Murder at Willow Slough

by Josh Thomas

  Louie stopped at a traffic light outside the #2 bar. “Not too many cars here. How nice. Business at my own bar is up 500% now that I have Casey and Jamie. It’s called advertising. Then hire young bartenders for a little tits and ass. It’s real simple, fellas.”

  “Don’t handsome, principled young journalists add to your paper’s cachet?”

  No way Louie would admit that.“I’ve never forgiven Jamie for calling me a profiteer, even though the article was fair overall. I paid to be pilloried in my own paper! It established once and for all that The Times is editorially independent, but it cut me like an incision. I should have fired their asses for insubordination—but they did tell the truth, that the bar makes a very tidy profit.”

  Only later did he realize the article boosted his status; he was a successful entrepreneur. That’s when he started running more fundraisers, like the shitheads wanted all along. It was even good for business, but Jamie was too damn smart.

  Louie went on, “It’s admirable, I suppose, that Foster and Jordan are always trying to make Gay rights some big political thing. They’re right, not that I ever let on. Here lately I even vote the way they want me to, for every high-tax Democrat that comes down the pike. Standing in line with my Times Voters’ Guide like every other fag and dyke in Columbus. There are whole precincts here now—Clintonville, German Village, the Short North—where half the voters are clutching their handy guide out of The Times. It makes voting fun, a town meeting of the Queer Society. Guys whooping it up in church basements while elderly precinct committeewomen try to act like nothing’s happening, ‘Do you still live on Whittier Street?’

  “And a whole chorus screaming, ‘When he’s not on his knees in the park!’

  “At least we’ve got something to show for it. The judges are getting better, and that’s important in the bar business. You never know when some customer—or employee—is going to show up with a tale about being entrapped, abused, beaten up, robbed, hit over the head with a baseball bat. With a real newspaper now, with the hotshots’ precious credibility, we can pressure the cops, tell everyone what happened, warn people even. Go after the bashers, attend their trials, publish their pictures, wave bye-bye as they shuffle off in leg chains.

  “That’s something I don’t mind paying for. Anti-Gay crime is no longer tolerated in Columbus, Ohio. Foster goes after the bashers like a junkyard dog. The Strangler thing was just another anti-Gay crime at first. But that was so long ago, so many dead guys ago, I can’t even remember when it was.”

  “It’s a publisher’s job to be a cheapskate.”

  “Foster’s even got an expense account! If I didn’t think so much of them I’d fire them. Now we just threaten each other with it once a week. Foster will have a tantrum, or Jordan will yank out his contract, and soon I’m talked out of another thousand bucks. God, they can make a racket. Then five minutes later, smooch smooch and we’re back to normal. Just like kids—they always cost money too.”

  His youngest daughter got accepted at Princeton last week. He clutched, so proud of her. But the tuition bills would kill him. He wondered if the customers would tolerate a 10¢ price increase on a Bud.

  He eyed a skyscraper. It wasn’t tall enough to contain his pride.

  “The cops are getting better, too, it helps to have a little clout. It’s fun to have candidates for mayor traipse through my office every four years, looking for that endorsement and its automatic 40,000 votes. They have to sit in my office, even if they think they’re there to talk to Foster and Jordan. You come to me, baby! Plus I get to throw in a few business-related questions, which the hotshots never think about. Of course they always outvote me on the endorsements. They don’t know I just vote for whoever they don’t want. Keep ‘Em Honest, it’s another of Mascaro’s Rules.

  “And every December for the last several years, we get three big Christmas cards: The White House, Washington. Know why? The Ohio primary was very competitive last time. We’re circulated statewide, our endorsement matters. We influence every Gay and Lesbian voter in the swing state of Ohio.

  “Not too shabby for an immigrant’s son who never went to college, eh? Even if I do like dick. The entire world likes dick, why should I be any different?”

  “Excuse me, except Lesbians.”

  “I have Gay women on the payroll, they’re hard workers. The only problem with Lesbians is that there aren’t enough of them, and they don’t spend anything like the guys do. The women have two bars, the men have ten. The men’s bars advertise, only one of the ladies’ can afford to. Demographics, I didn’t invent this stuff. But jeez, next time, hire stupid people and tell them what to do. No more ‘journalists.’ Hire fags so stupid they’ll make bartenders look like scholars. And change the name back to Gay Times. That’s what started this whole thing.”

