P'town Murders: A Bradford Fairfax Murder Mystery (14 page)

Ruby sucked on the joint and held her breath till her eyes watered. She passed it back to Bradford.

"Stuff s not bad, eh?" she said, watching as he took a toke. "Some dope rips the shit out of your throat and makes you feel like you've been sucking on sandpaper, but this stuff goes down real smooth."

Brad thought that was an interesting comment, considering all the throaty voices he'd been hearing lately.

"Anyway, my Rinpoche left Tibet when he was barely a child," Ruby continued. "When the Chinese invaded in '59, the Dalai Lama fled with two children and a handful of holy books."

Brad's interest twigged at the mention of the Dalai Lama.

"My Rinpoche was one of the kids," Ruby concluded. "I've been trying to convince him to teach, but he's not ready yet. Anyway, I'm sure that's not what you wanted to talk to me about."

Brad pulled a picture of Ross from his wallet. "I'm trying to find out what happened to this guy."

Ruby took the picture and nodded. "I remember him well. He was a sweet man, really and truly. Used to come in every other day for a caramel macchiato. Sometimes he'd sit and we'd talk for a while—nothing special, just shootin' the shit. I never knew where he worked or I would've warned him he was in bad company."

Ruby passed the picture back and shook her head sadly.

"Any idea why someone would want him dead?"

Ruby's eyes narrowed. "You sayin' he was murdered?"

Brad nodded. "I'm afraid so."

"What happened?"

"Drug overdose. But it was a drug he didn't normally use."

"Well, now!" Ruby took a final toke and blew the smoke slowly across her lips. She looked Brad in the eye and shook her head. "It doesn't make sense, a nice man like that. Who would want to harm him? There'd be plenty that'd want to see his boss dead, though."

"Do you think someone who had it in for Rosengarten might have bumped off Ross to get back at him?"

"To send a message, you mean?"

"Something like that."

Ruby ground out the roach under her sneaker.

"Doubt it," she said. "This town's too small. Thing like that'd get around faster than a jackrabbit on speed."

"Could he have seen something at the house that made him a target?"

"Now that's possible!" Ruby paused. "I hear tell there's plenty of high-powered, closety political types that go to that place. Maybe your friend Ross sees somebody who doesn't want to be seen there—somebody real dangerous—and the guy has him popped."

Bradford had already reached a similar conclusion. He thought of Marilyn Monroe and her deadly tryst with the Kennedy brothers. Where many have cried 'conspiracy theory,' others simply knew better. Marilyn's death had always seemed too convenient. And who better to have done it than J. Edgar Hoover and his demented band? In their eyes, Doris Day could have been a communist sympathizer and a threat to the government. But it wasn't till the revelations of Hoover's personal life came out after his death that it really began to make sense. Everything had been tossed from that closet, including the dresses the old man liked to wear—all the way from kitsch to kvetch, and just about anything in between. Who would have benefited most from the death of America's love goddess but a dress-wearing, FBI-running, Johnny-come-lately rival? Marilyn threatened to blow the goods on the Kennedys and Hoover came to the rescue, taking the opportunity to get their love doll out of the picture and get himself in good with the boys in one foul move. It was that simple.

"How many other guys work in that place?" Ruby asked.

"Maybe a dozen."

She clucked. "You should ask one of them. They'd know more than me."

"That's what I was doing last night when I got conked on the head," he said. "Can you tell me anything more?"

"Not really, hon," she said. "I avoid the place like the plague. In a small town like this it's hard to stay out of people's way, but I try extra hard with that bunch."

Brad was disappointed. He was sure Ruby knew something that could help. At least the dope was working. The throbbing in his head had begun to feel like a distant ache. He pulled out his card. "Here's my number. Call me if you remember anything."

"Will do." Ruby shook her head and laughed. "My, my! What kind of Karma do you have going on, brother?"

17

Zach was waiting at the cafe. He wore a tight yellow sweater that focused attention on his boyishly handsome face, while leaving no doubt about his well-formed physique. He'd come capless that evening. His hair had been coaxed into a whorl over his brow, a little peak tilting up and back the way the younger boys styled it those days.

