Redirection Page 19

  “Guess you’re too busy for that kind of thing.”

  Will laughed at that too. “Is this normal?”

  “Yes, he always dresses like that.”

  “Actually, sometimes I dress better, but all my sarongs got burned up. Oh. Because my house got burned up. Because someone tried to kill me.”

  “I can’t imagine why,” Will murmured before taking another bite of pancake. Then he said, “I meant all of this. You’re private detectives. You’re looking into my dad’s murder. But now we’re eating pancakes, and I’m practically naked. That’s what I meant when I asked if this was normal.”

  “There’s not a normal for this job. You take people as they are.”

  “I bet you do.”

  “We meet all sorts of interesting people,” Shaw said. “One time we met a shaman, but she didn’t know she was a shaman, and she told us all sorts of things. She told us how North’s spirit animal was a ptarmigan, because he’s got a weird neck—”

  “Excuse me?”

  “—and how my spirit animal was a cuttlefish, and my past-life regressions had psychically conditioned me favorably towards orgies, like cuttlefish are—”

  “This, right here, is why we broke up.” North made an encompassing gesture with his fork. “All of this.”

  “—and then she predicted that one of us was going to come into a great deal of money soon, and she was right! The next time we saw her, she had a nice car and new clothes and she’d gotten her teeth capped.”

  “She stole his credit cards. And do you know who spent six months untangling that fucking mess? You get one guess.”

  Will burst out laughing. “This is nuts, man. You guys are nuts.”

  “Will, what happened with your dad?” Shaw asked.

  The transformation was instantaneous: the good humor dropped away, and for a moment, a sullen, wary anger peered out. Then Will’s face was neutral. He rubbed his jaw with a thumb.

  “You didn’t tell us the truth,” North said.

  “I told you the truth.”

  “You didn’t tell us all of it.”

  “My dad,” the word had a hesitancy to it, “taught me how to do this. Make pancakes, I mean. He was on that early wave of low-carb stuff. Atkins. All that. I guess he had to look good for all the homos he was tapping on the side. Anyway, pancakes were a big deal. They had to be made exactly right. Buttermilk, real butter, real maple syrup. We didn’t even keep flour in the house, so he’d bring home a sack of that. When the pancake craze was over, he’d dump the rest of the bag in the trash. I remembered that for a long time. How careful he was with all of it. How you had to do it exactly right. And then one day, I was squatting in this park, not that far from La Jolla, and these guys had a little griddle over a tiny fire, and they were making pancakes. Just mix and water. God, I had no idea. I felt so stupid.” He was silent for a moment, considering the fork and plate. “Did you know that you don’t even have to have buttermilk? You can mix milk and vinegar. Or lemon juice, I think. Or lime. I can’t remember.”

  “Yeah, the pancakes were good,” North said, “but—”

  Shaw kneed him under the island. “My parents gave me all sorts of speeches when I was growing up. ‘It’s ok to be you.’ ‘We’ll love you no matter who you are.’ They meant it, up to a point. Honestly, I think they were happy when I came out. But they didn’t like a lot of my other decisions.”

  Will frowned, but the expression was directed inward. He picked up his plate, then Shaw’s, then North’s, and he carried them to the sink. He stood there for a minute, running water over them, the only sound the splashing in the sink. When he came back, he rubbed his jaw again and said, “Parents really mess you up, huh?”

  “If you’re lucky,” North said, shrugging, “that’s all they do.”

  “Your parents were happy when you came out?”

  “They made t-shirts,” Shaw said.

  North made a face. “In case anybody cares, my dad shat bricks for a year.”

  “Yeah?” Will asked. “What’d he do?”

  “Bitch, moan, gripe, complain, threaten.”

  “Wail,” Shaw suggested, “worry, whimper, whinge.”

  “Whinge? He wasn’t a colorless English fop at Eton.”

  “I’ve met your dad. I bet there was some whinging.”

