The Role Players (25 page)

I returned to the living room, determined to call Tait later and set up another meeting. If that didn't give me anything more to go on than I had so far, I was seriously considering just telling Tait I give up, and let him go to the police or not go to the police as he saw fit.

What a fucked-up vacation this had turned into! I was ignoring my partner, ignoring our friends, unable to think about anything but this damned case. And it was my own damned fault! Why did I get involved in the first place?
Shit!

*

“Oh-oh,” Jonathan said as I entered the room. “What's wrong?”

I tried to smile, but it probably came across more as a grimace. “Nothing, really,” I said. “Just the same thing that's been wrong with this case since I took it. I'm thoroughly convinced that someone at the Whitman killed Rod Pearce, but I've eliminated everyone but the one person I don't believe could have done it.”

“I guess you can't solve 'em all,” Chris said.

“Well, I
want
to solve them all, damn it. That's why I'm a private investigator.” I realized I was sounding like a petulant teenager, and decided to shut up. “Sorry,” I said, and walked over and sat down beside Jonathan, who put his arm around my shoulder.

“Better,” I said.

“So,” Max said, changing the subject, “we've been talking about maybe running up to the Cloisters today—unless you've got to meet with Gene or Tait.”

“No,” I said, sighing. “I do want to set up another meeting with Tait, though, and try to get to the bottom of all this shit. If it doesn't produce something tangible I can deal with in the next three days, I've had it.”

“You'd quit?” Jonathan asked, surprised.

“Yep.”

“But then he wouldn't have to pay you!” Jonathan said. “He only wanted you to work on it while we were here. Do you really think you should quit now?”

The lad had a very good point there, I realized.

I shrugged. “We'll see how the next meeting goes,” I said.

CHAPTER 10

Breakfast at the jumbo-servings place, where Jonathan did yeoman service to another order of steak and eggs, and about a quarter of my unfinished corned beef hash, scrambled eggs, and hash browns. Max, Chris, and I watched him in amazement.

“You want the rest of my bacon?” Chris asked.

Jonathan wiped his mouth with his napkin and grinned.

“No, thanks. As Grandpa Quinlan used to say, ‘my sufficiency has been suffancified.'”

“I like this place,” he said as we stepped onto the sidewalk and headed toward the subway.

*

The day consisted of the Cloisters—at the far northern end of Manhattan—Lincoln Center, a pleasant lunch, and constant thoughts of what I was going to say to Tait when we got together. Obviously, not only had I not gotten over my frustration, but it was intensified by the fact that I was able to cram nearly an entire day of our vacation into the first eighteen words of one sentence without really enjoying three-quarters of it. Jonathan, Max, and Chris had a great time wandering around the Cloisters, a museum devoted to medieval art, artifacts, and architecture and its grounds. I remember Jonathan jokingly asking if the knights carried a can opener for emergency exits from their suits of armor.

Just confront him
, I told myself.
Lay it all on the table
.

Oh, sure. “Tait, did you kill Rod for screwing around with Keith?” Simple.
“Oh, and if so, why did you bother to hire me in the first place?”

Lunch at a restaurant in the Cloisters was pretty good as far as museum restaurants go, and for a while there I almost pulled myself back into reality and enjoyed talking and laughing with the guys.

But it didn't last.

You know what would be helpful?
If you knew for sure that Rod was into Master/slave games, and if so, how far, and if Masters go around killing people who try to have sex
with their slaves
,
and…

Lincoln Center was beautiful, what little I remember having seen of it.
What about Keith? I know that if somebody made me stand behind a two-way mirror and watch Jonathan having sex with another guy…yeah, like I'd let that happen…. I'd be more than a little miffed
.
Maybe Keith…

…Yeah, kill Chuck. But he didn't, and it's Rod who's dead.

And that's what Master/slave is all about—the Master making the slave do whatever the Master wants. And the slave's supposed to love the humiliation.

