Strip Poker

by Lisa Lawrence

  Each one with that standard cryptic message you get with the rest of the page blank, a complete waste of paper: “Transmission: OK.” No copies of the outgoing documents he’d been faxing, but that was no surprise. Once you send them, why leave them on the machine?

  In the rubbish bin by the desk, I saw torn half-sheets of paper—yet more acknowledgements from the Canon that whatever he’d sent had gone out all right.

  The phone number where he’d sent them didn’t tell me much—from the codes, I could tell it was a Paris line, but that was about it. I hit the little read-out diary display, and he had received dozens of faxes from the same number. Made me wonder why he didn’t simply email the person, but some folks can be old-fashioned.

  I hadn’t bothered to check out the drafting board. My lover of last night was an architect, and sure enough, under the T-square and little Pyrex triangle were several elaborate sketches of modern designs. Maybe that explained the fax machine. As one of the last of the brave few who still knew how to work a mechanical pencil instead of using Photoshop, he could draw a few squiggles on a sheet of A4 and whip it off to his client.

  And yep, there were crumpled balls of sketches in the bin by the table. Okay, move on.

  Except there was nothing much to move on to. You always find out something about a person in his home, but this morning, I’d learned little except that Daniel Giradeau liked Alpen, kept mint tea next to his Dark Roast, seemed to shop in Chinatown for healthy veggies but had a bit of a sweet tooth with three boxes of Ferrero Rocher in the kitchen cupboard, and he had a thing for Jennifer Connelly—five of her movies in his DVD collection.

  The sum of these parts made me start to lose interest in him—not only as a suspect but also as a man. Yeah, he was a good lay, but I didn’t think I was getting the real Daniel Giradeau. I think his entire seductive Master in the Art of Love bit was a role he was playing while away from home. It’s not like he’d have revealing tan lines around his ring finger, not here in sunless England, but he was just too much on the make.

  I admit it. He could turn me on, and he was sexually amusing for lack of a better word. But I had to watch out that he didn’t become a pointless distraction.

  Like I said before, move on.

  Carl rang to say “I don’t know why I’m doing this” but that perhaps I wanted to tag along when he went to interview a witness over in Soho. Then he corrected himself to say yes, he did know, that maybe ignorance wasn’t bliss, and that if I was up on all the facts, I could keep my big politico client out of trouble. Big politicos in trouble made headaches for the Met.

  It’s not as if he could come out and say Teresa, I owe you one and here’s quid pro quo.

  He had tracked down the mixed-race boy from Lionel’s home movie, a kid of eighteen named Andre. He wore one of those half Ts for men, which always personally baffles me, since you got a guy showing only his midriff like a girl. Neon blue trousers, tassel loafers. Not picking up any style tips lately from Queer Life, but then I doubted he had Sky. The kid rented a bed-sit above one of the restaurants, and rather than call him in, Carl preferred to see cagier witnesses in “their environment.” We buttonholed him on a street corner, with the swirls of locals, sandwich shop punters, Nikon-noosed tourists, and yes, gay couples floating by.

  Carl didn’t say what Andre did exactly to support himself and maybe he didn’t know, but I doubted that the boy sold himself on the street. He didn’t look like he could handle what came with that sort of life, and I suspected that in between odd jobs, he’d relied on Lionel for quick infusions of cash.

  I didn’t need to ask Carl whether he was a suspect. Even if you suspended disbelief in that anyone could be stupid enough to leave an incriminating DVD in the box, well, the boy was too slight in build. He was the feminine half of the pair, and if it got ugly between the lovers, no way this boy could overpower a tall, fit guy like Lionel and bind him to a chair.

  Andre. Pretty. Pouting. Mincing. Chip-on-the-shoulder. Very suspicious of us coming around to hit him up for information. Carl let the kid assume I was a detective as well.

  “So now you need the faggot’s help, yeah?”

  “Your choice of words, not ours,” I put in.

