“No, but how hard can it be? You collect all the clues and you put them together, and, vóila. I have read a lot of mystery novels.”
“Great,” Tom said. “So, now what? Got any ideas where we look for these clues?”
“Well.” Stanley thought for a moment, and brightened. “Now we take a good look at Hartman’s apartment, don’t you think? Maybe we’ll find the motive there.”
“Maybe we’ll find a baseball bat.”
“You think Gaye Dawn was right? You think they cut them off for trophies?”
“Don’t look so eager, Stanley. They wouldn’t do home delivery with them.”
§ § § § §
The apartment manager provided them with the key to Hartman’s apartment.
“Should we wait for the techs?” Stanley asked.
“At the moment, it’s not a crime scene,” Tom said. “She shot the guy out there. If we find any more bodies inside, then we call the techs.”
They both donned rubber gloves and let themselves in. Tom shook out a plastic evidence bag. A black and white spotted cat ran out to greet them, purring and rubbing between Tom’s legs.
“Uh oh, what about him?” Stanley asked.
“We’ll call animal control. Unless you want some pussy?” He raised one eyebrow.
Was that supposed to be a joke? Sometimes you couldn’t tell with these straight guys. “I’m into two legged pets.”
The cat meowed plaintively and followed them down the short hall that led past the single bedroom—
unmade queen sized bed, a dresser with a couple of drawers not quite closed. On the far side of the room, an open door gave a glimpse of the bathroom.
Past the bedroom, a small kitchen, with a sink full of dirty dishes, and beyond that, a gray Formica table with a laptop sitting on it and a wooden chair at either end. The rest of the apartment was living area—a tweedy brown sofa sagging on one end, a small screen television sitting on a book shelf unit, a pile of newspapers and magazines on the floor next to the sofa. The air was stale, like Hartman had already been gone a long time, or like the apartment already knew he wasn’t coming back.
“Bachelor pad,” Stanley said. “Straight bachelor pad.”
“What’s the difference?”
“No queen would live like this. Look at the curtains, for Heaven’s sake, they don’t match anything. And that sofa.” He wrinkled his nose.
Tom glanced around the room, at the curtains and the sofa, his expression uncomprehending. “Looks okay to me.” The look Stanley gave him was withering.
Tom shrugged. Who understood fags? “We’ll take the computer down to the station,” he said, unplugging it and dropping it into the bag. “Find anything?”
Stanley was already looking through the kitchen drawers. In his experience you could tell a lot about a person from their kitchen.
“Not much. He didn’t do a lot of cooking. Nothing but TV dinners in the freezer. Wonder how he kept his strength up. Sounds like he was pretty athletic.”
“Hey, check this out,” Tom said, “An address book.”
“Anything interesting?”
Tom flipped through the pages, pausing now and then to read. “Maybe a dozen names, that’s all, with phone numbers. Huh. Lana La Rue. What kind of name is that?”
“Drag queen, I’ll bet,” Stanley said.
“Transgender.”
“We already knew he hung out at that club, what’d Andrews call it—Carla’s Web.”
“Probably all drag queens.” Tom shoved the address book into the evidence bag. “This him, you think?”
he asked, picking up a framed photo from atop the television—a man in a sailor’s uniform.
Stanley came to look past his shoulders, noticed his scent, something masculine and spicy. Nix that, he told himself firmly and focused on the photograph. “A few years ago, probably.”
“Nice looking guy.”
“Hot, really.”
Tom gave him a look and added the picture to the bag. “Seems funny, doesn’t it. Good looking guy, that big dick, you’d think he’d have women crawling all over him. Why’d he want to pick up drag queens?”
“Some guys dig it. A lot,” Stanley said. “Chacun a son gout.”
“What’s that mean.”
“Each to his own. I like a little foreign tongue now and then.”
“Jesus.” Tom grimaced. He stood one fist on his hip and pivoted slowly, his eyes doing a quick survey of the room. “No bodies. And doesn’t seem to be anything missing.”
“What makes you say that?”
“No dust-free spots where something had been sitting. No marks on the wall where pictures might have hung.”
“Golly. See, I’d never have thought about that.”
