“Who?” Perry asked.
“Jim Teagle,” answered Mrs. Bartlett.
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“It’s not exactly an amazing coincidence,” Nick said, raising a bottle of Sam Adams to his mouth. “What you’ve got is somebody farming out their pain-in-the-ass elderly relative to live for free or nearly for free in one of their investment properties. Teagle can keep an unofficial eye on the place -- and Mrs. MacQueen -- and it relieves the relatives from having to deal with him. We haven’t heard anything to indicate there’s a connection with the Alstons or with Shane Moran.” He drank from the bottle.
“It’s funny he never mentioned it,” Perry said, raising his voice to be heard over the large-screen plasma TV in one corner, where two college football teams were charging into each other.
“Do you tell him everything?” Nick inquired. “Did you tell him your reason for going to San Francisco?”
“Well, no,” Perry admitted.
They were grabbing a bite at the Moosehead Tavern on Bank Street. Leather-lined booths, a pool table in the adjacent room, and the head of a moose wearing a Santa Claus hat mounted over the bar -- it was not Perry’s kind of hangout, but he felt comfortable with Nick sitting across the table. Nick sipped his beer, his dark blue eyes flicking to the TV
screen now and then.
“What’s the job?” Perry asked.
“Hmm?” Nick’s eyes met his.
“In Los Angeles. Your new job.”
“Oh.” To Perry’s surprise, Nick’s color deepened. “Private investigator.”
Perry’s face lit up with interest. “For real?”
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“Yeah.” Nick sounded sheepish. “A SEAL buddy of mine started up the firm with some friends of his.” He shrugged.
“You’ll be great at that,” Perry said.
That seemed to make Nick more uncomfortable. He said, “It’s nothing like the
movies -- or those books you read. It’s a lot of background and vehicle locates.”
Perry suggested hopefully, “Insurance fraud? Missing persons?”
“Yeah, maybe,” Nick admitted. “It’s still not like the movies.”
“How do you know?”
“I hope it’s not like the movies,” Nick said, and Perry chuckled.
The waitress came over to their table, and they ordered food and a couple more beers.
She returned shortly with chicken cheesesteak for Perry and smoked pork chili topped with Vermont cheddar and onions for Nick. Nick was thinking that this was one of the things he was going to miss in California: the chili and the honey and jalapeño cornbread.
He glanced up, and Perry was smiling at him. That was another thing he was going to miss in California, but it was better not to think about that. Instead, he said, “Listen, I’ve been doing some thinking.”
Perry got that inquiring look -- as though Nick’s thoughts were always worth his full attention.
Nick said, “Did anyone know you had changed your plans for the weekend? Did
anyone know you were coming back early?”
“No.”
“Why did you come back early?”
Perry stared at him. “I told you. It didn’t work out with my friend.”
“Okay, what about this friend of yours? Where did you meet him?”
“Over the Internet.”
“Over the Internet? You mean, like in a chat room?”
“Yes.” Perry’s chin got an unexpectedly mulish jut to it. “So what? Lots of people meet that way. We started e-mailing each other, and it turned out we had a lot in common.
Marcel was --”
Nick put his beer down. “Marcel?”
“Marcel, yes,” Perry said shortly.
“You were having a cyber-romance with someone named Marcel?” Nick was laughing at him, and Perry turned red with anger.
“You make it sound stupid and weird. It wasn’t. We had a real friendship. A real relationship. We wrote each other every day, sometimes a couple of times a day. So then we finally called each other on the phone. We talked a long time, and we decided to meet, to see --”
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“And surprise, surprise,” Nick said cynically. “He was three feet tall, bald, fat, and pushing sixty.”
Perry said hotly, “He was exactly like I expected. Like I hoped. He was perfect.”
Nick’s mouth curved sardonically, but all he said was, “So what happened with Mr.
AOL? You weren’t what he expected?”
Perry stared at him, stricken. He said at last, “His ex-boyfriend wanted to get back together.”
Even Nick blinked at that one. “Jesus. He couldn’t have picked a different weekend?”
