Fag Hag (Robert Rodi Essentials) (20 page)

Scarcely the ideal circumstances under which to face a corrupt Chicago cop who had a bone to pick with her. She hadn’t fully figured out her strategy with Officer Gianelli; should she plead with him, try to bribe him, threaten to expose him? The last possibility made her shiver with fear; she didn’t dare try playing hardball with an All-Star.

She moved through the crowd, looking at every face that passed in front of hers; none met her eyes for more than a second. She was the only woman in the bar; never mind her red sweatshirt, it would be impossible for Gianelli not to notice her.

She ordered a Bacardi on the rocks, then sat at the bar, toying nervously with a cocktail straw. The video monitors were showing old 1950s television commercials—women ecstatically using vacuum cleaners, dishwashing liquid, hairspray. Could any of them have conceived that a member of their sex would one day develop problems as unorthodox as hers?

She felt a tap on her arm.

She put down her drink and turned. Standing there, wearing a scowl, was an enormous, hairy, barrel-chested man in a plain white T-shirt, black jeans, and a leather jacket. His eyebrows were big and frightening—they were as woolly and matted as roadkill—and his dark eyes narrowed in what Natalie presumed to be contempt.

“You Stathis?” he asked.

She nodded, unable to speak. A cold, bad feeling had gripped the base of her spine and was traveling up her vertebrae, one by one, like a corrosive acid.

Officer Gianelli—for that’s who this must be—motioned with his head that she should follow him. She slipped off her stool, forgetting her drink, and trailed behind him as he plowed his way through the bar, knocking less massive patrons to and fro. He didn’t once turn to make sure she was still with him.

He led her to the darkest corner of the bar, where two stools sat empty. He motioned her onto the one on the right, then swung his own beefy leg over the one on the left.

He sat staring at her while the music thoom-thoompa-thoomed in her ears.
Why this torture?
she thought.
He hasn’t even heard what I’m going to say!

She swallowed hard. “Office Gianelli,” she began.

He held up a finger, silencing her. Then in a low voice he said, “Luigi.”

She blinked. “Pardon me?”

“Lu-i-gi.
My name.” He paused. “It’s Italian.”

Thoroughly nonplussed, she stammered out an explanation. “I—I’m aware of how important it is, that you, that you get that bugging device back befo—”

He gasped loudly, seeming to inhale half the air in the bar; heads turned at the sound.

Natalie stopped short. She stared at him, not knowing what to think.

His eyes squinted, and he burst into an explosive sob.

“Nothing matters except getting Curtis back!” he howled. “You gotta help me out, here! I can’t eat, I can’t sleep—I—” He buried his head in his hands and just plain bawled.

Everyone in the bar was staring. She shifted on her stool and tried to look as nonchalant as possible. She diligently checked her cuticles and adjusted her watch very laboriously. But nothing could hide the fact that seated next to her, a man the size of a Kodiak bear was in the midst of a seismic meltdown. He gasped a few more times, then blasted forth with a fresh howl of despair.

Someone in the bar laughed. Surprising herself, Natalie began to feel protective of Luigi—this man who, mere moments before, had had her frightened half out of her wits. She sat up straight and coldly met the eyes of every patron who dared look in his direction; soon all had turned away in shame, leaving him to sob and moan in private.

He pulled a handkerchief from his leather jacket and mopped his eyes. “Oh, mother Mary,” he said, “I’m such a fuckin’ wuss for crying like that. But I break down all the time these days. Always on the fuckin’ verge. If I say more than a couple words, my whole heart comes out my fuckin’ mouth. On the job it’s hell. Two nights ago I picked up this kid on crack; he looked just like Curtis. Cuffed him and read him his rights and put him in the backseat, and soon as I got behind the wheel I started fuckin’ weeping and I couldn’t stop. I had to pull over and let it run its course.”

Natalie put a hand on his shoulder and clucked over his misery. “What happened?” she asked—so relieved that he wasn’t giving her any grief, that she was feeling positively maternal toward him.

He rolled his eyes heavenward and waved his handkerchief in dismissal. “Oh, what fuckin’ always happens—he caught me with somebody else. Can I help it? I’m just not made to be monogamous. I tried so fuckin’ hard, and for months—
months
—” He wiped his nose and stuffed the handkerchief back into his jacket pocket. “Nobody’s ever meant fuck to me except Curtis. All I want out of life now is to make it up to him. He’s fucking
gotta
give me another chance. Natalie, you know him, you’re friends—”

“Not quite,” she said. “More friendly than friends.”

