Boystown 7: Bloodlines (11 page)

But the visit had been worth it. I needed to be certain that Jimmy hadn’t kept the journal or diary himself. I believed him when he said he hadn’t. That left me thinking that Prince Charles had been the one writing things down. At the very least, he was connected to whoever had written it. If I figured out who he was, I could figure out what he had that was written down. Conversely, if I figured out exactly what the journal/diary was, then that could lead me to Prince Charles. I had a chicken and egg problem and no clue how to find the henhouse.

There were two hang-ups on my answering machine. I figured it was the woman who called earlier. She kept calling, so I had to assume she’d actually talk to me if I picked up the phone. So, why wouldn’t she leave a number? Without even thinking about it, I found myself crawling onto the sofa for nap. I tried to put together a plan for the next few days. I was going to spend them in the lobby of the Federal Building collecting for charity. I wondered if I should invest in one of those crazy little cameras they always showed in spy movies. That way I could take pictures of people as they came and went without being noticed. I realized it was actually a good thing I’d been in an elevator with those two Federal agents. If one of them walked in with Prince Charles I might have chance of figuring it out. Otherwise, I realized that the informant could walk by me twenty times a day and I probably wouldn’t know it. Staking out the Federal Building was a long shot but at the moment it was the only shot I had of any kind.

I was nearly asleep when the phone rang. Springing up from the couch I grabbed the receiver expecting to find some strange woman on the other end. Unfortunately, it was Frank Connors, Harker’s former partner.

“This is unexpected,” I said.

“I got a call about you.”

“Really, who from?”

“Someone who’s looking into you.”

“Why would someone look into me?”

“You got a new job, didn’t you?”

“Yes. Is that a problem?”

“It seems to be, yes. You’re working on something that is pissing people off.”

“It’s not the first time. It probably won’t be the last.”

“They’re nosing around things I’d rather they didn’t nose around.” That was a problem. The night I drowned the Bughouse Slasher in the pond at Graceland Cemetery I’d dropped my gun and couldn’t find it. Connors had brought it back to me three days later. That meant other people might know about the gun. Connors had probably run the serial number to find out it was mine. If someone was looking into me that meant they could hurt Connors. They could hurt him bad.

“Okay, I’m working on a couple of things. So what exactly is pissing people off?”

“Jimmy English. You’re on the wrong side of things, Nick.”

I was also helping a murderer get a lighter sentence. It had become my job to be on the wrong side of things. “Look I’m going to tell you a couple of things I shouldn’t. They’re not playing by the book. They’re trying to hang something on Jimmy that he didn’t do.”

“And you know this because?”

“Because this afternoon I talked to someone they want to use as a witness. Someone they want to feed testimony to.”

“I can’t worry about that. If I did everything by the book I wouldn’t be on the phone with you, would I? Sometimes doing the wrong thing is the right thing. You know that Nick.”

“Trying to get people to lie so they can put an old man in prison. That doesn’t feel like the right thing.”

“He’s not an innocent man.”

“I know that. But I think they missed their shot.”

“Maybe, maybe not. All I know is I don’t want to go down to save Jimmy English. And neither do you.” He hung up without saying goodbye.

That complicated things. I’d been enjoying the fact that I had a decent paying job that looked like it might go on for a while. The fact that it could put me in prison didn’t make me happy. I tried calling Owen, but I got the answering service. I glanced at my clock radio and saw that it was twenty after seven. I must have actually fallen asleep without realizing it.
 

Joseph was going to be there in a few minutes and I needed to put all of this out of my mind. I wasn’t sure I could do that. If he were coming by for a quick fuck I’d be a lot better at putting my thoughts on hold. But he was coming for a date, so I’d have to pay attention and seem not only interested but interesting.

My first impulse was to say, fuck it. Let the task force do whatever they could. But it wasn’t just me they’d be taking down. They’d be taking down Connors, too. And not only had he turned out to be pretty decent to me, he was a good partner and a good friend to Harker. Getting him in trouble had all sorts of wrong written all over it. Maybe Owen would have some suggestions. I was picking up the phone to see if the answering service would page him when there was a knock at the door.

