Murder on a Hot Tin Roof (8 page)

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Authors: Amanda Matetsky

BOOK: Murder on a Hot Tin Roof
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“None of the above,” I said, as we exited the building and came together on the sidewalk. “We’re going to Stewart’s Cafeteria, on Christopher near Seventh. We passed it twice today. Looked like a nice place to eat.” I turned and began walking down Bleecker toward Seventh Avenue.
Abby caught up with me and followed alongside, face screwed up in a crabby frown. “Why the hell do you want to go there?!” she squawked. “The food is lousy. Mostly steam-table stuff. And you have to stand in line and get it yourself.”
“How do you know? Have you been there before?”
“Sure. Lots of times.”
“But if the food’s so bad, why did you go so often?”
“I didn’t go there to eat, silly. I was just looking for models.”
“What?!” Now I was the one who was squawking. (Just when you think you know everything there is to know about her, Abby pulls another squirming rabbit out of her hat.) “Looking for
models?
!” I cried, tossing my hands up in wild confusion. “What the devil are you talking about?”
“Enough with the dramatics, Paige. It’s not as crazy as it sounds.” We came to a stop at Seventh Avenue and stood waiting for the light to change. “I’ll explain everything when we get there,” she said. “It’s too hot to talk while we’re walking. And the cafeteria’s right across the street.”
As rabidly curious as I was, I didn’t try to argue with her. When Abby set her mind to something, it was carved in stone. And besides—it really was too hot to walk and talk at the same time.
 
 
THE LIGHT CHANGED AND WE CROSSED over Seventh to Christopher. Stewart’s was right around the corner and the double entry doors were propped wide open. My heart sank at the sight. The gaping portal could mean only one thing: no air-conditioning. And if Abby was right about the steam tables, it was probably hotter inside the restaurant than out.
Yep. The indoor temperature was at least five degrees higher. And the air was so moist and heavy you could barely breathe—which turned out to be a good thing since the sickening smell of fried fish was overpowering. The ceiling fans were going full speed, but their only effect was to move the hot, greasy air from one spot to another. As a result, the place was practically empty. Except for a skinny middle-aged man sitting at a table near the windows, and the hairy, husky man behind the food counter, and two sweaty young busboys in wilted white uniforms, Abby and I were the only ones there.
Abby headed straight for the food service area and grabbed a brown plastic tray from the stack at the end of the counter. Then she began to move down the food line, asking the husky server for a slab of this, and two scoops of that, and a heap of that stuff over there. You’d have thought she was a starving longshoreman, the way she was piling it on. When she finished making her selections, the mound of grub on her plate was as high as the Matterhorn.
The sights and smells at the food counter—particularly the slimy display of boiled beef and the repulsive odor rising from a pan of steamed trout—were making me nauseous. I took a small roll, a puny portion of the fruit salad Jell-O mold, and a glass of iced tea.
“Okay, out with it,” I said, as soon as we were seated at a front table near the row of large windows and the open doors. “Whatever gave you the yo-yo idea to come here looking for models? Are they running an agency in the kitchen?”
“No, silly,” Abby said, digging into her meatloaf and mashed. “Ith juth tha a lop of goop loofing ghys ang hout ear and—”
“Stop! I can’t understand a word you’re saying. Can’t you swallow before you speak?!” My patience was wearing a little thin.
Abby gulped and gave me a goofy grin. “Sorry, babe, but my mooseloaf is calling.” She took another bite and gobbled it down. Then she looked up and said, “What I was trying to tell you was that a lot of really good-looking guys hang out here at Stewart’s, and some of them are only too happy to do a little modeling for me. Sometimes they’ll even do it for free. And that’s a whole lot less than the twenty-five bucks an hour the agency charges. And that’s why I come here looking for models. Get what I mean, Jean?” She shoveled a fresh load of mashed potatoes into her mouth.
“No! I don’t get it at all. What’s so special about this crummy place? Why do good-looking guys like to hang out
here
?”
