The Dirt Peddler (2 page)

“And what did he do to deserve all this sudden attention?”

O'Banyon sighed, took another swig of his beer and set the bottle on the table.

“He wrote a book.”

He sat there watching me in silence for a moment until I said, “Not one titled
Dirty Little Minds
, by any chance?”

“
Dirty Little Minds
,” he said.

Interesting,
I thought. “And where might I fit into all this?”

O'Banyon smiled. “Oh, we're just getting started. And by the way, I know I don't have to even mention that I'm telling you all this with the full confidence that none of it will go any further than between the two of us.”

“Of course.”

He stared out the window for a moment, then said, “Tunderew is currently working on a second book, which promises to be an even bigger blockbuster than his first. He's got every major publisher in the business practically throwing advance offers at him.”

“What's the new book about?”

O'Banyon shook his head. “He won't say, but he's got a lot of people very nervous. As you probably know, Craylaw and Collier is a very big outfit with its fingers in a lot of pies. It's primarily a consulting firm, but they have branches throughout the county doing public relations, financial planning, you name it. By no small coincidence, it handled the P.R. for Governor Keene's last gubernatorial campaign. Tunderew left the company shortly before his book came out. I wouldn't be surprised if he wasn't keeping some sort of little black book on some of C&C's other clients.” He finished his beer and pointed to my nearly empty mug.

“Want another?”

“Sure, thanks.”

He got off his stool and moved to the crowd at the bar, which by now was sprinkled with business suits as well as tee shirts and tank tops. The blond I'd seen earlier was talking earnestly with a forty-something guy in a white shirt who had his back to me. Every now and then the blond would glance over the guy's shoulder and lock eyes with me.

Hardesty! Knock it off!
my mind commanded, and I pulled my eyes away and concentrated on staring out the window until O'Banyon returned. Even our relatively empty corner of the room was beginning to fill up, so O'Banyon pulled his stool closer to me when he sat down and continued our conversation in a somewhat lowered voice.

“Tunderew had originally submitted
Dirty Little Minds
to every single publishing house that is currently chasing after him. None of them would touch it. Finally Bernadine Press took a chance with him, published it, spent a little money on promotion, sent copies to the right reviewers and…the rest, as they say, is history. But Bernadine is a very small house, and was on the verge of going under before
Dirty Little Minds
came along. They had enough faith in Tunderew to offer him a two-book, no-advance contract, which he signed.”

I saw where this was going. “So now he wants out of the contract for the second book.”

O'Banyon took a deep swallow of his beer, stifled a belch, and nodded.

“Yep. He's hired me to break the contract with Bernadine. So much for loyalty. Without Bernadine he'd be standing in line at the unemployment office, but as I said, the guy's a real piece of work. Oh, and I forgot to mention, on the subject of loyalty, that as soon as the book showed signs of taking off, he filed for divorce from his wife of thirteen years. Conveniently, before his first royalty check could be considered community property.”

“Why did you agree to take the case?”

O'Banyon shrugged, staring at the beer bottle in front of him. After a moment, he looked up at me.

“For one thing, weak as it may sound, because it is not up to lawyers to determine right or wrong. Lawyers present the case, the courts judge on the basis of law. And like it or not, Tunderew does have a case under law. I don't have to like my clients, just present their case to the best of my ability.”

I took another drink of my beer.

“So what, exactly, is it you'd like me to do for you?”

O'Banyon sighed. “Well, it seems he's also being blackmailed.”

Probably couldn't happen to a nicer guy,
I thought.

“Can I ask what for? Though from what you've said of this guy, I'd imagine it could be just about everything.”

O'Banyon smiled. “Yeah, and that's another interesting thing, and why I approached you. The guy's a rabid homophobe, and the blackmailer apparently has evidence indicating that Tunderew's gay.”

That one caught me by surprise.

“Is he?”