  “He’s purebred South City, Shaw. He’s never whinged a day in his life. Do you even know what that word means? I told you that you watched those Harry Potter movies too many times.” To Will, North said, “He wanted me to spend a weekend playacting this fantasy that we were students at Hogwarts.”

  “You said yes.”

  “Because you threatened to turn off the tap, you selfish piece of shit.”

  “No, I said that I couldn’t help it if I was under an imperius curse to only have sex with fellow Hogwarts students and that I had to do whatever they said, even if it involved that thing that holds my legs open—”

  “Mary, Mother of God, shut up.”

  In what Shaw obviously considered a helpful tone, he told Will, “There’s no such thing as watching the Harry Potter movies too many times. What happened when you tried to come out to your dad?”

  For a long moment, Will stared off into the distance. Then a hard, tiny smile pulled at the side of his mouth. “I didn’t. He walked in on me beating it to some porn.”

  “Wanking it,” Shaw corrected. “In Gryffindor, that’s how they’d say it.”

  This time, Will’s smile looked a little more real. “It was, you know, pretty rough stuff. And he lost his mind. We fought for days. First, I wasn’t gay. That’s what he kept telling me. I was confused. It’s ok to be curious, but if you watch too much of that kind of thing, it’ll turn you gay. That kind of thing. And then it was that I was a sex addict. He made me see a therapist. He wanted me to mark off this checklist of things that aroused me. Fetishes. Weird stuff. Stuff that as a sixteen-year-old, I couldn’t believe people did to each other. Let alone,” his eyes crinkled with amusement, “that they got off on it.”

  “What about your mom?”

  “Mom felt…mixed, I guess. She’s from Cameroon, you know, and people are conservative there. Religious. But she’s also the smartest person I know, and she’s educated. She said all the right things. But I don’t know if she felt them, you know?”

  The air conditioning stirred to life. Will traced a vein in the marble.

  “Look,” he said, “why are we digging this up? I’m standing here half naked, telling total strangers my sob story, and none of it matters because my dad is dead.”

  “Wrong, wrong, and wrong,” Shaw said. “You’re not half naked. You’re eighty percent naked. Ninety when you stand in profile because those trunks are really, really sheer, and the light from the window—” He cut off with a grunt when North elbowed him. “And we’re not total strangers. You know that I used to be a cuttlefish and would be the most valuable addition to any orgy because of my previous incarnations, and you know that North used to be a ptarmigan because of his neck—”

  “My neck is just fine, thank you very fucking much.” North struggled to keep silent; the rest burst free. “And I never used to be a bird. Any kind of bird. And sure as fuck not a ptarmigan. I’ll tell you what I told that charlatan: if I used to be any kind of tundra creature, it was a—”

  “Musk ox, I know.”

  “A musk ox? Are you out of your fucking mind?”

  “You do have a distinct aroma. It’s a good thing, but—”

  “An arctic fox, you imbecile. I would have been an arctic fox. They’re fast. They’re strong for their size. They’re beautiful.”

  Shaw was nodding like he was placating a toddler, sharing tolerant glances with Will. “An arctic fox. Of course. I can definitely see that.”

  “Don’t you need to stretch your legs or use the bathroom or something?”

  “Oh, no, I have excellent bladder control. All my sphincters—”

>   “Go. Away.”

  “Oh. Oh. Right. Will, can I use your bathroom?”

  Will was biting his lip to hold back laughter. He pointed down the hall.

  “Not one word,” North said as Shaw trotted off, espadrilles slapping the boards.

  Will zipped his lips.

  “The other thing you’re wrong about,” North said, “is that it does matter. Whoever killed your dad, we think they did it because of something in the past. That’s where we have to look for a motive.”

  “So you’re talking to me. Fuck you. How’s your relationship with your dad?”

  “We still go to all the father-son campouts. This isn’t about me. It’s about you, and it sounds like there’s something in your past. Something pretty awful. A lot of guys would carry that around. It could eat you up. One day, you might do something stupid so you could put the weight down for a while.”