  “Black man can’t be queer in this world, and that’s news to you?” snapped the boy. He folded his arms and lifted his chin as he stared down Old Compton Street. “My baby was so far in the fucking closet. He hated himself, end of story.”

  “Not end of story,” I said. “Somebody murdered him.”

  He had to look at us for that one.

  “Do you know anybody who bore him a grudge?” asked Carl. “Who wanted to hurt him?”

  “Oh, fuck…Oh, Jesus fuck.” Reeling from it.

  “Come on,” pushed Carl impatiently. “It doesn’t look like he got rough with you, but did he ever go in for something a little more athletic with someone else?”

  “What do you mean somebody else?” He lost his temper, tears rolling down his cheeks. “There is no ‘somebody else’!”

  “He did girls,” Carl pointed out blandly.

  “He didn’t shag the cows to get off,” said Andre. “That was for cash. And he pretty much stopped that shit anyway. He just took ’em around so they could be seen with him.”

  Carl and I looked at each other, both of us thinking how love is blind. We already knew Lionel made enough from his mining company job that he didn’t need pin money from escort gigs. More conflicted than his boyfriend could guess.

  “Right,” sighed Carl. “Any straight enemies, then?”

  “The whole bloody world’s our enemy! Double jeopardy, man. Black and queer. Told my boy why you go play with the suits and deny who you are, hon? Love me and be happy—we’ll manage. And don’t get me started on the bullshit black straights throw our way!”

  “We’re not,” I said.

  “The love that once dared not speak its name now can’t shut up,” muttered Carl.

  “Mike Nichols,” I said, recognising the reference.

  “Pays to get an education,” replied Carl.

  Andre wasn’t amused. “What is this?” he demanded, too loud and too flaming for even my taste, putting his hands on his hips. “Like I need your breeder smart-ass remarks?”

  “Well, then answer the bloody question,” prompted Carl. “Could anyone have known about you two? Somebody who hated him?”

  The sincere urgency of the question settled Andre down for a moment. Very quietly, sombrely, he answered: “No…I mean he was scared, so scared. He kept saying how we had to be careful, ’cause like, his company every so often gets these hired-gun spies to check out their own people. Bunch of homophobes in there. Oh, shit, they killed my man, didn’t they?”

  “We don’t know that,” said Carl. He gave me a sideways glance as he added witheringly, “I think multinational conglomerates have bigger fish to fry than if one of their analysts is gay.”

  I was neutral. Said nothing. It was like the trees were getting thicker in front of the forest. Blackmailer sends Lionel a note to stop seeing Janet, but blackmailer kills Lionel, knowing he was gay. If he wants Lionel out of the picture why not blackmail him with the very secret that terrified our late Mr. Young?

  “They did him,” Andre insisted to Carl. “You just don’t want to believe it or you want to ignore it!”

  “You go to those anti-globalisation rallies, too, don’t you?”

  “Matter of fucking fact, I do, man. That’s a crime, too, now, yeah?”

  “No,” said Carl quietly, “I just think you might want to expand your horizons a little, mate.” And reluctantly, he disclosed a couple of the more disturbing details of the murder, which only got Andre started on torture squads in South America, the dangers of a single world currency, how gays were targeted in Zimbabwe and on we go.

  “Bet you anything his killer’s in frickin’ Harare, dude! Not here! My Lionel…” He rubbed his eyes again.

  Meanwhile, I was circling back to our killer’s original inten
t: try to pass Lionel’s murder off as a suicide. Okay, if that was the intent then his sexual orientation, what with the DVD left in the machine, was simply factored in for the convenience of the staged scenario. Successful black mining executive tortured by self-loathing because he was queer. So he kills himself. But Carl wasn’t buying it. I wasn’t buying it. Hell, even Andre didn’t buy it.

  And the boy was bitter. “Couldn’t even go to the service for him. His family didn’t know…”

  Which tugged at me a little. Yes, the boy was a bit of a cartoon, but no doubt he was more natural and less “on” with Lionel. They had loved each other. It didn’t matter anymore whether Lionel was running away from himself and what he was, whether he actually liked getting it on with me or was using women to hide. He did love this young man. Love is love, I told myself.

