P'town Murders: A Bradford Fairfax Murder Mystery (5 page)

"Honey, was I fabulous?" he squawked.

"To die for," Brad allowed.

"You are
too
perfect!" Cinder proclaimed. "Now come backstage and help me out of these rags."

In the dressing room, Cinder suddenly turned serious. "In case you're wondering, I recognized you from Ross's picture albums. He had dozens of photos of you!"

"How did you know Ross?"

Cinder looked to the mirror where his face assumed a mask of grief. "We were roommates a couple of summers ago. It's so terrible about his death, isn't it?"

"Yes, it is terrible," Brad agreed.

The expression vanished. Cinder's face resumed its telltale Marilyn skittishness, but his talk was pure Tallulah.

"Anyway, that's how I knew who y'all were on the boat yesterday. And I knew ya'll had come about his death."

Brad wondered just how much Cinder really knew about him and whether his identity might be in jeopardy. Ross could have revealed a bit too much about Brad's line of work, thinking that a little colorful gossip wouldn't hurt since none of his Provincetown acquaintances would ever meet him in the flesh. Anonymity was easy in a big city where new identities could be put on and discarded again in seconds, but in a small seaside resort people could know more about you than you knew about yourself.

"I'm flattered you recognized me."

"It would be hard not to recognize a celebrity," Cinder cooed.

"A what?"

"Well, maybe not here, but certainly back where y'all come from you're a celebrity," Cinder said, tossing the end of the boa over his shoulder.

Brad was perplexed. "Who is it you think I am?"

"Why, you're Hartford Coleman!" He faltered. "Ain't you?"

Brad laughed. Cinder had mistaken him for a hard-bitten New York theater critic with the power to put any stage performer squarely before the public eye. The only problem was, he recalled, Coleman seldom liked any of the performers he saw.

"No," Brad said. "I'm not. I think Ross dated Hartford a few years ago, but I'm not him."

Cinder pouted. "Are y'all sure you're not him?"

Brad nodded. "I'm sure."

"Then who are y'all?"

"I'm Bradford Fairfax," he said.

"Ahh!"
The name brought forth a smile of recognition. "The bisexual golfing instructor and heir to a small chain of men's retail outlets from Seattle. Ross said you had multiple orgasms that were out of this world."

Brad flushed. At least the multiple orgasms part was correct, thanks to years of Tantric exercises and a mostly unintentional celibacy. The rest was a combination of personas Brad had developed over time. Despite a little bragging on Brad's behalf, Ross had kept his true identity a secret. He was safe.

"So y'all can't help me get famous and rich?" Cinder asked, clearly disappointed at having met yet another Miss Congeniality.

"I'm afraid not, but if I give any interviews to
Golf World
while I'm here I'll be sure to mention you. I thought your show was amazing."

Cinder's smile lit up the room. "Too bad you're not a critic," he said. "Or a crime writer. That wasn't true at all what they said about how Ross died."

"What do you mean?" Brad started. "Didn't Ross die of an overdose of Ecstasy?"

"Ross
hated
E. He said it robbed him of his erection. He couldn't luck when he took E, so he only took GHB and sometimes K or H or occasionally V, and from time to time even a little T or C. But never, ever
E!"

Brad's mind leapt. "But the coroner's report showed that Ross was pumped full of Ecstasy!"

"That's just it, honey. He may have
died
of an overdose of E, but I know Ross Pretty and he sure didn't take it willingly."

Cinder moved closer, glancing warily over his shoulder and speaking in a stage whisper. "I think it has something to do with Hayden Rosengarten, his boss at the Not-So-OK Corral. At least that's what we all call it around here. It doesn't have a real name, so far as anyone knows."

"Tell me this again slowly," Brad said.

Five minutes later a picture had emerged of Ross's final months working for an egotistical power broker who sold sex-and-drug-sodden weekends to wealthy men and gay celebrities who wanted their party lives kept out of the public eye.

"Five thousand a night buys anything a body could want," Cinder explained. "And I do mean 'anything.' I know because I perform there sometimes. As an impersonator, I mean. I don't do sex for a living any more."