He gave a cursory shrug. “Certainly not according to him, but the point is that he can't afford to have his public image ‘sullied' as he put it—an oddly Victorian word—which is rather laughable, considering. But since he writes about scandals, it wouldn't do his reputation much good to be caught up in the middle of one of his own. So he wants to quash the whole thing before any damage can be done.”

I polished off about half my remaining beer before responding.

“So he wants a gay private investigator to prove he's not gay?”

O'Banyon's face broke into a slow grin. “Ironic, isn't it? Of course I didn't tell him you were gay…you can do that if you want to, and knowing you I'm sure you will. I just told him I knew of a very good private investigator who was uniquely qualified to do the job. He didn't ask what I meant by ‘uniquely qualified,' and I didn't tell.”

“Does he know
you're
gay?”

“I haven't a clue. Maybe he does, maybe he doesn't. It's not as if I really gave a shit. But I've found out one thing over the years: if you're rich enough, or powerful enough, or if someone needs you badly enough, it doesn't matter who you sleep with.”

I shook my head and joined him in the grin. “You're getting a big kick out of this, aren't you?”

He gave a raised-eyebrow shrug, still grinning. “Hey, I get so little pleasure out of some of these cases, don't begrudge me.”

We small-talked while we finished our beers, and I noticed the blond walk out with the guy he'd been talking to. As he reached the door, he turned to me, gave a small shrug and a wink, then left. My crotch was muttering curses, but I ignored it.

As O'Banyon and I were getting ready to leave, he reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out a business card, which he handed me.

“Here's Tunderew's number. I told him to expect your call.”

I took it without looking at it, and stuck it in my shirt pocket. “If he's as big a pain in the ass as you say he is, I just might tell him to go fuck himself.”

“Yeah, you might,” O'Banyon said with a grin as we walked toward the door. “I made it clear to him that this was just a referral and you were your own man when it came to deciding what cases to take, so I'm off the hook. If you turn him down and he blames me and wants to find himself another lawyer, I wouldn't lose much sleep over it.”

We shook hands as we reached the sidewalk, and went our separate ways.

*

Walking back to my office, I pulled out the card and looked at it, “Tony T. Tunderew, Best-Selling author of
Dirty Little Minds.
” No ego there. There wasn't any address, but there was a phone number. I stuck the card back in my pocket, found my car in the lot across from my office building, and went home.

Jonathan was in the kitchen, talking to Phil and Tim, his two goldfish, and Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, recent Tropical Something-or-Other additions to the new, larger aquarium Jonathan had conned me into getting for him as atonement for a minor argument, which I obviously lost.

When he saw me, he grinned as though he hadn't seen me in years, then quickly turned to the refrigerator from which he extracted my evening Manhattan. Apparently I was a little later getting home than I'd thought. He started to reach into the freezer for some ice cubes, but instead set the glass down and came over to give me a lung-emptying hug.

“Glad you're home.”

“Me too.” As we released the hug, he started to turn back toward the refrigerator, but I stopped him. “I can get it. You want a Coke?”

“Sure. How did it go with Mr. O'Banyon?”

He followed me into the kitchen, where I handed him his Coke before I reached into the freezer for my ice cubes.

“Fine. I met him at Hughie's for a beer. He referred a case to me.”

Plopping a couple ice cubes into my glass, I closed the freezer door and turned to put my free arm around Jonathan's shoulders. “Let's go in and sit down, and you can tell me about your day. Have a good one?”

We sat, as always, side by side on the couch, thighs touching.

“As a matter of fact, yeah. We delivered some trees to New Eden today, and guess who I saw?”

I of course hadn't a clue. “Who?” I asked after an appropriate pause.

“Remember when I first met you I told you one of the other hustlers from Hughie's used to let me crash at his place every now and then?”

“Uh…yeah, I remember, sort of.” Jonathan has his own logic and his own way of getting from point A to point B. I'd learned just to go along and it would all become clear in time.

“Randy. Randy Jacobs. You remember. Anyway, he's at New Eden now! It sure was good to see him. I'm really glad he got off the streets. He's doing really well out there; he's working in the office and everything.”

