“No. Probably not.”
“If it was a girl he’d be all ho-ho-ho and hearty and nudgy, winking at me across the room and thumping me on the back whenever we were alone. But a guy-no way.”
“Not yet.”
“I’ve got a boyfriend,” Orlando said with pride. “My first.”
“Well,” I said banally, “good for you.”
He caught my tone and pulled away slightly. “Does it bother you?”
“No,” I said. “I just don’t know what I’m supposed to say. I’m not very good at intimacy.”
“And I’m not good at anything else. Eleanor’s the same way. That must be a problem between you.”
I was beginning to feel like our relationship was on CNN; everybody knew everything. “You could say that.”
“You never told that sergeant you weren’t gay.”
“It wasn’t any of his business,” I said. “Anyway, you know, it’s just one thing about you. Whether you like guys or girls or Eskimos or Arabian horses. It’s just one thing out of thousands, like who you voted for or whether you shave before you shower or after. It doesn’t have much to do with who you are.”
“It does when you can’t admit it,” Orlando said.
“I guess it would.”
“Here we are,” he said. “The next lot.” We negotiated the parking lane, deserted at this hour, and I braked at the curb when he told me to. He started to get out of the car, and then stopped and looked at me. “You’re okay,” he said. “Al is always talking about you being somebody unusual, but I never knew what he meant. You took everything that stunted little clown could dish out, and you never lost your dignity. I don’t know if I could have done that.”
“I got beaten up,” I pointed out.
“What you said about his shoes,” Orlando said, and then he laughed again. He extended a hand, and I shook it and watched him slide out of the car and angle across the parking lot, a slender teenager in a tuxedo, heading toward God only knew what. Then I drove home through the ragtag remnants of the rush hour, climbed the driveway to my house, and took a pistol away from Christopher Nordine, who was waiting in my living room.
5 ~ Requiem for Max
“Would you like to tell me what you think you’re doing?”
The couch had broken Nordine’s fall. He sat there and rocked back and forth, flexing the fingers of his right hand, the hand that had held the gun. I had the gun now, and it was pointed at his solar plexus.
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything. Only that Max is-”
“You saw him,” I said, wondering whether it had been smart not to tell Spurrier everything, swine though he was.
“Oh, my God,” Nordine said, blinking back tears. “It was, it was like Friday the Thirteenth or something. Poor Max, poor sweet old Max. And I thought, I guess I just went crazy, I thought, well, you’d been there-”
“So had you,” I said.
“But after he was dead,” Nordine said. He raised both hands, as though I’d put the gun to his head. “Wait, wait, you don’t think that-”
“The cops do.”
“Well, of course they do,” Nordine snapped. “What would you expect? Why do you think I called you instead of them?” He was wearing the same clothes he’d worn the day before, and I couldn’t see anything wrong with them.
“Listen, Christopher, they’re going to be hard-nosed about this. There are guys with guns looking for you. You had means, motive, and opportunity. And don’t tell me about how much you loved him. I’m tired of hearing about people loving each other. Open your coat.”
“What?”
“Open your coat. I want to see your shirt.”
“Oh,” he said flatly. “How thorough of you.” He unbuttoned the jacket and held it wide. The shirt was damp with sweat but unstained. I gestured for him to button up.
“How’d you do that?” he asked sulkily.
“Do what?”
“You were supposed to come in over there.” He waved a hand in the direction of my front door.
“I smelled your cologne,” I said. “So I went around the side of the house and climbed up onto the sun deck, and threw a folding chair over the roof toward the front door. When you got up and faced the door, I came in behind you.”
“You threw a chair over the roof?”
“It’s not a very big house.”
“No,” he said, giving it an unaffectionate eye, “it isn’t. It’s not very nice, either.”
“Did you kill him, Christopher?”
“Do you honestly think I could kill Max?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I asked.”
“Max was the best human being I ever met.” He sounded like he was about to cry.
“So somebody else killed him.”
“Well, of course they did. One of those walking trash heaps he was always picking up on the street.”
“Okay,” I said, popping the clip out of the gun and emptying it: seven rounds. I pocketed the bullets and held the gun out to him. “Get out of here.”
He gazed at the gun without taking it. “But wait. You have to help me.”
“Why do I have to do that?”
“Because they’re looking for me.”
“You should have called them in the first place.”
“No,” he said. “I couldn’t.” He shook his head, and the joints in his neck popped. “Absolutely not.”
“It’s just made it worse for you.”
“That means you told them about me.”
“Christopher,” I said, as though to a five-year-old, “I had to explain why I was there.”
He stared up at me, white completely surrounding the irises of his sunken eyes. “You told them everything?”
“I didn’t tell them about the will. I didn’t tell them what you said about the voice-print.”
“Thanks for nothing,” he said. “They’ll find out about the will in fifteen minutes, and that’ll be it. Do you know what those guys are like? About gay people, I mean? They’ll treat me like I’m Typhoid Mary. Gloves and masks and I don’t know what all.”
The kidney Spurrier had slammed sent off a little skyrocket of pain. With the pain came a sudden, overpowering conviction that I was sick and tired of other people’s lives. “I’ve got to sit down,” I said.
“It’s your house.” He was back to a sulk.
“Do you want some water?”
“I already took some.” He leaned over the edge of the couch, and I started fumbling in my pocket for the bullets, but all he came up with was a half-drained bottle of Evian.
“Good,” I said, sitting in the only other chair in the room. “But don’t do that again.”
“Do what?”
“Bend over and pick up anything I can’t see.”
He put a hand to his chest. “Oh, my God, you still think it was me.”
“I.” It was involuntary.
“You? Oh, I see. You’re correcting my grammar. How-”
“Old-fashioned,” I suggested.
“I was going to say how anal-retentive.”
“I’m almost as tired of that,” I said, “as I am about hearing people talk about love.”
“You really must be hurting,” he said, unscrewing the cap on the bottle of Evian. “Oh, I remember. ‘The fondness comes and goes.’ Gone at the moment?”
I was tired, and my left kidney was sending out painful little pulses, blasts of cold air aimed at my back. “Leave me alone. When I want analysis, I’ll pay for it.”
He drank. “Sure,” he said. “It’s a lot easier to be detached when you’re peeling off the bucks to a shrink. That’s half the problem with psychiatry, the money.”
“What’s the other half?”
“It doesn’t work.”
“There’s that,” I acknowledged.
He sat back, wedging the bottle between his legs. “I had analysts all over the South. Max was the only one who ever helped me, even a little.”
“Throw me the water.” He tightened the cap and tossed it to me underhand, like a softball, and I drank half of what was left. It tasted like warm plastic. “Okay,” I said. “Tell me how Max helped you.”
He grimaced. “Is this necessary?”
“No. You could just leave.”
The deep eyes fastened on mine and then cruised the room, settling on one of the darkened windows, and he sighed. “We always want to be the hero,” he said.