Drag Queen in the Court of Death (6 page)

"Ever have any trouble with the law?"
"Look, man, even if I had a record as long as my arm, which I don't, I'd be dumb to tell you about it, wouldn't I?"
"Good point."
He dropped his lashes for a moment, then gave me a frank look. Man to man. No more beating around the bush. "The place I was at kicked me out, like they do everyone after three weeks. I can't take those shelters, man. Last time I got beat up by some guys and then they took my Docs right off my feet." He paused, took a sip of coffee. "I thought maybe I could work for room and board. There must be lots to do around this old place, and with me around you wouldn't have to hire anyone else."
The phone rang again.
I must be losing my tiny mind,
I thought to myself. One night I go to a gay bar for the first time in years, and look what happens! I unplugged the phone.
We didn't talk much after that. I just sat back and watched him finish off the rest of the cake. He didn't seem to mind. Perhaps he was used to being looked at.
His hunger satisfied, he leaned back in his chair and stretched out his legs. His tight jeans clung to his lithe body, the color washed out around the creases of his groin and fly as if worn off by a lover's hand. I poured us both more coffee, thinking as I did so that it was a good thing I had switched to decaffeinated.
Gradually it was understood between us that he would move into the little room on the second floor, over the garage. It was a mess, full of cast-off things and junk from the previous owner I had meant to sort through and never had. That could be his first job. And then there was the garden.
"It needs a lot of work," I said. "I'm putting in a reflecting pool and a small waterfall. All that needs to be dug out and concrete poured."
"Sure. I can do that."
"Good."
When I led him up the back stairs to the room, he looked around with pleasure as if the place was the royal suite at the King Edward.
"Cool," he said. "I can fix this place up good."
"Easy, Ryan. We're taking this one day at time, okay?"
"Yeah, sure."
I felt a disturbing warmth in my loins as I watched him. I cleared my throat. "Sleep well. I'll see you tomorrow."
The last I saw of him that night he was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the narrow bed as he sorted through the few possessions in his backpack. For a second, I flashed back to another room under a sloping roof—Ronnie Lipinksy sitting cross-legged on the bed while we shared a joint and planned a future that would never come to pass.
I ran downstairs, cleaned up the kitchen, and went for a long walk.
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Ryan's presence filled every corner of the house. As I lay in bed awake, staring into the darkness, I was aware of him. As I sat in the kitchen drinking an early morning cup of coffee, my mind's eye pictured him tousled in sleep, his body twisted in the sheets. Even when I couldn't hear him, I knew he was there. When he was up and working on some task I set, every creak and rattle penetrated my consciousness, a continual distraction, pulling my mind away from Ronnie's grim secret. You've lived alone too long, I told myself. Maybe it was good to have someone around for a while to shake me out of the deep rut I was in, to fill my mind with life, keeping death at bay.

He was a good worker, as long as he was supervised. If I left him on his own too long, he would drift off into inactivity, as if his battery was running down. I would find him staring off into space or lying in the grass, smoking, looking up at the clouds. I kept him busy, working on the garden. He dug a new flower bed in the front and planted the perennials we brought home from the nursery. He sawed up an old tree limb that had come down in a storm a few weeks ago and tied it into the requisite bundles so it would be taken away by the city. He cleaned the gutters on the roof, pulled down the old ivy, trimmed the back hedge. I was always catching sight of him as he worked, sweat glistening on his arms, his legs, his sun-streaked hair damp and curling around his face. His energy was unfailing. It crackled in the air, unnerving me in ways that were alarming.

Julie snapped pictures of him while he worked, her expensive camera clicking and whirring. "Relax," she told me. "Go with the flow." She laughed and told me Jeff, her boyfriend, was getting jealous. I suspect she meant this as some sort of compliment, but I found it irritating. She hadn't found any trace of Al Vecchio yet, even though I had unearthed the right spelling, and the newspapers hadn't come up with anything really new.

Of course they were still pursuing me, still parked outside, lying in wait, leaving notes on my car, when they finally found it out back, and phoning constantly. I had turned all the phones off now, leaving the machine to answer.

