I finished my sandwich on the way to the car, and was only moderately drunk as I climbed into the Mustang for the drive home.
I was still intoxicated enough to kill someone, but we managed to glide through the near-empty streets without mishap or arrest.
Jin sat silently beside me, sipping from the Crown Royal bottle and listening to a succession of innocuous love songs he’d found on the radio, dedicated to girlfriends and boyfriends by heartsick teenage callers.
When we were inside the apartment, and the door was locked behind us, I reached for the light switch.
Jin covered my hand with his.
“No lights.”
The dirty window provided shadowy illumination from a half-moon and a distant streetlight, and I could make out the shape of the Crown Royal bottle as he tilted it to his lips.
He handed it to me and I drained the last few ounces, before setting it on the night table, wishing we had another one and thankful we didn’t.
Jin tossed his shoulder bag on the bed.
“Fuck me,” he said.
I stood there looking at the bag.
“You know you want it,” he said.
He unbuttoned his shirt, slipped it off, and laid it over the chair. Then he removed his shoes and peeled off his socks.
“You want pictures, yes?”
“Yes. I want the pictures.”
“So you get both.”
He stepped out of his trousers, pleated them carefully, and placed them with his shirt.
“You get everything you want from Jin.”
He stepped out of his shorts, placed them on the chair, and faced me naked.
“Just give me the photos,” I said. “That’s all I want.”
But it was a lie. Under my clothes, my cock was as swollen and hard as his was soft and unaroused.
He stepped over to me, grabbed my shirt, and ripped it away, popping buttons.
“Stop, Jin!”
I grabbed his wrist.
He reached down with his free hand and pressed it against my erection.
“You ready. You got hard dick. So do it.”
I grabbed his head and kissed him forcefully enough to bruise his tender mouth.
He pulled away, went to the bed, and lay facedown, his dead eyes turned to the dim window light.
“No kiss. Just fuck.”
I pulled off my clothes, found a condom, rolled it on. I straddled him and lubricated him quickly, feeling him constrict inside.
He reached back and grabbed me by the balls, pulling me toward him so violently it hurt.
I lowered myself over him like a spider and found the opening I wanted. It tightened again as I entered, like a fist closing, and I felt a jolt of pleasure. I moved slowly, and had barely penetrated him when he cried out and tried to push me off.
“No more games, Jin.”
I shoved him back down, my big hands on his narrow shoulders. He fought me, but I outweighed him by fifty pounds and was twice as strong.
He cried out again as I pushed deeper, and I almost lost him once as he thrashed wildly to get free, screaming Korean words I didn’t understand. I encircled his upper body with my arms, clamped my legs around his, and pressed forward until I was all the way in.
I started slowly, but each stroke came faster than the last until the rhythm was furious and beyond control. I had no sense of myself now, or of him, of where or who I was, only of sensation and rage and the wild narcotic of power. The more he struggled against me, the more he cursed me, the harder I felt driven. I became lost in him, blind to everything but the sweet feeling building uncontrollably where our bodies joined. Then I was consumed by the hot explosion, riding on perfect waves of dark, terrifying sensation, and it was over.
I lay on top of him, panting heavily, growing sick with what I’d done.
I’d never been more aware of how much of my father I carried within me. Of how difficult it was to escape him, no matter how much I tried.
I felt Jin trembling beneath me and realized he was crying. I slipped out of him as gently as I could. Inside, he was slick with his own blood.
“I guess this mean I really gay,” he said.
“It doesn’t mean you’re not a man, any more than when you fucked me.”
I laid a hand on his shoulder but he pushed it off and crawled away from me on the bed.
“Korean man not permitted be gay. Only be with woman.”
He pulled himself up to his hands and knees, sobbing.
“I want you fuck me so I must be gay.”
His body shook convulsively, and when his words came, they were choked with tears.
“I tell you where I go the night when they kill Billy. You want to know, yes?”
“Yes.”
“I go to see my little girl. She live with my dad and my mom, because my wife…”
Sobs heaved up out of him in waves.
“They take care my little girl. I no allowed to see her. So after my dad sleep, my mom, she call me. I go their house. I watch my little girl when she sleep. So she not know I there.”
“Why?”