Joseph smiled at me when I answered, and I couldn’t stop myself from smiling back. I was happy to see him. He wore a simple baby blue Oxford shirt, a new pair of jeans, and a windbreaker with a racing stripe down one side. He had a brown paper bag in one hand. I stepped forward, took the bag, and kissed him whether he liked it or not. He jumped a little but then he kissed me back.
 

“Where should we go for dinner?” I asked. As soon as I asked I felt stupid. He didn’t know the neighborhood. I did. I should have picked out a place.

“There’s a Mexican place on Halsted I want to try. La Mañana… I can’t say it, I’ll just mangle it.”

“La Mañana?” It wasn’t the name but I decided to go with his mispronunciation. “We had Mexican yesterday.”

He shrugged. “I liked it.”

“Okay, La Mañana it is.”
 

“And we have to hurry, the movie is at nine.”

“What are we seeing?” I asked.

“
Terms of Endearment
. It just won all these Oscars. And it’s close.”

“All right.” I kind of liked that he’d made all these decisions. I certainly wasn’t in the mood to be deciding things. Maybe I’d ask him to pick out my dinner for me. Maybe I’d ask him to decide what to do about Connors and the task force, too.

As we walked out of my building, I asked, “How was your counseling session?”

“Tiring.”

“Well, you are struggling for your soul.”

“It would be an easier struggle if I understood what winning meant. What about you? Have you struggled for your soul?”

I almost made a joke about not having a soul, but then I decided to go with a more truthful answer. “Every day.”

“And how was today’s struggle?”

“Bad. I’m in a tough spot. I’m working on a case for someone who’s been kind to me and who’s paying me a lot of money, but if I keep doing that I risk hurting myself and someone else who’s been kind to me, badly, very badly.”

“Can you make a different choice?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“You presented the situation in an either-or fashion. I’m asking if there are other options, other possibilities.”

“I’m going to have to think about that.”
 

That settled it. He was choosing my dinner.
 

We arrived at the restaurant. It was a narrow storefront on the corner of Halsted and Brompton. Inside, there were only about ten tables. The walls were plastered white and hung with sombreros. We ordered a couple of big slushy margaritas and munched on chips while we talked. Joseph asked how I became a private investigator, which led to my telling the story of Daniel and the bashing and how I left the CPD. I tried not to bring up Harker, though there was, eventually, something of an overlap. I decided one depressing story was enough for the evening. Somewhere along the line I made Joseph order; he chose the chicken mole for me and adventurously picked the fish special for himself. The food arrived and I had a very odd revelation.

“This is a normal date, isn’t it?”

“Of course it’s a normal date,” Joseph said. “What other kinds are there?”

“I don’t really do this.”

“You don’t do this? But you’ve had relationships. How did you get into them?”

“Well…it’s kind of sex first, talk later. I mean, I dated women when I was in the closet. In fact, I dated Daniel’s sister. He came over to tell me that she was seeing someone else and the two of us ended up in bed. Eventually, we did things like having dinner and seeing movies but that’s not how it started.”

“And with Bert?”

“I met him on a case I was working. I had a broken leg, he came over to see how I was doing and we ended up…”

“I’m sensing a theme. Both relationships started with the other guy coming over to your place and having sex.”

“It’s a good thing I’m homeless then…”

“Getting into another relationship would be a bad thing?” he asked.

“Relationships are challenging. Even when they’re good.”

“You don’t strike me as the kind of guy who likes to take the easy way out of anything.” He threw the statement out like it was a gauntlet.

Later, as we walked down to The Broadway Theatre just below Belmont, I turned the tables on him and managed to extract a story about his seminary days when he fell in love with one of the other students. Nothing much happened between them except for angst and longing and guilt. It would have been a better story with some real sex.

“Would you have done something if he’d been willing?” I asked.

“Yes, of course. I loved him.”

“Why did you stay then? Why become a priest? If you knew that about yourself?”

“I didn’t know that it was something about me. I thought it was the two of us. I didn’t know it would ever happen again.”

We were silent for a moment. The implication was that it was happening again, and with me. I wondered for a moment if I should do something about that—like jump out of the ticket line and run away. But I knew I wanted to fuck him. After that, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with him. And the only way to figure that out was to hang around.

