Vermilion (10 page)

Valentine sighed heavily. “I wouldn't worry about it now. Searcy's just blowing off steam because he hasn't got any leads. He's got problems of his own. Mario Scarpetti is probably onto the cops every waking minute. Now, I talked to Searcy a couple of times, and he's got a problem. He got put on this investigation in the gay community, and he thought he was going to come down on top of all these squishy little faggots and strike terror in our hearts, and from what it sounds like, nobody's getting struck with terror. He's getting pushed himself, and so he's pushing you.”

“Yeah, he did that too.”

“He laid hands on you?”

“He shoved me up against the wall.”

“What did you do?”

“I said, ‘When do you get off duty?' He said, ‘I'm off duty now.' So then I shoved him back, hard. I knew better than to raise my hand to a cop that's on duty, even if there weren't any witnesses. He's in decent shape—more than decent shape—but he's not as quick as I am. He stormed out and said he'd better see me on Berkeley Street by Friday or my ass was cooked. Cal said it was just possible he could drag me into court, if he's really crazy, but I don't want it to go that far. I hate hassles.”

Valentine raised himself onto the top tier again. The two men then arranged themselves lengthwise on the narrow bench, leaning against either end of the small timbered room, facing one another. The heat was exhausting.

Randy knitted his brows. “The problem is…”

“What?” urged Valentine.

“The problem is, that after that cop left I thought of something else, but I'm afraid to call him up again because he'll think I was holding back on purpose, and that I know even more.”

“What was it you remembered?”

“Billy's john. He had a bag of toys.”

Valentine said nothing.

“Actually, I don't know what he had inside. Like a doctor's bag, maybe not as big, black leather. And I remember thinking: he had something in there that Billy didn't want to play with, and that's why they argued. But Valentine, what if he didn't have just toys inside that bag? What if he wasn't carrying around ‘marital aids'? What if he had a hammer or a lead pipe?”

C
LARISSE LOVELACE waited patiently for Daniel Valentine in the lobby of the International Health Spa. She was a member herself, but men and women had separate exercise rooms, and she wasn't as faithful in her attendance as Valentine. She examined now—as she had often examined before—one of the large paintings that flanked the wide entrance. This pair of large canvases, of the German academic school of the mid-nineteenth century, depicted the youth of Imperial Rome enjoying decorous physical activity in shimmering togas. In Clarisse's favorite, two blond men and a lithe young woman played an elaborate game of hoops. The scene lay in a large grove of unidentifiable trees, with the portico of a magnificent villa and the Mediterranean visible here and there through the foliage. Dappled sunlight illumined the golden heads of the three participants. The two men appeared to be twins—because the painter couldn't afford more than one model, Clarisse assumed—and she was attracted to both. Studying their features and expressions in detail, she realized that she liked them simply because they resembled a beardless Valentine.

She sighed. Valentine was at once as close and as unattainable as the two men of oil and canvas.

Clarisse had never come so near Daniel Valentine as during their brief intimacy in Bermuda, when his sexual orientation had not been so settled a question as now. But when she discovered that his impotency in her bed was counterbalanced with extreme prowess with the assistant manager of the hotel, Clarisse collapsed with grief, rage, and embarrassment, and took the first flight home. But back in Boston, Valentine had called her up and, oddly, from the moment she first heard his voice on the phone, the rift had been closed. They were fast companions since that time, and their friendship was broken only every couple of years or so by some violent pointless argument.

She pulled her fur coat close about her shoulders and turned away from the painting. Valentine approached silently across the double-laid Oriental carpets. He was hurriedly pulling on his navy pea coat over a red hooded sweatshirt.

“I'm late,” he apologized.

She shrugged noncommittally, and buttoned her coat as they moved toward the wide glass doors. They didn't speak as they descended the dark, short flight of stairs. They had just stepped out in the frigid night air when Valentine hurried to the edge of the street, stooped, and lifted a torn playing card from a pile of snow and ice atop a storm drain. He thumped it with his forefinger to loosen the filth on it, and slipped it into the pocket of his pea jacket.

“God!” breathed Clarisse, “how can I maintain my facade as a woman of fashion and leisure if I keep company with a man who picks playing cards up out of the gutter?”

“Ten of spades. Congress. Blue field, red filigree border. Probably part of a bridge set.”

They dodged traffic to cross to the boulevard down the center of Commonwealth Avenue. Invariably they preferred this generous path to the much narrower sidewalk in front of the townhouses on either side of the street. Bare gnarled oaks and maples lined the island, and new street-lamps burned sharply behind their black branches. Daniel still said nothing, but as they were crossing Fairfield Street, Clarisse slipped her arm into his.

“What's the matter? You gain five pounds over the holidays?”

He laughed shortly. “No, in fact I lost.”

“What's wrong then?”

He took a package of cigarettes from his pocket. They paused beneath the statue of a bald man who had once done something, or said something, or caused something to happen quite by accident. Valentine lit one for himself and offered a second to Clarisse. She took it.

“I saw Randy Harmon at the gym,” he said.

“Randy's always at the gym. It's hard to believe him anymore when he tries to tell you how much he hates it.”

Valentine, as they moved on, more slowly now, told Clarisse about Lieutenant Searcy's raucous visit to the Royal Baths.

“Well,” said Clarisse, “at least he's living up to his name.”

“Still think he's cute?”

“I see the man's point. How could Randy not have noticed the john? I mean, he was interested enough to notice how long Billy stayed with him, and notice that he was carrying a bag of toys.”

