by Rhys Ford
As I mounted the steps, I noticed the man on the porch was, at most, in his late teens, and if possible, even larger than my mind could comprehend. I was tall, but he stood nearly a foot taller than me and a solid six inches or so wider across the shoulders. He saw me look at him, and he straightened, distancing his head from mine even more.
“Hey, Mr. McGinnis.” I tried not to flinch, hearing myself age about twenty years as he spoke.
“Hey.” I nodded my chin at him. It might not have earned me cool points, but maybe I could gain back a decade or so of my youth. “Which one are you?”
“Mo. Martin’s my dad.” Dangling a set of keys from his fingers, he gave me a sly smile. “He said if I picked Nana up this afternoon, I could have the car tonight to go out with.”
“Excellent deal.” I saw movement in the office, shadows moving behind the black-screen security door. “Guess I better get in there before she comes out here and gets me.”
“Yeah, you don’t want that,” he rumbled. “Nana told me to wait out here on account that you all had business. That okay?”
“Oh yeah, it’s all good.” Nodding again, I braced myself for the Brinkerhoffs. “I’ll send her out. Sorry you had to wait.”
“No problem.” His grin was wide, creasing his strong face nearly in half. “I got out of mowing the lawn. Sissy had to do it instead.”
There wasn’t a gender line dividing tasks in the Clan of Claudia, and other than not being massive enough to form a sea wall to hold back a tsunami, the girls in the family were expected to do the same chores as the boys and vice versa. Self-sufficiency was a stern requirement in that genetic pool. Made me wonder what they did to the ones who failed to live up to their matriarch’s expectations.
Dressed, Mrs. Brinkerhoff looked much more of the traditional grandmother I’d had in mind when I set out to stalk her the night before. There was not a shred of black studded leather in sight, her lush body covered by a floral-print dress. She sat primly in one of the comfortable wing chairs I’d reupholstered in a red faux suede, her trim legs crossed at the ankles and her dainty feet encased in a pair of sensible black pumps. If it wasn’t for the knife-sharp glare she gave me when I came through the door, I’d have expected her to dab her index finger with grandma spit and wipe a spot clean off my face.
I wasn’t planning on getting within less than five feet of her.
It went smoothly. Her husband spoke for the most part while Claudia stood behind me, providing me with at least visual backup. I wasn’t above being thankful for it. I’d already learned that I’m not invincible to bullets, and Mrs. Brinkerhoff’s purse was certainly large enough to hold a sawed-off shotgun. If things went against it, I planned on grabbing Mr. Brinkerhoff and using him as a shield while Claudia escaped out the front door.
The door had barely closed behind them when Claudia breathed a sigh of relief, fanning herself with a stack of papers. Her grandson’s bulk cast a long shadow across the screen door, and she waved at him, telling him to go warm up the car and she’d follow along in a moment.
“Thanks, honey.” I gave her a kiss on the cheek, pulling back before she smacked me again. “You’re a sweetheart for staying, even though I’m sure I could have taken them.”
“I just wanted to see if they were going to give you crap about the bill.” Grabbing her purse, she hunted around in its depths until she came out with a pair of oversized sunglasses. Putting them on, she patted at her hair and headed to the door. “I charged them for repairing your car window and a little extra for replacing the clothes that you tore on that fence.”
“I didn’t tear….” I stopped, very familiar with Claudia’s creative billing techniques. “Got it. Have a good night.”
“You too.” She stepped onto the porch, stopping to give me one last critical look. “You have a good weekend. Be sure to get some food in you.”
“Look at me. Do I look like I’m starving?” I patted my stomach, straining to create a pot belly. “Promise. I’ll eat.”
Letting the door slam behind her, Claudia gave me a parting shot. “And something other than red meat. I swear, Cole, I’m going to come in one day and you’ll have turned into a cow.”
I’D PLANNED on kicking around the house until mid-evening, then driving down to the club where Hyun-Shik had died. Then the phone rang, and I found myself being talked into having a quick beer with an ex-cop I’d worked with. I’d missed getting the shit beaten out of me that morning, so I thought I owed Bobby at least a crack at my brain. Hell, I couldn’t even begin to tally the debts I owed to Bobby. Stopping off to spend some time with him seemed like a very small price to pay.
