Murder in the Rue St. Ann (10 page)

 I’d taken Paul at his word. I hadn’t checked him out.
Why was he different?
I wondered.

Because you’re supposed to trust and believe in your boyfriend, that’s why.

I took a deep breath and clicked the mouse.

The engine I was using showed previous addresses. It wasn’t always accurate—it only showed mailing addresses. I sat, stared at the screen as the site looked up Paul’s information. The program dinged when the search was finished and the page was loaded.  Sure enough, it showed Paul’s current address as his apartment up on Valence Street, with two former addresses in Dallas and the one prior to that in Tempe—the student apartment where he lived during his brief stint at ASU, and before that Albuquerque.

I printed out the page of his former addresses, then went to a basic web search engine and typed in his name. I cursed myself for being stupid. What did I expect to find about him on Google, anyway? After a few seconds, the results came up.

The first page of results obviously were in reference to several other Paul Maxwells.  I knew Paul couldn’t be a professor of psychology at Washington State, nor was he a dancer on Broadway. I scrolled to the bottom of the page. The last one read simply:…
Paul Maxwell
, one of Top Rope’s biggest stars as Cody Dallas, recently…..

Cody Dallas? I grinned. That had to be a porn star name.

For the hell of it, thinking it might be funny to tell him about it later,  I clicked on the link. It took me to a website called “Ilovetoprope.com.” The front page loaded, and then the window flashed off as it loaded a sub-page.A headline appeared, in caps and all red: CODY DALLAS RETIRES! EXCLUSIVE!!

The notice kind of like a checkout-stand tabloid newspaper. I started to close the window— obviously, this couldn’t be my Paul Maxwell— but I decided to wait and see what this guy looked like. He couldn’t be as good-looking as my Paul.

Some text appeared, and next to it a picture began to load.  I started to read the text. Cody Dallas was apparently a video star of some repute for a company named Top Rope Productions. But now he was giving up the business, and the website revealed, for the first time, his real name: Paul Maxwell.

Paul’s going to get a kick out of this
, I thought, deciding to print the whole thing out once it finished loading. We’d laugh about this when—

When he gets out of jail?

Of course he was going to get out of jail. It was all a misunderstanding—it had to be. Paul couldn’t kill anyone. He might not have told me a few things about his past, but I’d know if he was a killer. He couldn’t even kill the damned cockroaches that got in from outside and ran across the floor—I always had to do it.

The picture finished loading and my mouth went dry.

It was Paul, wearing a low cut red bikini that left little to the imagination. His hands were behind his head, his arms flexed, his abs standing out in bas-relief. You could clearly see the outline of his genitals in the bikini, and his dick was hard.

He was smiling.

I knew that smile quite well. My heart sank and my stomach twisted.

I looked over at the text again.

“Cody Dallas, long one of the biggest stars under contract to Top Rope Productions, recently announced his retirement from the scene.

“’It’s kind of hard to top the video I just shot with Mark Miller,” he says with a shy smile. “I’d like to go while I’m still on top.’

Pun fully intended, of course. More>>>

I clicked to the next page. I stared at the screen.

Action pictures loaded.  Paul in a black bikini. Wrestling Mark Miller, who wore white. One picture showed Mark Miller pulling Paul to his feet by his hair. The bikini had crept into the crack of his ass, revealing both round hard cheeks.  I kept shaking my head, trying to make sure I was looking at the right thing, trying to get my brain to accept what I was looking at. It just wouldn’t compute, on any level. Then, taking a closer look at Paul’s opponent, my blood ran cold.

Mark Miller was Mark Williams
.

I pushed my chair away from the desk, staggered into the bathroom and threw up.

It was Paul, my Paul all right, and he and Mark Williams obviously knew each other much better than he’d led me to believe.

How many other lies had he told me?

This was more than just not telling me about his past—he lied about knowing Mark Williams. What had he said? Oh, yeah: “the guy who owns the magazine wants me to pose for the cover.” Not “I knew him from before, I fucking made a goddamned fucking porn tape with him.”