  “The Times is one of the few Gay papers built on the classic model, with a successful businessperson running the money, but having no influence on the editorial content. What does being the publisher mean to you?”

  “People look at me with new respect. I’m not just a bar owner anymore, some old drag queen, keeper of a sleazy tavern; I’m giving something back. The Gay community associates me with The Times and my Gay and Lesbian bookstore as much as the bar now. So do the media. Every reporter in town subscribes to us to read Jamie. He’s a star, advertisers fly out of the woodwork. He adds excitement to Columbus, sophistication, sparkle. We helped the city make up its mind about Gay rights. A few years ago John Preston even named Columbus the best Gay city in America—not New York, not San Francisco—and here I am, right in the thick of it.”

  In a rare flash of modesty Louie added,“But it’s not just me.The whole Gay and Lesbian community here is looked on with more respect.”

  Besides Stonewall Union and the all-important activists, it was Casey’s and Jamie’s doing, but he’d never let them know that, it broke a rule. Don’t tell ’em you love ’em, they’ll want more money.

  “If he’s that goodlooking and talented, how long can you keep him?”

  “That’s the real question. At contract renewal the non-Gay weekly made me shell out an extra five grand for his services. The Pinnacle has three times our circulation and Jamie loves the power of big numbers. But he also needs the freedom Casey gives him.”

  It was unspoken, but Louie knew why. If anything happens to Rick, I’m toast. Jamie didn’t change jobs for fear he’d be stuck on assignment when Rick needed him.

  “What’s he like privately? Help me get inside his head so I know what to ask him.”

  “I have to admit, he’s kind and thoughtful. But so hurt inside, so aloof. He won’t set foot in bars unless there’s genuine news, and I’m not talking Mr. Ohio Leather.

  “But I know human nature, his self-control won’t last forever. Maybe he’s really a vampire. You know he’s going to kill you, but he’s so beautiful you can’t resist. Go ahead and bite me, so I can feel alive!”

  Jeez, fantasizing over an employee. Louie swore off reading any more Anne Rice books.

  “What else? Last call, Mr. Barman.”

  “When I hired Casey, I basically left him alone. When he hired Jamie, we turned into a real newspaper. I started going into the office every day, business really picked up. We bitch at each other constantly, it’s fun. I like him, and I know he respects me. He’s very sensitive and caring sometimes, when he’s not being a spoiled brat.”

  Having softened his subject up, the Clarion reporter went for the kill. “He’s very well-known in New York. You admit he has the looks of a supermodel. Multiple sources indicate he was, or is, Calvin’s lover.”

  “Then your sources are full of it! I can name the exact day Jamie lost his virginity and with whom—Rick Lawson. Jamie came swaggering in the next day like he’d just invented sex. As for New York, he went to journalism school at Columbia, where he learned to be a Pulitzer Prize finalist, not some gossip-mongering queer in La-La Land.” Louie punched off, click!

  He fumed. It was
a hatchet job, all right, the guy didn’t even ask about the Strangler. Once again Jamie was right.

  But Calvin’s lover? Not even Jamie could pull that off. Louie laughed all the way to the bar.

  He parked his new black Cadillac. What’s the use of owning the #1 Gay bar if you can’t have your own spot next to the door? “Make it a double, Miss Thang,” he called, hoisting himself onto his stool with the Don’t Even Think About Sitting Here sign.

  The boy behind the bar with his tits hanging out scurried. Like an employee, for once. If Louie wasn’t careful, he’d even break out in a smile. But he was careful enough to notice that everyone in the place had his nose buried in the latest issue of The Ohio Gay Times, where they couldn’t help but be exposed to ads for the #1 bar in town. Damn smile broke out anyway. Nippleboy brought his drink, “What are you so happy about?”

  Louie growled, “I’m raising the price of beer ten cents.” ***

  His passions were beer prices and porn stars; Casey had other things to worry about—a reporter’s sexual magnetism versus a killer’s sexual violence. Dear Christ, why did we print something so inflammatory? But the libel lawyer vetted the piece, and Casey fought hard for Jamie’s incendiaries.