He is? Chapter and verse, please?

Shit!

Jared would know.

“Know what?” Jonathan asked.

“Excuse me?” I said, startled back to the moment.

“You said Jared would know. Know what?” Jonathan repeated.

“Oh,” I said, thoroughly embarrassed and hoping I wasn't blushing. “I'm sorry. I guess I was thinking out loud.”

“We were wondering where you've been most of the day,” Max said with a grin.

I sighed. “Yeah…I'm really sorry, guys. But I've been trying to figure out just what in hell might be going on, and when it comes to Master/slave relationships, I don't know enough about them to even hazard a guess whether I might be wrong or right in my assumptions. It occurred to me that Jared would know.”

“Jared's into S&M?” Chris asked.

“I'm not sure. Not much that I'm aware of,” I said. “But he likes leather and he has a favorite leather bar he hangs out in. He'd know a hell a lot more about the subject than I do. I'll give him a call tonight. I'd like to talk to him before I meet with Tait again.”

There were three sets of raised eyebrows and questioning looks, but no one said anything.

“I'll explain later,” I said.

*

We returned to the apartment at around 4:30, and since everyone knew I was eager to talk to Jared, Chris and Jonathan suggested we just spend the evening at home. Again, I felt guilty for letting my job interfere with our vacation, but appreciated the offer. We stopped at the deli on the way to pick up something for dinner. We ended up with four huge sub sandwiches—eight inchers for Chris, Max, and me, and a twelve-incher for Jonathan, plus a bucket of potato salad. Spotting a huge five-gallon jar of kosher dill pickles, we added four of them to our order. As the clerk removed the large pickles from the jar with a pair of tongs, Jonathan looked from the pickles to me and grinned.

“Not a word!” I said.

“You're no fun,” he replied.

I put in a call to Jared as soon as we walked into the apartment. I knew he was probably still teaching, but left a message on his machine asking him to call me as soon as he could.

I really like a good sub sandwich but they are sometimes, as these were, a tad messy in the actual eating. They almost required a hinged jaw to get the whole thickness of the sandwich in in one bite. Plus that demonstration of the laws of physics wherein when you take a bite out of one end, everything seems to want to come out of the other. Ah, well, all part of the fun.

Max left for the theater at around 6:45, and Jonathan and Chris were panning the TV guide for any potential nuggets of entertainment gold when the phone rang.

Chris hurried to answer. “Oh, hi, Jared!” he said, waving me over. “No, it's Chris. How have you been?… Great!… Yeah, Max is fine. He just left for the theater… Yeah, it looks like it's a real hit. Okay… Here's Dick.” He handed the phone to me, and I walked it into the kitchen. As I left the living room, Jonathan said: “Let me say ‘hi' to him before you hang up, okay?”

“Jared! Hi,” I said, glad he'd called so soon.

“Don't tell me,” Jared said—it was really good to hear his voice—“you've decided you like New York so much you're going to move there.”

“Uh, not quite,” I said, “although Jonathan did suggest it so he could become a chorus boy.”

Jared laughed. “Hell,” he said, “
I'd
come to New York to see that! So you're having a good time, I trust?”

I paused. “Yes and no.”

“Uh-oh…what's up?”

“Well, I got involved in this case, and…”

“Why am I not surprised?” he asked.

“Yeah, I know, I know. And this one's driving me nuts. Too complicated to go into detail right now, but I'm pretty sure it involves some Master/slave action and I'm really out of my element trying to figure it out. I know we talked about it once, but I'm afraid it didn't quite register.”

There was another pause, this time from his end. Finally he said, “Well, I'm not an expert there, you know—though I've played around with being a Master with a trick or two who really wanted it, and I do know a couple of guys from the Male Call who are the real thing.”

“Well, let's say there is this slave who tricks on his Master. Would the Master ever kill the trick over it?”