Robert Dawson was a burly, twenty-five-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department. He was winding down his career while I was coming up. We worked together on some cases, and then after I got shot, he’d come by every once in a while to check up on me. There was a solid friendship between us, something I was grateful for as I fought through the pain. Bobby was there with bad jokes and smuggled-in hamburgers. I decided, after two weeks of broth and Jell-O, that a true friend was worth his weight in rare, greasy food.
There were always rumors going on around the departments, tidbits of gossip that no one really paid attention to. I had my own problems to deal with. I never hid my sexuality. If someone asked if I had a girlfriend, I’d respond no, because my boyfriend would be pissed off. Eventually, people realized I wasn’t joking.
Bobby took a different route. He lay low, keeping any relationship he had hidden, even from the closest of his friends. My getting shot affected him probably as much as it did me, and he took it upon himself to change things. Putting in for retirement, he opened the door of the closet he’d hidden in for decades and stepped out, never looking back. He lost a lot of friends after that, and to this day, he says he has no regrets, other than he should have done it sooner.
One afternoon as he sat next to my hospital bed, a grey-flecked, muscular older man whose face was creased from squinting against the sun and laughing, he asked me if I forgave him for not being open sooner.
I told him there was nothing to forgive. We both knew there wasn’t a lot of room for a rainbow behind the blue line. He’d done what he felt he should do, and I’d made my choices. At that moment, I wasn’t so sure my decision had been the right one. Bobby said, after everything that happened, he could say the same thing about himself.
“You are a sight for sore eyes, boy.” Bobby stretched his arms over his head, resting his boots on the edge of the low table between our seats. “About time you decided to spend some time relaxing.”
“You saw me a couple of days ago. Shit, we’re not married or anything.” I sniffed at the nonalcoholic beer the server brought me. It wouldn’t have been my first choice, but I wanted my head clear when I drove down to Dorthi Ki Seu. “What’s up?”
We’d fallen into a routine of sorts, boxing on some days and sharing a round of beers at a bar near my house on others. Sometimes we were joined by other mutual friends, but today it was just me and Bobby taking up residence in one of the corners.
“I expected to at least see you this morning in the ring,” Bobby said, watching a much younger man asking the bartender to refill his drink. “Then I noticed you limping and figured you might have caught some tail last night and overdid it.”
“Oh, I caught tail. I just had to throw it back,” I joked. I spent a few minutes telling Bobby the story of Mrs. Brinkerhoff and her shotgun, not skipping over the gory details of me running through the lawn with my tail tucked between my legs.
His booming laugh echoed against the walls and made me smile. On the job, he’d been so tightly controlled, I often wondered if he even had a heartbeat. Breaking years of silence was good for Bobby, and I enjoyed being around to see him laugh as hard as he did. It was like he was making up for lost time.
“God, stop talking, kid.” He rubbed at his face with a napkin, wiping his mouth and mustache. “You’re going to make me pee my pants.”
“Tha
t’s what happens when you get old.” I nodded sagely. “Next we’ll be fitting you for a diaper and feeding you baby food.”
“Keep it up and I’ll make sure you don’t have enough teeth left in your mouth that the boys will be lining up for blocks to date you.” I earned the stinging punch on my arm, and I was sure it was going to bruise beautifully come morning. Lifting his empty mug for the server to see, he ordered himself another beer. “So what are you working on now?”
“Suicide case,” I said, setting my bottle down and following Bobby’s gaze. The young man turned, meeting Bobby’s eyes and smiling. “Don’t you have enough phone numbers by now?”
“One can never have too many phone numbers,” he retorted. Bobby became all business, his face turning solemn. “Tell me about your case.”
“Young Korean man killed himself at a sex club called Dorthi Ki Seu. Mike asked me to look into it for the family.” It felt good to talk about the Kims and what happened. I missed having a partner to bounce ideas off of, and Bobby was the closest thing to a partner I had these days. He bent forward, listening intently and letting me ramble until I eventually got to Jae-Min.
