A Time for Secrets (4 page)

“Go home sweetie. The queens on this street can’t remember last week, no less nineteen fifty-nine.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Over on Michigan, I tried to catch a bus that would take me all the way down to my office in the Loop. I miscalculated and had to jump off about eight blocks from LaSalle. As I walked, I smoked a cigarette and tried not to feel guilty about the blow job I’d gotten from Andy. I didn’t have any reason to feel guilty; my relationship with Harker left room for little indiscretions like Andy, and certainly our sex life had faded to virtually non-existent since Harker got sick. Still, I wondered if I should cool it with the tricking.

Maybe what I needed to do was start things up with my friend Ross again. We’d had a nice little fuck buddy thing going on for a couple of years. It was simple, convenient, and uncomplicated. That might be just what I needed. Something regular, something without the risk of emotional involvement while at the same time being, well, friendlier than what I’d done with Andy. It was a Friday, so I’d see Ross when I went to my second job working the door at Paradise Isle.

The great love of Ross’ life, Earl Silver, had died a few months before, so he was still grieving. People do stupid things while they’re grieving. Doing the fuck buddy thing with me might be the best thing for him. By the time I got off the elevator, I’d convinced myself that fucking Ross would practically be a public service.

Then I thought, “Speak of the devil.” Ross was leaning against the wall next to my office door. Next to him was Brian Peerson.

“Well, there you are,” Ross said, as though I was late. He and Brian were dressed in old sweatshirts, jeans, and sneakers.

“Here I am,” I said, having no idea what they were doing there, something Ross picked up from the look on my face.

“We’re here to help you move. We talked about it Saturday night when you got off.”

I had no memory of that. I did remember drinking too much that night, something that had been happening a little too often.

“You’re twenty minutes late,” Ross added.

“I borrowed a truck from a friend,” Brian said.

“You have friends who own trucks?” I asked dumbly.

“I have lots of friends,” he said defensively. Brian and I had met a year and a half before when his stepfather hired me to find him. And I did find him, in one of the local bars surrounded by his twinkie friends. He had a bunch of them. I never would have guessed any of them had trucks.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

I unlocked my office door and looked at my mess. “We might be able to do it in one or two loads. Brian, the service elevator is down the hall. Why don’t you go call it and hit emergency stop. Ross and I will bring the desk down.”

Brian went off in the direction I’d pointed while Ross and I lifted the desk. It was a tight fit down through the door, but after two tries we got it through. As we carried the desk down the hall, Ross walking backward, I tried to figure out how to raise the idea of being fuck buddies again. I started with, “How’s it going?”

“Good.”

“Good? Really?” It hadn’t been that long since Earl’s death. Good had to be an overstatement.

“Everything works out for the best.”

I struggled to smile. It always irked me when people said shit like that. I didn’t believe it for a minute. Things did not work out for the best unless you bent logic into a pretzel. Yeah, things would very likely get better for Ross; I certainly hoped they would, and yes, he might even be able to draw the conclusion that Earl’s death led to some good things happening in his life. But, he’d never be able to say things worked out for the best for Earl. Things did not go well for Earl. Sooner or later, things do not go well for all of us.

“Thank you,” Ross said.

“For what?” I asked.

“Finding out,” he said. “I needed to know.”

I shrugged, hoping he’d drop it. I didn’t want to talk about solving the mystery of Earl’s death. His wife, Gloria, had tried to hide that he’d died of GRID, but I’d found out. And that had led me to Dr. Macht.

“I had a customer at Paradise tell me an interesting theory,” Ross said. I could see the service elevator and Brian standing by it. I wanted to get there, hoping this conversation would end. “He heard that it’s all related to a bad bunch of drugs, marijuana or cocaine. Like everyone bought from the same dealer a few years back and got contaminated. I think that makes sense. Earl liked to do a little cocaine now and then. Especially when he’d go to New York. Everyone there is coked out all the time.”

“No, that’s not it,” I said without thinking.

“Why not?” he asked.

I couldn’t tell the truth, so I said, “It’s affecting too many people in too many places.”

We got to the elevator and slid the desk in. Brian helped us position it in the back.