  And none of any of this speculation was relevant to the case.

  “Blind alley,” said Carl as we left Andre on his corner of pavement.

  I nodded. I had the feeling it wasn’t so much that we pursued the trail of evidence into this alley as we were led there down a garden path.

  Of course, there was one other possibility.

  Poker night. A townhouse in South Kensington. The site, interestingly, was the home of one of the players. This was Cahill’s place, so we were back in the land of antiques, Persian carpets and Anglo bric-à-brac clutter.

  The talk for a short while, among those in the know, was about Lionel Young and how terrible it was, him killing himself like that. Troubled fellow. What a waste. The perfunctory expressions got on my nerves a little, as if Lionel was a matter of old business with the reading of the minutes that had to be quickly dismissed.

  To my mild astonishment, the one person who didn’t play the hypocrite was the very person I expected to make a big show of public grief: Vivian. She had been with him enough, booked him several times through Helena, never hid how she liked him. But when I managed to be alone with her in a corner and mentioned how awful Lionel’s death was, she took a long pull of her martini and snapped, “What can you expect, darling? He was a bloody queer, taking it up the bum all this time. That’s right—I have it on the best authority. Made fools of us girls. He had no…business being here when he went around doing that.”

  I couldn’t help but notice how tightly she held her now-empty glass. I worried for a second it might shatter in her hand.

  “Gives me the creeps when I think how I had him. He was a good lay and all, but I don’t want to be with some faggot! I don’t think it was suicide, if you ask me.”

  “You don’t?”

  She dropped her voice to a gossipy whisper. “I bet you anything something went wrong. Well, they’re all into kink, aren’t they?”

  Someone called her from across the room, and she was up and gone without another word—leaving me to wonder how she would know enough details to even speculate on any “kink” involved in Lionel’s death.

  Vivian was my suspect who inspired my “one other possibility” about Lionel’s murder. If she were off the rails with sexual obsession, Lionel’s taste in boys would surely be enough to prompt a violent—even murderous—reaction. The loathing in her voice a moment ago. The anger that reflected a perceived betrayal. I tried to fathom it. Was it because of her vanity? That Lionel was such a good conquest for her public displays of lust? And now to discover he might well have been putting on a show? Forcing him to masturbate while bound and under a gun would be a kind of sick justice for “lying to her all this time.”

  Trouble was, I didn’t have the piece of the puzzle for just when and how Vivian discovered the truth about Lionel. More importantly, how did she manage to get Lionel naked and bound—one woman against a fit, strong guy? Yes, she would have had the gun, but at some point she surely would have wanted to check his restraints. And while Lionel might have been forced to tie himself up partway, he couldn’t finish the job. She would have had to take the risk of coming close to the chair and risking a struggle. Hell, would she even know where Lionel had lived? Did she have an alibi? I had to check it out.

  George Westlake came into the kitchen to freshen his drink and Ayako’s while I was snapping tongs over cubes of ice for my G & T. He barely looked at me. I assumed this must have been a preoccupation with Lionel. They were an odd pair to be friends—different ages, different professions and backgrounds—but friends nonetheless, and George must have had a shock.

  “Poor Lionel, he would have had a long, good life ahead of him if it hadn’t been taken away,” said George.

  Taken as opposed to taking it himself. Carl and his men must have paid George a visit. Lionel probably wouldn’t have had any other players’ names in his Rolodex, but he would have kept his buddy Westlake’s number on file.

  I pretended not to pick up on George’s phrasing, since I would have to play out a scene of shock over suggestions Lionel was murdered, what did the cops say and blah, blah, blah.

  “Did you go?” I asked simply.

  “To his funeral? Yes, I did. It was all right.” He turned his attention to chopping up a couple of limes. “Nice service. I invited a couple of the others—Helena, Cahill. Vivian didn’t want—” He suddenly remembered his tact. “She didn’t feel like going.”