Perry’s anger was already spent. He smiled lopsidedly. “I guess it would have been nice if they’d figured it out before I spent all that money on plane tickets and three new shirts. It took forever to save up.”
“So now you’re short rent money because you wasted it on new clothes and a trip.”
Perry nodded.
Nick studied him critically but not unkindly. “Didn’t it occur to you…?”
“You don’t understand,” Perry said. “I thought I knew him. I do know him. He’s…he’s smart and funny and sensitive. He’s an architect. Someday he’s going to build something as amazing as…as Frank Lloyd Wright. We had a lot in common. We had the same favorite movie in high school -- Come Undone -- and we have the same favorite song -- “Human” by the Killers. We both like our corn on the cob barbecued, and cinnamon and nutmeg in our cocoa. And neither of us watched Queer as Folk, and we both had golden retrievers when we were kids.”
Strictly speaking, it was more than he and Marie had ever had in common. Nick said,
“He didn’t mention the ex-boyfriend to you?”
The prosaic question brought Perry up short. “Sort of. I knew he’d been in a
relationship. Who hasn’t?”
“Have you?”
“I haven’t lived with anyone,” Perry said with great dignity.
Nick shook his head.
“It’s not that easy to meet people here,” Perry told him. “Vermont isn’t all…I mean, parts of it are conservative. Especially in the Kingdom. This is a small town.”
“So move.”
“Where?” Even in the murky light, Nick could see the delicate wash of color beneath Foster’s clear skin. “It takes money. First and last month’s rent, and I don’t even have this month’s rent. And I’d have to find a new job. I’m not really trained for anything.”
Nick considered him. “I can’t help you there, but I’ll tell you what. My rent’s paid for the next two months. I paid six months in advance. When I go, you can stay on here. That should get you time to catch up.”
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Perry gazed at him, speechless.
“Don’t make a big deal of it,” Nick warned.
“No. Right.” Perry lowered his lashes. He seemed to be struggling to repress a smile as he devoted himself to his French fries.
“Okay, that’s settled,” Nick said briskly. “Now all we have to do is figure out who dumped that body in your bathtub.” He wasn’t entirely serious. At least…he thought they might uncover information that might help the sheriff’s department with their lame-ass investigation, and he thought it was good to keep the kid’s mind occupied. But Nick really didn’t have hopes they would crack the case of the disappearing corpse.
“Whoever killed Tiny,” Perry replied -- apparently under the illusion that they were really going to bust this thing wide open.
“Maybe.”
“That had to be it. Tiny was going around blabbing about seeing the ghost with yellow socks, and that must have posed some kind of danger for someone.”
Nick said, “But you realize he was talking about that to us while we were in Watson’s apartment.”
Those ridiculous lashes swept up. “You mean someone was listening to us.”
This was one of the things Nick did like about Foster. He could put two and two together without a song and dance.
“Yeah. I have trouble believing in secret passages, but I think either someone overheard Tiny talking to you, or Tiny mentioned ‘the ghost’ to one too many people.”
“Center and Stein are both on that floor. Center’s apartment is right next to Watson’s --
and they say blind people compensate with their other senses. Maybe he’s got really acute hearing.”
“Huh,” Nick said.
They ate in silence while music played in the background. Christmas music. It was only November, but Bing Crosby was already hitting the airwaves. Nick found it vaguely depressing.
“We could try the library archives next,” Perry said.
Nick nodded. He wasn’t thrilled at the idea of spending the day in the library, but it wasn’t like he had a lot of other ideas. This was about as cold a case as they came, so the obvious avenues of investigation were eliminated. Too bad this hadn’t come up a few months after he had some P.I. training under his belt.
Of course, in a few months he would be in California, and Perry Foster would be just another memory of a time in his life he couldn’t wait to put behind him.
“Or,” Perry suggested suddenly, hopefully, “We could go see the Verity Lane film at the Players Theater.”
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“That sounds like a waste of time.”
“We don’t have a lot of leads,” Perry pointed out. “It couldn’t hurt to see one of the principals, right?”
