Vermilion

by Aldyne, Nathan

  “Well, let me ask you this,” said Searcy with growing impatience, “you think it’s possible that this ‘leisure suit from Sharon’ might have…”

  “Killed Billy? You mean, did he look like violence?”

  Searcy nodded.

  “No,” said Mack flatly, “not the type. And let me tell you something, Lieutenant: I know the type.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I did time.”

  Searcy took a deep breath and lit a cigarette. “What else about the kid?”

  “Not much. He didn’t talk a lot. Hustlers don’t, in general. Sometimes Billy made money, sometimes he didn’t. You could tell when he had money, because he’d always pay with the biggest bill that he had in his pocket. He’d turn a trick and come in here with a couple of twenties. If he came in here and paid with a dollar, I’d know he didn’t have much left.”

  “What’d he have last night?”

  “I didn’t charge him. Holiday spirit, and all. Billy was a runaway. If he had been smarter, he would have been lonely and unhappy. But he had his little dreams too, just like the rest of us.”

  “You knew him pretty well.”

  Mack shook his head, a little sadly. “No. I hear a lot, and I see these people every day. And there’s not much to see. As I say, they don’t talk much, but when they do it’s right to the point. Sometime before Thanksgiving Billy was in here one night, and he sat down and ordered a Miller’s—that’s what he drank, always. He was sitting there, smoothing out a whole wad of dollar bills. He told me he was saving his money now for a face job.”

  “A nineteen-year-old hustler was saving up to have a face-lift?”

  Mack laughed. “No, a face job. He had mottled skin, you can see it here in the picture.” Mack pointed to the photograph. “He was going to get a peel or something so his face would look like a baby’s ass, all smooth and all. Said it would increase his business.”

  Searcy shook his head and laughed. “What did you say when he told you that?”

  “Oh, I told him great, that he should do it if he wanted it.”

  Searcy was silent for a moment. He checked his watch. “Right now,” he said, “my own little dream has come true. I’m officially off duty, by my watch. Another bourbon, but straight up. I’ll pay you with the biggest bill I’ve got.”

  Mack laughed, slipped off the stool, and went around behind the bar. In passing, he tickled Daisy Mae’s ribs. She laughed shrilly, and swiveled to face Searcy.

  Her attempt at a shy smile was so bizarre that Searcy was hard put not to laugh aloud.

  “Hi,” she said, in a not very good southern accent, “nice night, hunh? I saw you come in. You came in all by yourself, but what I want to know is, are you planning to go out the same way?”

  Searcy smiled. “Payday’s tomorrow. Tonight I’m broke.”

  Daisy Mae closed her disbelieving eyes. She opened them and sighed. “Well then, don’t let me waste your time.” She shook her thick ponytails, and straightened up. She looked back at him. “Listen, honey, if you’re looking for a piece of free chicken, you came to the wrong place. The boys in here have dollar signs tattooed all over their precious little bodies.”

  “I’m not interested in that either.”

  “Listen, on account of its being cold and you being so good-looking, I think I could manage a full ten-dollar discount.”

  Mack stood between them, on the other side of the bar.

  “Thanks,” said Searcy, “not tonight.”

  Daisy Mae gulped her drink. “Honestly, Mack, you think it would do any good if I laid myself at his feet? Some nights you can’t even give it away.”

  “I know,” said Mack sympathetically. From beneath the bar Mack produced a voluminous waist-length rabbit coat. Daisy stood and pulled it on. She closed the bottom button and took a deep breath, which lifted her breasts high. She raised her hand and wiggled it at Mack. “I’m off to find somebody who needs a bit of five-finger exercise to get his blood going again. Listen, honey,” she said, turning to Searcy, “you change your mind, you’ll find me at the end of Carver, frozen to the bricks.”

  She headed for the exit. Her walk was between a trot and a bounce. She hit the ramp and disappeared.

  “I think she was interested in you,” said Mack.

  Searcy laughed, a little uneasily.