  That could explain how Vivian learned about Lionel. The cops had told George, and George had confided this information to Vivian. Unless, of course, she knew before and was our murderer. Got to check her alibi, I told myself again.

  No Neil at tonight’s game. Not that I really expected him so soon after his run-in with the Met.

  “How are you holding up, George?”

  “Not too well, actually,” he confided.

  “Sorry.”

  “I heard you’re going out with Giradeau.”

  And he had heard because I had allowed it to circulate back through Helena. I wanted to see what effect the news would have. As likeable as George was, I realized I couldn’t rule him out yet as a suspect.

  “Are you?” he asked me flat out. “Going out with him?”

  I let out a tired breath. “George…”

  “Teresa, I thought you and I, well—”

  “Oh, come on, George,” I said. “Look where we are! You watched Neil fucking me right on a table just like that one. And you got off on it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you think I was going to be exclusive in my dating? Are you expecting that of me?”

  “N—No,” he said, somewhat timidly. “No, I haven’t the right.”

  “And if you must know, Daniel did ask me out,” I whispered. “You and I had our little shopping trip, and you haven’t called. What were you waiting for?”

  God, what a bitch, I’m acting, I thought. I was technically in the right, sure, but if he wasn’t our killer then I was using a nice guy as my personal cat-toy.

  All part of the job and the role I was playing. And there are all kinds of ways to dangle your bait. But boy, it sucked.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered, which just made me feel worse. “You’re right. I shouldn’t be asking you things like this.”

  Woo, boy.

  “Let’s forget about it,” I said, my hands on his shoulders, and I gave him a short kiss on the lips. I nearly told him to call me, but he already thought I had led him on somehow, and my dance card was getting awfully full lately. Better to see what he does.

  I went off to mingle, putting my arm briefly around Daniel Giradeau’s waist, playing the flirt.

  “What are you two discussing?” I asked pleasantly.

  “Gossip,” replied Cahill. “There’s always a buzz over fresh talent, new blood. God knows Helena got us very worked up over you.”

  “So who is she?”

  “Not a she.”

  “Oh?”

  “Vivian provided the bloke’s introduction to our organiser,” said Cahill. “Don’t know how she knows him, and she’s doing her tee-hee girlish act whenever I ask. I presume she caught him in her web at some party. So blame her if
the chap turns out to be a dud. But he sounds promising. Might actually be someone worth talking to. He’s had all kinds of adventures, apparently.”

  Giradeau was sceptical. “There’s some nonsense going around that he was with one of those corporate military outfits in Iraq, the new dogs of war. Well, people make things up, don’t they? To make themselves look better.”

  “But these fellows are real,” Cahill insisted, just for the fun of the debate. “I mean Britain used them, the Americans used them. They have to come from somewhere! You ask him tonight, Daniel. You find out for us.” He let out one of his boisterous laughs.

  No, Giradeau didn’t have to ask, not for my sake anyway.

  The guy coming in. Diamond chip blue eyes, boyish curl of blond hair across his forehead, pale white skin lightly tanned. Good body on him, and I should know.

  It wasn’t Iraq. It was Africa.

  Simon. Simon Highsmith, and what is he doing here? Second question: what the hell can you do about it?

  I tried to melt into a corner by the fireplace as he let Cahill take his raincoat and Vivian give him a showy hug and a kiss on both cheeks. George shyly shook his hand, and Ayako hovered, stroking her glass tumbler. And then he saw me.

  He saw me. Surprise on his face, of course. Didn’t come over. Avoiding me.

  No. Scratch that. He doesn’t want to know me here. And since I wasn’t coming to him, he knew I didn’t want to know him here either. Okay, you know about you, so what’s his reason?

  Then Cahill called us to the game and went around the table, making formal introductions. And Simon kept hiding in plain sight, pretending we were strangers. Just as I did.

  Flip go the cards. Flip, flip, flip, each player scooping up his hand, the soft crunch of the deck as it goes back to the green felt of the table.

  “What did you say your line of work was, Mr. Highsmith?” asks Giradeau.