A Time for Secrets (14 page)

Behind the bar, over the cash register, hung a cheaply made poster advertising a fundraiser being held at Big Nell’s in a couple of weeks for Alderman Thomas Finnegan’s run for mayor. I decided not to attend. It’
s not
that I
wasn
’
t
political, though
I wasn
’
t
. It
was
that the only group of people I c
ould
think of who were more corrupt than the Chicago Police Department were Chicago politicians. Hmmm. Make that politicians everywhere. It was naïve to think that there
we
re honest politicians somewhere else, and I
was
not naïve.

As this little rant drifted around my drunken head, my eyes wandered around the bar until they fell on a short brunet guy with heavy dark stubble and an overgrown mustache sitting at the end of the bar. He caught me looking and kept his eyes glued to me for a good thirty seconds. Then he stood up, walked over to the jukebox, and leaned over it in a fetching way. He wore a white tank-top, the kind some people call
ed
wife-beaters, and a pair of 501s. In the left hand back pocket of his jeans he’d shoved a blue bandana. I knew it meant something about sex, but I’d never been especially good at the hanky code. In fact, I thought it had gone completely out of style and had been relieved. But here it was again.

He put a dollar’s worth of quarters into the jukebox, made his eight selections, and walked back to the bar. Grabbing his bottle of beer by its long neck, he walked down to my end and climbed onto the stool next to me.

I waited for his opening line, curious as to what it might be, but it didn’t come. He just sat there quietly like he’d been sitting next to me all along. I considered lines I could use myself. I was tempted to go with, “I fucked the guy in the porno you’re watching,” but I wasn’t sure I wanted to get laid by association. I settled on, “What does your bandana mean? I always forget.”

“It means I want you to fuck me.”

I smiled. “Do you live nearby?”

“Yeah. With my boyfriend. You?”

“Ditto.”

If it had been the dead of winter, we might have ended the conversation right there, but it wasn’t winter. It was the beginning of August, and outside it was warm and muggy.

“I have a car,” I said.

“That’ll do.”

He sucked down the rest of his beer. I decided not to finish my drink. I didn’t need it; I was good and drunk, and I now had other things to occupy my attention. As we walked out of Big Nell’s I tried to remember where I’d parked my car. I was pretty sure it was on Melrose, close to Halsted. I was about to put that idea to the test.

We didn’t say much as we walked down Halsted. I suppose
d
I could have asked his name, but that would have implied I wanted to know it. He didn’t bother to ask mine, so I figured we were on the same wavelength. When we turned down Melrose, it wasn’t difficult to find my car given its color. It seemed to glow a little at night.

Of course, I knew perfectly well that there were places I could have taken this guy. There was a leather bar up on Clark that had a back room. There was a bathhouse just a few blocks away. The leather bar was too far away, and the bathhouse…well, I’d never been. I heard there was a cover charge and that it wasn’t cheap.

We got into my car and the guy said, “Nice car.” I don’t think he meant it. He looked around. There were a lot of houses nearby, and it felt a little too much in the open. I unlocked my door, reached over and unlocked the passenger door. When he got in, he said, “Is there someplace—”

“Yeah, I’ve got an idea.”

Melrose in that area was in bad need of an overhaul. The clapboard houses were sagging and the graystones were looking shabby. About three buildings in from Halsted there was an alley in both directions. That was my idea.

I started the car and drove back to the alley. Turning down it, I found a spot to nudge the car into behind a couple of garbage cans. I turned off the ignition and the lights. It got nice and dark.

We leaned over and kissed each other. Beneath the smell of cigarette smoke, four or five different alcohols, and two colognes, I could smell the musky scent of a man. That got me going. I jammed my tongue into his mouth, and he grabbed me, trying to pull me closer.

The stick shift, with its black knob that reminded me of an eight ball, was jabbing into my side. I tried to ignore it and reached for the guy’s cock. It was a nice size and already stiff in his jeans. My own dick was good and hard and getting strangled by my boxers. I reached down and undid my jeans to set it free.