That is one delicious-looking young man, Brad decided, as he crossed the room. Envious eyes followed him to his seat. Anyone watching might think they were a couple. Oddly, that appealed to him.

Their waiter that evening was somewhat more experienced at serving the public than the one Brad had endured the night before. He spread a napkin across Brad's lap and made sure he was comfortably settled before leaving. Every few minutes he would float by the table or wink from across the room, as though the three of them shared a secret. In fact, he was so attentive, Brad began to suspect he had designs on Zach.

Zach was forthcoming about himself. As he told it, his family were typical middle-class liberals who embraced the ideals of tolerance, education and self-knowledge. His parents encouraged their children to follow their own paths in life. Zach's sister Anna had recently become a dancer with a European ballet company, while Zach's older brother Harold, a nuclear physicist, was busy making waves in his field.

Zach was the baby in the family. His talents had proven somewhat more esoteric. Apart from an affinity for healing, he'd also come out in his last year of high school. Secure in his sexuality when others were just questioning theirs, he informed his parents of his orientation.
We support you in anything you choose,
was their response. Zach had never looked back.

After high school, he enrolled in university but showed no real interest apart from Asian languages. He dropped out in his second year to tour the Far East. He spent a month rafting on the Ganges and eight more months in the mountains of Tibet learning to harness the healing powers latent in his hands. That, he claimed, had taught him more than all his years in school.

He'd returned home the following spring, but couldn't make up his mind about his studies. He hemmed and hawed about it all summer. At the last moment, he chose not to return to school and had come to Provincetown instead, hoping to discover a new direction in life.

Zach ended his narrative and listened as Brad spoke briefly of his past, and how he'd become a ward of the state at the age of fifteen after the death of his father. He also mentioned Ross's death, the reason for his presence in Provincetown. Zach offered his sympathy.

"We'd been apart for a few years," Brad said. "Still, I wish now I hadn't let him go."

"Do you feel responsible for what happened?"

"In a way," Brad admitted. "Though I always thought of Ross as a survivor. Whenever he fell down, he'd just pick himself up and go on. He never wasted time feeling sorry for himself. And even though he had a family, he thought of himself as an orphan, like me. I just never expected him to end up like this."

"Was he another younger guy who fell for you?"

"Ouch!"

"Sorry. I didn't mean it that way. How long were you together?"

"Two years. Just long enough for me to fall in love and long enough for him to realize he wasn't the settling-down type."

Zach cocked his head. "Most gay guys aren't. They just think they want to be. As soon as anything ties them down, they get scared and start to run."

"Is that experience talking?"

"Exactly."

"You don't seem old enough to have had all that much experience—no offense."

"I'm twenty-one!"

Bradford whistled. "Twenty-one! You'll be old and jaded in no time."

"Anyway, what's age got to do with it? These days most teenagers know more about sex than the pope."

Their server had chosen that moment to return with a bottle of wine.

"Depends which pope," he remarked as he opened the bottle with a pop.

Zach grinned. "How's your head feeling?" he asked Brad when the waiter had gone.

"Much better, thanks. Between your Reiki and Big Ruby's fair-trade joint the pain seems to have receded to a dull roar at the back of my head."

"Well, let's have some wine then," Zach said. "Whatever the Reiki started, this will finish. Cheers!"

They clinked glasses and sipped.

"Wow! This is really good wine!" Zach declared.

Brad looked up in surprise. Here was a very attractive twenty-one-year-old with blue hair telling him the wine was good. It
was
good wine, he knew, because he'd purposely selected an excellent vintage. In fact, it was
superb
wine. But at twenty-one, not only had Brad not known good wine from bad, he had yet to discover that he liked wine.

Brad found himself gazing with interest across the table. This wasn't the same boy he'd slept with a scant year and a half earlier. Or perhaps he just hadn't given him much of a chance then.