Abby swallowed her spuds and widened her eyes in surprise. “You mean you don’t know?”
“Know what?” I urged.
“About Stewart’s,” she said.
“What about Stewart’s?” I begged.
“I can’t believe you don’t know,” she said. “I thought
everybody
knew about Stewart’s.”
“Well,
I
don’t!” I shrieked. My patience wasn’t wearing thin anymore. It was officially worn-out.
“Shhhh! Keep your voice down. You’re making a scene.”
“You’re
making
me make a scene! And if you don’t tell me everything you know about this place right now, I’m going to jump on the table and hoot like a monkey!”
“Do monkeys hoot? I always thought of them as screechers, not—”
“Abby!!”
“Okay, okay!” she finally relented, leaning forward and lowering her voice to a whisper. “Here’s the dirt, Bert: Stew-art’s Cafeteria is known in these parts as Queer Central Station. You dig my meaning? It’s where all the fairies meet and greet. See the fellow sitting at that table over there, staring out the window? He’s probably a queer looking for company. And see the sidewalk right outside this row of windows? They call it the chicken run. That’s where all the chickens strut up and down and back and forth, flouncing their feathers and flexing their muscles, angling for potential . . . um . . . boyfriends. Or, in some cases, modeling jobs.”
“Chickens?”
“Yeah,”Abby said, smiling. “You never heard that term before? It’s what the older homosexuals call the younger, more attractive ones. The chickens are the handsomest, most well-built, most sexy guys of all. A lot of them live in the Village and a whole flock of them live right here on Christopher Street. They’re always prancing by these windows on their way to and from one place or another.
“On normal days,” she went on, “there’s a constant parade out there. And all these chairs and tables here, right inside the windows? They’re like the bleachers. On normal days they’re packed with enthusiastic . . . uh . . . spectators.”
“What do you mean by
normal
days?”
“I mean days when it isn’t over a hundred goddamn degrees in the shade. And when it’s
not
the Fourth of July weekend. The bleachers and the runway are deserted today because every homo who has two nickels to rub together is out on Fire Island. And all the others are tucked away at home, sitting naked in front of the fan and soaking their feet in ice water.”
Or being grilled about a murder by a hotheaded homicide detective
, I brooded, thinking of Willy.
Abby started chowing down again. “So, what’s your excuse?” she asked between mouthfuls. “Why did
you
want to come here? You certainly aren’t in the market for a homosexual lover. Or a male model. And don’t give me that crap about how it looked like a nice place to eat, either. Because it doesn’t. And it isn’t. The food stinks to high heaven,” she said, forking a huge pile of gray string beans into her mouth.
I nibbled on my roll and took a sip of iced tea. “It was something Willy said,” I told her. “He mentioned that Gray had been bussing tables here. I thought I’d check the place out and see if that was true.”
“It was true all right.
I
could have told you that. Jeez, Paige, why didn’t you just ask me? I would have given you the dope, and then we wouldn’t have had to come here to eat!” She took another bite of meatloaf and chomped it eagerly.
“So you knew that Gray worked here?”
“Of course I did. This is where I met him. I was about to start working on a new illustration, and I needed a new model, so I came here to check out the chicken run. But then I saw Gray clearing the tables, and I really dug the way he looked, so I skipped the whole sidewalk show and asked him to pose for me. I had just landed a cover assignment from
Real Men
magazine.”
“So what did he say? Did he accept?”
“In a flash.”
“When did this happen?”
“Oh, a couple of years ago. Right after Gray moved from Brooklyn to the Village. Both of his parents were killed in a car accident, so he packed up his meager belongings and moved to the city to start a new life—to pursue the acting career his parents had never approved of. He was working as a busboy just to pay the rent while he took acting lessons and went on auditions. When I offered him ten dollars to pose for me, he pounced on it like a hungry tomcat.”
