The Lure (24 page)

“It will be done soon,” Dorrance assured them. “But Eric absolutely believes that we have to wait until the time is right.”

“It’s right now,” one man said.

“We’ve waited long enough,” the other leather number said, disgusted.

“You’ll just have to wait a little longer,” Dorrance said. He was facing away from the others, and was the first to spot Noel and Randy, who had stopped a few feet away from the group.

“It’s long overdue already,” one more voice put in.

Dorrance gave him a stern glance, then said in another tone of voice, “Some friends are joining us. Noel. Randy. You all know each other?”

The others turned as though on cue. “Hey, hot guy,” the blond, leather-dressed man said to Randy.

“We’ll talk later,” Dorrance said, low, to one of the other men.

In seconds, the group dispersed and reformed around Noel and Randy. Introductions were made, hands shaken all around. Noel watched helplessly as Dorrance excused himself and went over to the others on the roof, talked to them briefly, then disappeared down a stairway next to the pool door.

A half hour later Noel was no closer to Dorrance. Loomis would have a fit if he found out. He had to get to him, if only for a moment. If the party were seeded with Whisper operatives, they’d report that he and Mr. X were seen together.

Noel excused himself from the small group Randy had gathered and began searching for Dorrance. Here and there he came across familiar faces—people he’d seen at the Grip, some whose photos he’d seen in magazines and newspapers. That man with the shock of platinum hair had to be Jerry Kovacs, the avant-garde playwright, and Noel was certain the pretty, chubby girl in the corner, with a slim black boy on either side of her, was María Antonia Díaz-Juárez, the tin heiress.

He’d combed the main floor and was climbing up to the dining room when he spotted Dorrance by the elevators, just pushing the button and checking his watch.

By the time Noel got there, Dorrance had descended. Noel took the second elevator down.

Two couples, one straight, one gay, were coming in the front door when Noel got out on the first floor. They were snorting cocaine and groping each other. He went to the office and knocked. No answer. The door was locked. He knocked again, louder. Still no answer.

Maybe Dorrance had gone up to the pool again.

He got into the elevator and pressed five. It must have been prepushed by someone else; it went down to the basement.

“Hell!” Noel said when the door opened to the strange, dark lower floor. But a door was ajar. He let the elevator close behind him, and pushed the door fully open.

He was just in time to see the front of Dorrance’s Bentley slide up the steep driveway, stop for a second at the street, then take off, before the automatic garage doors began to close again.

Where was he going? Not to the Bar Sinister. With all the people here going over, too, he surely would have taken a few of them with him.

Noel closed the hallway door, found the wall switch for the lights, and stood for a minute thinking. He ought to follow Dorrance, find out where he was going. If he were leaving the party, where he went would be important.

But how to follow him? Getting a cab at this hour, outside the door, would be near impossible. He might wait fifteen minutes before an empty one arrived.

He looked at the low-slung Mercedes SL coupe, then bent down and peered inside. The keys were in the ignition. It was a signal. He shouldn’t ask questions.

Without another thought, Noel got into the car and turned on the ignition. In front of him, the garage doors automatically opened. It was a minute before he had located all the necessary switches and buttons to operate the car. Then he drove up the ramp and out, noticing, with satisfaction, the doors close behind him, and hoping no one had seen him leave.

Two blocks east, he spotted the big Bentley. Noel decided to hang on at a distance, in case Dorrance recognized the pale, metallic blue coupe. It was low enough that he could easily hide behind most sedans and keep the Bentley in view with only one car between them.

Dorrance swung downtown. Noel followed.

At Sixty-third Street, the Bentley took the short, curving ramp onto the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. Noel opted for the same lane, keeping two cars between them. The Mercedes took the hundred-and-twenty-degree curve as though it were a straightaway. It handled like a dream.

At the end of the bridge, Dorrance went through the various turnways onto the road leading to the Long Island Expressway. Noel stayed about an eighth of a mile behind in the same lane for the next ten minutes or so. The highway was empty, fast moving.

Examining the side pockets of the seat, Noel found a stick of grass and several cassettes. Keith Jarrett’s
Köln Concert
was handmarked: probably taped from records. Noel popped it into the deck opening at his knee height and was serenaded in quadrasonics by the funky, pristine piano.

A minute later Dorrance turned onto the Grand Central Parkway. Noel swung the SL from the third lane onto the service road with utter ease. Jarrett’s piano was building a fantasia out of isolated chords like silver.

He almost missed the turnoff Dorrance took, and had to cut fast in front of another car to take the exit ramp leading up. The coupe lunged forward like a great cat let off its leash.

At the end of the ramp, Noel slowed down to a stop. He was atop a road overlooking the parkway, with an unimpeded view of Flushing Meadow Park slung out below, the lake glittering blackly in the necklace of tiny lights from the surrounding street lamps.

This was a residential area: medium-sized houses, some single, some attached. Not too many cars on this road.

The Bentley was ahead, turning off the service road at a major thoroughfare. Noel followed. The road narrowed, rose and fell like a ribbon in the wind for the next mile and a half.

The next turnoff was sudden: up a hilly road left. Noel shot past as Dorrance made a sharp right into a driveway. The Mercedes glided to a stop. Noel looked in the rearview mirror.

Dorrance got out of the Bentley, locked it, and walked up the stone stairs of a large, white, two-story frame house with dark gables and roof.

Noel waited, double-parked on the silent street, expecting Dorrance to come out any minute and drive off again. But when the front door opened again, it was a young girl who came out, unlocked the car, and drove it into the garage alongside the house.

Noel waited another five minutes, feeling increasingly nervous as a face peered out of the lighted window of the house he was parked alongside. He hoped the observer wouldn’t call the police.