“I’m a homicide detective, Stanley.” Meaning, Stanley thought, you’re not. “What about the bedroom?” Tom said.
They went in there together. The walls were mirrored, and the bathroom door. Stanley glanced up. So was the ceiling.
“Kinky,” Tom said.
“Looks like the neighbors weren’t the only ones who liked to watch.”
Stanley went to the dresser and riffled through the drawers, found nothing but shirts, socks, underwear.
“He liked thongs,” he commented. “Guess they’d show off the package better.” He held one up and eyed it wistfully.
Tom found a box of condoms in a nightstand. “Busy guy,” he said. “This is half empty.” He looked at the box. “Extra large.”
“What do you wear?” Stanley asked without thinking, because it was something that had been on his mind, and quickly added, “just as a matter of curiosity?”
“You don’t need to know. Ugh.” Tom had picked up a towel from the floor by the bed. It was stiff to the touch. “Jesus, it’s like a board. You wouldn’t think the guy would have any energy left for whacking off.” He dropped the towel and rubbed his hand down the leg of his trousers despite the rubber gloves he wore.
Stanley peeked into the bathroom. Like the rest of the apartment it was messy, not disgustingly so, not
“pig sty” status, but not pristine, either. Towels on the floor, a kitty litter box, in need of cleaning, behind the door. “He didn’t spend a lot of time or energy on housework,” he said.
“Guess that wasn’t what the ladies were coming home to see,” Tom said. “Besides, he had to save his energy, didn’t he? Lucky stiff.” To Stanley’s surprise, Tom gave him a big smile. A funny kind of smile, as if he’d done it accidentally, before he remembered to frown. It made something do a little jig inside Stanley’s chest. Incongruously, it made him think of the sunlight, when he was a little boy back in Iowa, the way it rippled through the wheat on a summer day.
“Especially stiff,” Stanley said, suddenly embarrassed by how much the smile had pleased him. Police investigators didn’t think about sunny wheat fields, he felt pretty sure. He needed to keep himself focused on the job at hand. He was a homicide detective now. Or, he was going to be, as soon as he had solved his case.
Back in the living room, they found a collection of video tapes on a shelf under the television. “‘The Opening of Misty Beethoven,’” Stanley read labels. “‘Betty’s Big Night.’ ‘What The Maid Saw.’”
“Porn flicks,” Tom said. “What about these?” There were two cassettes by themselves on a lower shelf.
“Looks like home videos.”
Stanley took them. “‘Our First Anniversary.’ ‘Weekend in Palm Springs.’ ‘Jay’s birthday.’”
“Probably nothing we can use. Better check them out, though.” Tom dropped the tapes into the evidence bag.
Tom gave the apartment a cursory glance. “Maybe we’ll have the techs take a look, just to be safe. I doubt they’ll find anything of value.”
“She shot him before they even got inside.”
“Yeah. Unless she was a regular. That Lana La Rue, maybe.”
“In which case, he’d hardly be surprised to find a dick on her,” Stanley sa
id. “If they’d done it before, he most likely would have noticed that.”
“For sure I would have,” Tom said, shaking his head. “Uh, so, Mister Detective Movie, now what do you think we should do?”
“I think…” Stanley screwed his face up for a moment. “I think now we see what the crime scene technicians found outside.”
“Techs. And I’m betting not much there either.”
Stanley noticed that before they left, Tom emptied a can of tuna into a dish for the grateful cat, and filled a companion bowl with water.
“No telling when the animal people will get here,” he said gruffly.
§ § § § §
Tom’s prediction turned out to be accurate.
“A few drops of blood on the landing, not much,” the tech told them, “And all of it the victim’s.”
“It was raining,” Stanley said. “Maybe it washed away?”
“Roof over that spot,” the tech said.
“No reason why the perp would be bleeding, from what we’ve heard,” Tom said. “Anything else?”
“I thought we didn’t say ‘perp,’” Stanley said.
“A shell,” the tech said. “Twenty-two. If we get a gun, we can run a match on it. The victim had lipstick on his collar, some on his mouth, looked like they’d been doing some heavy smooching.”
“Maybe we can track that down?” Tom said. “The lipstick, I mean.”