Valentine shrugged. “Think, though, Clarisse. He just didn't. Just the way that I tune out the people who come to Bonaparte's. It's automatic. There's such a thing as too much information—too much input. You don't
want
to know all your customers. They order a drink, you fix it, you take the money, and it's on to the next. The regulars I remember, but even that takes time.”

“You sound like a whore,” said Clarisse.

Where Commonwealth Avenue ends, at Arlington Street, they stopped for crossing traffic. Clarisse pressed Valentine's arm. “OK, I know you're upset and I feel bad for Randy, but Randy's just going to have to take care of himself, and we should all be so lucky as to have an ex who's as good a lawyer as Cal. But tonight we're going to have a nice dinner together, just you and I, and put all this aside. Tomorrow you have off. You have dinner with me, and then I'll spin you around three times and send you out to a bar and you can pick up the most beautiful man in Boston.”

Valentine smiled warmly. “If you weren't a woman, I'd marry you. Where do we eat?”

“I don't care. Let's try the Tudor House. We haven't been there for at least two weeks.”

“All right. Bonaparte's first though. The Tudor House doesn't have a license.”

There was a small boisterous crowd at Bonaparte's when Valentine and Clarisse arrived. Someone was going away somewhere, or had just returned, or had been fired from a job he didn't like—at any rate, someone and all his friends were very drunk.

Valentine and Clarisse did not check their coats but settled immediately into two seats in the main bar downstairs, as far as possible from those celebrating. Jack brought Clarisse her usual scotch and water and Valentine ordered a beer.

After the scotch touched her lips, Clarisse's eyes blew open in panic. She gripped Valentine's arm, spilling his beer. “Oh, my God!” she cried.

“What is it?”

“I forgot to call in sick today.”

“It's a little late, don't you think?”

Clarisse wiped up the beer with a bar napkin and threw it at Jack. “No,” she said with determination, “it's never too late.”

She slid off the stool and crossed through the Wicker Room. She leaned against the wall between the two restroom doors and dropped a dime into the pay telephone there. While waiting for the real estate office's answering service to respond, she noted that although Trudy was not at the keyboard, several sheets of music were strewn across the top of the piano. There was a line of three empty glasses on the edge of the bench. She remembered then that Trudy's weekly sing-along began at eight each Thursday night; it was the only thing for which Trudy was on time.

Clarisse shifted her envelope from one arm to the other. After fifteen rings a female with an offensive Boston accent answered huffily. Clarisse identified herself and then dictated a message. “I am writhing in bed with the flu, doped up on Contac, and waiting for a team of surgeons.” At the end, she said, “Sign that—‘Lovelace, eight-thirty A.M.'”

The woman protested the inaccuracy of the time, but Clarisse was stern. She got her way.

Pleased, Clarisse replaced the receiver and turned. The contact lens in her left eye slipped from her iris, and without hesitation she whirled about and stiff-armed her way into the ladies room.

Clarisse plugged the sink and drew a couple of inches of lukewarm water. She leaned toward the mirror, and tried to right the lens with a wetted finger.

The lens was replaced. To check it, she focused first on her own image in the mirror, then on the two stalls behind her. In the one adjacent to the outside wall, there was a sudden commotion of rustling material and a violent repeated sigh of exasperation.

Clarisse turned, curious, and leaned against the sink. Through the crack by the door, she could see flashing stuffs of light green, dark green, and black.

“Oh, Jesus!” cried a deep masculine voice from the stall.

The sound of snapped elastic crackled through the small room, and was immediately followed by an even greater commotion of rustling material. Clarisse wondered for a moment whether there were a Girl Scout troop in crinolines behind the door.

There was a splash.

“Oh, God!” cried the voice.

Clarisse folded her arms and leaned back against the sink.

The door to the stall was eased open, and Trudy's light-blue wig, the color of Cinderella's ball-dress in the Disney film, emerged askew. Beneath it, Trudy's green-lashed eyes fluttered up.

“Oh, Clarisse, I'm glad it's just you. I thought one of my fans had come in to attack.”

Trudy grabbed Clarisse's arm, and pulled herself entirely out of the stall. Clarisse pushed her over to the other sink. “Is life hard, Trudy?” asked Clarisse sympathetically.

Trudy leaned against the sink and sighed. The green plastic lashes above and below her eyes meshed like gears. “Life is a shambles,” she whispered.

“Worse than usual?”

“The strap on my new brassiere broke, right in the middle of ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.' I was so humiliated I couldn't even finish, and it was a request. Half of me was up here where it should be, and the other one was down there around my girdle. Then, when I was in there”—she pointed one broken green nail at the stall—“I was putting Mama's Helper back in, and the damn thing fell in the toilet! Oh, Clarisse,” Trudy moaned, “I think I'm being punished for all my unpaid parking tickets. I haven't had to stuff my brassiere with toilet tissue since my high school graduation!”

Clarisse wanted desperately to ask whether Trudy had graduated from high school in drag, but she forbore in consideration of Trudy's distress.

Trudy straightened herself, put on a brave face, and turned to the mirror. She smoothed the material of her dress over her hips. She studied her breasts critically, and adjusted the left slightly, moving it to the side. Then she moved the other in the same direction. “Honey,” she said, “if I thought this bra would fit you, I'd take it off right now and strap it on you. Aren't you uncomfortable bouncing around like that? Don't take this the wrong way, but they're not—
discreet
, if you know what I mean.”

Clarisse rolled her eyes and pursed her mouth. She drew her coat closed. “I rent more flats if I don't wear a bra,” she said tightly.

Trudy shrugged. “As long as you don't mind a little curvature of the spine, I guess it's all right. How do I look?”