“Hmm. While I suppose anything is possible, I'd say it would be very unlikely just because of the very nature of the relationship. The whole point in these relationships is that the slave is totally subservient to the Master. For a slave to trick behind his Master's back would be practically unthinkable. It's possible that the Master might have the slave have sex with somebody else while he watches, perhaps, but only if the Master gets his kicks that way, or wanted to punish the slave by humiliating him.”

“Okay,” I said, “but what about the other side. The Master makes the slave watch while he has sex with someone else. Couldn't the slave get jealous enough to kill the guy his Master's with?”

“Again, almost unthinkable. Whatever the Master does to humiliate the slave, the slave believes he has coming to him. He is there to do whatever his Master wants him to without question.”

What Jared was saying was like the other side of the moon for me. I found it really hard to comprehend a relationship like that. But then I guess that's why the rainbow flag has all those colors—room in there for everybody.

We talked for several minutes more, Jared asking about Jonathan, Chris, Max, and what we'd seen and done, and filling me in on what was going on with our “gang” back home: Tim, Phil, Bob Allen, Mario, and Jake. We agreed to arrange a get-together as soon as we got back, and I realized I was really looking forward to returning home.

We were about to say our good-byes and hang up when I remembered Jonathan's request to talk to Jared.

“Hold just a sec, will you, Jared? Jonathan wants to say hi.”

*

After hanging up from Jared, Jonathan asked Chris if he could call his brother Samuel in Wisconsin, to see if Joshua's birthday gift had arrived, and to wish him a happy birthday. Chris said “sure,” and Jonathan took the phone back into the kitchen. A few minutes later, Chris and I heard him singing “Happy Birthday, Dear Josh-u-ah, Happy Birthday to You.”

He returned to the living room ten minutes later, beaming.

“You should hear how smart he is!” he said happily. “When I left he was talking some, but now it's like he can say almost anything. Sheryl says she's read him just about every children's book in the library, and he almost knows his own books by heart!

“And his present came, and he loves it! He had it with him when I was talking to him and I asked him if he had given it a name yet. ‘His name is Bunny,' he said. Then he said ‘Thank you, Uncle Jonathan' and everything! Of course Sheryl coaxed him, but he said it.”

“How's Samuel?” I asked.

“He's doing great. He's the top salesman for our local John Deere distributor, and he says John Deere is having a sales contest for all of Wisconsin and whoever wins gets a trip to Hawaii. He really wants to win it, and I'll bet he can!”

“That's great, Babe,” I said as he came to sit down beside me.

“I really wish we could have kids,” he sighed.

“Well,” Chris said, “it's like that old joke about ‘how do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice.'”

*

Chris and Jonathan's search through the TV guide earlier had revealed a rerun of one of the first—and one of the best—gay-themed TV movies,
That Certain Summer
,
starring Hal Holbrook and Martin Sheen. Made in 1972, it was really a breakthrough, though it strongly mirrored the status of gays at the time. Jonathan had never seen it, so Chris made a huge batch of popcorn, which he poured into three paper bags, got himself and me a beer and Jonathan a Coke, and we all settled back to watch.

Well, maybe not “we all.”

So Tait, as a Master…
if
he is a Master, which you don't know for positive…was very unlikely to have killed Rod for having had sex with Keith…
if
he did have sex with Keith…and Keith, as the assumed-to-be slave, would not dare to have killed Rod for having sex with Tait…
if
Rod did have sex with Tait…and
if
Rod even ever had sex with either one of them, which you also don't know—just where does this leave us?

Up Shit Creek without a paddle, obviously.

“I'll make some more popcorn,” Chris said, and I realized it was a commercial break and I was sitting there with an empty paper bag and a lap full of popcorn crumbs. “Another beer, Dick?”

Jonathan got up to follow Chris. “I'll get it,” he said, then, looking at my lap and grinning, added, “and the vacuum cleaner. Let us know when the movie comes back on.”