn, thick with bare lindens and blue spruce, up to the Scarpetti’s house. The structure was a solid three stories, squarish, covered with cream stucco. An ornate parapet running about the edge of the roof was the only decoration on the otherwise severe 1920s design. Nothing stirred behind the windows on the near side of the house.

  The snow on the lawn was unmarred. Lawrence turned to look briefly up and down the road, which ended in a cul-de-sac two houses beyond. There were no footprints near the boy’s body, but a faint set of tire tracks came up from the highway to the spot, and was repeated going down again. The boy had evidently been dumped shortly after the snow began to stick.

  Professor Philip Lawrence smiled with pleasure as he contemplated informing Representative Mario Scarpetti that the body of a young man had been deposited beneath his hemlocks. He glanced once more at the corpse, and then stepped through the screen of evergreens, heading toward the house.

  Chapter Three

  DANIEL VALENTINE punched a key on the cash register. The bell pinged sharply as the “$1.00” tab popped up into the tiny glass window and the drawer slid open. He smoothed the bill out and pushed it into the proper compartment. Before closing it, Valentine reached into the back of the drawer and extracted matches and a fresh pack of Lucky’s.

  Valentine opened the cigarettes and took one out. He leaned his elbows lazily on the highly polished bar and smoked sedately, consciously enjoying this slow part of the evening. In less than an hour, Bonaparte’s regular crowd would begin its erratic but inevitable buildup. He sighed and dragged deep on the Lucky; he was weary and the 2:00 A.M. closing seemed about four days away. For the fifth time in ten minutes, he swept his eyes across the room for a head count.

  A little down from the register two men in business suits talked quietly and laughed softly as they sipped at a third round of rye. In a shadowed corner stood three other men, who were regulars at Bonaparte’s.

  In rattan chairs set among the jungle of palms in the room behind the mirrored bar
two more men pursued a low-voiced serious argument, the same discussion that had occupied them in an identical manner—in the same chairs, across the same table—over the past couple of months. The walls of this back room were a dark rich green. Six more rattan chairs were grouped around three more glass-topped wicker tables. In the corner was a lacquered baby grand.

  Valentine checked his watch. Trudy, scheduled to play at the piano from ten to two, was late, but not much later than usual. Trudy maintained that she couldn’t tell the time on a digital clock.

  Valentine looked across the room, through the opened white louvered doors. The foyer was empty but for Irene at her station in the coat checkroom. Irene was a plump woman in her sixties, who wore her white hair pulled severely back into a bun at the nape of her neck. Large round rhinestone-studded bifocal glasses perched at the bridge of her thin red nose. Alert but motionless, hands resting on the lower half of the Dutch door, Irene stared ahead as if she were momentarily expecting to witness a bloody murder on the staircase that led to the dance floor above. She did not notice Valentine’s wink.

  Valentine mixed himself a tonic water and lime.

  Bonaparte’s had changed little since it was converted in 1925 from a private residence into a speakeasy. Discreetly situated on the quiet edge of Boston’s Bay Village, the bar had carefully established and perpetuated a reputation as a quiet decorous gathering place for the city’s wealthy and older gay men.

  The room in which Valentine worked had been the original parlor of the townhouse. The ornate wainscoting and ceiling medallion remained and panels of lightly tinted mirror had been placed into the four walls. From the bar Valentine was able to watch all who entered and mingled in the Mirror Room or sat in the rattan chairs in the shadowy Wicker Room behind.

  Valentine looked across the room at his reflected image. He studied himself carefully and frowned. He had lost some weight, he thought. Having worked long hours almost every night during the Christmas holidays, he had not been able to visit the gym in the past two weeks. He usually went on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sunday afternoons for a rigorous workout on the Universal gym machine, a half hour run around the track and a final few laps in the pool. He didn’t much like this exhausting exercise—in fact, he hated it—but it kept him in shape. He took a swallow of his tonic and lime and resigned himself to the resumption of the schedule on the following day.

  Valentine had begun keeping bar for Bonaparte’s five years before, as a weekend supplement to his meager salary as a prison counselor at the Charles Street Jail. However, after informing the Boston Globe that the sheriff of Suffolk County, whose house immediately adjoined the prison, had paid ten thousand dollars of taxpayers’ money for his living room draperies, Valentine had been fired from his state job. He had got this information not through his connection with the prison, but from the sales representative of the company that had provided the material, with whom he had had a brief affair. Valentine had been privately assured that he would regain his position at the prison as soon as the sheriff was out of office, and he had decided to work full-time at Bonaparte’s until then. It had been a disappointment that the man had been reelected, but now there was some hope that he would die in office.

  Tending the main bar at Bonaparte’s brought in better money than the Charles Street Jail, and the hours were more congenial, but Daniel Valentine still wished for his old post. If questioned, he always denied it, but the truth was that he had much satisfaction in helping prisoners adjust both to captivity and release. Friends had urged Valentine to take one of the positions that were open in other Massachusetts prisons, at Concord or Walpole, but Valentine met these suggestions with unfeigned horror, for it was unthinkable that he should work outside the city. “I get the shakes,” he would shudder, “just thinking about the suburbs, and I haven’t seen the open countryside in five years…”

  From beneath the bar Valentine pulled the late edition of the Boston Globe. He spread the paper out and was taken aback by the headline in the lower right-hand corner of the front page.

