“It must have been strange to you, taking in so much cash at once.”
Brad leaned back against his chair, looked around at the empty shop, and then back at me. “Well, between you and me and the lamppost, at first I thought she was somebody’s mistress. You know, she had a body that wouldn’t quit, and she liked to show it off. But she wasn’t much into sexy lingerie.”
I let my voice catch. “I just can’t believe she’s gone.”
He pushed out of the chair, squatted down next to me and took my hand. “You poor thing, you must be devastated,” he said. “I mean, to find out your only friend in town was murdered!”
“It’s a shock.” I caught my breath, and then sighed.
Brad nodded. “All her friends felt that way.”
A bell started ringing in my head. “You knew her other friends?”
“Well, more like she knew my friends.” Brad stood up and walked over to the cash wrap. It looked like he was getting ready to close up. “I know this group of guys, and they all got to know her and like her.” He looked up at me sadly. “I guess that’s almost the same as having friends.”
“Do you think I could, maybe, meet some of your friends?”
Using this guy who had been so nice to me was making me feel more and more like crap, but I needed some insight into this case, and if his friends could help me get to know Lucie better, then I would do what I had to do.
“I’m just going to meet them once I close up,” Brad said.
Though I really wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed and rest after a day’s hard surfing, I said, “Do you think I could kind of tag along? Like I said, I really don’t know anyone else up here.”
Brad looked me up and down, hands on hips. “I hope you don’t mind my saying, but you could use a little cleaning up before you go out in polite society.”
“I’ve got a room at the Hibiscus House. I could swing past there, clean up, and meet you wherever you want.” Finally, an emotion I didn’t have to feign; the eagerness I was showing was how I really felt.
“I’ll follow you there.” He locked the door, and shooed me toward my truck. “You need serious help, mister, and looking at you, I know you’re not going to find it in your room at the Hibiscus House.”
Brad drove a gold Toyota Camry with rainbow bumper stickers and a broken antenna, and he followed me as promised. I was embarrassed to let him into my room, which was a mess. There was no housekeeping staff, the furniture looked like it had come from the Salvation Army store, and I needed to do laundry, which was evident from various items of clothing strewn around on the floor.
“Are you sure you’re gay?” Brad said, standing behind me in the doorway. “My God, I’ve seen straight men who clean up better than this.”
“Well, if I’m not, then I’ve just knocked a big fat hole in my life for no reason,” I said. “I guess I should jump in the shower.”
“Not here.” Brad walked into the room and pulled open the half of the sliding closet door that actually worked. There were still a couple of clean shirts and pants hanging there. “OK, this, and this,” he said, pulling out a pair of Ralph Lauren chinos my mother had bought me and a black t-shirt that was almost a clone of his own.
He looked at me. “Boxers, right?” Without waiting for my assent, he walked over to the flimsy bureau and opened the top drawer. “Bad,” he said, holding up a pair with tropical fish on them. “Horrible,” were a pair spattered with ice cream cones, and “Awful” were a pair decorated with Santas and Christmas trees. “Jesus, you don’t get laid much, do you?” he asked. “Who would want to sleep with a man who wears these?” I didn’t want to admit to him that I liked those goofy boxers, and frankly, the few times I’d had sex with other guys, they’d come off so quickly they’d never been an issue. He finally found a striped pair that met with his approval.
I watched his whole performance with a kind of baffled amusement. He reminded me of Gunter, a gay man in Honolulu I knew, except that Gunter mixed his attitude with an athletic physicality that was as sexy as it was intimidating. Brad was simply a guy with no tolerance for bad fashion. He found a pair of loafers and a leather belt on the floor, and then said, “All right. You come with me now.”
I was eager to get to the bar to meet these other people who had known Lucie Zamora, but I had to humor Brad. He drove me to his apartment, a one-bedroom a couple of blocks off the Kam Highway, and led me without ceremony to his bathroom. “Strip, soldier,” he said. “Get in the shower, and don’t forget to moisturize.”
Brad’s shower was big enough for two, and I thought for the first few minutes that he might be joining me, which was a prospect I thought would be interesting—if I wasn’t in such a hurry to get to the bar and meet his friends. Instead, though, I was left alone with a shelf of grooming products. Lavender-scented bath soap, lemon moisturizer, shampoo, conditioner, shave gel, and a host of other products whose function I did not understand.
I used a disposable razor and a fog-free mirror in the shower to shave, and when I stepped out Brad was there with an oversized bath sheet. “Feel better?”
“Almost human.” I wrapped the towel around my waist and faced the mirror.
“Give me your hand.”
Brad squeezed a dollop of lotion into my palm. “Massage that into your hair, from the back forward.” When I finished, he handed me a comb. “You have good material. But if you don’t take care of it, it’ll never last. How old are you?” He turned me to face him. “Thirty?”
“Thirty-two.”
