“Listen. If I were planning a blind-side story, do you think I would approach you first, ask for your cooperation? Come on, Mr. Cobbs, you’re smarter than that.”
He looked at her for the first time, his stare more piercing than the cold. “What do you want, Miss Patterson?”
“I want to know,” she said deliberately, “what makes people seek help coming out of the closet. I want to know what happens to them if they decide they can’t. I want to know what they’re more afraid of: being in the closet or out.” And, she said to herself as she waited for his response, I want to know if you’re a killer.
Eric Ashby plopped down in the chair across the desk from Gianna and opened the bag that contained their lunch: Smoked turkey breast sandwiches, salad, milk, and a brownie. They’d promised each other, after they’d both become ill due to lack of sleep and food during their last investigation, that they would always eat a balanced meal at least once a day, regardless of whether they ever got to sleep. He leaned back in the chair, his feet on Gianna’s desk, and took a savoring bite of his sandwich. They ate in silence for a while before he began his report.
“For starters, we can place all four victims at Metro GALCO some time in the last year, all in one or the other of the classes on coming out.”
“That’s good, Eric. What else?”
“Looks like Tolliver’s telling the truth, as far as it goes. Nothing incriminating in his apartment. The records from the phone company confirm what he said about the calls he made from his home phone to a pay phone to his contact. The phone is at Union Station so that’s a dead end. And to say that our boy is gay is to say that Jack the Ripper was a ladies’ man. Tolliver’s into heavy S and M. He likes beating people. He’s well known in the leather bars and I’ve talked to several guys who know him, but nobody’s ever known him to have a sustained relationship with a man, to care for anyone.”
“What about the rest of them, Eric? Something? Anything?”
He shook his head woefully. “Not a peep. Nobody’s ever seen or heard of them. They’re not associated with any known group or organization. In short, boss, these people are bogus, just like you said they were. How does it feel to be right all the time?”
“If being wrong would find me a killer...” She trailed off as he shook his head and one-handedly—he was still holding part of a turkey sandwich—rifled through the report. He held out three pages to her.
“You’re still batting a thousand. About those parking lots...” She sat up straight and gave him a hard look. “You obviously saved the best for last,” she said expectantly.
“Joe Murray was in the RFK Stadium parking lot because he was having an affair with Alfie Cane, running back extraordinaire. Phil Tancil was involved with the principal at Washington High. Liz Grayson’s car was in the Arena Stage parking lot because she and Susan Jolley had season tickets. And Tony delValle’s most recent boyfriend was the teaching pro at the Tennis Center.” Gianna let the words hang there while she considered their meaning; and when clarity came, it brought a new sense of dread. “The killer not only knew those people were gay, he knew who their lovers were,” she said in a flat tone.
“That could be a good thing, Anna,” Eric said.
But she didn’t think so. In fact, something told her that just the opposite was true and once again she found no joy in being right. “Are these people in the closet, too?”
He shook his head. “Nope. I thought of that, too, but all the lovers are out of the closet. Even Susan Jolley, who worked for the Army. They all knew she was gay,” Eric said, “and the Board of Education knows about the Washington High principal.”
She squeezed her eyes shut and pressed her fingers to her temples. Her insides churned and the bile rose in her throat as she accepted the truth that in six days there would most certainly be another dead gay person in another parking lot some place in Washington, D.C. and there seemed little she could do to prevent it.
*****
Mimi hung up the phone, looked at the clock, and sighed. It’s payback, she told herself, for all the nights Bev must’ve watched the clock and waited for me to decide to leave work. Still, she thought, 10:30 on a Friday night is stretching it a bit. Then she laughed at herself. She’d been home all of twenty minutes, time to strip off her clothes, wrap up in a thick robe, and pour a glass of wine. The phone rang and she grabbed it.
“Hi. It’s me.” Gianna sounded exhausted.
“I just called you. You’re not home.”
“You’re so brilliant,” Gianna said teasingly. “I’m in the car, heading uptown...”