Zach combined the boyish good looks of Tobey Maguire with the sexual appeal of a young porn star. He was a grunge Gainsborough:
Hustler Blue Boy.
Brad still recalled their initial encounter the previous summer. He'd been idling on the Internet one evening when a message blinked in front of him:
I found your profile on GayNet,
it said.
You sound like a very cool guy. Want to meet?

It was signed 'Zach,' which Brad assumed was a pseudonym. No one signed his real name on GayNet. He read the profile. It sounded innocuous enough. Zach professed to like hiking and camping. Brad smirked when he read that. On screen, all the boys professed to like hiking and camping, but few turned out to have done either.

He read further. Zach also enjoyed most 'outdoor pursuits.' That sounded like a euphemism for sex. Brad clicked on the picture. It showed an attractive young man posed on a mountaintop in hiking gear. His legs were tanned and rippling with muscle. He looked like a pop-up poster boy for the great outdoors. That said something, of course, unless it'd been Photoshopped. You could be standing on top of the Pyramid of Cheops at Giza without ever having set foot in the Middle East, and no one would be the wiser.

With his sunglasses on, Zach had looked about twenty-six or twenty-seven in the photo. That was a decade or two shy of Brad's ideal but,
Hey!
It was a Friday night and he was horny. Wasn't that the purpose of being on GayNet?

A brief electronic conversation ensued, followed by an invitation from Zach. Brad was at his door in less than an hour. When it opened, the boy who stood there was considerably younger than he'd appeared in his picture. A lot of men Photoshopped their images to look younger, he knew, but almost nobody did it to look
older.
Just how much younger Zach was, Brad couldn't tell, but one thing was sure—he was
hot!
And what he lacked in age he made up for in sheer sensuality. Bradford quickly decided 'Zach' would do for an evening's fun.

As it turned out, the sex was great. There weren't many younger men who could satisfy him the way an older and more experienced man could, but Zach had made all the right moves that evening. In fact, he was far better in bed than Brad had been at his age. Or perhaps he was just more comfortable in his skin.

Brad enjoyed playing the older aggressor role that evening. He hadn't been rough, but he'd taken advantage of Zach's submissiveness. He raked the boy's back with his chin stubble, giving him love bites and gripping him forcefully as he took control of his body, making Zach gasp and moan. He was a tasty meal and Bradford dug in for a generous helping.

All was
going
well until Zach responded to Brad's passion with an ardor of his own.
I love you!
Zach blurted out as he climaxed, clapping his hands over his mouth as though to shut out the offending words.

That was his first fatal error in Gay. Another quickly followed: the confession that he was only nineteen.
But almost twenty!
he'd added as an afterthought. All this had come on the heels of an admission that he already 'sort of had a boyfriend, though, as far as he was concerned, the relationship was all but over.

Brad left Zach's apartment that evening with a promise to call that he knew he'd never keep. For days afterward, he was plagued by the memory of their encounter, but as much as he'd wanted to repeat it he couldn't see himself as the partner of a nineteen-year-old who showed no emotional restraint whatsoever. Even Grace would have given pause at the thought.

Brad had long ago decided he would never let mere physical desire overcome his willpower. He saw himself as someone very much in charge of every aspect of his life. He needed to be in complete control. It was only beginning to occur to him now that it was the main reason he was always alone.

So how was it that a year and a half later he found himself seated on the upstairs patio of an upscale restaurant in Provincetown after a very enjoyable dinner, sipping wine with this same boy? But clearly this wasn't the same boy. Even his hair color had changed!

Brad watched him across the table. The night they'd made love Zach's body had been every bit as superb as the wine they were now drinking. Except the wine was older. At that age, Brad knew, he probably forced himself to go to the gym once a week, at most. Muscles appeared spontaneously on kids like Zach and were the envy of every gay man over thirty. Himself included.

There was a decade between them, but Brad wondered if his experiences in the last five years alone weren't an impassable chasm. On the other hand, he was having what amounted to a very intelligent conversation with this boy who was barely out of his teens. On the other hand again, the boy was truly irresistible. Zach smiled and Brad felt himself melting.