No Rest for the Wicked

No Rest for the Wicked

A.
M. Riley

No Rest for the Wicked

Copyright © March 2010 by A. M. Riley

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eISBN 978-1-60737-546-3

Editor: Judith David

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“When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That is my religion.”

—Abraham Lincoln

At ten o'clock on a Friday night on the streets of Hollywood, the sound of sirens aren't likely to turn a lot of heads. Even if those sirens are accompanied by police helicopters, their search lights strafing Sunset Boulevard, swinging to illuminate the dark cracks and crevices behind and around Grauman's Chinese theater, occasionally clashing with spotlights midair like some kind of matter-antimatter event.

And that thought you can blame on the movie I just saw here in the theater.

The latest sci-fi feature had opened amid the proverbial glamour of Hollywood, complete with lines that circled the city block, clowns and street musicians, vendors peddling cheap flashing lights, Darth Vader and Spider-Man soliciting five bucks per photo from the tourists, and an exsanguinated body in the men's room stall.

That last was the reason I was standing in the rain, chatting with a Marilyn Monroe look-alike, instead of in a nice warm bed fucking the socks off a certain somebody.

Okay, first let me explain.

It was a Friday night and Peter and I were, for lack of a better term, “on a date.” That's right, dinner and a movie. With a good chance of an aperitif at his place later.

Now, if you know me, you know dating's not exactly my shtick. But after years of finding Peter conveniently available whenever I was in the mood to drop in, I'd found Peter inconveniently being “courted” by a younger man and, well, I felt called upon to step up to the plate, as they say.

“You want to see that?” We were near a construction site, the plywood walls built around
it plastered with posters for one movie.

Peter dragged his gaze away from the poster he'd been ogling. “Nah,” he said.

“Yes you do.”

He sneaked another peek at the life-size image of a gorgeous young man in a spandex
costume with a little logo on the left breast. “When I was a kid I wanted to be James Kirk,” Peter
confessed sheepishly.

I eyed the poster. My guess was Peter had wanted to do James Kirk, but I had an intuition
suggesting this would be like suggesting he'd wanted to do his priest, so I kept my yap shut.

“Well, then. Let's go see it next week.”

There, I'd surprised him. “Okay.”

Jonathan, the aforesaid young man, had taken Peter to some symphonic performance a few weeks previously. Peter kept telling me that he and Jonathan were just friends, but nobody lays down a couple hundred bucks on tickets to sit in a stuffy room and listen to men play violins unless he has ulterior motives. A man is a man; I don't care how pink cheeked and bright eyed that man may be. So, not to be outdone, I'd gone whole hog. Gotten tickets for the opening week in the main theater at the Grauman's Chinese, reservations at Peter's favorite restaurant. Kind of place you have to wear a tie.

“Hang on.” Peter brushed at invisible lint on my shoulder. “Turn around,” he
commanded.

So I did the runway turn there in his hallway. “Peter, we're going to be late.”

When I faced him again, he had that smile he sometimes gets. Like he knew a secret about
me that even I didn't know. A look in his eyes that made me want to tear off both our suits and
drag him into the bedroom. It'd been a long time since I'd seen Peter anything but worried and
exhausted. Made the whole damned rigmarole worth it.

Things started going wrong right off the bat, of course. Firstly, it was the coldest day on record since 1922 in the city of Los Angeles. Rain poured from the sky as if from a bucket. The traffic was an unholy mess from the mountains to the sea, and the restaurant I'd made reservations at had a flood in the basement that blew out their generators and shut the place down.

“It's okay,” Peter said. And he still had that smile. “We'll pick up something on our way
back to my place.”

Then while we stood in line at the theater, it started to rain, again. Peter had to give his umbrella to a couple of old people in front of us, so we got good and wet and waited in line pressed up under the eaves of a pawn shop, trying to stay out of the direct downpour.

Peter's head was damp enough that the tips of his short blond hair were dark. The ends of his fingers, when I surreptitiously grabbed his hand, were freezing cold. I could feel water dribbling down the back of my neck, uncomfortably combining with the itch of the wool suit.

