P'town Murders: A Bradford Fairfax Murder Mystery (2 page)

A typical evening brought together hundreds of differing voices from across the continent, and farther:
Hey, all you politicos! Houston here. It's a hundred-and-ten degrees outside. Barbies are melting!
came the report from a regular nicknamed Billy D.

Hey, Billy D—Icarus here,
Bradford responded.
Good to hear from you. I'm in a somewhat cooler place, myself.

London checking in, chimed an eager voice calling itself Lola.
Anybody for a discussion of the relative merits of Bush and Gore?

Lola, you're all wet,
came a swift reply with a New York moniker.
Gore will trounce Bush and the world will never hear about that Texan halfwit again,

Lay off Texas, Yankee! Billy D retorted.
I think Bush is gonna win!

Despite rumors of eavesdropping by security organizations, the chatters freely discussed any and all topics: how to sneak into Cuba, Saddam Hussein, Hilary Clinton's sexuality. Here, the forbidden was everyday. They even joked about the likelihood of secret surveillance.
Smile for the camera,
someone was sure to say to remind them of the presence of electronic snoopers.

The discussions lasted for hours. Brad often found himself at the center of the talks, frequently accepting the role of moderator at the group's request. When most of the others had given up and gone back to the real world, a semi-regular known as Dedalus continued to engage him. At first, Dedalus seemed to be goading him, prodding for his point of view, which he always gave with unfailing politeness. Later, Brad realized Dedalus had been drawing him out. What he couldn't know was that Dedalus had been tracking him.

It would have shocked Brad to learn his nickname appeared frequently in surveillance scans by the National Security Agency's "Project Echelon." With its high-speed artificial intelligence programs, Echelon intercepted and sifted through billions of private messages every day. The NSA relied on the disbelief of most Internet users that such operations could actually occur. It was Big Brother, big time, all the time.

No one was safe. Joke about a possible assassination of George W. Bush by Osama Bin Laden, and Echelon red-flagged you. Get fancy and encode it as a pun—a secret wish to see the 'Shrub' end up in the 'Trash Bin', for example—and you might make a terrorist alert list.

As Icarus, Brad was well known to the NSA, who eavesdropped on BOI's chat rooms. Grace, aka Dedalus, didn't approve of the NSA, but she wasn't above eavesdropping as well. Grace soon began to consider Bradford Fairfax a worthy candidate for her own security organization, one that was nameless. It was a secret eye in an invisible door.

Grace contacted Bradford, told him he could do great things for the world, and made him an offer. Then she left him to think about it.

At the time, Brad was a freelance journalist specializing in world affairs. He had few close friends and, apart from Ross, no immediate family. He'd been made a ward of the state at fifteen when his father was killed in a car crash. His mother had died eleven years earlier. As far as Brad knew, he had no living blood relatives. For him to disappear from view completely wouldn't take much.

Brad thought over Grace's offer for a month before agreeing to join. Once he'd made his decision, the rest fell quickly in line. Leaving his old life behind wasn't an issue, but he knew it would change him forever. Any sort of personal commitment would be impossible. It was why he'd chosen to set Ross free in Provincetown.

That had been five years ago.

2

The towers of Boston receded as the water churned beneath the big boat. Sunlight winked on the waves. Despite the bright September afternoon, the air was cool. Brad waited till the city had all but disappeared before making his way inside the cabin.

He looked around at the gay men sporting their festive moods and colorful clothes, the stylish lesbians accompanied by well-groomed dogs, and a handful of straight families with fiercely hip three-year-olds doing intergalactic battle on Game Boys. Somehow, these wildly different tribes all managed to get along together in Provincetown.

Over in a far corner, a handsome muscular man sat clad only in a pair of boxers. Brad's eyes played over the sculpted chest, plucked to within an inch of its derma's life. The man's stomach was so flat it was concave. Brad felt a twinge of abdomen envy mixed with a tingling of lust.

Across the table from the boxer-clad beauty a slightly plump young man leaned forward, frowning with effort as he applied makeup to the demigod.

I'd like to be his blush brush, thought Brad.

The near-naked man turned and caught Brad's eye. His smile flashed fun across the cabin. And maybe something else.

"Don't move!" squeaked the makeup artist. "You'll ruin my work."

