She again leafed through the list of counseling and referral services, counting them and noticing that every one of her people was asleep standing up. She was about to assign herself to cover part of the list when the scowling visage of Capt. Davis inserted himself into the doorway.
“What’s this I hear about you canceling a speech to the B’nai B’rith? And where the hell is that report comparing race crimes in D.C., Maryland and Virginia? I need that stuff for a speech I have to give to the National Council of Negro Women. Dammit, Anna, you promised! You can’t let your duties slip!”
And he was gone as quickly as he appeared, leaving in his wake a greater dose of anger, confusion, dismay, and guilt. Gianna sighed and closed Eric’s report and gathered all the files into a neat stack and put it on the floor, next to another stack of reports which she picked up and placed on the desk. She swiveled around in the chair and switched on the computer. She gave the screen her full attention as Eric led the others from the office.
Mimi walked up the steps of the sprawling Metropolitan Gay and Lesbian Community Organization thinking that it was the first such organizational contact she’d had since college when she’d regularly attended Gay Activist Alliance meetings—back when the GAA was on the FBI list of dangerous and radical organizations; back when her own family would have viewed her emerging sexuality as dangerous and radical.
She felt energized now as she blended in with the stream of people milling about in the building’s lobby which, with its red-and-green tiled floor, acoustical ceiling and gleaming oak doors and stair railings, still looked and felt just like a school. She saw a microcosm of the city’s population: men and women of every age and color; well-dressed affluence and down right grubbiness; women with children; people with AIDS. Metro GALCO certainly lived up to its promise of serving the entire gay and lesbian community of the metropolitan Washington, D.C. area.
Once inside, Mimi took one look at the bulletin board and the schedule of activities and understood why Metro GALCO needed the old elementary school building for its headquarters. Every night of the week featured dozens of meetings, social gatherings, many sponsored by recognized and established organizations such as GLAAD, GAA, ACT UP, NOW, MADD, AA, NA, even an H & R Block Tax Preparation Seminar. There were dance classes, language classes, yoga classes, acting classes, writing classes, poetry readings. Looking at the bulletin board, and looking at the people surrounding her, Mimi realized with a warm feeling that being gay no longer had to mean being alone and isolated. But the warmth of that thought was quickly mitigated by the realization that somewhere in the building was someone who could help her understand why four people who had chosen to remain in the closet were now dead. Maybe someone in this building actually hated gay people, instead of loving them.
Scrutinizing the schedule of organizations and meetings, she focused on a series of lectures entitled Out of the Closet and into the World, and Hi Honey, I’m Gay: Telling Your Spouse the Truth, both facilitated by a Professor Calvin Cobbs. As she was writing days and times in her appointment book— and thinking that facilitated was a silly sounding word— she was joined by two young women who forthrightly and happily introduced themselves as Trisha and Mavis and who asked if she was on her way to the Cruise Room.
“To the, ah, what?” Mimi asked in confusion.
“That’s just what we call it, jokingly,” said Trish, tall and chocolate and gorgeous with a head full baby dreadlocks and wearing a pair of skin tight jeans with more holes than Swiss cheese. Mimi looked from the wide-open innocent eyes to the combat-booted feet and back again and forgot where she was and why.
“Ah, call what?” asked Mimi, struggling for equilibrium.
“The weekly get acquainted dance for women,” said Mavis, with the slightest tinge of impatience. Her raven-black hair was cut impossibly short, her eyes were impossibly blue, the flash of smile much too seductive.
“There are sometimes some really nice women there,” said Trish, with a complete and unabashed appraisal of Mimi, who laughed to herself at the notion of being cruised by a couple of kids whose combined ages she probably exceeded.
“Well?” said Mavis, hands on deliciously curving young hips, hugged by those deliciously tight jeans. “You coming?”
“You can dance, can’t you?” asked Trish with that smile.