  Bold black letters cried, SLAIN YOUTH DISCOVERED ON STATE REP’S LAWN and in smaller print, “Rep. Scarpetti Blames ‘Homosexual Conspiracy.’” With knitted brow Valentine darted down the column of text, reading uneasily. Mario Scarpetti had led the fight in the House, just that past November, to defeat a bill, already passed in the state Senate, that would have made unlawful discrimination against homosexuals in the matter of public housing and employment. He was an ignorant, loudmouthed, and powerful enemy of Boston’s gay community.

  “The body of a young man was discovered early this morning on the lawn of State Rep. Mario Scarpetti’s suburban home. Apparently placed there sometime during the night or early morning, the victim has been identified as William A. Golacinsky, nineteen, of Harrisburg, Pa. The young man’s father was contacted early this morning…”

  And further down:

  “Police sources revealed that Golacinsky was a known hustler, or male prostitute, in the Boston area, and had been arrested only three weeks ago on a charge of soliciting. The charges in that case were dropped…”

  “‘It’s all part of the homosexual conspiracy,’ Rep. Scarpetti angrily stated this morning at an impromptu press conference at his home. ‘The homosexual element in this city elected a human sacrifice, and put him on my lawn to crucify me. This is just an attempt to smear my good name. If they want to kill their own kind let them do it. All the better for Boston, but let them dump their garbage somewhere else.’”

  Valentine drew his fingers into a fist.

  “Police Commissioner Joseph O’Brien stated that his department has no suspects as yet but that a full and thorough investigation has been launched. Contacted by phone this morning, O’Brien said that ‘it appears to be more than coincidence that the deceased, a known homosexual, was left on Mario’s [Rep. Scarpetti’s] lawn.’”

  Valentine was about to turn the page to the continuation of the story, when a well-manicured hand reached over and pushed the paper aside. Valentine looked up.

  The man on the other side of the bar was clean shaven, with a strong prominent square jaw, and a thin hard colorless mouth. His deep-set eyes were dark but shallow-focused; his dark hair was close-cut and wavy. Beneath the open topcoat of good material and cut, he wore a gray suit, finely tailored and well-fitted to his tall muscular frame.

  Well, considered Valentine, this one must work out on Tuesdays and Thursdays too. He stared at the man, but said nothing.

  The man reached into his inside coat pocket and produced a wallet. He flipped it open in an automatic, practiced manner. Pinned to one leaf was a badge and an identification card encased in cracked clouded plastic. Valentine glanced at it and then back to the man’s face, no longer wondering why the dark eyes were shallow-focused. The policeman’s serious expression was as practiced as his movements.

  “Lieutenant Searcy,” the man said and flipped the wallet closed. “Police Lieutenant William Searcy,” he added, and dexterously the wallet disappeared. The voice was flat and uninflected, as if he feared giving something away by tone.

  “Valentine,” said Daniel, matching the flat tone. “Daniel Valentine—I’m the bartender here.”

  Searcy’s mouth creased into a frown and he seated himself to face Valentine. He took a small piece of paper from another pocket and cupped it in his hand, away from Valentine. He rested his elbows on the bar and looked briefly about. “Slow night,” he said.

  Valentine rolled his eyes. “What can I do for you?” he asked.

  “I need information.”

  One of the men further down raised two fingers and Valentine turned to pour another round of rye. In a moment he came back to Searcy.

  “Would you like a drink?”

  “You may not have guessed it, but I’m on duty.”

  Valentine sighed. “It’s on the house.”

  Searcy considered a moment. “Bourbon, on the rocks.”

  Valentine smiled for the first time.
From beneath the bar he took a coffee cup, scooped ice into it, and poured in the liquor. He placed it on a saucer and slid it across to the detective. “You’re not the only cop who’s ever been in here ‘on duty.’”

  The piece of paper cupped in the policeman’s hand snapped face-up onto the bar. Valentine picked the photograph up.

  “Ever see this kid in here?”

  The picture was in high-contrast black and white: a young man with straight light hair and mottled skin. The coarse unmemorable features were slack and when Valentine looked more closely he saw that a good portion of the forehead had been airbrushed and the eyes painted open. He looked up at Searcy.

  “Who is it?”

  “You tell me.”

  Valentine glanced at the photograph again and shrugged. He placed it on the bar between them, turning it so that the blank painted eyes stared at the detective.

  “Never saw him before. Is he a desperate character?”

  “Not anymore.” Searcy took a swallow of his drink.

  Valentine blinked but said nothing for a moment. “William A. Golacinsky?” he asked finally.

  “You just said you didn’t know him.”

  “I don’t,” Valentine said as he tapped the newspaper. “But I have seen the Globe.” He lit another cigarette.

  “We’re trying to trace his movements, find out where he was last night.”

  “He wasn’t with me—not my type,” said Valentine. “Perhaps he spent the evening debating homosexual rights with Representative Scarpetti.”

  “He was a hustler.”

  “The charges got dropped,” said Valentine.

  Searcy glanced up quickly. “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing,” shrugged Valentine. “But why are you asking around here? He was killed out in the suburbs, wasn’t he? Horrible things happen to you in the suburbs—”