“If she know I there, she might tell my wife parents. And then they try to take her live with them. And I never see her no more.”
“Where’s your wife?”
He crawled off the bed, stood, and pressed his face against the wall. He began to cry again, so hard it turned into a wail.
“My wife and I have problem between us. The sex. I finally tell her I like mens, that I am gay man. She try to kill herself and our baby. But only she die. Our daughter OK.”
A scream tore out of him, followed by more tears than I thought a man could have inside.
“I put so much shame on my family. Very bad shame.”
“I wish you’d told me this before.”
“You American. American different. Korean not talk about self, not talk about private thing. We swallow our pain. That our way. That always be our way.”
“You and I might not be as different as you think.”
I went to him, but he slipped away from me and into the bathroom. Then I heard the shower running. The door was ajar.
I went in, got rid of the condom, and stepped into the shower beside him.
I took the soap from his hands, turned him around, and washed his back and legs. Then I pried him apart and washed the place where I’d hurt him so wrongly.
I turned him back around to face me and washed his front. When I lathered and stroked the part of him that was hard, he clutched me fiercely, and cried out as he erupted.
I rinsed him off, and he let me hold him, our faces touching and our wet bellies pressed together, until the water finally grew cold.
He separated from me to find a towel.
“Please stay,” I said.
“No. I go.”
“We can sleep late. Get some breakfast.”
He resolutely shook his head. I reached out and touched his face.
“Will you be all right?”
He took my hand away.
“Korean mens, they always all right.”
He went out. I finished washing and toweled off, then stared into the mirror awhile, trying to figure out who I’d become.
*
When I went back out, Jin Jai-Sik was gone. I wasn’t surprised, or all that disappointed. It made everything easier.
He’d turned on the light, neatly made up the bed, and set the box of photos at the foot.
I went to the window and looked out. To the east, dawn was turning the sky pink.
Jin Jai-Sik strode down the driveway to the street, stopping to look back for a moment. I started to wave, but he’d already turned, angling across Norma Place and out of sight.
I sat on the bed and opened the box.
Atop the pile of snapshots was a note:
Good-bye. I not see you again. Please have good luck. Jin.
I put the note on the night table, anchoring it with the empty Crown Royal bottle.
I knew that I had to be busy now, to fill the rest of the morning with work and duty, and then the day, and then the night, until I put some distance between myself and the whiskey I’d shared with Jin Jai-Sik. If I didn’t, I’d be comfortably drunk again before noon, and probably stay that way for the rest of my short, miserable life.
I dumped several years of Billy Lusk’s sexual history onto the blanket and glanced through the Polaroids one by one, counting as I went.
When I reached number 203, I recognized a familiar face. He slept peacefully on Billy’s bed, an arm thrown back on the pillow, his naked body fully exposed to Billy’s spying camera.
I studied the photo awhile, reached for the phone, and called Alexandra Templeton at home.
“Sorry for the early call, Templeton.”
“Justice?’’
A yawn worked its way out of her.
“Look,” I said, “I know who murdered Billy Lusk.”
Before we hung up, I agreed to meet Templeton at her place at one that afternoon.
Her job in the meantime was to convince Harry to join us, help me fix things up with him, then move forward on the Billy Lusk story as quickly as possible.
We didn’t talk about the kiss she’d drawn me into the previous evening, and I hoped it wouldn’t come up. We had more important matters to resolve, and not a lot of time to do it.
I shaved, put on some decent clothes, and went out for breakfast, hoping to quell the hangover I felt coming over me like a toxic spill.
I ate at a twenty-four-hour coffee shop east of Fairfax, where the booths swarmed with energetic kids who had danced at after-hours clubs until 4 a.m. A ragged assortment of tired-looking tricks and skinny hustlers with amphetamine eyes sat at the counter like a police lineup, joylessly sipping their coffee.
I sat with them at the far end, picking my way through a plate of pancakes and eggs while I mulled over everything I’d learned about Billy Lusk and the people who knew him in the five days since his death. I jotted it down in a notebook, then endlessly revised and reorganized it to give myself a sense of order and to keep my mind off booze.
I washed the food down with three cups of coffee and some Tylenol, but the hangover came on anyway. I paid the check at the register, and on my way out told a hustler for the third time that I wasn’t interested.