“I’ll open the garage door,” Mimi said quickly.
“Three minutes,” Gianna said.
It was actually four, but Mimi decided to forgive her, seeing the fatigue clouding the clear hazel eyes as Gianna pulled the police-issue white Chevy into the double garage next to the Karmann Ghia. Mimi pushed the button that lowered the door and Gianna stepped out of the car into her arms, her mouth greedy, demanding, her arms drawing Mimi in almost roughly, her hands running up and down Mimi’s body. She untied and opened the robe and they both gasped when Gianna’s hands made contact with Mimi’s nakedness and Mimi went weak in the knees.
“I can’t believe I haven’t seen you since Sunday.”
“Believe it,” Mimi gasped as Gianna caressed her nipples. “Take off your clothes,” she whispered hoarsely.
Gianna paused long enough to laugh. “You’re going to have me on the garage floor?” she asked as her fingers eased between Mimi’s legs.
“Stop it!” Mimi shrieked, jumping away from her. “Take off your clothes and put on this robe,” she demanded, holding up the mate to the one she wore.
Gianna smiled, shrugged and complied, stripping off her clothes and plunging into the wooly warmth of the robe. Mimi tossed Gianna’s clothes inside the kitchen door and walked toward a door in the opposite corner of the garage, beckoning to Gianna who followed gamely.
Mimi opened the door to another world. What was once a tool shed had been converted into a paradise with its centerpiece a six-seater above-ground hot tub, its exterior camouflaged with brick and adobe. Italian tile covered the floor, hot house plants filled up all four corners of the small room and a domed sky-roof let the moon and stars become part of the landscape. The effect was of a small town Italian piazza. The steam from the tub filled the room, giving a delicious contrast to the chilly garage. Mimi threw her robe onto a low-slung wicker chair.
Gianna laughed out loud. “This is unbelievable! You are just full of surprises!” She threw off her robe and raised her arms to the night sky. Mimi crossed to her and embraced her from behind. Gianna leaned into the embrace with a sigh.
“The first time I saw you, you were naked in the steam and I had to pretend I didn’t notice.”
“You didn’t notice!” Mimi insisted. “You just walked away.”
“Right into a cold shower.” Gianna laughed, turning around to face Mimi. “But that was then and this is now.” Gianna kissed her with a gentle urgency that increased in intensity until Mimi was weak-kneed.
Mimi pushed Gianna back into the well-cushioned wicker chair, knelt before her, draped Gianna’s legs over her shoulders. She arched upward to meet Mimi’s mouth and then, the instant she felt her tongue, she collapsed into the chair, opened her legs totally to the exquisite agony, and released herself to follow the sensation into the night sky. She wanted to ride out there forever but she was riding the wave back, so fast, so fast. She cried out and Mimi held her hands, held on to her.
Mimi rested her face on Gianna’s thighs and Gianna toyed with the curly ringlets of Mimi’s hair, catching her breath. Then Mimi rose and pulled Gianna to her feet, holding her close for a long moment before releasing her to step into the hot tub. Mimi opened a small refrigerator and removed a bottle of seltzer. Gianna suggested that she bring a bottle of champagne instead.
They luxuriated in the hot, churning water, sipping champagne and learning more about each ot
her, a process prompted by Mimi’s demand, “Tell me about you. Where are you from? Why are you a cop? Where’s your favorite place in Italy? Why were you celibate for two years?”
Gianna laughed and splashed water on her and told of growing up in a traditional Italian family in Philadelphia, the granddaughter, daughter, niece, and sister of policemen who naturally wanted to be a cop, too, but yielded to family pressure to be the first to attend college since she’d been smart enough to win a partial scholarship to Catholic University.
“So, I came down here to D.C. and after the first semester of classes I applied to take the police department’s entrance exam.”
“School was that bad?” Mimi asked, laughing.
“It’s not that it was bad, I just wasn’t interested. I wanted to be a cop, so, when I passed the entrance exam and was admitted to the Academy my sophomore year, I took classes at night and police training during the day.”