  Will was tracing the vein in the marble again. Then he looked up, eyes clear, and met North’s gaze. “He was going to send me to a residential treatment center for teens. Most of them claim they help with addiction, but really, the whole point is behavior problems. When he told me, I hit him. He was surprised. I was almost as tall as he was by then, but he was bigger. I still put him flat on his ass. I grabbed my wallet and keys and ran. And that was it. The end.”

  “And you hadn’t seen him since then?”

  Will shook his head. “Not once.”

  “And you weren’t planning on being back in St. Louis until your mom called you and told you he’d died?”

  “No; I had my life. I was doing my thing.”

  “Must have been a surprise, then, learning how he died.”

  “Killed by his fag lover? Sorry. Killed by the queer he was fucking? Yeah.” He laughed, but the sound was all broken edges. “Yeah, definitely a surprise.”

  “I don’t get it,” North said. “Are you gay or not? Why do you keep talking like that?”

  “I’ve sucked a lot of cocks. Does that make me gay?”

  “It’s a start.”

  Will shook his head again, and after a moment, it became clear that was the only answer he was going to give.

  The sound of footsteps drew both of their gazes to the hall, and Shaw entered the kitchen a moment later. “Did you show him the video?”

  North shook his head. He produced his phone and played the video of Rik, Tucker, and the third, younger man.

  Will’s gaze was intent on the screen. When the blowjob started, he growled, “That ancient faggot fuckboy.” He flinched, seeming to hear himself, and tried to push the phone away.

  North said, “No, you need to see this.”

  The video ended. Will rubbed his forehead. “What the hell?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I just finished telling you all this…all this shit I carry around about me and about my dad, I just finished telling you about what it was like, learning what he’d been doing to me and my mom all those years. And you show me that?”

  “I want to know if it means something to you. ‘Blast from the past?’ What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t want to know.”

  “Maybe you didn’t tell us the whole story. Maybe your dad didn’t walk in on you stroking it to some porn. Maybe he walked in on you with someone else.”

  It took a moment. Then Will’s face contorted. “Fuck you. Get the fuck out of here, both of you. You want to put this on me? You think I killed him? I wasn’t even here. For the last few years, I’ve thought my dad was this super-straight conservative type, and you know what? That was actually kind of easy to deal with. I understood it. I couldn’t change it. But this? Finding out he’s as much a fag as his cock-gobbling son? Finding out that he didn’t care about commitment, didn’t care about the only real relationship in his life, and that he was fucking anything that moved? How the fuck am I supposed to deal with that?”

  “Will—” Shaw began.

  “Get the fuck out! Get the fuck out of here right now! And if you come back, I’m calling the cops!”

  Chapter 20

  WITHOUT ANY BETTER OPTIONS, they decided to talk to Peter and Paul about their bad investment. As North drove them south and east toward Clayton, Shaw let out a breath. “That could have gone better.”

  “I think it went pretty well.” North dug out his wayfarers, a concession to the July sun. “We know that kid is seriously cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, and he’s got some major unresolved shit with his dad.”

  “Don’t we all,” Shaw muttered.

  “You got something to say?”

  “He’s trying to get into the safe. Otherwise, the office looked about the same—papers everywhere, furniture pulled apart. I don’t think anything’s been touched since we were there last. Except the safe, I mean.”

  “God damn it. If he wants to get in there, it won’t take him long. He’ll find someone sooner or later who can either crack it or cut it open. Hell, he might cut it open himself.” North shook his head. “I don’t get it. Is the plan to rob mommy dearest blind and then skip town before she wakes up? It sounds like he gets along with her. Why not stick around? Whatever he can steal and hock, she’ll give him more now that she’s in charge of the purse strings.”

  Shaw was silent. The GTO roared when North accelerated, and they ate up the miles into the city. A few fat clouds were moving high and fast, and the shadows skimmed the highway—the brilliance of a July day, then a patch of shade, and then that white-hot intensity again. The city was a jumble of loose change ahead of them.

  “He says he wasn’t here when Rik was killed.”