“You should see him, damned pretty. Not feminine, just… I don’t know, sexy. There’s this thing about him. It’s like he’s just a bit feral.” Exhaling, I ran my finger along the rim of the bottle, listening to the sing of my wet skin on the glass. “And I swear to God, I could hear him purring underneath his words. Smelled good too. You know how I am about guys and how they smell.”
“Yeah, I know.” Bobby looked bemused, and I quirked an eyebrow at him.
“What?”
“It’s good to hear you talk about a guy. Nice to see you getting back out there.”
“No… no.” If I’d shaken my head more, it would have fallen off. “I’m not interested. Hell, I don’t even plan on seeing him again for the rest of my life.”
“Cole, he’s good-looking and made you laugh. What more do you want? You don’t have to marry the guy. Just go grab a burger or something and see where it goes.” The bar’s noise suddenly dropped, and Bobby leaned in closer, keeping his voice low. “It’s been a couple of years now. Almost three, yeah? Isn’t it time you started to look at guys, at least?”
“I look at them all the time.” Protesting didn’t seem to help my cause. He just sat back and nodded at me like I was some wayward child he needed to save. “Hell, didn’t I just check out that kid at the bar?”
“You looked at him like you were trying to decide if he was going to hold the place up.” A sip of beer left foam on Bobby’s mustache, and he licked it off with a swipe of his tongue. “Cole, you were never apologetic about who you were, and then after that thing with Rick, you shut down.”
“I’m not ready. It’s too soon.” It was all I could give him. Not much, really, but it was all I had. Jae-Min had been pretty to look at and dangerous because he made me want. He kindled a thirst in me that I’d thought had died along with my lover, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to have that kind of desire back in my life. “Bobby, he was good-looking and exotic, but that’s the end of it. Something to share with a friend over a beer. Just a story.”
“All I’m saying is, you should start doing something with yourself other than digging into other people’s problems.” He drained the rest of his beer, setting the mug down a little harder than he needed to. “Or pretty soon, all you’ve got left is those stories to tell and an empty house. Don’t make the same mistakes that I did. Live a little bit, kid, before there isn’t any more life left in you.”
Chapter 4
DORTHI KI SEU wasn’t like any other gay bar I knew. The first time I’d been there, I’d been amazed at how clean and, for lack of a better word, civil everything was. I’d been a part of a task force, a junior member but still apparently high enough up the food chain to warrant a field trip. It had been a good experience, and in more ways than one.
Getting in was easy. There wasn’t a cover charge, although I got a thorough looking-at by the young man at the door. Stepping inside, I could see why I’d gotten such close scrutiny. If my light brown hair and height didn’t stand out, then the lack of business attire did me in. Dressed down at Dorthi Ki Seu meant taking off your suit jacket and hanging it from the back of the chair.
The interior décor leaned heavily toward what I imagined a Victorian gentleman’s club looked like, expensive wall paneling and small clusters of leather chairs. There was a definite Asian flavor to the furnishings, discreet, tasteful, and at odds with other gay clubs I’d been to. I could barely hear the murmur of conversations around me, and the lighting was dimmed down to a nearly intimate level.
Waiters attended to individual parties, sometimes a single man or, at other tables, a pair. The exclusively male crowd ignored me, a politeness I guessed was more cultural than lack of interest. I was lucky I’d found a table, even one as far from the stage as possible. The place was packed, and it showed no signs of letting up.
I was quickly measured up by the white-shirted waiter who’d come to see what I wanted to drink. He was young, fresh-faced, and good-looking enough to make a man look twice. After staring at him for a moment, I realized I was comparing him to another Korean man I’d just met.
Tapping at the order pad with his pencil, he tilted his head to look at me. “Something from the bar, hyung?”
The hyung word confused me. To my untrained ears, it was the same word that Jae-Min used for Hyun-Shik.