“You must have been exhausted! When did you sleep?”
“Never! But I’d promised my parents I’d finish college. Then Dad was killed in the line of duty.”
“Gianna! I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah. Me, too. It was so stupid. He was trying to prove that all Italians aren’t crooks and went solo to bust up some Mafia thing.” A frown creased her face as she brought forth the painful memory and she shook her mane of wet hair, like a puppy, to chase it away. “Anyway, with him gone, Mom couldn’t afford to help me with tuition which upset her as much as Dad being killed, so I confessed my double life and she cried for about a week before deciding to forgive me and here I am, in a hot tub with you, drinking champagne and thinking impure thoughts about certain parts of your anatomy.”
Mimi laughed and reached across the water to pull her close. “You left out some things. Your favorite place in Italy and the small matter of a two-year hiatus...”
“You’re why the Chief warned me against reporters. You expect all your questions to be answered?”
“Absolutely,” Mimi murmured against her hair and Gianna smiled and settled back into her strong arms and talked happily about a tiny village on the Gulf of Gaeta and then less happily about Dorothea who almost two years ago had left to accompany her husband to his new, high-paying job in Arizona.
“She’d long before ceased to love him but, in her words, she’d spent eight years working shitty clerical and secretarial jobs to put him through business school and law school and she was entitled, finally, to the country club life, not to scratching out an existence on a police lieutenant’s salary.”
“Police lieutenants make good money,” Mimi said hotly, coming to Gianna’s defense.
“Show me where they make two hundred thousand a year and the company car is a Cadillac and I’ll take the exam tomorrow. Anyway, for months I was too numb to think about being with anybody. Then I got involved in a couple of back-breaking cases and I didn’t have time to think about being with anybody, and by then, it had been so long....” The bubbling hot water churned and the steam rose around them and the flickering candles played shadows against the walls.
“Been down so long seems like up to me,” Mimi said musingly.
“You’ve read that!” Gianna exclaimed, laughing.
“Of course. Hasn’t everybody?”
“You’re not old enough to have read that.”
“How do you know how old I am? I don’t know your age.”
“Forty. And,” Gianna said, moving to the other side of the tub in accurate anticipation of Mimi’s reaction, “I’m the police and we can find out all kinds of things.”
Mimi shrieked, stood up, hands on hips, attitude at the ready, but momentarily speechless.
“Sit down and come here,” Gianna ordered, working hard to suppress laughter as Mimi glared at her indignantly.
“You pulled my file?”
“Of course I did. Now come here, Mimi.”
“And you think because you’re some hot-shot cop you can order me around and expect me to obey?”
“Absolutely. Now come here. Please.”
Mimi reluctantly obeyed, sitting on the ledge between Gianna’s legs and leaning back into her but still irritated. “You had no right, you know. Background checks are personal and private— a necessary evil— the only way any reporter can obtain a police department press credentials. Not even cops can go nosing around in personal background—”
Gianna cut her off with a bite to the back of the neck. “What are you so incensed about? You act like there’s some deep, dark secret you don’t want discovered. All I saw was brilliance: captain of the debate team, Phi Beta Kappa, enough journalism awards for ten reporters. I saved a lot of time by pulling your file. Now all I need you to tell me is why there was nobody for you after Bev.” But because her hands had begun to move on Mimi’s there was little interest in— or need for— the answer to that question.
And they agreed that before one of them drowned it would be a good idea to move to the bedroom, where they remained until late Saturday afternoon when they both had to go to work.
*****
“If I tell my wife I’m gay, she’ll leave me! She’ll take the kids, the house, the car, the dog and the cat! She’ll feel hurt and betrayed. How does it help either of us for me to do that? Who benefits?” wailed a man in a blue suit.
The twenty people in the Hi, Honey, I’m Gay: How to tell your Spouse the Truth seminar looked, almost as a unit, from the man in the blue suit at the back of the room, to Calvin Cobbs at the front, waiting for his response.