  A week later an unsigned note arrived from Indianapolis. It said, “I know who you are, too.”

  4

  Counties

  A year and a half of scoops passed, eighteen months of pain and death; a time of increasing accomplishment, though Jamie didn’t catch the Strangler and neither did anyone else.

  Labor Day weekend, via I-70, Jamie headed west for Indiana and his mother’s house. He was fine until he hit the Quincy County line. Then the green highway sign reached inside the Acura and slapped him.

  Since Schmidgall died, he hadn’t had to think about it so much; no new victims. Now he could think of nothing else: “ENTERING QUINCY COUNTY.”

  He drove on, stunned at first, then angry. He found himself glaring at a lush cornfield. Beyond, scrubby oaks marked a ditch separating the field from a pasture, where a dozen lazy Angus grazed. Damn cattle, why didn’t they tell the cops what they saw?

  Through Dayton he’d enjoyed Sheryl Crow on the CD player, but now he couldn’t stand her cynical ennui. He hit Stop so hard his finger burned.

  The A/C suddenly wasn’t putting out enough. He cranked it up a notch, then another. Cool air rushed his face to make amends.

  Ahead of him an old lady in a K-car full of pre-schoolers poked along. He slammed down his turn signal, lurched into the passing lane. Kids squealed out the windows like a farrow at its first trough of slop.

  The strangulations started when Jamie was in junior high, so the Strangler’s 15-year run wasn’t his fault. Still, he and Casey bore a singular guilt, which they could not absolve with a Pulitzer nomination. They failed to follow up on a tip a year earlier; two men died as a result.

  There is power in journalism, power to uplift or to destroy. Jamie and Casey learned their lesson the hardest way. Once they finally broke the story, they pounded it fiercely, diligently, long after everyone else gave up. But what looked like heroic enterprise was really a shameful game of catchup.

  In three years since, no fresh kills. Was The Times at all responsible for that? In their deepest hearts they hoped so, but it was hubris even to ask.

  Jamie looked left, saw an image of Aaron Haney form on a white-painted barn, smiling in an out-of-focus Polaroid at his last birthday party. That was in Year 10. Around Labor Day in Year 11 someone found him strangled and dumped a few miles south of here in Tenmile Creek, a Gay child of poverty who made himself a nurse. Haney was the one who convinced them that the murders could be serial. Kenny Dyson, their closeted Dayton stringer, tried to tell them a year earlier, when Christopher Carnes turned up in a creek outside New Lisbon, the third young Indianapolis man to wind up in Quincy County with the life wrung out of his neck.

  Kenny remembered Buddy Trueblood in Year 6, then Brian Greene in Year 7—a space of three years, then Carnes, all single young men from Indianapolis dumped in the same Ohio county. Kenny argued that Carnes showed the murders could be connected. But Kenny had no documentation, so Casey didn’t buy it. In Year 11 Haney paid full price instead.

  As Bulldog told Jamie after the scoop, “Two is a coincidence, three’s a pattern. We knew exactly what we had as soon as we found out Carnes was from Indy.”

  Two smalltown cops knew what they had, but they didn’t notify the media, they didn’t warn the Gay community; they didn’t ask for help. Bulldog and Hickman were competent investigators, but it was like Barney Fife and Goober going after the Unabomber.

  When Kenny relayed the Haney news, Jamie got confirmation from the sheriff and broke the story. The Straight media ran with it. Then, two weeks later, the Strangler dropped Bobby Hanger in an abandoned railroad bed one county north of here in Stillwater, as if to say, “Your move, Mr. Queer Reporter.”

  For three days the murders and The Ohio Gay Times were front-page in the Dayton market, with big play statewide. Bulldog’s boss called a press conference, admitted 10% of what was happening and down-played the rest like mad. Jamie himself was the lead on all three Dayton TV stations that night, and front-page the following Sunday (“Tiny Tabloid, Big Story”) in the Dayton Tribune.

  Then there were new fires for the dailies to chase, new celebs to hype, and the Dayton blow-drieds stopped talking about those five young men from Indiana strangled and dumped across the state line.