Brad smiled. Only on the P'Town ferry! He moved on till he came to the snack bar, stopping to stare at an assortment of food beneath the glass. Hardly anything nonfat or low-carb, he noted grimly. At his neighborhood supermarket, Brad shopped exclusively in what he called the "No Fat-No Fun" section. Maybe it was time to live a little.

He decided on an apple turnover, giving himself a mental slap on the wrist. Just one won't hurt, he thought, though he knew that was always how it started.

The server looked at him with concern. "You sure you want this?" he asked, as though he'd read Brad's mind. Brad flushed and thought of his midriff. Was it showing already?

"It might get a bit rough out there," the man said, with a nod toward the water.

Brad smiled. "I like it rough." No reaction from the server. Brad's smile faltered. Definitely straight, he decided. "I'll be okay," he said with a shrug. "I've done this trip before."

"All right," the man said. "Just thought I should warn you."

"I stand warned."

Brad continued through the cabin, settling in to read
The New York Times,
a publication he liked to refer to as 'that amusing concoction of lies.' Two front-page stories vied for his attention: Hurricane Isabel was threatening offshore Maryland, and Arnold Schwarzenegger was threatening the rest of America in his campaign to become governor of California.

"I'm not afraid of Democrats," Arnie declared in a fervent interview. "I married one."

Isabel was a woman of fewer words, but her 150-mph winds kept the country's attention regardless.

It wasn't until he reached the back page of section one that Brad found a brief write-up on the Dalai Lama's upcoming lecture series in New York. To conclude his visit, the guru-in-exile had scheduled an open-air talk in Central Park the following Sunday. If Grace was so worried about him, Brad wondered, why didn't she just advise him to cancel his trip? Of course there could be any number of reasons, but it seemed the sensible solution.

He'd just finished the article when a loud squawking burst from the back of the cabin. He looked up to see Marilyn Monroe charging through the room. It was the man in boxers, now wearing a platinum wig and false eyelashes. He teetered through the cabin on high heels, a pink boa trailing behind.

"Help! Save me!" Marilyn cried to the room as everyone erupted in laughter.

"Norma Jean, I am not
finished
with you!" the makeup artist screamed as he raced after the charging figure.

The fugitive spied Brad sitting with his paper and suddenly turned coy. He sashayed over and ran the boa's feathery tip across Brad's cheeks.

"Hey, big boy!" he whispered in imitation of a very-Hollywood Marilyn. "How's about a little fun later, just you and me?"

"Norma Jean!"

Brad suddenly found his face pressed into the man's taut midriff.

"Please don't let them take me," Marilyn cooed in mock fright. His voice lowered and Brad thought he heard the man say, "I know who you are. I've got to talk to you about Ross Pretty."

Before Brad could react, the irate makeup artist reached his prey. "I'm not
finished
with you!" he cried, grabbing the unfinished Marilyn by the biceps and pulling him out of the room.

Marilyn gave Brad a last reluctant glance.

"And I'm not finished with
you,
honey," he crowed over the crowd's approving roar. "By the way, everybody," he said, turning to the room. "I'd like to take this opportunity to invite y'all to my show at the Post Office Cabaret, starting tomorrow night!"

Brad watched, intrigued, as Marilyn disappeared in a flurry of high heels and feathers.

3

Every time Bradford stepped off the Provincetown Ferry he felt as though he'd come home. He merged with the circuslike atmosphere of merrymakers, gleeful children, souvenir hawkers, roving dogs, arts-and-crafts collectors, professional escape artists, and the occasional genuine tourist swelling the crowded streets.

Every year, for five long months from May through September, Provincetown endured a throng of visitors so mighty it stopped traffic the entire length of town. The bustle started just after sunup and lasted all night long, barely resting for a few tranquil minutes at the beginning of each day. If you were straight, homophobic, and arriving unaware from the wilds of New Jersey, you might think you'd been plunked down in Sodom. But if you were one of the chosen few, you knew you'd reached the Promised Land.

After visiting Provincetown it was difficult, if not downright impossible, to go back whence you'd come and resign yourself to coping with 'normality' again.
I never want to go home,
Judy told her audience that final night in Carnegie Hall. She might have been talking about P'Town. It had an allure that got in your blood and wouldn't leave you alone.