I washed my face and brushed my teeth, staring at myself in the mirror.

That was something else I knew about Paul—he liked wrestling. If there was a wrestling show on television, he wanted to watch it. It wasn’t anything I’d ever really gotten into. When I was in college, some of the guys in my fraternity were into it, ordering pay-per-views, but I’d never bothered with it much. Yeah, the bodies of some of the guys were great, and it was nice seeing huge, muscular men running around in tights— kind of hot in a way—but it was always so obviously fake I couldn’t deal with it.

But Paul loved it. Every once in a when we were in bed, he’d ask me to restrain him physically, but I’d never given it much of a thought. I liked holding him down while he struggled against me—it always seemed to make him really horny and the sex even hotter. Watching wrestling shows with him was interesting. I never paid much attention, just daydreaming while he watched and kept a running commentary. He often critiqued the wrestlers and complained about the obvious cartoonish elements. I didn’t mind watching it with him. It never stirred my interest, but every so often there was a hot guy I’d watch, which was kind of fun, but their hitting each other with chairs and ladders and so on was just dumb.

I walked into the kitchen and got a beer. I pulled the cigarettes out of my pocket  and lit another one. At this point, what did my smoking matter?
Yeah, just try to lecture me now
,  I thought as I walked back into the living room and sat down at the computer.

At the bottom of the page was a link that said ORDER THIS TAPE NOW!

I clicked on it without a second thought.

A window popped open. WOULD YOU LIKE TO ORDER MORE CODY DALLAS TAPES? I clicked yes, and a list popped up. I clicked on three more, adding them to the shopping cart.

What the hell? Why not? Didn’t I have the right to see what my boyfriend got up to on videotapes? Just another interested customer, like God knows how many others there were. I ordered the tape. I typed in my American Express number as quickly as my shaking fingers could move. I clicked on ‘overnight rush delivery,’ authorizing an additional $20 charge on the card. After I clicked ‘send,’ the confirmation email arrived.

I book-marked all the pages and logged off the Internet.

Then I turned on the overhead light and ceiling fan in the living room.

Not only was he a nude model, he also has a lucrative video wrestling career. And what else? A murderer?

My phone rang. I got to it on the third ring.  “MacLeod.”

“Hey Chanse, it’s Loren.” He let out a breath of air. “They’ve booked him, and they’re keeping him overnight as a guest of the parish. He’ll been arraigned in the morning. I’m pretty sure I can get him out on bail, though.”

“How bad is it?”

“I won’t lie to you, Chanse, it looks pretty bad. You got any cranberry juice?” Loren was a vodka and cranberry drinker.

“No.”

“You do have vodka in the house?”

“Yeah.”

“All right, I’ll stop on my way over and get some cranberry. You need anything?”

“No—“ then something occurred to me. “Yeah, get me a pack of Marlboro Light 100’s. In a box.”

“See ya in a few.”

I walked into my bedroom and reached up onto the closet shelf. I felt around for a while before I found the old Cuban cigar box with my pot stash in it. I hadn’t smoked pot in almost three months. Paul thought I threw it all away, but I hadn’t. I’d kept it. Keeping some in the house where I could get to it whenever I wanted to was how I was getting through life. It was a challenge to myself, every day, to see if I could handle everything without having to get stoned at night in order to deal. Once Loren was gone, I’d roll myself a big fattie.

I’d probably smoke the entire pack of cigarettes as well.

Paul wouldn’t like it, but he could just get over himself. Like he was anyone to criticize my bad habits. I didn’t pose naked. I didn’t make wrestling porn tapes. I wasn’t all over the fucking Internet in a tiny little bikini with my dick hard. I wasn’t so big a star that my ‘retirement’ required a press release and an interview on a website.

Who the fuck
was
my boyfriend? Was he a murderer?

As I sat there on the bed, my head and heart were pounding.