The Broadway Theatre was a second-run house built in the twenties, but it wasn’t one of the gorgeous theaters like the Chicago Theatre or the Music Box. It didn’t have any interesting embellishments like painted ceilings or ornate moldings. All it had were red velvet curtains and electric lights on the wall that flickered like candles. We picked seats in the back. It was a Wednesday and the movie had been out for a while so it wasn’t crowded. I took my overcoat off and threw it over a seat. I wondered if I should begin wearing a gun again. I didn’t want to. Guns were for killing people and I wasn’t interested in doing that again. But…I
was
being threatened. Right now they were trying to use the system to take me down. But if that didn’t work, what would they do next?

Then something hit me. What exactly had I done? I’d spent weeks reading the files. Files they’d clearly wanted Jimmy’s attorney’s to have. The only two things I’d done outside of that was talk to The Nose Jr. and Jimmy. I could see why they didn’t want me talking to anyone in the Nitti family, didn’t want me to find out they’d tried to coerce testimony. But still, they were awfully quick on the trigger. I’d just been to the Nitti’s that afternoon. Had they been planning something like this for the last month? Waiting until I truly started an investigation? And, if this was what they were willing to do to me, what would they do to Nitti’s son in order to get what they wanted?

Joseph pressed his leg against mine. “You got quiet.”

“Sorry. I was thinking about work.”

“You want to talk about it some more? We could call it confession and then my vow of silence will protect your confidentiality.”

I laughed. “How sweet of you to offer to pervert the rules of your religion for me.”

“Confession is an opportunity to unburden. I always let people talk about whatever bothered them. It wasn’t all sin all the time.”

The lights went down. The previews began. I said, “I just need to think about something else for a while.” And then I slipped my hand into his lap. I half expected him to move my hand away, but he didn’t. I gave him a good squeeze. His dick was already swelling. It seemed like it might be impressively long, if not a bit thin. I imagined it must be very pink to match his skin. I wondered if it was freckled.

The previews were all for movies that were playing elsewhere: a new Tarzan movie, a mermaid movie, something with Jodie Foster. I explored Joseph’s crotch through all of them. He moved his hand to my thigh and caressed it. His breathing grew heavy. A preview played for a new Dudley Moore movie. I didn’t catch the name because I was busy pulling down Joseph’s zipper. He stopped me. He had a point I suppose. This wasn’t the kind of theater where guys did that. Still, I was stubborn.

I took my coat off the back of the seat in front of me and spread it across our laps. Worst-case scenario, if an usher showed up waving a flashlight at us, I could claim that we were cold. Joseph’s eyes followed me as I reached under the coat and went for his zipper again. This time he let me pull it down and slip my hand into his jeans. His dick was fully hard now, as was mine. When I wrapped my hand around him, he moved his hand from my thigh to my crotch. He took hold of me through my jeans.
 

I was jerking him gently as the movie began. Pulling him out of his pants, I kept stroking, focusing a lot of attention on the tip. He gripped me tighter. I glanced around the theater to make sure no one had noticed what we were doing. There wasn’t anyone near enough to see us in the dark.
 

From the corner of my eye, I could see Shirley MacLaine trying to climb into a baby’s crib. I leaned over to kiss Joseph. That was even more daring than what I was doing with my hand. Anyone could turn around and see us. But still, I wanted to kiss him, wanted to kiss him while I had his dick in my hand and his hand on mine. He pulled his head back, clearly afraid, but then he leaned back in and kissed me. We explored each other with our tongues, and our hands kept up their business. I could feel his dick getting even harder and thought he might be close to coming. When the lights came up, my first horrible thought was that we’d been caught.

Immediately we separated. Joseph quickly pulled his cock back into his pants. I looked around and saw a slobby, middle-aged guy coming down the aisle. Luckily, he walked right by us. When he was halfway down the aisle he began to speak at the top of his voice, “Ladies and Gentlemen, we need to evacuate the theater as quickly as possible. Please move to the exit closest to you. There’s nothing to worry about. We’ve just had a bomb threat called in. These are always pranks. The police will be here in a few minutes. It should take about twenty minutes for them to examine the theater and then we will restart the feature. In recognition of your patience we will be giving out free popcorn and soda when you return. Once again, please move calmly to the exits.”