Residents can tell you that anyone who comes to Provincetown will return before long. Bradford was happy to be made a case in point, returning again and again to the gingerbread houses and salt air, the crowded streets and friendly cafes, the buoys and the boys.

On his first trip he was just another twinkie lucky enough to have booked a tiny room in one of the town's myriad guesthouses. He'd lodged at Romeo's then, a nondescript but entirely functional abode where any number of boys with limited means have rested their weary heads after long nights spent carousing and indulging in P'Town's thousand-and-one distractions.

For young Brad, simply being in P'Town had seemed more than enough reason to be thrilled, but whenever people asked where he was staying they looked genuinely distressed by his answer:
Those shoes with that dress?
their expressions demanded.
Impossible!

He'd just announced the name of his residence to an ebullient crowd partying in the Atlantic House one evening, when a drunken queen in casual wear sidled over and placed an arm over his shoulder. A jeweled finger strayed across Brad's chest, tracing the outline of a boyish nipple through his Banana Republic T-shirt.

"Don't worry, sweetie," the queen cooed over the din of the bar. "We'll get you into a really..."—the finger strolled across to the other nipple—"...
good
house next year."

"But I like where I'm staying," Brad replied, for he hadn't yet learned to recognize a queen out of drag. "They even have chocolate donuts for breakfast."

He'd thought himself clever, but the horrified faces surrounding Brad told him he'd just committed social
hara-kiri.

"You know
nothing!"
the queen shrieked, retracting her arm and banishing him with an imperious finger to the outer circle of the bar.

The queen transformed. Majesty and Presence towered before Bradford where moments before there'd been a dumpy sod in shorts and a shapeless golf shirt.

The queen's nostrils flared.
"Style! Grace! Position!
These things
matter!"
she screamed, as though to say he knew not what dangers lurked.

She regarded him, eyes narrowed, as the bar shifted nervously. "But," she purred. And then again,
"But!"
giving the word its fullest meaning. "You're cute. And you're... young."

The queen faltered, for
young
is the one thing before which all queens will allow themselves to weaken.

"So!" She nodded slowly.
"Just so.
We will give you another chance."

Breaths were exhaled. The chatter resumed and people laughed again. Brad had been spared. Moreover, he'd been called upon to join the inner circle of a Queen of Some Standing—nothing to snort at for the impudent upstart that he was.

As Brad was to learn, in every young man's passage into The Life there arrives a moment when he realizes that all is not as it appears. To the uninitiated, The Life may seem a hall of mirrors in which one can be lost forever without a knowledgeable friend or a Wise Queen to act as guide.

Just so!

A Wise Queen stands before one, then, disguised in shorts and a T-shirt. A Wizard stalks the glen without his wand. Alice peers into a looking glass and beholds another world entirely. And Dorothy peeks behind the curtain and sees...
well!

One must take care not to misinterpret such things. The Life can be an uncharted voyage, a bottomless bog waiting to trap the unsuspecting twink who presumes that a modicum of looks and a certain flair on the dance floor are a substitute for style, or that mere panache might be a match for true wit. The Wise Queen in the A-House had been trying to convey just such to her largely undiscerning novitiate.

Meaning is attached to everything, she'd implied. One must learn to read
into.
A label queen is not simply one who knows the price of your outfit at a glance, but sees its social standing as well. True, it takes talent to see "Burberrys of London" rather than "Designer Knock-Off' sewn onto a tag inside a man's long-sleeved linen shirt, but that's only the beginning. A
vrai
label queen can read meaning into that shirt as well.

Has it been donned casually so as to suggest the
vie d'esprit
of the well-to-do, or is it being worn
avec hauteur
to disguise the fact that its owner has gone bankrupt purchasing this exclusive novelty item to wear to uptown cocktail parties? Or!—
Listen carefully,
the Wise Queen advises,
for herein lies the danger—As
it being worn by a young Gangsta Rapper whose world holds its own private associations of meaning and power? The beholder must beware of confusing them! Those stunning mahogany chest muscles bulging beneath that creamy Touch-Me-There Burberrys cotton may seem to have been made just for you, but much is at stake if you risk running your hands over them uninvited. And only a real queen knows such things with unfailing instinct.