My appointment with the lawyer was for Wednesday. By some strange coincidence, Ronnie had chosen Archy Marcus, who had been an old friend of my father, as his lawyer. It was a small, very traditional, very WASP firm with offices in an old house in the upscale Yorkville area. I left Ryan toiling in the back alley, digging out the old paving stones so he could pour sand underneath and lay the new ones that had been piled there for weeks. Reporters wouldn't get anywhere with him. He didn't know anything.

Pam Marcus and I had grown up together. She had lived down the street from me, and since our parents were friends, we were often thrown into each other's company. It was a mixed blessing having her as the lawyer in charge of Ronnie's estate. She was tall and slim, with a long, intelligent face and very bright dark eyes. Her hair was swept up on her head, making her look even taller, and she wore gold earrings and a rope of pear could have paid someone's mortgage. Behind the sophistication, I still saw the skinny tomboy kid in braces and a navy blue balaclava, always wanting to join the boys.

"Look, Mikey, I inherited this mess when my uncle died," she was saying now, looking me in the eye in the
disconcerting way she had always had. "Frankly, I don't give a hoot in hell what you do. You want to back out, fine. All the more money for me, and let me tell you, with taxes the way they are now and Mother refusing to move, even though the house is falling down around our ears, I could use it. So don't get me wrong when I say I think you're making a big mistake."

Ronnie's shit."
"Makes sense to me. But hear me out, Mikey."
"No one has called me Mikey since kindergarten." "God, you're touchy. Some people never change. Okay,

okay. So I understand where you're coming from and everything, Mike—er, Michael—but look at it this way. You know the people involved in this. I don't know them from Adam, and frankly, I don't understand any of it: the courts, the balls, the Wilde Nights. God! It might as well be Chinese! But that's okay. I can do it, not a problem."

"What's your point?" For someone so direct, she was taking a long time to get to the heart of the matter.
"My point is that it would be simpler for you to do it. And look, the story will be off the front page in no time. It already is, as a matter of fact. The
Globe
has it on page three already. Soon it will disappear. New massacres. Some big politico sued for paternity. New grist for the media mills."
"Pam, why don't you really want to do this?"
"Fuck," she said, startling me. She took a deep breath and leaned back in her chair. Her face looked pinched and strained. She looked tired, worn down by hard work and disappointment. She was still not a partner in the firm started by her uncle. I had heard a rumor she had almost lost her job a few years ago when the old man died.
We looked at each other over the piles of files and papers, the two untidy baskets of correspondence, the pink pile of phone messages jammed on a spike.
"I don't have the time," she said at last. "Look at this mess! I'd be behind even if I stayed at this desk twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Not so long ago I had time for long lunches with a friend now and then and the occasional visit to the spa. Now I come here at seven thirty and leave around eight, and I still have to take stuff home. They need to hire more people, but they won't as long as—" She stopped and took a long breath. "Downsizing," she said and gave a sudden bark of laughter. She reached for her cigarettes, then slipped them back into her bag. "And another thing," she went on. "Even if you give up being executor, you'll still be connected to the case. It's your story that's interesting, and the reporters won't give up just because you're no longer executor. Am I right? So you might as well get paid for it, I say."
"Well, the damage is already done, I suppose," I said after a pause. "What more can they say?"
"Good man! That's the spirit! Bash on, regardless!" The color had come back to her cheeks. I felt defeated. How had she managed this? I had been so sure when I came in here. "I was always on your side," she said as I was leaving. "Laura was Miss Priss even in school." She kissed the air near me and closed the door.
My side. I guess a lot of people say things like that. Me, I was just trying to get along, move along in my life, and lately that was getting more and more complicated.
* * * *

