“To the murder?”
“Not to that murder, but if all of this was, you know, like a movie. A TV show. Whatever. I mean, say something like that happens, and you have a shot of the bartender, and he’s holding up the glass, holding up the bottle, thinking these could have prints on them. I remember I had the thought, I should keep this glass. You know, just in case.”
Jesus, was it possible?
“Did you?”
“Did I what?”
Mother of God. “Did you keep the glass?”
A slow smile. “Yeah, matter of fact I did.” And he pointed to a whole shelf of glassware above the back bar. “It’s one of those,” he said, grinning like a fucking chimpanzee. “But don’t ask me which one. It’s hard to tell them apart.”
I T T O O K T H E R E S T of that day and half of the next, but he found the moving men. There were half a dozen moving firms based in the Village and Chelsea, plus no end of Man-With-Truck operations. If it was just a guy with a van and a helper he was shit out of luck, but this sounded like guys who picked up day work when they weren’t going to auditions, which meant they worked for a company.
He didn’t have much to go on. A choice of three dates, draft Guinness (because the one thing he trusted Eddie on was who drank what), and a moving job for a woman. And Eddie’d come up with one more item, a colleague of the two named Big Arnie, with a droopy eyelid.
Big Arnie turned out to be the straw that stirred the drink, even though his name wasn’t Arnie at all. I know a guy like that, the desk man at one place told him, got an eye goes like this, and more so at the end of the day than early on. And he’s big, but his name ain’t Arnie. It’s Paul.
Big Paul had worked for him, but not lately. He’d had some complaints, no need to go into that now, but the last he heard Paul was working for Gentle Touch, on West Eleventh.
Which was his next stop, where he learned that Big Paul didn’t work there anymore, hadn’t for a while, but yeah, he was working for them around the time Galvin was asking about. And yeah, the books showed they had a local move on such and such a date when the client was a woman, a two-person job, and I guess I can let you have their names.
And he found them, and questioned them separately, and they both remembered the incident. They didn’t remember the guy, they never even saw the guy, but they remembered what Eddie went through, pouring another bottle of Tuborg into two glasses and making them taste it, to make sure the case wasn’t skunky or something. Fucking scene Eddie turned it into, when all it was was a guy didn’t finish his beer.
Sign a statement to that effect? Yeah, I suppose so. Why the hell not?
thirty
NO WAY HEwas gay. No fucking way.
Jay McGann paused at the threshold, then let himself be drawn into the wet warmth of Susan’s pussy. He lay on top of her, felt her smooth female flesh under him, tasted her mouth.
Would a gay man be doing this?
Earlier, he’d feasted between her legs, and Jesus, wasn’t that a treat, hair pie without the hair. No gay man would be caught dead doing that, not if his life depended on it, not if his own mother came to him in a dream and told him he had to. Pussy was what Wheaties claimed to be, the true breakfast of champions, not teatime with lavender napkins.
Not that there was anything wrong with being gay . . .
But he wasn’t. A gay man wouldn’t be thrusting gently but firmly with his hips, moving his rock-hard cock in and out of that sweet channel, that velvet vulva, that pathway to paradise.
And only a man who was genuinely confident about his sexual-ity would welcome the touch of a pair of hands on his buttocks, male hands, Lowell’s hand, taking hold of him firmly, pressing the cheeks together, coaxing them apart. He drew in his breath sharply at the touch, and again at the touch of Lowell’s cock at his own opening, his own portal, his very own entryway.
Oh Christ it’ll never fit he’s gonna tear me apart . . .
But he knew better. It had fit before and it would fit now, and he held himself in check, stopped his thrusting into the woman beneath him, and opened himself up to the man behind him. His sphincter tightened of its own accord— That’s why they call it an asshole—but then it relaxed, and now the head was in, and that was the difficult part, and now it was all in there, he’d taken it all, had almost sucked it in, greeting the insistent guest with open arms, making him welcome.
Oh, God, this was good. Fucking and being fucked, giving and getting. Heaven. He didn’t even have to do anything, could let Lowell supply the power that moved him within Susan. Sheer heaven.
All right, maybe he was bi. You could argue that everybody was, though not everybody was honest enough to admit it and act on it.
Most straight men were too frightened of that capacity to let themselves feel it, let alone do something about it. And most gay guys, well, they were warped one way or another, had it hooked up so that they couldn’t fuck women without thinking they were fucking their mothers.
But if you got past your hang-ups, you could do anything with anybody and feel good about it.
And it was part of being a writer, wasn’t it? Tasting all of life, not just the blue plate special. Drinking deep at the well. What was it Flaubert said? Madame Bovary, c’est moi. Not, oh, yeah, I knew a girl like Emma once.
Nothing human is foreign to me. He couldn’t remember who said that, but it was some writer, it had to be, and he got it right.
You couldn’t write it unless you could first find it somewhere in your self, and how could you do that if you were paralyzed with fear over who you might turn out to be?
Oh, Jesus, it felt good . . .