“I’d love a whiskey.” Whiskey not only sounded good, but there were some bottles I’d seen at the bar that I lusted for and sticking to the no-alcohol rule I’d set up a few hours ago nixed sampling. “Just a diet Coke, please.”
“Is diet Pepsi okay?” His smile was warm, an underlying promise of sex in his voice. “I can add lime if you want.”
“Thanks.” I watched his ass move as he walked away. Whoever did the hiring knew what they were doing.
The room smelled of cigarettes and expensive booze. I knew there were private karaoke rooms off the main room, usually rented by drunken, middle-aged Korean men for God knows what, but apparently singing was involved. Even more private rooms were upstairs, and by all accounts, these were for exclusive members of the club. Just small getaways where they could relax, or so we’d been told.
It was only considerate that these rooms had beds or pillow pits in them.
When I was a junior detective, Dorthi Ki Seu had become a place of interest for a multi-city Vice shakedown. There were other spots that were more lucrative, but Dorthi Ki Seu was a holy grail for one of the senior guys I worked with. That was how I met Scarlet.
The detective eventually arrested Scarlet and a few of the other main floor entertainers, cross-dressing gay men who worked the stage of the club either singing or dancing. She’d been attractive then, and I didn’t expect her to have changed. When I placed the cuffs on her, I apologized when I cinched a wrist too tightly. I loosened it and asked if she preferred to be addressed as a woman or a man. Her smile was brilliant, making her already gorgeous Filipino face heartbreakingly beautiful.
Scarlet spent less than an hour in the holding cell after her phone call. I never knew who she called, but within twenty-four hours of her arrest, all charges were dropped against the Dorthi Ki Seu staff, and the task force’s head detective was reassigned. Last I heard, he was manning an information substation on the pier.
It’d been made clear to us that Scarlet had very powerful friends, friends who would move heaven and earth for her. Or at the very least, make her problems disappear. But I liked her. She was sweet and funny, not to mention in possession of a wicked sense of humor. And I admired the comfort she had in her own skin. I envied that. I’ve still not found it.
I’d given her my card when she was released, asking her to call if she needed anything. She called casually, more to keep in touch and maybe pump me for information about what was going on in the world of vice and cops. Scarlet was always good for a laugh. I’d just not felt like
laughing for a while.
The soft music playing over the club’s speakers quieted, and the lights went up on the stage. It was nearly ten o’clock, time for Scarlet’s first show. My heart stopped for a brief second as a smoky tune rolled out of the piano on stage, and she stepped out from behind the stage curtains.
She was as seductively gorgeous as I remembered her.
I’d worked Vice long enough to spot a ladyboy, but Scarlet was a different level altogether. As she approached the box-style mic set at the corner of the stage, a spotlight followed her lithe body, and she smiled at the crowd. Even knowing how old she was, Scarlet was flawless, showing miles of café au lait skin, and her luminous black eyes were expertly rimmed with a dark kohl to emphasize their almond shape.
Red sequins flashed under the lights, her slinky gown slit up past mid-thigh and down to her belly button. Her glossy black hair was up, very Audrey Hepburn, and studded with large diamonds near her right ear. She looked expensive, like the kind of woman none of us could afford. I certainly couldn’t, even if I leaned that way.
“You look at me and smile.” Sex oozed from Scarlet’s throat.
There was no other way to put it. She might be a man under the dress, but she knew how to cast a pure womanly spell. Playing with the Etta James tune, she worked the stage, leaning over to croon at a pack of suited men sitting at the edge of the lights. They loved it, grinning back like schoolboys who’d earned a gold star from their teacher.
“Miss Scarlet got your message. She said to come to the back when she’s done.” A large hand clamped down on my shoulder, and I found myself looking up at a Korean version of one of Claudia’s mountainous children. If ever I spoke to my father again, I was going to have a talk with him about the lack of enormous in our gene pool.
Not wanting to startle him into stampeding, I replied, “Thanks.”
There were a few more songs, and I listened with half an ear, more interested in secretly watching the men who approached a wide doorway cordoned off with a thick velvet rope and protected by the much larger older-brother-in-arms of the man who gave me Scarlet’s message.