“Unlikely. It’s a common brand, you can get it at any Walgreens or Rite Aid, probably a million or two tubes sold every year. Every month, maybe. There were a couple of long, dark hairs on his lapel, we’re checking those. Nothing under his nails. Didn’t look like he’d put up any kind of fight. He was shot at close range. Very close. Poor bastard probably didn’t know what hit him.”
“That fits with what the witnesses have to say,” Tom said. “The gunshot was muffled.”
“Probably she shot him while they were smooching,” Stanley said.
“Sounds pretty cold,” Tom said. “What do you make of the body’s position, at the top of the stairs like that? Could she, say, have dragged him back up the stairs for some reason, after he’d tumbled down them?”
The tech shook his head. “No bruises to suggest that. Nothing but the usual lividity underneath. It looks as if she caught him before he fell, by his lapels—they were twisted—and laid him out nice and neat like that.”
“But why would she?” Stanley asked.
“A statement of some kind,” Tom said. He thought for a minute. “Maybe they weren’t strangers. Maybe they were old friends, lovers even. And she shot him on the spur of the moment, but she didn’t want…” He shook his head. “No, that doesn’t fit with what that Acheson said. The poor sap was surprised to find out she was a drag queen. If they were old friends, he’d have known that.”
“Wait,” Stanley said. “If they were smooching when she shot him, what about saliva? In his mouth, I mean. Maybe get some DNA? I saw that on a television show.”
The tech gave him a funny look. “We did swabs. Waiting for the results.”
§ § § § §
“But that’s like the gun, isn’t it?” Tom said when they were back at his desk. “It’ll give us a match if we find the perp.”
“I thought we didn’t say ‘perp.’”
“It’s not against the law, I just said it’s a television thing. Suspect, okay. If we find the suspect.”
“Oh.”
“So, like I was saying, the gun is evidence if we go to trial, but we’d have to come up with the perp first.”
“Right,” Stanley said. “You know, we’re really thinking alike on this.” He looked altogether pleased. Tom looked decidedly less so.
“So, the sixty-four thousand dollar question is, how do we do that?” Tom asked. “Come up with the perp?
The suspect?” He lifted a challenging eyebrow in Stanley’s direction.
Stanley thought for a minute. “You know, I keep thinking about that Acheson. Something still bothers me about him.”
“Gaye Dawn bothered me,” Tom said.
Stanley regarded him for a moment. “Not as in hot and bothered, I hope.”
“Christ.” Tom made a disgusted grimace. “What’d you want to go and say something like that for?”
“I catch that slut poaching on my turf, she won’t need to strap her balls down, I’ll pull them off.”
Tom stared at him open-mouthed.
“What?” Stanley said, all studied innocence. “No one messes with my man.”
“Uh, just for the record—I’m not your man. Plus, I didn’t know they strapped their balls down.”
“Well, sure, their dicks, too. Otherwise, they’d show, wouldn’t they?”
“Doesn’t it hurt?”
“Beauty is painful. Come on,” Stanley said. He started for the door.
“Where are we going?”
“Field work. I know some people who hang out at The Boom Boom Room. They’ve got to know Acheson, and Gaye Dawn. Maybe they can tell us something.”
“Acheson bothered me too, now that you mention it. There was something he wasn’t telling us.”
“Fine. It’s okay being bothered by Acheson.”
“Just as a matter of curiosity, what’s the difference?”
“He’s a dork. She is a total bitch. And a man stealer if I ever saw one.”
CHAPTER FOUR
The house Stanley took them to was in Diamond Heights, in the hills above the Castro, with a view that stretched all the way to downtown, and a glimpse of the Bay Bridge and Oakland in the far distance.
“How the other half lives,” Tom said while they waited for someone to answer the doorbell.
“Or pretends,” Stanley said.
A thin Asian man in a fuchsia silk shirt opened the door.
“Hi,” Stanley said, “we came by to see Peter.”
“Uh, come in.” He looked Tom up and down, apparently liked what he saw. “I’m Lotus Blossom. Peter’s in the kitchen.”
“We’ll wait,” Stanley said, and added, “Marvin.”