As no one came out of the white frame house, Noel slowly backed up until he was parallel to it. There was a brass address plate: 57-38.

Lights blazed from both floors.

Noel inched forward to where the winding street crossed another road. There he swung a U turn, and again glided past the house. The downstairs lights were off now, only one on upstairs. It was two o’clock. The SL coasted down to the main road, where he spotted the street sign hidden high in the foliage of tall trees—Edgeware Road.

“I know where Mr. X lives,” he said out loud, as he swerved back onto the Grand Central Parkway: “57-38 Edgeware Road, in Queens. I know. I know,” he repeated, then flipped the cassette to listen to Jarrett’s moody playing until he was back in Manhattan.

There must have been a sensing device between the Mercedes and the garage door: it swung open as soon as he sidled over the edge of the down ramp.

He drove in, got out, watched the door close, and turned to leave.

Then the garage lights went out.

Noel remained still for a second. Did he hear someone else there? Or was that his own breathing magnified in the closed, echoing hollow space?

He took three steps to the door into the hallway, groped for the handle, turned it.

Another hand covered his on the doorknob, gripped it hard.

The lights went on again. Noel blinked, pulled his hand away, and fought down a dozen sudden fears. Before he could regain his vision, he’d been pushed up against the metal door.

“You think you’re funny, don’t you, Professor Cummings?” Eric said, his face inches away from Noel’s.

Noel had seen that look before: in the eyes of wolves about to attack defenseless prey. He went rigid.

“I wanted a drive.”

“Sure.”

“So I took it.”

“That’s my car, you know.”

“I brought it back, didn’t I?”

“This time.”

Noel’s initial fear was beginning to dissipate in his anger at Eric. “You’d never miss it,” he said. “A twenty-five-thousand-dollar car to you is like a Three Musketeers bar to anyone else.”

“Where did you go?”

Noel heard the edge in his voice, but brazened it out “For a drive.”

“Where?”

Odometers didn’t lie. Redfern would check the one on the Benz.

“Staten Island. Jersey. Back over the bridge. Around.”

“You’re lying.”

Eric’s hand was pressing a fist-sized lump through his ribs. But Noel couldn’t see any weapon. If it came to it, they were evenly matched.

“You’re lying,” Redfern repeated. “I know you are.”

Redfern was dangerous, maybe even a lunatic. But—close as he was to Dorrance—he had to be dealt with now, or he’d never let up on Noel. He’d bully him any chance he had. And that wouldn’t help Noel to get close to Dorrance. No way.

Slowly, calmly, Noel said, “Why don’t you go fuck yourself, man?”

Eric moved away. The pressure was suddenly lifted off Noel’s chest. Then, pivoting quickly, Eric slapped him backhand across the face.

Noel recovered from the blow and dove headfirst into Eric’s middle, slamming him against the side of the Mercedes. Eric grabbed him, they wrestled, fell onto the garage floor, rolling, grabbing recklessly at each other, until Noel suddenly let go and managed to get to his feet. Eric sprang up. They faced each other, arms and hands out, circling slowly, eyeing each other’s throats, faces, heads, eyes, mouths—anything that would be soft and hurt.

Eric put down his hands and straightened up.

Certain this was a ruse, Noel kept on guard.

“I don’t believe it. I just don’t fucking believe it,” Eric said in a strangely broken voice. He turned away from Noel and walked over to the garage door, where he continued to repeat the words, punching one hand over and over into the open palm of the other. When he was done, he turned around again.

“Why do you do these things to me?” Eric said. “Why? Only one other person in my entire goddamned life can irritate me to the point where I want to smash him, really smash him. You know who? My father. That’s right. Go on laugh, big sociology professor. Laugh.”

Noel straightened up, hoping it wasn’t a mistake.

“I’m not laughing.”

“You don’t deny it, then? Being a college teacher?”

“Why should I? Everyone knows it.”

“Then why work at a bar?”

“That’s my business.”

“There you go again, goddamn you! Can’t you be human for one fucking minute?”

They glared at each other, and suddenly all the levers that had been going click click before with Randy, all clicked into place. Jackpot. Eric was Mr. X. Not Dorrance. It was Eric. And here he was, facing Noel and asking for something, trust, or honesty—something. And if he didn’t get it—what then? A razor blade across the eyes?

“I’m doing a book on gay life. That’s why. The university press at my school is going to publish it. It’s long overdue. If I don’t do it, I probably won’t get tenure. I’m even on sabbatical next term to finish it. It’s a view of gay life seen from the inside. I’ve gotten a grant to help me with it. If I don’t do it my career is washed up. It’s going to be a breakthrough study.”

He could see Eric was wavering.

“You chose it because you’re gay?”

“My department chairman chose it.”

“But you are gay?”

“More or less.”

“Which? More? Or less?”

“Ask Randy Nerone. What do you think we do together? Read Margaret Mead to each other?”

“No. I guess not.”

“I suppose I’m bisexual,” Noel said. Eric seemed to believe him; he wasn’t going to fuck it up now. “Like you. Like everyone probably.”

“Is that what your book is going to be about?”

“No. It’s going to be about social structures of the gay scene and its imitations and adaptations of general cultural mores.”

Eric stared at him. Something was going on inside his mind; Noel wished he knew what.

“All right.” He shrugged, seemed defeated for the minute. “All right. Let’s go upstairs and clean up.”

Noel tried not to emit the sigh of relief he felt. He put out his hand: “Shake?”

“No,” Eric said, “that would imply trust. I don’t trust you.”

“I’m sorry about that,” Noel replied. It was the truth. If Eric really was Mr. X, he needed Eric’s trust.