“Of course I can dance,” said Mimi with the proper amount of attitude. “Let’s go.” And as she followed them, delighting in their youthful beauty and reminding herself that she had a niece their age, she marveled at how quickly the world had changed. Not only was okay to be out of the closet at fifteen or sixteen, there was also a safe place to be once you emerged. Then she was struck by another thought, one that sapped a bit of the swagger from her step: The world had changed so much so quickly that all the dances she knew belonged to another time.
CHAPTER SIX
“What in the ever-lovin’ bloody hell is the FBI doing poking around in my case?” Gianna stopped pacing long enough to throw the file she held across the room. “Goddammit, somebody better have an answer for me!”
Gianna’s team looked at her in wide-eyed amazement. Eric attempted a hesitant response. “Well, they did find Susan Jolley...”
Gianna stopped him cold. “That doesn’t give them the right to access my case files. I want to know who this ‘Don’ person is and why he wants the files on this case!”
Eric tried again. “It seems to be a personal matter, Anna, ah, Lieutenant...”
She smiled bleakly, reached to Eric and squeezed his arm. That simple, personal action seemed to release all the tension in the room.
“Don’t you ‘Lieutenant’ me, Detective. Listen, guys. I’m pretty damn certain that what we’re searching for is in those files and I don’t want anybody outside this unit messing around in them, especially some dipshit FBI guy. Everybody clear about that?”
There was a general murmuring of assent.
“Do you really think we’re looking at the answer and just not seeing it?” asked Linda Lopez, another veteran who’d jumped ship from Fraud to join Hate Crimes. Detail was Linda’s strong suit and Gianna knew that she loved burying herself in facts and figures and finding the one that didn’t belong.
“I do,” Gianna said emphatically, “and Linda, I want you and Kenny to turn these files sideways. We know there’s one common link between these four people and that’s some kind of gay counseling. But we’ve got to make it more specific.” And there was something, Gianna was sure of it. “Cassie, how’re you coming on the nationwide check of homicides on the 21st of the month for the last five years?”
Cassie groaned and buried her head in her hands. “Do you know how many people have been killed on the 21st, especially when the moon was full?”
Gianna laughed out loud. “The other part of the equation, Cassie, was that the victim or the perp was gay or there was even the hint of gay, not that the moon was full.”
“I’m on it, I’m on it,” Cassie groaned loudly.
“You still think he’s marking some kind of anniversary, that the murders are ritualistic?” asked Kenny Chang.
“It’s one of the few I’ve got left that makes any sense at all,” Gianna said with a shrug, and almost immediately those words pushed to the surface a thought, a feeling, something that had nagged at her for days, one of those things that would never quite take shape on its own but with the proper impetus bloomed fully.
“The parking lots. Why those parking lots? We need to make the connection between the victims and the location they were found.”
“You seem certain there is one,” Eric said.
“These are logical crimes, people. The logic may be a bit cracked but it’s there. There is nothing random or haphazard or accidental about any of this.”
Tyler and Mimi huddled in the hallway behind the newsroom near the recycling bin, the only really private place in the newsroom, and she was almost enjoying his discomfort as she pressed him for more details about his association w
ith Phil Tancil.
“Right now, you’re my best lead, Tyler,” she pleaded.
And he was. Tancil’s wife had become hysterical, screaming when Mimi introduced herself as a reporter, throwing the rake she’d been using on the yard, missing Mimi’s head by mere inches. Joe Murray’s wife had refused to open the door, and Tony delValle’s wife threatened to sue for libel, slander, defamation of character, and everything else she could think of if Mimi persisted in asking questions about her dead husband. Elizabeth Grayson’s former house was empty, a For Sale sign in the front yard. The neighbors either didn’t know or wouldn’t say where the family had gone.
“That leaves you, Tyler. You knew the man. He’s dead. Murdered. Tell me something. Anything!”
Tyler shook his head in misery. Mimi wasn’t sure whether he was telling her no or whether he was finally buckling, finally caving in. Mercilessly, she shot her final arrow. “He was your friend, Tyler. You owe him this much.”