Logan thought it was amusing, how I had been neatly trapped by pity.
"She was all crisp efficiency when this started," I said.
"She was getting it off her desk," Logan said. His cracked lips gleamed with medicated gel, and his eyes were too bright, but he was very aware and interested. I felt guilty for not visiting in several days.
When I explained about Ryan, he laughed, a startling, rough sound that grated on my ears. "Michael, you're getting old. Women walk over you, boys move into your house. Watch out for the silver."
"God, he can have it. Heavy, old, ornate stuff that's a bitch to clean."
"And you use it all the time, right?"
I shrugged.
He adjusted himself on the bed, his breath rasping as he changed position. "So did you know your Ronnie was involved with the mob?"
"What?" I stared at him, knowing he was going for shock value, knowing he had succeeded, but not wanting it obvious. I took a big breath. "He hasn't been
mine
for twenty-five years," I said testily, "and he was certainly
not
a mafioso. I expect they wouldn't want to claim him, either," I added, as an afterthought.
"What about the Krays?"
"Don't be ridiculous. Anyway, they weren't Mafia."
"I take it you haven't seen the paper today."
"I thought it was off the front page."
"Of the
Globe
, maybe. The others.... Anyway, the big news is that the corpse was shot in the back of the head with a .32."
"That's not news. We already knew he was shot."
"In the back of the head, Michael. Execution-style, and that spells mob. Big bad guys with no necks and black shirts."
"Oh shit."
"That too."
"But that's ridiculous! If the corpse is as old as they say, that means Ronnie was just eighteen or nineteen. Twenty, max!"
"And he did some drugs, right?"
"It was the '60s, Logan. Even I did some drugs!"
"I hear you. Was Ronnie dealing?"
"I don't know. He was going a bit wonky there for a while before I left. But no, not in '65. Whatever it was he was into, I'm sure he was just experimenting. He was a kid. Everyone was into it."
"A bit wonky," Logan mused.
"Maybe Al was the one in the mob," I suggested, feeling a slight tingle of delight at the thought. Danger, at a safe distance. "Maybe that's why he was executed."
"And why Ronnie kept him all these years in his trunk?"
I shrugged. "That's a problem, I admit."
"The main problem is that we need the chronology to figure this out. We don't know exactly how long that thing was in the trunk. Once we do, we can start to narrow down our suspects."
"Narrow down our suspects," I repeated, incredulously. "What is this? You auditioning for Hercule Poirot now?"
"There's not a hell of a lot to take my mind away from these closing-in walls," he said bitterly. "These sickly hospital smells, the ooze of my own putrefaction always seeping into my brain. I need a distraction."
"Fine. I give you what my friend Lew calls cosily
The Mummy Guy
. He's all yours."
"I need details."
"You just said yourself you can't start until we know how old the thing is. Julie is tracking down Al Vecchio for me, so we can start to do a 'last seen by so and so' scenario."
A nurse swept in, looking most un-nurselike in a purple pantsuit, her long blonde hair in a French braid down her back. "It's that time again," she said, with a false heartiness that set my teeth on edge.
"Oh boy," Logan sang back. "Time for
us
to have our scrubba-dub."
I didn't envy his nurses as I gathered my things and left, promising to fill him in as soon as I had some info. * * * *

Ryan was stretched out in a deck chair sound asleep when I got back. His body was streaked with grime and sweat, and a gash on his leg looked new. The flagstones were laid all the way to the back gate.

Julie yodeled from the front door. She must have been watching for me, she got downstairs so fast.
"Julie, you're the only one I ever knew who actually says
yoo-hoo
."
"Big wow," said Julie. "Hey, hey, listen up. I've got some good news and some bad news."
"Shoot."
"Good news is—I found the guy. I found him!"
"Great! What's the bad news?"
"He's alive."
"I'm sure he wouldn't think that was bad."
"Good for him. Bad for us. Now we don't know who the corpse is."
"Right."
"I've got his home address, business address, phone number, fax number, you name it. Here." She thrust the paper at me. "He lives in London, Ontario. Sells cars."
"Why does that not surprise me? Thanks, Julie."
"So who's the next suspect? Anyone else I can run down for you?"
"I'll see what I can dig up," I said, thinking of all those scrapbooks and photo albums I had only skimmed.
When I had opened that box, memories escaped like smoke, carrying sharp pinpricks of guilt and longing and betrayal. But smoke thins, I told myself, dissipates in the air and is soon gone. Those memories have been preserved too long. It was time to let the light in before they mummified like the body in Ronnie's trunk. There must be something in all that information that would be useful. Why else would Ronnie have insisted I take it away?
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