  “I’m glad you didn’t give her any grief, being a cop and all, I mean.”

  “I’m not the vice,” said Searcy.

  “Listen, I got to get back, Lieutenant. I’m missing my tips. Anything else you want to know?”

  “I want you to think hard about this older man, what he looked like, exactly what he looked like. You could be wrong about the South Shore. I’ll call you tomorrow, day after, and if you’ve got anything, I’ll have you in to make up a composite.”

  Mack was silent for a moment. “There was something else.”

  “What?”

  “Billy sometimes took his tricks to the baths. Maybe that’s where they went after they left here. Maybe Billy made the man take him to the baths.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Because he got the best deal that way. The john would pay for the room. They’d have sex, and the john would pay Billy and go home. Billy had a place to stay for the night and all the free sex he wanted. He made out both ways. It’s a smart idea—probably not his. Maybe you ought to check the baths.”

  “Any particular one?”

  Mack rubbed his chin. “Only two in town. But Billy went to the Royal Baths, I think.” He looked at Searcy. “I’m not really sure.”

  Searcy stood to go. He was surprised when Mack stuck his hand across the bar to be shaken.

  Searcy shook his hand and said, “Listen, you’re not one of them, are you?” He cocked his head toward the dance floor. “You’re not a fag.”

  Mack paused before answering. “No,” he replied quietly.

  “Then why do you work in this place, why do you hang out with these people?”

  Mack dropped Searcy’s hand, and picked up a towel. “I tell you, Lieutenant: twenty-five years ago, it was straight men that got me in trouble, and ten years ago, it was straight men that got me put in jail. It was a fag that got me out of jail, and it was a fag that made sure I got a decent job. I got nothing against ’em. I’m not a fag, but I know what they know”—he gestured just as Searcy had, with a cocked head—“that straight men are just trouble.”

  Searcy turned to go, but Mack arrested him in a friendlier voice: “Listen, Lieutenant, Daisy Mae’s turning blue. Tonight, I don’t think she’d charge a thing.”

  Wednesday, 3 January

  Chapter Six

  AS DANIEL VALENTINE roused himself from sleep, a fine mist of snow was falling from a sky of low-hung, steel-gray clouds.

  With a practiced, sure motion he swept the alarm clock from the bedside table onto the floor, seconds before the alarm was to sound. It landed on the alarm button and the clock never rang.

  Valentine opened his eye not buried in the pillow, and noted the snow with some satisfaction. He raised one arm and brought it firmly down onto the pillow behind him.

  No one was there.

  Valentine opened his eyes and turned over. He had the feeling that someone ought to have been lying on the other half of the bed, although he had no idea who.

  He stared across the shadowed room to the bath. The door was ajar, and he could see that it was empty.

  Valentine shrugged and pushed back the covers. He swung his legs over onto the chill floor, and quickly raised them again. He coughed to see how cold the air in his lungs was, and finding it very cold, he rubbed his arms violently for warmth.

  He stared at the other half of the bed, looking for proof of someone’s having slept there. He saw none; perhaps it had been only a dream.

  Taking a deep breath he padded across the cold hardwood floor to the bathroom. A long shower warmed him but didn’t do much toward waking him up. He pulled on a red flannel shirt, worn jeans, and
heavy white wool athletic socks.

  Crossing the hallway toward the living room, he flicked the thermostat up to 70. Beyond the living room was the small kitchen, much too narrow for the red deal table he had placed in it. While water heated for instant coffee, he stood at the window and stared out at Fayette Street three floors below. His single thought was that the irregular spitting of snow was not going to block the streets; he would, in all good conscience, have to go to the health club in the afternoon.

  After he had stared awhile into the empty street, he stared at the three Boston ferns that hung in the kitchen window. Their fronds were tipped with yellow; they needed to be thinned and cut back. He couldn’t remember when he’d watered them last. The ferns were a gift from Clarisse, who had had a short affair with a wholesale florist. Valentine decided that it would actually be more cruel to water them than not, thereby drawing out their inevitable death by dehydration and neglect.