“Whatever,”
he said testily, and she reminded herself that she should still handle this guy carefully; there was no telling what a bent Chicago cop in the throes of a rejection was capable of. He sniffled and said, “I don’t know where else to turn. He’s already got all his friends to give me the silent treatment. Makes me want to beat the fuck out of those little twinky sons of bitches, smash their fuckin’ teeth in, the way they snub me. But then I know Curtis would totally—I mean, I’d fuckin’
never
have a chance with him again if I did that.”

What, Natalie wondered, could this brawny, macho cop with his rough-hewn, beer-commercial looks want with a stylish little gamin like Curtis? What could make for so powerful an attraction?

As if to answer her, he pulled out his wallet. “Take a look at this,” he said, and he opened it to a Polaroid snapshot of a black man’s naked pelvis, with an enormous hard-on standing at forty-five degrees from the camera. In spite of herself, Natalie crossed her knees.

“Curtis?” she asked, trying to sound urbane and unaffected, but her voice was like a teapot coming to boil.

Luigi nodded, not taking his eyes from the photo. He reached again into the wallet and produced a few more. “Here’s another one,” he said, handing it to her.

She took it from him and looked down at it with some apprehension, as if it were alive and might bite her. It was an extremely explicit shot; Curtis, still naked, was on his back, with his ankles wrapped behind his head, and all that might be revealed by such a pose revealed quite alarmingly. “Oh, my,” she said.

“I know,” he said admiringly. “You wouldn’t believe what that guy can do. Sometimes I take these shots out at the station house,” he continued, handing her another one in which Curtis was performing an act on himself that other men had many times assured her was patently impossible, “just to cut the tension, and I get so fuckin’ wired up I gotta go in the can and just jerk off a load.”

How poetic,
thought Natalie, as another shot of Curtis and his amazing appendage passed into her hands. She had to wonder at Curtis being so final in breaking up with someone who possessed such outrageous documentary evidence of him; shouldn’t he at least have waited till he’d had a chance to sneak them out of Luigi’s wallet? Well, maybe he didn’t know that’s where Luigi kept them; most men, after all, don’t carry hardcore porn between their driver’s licenses and Diners Club cards. And in fact Curtis might not even realize the photos existed; he might have been oblivious to them being taken. But no, here he was in a new shot, plainly smiling at the camera while inserting into himself a dildo that looked distressingly like a Yule log.

She handed the photos back to Luigi. “I can see why you miss him so much,” was all she could think of to say.

“It’s not just this,” he said, apparently not wanting to seem excessively carnal. “I mean—this is obviously a big reason why I love him, but there are others. He makes me laugh, he—uh—”

Natalie waited, but he appeared to be having trouble coming up with further examples. “Never mind, I understand,” she said, patting his hand. “What I
don’t
understand is why you carry those photos around with you. What if you got shot or something? Your partners could find them on you while you were unconscious, or something.”

“Ah, fuck it, everyone on the force knows I’m gay.”

She raised an eyebrow. “That must make for interesting working conditions. Do they hassle you about it?”

“They used to.” He slipped the photos back into his wallet.

“How’d you get them to stop?”

“Simple. My uncle’s a big-shot alderman. Anybody who gave me shit would get mysteriously transferred to some fuckin’ South Side war zone. Pretty soon, the guys learned they’d better fuckin’ treat me right.” He tried to tuck the wallet back into his jacket pocket, but it slipped out of his hand and dropped. A dozen more Polaroids were strewn across the floor.

She slid off her stool to help him scoop them up. Other patrons at the bar were stepping on them as they passed and he shouted at them to lay off; he was on his hands and knees, clawing them up two and three at a time.

Natalie was just returning one to him when she noticed that its subject wasn’t Curtis. This was a white guy—a guy who looked very familiar…

She placed him. It was Will Hammond! The man she’d stolen Peter from—the one who’d called her a fag hag!

And even more astonishing:
he was wearing a diaper.

Luigi snatched it from her hand. “Thanks,” he said sheepishly.