“So, maybe it was a really big batch,” Ross said. “Maybe it was split up and went to a lot of places. You don’t know.”

But I did know. Harker would never use illegal drugs. So, it wasn’t a bad batch of cocaine.

“Let’s do the boxes now,” I said and headed back to my office. They both followed.

“Is he telling you about the bad drugs theory?” Brian asked.

“Do you believe it too?” I asked. I really needed to change the subject. I didn’t want to spend the whole move talking about this kind of thing.

“It could happen,” Ross said, defending himself. “Nobody’s come up with a better idea.”

“I think my favorite theory is disco fog,” Brian said.

“Disco fog?” I asked.

“You know, the fog they put out onto the dance floor—”

“Yeah, I know. I work in a disco. What would that have to do with GRID?”

“People think something was in the fog. They think it was put there deliberately by the Moral Majority.”

I shook my head.

Brian shrugged. “Makes the bad cocaine theory sound rational, doesn’t it?”

We grabbed the boxes and walked back down to the utility elevator, stacking them in the back. Then we grabbed my two chairs. That left the file cabinet and the dead corn plant. The cabinet would have been easier if I’d thought ahead and borrowed a dolly from the building, but I hadn’t so the three of us struggled with it all the way to the elevator. By the time we got there I’d decided it was time to let the corn plant go. The fact that they were going to be tearing down the building meant I didn’t have to bother throwing the plant away, didn’t have to clean the office, didn’t even have to return the keys or shut the door. I was simply done.

“I’m at a meter about three blocks from here,” Brian said. “I’ll run and get the truck and meet you two in the alley.”

“Okay,” I said, though I seriously doubted the truck was at a meter. He’d probably spent eight bucks parking it in a garage for all of half an hour and didn’t want to tell me since I’d offer to pay for it.

Brian headed back to the regular elevator. I released the emergency stop, then Ross and I descended eight floors to the street. We unloaded, carrying things out to the wide alley between my building and the next. As we grappled with the file cabinet, which had been easier with three, Ross said, “I think they’ll figure it out.”

“Figure what out?”

“GRID. You remember how they were about that thing those conventioneers got a few years ago. They went ape shit figuring that out. They’ll have this all solved soon enough.”

I didn’t think that was likely, but didn’t say so.

“Is it hard without Earl?” I asked when we got everything into the alley. I offered him a cigarette and he took it. We lit up.

“Sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes it’s actually easier. It wasn’t the best relationship.” It hadn’t been. It had been very on and off.

“I think at the end. Some of what he did might have been about his being sick,” I said. Maybe it was true, maybe it wasn’t, but it was the kindest thing I could think of to say.

“Yeah. He could have told me, though. He should have told me.”

A green Ford F-150 came around the corner. It looked pretty new, and I wondered if Brian had rented it to help me move. I was getting sweaty and took off my jean jacket and my shoulder holster, putting them on the front seat of the truck. Brian gave me a look. I don’t think he was especially fond of guns. Bad memories.

Quickly, we loaded my things into the bed of the truck. I figured we were going to be done by two-thirty, three at the latest. I wondered if Ross might like to go back to his place and fool around. I kicked myself for not asking him while Brian was getting the truck. The mood hadn’t been right, though. Not that I couldn’t say something in front of Brian; he knew Ross and I fooled around from time to time, it was just that Brian already thought I was the whore of Babylon. For some reason I wasn’t going to think about, that bothered me.

“Where to?” Brian asked after the three of us had climbed into the truck’s cab. Ross sat in the middle. The truck had a manual transmission on the steering column, something you didn’t see much anymore, so Ross didn’t have to straddle a stick shift. Though if he had, it would have suggested some interesting imagery.

I gave Brian the address of my new office on Clark between Belmont and Addison. It might not be such a good idea moving my office up to Boystown and away from the Loop, but I didn’t feel I had a whole lot of choice in the matter. Rents in the Loop had gone up in the last few years, while my income had remained pretty much what it was. The new office was cheap, very cheap, and only a few blocks from my apartment. Sure, I still worked for Peterson/Palmer doing background checks on their employees, so I’d have to bop down to the Loop a couple times a week to visit the County Clerk at the Daley Center and drop by their offices, which kind of sucked. On the other hand, most of the time I’d just be a few blocks away from Harker if he needed me. It wasn’t all bad.