  Valentine pressed a finger into the soil of one of the pots. To his surprise it was moist; Clarisse had evidently been watering them behind his back.

  To counteract her care of the plants, he opened the window a couple of inches, from the top, so that the cold air would blow in on the ferns. He had never been able to explain to his friends that he resented the demands put upon him by green plants—there was something continually reproachful in their complete helplessness.

  He much preferred the notion of the Christmas tree. You bring in a fine plant that, without any attention being paid it, remains perfectly beautiful for three weeks. Then it is thrown out, or burnt in the fireplace, and never thought of again. Valentine complacently looked at his own Christmas tree, which he had decorated with three very fine packs of late-nineteenth-century Austrian playing cards. He had ingeniously constructed a web of invisible nylon thread to hold the cards in place about the tree, for it would have been unthinkable to drill holes in the cards, which had been an important and expensive addition to his collection.

  Clarisse had groaned when she saw the tree, for there were times that she considered his collecting an obsession. He had his finest cards set in large frames and placed on all the walls of the rooms in his flat, and had playing cards embedded beneath the glass of the coffee table. Kitchen drawers, drawers in the bedside table and living room end tables, were filled with uncatalogued packs, there were albums and boxes of cards stacked high in the corners of the bedroom. Clarisse once suggested that he take down some of the cards and put up pictures of naked men, since so many playing cards made her think of Las Vegas; so Valentine replaced a pack that he had grown tired of with one that pictured a naked man on each card. When she saw this, Clarisse had sighed and given up. “It would be different if you liked to play poker, or bridge, or—”

  “I hate card games,” Valentine had said.

  The kettle whistled. He poured the boiling water into a cup that held three times the recommended amount of instant coffee, and took the mug into the living room. He sat on the overstuffed white sofa that faced the bay window. He smiled to see the snow falling more heavily.

  He had raised the cup to his lips, when he noticed a neatly folded piece of blue notepaper resting above the jack of clubs embedded in the coffee table. He put the coffee down, picked the note up, unfolded and read it. In neat clear script was written: “Had to get to work early. Didn’t want to wake you. Thanks for a great time. Call me soon. Your number wasn’t on the phone, so I’ll just leave mine.” It gave the telephone number, a Boston exchange, and was signed “Gary.”

  It had been no dream. Valentine tried to remember what Gary looked like.

  Valentine raised the cup to his lips, and the door buzzer sounded. He groaned, and swallowed a quarter of the cup of burning coffee. On the fifth insistent buzz, he went to the door and pressed the intercom.

  It was Clarisse’s voice, quick and blurred. After thirty seconds of incomprehensible speech, Valentine pressed the door-release button for a sarcastically long time, opened the door, and retreated to the sofa.

  A few moments later, Clarisse rushed in. She was wearing her fur coat, but no hat. As Valentine watched, droplets of snow melted in her thick black hair like tiny dissolving pearls. Under one arm was her leather envelope with a newspaper sticking out of it, and in her other hand was a glazed paper bag, torn, with the logo of an expensive and fashionable Italian bakery on it.

  “Gorgeous day!” she cried, and kicked the door shut. She threw the envelope and the bag onto the glass table, and then pulled off her coat. Beneath she wore full-cut black corduroy slacks and a white silk blouse opened one button too many. Around her neck was a gold chain fashioned of square links.

  The coat flew over Valentine’s head and fell behind the couch.

  “It’s too early in the morning for June Allyson,” said Valentine sulkily.

  “No,” said Clarisse, “I’m Faye Dunaway this morning. To do June Allyson, I’d have to be drunk.” She craned her neck in several directions. “Where is he?” she demanded.

  “Who?”

  “The man of the hour. The trick of the day?”

  “He left. I was too much for him.”

  “Too bad,” she said, disappointed. “I brought breakfast for three.” She ran to the kitchen, leaned through the doorframe, balancing precariously on one high-heeled shoe, and flicked on the flame under the water.

  “Why are you out so early?”