Brad watched Cinder carefully. "What was Ross's job there?"

"Pool boy and sex slave to anyone who wanted him. And believe me, there were plenty who wanted him!"

Brad could well imagine that.

"Do you have any idea why someone would want to kill Ross?" he asked.

Cinder shook his platinum locks. Suddenly his face took on a look of realization.

"What am I saying? Of course I do," he said. "It's like they take over me. When I'm Marilyn, I really am a ditzy blond."

"That's okay," Brad said. "Take your time."

Cinder frowned in a pantomime of concentration.

"Actually, I thought Ross might have pissed off some of the other boys by getting in a little too tight with Hayden. There was a real good-looking boy named Perry who used to be the boss's favorite, but something happened not long after Ross showed up. There was a fight and Perry left and never came back. Maybe he got even with Ross. I hear he works at Purgatory now."

"The Gifford House bar?"

"That's the one."

Brad made a mental note of it. "Anybody else?"

Cinder thought for a moment, and then snapped his fingers.

"There was a drug dealer," he said. "He got in a nasty argument with Hayden. I think Ross used to buy party favors from him now and then. Maybe he gave Ross an overdose of E to get back at Hayden. Kind of like a gang warfare thing, if you know what I mean."

Brad wondered if he was dealing with the overactive imagination of a small-town drag queen, but Cinder's story had the salt air tang of truth. Brad thought again of the drowned boy and the cop's suspicion that he'd been on drugs when he fell in the water. Had the coroner been concealing something? He'd have to look into it quickly. Once Ross's body was cremated, there wouldn't be much call for anyone to investigate further.

"Cinder, are you sure of everything you're telling me?" Brad pressed.

"Sure as shootin', big guy," Cinder said, trailing off into a whispery Marilyn again.

"How can I meet this Hayden guy?"

"Honey, you don't want to meet him—believe me!"

"All the same, I need to," Brad said.

"Well then, you need to spend a night at the Not-So-OK Corral," Cinder said.

"Can you arrange it for me? I'd like to see for myself where Ross worked."

"Uh-huh. Sure I can set it up for you. I'm performing there for the next few nights after my show, but it'll cost ya."

"I'm good for it."

Cinder smiled and blew back a platinum lock. "I've heard," he cooed.

Cinder's fingers crept up Brad's thigh, making his crotch stir. He hadn't dated a woman since Leslie Anne Morphy in grade six, but then it wasn't every day that Marilyn Monroe gave him the eye.

"And now, Sugar, Marilyn would like to give y'all a private performance y'all won't evah forget!"

6

During the night Brad dreamed he was making love to a blue-haired alien with a spectacular erection. As he gazed into the creature's eyes, he felt as though he were looking into the very depths of the ocean.

The dream was a recurring one, but it never made much sense. He always started out alone, but soon became conscious of being drawn toward the alien who smiled down at him from somewhere high above. Eventually, the distance between them shrank until they found themselves lying on a beach. At some point their clothes dissolved, the alien penetrated Brad with his erection and their bodies merged. That was usually where it ended.

Last night's dream had gone farther. They were riding a winged Lipizzaner stallion that climbed with them into the air over Provincetown. Clinging to the alien, Brad felt an indescribable sensation of pleasure overtake him and woke to find he'd drenched yet another expensive set of sheets with his wet dream.

Morning light filtered into the loft. Brad's heart ached at the memory of having been joined so completely with another being. It was something he'd never experienced in real life, not even with Ross, though there had been moments when they'd come close.

Except for his father, he had never trusted another man completely. He always kept a guard between himself and his lovers—a guard he couldn't drop. And as much as he'd wanted Ross to be free, Brad had been threatened by his desire to be with other men. Something in Brad wouldn't allow him to commit all the way with someone who still had so much exploring to do.

"I can't give you the kind of relationship you want," Ross told him candidly when they moved in together. "But I can tell you I'll love you for as long as I live. Even longer, if that's possible."