New Eden was one of a number of very large, very profitable, tax-exempt farms run just outside major cities across the nation, owned and operated by the Eternal Light Foundation. In turn, the Eternal Light Foundation was, when all the governing committees and advisory boards and assorted boards of directors were stripped away, two people: the Reverends Jeffrey and Barbara Dinsmore, rising stars in the conservative skies of this great nation. The stated purpose of these New Edens was to take in homeless, throwaway kids, the ones no one wanted or everyone else had given up on, and put them in an environment of hope. Sort of like the local M.C.C.'s Haven House, but on a much larger scale, and it was of course not limited to gay/lesbian kids as Haven House was.

Each New Eden was as self-sufficient as possible. Eternal Light kids worked the farms, built the barns and sheds, repaired and maintained all the farm equipment in exchange for room, board, rehabilitation, education, and counseling. The profits from the farms were plowed back into the expansion of the Foundation's good works.

Surprisingly, from all accounts the approach appeared to be actually working, and the Dinsmores had recently been featured on the cover of
Time
. While there was absolutely no doubt that Eternal Light was set in rock-solid Christian fundamentalism, the Dinsmores were smart enough to keep it very low-key. No fire-and-brimstone bible thumping, no mandatory seven-days-a-week religious services, no passing out religious tracts at the airport or selling flowers on the streets. You had to give them credit for that. And since they were able to walk such a fine line between the religious and secular aspects of their foundation, they had access to corporate funding not available to more overtly religious organizations.

“I'd like to ask him over sometime,” Jonathan said, bringing me back to the moment. “I think you'd like him.”

“Sure. That'd be nice. Can they come and go as they please?”

He took a sip of his Coke before answering. “I think they can have one night a week, as long as they say where they're going, and they have a ride back and forth to town…and they have to be back by midnight.”

“Whenever you want. But I'm curious why you'd be delivering trees to New Eden. It's a farm; you'd think they'd have enough trees of their own.”

Jonathan grinned and nudged my leg with his. “Well of course they do. But these are for around the Dinsmores' new house: some flowering dogwood and Japanese cherry.”

“A new house, huh? A little ninety-seven-room cottage with an indoor polo field and trout pond?”

He gave me a look of mock disgust. “Jeez! What a cynic! No, no trout pond or polo field. It's a nice house, but it's just a house. Maybe four bedrooms?”

Now that came as quite a surprise, given the tendency to excess of some other doers-of-good-works who had been making the headlines in the past few years.

“Well, you ask Randy over whenever you want.”

Jonathan beamed, as only he can.

“Great! We'll be going out there again tomorrow. I'll ask him then.”

*

At the office the next morning, I waited until about ten o'clock to call the number on Tunderew's business card. I figured rich and famous authors probably liked to sleep in in the morning. They could afford to.

There were two rings at the other end of the line, then a click and a woman's voice: “Mr. Tunderew's office.”

An office! I'm impressed!
I made a note to remind myself to write a book someday.

“Is Mr. Tunderew in?”

“No sir, he's not. May I take a message?” There were sounds in the background, which I couldn't quite make out, but seemed familiar.

“Could you tell me where your office is located? Perhaps I can drop Mr. Tunderew a note.”

“Ah, well, I'm afraid I couldn't tell you that, sir. I really don't have an address. This is Mr. Tunderew's answering service.”

Aha! The sounds in the background were other operators taking other calls for other clients. ‘Mr. Tunderew's office!' Right! So much for my writing a book.

I gave her my name and number and told her that I was calling in response to his conversation with his attorney, Glen O'Banyon. She thanked me, and we hung up. Well, at least he had a pretty high-class service—I didn't hear her popping gum.

While I waited, having no idea how long the wait would be, I looked in the phone book for the address and phone number of Bernadine Press. I figured I'd be needing to contact them at some point. Somewhat to my surprise, the phone rang just as I was turning the yellow pages to Publishers. “Hardesty Investigations.”