Back on Norma Place, I swept the patio and helped Maurice and Fred set up folding tables for the memorial service they held each year for Jacques.
Maurice placed my photograph of Jacques on a small table in the shade of the jacaranda, surrounded by candles, incense, and fresh-cut flowers. Before he’d died, Jacques had compiled a list of music he wanted played at his first service: “Imagine,” by John Lennon; “We Can Be Heroes” and “Space Oddity,” by David Bowie; “Respect,” by Aretha Franklin; “Careless Whisper,” by Wham! and Verdi’s
Requiem
in its entirety. He’d also left specific instructions for the mourners: “Cry a lot and say wonderful things about me.”
Fred cued up the tape and started the music as Jacques’s friends and a few relatives filed in from the street. The group had thinned in recent years, a dozen or more gone from AIDS, but I counted about forty women and men, and several small children.
Jacques’s mother and sisters showed up, but not his stepfather, whom I’d barred from the first memorial service six years before, following Jacques’s express wish that I keep him away. He’d showed up anyway, telling me he’d gotten counseling and needed to be there to cope with his guilt and “facilitate his closure.” I’d told him he’d fucked his stepson enough while he was alive without fucking him again now that he was dead, then knocked him down and kicked him until he was off the property.
He hadn’t tried to come back. I didn’t expect him to show up today, or ever again, but I kept my eye on the street, just in case.
Maurice directed people to coffee and juice on a side table, and there was light chatter while the two cats dodged children who tried to pull their tails. Maurice explained to the gathering what had happened to his other cat, whose ashes would eventually be spread beneath the jacaranda, and said a short Buddhist prayer for its soul.
Then he spoke about Jacques, and how important his family of friends had been to him always, but especially in his final days.
Others followed, repeating anecdotes or recalling new ones about how Jacques had changed their lives and insisting that his spirit lived in everyone he had touched.
I watched and listened from the apartment, standing just inside the doorway, until it was over and everyone had gone.
Then I went down to help Maurice and Fred clean up, before driving out to Santa Monica for my meeting with Alexandra Templeton.
I spoke to Templeton on her intercom, while the guard eyed me from his lobby desk inside.
She told me that I’d find her front door open and buzzed me in. I didn’t like the sound of that, and went up warily.
The interior of the Montana Towers had all the pretensions of elegance one would expect in a westside condominium complex, right down to the artificial plants, which fooled you until you took a closer look.
I rode an elevator to the sixth floor, studying myself in a wall of mirrored glass. I saw a man with ashen skin and foggy eyes who needed sleep and something stronger than Tylenol for his pounding head.
A carpeted corridor led me to Templeton’s door, which I found ajar, as she’d promised. I stepped in, and called out to let her know I was there.
At the far end of a hallway to my right a bathroom door opened. Templeton stepped out naked, drops of water catching the light on her almond-colored skin.
She feigned surprise and covered herself with her arms.
“Sorry. I didn’t expect you so quickly.”
As she reached back for a towel, her upper body arched, fully exposing her breasts and stretching her belly taut above a dark cloud of pubic hair.
She draped her front with the towel, told me to make myself comfortable, and disappeared into a door halfway down the hall, giving me a glimpse of bare bottom as she went in.
I glanced around the living room while my mind ran through the little charade that had just taken place.
Windows big enough for a Lamborghini showroom opened to a generous balcony and an unobstructed view of Palisades Park, with a silver streak of ocean beyond. An ivory sofa faced the view, soft and deep, with a matching love seat next to it. The plants on the glass-topped coffee table were real. So was the Romare Bearden collage hanging above the fireplace. It was all spotless and in place, and every bit of it looked like money. Daddy’s money.
I walked down the hallway and turned into the room that Templeton had entered moments before.
When she saw me, she cried out my name and snatched the towel off the bed to cover herself. It felt about as unscripted as a television soap opera.
“I’ve had a troubling night, Templeton, and the morning hasn’t been much better. I look like shit and feel worse. I’m not sure why you’re playing these games, but they need to stop.”
She grabbed her robe from the bed, turned her back to me, and slipped into it.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Maybe I’m supposed to play the role of the timid faggot, afraid of women. Is that what the kiss was about yesterday? Is that what’s behind your little act this morning? If I squirm and get nervous, will it make you feel superior in some way? Is this your way of putting me down, getting back at me?”