So many people didn’t get it. Same as one drop of African blood made you black in the old segregated South, same as one grandparent made you Jewish in Nazi Germany, in some equally objective eyes one interlude with another guy made you a screaming queen. Like that old joke about Pierre:
Ah, monsieur, do you see that bridge? I, Pierre, built that bridge. I built over twenty bridges. But do they call me Pierre the Bridge Builder? They do not.
Monsieur, do you see that lion? I, Pierre, tamed that lion, and all the other animals in the circus. But do they call me Pierre the Lion Tamer? Alas, you know they do not.
But suck one cock . . .
What was he when he heard that joke, twelve? Thirteen? About the age he was when he got his first blow job, at good old Camp Tamaqua, from good old Henrietta. Henry Blankenship his name was, but everybody called him Henrietta, which would have been cruel except the kid honestly didn’t seem to mind. And he surely did like to suck cock.
It felt great. I mean, a blow job generally does, and at that age, with no experience, Jesus. But he remembered how he’d sat there with old Henrietta’s head bobbing in his lap and thinking how great it would be if he could get a girl to do this to him. I mean, that’s not exactly gay, is it? To be getting head from a guy and wishing it was from a girl?
And it was just curiosity that made him imagine what it would be like to do what Henrietta was doing. I mean, everybody did that, didn’t they? Imagined it? And if he imagined it sometimes late at night when he was lying on his camp cot and spanking the monkey, well, that was natural enough, wasn’t it?
Here, as far as he was concerned, was the acid test: On this night and other Tuesdays, he had blown Lowell and been blown by him, had fucked him and been fucked by him. Had he enjoyed it? Yes, damn right he had, even as he was enjoying it now.
But had he ever done it without Susan present? Had he ever had the slightest interest in getting together with Lowell, or any other man, on some day or night other than this one, with no woman to share the fun?
Absolutely not. Never happen.
While, on the other hand, he’d do Susan all by himself any day of the week. And he’d make love to his wife, as he did several nights a week, though not on Tuesday, not after a night of excess like this, and Wednesday was a stretch sometimes, he had to admit. But he did it, and enjoyed it as much as ever. More, really, because he was a more sexual being as a result of everything he was doing on Tuesdays.
Oh, Jesus, that felt great. Oh, here we go, all three of us at once.
Oh, wow . . .
So his primary orientation was heterosexual, no question about it. Gay? Him?
You gotta be kidding.
“J A Y ? T E L L S U S A N A B O U T your mystery.”
“Are you writing a mystery, Jay?”
“No, of course not,” he said. “I mean, Raymond Chandler pretty much did it, didn’t he?”
“Your real-life mystery,” Lowell said. “The little man who was or wasn’t there. You know, that your aunt told you about.”
“Oh, Mr. Shevlin.”
“Who’s Mr. Shevlin?”
He yawned, stretched, felt entirely at peace with the world. He was lying between them, and he put one hand on each of them, slipped a finger into Susan, curled fingers around Lowell. “If I could change one thing,” he said, “I’d make this big old thing just the tiniest bit smaller.”
“Just wait,” Susan said. “Pretty soon you’ll be wishing it was bigger. Tell me about Mr. Devlin.”
“Shevlin. He lives in the same building as my Aunt Kate, who’s my father’s kid sister. Twice married, twice divorced, and she’s the one they thought was going to be a nun, so go figure. Anyway, Shevlin’s an older man, and a couple of years ago his wife died and he bought a boat.”
“And it turns out he murdered her?”
“Jesus, no. Woman died of cancer, by the time she died everybody said it was a mercy. The mystery is that Shevlin disappeared.”
“When he bought the boat? I’m sorry, I’ll shut up.”
“Not when he bought the boat. I don’t know when exactly. A few weeks ago. My aunt’s friend, I forget her name, she knows Shevlin better than Kate does, and I think she’s got a special interest in him. What’s the expression? I think she set her cap for him.”
“I haven’t heard that in years.”
“And her name’s Helen, I just remembered. Anyway, Helen told Kate that Peter—that’s his name, Peter Shevlin—that he hadn’t been around lately. It’s a big building, there must be a hundred, hundred and fifty apartments in it, so Shevlin was just somebody Kate would nod to in the elevator, and not seeing him for a few weeks wouldn’t set off any alarms for her. But Helen had an interest, so she noticed.”
“Maybe he went to the Catskills.”
“The Jewish Alps? Peter Aloysius Shevlin?”
“He’s making up the Aloysius,” Lowell said.
“I get the point,” Susan said, “but isn’t there an Irish Alps? Or don’t you people get any farther away than Rockaway?”
“As soon as the fucking stops,” he said, “the ethnic slurs begin.”
“Or the Inland Waterway,” she said. “Maybe he took his boat all the way down the coast.”
“Except it’s still at the Seventy-ninth Street Boat Basin. Most of the time, anyway.”
“Most of the time?”
“Helen called him on the phone,” he said, “and she got the doorman to open the door and see if he was lying in a heap somewhere, but he wasn’t. And then she called his office, and all they would tell her was that Shevlin was away and they weren’t sure when he’d be back.”