  “Guilt,” replied Clarisse, turning back with a ravishing smile. “This morning I got up and decided I was going to pull a real nine-to-fiver. First one in, last one out. That office wouldn’t know what hit it.”

  Valentine glanced at the clock on the mantel. “You mean you already put in two hours?”

  Clarisse paused. “Actually, no,” she admitted. “I haven’t quite made it in yet. I left the apartment though at eight-thirty. I really did. But it was so cold I couldn’t put in my contacts, because I was afraid they’d freeze to my pupils, and I got on the wrong train, and I ended up at Haymarket. So as long as I was there, I figured I might as well have coffee with this cute fireman who was just getting off duty, and I did, and we have a date, and you’ll be real jealous if I ever let you meet him, and then I thought that as long as I was still there, I might as well run across to the North End and buy you and Mr. Nameless some breakfast, and then I was headed back and I remembered that my passport needed to be renewed so I stopped in at Government Center and filled out all the forms, and ran across the street to have my picture taken, and here I am. I’m considering this an early lunch hour.”

  “I don’t know why you even try.”

  “Well,” said Clarisse, returning languidly to the kitchen to prepare coffee for herself, “I feel so virtuous, you just can’t imagine.”

  Valentine had pulled the newspaper out of her leather envelope and opened it onto his lap.

  “It’s on page three, lower right,” called Clarisse from the kitchen.

  A small headline above a short column read, NEW CLUE IN HUSTLER DEATH. Valentine read the first sentence, lost the sense of it, and brushed the newspaper off his lap onto the floor.

  “Not ready for the gory details this early?” said Clarisse.

  “Not awake.”

  “Then don’t read the Letters to the Editor either. Some imbecilic woman from Jamaica Plain wrote in, talking about Billy G., saying he was one down and seventy-five thousand to go—”

  “Not a bad estimate for a bigot,” remarked Valentine. “That is, if she was talking about just Boston.”

  “—and that she thought it was a good sign that he had been dumped on Scarpetti’s lawn, except that his grass probably wouldn’t ever grow there again, and that she hoped someone was seeing to it that the boy wasn’t buried in consecrated ground.”

  “That’s great. Find out her address, and later we’ll ride by and fire-bomb her house. That’ll be one bigot down, and two hundred million to go.”

  Clarisse tossed the bakery bag into Valentine’s lap. He opened it, handed Clarisse an enormous
sweet bun filled with honey and covered with crushed walnuts. He took a second one out for himself.

  “This snow could get on my nerves if it keeps up,” said Clarisse. “Maybe you and I ought to go away somewhere.”

  “Sure,” said Valentine, “let’s go back to Bermuda. We can stay in that hotel where we met—relive our first happy days together—”

  “Yes,” said Clarisse. “Those happy days when I fell in love with you by the pool, those happy nights in my cabana, and those happy mornings that you spent in bed with the assistant manager—”

  “I didn’t know quite how to break it to you…”

  “I thought your impotence was my fault—but by the time you got around to me in the evening, you were just worn out. God was I upset when I found out!”

  “I would have been impotent without the assistant manager,” smiled Valentine, consolingly.

  “So why did you even try?”

  “Because you were in love with me, and I was in love with your tits. I still am.”

  “Let’s go to Rio instead,” said Clarisse. “Rio’s great this time of year.”

  “I can’t afford Rio,” said Valentine.

  “You could if you didn’t spend half your salary on a maid for this three-room apartment.”

  “I have to have someone to clean. Housecleaning depresses me. That’s something else that makes me impotent. I don’t even like to watch other people cleaning. That’s why Joyce comes in at night, when I’m at Bonaparte’s.”

  “You’ve got the only maid in town who comes in three times a week to watch the late movie!”

  “Clarisse, I’m not paying her for the work she does, but for the work that I don’t have to do.”

  “Anyway, if you weren’t supporting Joyce and her two husbands, you’d have enough money to go to Rio.”

  “Probably.” Valentine shrugged.