He couldn’t look her in the eye right now. Some CD-ROM game was on his computer, playing through a demo—monsters prowling medieval corridors—and he used this distraction to go and turn it off.
Finally, Helen spoke up, if only to create a break which would relieve her from merely standing there in her overcoat feeling idiotic. “Bisexual, gay—what’s the difference?”
“Well, there is a difference, Helen. It’s not easy to explain but there’s still a difference. Christ, this is the 90s. I mean, don’t go Rush Limbaugh on me.”
“Oh for God’s sake, Tom! I’m not a homophobe! But I think I have damn good reason for being disillusioned when I see my lover kissing another man on the steps of his condo!”
The rant hushed the room.
“I don’t know what to say,” he told her.
“And what about precautions, Tom? You’re the one who just told me this is the 90s. You ever hear of AIDS? For the last year and a half, whenever you and I have slept together, you never once used a condom.”
“But I did at first, didn’t I? Until you were comfortable not using them. I’m a state employee, Helen, just like you. I get an AIDS test every six months to maintain my health insurance. And whenever I’m with another man…”
“What?” she spat back.
“I’ve always used condoms,” he sheepishly replied.
“Great. Give yourself the gold star. But tell me this, Tom. For the time we’ve been together, just how many other men have there been?”
More hushed silence cramped the room. Tom looked at the carpet. “I won’t lie to you. There’ve been, well, a bunch. Nothing serious. Just…flings.”
“A bunch, huh? Well tell me something, how many is a bunch?”
He faltered like a car with a bad carb. “A dozen, I guess, er, probably less than that, more like, I don’t know, nine or ten.”
The roof of Helen’s consciousness caved in then—she simply couldn’t picture it, she simply couldn’t understand. He’s been with a dozen men for the whole time he was with me?
But as if he’d read her thought, he scrambled to explain. “No, you’re right, I didn’t tell you and I should’ve—”
“You’re goddamn right, you should’ve.”
“—and the reason I didn’t was, well, because, you are too important to me—”
“That’s the biggest crock of shit I’ve ever heard in my life,” she replied.
“—and I didn’t know how you’d feel. I needed to get things out of my system before I took the plunge.”
She shook her head, wincing, incomprehensible. “What plunge?”
“Marrying you.”
“I—” she came right back, but that was all. Marrying. You. She felt lost now. Test the water before you jump to conclusions. Christ, this was hard. Marriage was what she wanted more than anything—at least a marriage to the right man. For so long, she’d believed he was it. But now?
She…just…didn’t think…she could…believe him.
“I can’t handle this,” she murmured more to herself. “This is too weird, this is too—shit, I don’t know what.”
She turned and left, blew out of the condo and into the stairwell. Tom rushed after her.
“Don’t run away!” he bellowed.
“Shut up! Leave me alone!”
Her high heels scampered down the steps.
“I won’t do it again, I promise!”
She kept going down, and he kept following. The cold air of the parking lot exploded into her face. She trotted for the Taurus like someone fleeing demons.
Tom stopped at the condo entry. “I’ll marry you!” he shouted.
Helen paused as she meant to open the car door.
“I’ll marry you, right now. We’ll go someplace right now, some justice of the piece, some lawyer—anywhere.”
Her hand shook holding the key.
“I love you, Helen,” he professed. “I don’t ever want to be with anyone else in the world, man or woman, except you.”
Helen felt as though she’d just stared into the eyes of the Medusa, and was turned to a pillar of salt.
“I’ll never touch anyone else in the world,” Tom promised, “except you.”
Tears turned to frost on her cheeks when she got into her state car, started the engine, and drove away. She wasn’t out of the parking lot a full two minutes when her pager began to beep.
««—»»
“Dumplin, Alan, 36 years old,” Jan Beck rattled off at the bottom of the stairwell of the Reed Circle loft. The stairwell rose narrowly into close darkness; Helen smelled dust and new paint as she followed the CES chief up.
Another one. In the Madison gay district. Beck looked like a pop scrub nurse in her red polys, showercap, elastic booties, and vinyl gloves. “No one saw or heard anything,” Beck added.
“That figures.” Helen was losing her breath mounting the close steps. I quit smoking a year ago but I’m still huffing and puffing, she thought. She felt short-changed, and the scene, less than thirty minutes ago at Tom’s, only supplemented that particular notion. “Please tell me there’s not another note.”
“There’s another note,” Beck said. “And it looks like we’ve got the pen this time.”
“A Flair?”
“Yep. And my UV guy thinks he’s got a solid tented arch on the note.”
UV guy, Helen thought. Most latent techs used battery-powered ultraviolet lamps to scan crime scenes for initial prints. The killer screwed up, came the bald thought. A tented arch was one of the most common types of fingerprint partials, and the easiest to make an ID from.
Beck waited on the landing for Helen to catch her breath. “In other words, this case may be solved now, or at the very least we’ll be able to prove the killer isn’t Dahmer. By mistakenly leaving a fingerprint on the note? That’s direct evidence that will contradict the graphological analysis of Dahmer’s handwriting.” Beck paused to peer at Helen. “I would think you’d be elated by this news, Captain.”
“I am,” Helen replied in something like numbness. She was still thinking about Tom. “But whenever there’s good news, there’s always bad news too.”
“No exception here. The bad news is you’re going to have to go in and look at the body. Hair and Fibers is finished, so I won’t make you dress up.”
“Thank you, Jan.” Helen could feel relieved, at least, about one thing. She hated having to don those ridiculous bright-red polyester overalls and booties.
Two state uniforms parted to make way at the door. Inside was a spacious, airy loft with veneered, old wood floors, throw rugs, and tasteful spartanish furniture. Several red-dressed technicians, a typical sight for Helen, went about their business, oblivious to the world. An immediate chill surrounded her: the windows were open. Helen wondered if the killer had left it open on purpose, to thwart a forensic effort to determine an accurate time-of-death margin by calculating an approximate drop in body temperature against the average temperature of the room. Her mind ticked.
An opened, roll-top desk sat in one corner, but in the corner opposite rested a king-sized waterbed.
The portly, naked body seemed to float there atop churning sheets. Helen paused for an unbidden glance.
Her stomach hitched.
“He tended bar at a place just down the block,” Beck said.
“A trade bar?”
“No, no. Place called Friends. Happy hour sort of place, big lunch crowd from the bizz district, and a lot of after-work meetings. Not a pickup joint at all is the word.”
“Any current lovers or…relationships?” she asked the question through something like a heart palpitation. Lovers, relationships… Men.