“Getting back at you?”
She laughed, but it was hollow.
“For what?”
“For shattering your fantasy six years ago,” I said. “When I wrote a fraudulent newspaper series and broke a college girl’s heart.”
She turned to face me, pulling the robe tight.
“God, what an ego you have.”
She knotted the sash furiously at her waist without taking her eyes off me.
“You’re not trying to seduce me, Templeton. You’re trying to humiliate me.”
Her jaw remained set, but her eyes faltered.
“Whatever your reasons,” I said, “they don’t matter right now. You’re about to write what could be the biggest story of your career. The fate of Gonzalo Albundo may depend on what we do in the next few hours and how well we do it. It’s vital that we work as a team. We can’t afford to let anything personal get in the way of that.”
Her eyes changed again, becoming steady.
“The way you let your personal life get in the way six years ago?”
“This isn’t the time, Templeton.”
As she talked, she wound the towel around her damp hair, fixing it like a turban.
“When you wrote that AIDS series, I believe you created the two lovers as a way of idealizing a personal situation that was too painful for you to handle.”
“This really isn’t the time.”
I turned to walk out but she moved around me and blocked the door.
“Jacques’s death left you consumed with guilt, didn’t it?”
“You didn’t know him. Stop using his name as if you did.”
“I think that to this day you feel you didn’t love him enough, didn’t do enough to save him. That you weren’t there for him emotionally the way he had always been there for you. Because you didn’t know how. Because you were too afraid.”
I was worried that I might slap her, and pushed my hands deep into my pants pockets.
“Maurice told me you did your best,” she said. “Taking care of Jacques, tending to his physical needs.”
“Yes. I took care of his physical needs.”
“But you couldn’t tell him you loved him, could you?”
Like any good investigative reporter, she had prepared herself well before the final interview; she knew the answers before she asked the questions.
“No,” I said. “I couldn’t tell him that.”
“You couldn’t hold him the way he needed to be held. You couldn’t be his lover in the truest sense of the word. Not in those final months. Getting that close terrified you, because you knew you were losing him.”
Bingo
. I said nothing.
“But the worst moment was yet to come, wasn’t it, Justice?”
She recounted the last hour of Jacques’s life almost minute by minute, when he’d known he was dying of pneumocystis and continually asked a nurse named Amelia Tomayo where I was, until she’d lowered the oxygen mask over his face for the final time.
“You found Amelia Tomayo,” I said.
“She still works at County. She spoke to me, off the record.”
“Nice work.”
“When Jacques died, you were on assignment. At the moment he needed you most, you were in the Hall of Records, digging through documents related to a slumlord case.”
I thought of Phil Devonshire, off playing golf while his wife visited the morgue.
“Yes,” I said. “I was at the Hall of Records.”
“You could have been at the hospital. Harry would have given you time off. All the time you needed.”
“Of course.”
“But you didn’t ask for time off.”
“No.”
“Why, Justice? Because you couldn’t bear to watch Jacques die?”
“I’m not sure any of us really knows why we do what we do.”
I felt exhausted, sick. I sat down on the edge of her bed, staring at the spotless Berber carpet.
“You’d planned to write a first-person series about you and Jacques, hadn’t you, Justice? About one man caring for his dying partner.”
I nodded.
“But the truth was too painful. When the time came, you couldn’t do it, could you?”
She’d beaten me down. I didn’t want to fight her anymore. I wanted some peace.
“No,” I said.
“So you wrote it the way you wished it had been. You created two fictional men, working with the real feelings you never expressed when Jacques was alive. That’s where the power of the writing came from. And that’s why it won the Pulitzer.”
“There are couples like that all over this city, thousands of them,” I said. “All over this country. Tens of thousands. Helping each other die.”
“They say there’s sometimes more truth in fiction than in facts.”
“Is that what they say?”
She sat beside me, leaving a few careful inches between us.
“It’s time to forgive yourself, Justice.”
I turned to look into the large brown pools of her eyes. I saw no animosity, only concern.
“Have you forgiven me, Templeton?”
“Is it important?”
“It wouldn’t hurt,” I said.