“So what’re you?” he asked when he had the second glove on. “Sherlock Homo? The Gay Detective? You investigate a lot of police brutality?”
“I don’t think there is a lot of police brutality.” My throat was very dry.
“Think again,” Spurrier said, and he stepped up to me and hit me with the heel of his right hand, just below the heart.
The chair went over beneath me and splintered on the hardwood floor, and I curled reflexively into a ball, trying to find some air somewhere in the world and fighting down a hot, poison-green wave of nausea. Spurrier’s shiny black shoes were inches from my face.
“Not a mark,” he said. “Not even a red spot.” His fingers curled around my arms and pulled me to my feet, but I couldn’t straighten up, so I was leaning forward when he turned me around and brought a fist down on my kidney.
I went to my knees. “Why didn’t Nordine call us?” he said quietly.
“Because he didn’t want to talk to an asshole,” I gasped. I barely had enough breath to get to the end of the sentence.
“Well, I suppose he’s an expert on assholes.” Spurrier sounded meditative. “You know what my big question is?”
“Which shoe to take off first at night?”
He brought a cupped hand around and slammed it over my left ear. It sounded as though someone had fired a pistol inside my skull, and the pain skittered like foxfire through the bones of my jaw and straight down my throat to my heart. “Can you hear me?” he asked. The hand came up again.
“I can hear you,” I said.
“Nothing in his car, Sergeant,” said a cop at the door. Behind him, I saw Orlando gazing at me with wide eyes.
“Give the gentleman his keys,” Spurrier said, and the cop tossed them at me. They hit my shoulder and clattered to the floor. I tried to pick them up, but my fingers wouldn’t do anything I wanted them to.
“My big question is what a faggot P.I. was doing at a cop’s wedding.”
“I was a bridesmaid,” I said through jaws that felt like they’d been wired together.
He laughed, and I heard the snap of latex as he peeled a glove from his hand. “Who was calling that phone number?” he yelled.
“I was, Sarge,” said a very young cop. “I had to call a couple times to get it all down.”
“Give it here.” He looked at the paper the cop had handed him and said, “What’s this number?”
“Parker Center pistol range,” the cop said. My fingers finally managed to wrap themselves around my keys.
“They have a wedding there today?”
The young cop shifted nervously. “I didn’t ask.”
“Ask,” he said, giving the piece of paper back and turning to face me. He ran his tongue over the plump red lip. “I believe you, of course. You’re just a good citizen who did his civic duty. Wish we had more like you. Well, maybe not exactly like you. Get up and sit in the other chair. You seem to have broken this one.”
I did as I was told, trying to sort out the various sources of pain and rank them by intensity. The ear was the worst.
“You are completely unbruised,” Spurrier said, stuffing the gloves into his pocket. “Nothing happened here, and a lot more nothing will happen if you stick your nose into this affair. I’ve got your address and I’ve got units in the neighborhood twenty-four hours a day. If you don’t want to develop undiagnosable internal injuries, you stay miles away from all this. Am I communicating?”
“Very unambiguously.”
“Just so we’re straight. Sorry, wrong term. Just so you’re clear on it. Are you? Clear on it?”
“Yes,” I said through a spasm of hatred that threatened to close my throat completely.
“Good,” he said. “Stephen, the pretty boy check out?”
“He’s a cop’s little brother, the bride’s. He was at the wedding, went there with her. With her all day, he says.”
“Where’s she?”
“On her way to Honolulu.”
Spurrier screwed up his face in frustration. “How long?”
“Two weeks.”
“You get a number?”
“Yeah. Maui.”
“How nice for her.”
“There was a wedding there today,” the young cop said, coming into the room. “At Parker Center, I mean.”
“My, my,” Spurrier said admiringly. “It all checks out.”
“You primitive piece of shit,” I said.
“I can understand your frustration, sir,” Spurrier said. “Wasting so much of your day this way. But I’d like to thank you for coming forward and assisting us with our inquiries.
“You’ll be wanting to get along now.” Spurrier backed away from the chair, his face tight, as though he hoped I was going to come out of it and try to rip his heart out. “I’m sure you two have a big evening planned.”
I got up more painfully than Christopher Nordine had. “I’ll be seeing you,” I said.
“I’ll be looking forward to it,” he said. “But not on this case.”
As we went down the porch steps, I heard the laugh again, and recognized it as Spurrier’s.
“Is that what they’re like, the Sheriffs?” Orlando asked twenty minutes later. It was the first thing he’d said since we left Grover’s house.
“It’s what some of them are like. Not many. There used to be more like Spurrier. Now the problem is that the better cops don’t do anything when a bad one gets out of line. White people don’t generally see too much of it, though.”
“White heterosexual people, you mean.”
“Yeah. Spurrier’s a little twisted on the subject of gays. I wonder what his analyst has to say about it.”
“He thought you were gay.” He turned on the radio and gave the indicator a skid across the dial.
“He thought we both were.”
Orlando found a station playing heavy metal, something that sounded like a head-on collision between San Diego and Tijuana, listened for a second, and turned it down. “I am,” he said.
“Oh,” I said, nonplussed. The first time I’d met him, he’d been hondling Eleanor to introduce him to a girl.
He fiddled with the tuning knob on the radio, giving it all his attention. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “About Eleanor and that Chinese girl.”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
“I was fooling myself. Telling myself I couldn’t get dates with girls because I was too young for the ones at UCLA, telling myself I was too shy to talk to women, when what was really happening was that I didn’t want to.” He threw me a quick evaluative glance. “I was in denial.”
Denial. “ You’re seeing a therapist,” I said.
“At school. She’s helped a lot. It’s hard for a Latino guy, especially when he comes from a family of cops.”
“Therapists like to tell people they’re suppressing homosexual feelings,” I said cautiously. “It gives them something to do.”
“In my case, though, it’s true.” He gave up on the radio and began to gnaw on the nail of his right index finger.
“Don’t bite your nails,” I said automatically.
He laughed. Then I started to laugh, too, and he leaned back and made hooting noises, laughing off some of the tension from Max Grover’s house.
“Was your cop okay to you?” I asked, braking to avoid rear-ending someone who was apparently multiplying addresses in his head as he drove. The laughter had hurt in several places.
“Stephen? No, he was very nice, really sympathetic. In fact, I think he might be gay. He was good-looking enough to be gay, anyway. Has anybody told you you have repressed homosexual feelings?”
“Lots of people. All therapists.”
He hesitated. “But it isn’t true.”
“If it is, they’re very repressed. I mean, I think men are interesting people, and some of them are good-looking, but there’s nothing sexual about it.”
“I think I’ve known forever,” Orlando said dreamily. “Since I was eight or nine or something.”
“Does Sonia know?”
“Of course.” He sounded affronted. “That’s why she got so mad at Al in the car.”
“Then Al doesn’t-”
“Not yet,” he said quietly. “He’s got a surprise coming.”
“It’ll raise his consciousness,” I said. “Something has to.”
“Al’s all right,” Orlando said, surprising me a second time. “He’s probably not ready for me to bring anybody over to spend the night, though.”