“You do,” said Cobbs in his gentle, professor’s voice, “because once you’re out, you’re relieved of the fear that she’ll find out. You’ll have no more secrets.”
“Yeah,” offered a glum man in a jogging suit, “and no more job, no more family, no more friends, no more home.”
There was scattered tittering in the room, and even Calvin let a smile lift his lips, and Mimi shared an I-know-what-you-mean smile with the glum man who was seated next to her.
Calvin walked down an aisle to stand next to the man in the blue suit, and spoke to him gently, carefully. “How often do you think about telling her?”
“All the time! All the time.” The man’s misery was palpable.
“And I daresay that holds true for everyone in this room. It’s why you’re here, isn’t it?” Calvin looked around at them as he returned to his perch at the front of the room. “You want to tell them the truth, these people you’re married to, because you love them, because you know you’re hurting them with your lies about your ‘other friends,’ about where you are— like tonight. How many of your spouses think you’re working late tonight?” He laughed with them as every hand was raised, breaking the tension. Mimi surveyed the group of ordinary men and women with their not-so-ordinary secret. She thought again of Cedric’s words, and then her glance fell on a woman who was seated all the way at the back, in a corner, the quiet, mousy woman from the other seminar, the one had who looked vaguely familiar but who Mimi couldn’t place.
After the class Mimi walked with Cobbs to the parking lot. She’d had to level with him before he’d even give her the time of day, so, swearing him to secrecy she’d shared with him minimal details about the murders and the fact that the only link between the victims was that they’d all attended some kind of class designed to help married gay people come out of the closet. As they sat in his car, he looked at the photographs she proffered. No, he said, to Elizabeth Grayson and Antonio delValle. But his eyes widened in shock and horror at the photos of Joe Murray and Phil Tancil. Calvin didn’t know their names— his was the only name used in class— but he recognized their faces. They’d attended the same lecture series this time last year. And he was certain that the Black guy, Joe Murray, had taken the course twice.
“Do people do that?” Mimi asked with a frown, “come back again?”
“Oh, sure, happens all the time. That scared, funny looking little woman who always sits in the corner? She’s been in both classes thre
e or four times. You must understand, Miss Patterson, that some of these people are absolutely terrified. It’s not just about angering or disappointing a spouse or losing a house. Some of the women have violent husbands. Some belong to restrictive religions and risk being totally cut off from everything they know.”
“Then why do you push them to come out?” Mimi was angry.
“I don’t push them to come out, but I do push them to make the process logical and orderly and honest. Remember, Miss Patterson, I’ve been there. I have three children I’m not allowed to see and my father hasn’t spoken to me in four years, but as much pain as I have about that, I can honestly tell you that being relieved of the burden of that secret has changed my life.”
Mimi shook her head wearily. “I’m sorry I snapped at you.”
“No apologies necessary.” He paused and she watched him, watched his face work as he formulated the words to express his thoughts. “Do you really believe,” he asked, “that someone who has attended one of these seminars...?” He stopped himself, obviously unwilling to go where the thoughts were taking him. “Is it really possible, Miss Patterson, that a person would use these seminars as a vehicle to do harm?”
“Anything is possible, Dr. Cobbs,” Mimi said wearily.
“But do you believe that’s what happened?” he pressed.
“I don’t know what to believe,” she said honestly.
“I hope to God you’re wrong,” Calvin Cobbs said with prayer in his voice, “and I hope I helped.”
He returned the photographs, they shook hands, and she exited his car. Across the deserted the parking lot at her own car, she started the engine, then turned it off. Her imagination was running wild and she couldn’t drive under these circumstances. She opened the envelope and removed the photographs of Joe Murray and Phil Tancil. She imagined them sitting in the same room she’d left not thirty minutes earlier, listening to Calvin Cobbs just as she had, perhaps asking the same questions the man in the blue suit asked tonight: ho benefits? She pictured them telling their wives they had to work late. She pictured them trying to tell their wives the secret of their lives.
Keeping Secrets Page 9