He bent over and tried to suck me, but he knocked his shoulder on the stick shift and jumped up with an “Ouch.”

“Hold on,” I said. The car
was
a sort of sporty hatchback, and if you flip
ped
down the backseat you’
d
ma
k
e a cargo area out of the back of the backseat and the floor of the trunk. Not a lot of room in a small car, certainly, but much more room than two bucket seats and a stick shift provide
d
.

I managed to flip the backseat down and leaned back so my new friend could crawl back there. I followed him and was able to get most of me into the back. My feet were still flopping around near the gearshift.

We wiggled around, getting our jeans down around our knees, and had a nice sword fight with our dicks. Rubbing against each other like that was sexy for a minute or so, but then it turned damn frustrating. I wanted to be inside of him. The fight I’d had with Harker kept popping into my head, and I wanted to forget about it. Besides, this guy promised I’d get to fuck him, and I wanted him to pay up.

Rolling him over, he went willingly. I slipped a finger into the crack of his ass and ran it down to his pucker hole. I began to stick it in when he started wiggling; for a moment I was afraid he was pulling up his jeans, when suddenly he reached back to hand me a little tube of Vaseline jelly. I grabbed it and went to work.

“I like a man who comes prepared,” I said. Of course, a man with a blue bandana sticking out of his back pocket kn
e
w what he want
ed
, so I shouldn’t have been surprised.

A few moments later, I eased my prick into him. He began rocking his hips as soon as I was inside him. I fucked him from the side until my hip was getting raw from rubbing against the low pile carpet that lined the cargo area. I pushed the guy face down and got on top of him. It was a pretty awkward position, but it was better than fucking from the side.

Luckily, he wasn’t very tall; unluckily, I was. My head was crammed against the hatch back as I tried to get some leverage. He wiggled underneath me, moaning happily and encouraging me to keep fucking him. Distantly, I worried he might get a bad rug burn on his prick, but, since that wasn’t my problem, I kept fucking him.

I was close to coming and trying not to, not because I was worried about being a considerate lover, I wasn’t. I didn’t want to come because then this would be over and I’d have to go home and face the mess I’d made with Harker. I knew the whole thing was my fault, and that just made me angrier. I fucked the guy even harder just thinking about it.

Suddenly, his moans increased and he whispered, “I’m going to come,” right before his sphincter muscles grabbed my dick in a death hold. Then I had no say in the matter, I was coming whether I liked it or not.

The guy had barely finished quivering when he pulled up his 501s and crawled over the seat to the driver’s door. He popped it open and got out, leaving me still mostly in the backseat. He gave me a look and said, “Thanks, that was just what I needed.” And then he was gone.

I pulled up my jeans and climbed into the driver’s seat. A minute or so later I had the seats back where they belonged and was headed down the alley. When I got to the end, the first thing I saw was a CPD patrol car cruising slowly down the street. When the car got to the alley, it paused and waited for me to pull out so it could pull in. I had just gotten incredibly lucky.

Of course, I’d known what we’d done was a crime. Not the sex, that was legal in Illinois and had been since 1961, if it was done in private. Sex in a car was considered sex in a public place; if memory served, a class A misdemeanor that could land me in the county lockup. If that patrol car had turned down the street a minute earlier I’d be on my way to Town Hall Station.

It d
id
n’t matter that if I’d been a straight guy making a little whoopee with his girl, the cops would have just shined a flashlight in the window and told me to move along. Since I wasn’t, they’d throw the book at me. Twice that week I’d had sex in a public place, and therefore it was the second time I’d committed public indecency. I should really know better. I needed to—

A weird thought popped into my head. I was still being followed. I’d figured out that I’d been followed from the time I took Meek’s case until his death. I’d assumed that it had stopped, but had it? I flashed on the guy I’d seen in the park right before I’d picked the biker. I thought he looked like a policeman. What if he was? I vaguely remembered a straight-laced kind of guy on the bus a few days before. Was he a police officer as well, and what if the squad I’d just seen was actually looking for me?