“Did he say Lotus Blossom?” Tom asked in a whispered aside to Stanley. “What kind of name is that?”
Marvin heard him. “Lotus Blossom. The Star of the East, Jewel of the Orient, The Bright and Morning Sun.” He smiled at Tom. “Stanley,” he added, the smile fading. “Would anyone like a drink?”
“We’ll pass,” Stanley said, and Tom said, at the same moment, “Yes. Bourbon. Straight. Lots of it.”
“Peter, we need a couple of clean glasses in here,” Marvin called in the direction of the kitchen.
“Isn’t that just like a fucking faggot,” a voice came back from the kitchen. “Suck cock all night long and won’t drink out of a dirty glass.”
“I’m out of here,” Tom said.
“Oh, don’t go off mad, it makes mean kids,” Marvin said, reaching to take Tom’s arm.
Stanley swatted the hand away, none too gently. “Come along,” he said to Tom, steering him toward the living room and well clear of Marvin.
“If you like swimming with barracudas,” Marvin mumbled, following in their wake.
“Fear not, you’re safe with me.” Stanley glowered over his shoulder at Marvin. “I’ll kill the first queen that lays a hand on you.” His eyes swept the room. Its occupants were too obviously happy to see Tom. “That goes for all of you. Hi, girls.”
“Stanley,” Peter cried, carrying two drinks in from the kitchen. Peter looked like a college linebacker and walked like a ballerina. He air-kissed in the vicinity of Stanley’s cheeks, balancing the drinks carefully. “What brings you to my little salon? And what’s this, an early birthday present?” Approving eyes quickly surveyed Tom’s substantial frame.
“Peter, Tom, Tom, Peter. And it’s business, I’m afraid,” Stanley said.
“Some business,” Peter said, leering.
“Police business,” Tom added, turning red. He glanced briefly at the men strewn about the living room.
/> He thought of an aquarium filled with brightly colored tropical fish. The fish eyed him in return like a handful of brine shrimp.
“Ah, I heard you were a policewoman now,” Peter said to Stanley.
“Homicide detective.” Stanley beamed. Tom shot him a scornful look.
“Well, I’m flattered that you’ve come to me, of course,” Peter said, “but I do hope this isn’t about the white lady, I’d hate to see her go. Shoo, girls, make room for our guests.” He waved a hand at a trio seated on an ecru-colored leather sofa. Its occupants sighed and shifted, two of them moving to chairs and one scooting to the far end. Tom and Stanley sat, Stanley carefully directing Tom to the opposite end and parking himself between him and the sofa’s other occupant. Tom popped a stick of gum into his mouth, chewed vigorously.
“The Boom Boom Room,” Stanley said. “Tell us about it.”
“What a dump,” the young man at the end of the sofa said, in a surprisingly good imitation of Bette Davis.
“It’s one of the bartenders we’re interested in, actually,” Stanley said. “Jake Acheson. Know him?”
Peter nodded. “Jake the fake? Sure, I know him.”
“Why do you call him that?” Stanley asked.
Peter glanced around at the others. Lotus Blossom Marvin shrugged and blew him a kiss. “It’s your party, you can die if you want to,” he said.
“It’s what we all call him. It’s just… well, he never seems to know what he is, I guess is why. He was married, you know? To a woman, I mean.”
“We knew that,” Tom said.
“Only, it wasn’t a real marriage, if you know what I mean.”
“Hmm, I’m not sure I do,” Stanley said. “You mean, it was just for appearances sake? Like, she was his beard?”
“No, not even that, exactly.” Peter tented his hands together, rested his chin on them. “I think it was real, on her part, maybe, and from the way he talked, he really seemed to want to make it work. He wanted kids, I think, not for his own sake, so much, more like, to make his family happy, but… well, we got really tanked one night after closing, and I asked him, kind of, like, are you really bisexual, and he said—I was drunk too, so I may not be quoting him exactly—he said he thought he was, he wanted to be, but, when they got down to the deed, he couldn’t do it. He said he’d be stiff as a rail. I got the impression she gave great head, or maybe he was just one of those minute men, you touch it and up it springs. Only, when he tried to get in the saddle, it died on him, went soft as fast as it got hard.”
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