When they'd separated, Bradford had accepted the lifetime promise to love each other as friends. Now that was over too.

He looked out the window to the dunes. To some men, the dunes
were
Provincetown, that incredible swath of wilderness where you could just let go and shuck your clothes and explore your innermost self with a beautiful stranger. It was a Gay Eden. He watched as two buff men cycled down the road past his house. The pair stopped at the edge of the salt marsh and dismounted, chaining their bikes to a wooden fence and walking hand-in-hand toward the beach.

Gays tended to collect lovers rather than cultivate relationships, Brad knew. Their lives often resembled an unplanned garden bearing an explosion of different flowers. Under such conditions nothing could really stand out, making the whole seem little more than a riot. And while riots might occasionally be useful for changing the social order, how cultivated could they be?

While many gay men looked down their noses at the traditional concept of marriage, Brad believed they could learn from their straight friends the simple doctrine that, to a certain degree, less is more. With relationships, as with gardens, a well-cultivated handful shows better than a hodgepodge, tilt-a-whirl of sexual theme-and-variations.

One thing he knew for sure through conversations with his own friends, it's not
more
that gay men wanted, but
better.
Still, the straight camp could stand to learn a thing or two from his tribe. With a divorce rate of something like thirty-percent, the hetero dream of suburbia was largely hollow, not to mention undecorated. Land of bad perms and ski jackets, there were no fireflies coming through the smoke in any stage of the suburban Afterlife. Their Nirvana had failed them.

That, Brad knew, was because straights dreamed exclusively of the pleasures of idleness while gays dreamed of a never-ending circus of delight. To the gay man the suburbs are death, an endless desert of nothingness, but the straight man often doesn't figure this out till it's too late and his life has turned to dust. Nevertheless, one must consider the alternative: drowning in a sea of mediocrity.

That was why The Life needed a cutting edge, and that edge was constantly moving. Who would choose to become the victim of social decline like the procreating hordes that married and moved to the suburbs, never to be heard from again except at Christmas? To do so was to declare oneself
Out! Passé! Over!
Yet a cutting edge is best danced upon with friends and lovers of some standing, not mere addins to the wedding scene in a mural of jolly peasants frolicking on a pig farm in Lower Bohemia. After all, Brad thought, it's
better
we want, not
more.

Besides style, the most important thing straights could learn from gays is choice. Straights will tell you that deciding
when
and
whom
you marry is a choice.
Wrong!
That's simply a rose-colored view of the assembly line. But for a woman to choose to live with her husband
and
her female secretary while cultivating relationships with one or two others
is
a choice, because it's not a given.

So often choice means going against the grain of expectation, yet it doesn't mean simply inventing bizarre alternatives to the norm. That's merely being different for the sake of being different, which is mere reaction and ultimately a bore. Marrying an orangutan is not a choice, unless you're Michael Jackson, in which case it might be. No—choosing means considering the alternatives and perhaps creating a few for yourself.

So many unimaginative people think of striking out on their own as being something akin to "celebrity."
Oooh!
they say.
She's so different!
Meaning
bizarre,
rather than
unique.
Meaning Christina Aguilera or some such, with braids and a quavery voice. But that's not really different. It's just more variety. Being Christina Aguilera or Britney Spears is
not
a revolutionary act. But being Che Guevara or Harvey Milk
is,
for the very reason that leading the revolution is hard work. For another thing, you may be the first to be shot.

So for gays, choice is at the root of everything. Brad was acquainted with one young man of an exotic sexuality who found it exceedingly hard to stay with his lovers after capturing them, but even harder to give them up. More than once the young man—Justin—faced an
It's me or him!
imperative delivered by a jealousy-stung boyfriend. Eventually, he instituted a friends-first policy to his encounters, taking great pains to bring all his former and current lovers together two or three times each year.

To his delight, Justin discovered that everyone got along splendidly once they realized each was as heart-achingly beautiful as the next. There was no need to feel left out, for there would always be a succession of lovers in Justin's life, like a rotating royalty policy. Many of them even found eventual long-term happiness in pairing with one another.