“I know that guy!” she cried, pointing to the Polaroid as Luigi shoved it back into his wallet. “That’s Will Hammond!”

He blushed red to the gills. “Yeah.”

“What’s he doing in your wallet? What’s he doing in a
diaper?”

He was sweating now. “Come on, Natalie. Mind your own fuckin’ business.”

“Listen, if I’m going to help you, you’d better tell me everything.” She leaned forward and licked her lips; she was positively
rabid
to have some dirt on Will. That night at Bulldog Road had not been forgotten; she would make him pay for his humiliation of her.

Luigi deposited his wallet more carefully into his pocket. “All right, then,” he said. “That’s the guy Curtis caught me with, okay? That’s the guy who fuckin’ caused all my problems.” He seemed on the verge of tears again.

“That sounds like Will,” she said, nodding. “He loves ruining people’s lives. Kind of a hobby.”

“I have this fetish, okay?” he said, stifling a sob. “So fuckin’ sue me. Like you don’t. Like everybody doesn’t.” He heaved a watery sigh. “I like guys in diapers. It’s a tremendous fuckin’ turn-on for me, I don’t know why, I don’t fuckin’ care. Trouble is, though, hardly anybody else is into it. I mean, if Curtis would do that for me, man, I never have to fuckin’ play around anywhere else, ever. But sometimes I just get this urge. So I placed a personal ad in one of the gay rags asking for someone to help me out. This guy, Will, answers, and he’s fuckin’
hot.
So we get together, and whaddaya know, he’s a wild man. I mean, not only will he wear diapers, he’ll even crap in them, which, for me—I mean, I just fuckin’ come in my
pants
over that.”

This was so much more than Natalie needed or wanted to know that she felt obliged to hold up her hand. “Okay, I get the idea.”

“All I really wanted was a couple snapshots,” he said.

“Really, it’s
okay.”

He sat back, and she took advantage of the spell of silence to collect herself.

“Now,” she said, resuming the conversation, “you’re not seeing him anymore, are you?”

“No, no.”

“And you have no intention of seeing him again?”

“All I fuckin’ wanted was a couple pictures.”

“Yes or no, Luigi.”

“No.”

She folded her hands over her knees. “Okay. That helps.”

“Just forget you ever saw those, okay?”

She barked a laugh. “Like it’s that easy!”

“Just say you’ll help me. Say you’ll talk to Curtis.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Tell you what. I’ll consider it, if you let me have one of those Polaroids of Will.”

“That’s what it’s gonna take?” he asked plaintively.

“‘Fraid so.”

Glumly he removed the wallet again, thumbed through the shapshots, and gave her one in which Will was parading around in cloth nappies with big blue safety pins. There was an awful, telltale bulge in the seat. She smiled evilly.

“So how ‘bout it?” Luigi asked.

She slipped the photo into her purse, snapped it shut, and turned to face him. “Well, as I said, we’re not quite friends…but yes, I’ll talk to him. I’ll try—
try
—to convince him to give you another chance.”

He took her hand. “Natalie, you pull that off, I’ll do anything you want.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Anything?”

“Fuck yeah. You get Curtis back in my life, you just name the favor, and it’s yours. I fuckin’ mean it.”

Her heartbeat quickened, and her mind filled with new possibilities. She’d had to bribe a listening device out of this man, and now he was promising her everything at his disposal. And at his disposal was the full force and authority of the Chicago Police Department.

“Deal,” she said.

He grinned in triumph. “I know he’ll listen to you.”

“I’m certainly going to do my best to
make
him listen.”

He nodded at her empty hands. “Buy you a drink?”

“Bacardi on the rocks, thanks.”

He returned a few minutes later, having also gotten a beer for himself.

“Now,” he said as he climbed back on his stool, “how ‘bout toasting to our success?”

They did so, and Natalie took a sip of her drink, then crossed her legs and said, “Aren’t we going to talk about that other issue?”

“What other issue?” He wiped his mouth on his bare wrist.

“The bug. The surveillance equipment.”

He grimaced. “No. I don’t care. I mean—yeah, I could lose my job, and it could be a big fuckin’ scandal for the force—but Natalie, I mean it. Right now, nothing matters a fuck but Curtis. I’m in love with the guy. One thing at a time, right? My first priority is my man.”