A Ticket to the Boneyard

Still, it takes it out of you. I took the bus and went back to my hotel room and turned on the television. There was a late college game underway, two Pac-10 teams, and one of them had a quarterback who was being hyped for the Heisman Trophy. I sat down and started watching, and I could understand what the fuss was about. He was a white boy, too, and big enough for pro ball. Something gave me the feeling that his income over the next ten years was going to be higher than mine.

I must have dozed off watching, because I was having some kind of dream when the phone rang. I opened my eyes, turned the sound down on the TV, and answered the phone.

It was Elaine. She said, "Hi, sweetie. I called earlier but they said you were out."

"I didn't get a message."

"I didn't leave one. I just wanted to thank you and I didn't want to do that by message. You're a sweet man, but I suppose everybody tells you that."

"Not quite everybody," I said. "I talked to dozens of people today and not one of them told me that. Most of them didn't tell me a thing."

"What were you doing?"

"Looking for our friend. I found a hotel where he spent a month after he got out of prison."

"Where?"

"A flop in the West Nineties. The Benjamin Davis, but I don't think you'd know it."

"Would I want to?"

"Probably not. Our sketch is good, I managed to establish that much, and it may be the most important thing I learned today."

"Did you get the original back?"

"You still want it, huh?"

"Of course I do. What are you doing tonight? Do you want to bring it over?"

"I've got some more legwork to do."

"And I bet you give great leg, don't you?"

"And I want to get to a meeting," I said. "I'll call later, if it's not too late. And maybe I'll come by, if you feel like late company."

"Good," she said. "And Matt? That was sweet."

"For me, too."

"Did you used to be such a romantic? Well, I just wanted you to know I appreciate it."

I put the phone down and turned the sound up. The game was well into the fourth quarter, so I'd evidently been asleep for a while. It was no contest at this stage, but I watched the rest of it anyway, then went out to get something to eat.

I took a batch of copies of Motley's likeness and an inch-thick stack of business cards, and after I ate I went on downtown. I worked the SRO hotels and rooming houses in Chelsea, then walked on down to the Village. I timed things so I could catch a meeting in a storefront on Perry Street. There were about seventy people jammed into a room that would have held half that number comfortably, and the seats were all spoken for by the time I got there. There was standing room only, and precious little of that. The meeting was lively, though, and I got a seat when the place thinned out at the break.

The meeting broke at ten and I made the rounds of some of the leather bars, Boots and Saddles on Christopher, the Chuckwagon on Greenwich, and a couple of lowdown riverfront joints on West Street. The gay bars catering to the S & M crowd had always had a murky ambience, but now in the Age of AIDS I found their atmosphere particularly unsettling. Part of this, I suppose, came from the perception that a large proportion of the men I saw, looking so gracefully casual in denim and cowhide, smoking their Marlboros and nursing their Coors, were walking time bombs, infected with the virus and odds-on to come down with the disease within months or years. Armed with this knowledge, or perhaps disarmed by it, it was all too easy for me to see the skull beneath the skin.

I was there on a hunch, and a thin one at that. The day Motley surprised us at Elaine's apartment, the first time I'd seen him, he'd been togged out like some sort of urban cowboy, all the way down to his metal-tipped boots. This was a long way from making him a leather queen, I had to admit, but I didn't have any trouble picturing him in those bars, leaning sinuously against something, those long strong fingers curled around a beer bottle, those flat cold eyes staring, measuring, challenging. As far as I knew, women were Motley's victims, but I couldn't be sure how discriminating he was in that particular regard. If he didn't care whether his partners were alive or dead, how important could their gender be to him?

So I showed his likeness around and asked the questions that went with it. Two bartenders thought Motley looked familiar, although neither could ID him for certain. At one of the West Street dives, they had a dress code on weekends; you had to be wearing denim or leather, and a bouncer wearing both stopped me in my suit and pointed to the sign explaining the policy.

I suppose it's fair play. Look at all the people in jeans and bomber jackets who don't get to have a drink at the Plaza. "It's not a social call," I told him. I showed him Motley's picture and asked if he knew him.

"What's he done?"

"He hurt some people."

"We get our share of rough trade."

"This is rougher than you'd want."

"Let me see that," he said, raising his sunglasses, bringing the sketch up to his eyes for a closer look. "Oh, yes," he said.

"You know him?"

"I've seen him. You wouldn't call him a frequent flier, but I've got a bitching memory for faces. Among other body parts."

"How many times has he been here?"

"I don't know. Four times? Five times? First time I saw him must have been around Labor Day. Maybe a little earlier than that. And he's been here, oh, four times since. Now he could come in early in the day and I wouldn't know it, because I don't start until nine o'clock."