The arrow hit home. Forty-four year old Phillip Tancil had been Mr. Middle America. Born in Baltimore, college at Georgetown, MBA at Wharton, back to D.C. to a job offer at a bank, a fast and accomplished rise to the top. He’d had sexual encounters with men beginning at age sixteen, but in graduate school he’d found himself attracted to a woman classmate, had given thanks and married her quickly and became as successful at being a husband and father as he was a banker. But no matter how roomy the closet, the attraction to one’s own sex is a powerful pull and being a white collar, corporate American success hadn’t made Phil Tancil any less susceptible to the pull. He soon established a separate life, a group of friends separate from the friends he shared with his wife, men with whom he played golf and tennis and poker. Men with whom he was free to be his true self. Men like himself— successful corporate men with whom he could have sex without endangering his home life.
“Any of those other men married, Tyler?” Mimi asked.
“Yeah,” Tyler said warily. “Why?”
“I need to talk to them.”
“No way! Those are my friends, Mimi.”
“Phil Tancil is your dead, friend, Tyler,” Mimi hissed, dimly aware that one or two people had crossed to the recycling bin during their conversation. Looking dejected, Tyler ran his fingers through his hair. “Tyler, did Phil belong to any groups, you know, the gay groups that help people work through their problems?”
“Yeah,” Tyler said, removing his glasses and squeezing his temples. “Some kind of counseling thing for married people. It made him feel better because they didn’t tell him he was a jerk for deceiving his wife. He told me once he felt like enough of a creep without paying somebody to tell him he was.”
“The name of this counseling group, Tyler. Do you—”
“I don’t know,” he said wearily, “I’ll ask around. Maybe one of the guys will remember. One of the married ones...” He trailed off, obviously distressed. Mimi sympathized with his dilemma though she was still annoyed by his stony unwillingness to push his friends for information and she told him as much. He didn’t appreciate her forthrightness. “I didn’t expect you to badger me like you do your skuzzy politicians, Patterson,” he snarled at her.
Oddly enough his words and his tone hurt and she wilted and retreated. “Why did you put me on this story, Tyler? Because I’m gay?”
“Because you care about right and wrong, Patterson. Because you hate it when people suffer unnecessarily. Because you’re one pushy broad. I’m going home. I’ll see you bright and early Monday.”
Mimi walked slowly back to her desk drained, depressed, and with an overwhelming sense of uselessness. Two weeks of work and not a single lead, not one scrap of new information, and not the slightest idea how to proceed. She looked around the almost empty newsroom and wondered if she, too, should pack it in for the weekend and start fresh on Monday. Her phone rang and she looked up at the wall of clocks, frowning.
“Yes?”
“Ciao, Mimi, io sono Gianna. Come sta?”
Mimi stuttered in surprised confusion, both at hearing Gianna’s voice so unexpectedly and at hearing her speak Italian.
“Ah, Gianna...ah, molto bene...” Every word of Italian she knew had fled her brain, leaving her stumbling like a first time tourist.
“I’m making a big assumption that since you’re still at work you haven’t eaten and I’ve just made a pot of vegetarian chili and a big salad and I wondered if you’d care to join me for dinner?”
“How,” Mimi asked carefully, “did you know I’m a vegetarian?”
“Bev told me,” Gianna said breezily. “So, are you coming?”
“Ah,” Mimi cleared her throat, “what’s the address?” She wrote down an address just over the Maryland line in Silver Spring not far from her own upper northwest D.C. house and hung up the phone. She stored her files and tried to make some order out of the chaos on her desk, but her mind was spinning. Why this out-of-the-blue dinner invitation at nine o’clock on a Friday night, and what the hell is she doing talking to Beverly about me?
When she got off the elevator on the fourteenth floor of the aging but elegant pre-war building, the aromas of several dinners wafting out into the hallway from behind closed doors bombarded her, and she realized how hungry she was. Still irritated, but very hungry. She pressed the door bell.