The doorbell rang. I grabbed the bottle of vodka from under the sink on my way to answer the door.

“You expect me to drink that cheap-ass vodka?” Loren said, giving the bottle in my hand a withering look. “For shit’s sake, MacLeod, get out the good stuff.”

“This is the good stuff.”

He handed me the bag with the cranberry juice in it and sighed. “I don’t think that bodes well for my fee.” He walked past me and sat on the couch. Loren is short; maybe five-five— but stocky. He wears silver wire-framed glasses, has toffy colored skin, and short cut gray hair. He wore a light, pistachio-colored suit with a white shirt underneath the jacket. He lit a cigarette and looked for an ashtray.

I’d first met Loren at a gay and lesbian business social held at Cobalt on St. Charles Avenue. The invitation to attend had been unexpected, and I wasn’t that interested in going, but when the night rolled around, I had nothing else to do. Paul was visiting his parents in Albuquerque and I was bored, so I decided to get dressed and go. I’d met Loren at the bar—both of us were getting glasses of wine—and then had run into him again outside smoking. We started chatting, exchanged business cards. After we’d met,  he threw some business my way every once in a while.

 Loren was one of those gay men who made you feel guilty. He was politically active—he often wrote briefs and legislation about queer rights to go before the state legislature. He never tired of trying to get me more involved in things like that. I always said no—hell, I rarely voted—but he always kept after me. It was people like Loren who made life better for the rest of us.

I handed him an ashtray and went into the kitchen to make us both a drink. I made them about half liquor and half mixer.

“Now that’s a drink.” Loren said, making a face as he swallowed. “But this rotgut vodka is going to give me a headache in the morning.

 I lit up another cigarette. It tasted incredible, a little piece of heaven just for me.
Fuck you, Paul,
I thought as I inhaled another lungful of relaxing smoke. “So what’s the story?”

Loren took another swig of his drink. “It looks bad. He talked before I could get there to shut him up.” He shook his head. “Why don’t people know better?”

 “Fuck.” That was bad news.  Never, ever talk to the cops without a lawyer.

“Well, this is what the police know.” Loren sat back in the sofa, holding his cigarette. “At 6:15 one of the neighbors heard a shot and called 9-1-1. The cops who arrived on the scene a few minutes later found Paul standing over Mark Williams’s body, holding a gun.” He looked at me over his glasses. “I’m vastly oversimplifying to get the point across, all right?” I nodded. “They take him down to the station. They test him for powder residue. He comes up positive. But even before the test came back he told a story to explain it away. He claims he walked in, saw the gun and picked it up. It went off, and then he saw Williams’s body lying there. Then he called 911 on his cell phone.”

Oh God.
I took a big swig of my drink, which burned. Loren was right, the vodka was shit. “How fucking stupid is he?” I growled. I clenched my fists. The cops would never believe a story like that—hell, I didn’t believe it.
Nobody
could be that stupid.

“That’s the key, Chanse.” He toasted me with his glass.  “Is he stupid enough to do something like that?”

“I don’t know.”  And I didn’t. I didn’t know anything about him at all.

“Come on, Chanse.” Loren stubbed out his cigarette and lit another. “You’re his partner, for Christ’s sake. If you don’t know, who does?”

“Turns out I don’t know a lot of things.” I took another drink. This one went down smoother.  “What do they say the motive is?”

“They don’t need a motive yet. There’s more than enough physical evidence to arraign him.”

“Why was he there?”

“He told the police—and me—that Williams wanted him to pose for his magazine. He’d decided against it, went over to tell Williams so, and found the door open and Williams dead.” Loren raised his eyebrows. “He saw the gun lying there, picked it up, and it went off. Williams was shot once, right through the heart, and the gun had only been fired twice, and the cops did find the bullet in the floor, like he said, so that part holds up.” He sighed. “But I don’t like it. It doesn’t look good for him, not good at all. The cops are convinced they’ve got their killer, and you know what that means.”