"How was he dressed?"

"Our friend here? I don't remember. Nothing specific sticks in my mind. Jeans and boots, for a guess. I never had to challenge him, so whatever he was wearing must have been appropriate."

I asked some more questions and gave him my card and told him to keep the sketch. I said I'd like to go inside and show the sketch to the bartender, if I could do so without too severely breaching decorum.

"We have to make certain exceptions," he said. "After all, you're a police officer, aren't you?"

"Private," I said. I don't know what made me say it.

"Oh, a private dick! That's even better, isn't it?"

"Is it?"

"I'd have to say it's about as butch as it gets." He sighed theatrically. "Honey," he said, "I'd let you past the rope even if you were wearing taffeta."

It was well past midnight by the time I ran out of leather bars. There were other places I could have tried, after-hours cellars clubs that were just getting started at that hour, but most of the ones I knew about were gone now, shut down in reaction to the gay plague, barn doors securely padlocked now that the horse was gone. One or two had survived, though, and I'd learned of some new ones that night, and for all I knew James Leo Motley was in one of them at that very moment, waiting for an invitation into the darkened back room.

But it was late and I was tired and I didn't have the stomach to go looking for him. I walked for a dozen blocks, trying to clear my nostrils of the reek of stale beer and backed-up drains and sweat-soaked leather and amyl nitrate, an amalgam of smells with a base note of lust. Walking helped, and I'd have walked all the way home if I hadn't already been feeling the miles I'd clocked earlier in the day. I walked until a cab came along, then rode the rest of the way.

In my room I thought of Elaine, but it was much too late to call her. I spent a long time under the shower and went to bed.

Church bells woke me. I must have been sleeping right on the surface of consciousness or I wouldn't have heard them; but I did, and I stirred myself and sat on the edge of my bed. Something was bothering me and I didn't know what it was.

I called Elaine. Her line was busy. I tried her again after I'd finished shaving and got another busy signal. I decided I'd try her again after breakfast.

There are three places I'm apt to have breakfast, but only one of them is open on Sundays. I went there and all the tables were taken. I didn't feel like waiting. I walked a couple of blocks to a place that had opened within the past several months. This was my first meal there, and I ordered a full breakfast and ate about half of it. The food didn't satisfy my appetite but it did a good job of killing it, and by the time I got out of there I'd forgotten about calling Elaine.

Instead I continued on down Eighth Avenue and started making the rounds of the Times Square hotels. There used to be more of them. A lot of the buildings have come down to make way for bigger ones, and most of the landlords would tear theirs down if they could. For a few years now there's been a moratorium on the conversion or demolition of SRO hotels, the city's attempt to keep the homelessness problem from getting worse than it is.

The closer you get to Forty-second Street, the nastier it gets in the lobbies. Something in the air announces that everyone within the walls has a couple of wants out on him. Even the semi-respectable places, third-class hotels charging fifty or sixty dollars a night, have a sour and desperate aura. As you move down in class, more and more signs turn up above the desk and taped to the glass partitions. No guests after eight o'clock. No cooking in the rooms. No firearms allowed on premises. Maximum stay twenty-eight days- this to prevent anyone's attaining the status of a permanent resident, and thus acquiring a statutory immunity to steep rent increases.

I put in a couple of hours and handed out a fair number of cards and pictures. The desk clerks were either wary or uninterested, and some of them managed to be both at once. By the time I'd worked my way past the Port Authority bus terminal, everybody looked like a crack addict to me. If Motley was staying in one of these dumps, what was the point of trying to ferret him out? I could just wait a while and the city would kill him for me.

I found a phone, dialed Elaine's number. She had the machine on but picked up after I'd announced myself. "I had a late night last night," I said. "That's why I didn't call."

"It's just as well. I made it an early night and slept like a log."

"You probably needed it."

"I probably did." A pause. "Your flowers are beautiful today."

I kept my voice neutral. "Are they?"

"Absolutely. I think they're like homemade soup, I think they're actually better on the second day."

Across the street two teenagers leaned against the steel shutter of an army-surplus store, alternately scanning the street and sending casual glances toward me. I said, "I'd like to come over."

"I'd like that. Can you give me an hour or so?"

"I suppose so."

She laughed. "But you don't sound happy about it. Let's see, it's a quarter to twelve. Why don't you come over at one o'clock or a few minutes after. Is that all right?"

"Sure."

I hung up the phone. The two boys across the street were still keeping an eye on me. I had the sudden urge to go over there and ask them what the hell they were staring at. That would have been asking for trouble, but I felt like it all the same.

Instead I turned and walked away. When I'd gone half a block I turned and looked over my shoulder at them. They were still lounging against the same steel shutter, and they didn't appear to have moved.