Gianna opened the door immediately and surprised Mimi with a brief but warm hug and ushered her into a warmly elegant room. She expressed delight that Mimi had stopped to get her flowers and spent a few moments arranging them, moments during which Mimi had time to survey her surroundings, beginning with Gianna. She wore black tights and a white shirt and her hair was loose and wild. Fresh flowers were everywhere and Mimi was glad she’d decided to take the time to get them. Gianna clearly loved them. Framed photographs shared every surface with the vases of flowers— photographs of people young and old, all of whom resembled Gianna enough for Mimi to assume they were family; and one in particular— a striking woman whose loose, wild hair had turned to silver and who Mimi would bet was Gianna’s mother.
Done with the flowers, Gianna was now pouring wine—Mimi’s favorite Chianti. The anger that had dissipated swiftly returned. “Is this an accident or did you know I liked this wine?”
“Of course it’s not an accident. Bev told me.”
“And what the hell else did Bev tell you?”
“Well, obviously,” Gianna said with calculated calm, “she told me were to find you since you weren’t at home.”
“Anything else?” Mimi said coldly.
“No,” said Gianna calmly. “The other thing I want to know I’ll find out for myself. Shall we eat?”
Mimi shrugged in good-natured defeat and helped Gianna carry the food to the table, an antique, battered pine polished to a high gloss, the kind upon which every meal was served in every town and village in Southern Italy. The vegetarian chili notwithstanding, it was a very Italian meal—hot and toasty focaccia, tomatoes and bufala mozzarella, spinach sautéed in garlic and pignolis, and crisp green salad. Mimi laughed with delight as she sat down. Italian hospitality and food were always so wonderful and always so much, too much.
“E piu di abbastanza,”she said to Gianna, who laughed a full, golden, throaty laugh.
“Your accent needs a little work, but I get the message. How did you learn to love things Italian?”
“It’s so easy,” Mimi said softly, watching the candle light dance and reflect in Gianna’s eyes, and as the color crept into Gianna’s face she lowered her eyes and they ate in silence for a few moments.
“You must think me an awful glutton,” Mimi said, remembering but not caring that she was talking with her mouth full. “I know I’ve eaten recently, I just don’t remember when it was.”
“I am truly relieved to know that there are people who work worse hours and have worse eating habits than cops!”
They chatted easily throughout the meal, through the excellent espresso, as they cleared the table and cleaned the kitchen and set
tled into the luxurious claret-colored couch to talk even more: about football (Mimi as a Redskins fan, Gianna as an Eagles fan); about religion; about politics; about art; about film. Gianna was relaxed and entertaining, bearing no resemblance to the calm and controlled Lieutenant Maglione. And they were both aware of their efforts to keep the conversation clear of work—clear of any subject that would lead them to the four murders.
“I’m sorry I snapped at you earlier, you didn’t deserve that. I guess I’m a little touchy...about that.”
“Relationships are touchy things.” Gianna looked distant.
“Anyway,” Mimi said quickly to bring her back, “you said there was something you wanted to know, something you’d find out for yourself. Well, ask away. You’ve guaranteed my cooperation with your hospitality.”
“Really?” said Gianna almost under her breath as she took Mimi’s glass and placed it on the kidney-shaped coffee table. Then she leaned toward Mimi. “I want to know what it’s like to make love with you but I don’t want to hear about it from somebody else.”
Mimi reached out to Gianna, to touch, to savor the silky, dark richness of her hair. Slowly, gently, she ran her fingers through it until she held the back of Gianna’s neck and drew her in close, closer, until their lips touched, softly, briefly, and then—then the fire of arousal that had smoldered within her for so many weeks, burst into full flame. The soft fullness of Gianna’s lips released the surging electricity transmitted by her searching, probing tongue. Mimi pulled away to breathe, to look into Gianna’s eyes, to confirm reality.
Gianna stood abruptly, pulling Mimi up with her. “Come on.” They undressed en route to the bedroom, hasty like teenagers, leaving a trail of clothes, and Mimi laughed lightly when she saw the all white bed ensemble.
“What?” Gianna whispered.
Keeping Secrets Page 6