  “That kid doesn’t know what he’s saying.” North flipped off a driver who was trying to pass them, hit the gas, and the GTO lunged forward. “He hates himself. He hates his dad. He’s got a history of violence, and he’s been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. Then he finds out daddy likes to take rides on the bucking bronco too. Is it a stretch to think that could have put him over the edge?”

  “But if he wasn’t here…”

  North shrugged, which was so dismissive that Shaw had to close his eyes and summon the mantra that Master Hermes had revealed to him—newly assayed and enhanced, $49.99, we’ll need to do this again in three months—and woke to his face sticky against the hot glass and North’s hand on his thigh. High on his thigh.

  “You want to take the car and get yourself a Coke?”

  Shaw shook his head, sitting up and looking around. They were in Clayton, one of the innermost suburbs. This part of the city was what downtown St. Louis wished it could be: high-end shops, expensive condos, glittering office buildings. They were floating in the middle lane while North waited to turn into a parking garage. It was almost noon, and traffic was heavy as people hurried to restaurants—Korean fusion, hand-cut pasta, sushi, burgers that, as North put it, cost more than his boots.

  “You don’t have to come up. This might get ugly.”

  “They’re my friends too. And I think they’re still mad at you because, you know, you ruined their party last year.”

  “Petty little shits,” North said under his breath as he made the turn.

  They parked, took the stairs to the lobby, and waited while the security guard called up to Peter and Paul. A few moments later, he was pointing them to a bank of elevators, and they rode up. And up. And up.

  Peter and Paul’s condo occupied an entire floor of the building; instead of opening into a hallway, the elevator connected directly with their front room. Paul was waiting for them in boat shoes, khaki shorts that were a little too snug, and a salmon-colored polo that was a little too big. He and Peter had been together since college, and they had made a fortune with some kind of tech startup, and now when they worked—if they worked, which wasn’t always the case—they did so from home. Right now, Paul didn’t look happy at the interruption.

  “North, Shaw, nice to see you. It’s really not a good time—”

 
“Too bad,” North said. “This is about Tucker and proving he didn’t commit murder. Tell your conference call with Palo Alto or Tokyo or wherever the fuck it is that they’ll have to wait a few minutes.”

  “I think it’s two in the morning in Tokyo right now,” Shaw said.

  North shot him a look.

  “I thought you’d know that since you bought that bulk case of soybean-powder flavored Kit Kats.”

  “If it’s for Tucker—” Paul stopped himself. “I can give you a few minutes.”

  “Where’s Peter? Never mind, I see him.”

  “He’s—North, sit down and I’ll see if he wants to—”

  The condo had been redone since Shaw’s last visit. Instead of the blond wood and mid-century design, everything was shifting to industrial: more dark metal, the kitchen cabinets painted gray, a brick veneer on one wall to suggest raw, urban grit. The best feature of the condo, in Shaw’s opinion, was the window walls, which offered a view of the city. A large balcony extended on the far side of the unit, and North headed towards this.

  “Peter, sweetheart,” Paul was shouting. “North and Shaw are here, and they want to talk to both of us.”

  Shaw studied Paul with sidelong glances. Sweat dotted his forehead, although the air conditioner was set to somewhere in the Antarctic regions.

  “North, Peter’s busy. I can answer any questions—”

  But North was already sliding back the door. He stepped out onto the balcony, and Shaw followed.

  “Hi, North. Hi, Shaw.” Peter, in matching salmon-colored polo and khaki shorts, knelt next to a planter. A bag of potting soil lay on its side next to him, and he was packing the soil into the planter with both hands, pausing every now and then to plunge his hands in deeper and turn the soil over and over. An awning tempered the heat and, combined with the breeze, made the day tolerable. On the table behind Peter, a bottle of gin stood—mostly empty—next to a tumbler. “Didn’t expect to see you today.”

  “When were you expecting us?” North said.

  “I didn’t—that’s not what I—” Peter looked to Paul for help.

  “What do you need, North?” Paul had his hands on his hips. “Now is not a good time.”