The office was on the second floor just up a narrow staircase, which you entered through a windowless door on the street next to a copy shop that operated on the first floor. Fortunately, mine was not a business that relied on foot traffic. No one would know where my office was if they weren’t looking for it, and even then I expected some people would have trouble. I kind of liked that idea.

There were two other offices on the second floor, SYLVIA WATSON, CPA right next to me and MADAME TORNEAU in the back. I didn’t know exactly what Madame Torneau did, but I hoped she was a psychic and not some kind of tap-dancing instructor.

My office was in the front and was basically a big, oddly shaped room. Walking in, the first thing you saw was the enormous bay window hanging out over the street. It took up most of the front wall. To the left were two doors, one leading to a tiny closet and the other to an equally tiny lavatory with just a toilet, a sink, and not much room to maneuver between them. To the right, the wall dove backward at a forty-five degree angle until it stopped at a tiny window, which looked out onto the space between the buildings. The woman who showed me the place called the space a courtyard. That was a gross overstatement. There was heavy molding at the floor and ceiling and a globe light that hung down about a foot from some kind of ornate plaster flower in the center of the room. The landlord had recently painted everything Navajo white, which to me looked like sour milk.

I’d been planning to ask Ross if we could go back to his place, but was beginning to think we could get rid of Brian and mess around in my new office. Christen it, sort of. The place came with a set of decades-old Venetian blinds; I could pull them down so no one in the senior housing project across the street got an eye-full.

But just as I was thinking that, we pulled up in front of the building and I noticed Ross had slipped his hand onto Brian’s thigh. It was a comfortable gesture, possessive. Something was going on between them. Something that should have been obvious simply by the fact of them showing up together, but somehow I’d managed to miss.

“You two are together,” I said. They both blushed. I scrambled to cover my surprise. “That’s nice. That’s really nice.”

And it was nice. It left me out in the cold, but I was happy for them. They each needed someone and could do a lot worse than each other. Not to mention they were probably a whole lot more sexually compatible than Ross and I ever had been.

“It’s just been a couple of weeks,” Ross said, as though to explain why I hadn’t known.

“Seventeen days,” Brian said.

I shrugged, gave them a smile and said, “Let’s get this stuff upstairs.”

CHAPTER FIVE

It was a shitty weekend. Well, the first half anyway.

With business down at Paradise Isle I had most Friday nights off, since the owner, Davey Edwards, figured he could handle the door himself. But that Friday night, he had plans with his Pakistani boyfriend, Salim. Salim was a slight, light-skinned young man who I’d once mistakenly referred to as Filipino. Davey warned me that I might lose body parts if I ever did that in front of Salim.

They were having some kind of anniversary, so I got to work the door. It was a slow night and pretty boring, but then around midnight a whole crew of teenage girls showed up from some suburb. We don’t usually get a lot of young girls, being a gay bar, and I had to assume they were there on a lark or had assumed it would be somehow easier to get in since none of them were old enough to drink. They tried showing me IDs they’d either borrowed or stolen but managed to look nothing like. When I told them to get lost, the nine or ten of them tried to simply swarm by me. It was like herding cats.

Young girls were always the worst to deal with. They knew I wouldn’t hit them, and without the threat of violence a bouncer is pretty useless. Yeah, I could pick them up and carry them out of the bar, but when there are so many it becomes tedious. We played at that game for almost half an hour before they started screaming discrimination. I’d had enough, so I offered to call the police, making sure they understood the police would call their parents, who probably didn’t even know their precious little angels were in Chicago at all. That made them finally disperse.

I was still rattled when my shift ended. Sitting down at the bar I ordered a Johnnie Walker Red on ice and drank it down in about three minutes flat. Then I ordered another. A couple hours later I was still at the bar. The customers had all been chased out and Ross was finishing his side work. He wandered down my way, poured himself a shot of tequila, and drank it. He didn’t offer me another drink, though I’d nearly finished with the one I had.