Wait a minute, I told myself. The guy in the park and the guy on the bus, I’d seen them both before the murders. The only thing I’d noticed since was a squad car coming around a corner at an almost inopportune moment. I wasn’t being followed. I was being paranoid.

Right?

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

That Monday morning, I woke up early, grabbed my gym bag, and walked over to my office. Well, actually I walked over to the El and almost got on, but then I remembered that my office was no longer downtown. I had a bad crick in my neck and felt like shit. I’d peeked in on Harker when I got home and saw that he was asleep. I’d been afraid I’d wake him and start our fight up again, so I slept on the sofa. I woke with the sun and managed to drag myself out of the apartment before Harker woke up. Cowardly, I know.

I picked up a large Styrofoam cup of coffee and a bear claw at a mom and pop store near the El and walked back to my office. I flipped on a jazz station I liked. Chuck Mangione was playing and I dug him, to use jazz parlance. The music was bright and cheerful, and I wondered if it might not turn out to be a pretty decent day.

After my experience finding Vernon Taber, I decided to spend some time with the Chicago phonebook and the list of names I’d gotten from back issue of the
Daily Herald
. This time, I wasn’t so lucky. My coffee was gone and the donut a distant memory, and I hadn’t found a single name. I tried calling people with similar names and asking if they were family members. I didn’t have any luck with that either.

There were thirteen names in total. Ronald and Vernon I knew all about, so that left eleven. Eleven names of men no longer listed in the phone book. They could be dead, they could have moved away, they could even have changed their names to avoid the stigma of their arrest. It was going to be tough finding anyone who knew anything about Bill Maker’s death.

I folded up the list of names and stuck it into my pocket. I’d have to make it to the County Clerk’s office after I met Aunt Bev for lunch. Maybe I could find something on one of these guys there. Even knowing they were dead would be helpful.

I had a couple of hours before I needed to go down to the Loop for lunch. I could have gone to the gym then, but the main reason I was thinking about going was to avoid going home. I decided to save the excuse for later. I spent the rest of the morning organizing my Peterson/Palmer work. Since I was going to the Clerk’s office, I might as well kill two birds.

By ten after twelve, I was sitting at a table in The French Bakery waiting for my aunt. It was not one of my favorite tables, but the place was already filling up and I didn’t feel like haggling with the hostess over it. It was one of six small café style tables placed in front of a blue-tufted banquette that ran across half the dining room. It was a good setup for them. They could shove the tables together and have just about any size they wanted. I didn’t care too much for it, though, since I didn’t like other diners sitting right smack next to me.

“My aunt will be joining me,” I told the hostess, an airy blonde whose name I th
ought
was Penny. “She’s a tough looking woman in her mid-fifties.”

“I’ll send her over,” Penny said.

I sat down, worrying that the tables were too close together. I didn’t want anyone eavesdropping on our conversation, but then I wondered if that might not actually be better. All Aunt Bev had to do was give me a piece of paper or two, and then we could spend the rest of the time talking about family and catching up. There was no reason for either of us to say anything that couldn’t be overheard.

Brian saw me and came over. He wore black slacks, a white shirt, bow tie, and a long butcher’s apron that already could use a good laundering. He slipped in between me and the two young secretaries lunching beside me.

“Hi, I just wanted to say again that I’m really sorry.”

I scowled at him.

“I didn’t mean to upset him. God, I feel like such an idiot.”

He seemed to be in real pain over this so I took pity on him; well, I sort of took pity. “Look, Brian, it’s not your fault. I didn’t tell Ross it was a secret. How were you to know? But here’s the thing, I’d appreciate it if you’d let me be pissed at you for a couple of days.”

He laughed like I’d made a joke. I pulled a face that made him know I hadn’t. At that particular moment in my life, it was easier to be mad at him than myself. Yes, the fact that I was aware of it might put a damper on it, but it was worth a try.

“But that’s not—” Brian started.

“Fair?” I finished for him. “No, it’s not. Now go away. Everything will be fine in a couple of days.”

He gave me a confused look, one that he’
d
given me before. I was not someone Brian understood, or would ever understand. He walked away.