“Ten dollars an hour? Wasn’t that a little high for somebody with no modeling experience?”
“Well, yeah, but Gray was so gorgeous he was worth it.” Her eyes lit up and her lips curled into a sinful smile. “He was worth it in other ways, too.”
Oh, brother
, I groaned to myself.
Doesn’t her libido ever take a nap?
“Other ways?” I said, widening my eyes in imitation innocence. “What other ways do you mean?” Though I knew all-too-well what Abby was hinting at, I wanted to make her say it. That way, she couldn’t get mad and accuse me of making snide remarks about her sex life.
“Oh, shut up, Paige!” she snapped. “You know exactly what I mean. And your cute little Shirley Temple act is getting on my nerves.”
Curses, foiled again.
“I slept with Gray once or twice,” she went on, “and that’s all there was to it. He was a good lay and a great model. We didn’t stay lovers for long, but we did remain friends. He kept on modeling for me, too.”
“So, Gray wasn’t a homosexual?”
“No way, Doris Day!”
“But he worked here at Stewart’s,” I said, wondering about the coincidence. “And he lived on Christopher Street, too.”
“So what? Not every man who works and lives here is gay. Just some of them are. And you can take it from me, babe, Gray
didn’t
belong to the club.”
“Then why was your affair with him so brief?” I asked. “Did you dump him for somebody else?” (This wasn’t an impertinent question, I swear. It was fair and perfectly reasonable. Abby was so beautiful and voluptuous and smart, no man ever willingly broke up with her. Whenever there was dumping to be done,
she
had to be the one to do it.)
“Nobody dumped anybody,” Abby insisted. “Gray simply decided to commit himself to just one of his flames and stop
shtupping
all the others. I was one of the others.”
“How many of those were there?”
“How the hell should I know? I didn’t ask him for an itemized list!” She was getting touchy again. She ripped her roll apart, swiped a piece of it through the leftover gravy in her otherwise empty plate, then poked the gloppy morsel in her mouth.
I took one taste of my canned fruit and Jell-O mold, then shoved the warm, half-melted mess aside. “Do you know who Gray’s chosen mate was?” I asked. “The one he finally committed himself to, I mean?”
“No,” she said, eyeing the gooey remains of my gelatin salad. “I never met her, and he never told me her real name. I only saw Gray when he was posing for me, you dig, and he didn’t talk about his girlfriend much at all. And the few times that he did bring her up, he just called her Cupcake.” Abby stretched her arm out over the table and picked up the plate of oozing Jell-O. “Are you finished with this?” she asked.
“Unconditionally,” I said. “Have a party.”
While Abby was polishing off whatever edibles were left on the table, I sat back in my chair and smoked a cigarette, silently watching the ghost-white fumes vanish in the gyrating air. I probably looked quite serene and relaxed, but my mind was spinning faster than the ceiling fans above. I smelled something fishy, and I knew it wasn’t just the food.
Chapter 7
“WANT TO GO TO THE MOVIES?” ABBY asked as we stood up from the table and headed for the cafeteria exit. “
Dial M for Murder
is still playing at the Waverly. I wouldn’t mind seeing that again.”
I wouldn’t have objected to seeing the clever Hitchcock mystery again, either, but at the moment my thoughts were focused on a different murder. “Two killings in one day?” I said. “That’s two too many for me.”
“I guess you’re right,” Abby said, growing sadder by the second. “I just thought it would take our minds off—”
“Hold on a minute,” I broke in, coming to an abrupt standstill three feet inside door. “I want to talk to the busboys before we leave.” I looked around and saw them standing together near the entrance to the kitchen. “Wait here for me, okay?”
“No! Why should I? What do you want to talk to them about, anyway? If they have anything interesting to say, I want to hear it, too. I’m coming with you!”
“Please don’t, Abby. Please stay here. I just want to ask them a couple of questions about Gray, and I think I’ll get more answers if I talk to them alone. The two of us together might be too overwhelming.”

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