He looked me up and down. “You’ll do. Your clothes are on the bed.”
By then, even though I knew I had to get to that bar and meet Brad’s friends, I was starting to be disappointed. I didn’t expect every gay man I met to want to drag me into bed, but Brad obviously liked me, or he wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble. Yet… nothing was happening.
I shrugged, and got dressed. Ever since I admitted to myself that I was gay—which had been what, six weeks before—I had been horny as hell. I felt like a kid in a candy store who’d just been given his allowance, and permission to buy whatever he wanted. But it was getting difficult to balance those personal desires with my need to investigate this case. If I kept on thinking about having sex with every guy I met, I’d never make any progress.
I took a deep breath before I walked back to Brad’s living room, willing myself to remember the three dead surfers, to focus on what I had to do. “Now you look presentable,” Brad said, eyeing me up and down. “Every caterpillar has a butterfly inside.” He looked at his watch. “Good. We’ve still got thirty minutes left of happy hour.”
A Little Sugar
As Brad drove us down the Kam Highway, I asked him what had brought him to the North Shore. “You a surfer on your off hours?”
“Not at all,” he said, shaking his head violently. “The closest I get to surfing is looking for gay porn on the Internet.”
“Then what are you doing up here?”
“It’s a very ordinary sort of story,” he said, sighing. “I fell in love with a surfer boy and followed him up here. Of course it didn’t work out, and he moved on, but by the time he did I had started to work at Butterfly. The woman who owns the store lives in LA and only comes up here once a year, so I’m the de facto manager and I can do as I please.”
“Great gig.”
“She’s a friend of my parents,” he said. “I grew up outside LA, and no, I do not have any family members in the movie business.” He looked over at me. “That seems to be what every gay man asks me when he hears I’m from LA. Like if my father was some big movie producer I’d be selling ladies’ shmattes in a strip mall.”
“The question would never have occurred to me.”
“I can see that,” Brad said dryly. “Just from your underwear selection. Anyway, after Francisco dumped me, I looked up, saw that I was making decent money and I had a bunch of friends, so I figured I’d hang around and see what happened next.” He smiled.
“And then you came up to the store.”
He pulled in to the parking lot of a nondescript bar called “Sugar’s: The Sweetest Spot in Town” in a strip shopping center just before the Kam split off to head inland. From the outside, it wasn’t very appealing; the building needed paint, and it was shaded by a single half-dead palm tree. A police cruiser sat at the edge of the parking lot—tracking homos or anticipating bar fights. The wind was picking up, moving dark clouds across the sky and tossing trash around the lot.
“Here we are, hon,” Brad said. He took my hand. “Now I know you’re upset about Lucie, but we all have to move on. I’m sure once you get a colorful cocktail in front of you, you’ll cheer right up.”
The bartender wore a George Bush mask, and there were black and orange streamers hanging from the walls. Judging by the chorus of hellos that greeted us as we walked in the door, Brad was a regular. He steered us to a big round table at the back of the bar, in front of sliding glass doors. Outside, I could see a deck overlooking what looked like a small pineapple plantation, endless neat rows of spiky bromeliads, many already with a tiny pineapple nesting in their centers.
Five guys sat around the table, and I tried to connect their names to their characteristics as they were introduced to me. Jeremy was chubby, Rik was skinny, Larry was cute, and George was butch. The last guy, older than everyone else by at least ten years, was Ari. Everyone was gay, though; I figured that out. As was pretty much everybody else in the place. But there wasn’t the desperate, sex-based atmosphere I’d seen in gay bars in Honolulu; this was more like a place that friends got together for a couple of drinks. How it might change as the evening wore on, though, I couldn’t say.
I felt a wave of excitement building in me, almost as good as being out on the water, as each of the guys was presented. It was just as I had hoped when I convinced Brad to bring me—this network of men could be just the entrée I needed, and I could begin mining each of them for information about the murders.
“Guys, this is Kimo,” Brad said. “For those of you who are totally unaware of current events, he used to be a cop in Honolulu until they figured out he was gay. Now he’s like, totally a surfer dude.”
“You know we shun people who use that kind of language,” I said, only half joking. Most of the real surfers I knew could speak just as well as any college professor, though there are always a few really dumb ones who perpetuate the stereotype.
“Why, Brad’s a genius,” Jeremy said. “We all find ourselves, from time to time, though we know it’s fruitless…”
“Literally speaking,” his skinny friend Rik interrupted.
“Though we know it’s pointless,” Jeremy rephrased, “pining after straight surfer boys. But you’re the antidote to all that—a gay surfer boy!”
“Hardly a boy,” I said.
“Metaphorically speaking,” he said. “So as long as Brad is willing to share, we can pass you around amongst ourselves, whenever we feel that surfer-boy urge.”