Oddly, Nick discovered that he didn’t want to disappoint the kid -- not that he could see any practical purpose in watching an old movie. Although he was mildly curious about Verity Lane.
“Maybe we could go to the library and then go see the film?”
When Nick didn’t respond, Perry said very casually, “If you’re worried about people thinking you’re gay if you go with me, you don’t have to be.”
Nick met Perry’s eyes levelly. “No?”
“No.”
“Why’s that?”
“You’re not the type.”
“There’s a type, huh? I thought that was a myth. What about those queer
bodybuilders?”
Perry shrugged. “I’ve never met one.”
“You know a lot of bodybuilders?”
“No, but I know other gay guys. You know, I haven’t lived my entire life here in Fox Run.”
“I figured. Where are you from?”
“Rutland.”
Second largest city in Vermont and a commercial hub, so Foster should have been relatively worldly. But Nick thought he had the picture. A sickly, overprotected little kid --
he was betting on only child of doting older parents.
“What are you doing here in the boondocks?”
“I thought it would be fun to live in a small town.” The cheerful cluelessness of that almost took Nick’s breath away. “You know, someplace where everyone knows your name, and you don’t have to lock your car or your doors. And I thought it would be good for my painting to live someplace rural and quiet.”
“It didn’t occur to you it might get a little lonely for someone with your orientation?”
Perry was silent. “I wasn’t thinking about that so much. I wanted to get away.”
“From what?”
“Everything. Everyone I knew. Everything I knew.”
Nick said mildly, “Sounds a little drastic.”
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Perry stared out the pub window at the Thomas Kincaid streets glistening in the rain.
The colored blur of shop lights, streetlights, car lights reflected in the wet blacktop. Nick hoped he wasn’t going to confide his life story.
Perry said matter-of-factly, “When I told my parents I was gay, they threw me out.”
The background noise of the TV swelled and dipped. Nick sipped his beer, set the mug down with careful deliberation. “Why’d you tell them?”
Perry looked confused. “They’re my parents.”
“Exactly. You must have known them well enough to know how they felt on the
subject.”
“But I thought -- it should -- make a difference that it was me.”
“You thought that they would feel different about something that shocked and
disgusted them if their darling little boy told them he was one of them? You really are naive.”
Perry reddened. “They love me. I love them. I had to be honest.”
This idea was alien to Nick. He had enlisted in the navy when he was eighteen -- five years younger than Foster was now. He would no more have discussed his sexual inclinations with his parents than he would have eaten the family dog. True, his mom and dad had been busy providing for six kids and his grandmother. Heartfelt confidences hadn’t been a big part of the Reno family life. Discussion in general hadn’t been something his folks had a lot of time or energy for. It had been all they could do to keep food on the table and clothes on their backs.
Besides, Nick had married Marie right before he went into the service -- mostly because that’s what people did in Island Pond. It had never occurred to him to do anything else -- not for a very long time.
Funny. Depending on how you looked at it, Foster was miles ahead of where Nick had been at that age.
Perry said staunchly, “They’ll come around when they realize…”
“It’s not a phase?”
He nodded.
“Are you sure it’s not?”
Perry’s eyes darkened. “Of course, I’m sure.”
“I mean, you’ve never been with anybody, right?” Nick was blunt. “Male or female? It’s my experience that a lot of young guys are scared of girls.”
To his surprise, Perry relaxed, chuckling, “I’m not scared of girls. My best friends have always been girls. Guys never had time for me in high school -- except the other misfits.”
Nick eyed him irritably.
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“Girls don’t interest me,” Perry explained, as though spelling out the facts of life. “Guys like you interest me.”
Nick dropped his cornbread.
“Anyway,” Perry said off-handedly. “My parents threw me out, and there went my degree in architecture, which was okay. I wanted art school anyway. So I decided to go for it.
Go after my dream and become a painter.” He smiled cheerfully at Nick. “Of course, it really doesn’t pay very well.”
Nick felt like he had a headache coming on. It was his own fault. He’d just had to open his big mouth and ask, hadn’t he?
* * * * *