  Later, when Bulldog trusted him more, he told Jamie that Indiana had six more cases that fit the pattern, “victims with ties to the Gay community in Indianapolis.” On his own Jamie found another in northern Ohio, despite the sheriff’s repeated denials.

  And then there was the topper: the alleged connection between the Quincy County Strangler and Schmidgall the Stabber. Jamie couldn’t report it, though he wanted to desperately. He closed his eyes briefly, wondered why he was alive.

  Haney was the link, Jamie the publicist, Hanger the exclamation point. All within ten miles of this goddamn interstate. Why had Casey killed the story after Carnes? Why hadn’t he made Kenny call the sheriff, ask around, dig a little deeper?

  Then Jamie remembered, Kenny was just a sharp tipster; he couldn’t call the sheriff without revealing his own Gayness. Meanwhile Casey was battling Louie because the workhorse computer was crashing every day, not enough RAM, not enough staff; Rick was getting sick and no one knew why, and…

  “Because we were scared to death. Stupid and naive and terrified,” Jamie said aloud. Sadness and shame tingled quietly down his spine.

  He passed an exit. The killer had turned left instead of right off the interstate, north to Stillwater County and the spot he’d picked out for Bobby Hanger. The killer sure knew great places to dump bodies. Sometimes it took months before someone discovered them, then even longer to figure out who they were. Police can’t solve a murder when the victim’s name is Doe.

  Did the Strangler’s success at concealing bodies mean he was from around here? Some people, locals, thought so; they didn’t take into account that he’d been equally successful in five other counties. To Jamie it meant that the guy spent his spare time scouting out dumping grounds, like Schmidgall and his sugar daddy had, taking poor Sammy Barlow to the abandoned farmhouse and hacking him to death. Jamie made a fist and pounded repeatedly on the steering wheel.

  This was getting him nowhere. He punched the Accel button on his cruise control, and the Acura sucked in fuel and air. He didn’t let up till the dial hit 80.

  If he got busted for speeding here, he’d just hand over Bulldog’s business card: “Prosecutor’s Investigator, Quincy County, Ohio.” He might get a ticket anyway, but none of the cops would fuck with him. They’d all heard about that Gay reporter and them thar homicides.

  Today of all days, he wanted out of here.

  The sun was in his eyes now. He reached for neon yellow shades and put them on. In his rearview mirror he saw a blue Miata convertible gaining
on him. Grimacing, he mashed Accel another 10 mph. The blue car didn’t compete, not that this gave him much satisfaction.

  He didn’t slow down till he reached the Indiana line. Over the eastbound lanes, Ohio had a big steel arch advertising the governor’s name at taxpayers’ expense. Indiana had got rid of that nonsense; its modest westbound sign read merely, “The People of Indiana Welcome You.” No politicians. As a native Hoosier, he took a little pride in that.

  The change of venue calmed him a little, but the highway turned bumpier. He eased the cruise control down to 65. The Miata soon whizzed by.

  He switched on the radio, country music out of Richmond, Indiana. He couldn’t stand country music; it had nothing to do with where he was from. He jammed the seek button, finally landed on WOWO out of Fort Wayne. Stopped there and didn’t know why.

  A DJ and a newswoman were talking about festivals, restaurants, a nearby lake, outings for the holiday weekend. It was a real conversation, not the usual radiobabble between commercials. Jamie didn’t recognize any of the places they were talking about. It was hopelessly smalltown.

  He liked it.

  He turned the sound down and pictured his mother. Thelma was going into the hospital for an aneurysm operation and Jamie volunteered to be the Hallmark card. His older brother Stone lived in southern Indiana, but no one thought of him to stay with their mother. Stone hadn’t spoken to Jamie in twelve years, since Jamie came out as Gay. Big Bro Danny had long ago fled to Denver; he was more than willing to fly back east, but Jamie could drive to West Lafayette in four hours.

  Besides, he was good at cheering the sick. Experienced too. On the tenth it would be six months since Rick died. He didn’t let himself follow that thought, trying to prevent an anxiety attack.

  The land turned hilly; he wasn’t sure why. But the valleys made a nice contrast to the prairie. He drove on, past the turnoff to New Castle and the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame. Its billboard had a giant pair of black hi-tops in 3-D. A smile cracked his lips. What other state has a monument to high school hoops?