“Jeremy Leddinger, I am not your pimp,” Brad said. “I am not anybody’s pimp. And I’ll have you know, Kimo is my friend. Not my boyfriend.”
“Then what’s with the Brad Jacobson makeover?” Jeremy asked. He leaned over to me. “Tell me you didn’t start out today looking like that.”
“I didn’t.” I felt the way I thought a ping-pong ball must, in the middle of a tournament. I didn’t mind, though. It was flattering.
“He needed a makeover,” Brad said. “I complied. End of story.”
“Gee, I hope it isn’t the end.” I batted my eyelashes at him. It seemed like the right thing to do.
The table roared, and Brad blushed. I felt a stiffening in my still-pressed chinos, and wondered if Brad was feeling the same thing.
“So do you make over every guy you meet?” I asked, when I finally had a chance to talk to Brad again.
“Just the ones who need it.” He looked at me and lowered his shoulders. “Okay, they all seem to need it. But you more than most.”
He looked around, and then leaned in close to me. “You actually never met Lucie, did you?”
“What makes you think that?”
“Because I’ve been watching you, and you’re asking questions about things you would know if you really had known Lucie.”
I looked at him in amazement. “Geez, you ever thought of becoming a detective, Brad? Cause you know there are departments on the mainland that take in gay cops.”
“I figured as much. I’ll bet you think that if you can figure out who killed Lucie, those cops might take you back.”
Give Brad points for seeing through me, though his take on the situation wasn’t quite correct. “I need to show them I’m still a good detective,” I said, thinking fast. That wasn’t far from the truth.
“We can help you,” Brad said. “Larry is a shopaholic like Lucie was; they used to compare notes all the time. Ari owns an apartment building where Jeremy lives, and where Lucie used to. George swings both ways, and he slept with Lucie at least once that I know of, because I walked in on them. And Rik was really friendly with Lucie, always wanting to know where she was. I’m sure he spent a lot of time with her.”
I was amazed yet again. It was just the kind of network that Sampson had hoped I’d tap into as a surfer. Behold the power of the homosexual.
“Let me get things moving.” Brad sat back, and when there was a lull in the conversation, he said, “I was kind of teary this afternoon. We got some new Armani in and the first person I thought of was Lucie.”
“Have they found who killed her yet?” Rik asked.
Brad shook his head. “But I have a little news flash for you.” He motioned for everyone to lean in close to the center of the table. “We now have our very own cop. If we all tell him what we know, maybe he can find out what really happened to her and Lucie can rest easier in her grave.”
“Our own Hawaii Five-O!” Jeremy said. “I still think Jack Lord is so masculine and handsome.” He sighed. “I wish they’d remake that show.”
“We could be your—what do they call them on TV—your confidential informants,” Rik said.
“You mean snitches,” George said, laughing.
“If there’s anything you know, that you want to tell me,” I said, “I can guarantee that it will get into the right hands. I know for a fact the investigating detectives weren’t able to find out much about Lucie or the others who were killed.”
“There were others!” Jeremy shrieked. “No one told us anything!”
I immediately regretted that slip of the tongue. But Brad saved me. “See, Kimo already knows a lot about the case. I mean, none of us even knew that anyone else had been killed. So we have to help him.”
“Who were the others?” Ari asked.
“A championship surfer named Mike Pratt,” I said. No response from the crowd. “And a Chinese computer guy named Ronald Chang.”
“Lucie had a friend named Ronnie,” Rik said. “He was a computer guy.”
“Yeah, I met him once,” Brad said. “Is that him?”
“I think so,” I said. “But I don’t know much about him either, so anything you guys know would be helpful.”
They all seemed eager, and my date book filled up. Breakfast the next morning with Ari, the landlord. I could surf until about three, when chubby Jeremy, who was a fourth grade teacher at Sunset Beach Elementary, could see me after school. Then cocktails with butch George Olsen and cute Larry Brickman followed by dinner with skinny Rik. “What about me?” Brad pouted.
“Ahh, you and I have tonight,” I said, taking his hand.
Brad blushed and the table cheered. The party broke up a little later, the rest of the guys going off wherever, leaving me and Brad at the big table at Sugar’s. I felt that I had made a lot of progress that evening, and I deserved a chance to put aside the homicide detective for a few hours and just be who I was—a lonely, horny gay man who had only recently admitted his sexuality, and who had no idea how to manage the feelings tha
t kept welling up inside. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you earlier,” I said to Brad. “I really appreciate everything you’ve done, and if you’re not into me, I totally understand.”
Brad nearly spit out the last of his strawberry daiquiri. “Not into you!” he sputtered. “You have the face of an angel and the body of death.”
I laughed. “Yeah, the guys are just lining up to date me.” I stood up. We’d already settled the check. “I just need a ride back to my truck, if you don’t mind.”
“Oh, honey,” Brad said, standing up too. “I’m giving you a ride, don’t you worry about that.”
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