But none of that mattered, really. Peter's cheeks and the tip of his nose were pink, the way they got when he was happy. And as we stood there, I observed a couple of boyish hops for glee.

In the theater proper he actually sneaked his hand over and squeezed my leg, and I figured payback afterward was going to be something to write home about.

My mistake was running into the men's room before leaving. Damned buttered popcorn goes through me like chaff. Anyway, the minute I walked through the door I sensed it.

Something particular and very familiar.

The place wasn't crowded, but there were two guys standing at the urinal. They both gave me a look and shifted their shoulders, dropping eyes immediately. I'm a big guy, and men tend to do that when they feel vulnerable. For instance, when they've got their pants unzipped and their dicks out. Anyway, neither looked up and into the mirrors again, which was a good thing because it gave me a few minutes to suss out the source of the particular something.

The end stall was closed and, I noted, jammed shut. Both of the dudes finished their business without looking or commenting, while I jerked on the door a few times until whatever it was tore loose, and I could swing it open.

A young Caucasian male had been propped, fully dressed, on the pot. Legs spread, head back and resting against the wall, lips parted, eyes closed, but not in sleep. Deader than the proverbial doornail. He was white white and still, with two big red holes in his neck. He hadn't been there long. I guessed maybe an hour, maybe less. I discerned this by running a few tests that a crime scene tech would gag to observe.

I heard the door to the men's room swing open, footsteps on the tile, and then Peter calling, “Hey, Adam, you almost finished?”

“Sure, Peter, give me a second.”

What to do with my unfortunate friend?

Because the minute Peter found out there was a dead body in there, our date was over.

Peter's a homicide detective, and he'd undoubtedly feel it was his duty to call in a dead body. Then stand around waiting for the officers to answer the call, then helpfully inform said officers of anything he might have noted and then, probably, end up working through the night.

The man was dead. Had been dead, as I said, for at least an hour. What the hell difference could it make if Peter spent a few hours relaxing and maybe getting some for the first time in weeks?

Not that I'm selfish or anything. Okay, hell yes, I'm selfish. In the past six months, I don't think Peter has taken one day off.

Close on the heels of the investigation resulting from the death of yours truly, Peter had been assigned the murder of Howard Snipes, a flamboyant former child actor frequently in the news before he had been found at the foot of a flight of stairs, a red silk scarf knotted around his throat, face blue, tongue extended—an image that had hit every tabloid's front page almost before the body had made it to the coroner's office.

It had been one of those investigations cursed from the get-go. From the compromised crime scene to questions of jurisdiction and a challenged will.

And then one day a former girlfriend had simply walked into the LA Sheriff's Department Compton office and confessed.

Peter had a break. For the first time in years. And I planned to take full advantage of it.

Here's something I'll tell you from the unique perspective of having all eternity to look forward to: no job in the world is as important as you think it is. Peter works too hard. I've told him so before. We've argued about it a bit actually. There are over one thousand homicides in the city of Los Angeles in a year. No way these guys are ever going to catch up. What's one more stiff, I reasoned.

Rigor hadn't begun to set in, so I was able to push the corpse's head down between his knees, pulling his feet up and his arms around so that his body assumed a kind of ball shape.

Which I fitted neatly onto the toilet seat. Then I kept the door locked, pulled myself up and over the stall wall, and came out of the stall next door.

Peter watched me worriedly. “What are you doing?”

“Door was stuck,” I said. I turned on the tap and washed my hands, raising my head to check my reflection in the mirror and, as usual, getting that small shock when all I saw was the row of stalls behind me. I looked away from the mirror and saw that Peter was still eyeing the bathroom stall door. “You want to stop for something to eat or you want takeout?” I asked him.

But Peter had begun shaking the stall door, frowning. And then he leaned over and looked underneath it.

Dammit all to heck.

He stood up, flipping open his cell phone, just giving me that
look.

Etcetera, as they say.

Peter sets a higher standard for me than I feel is reasonable, given my past, but he read me the riot act anyway. Cheesed off at me for tampering with the crime scene and the body, he commanded that I put everything back exactly as I had found it.