by Andrea Speed
Roan rubbed his eyes, took a deep breath, and wondered how heartbroken Matt would be if he turned down this case. “So what you’re telling me is she’s an unstable, troubled teenager who wouldn’t mind getting back at her family?”
“What? No! I mean... maybe. I don’t know. Am I?”
“Basically, yes. Has she ever disappeared for any length of time before?”
“No, not that I know of. Look, as I said, she’s fucked-up, but I don’t think she’d fake her own disappearance. Please, just find out what happened to her.”
The personal appeal for help. Damn it, it was his weakness. There was no way Matt could have known that, but, briefly, he was a little resentful of it. Then he asked for more information on Callie/Thora.
She was barely sixteen when she’d ended up in rehab, after an interesting overdose of Percodan and cocaine. Matt said it wasn’t a suicide attempt, but just an “over-enthusiastic” attempt to “balance herself out.” She’d also been hospitalized on at least one occasion due to her anorexia, although he didn’t know when. She didn’t have a job; she had simply been living off her trust fund while taking college courses online. He pulled out a snapshot and gave it to Roan, saying it had been taken last month and given to him by Hannah.
Good lord, she was a stick figure. She was so thin she looked like a head on top of a broom. She was painfully thin, Calista Flockhart “tie-her-down-it’s-getting-breezy” skinny; she was wearing a scoop neck top in the photo and it allowed him to see a collarbone standing out in relief, protruding through the skin like it was trying to get out. Her face was narrow and nearly skeletal—she didn’t have enough fat in her face to have cheeks—and her eyes seemed sunken. But her lips were artificially plumped, her hair dyed to a hay color and so straight it might have been ironed, not so much falling to her bony shoulders as positioned there. She had small breasts, but they were still startling on a body so free of fat—they were either artificial, or she was wearing a push-up bra. No way in hell were those breasts natural. “Has she had plastic surgery?” he wondered. She may have been attractive in a cold, artificial way, but all he felt for her was sorry. He wanted to sit her down and buy her a sandwich, much like he had done for Paris when they’d first met. (He was as skinny then as he was now, wasn’t he? But back then he’d been trying to die; the irony wasn’t pleasant.)
Matt snorted as if that had been a funny question. “Oh yeah. Nose job, chin job, collagen, boob job. I think she even had some work done on her ass, although maybe she was joking about that. Hard to tell in an e-mail, y’know.”
He stared at Matt in disbelief. “She’s seventeen years old.”
“I know. She got the boob job as a gift on her sixteenth birthday. She got the nose job for successfully completing rehab.” He said it flatly, but there was dry disapproval in Matt’s tone. He thought it was pretty sick too.
“Who the fuck are her parents, Michael Jackson?” He dropped the Polaroid on his desk, shoving it aside, and knew it was wrong this early in an investigation to just hate the parents, but he did. Either they were overindulgent parents who let their young daughter do whatever the hell she wanted, or they were fucking monsters who thought the best way to deal with teenage awkwardness was with a scalpel, but they were total assholes, no matter the case.
Her parents were actually Adam and Celestine Bishop; her brothers were Adam Bishop III (although he was called Jay by the family) and Joseph, both older, and she had several aunts and uncles and cousins, but she only had regular contact with Hannah. Hannah, though, had been estranged from Celestine (her sister) for several years, although Callie never told Matt why. Callie lived in Stonehaven, an expensive condo complex, and her condo was on the ground floor, as she was afraid of heights. (What neuroses didn’t this girl have?) That led him to ask Matt if he had a key, like he had a key to Ashley’s place, but Matt said he didn’t, which led Roan to ask how he knew her apartment was trashed. After a little hesitancy, Matt admitted he’d gotten in through the bathroom window.
Roan groaned in disgust at his stupidity. “You broke in?”
“I know, I know, but I didn’t break anything, that window’s always been wonky—”
“That’s not the point. You’ve left your fingerprints everywhere. You’ve been arrested before, yes?”
Matt didn’t want to answer; his eyes seemed to dance around the room like he wanted to look at anything but Roan, yet he finally gave up with an air of surrender. “Well, kinda. The charges were dropped.”
“Doesn’t matter. You were fingerprinted, right?”
He squirmed uncomfortably in his chair. “Yeah.”
“Then if I get my friends in the force to dust the place, your prints will be all over. It’ll look like you did it.”
Matt groaned and let his head fall back as he grabbed his forehead. “Fuck! I didn’t think of that. I just wanted to see if there was any clue as to where she might have gone or who might have been after her, y’know? I never really think of myself as a felon either, ’cause I’m not. I mean, yeah, I got arrested once for obviously tweaking in public, but my dad bein’ my dad, he got the charges dropped. I’m Robert Skouris’s son—that apparently carries some weight amongst the cops.” He fell silent for a moment, but before Roan could take the conversational reins again, Matt looked at him with infinitely sad eyes, making him look like a wounded little boy. “That was the last time I saw him, and mainly I just saw his back as he walked away. When I came out, at sixteen, he stopped talking to me. It was like he found it too painful to be in the same room with me. He moved out of the house. Mom said it wasn’t my fault, they’d been having problems—well, new problems—but I dunno. When I called his office, I was put on indefinite hold, and if I called his house, he’d just hang up on me. I didn’t call him when I got arrested, I called Mom; I guess she called him to fix it, and he did. But he did it for her; he just gave me this look, y’know? Like he wished I was dead.” He sniffed and rubbed his eyes. “Aw hell, queens and their daddy issues, huh?”
“If he can’t handle your sexuality, it’s his problem,” Roan pointed out. “Fuck him if he can’t handle it. Don’t let him make you feel bad.”
He half-smiled in a pained way. “You don’t have parental issues, do you?”
“I don’t have parents. I was a foster kid.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“Don’t be. The longer I’m in this job, the more I get the feeling I dodged a bullet.”
They got back on track, although he now wondered if Matt and Callie had bonded over issues of parental rejection: him because he had the audacity to be gay, her because she had the audacity to be mentally ill. In both wealthy families, that was probably seen as the equivalent of being a serial killer... or a hippie. Whichever was worse in their estimation. The Bishops lived in Avondale, which was no surprise—Eli Winters’s parents used to live there too, and Tom Winters still did. It was where the very wealthy lived, with waterfront views and unspoiled old growth making a natural barrier between them and the great unwashed. Hannah Noyes lived in Harrow Hill, which was the second-place slot for the wealthy around here; it wasn’t as exclusive, and it was slowly going to seed as those wealthy were old money who were getting older, moldering like mummies in their sarcophagi as the world crumbled around them, the new generation leaving them behind, and all the new wealthy were filling out the ranks of Avondale or the luxury condos going up downtown near the waterfront. He wondered how long it would take for every one of those people to look at his wardrobe and just assume he was the “help.”
But the first person he had to talk to was the supposed witness to Callie’s “disappearance,” the bartender at Panic. Sadly, Matt only knew him by his nickname, “Chi-Chi”—oy vey, that was one of the reasons why he hated gay bars—and had begun to describe him as a “really cute Asian guy” when Roan got up from his desk and opened the door. “Par,” he asked. “The bartender nicknamed Chi-Chi at Panic, who is he?”
Par, who was clearly playing Tetris on h
is computer, sat back and thought about it for a moment. “Oh, that’s Eric Chiang. Into leather daddies. Why?”
“No reason. Thank you.”
As soon as he closed the office door, Matt looked up at him in wonderment. “How did he know that?”
“Everybody hits on Paris—everybody. He generally remembers their names when they offer them.” Once he sat back down at his desk, he entered the name Eric Chiang into his database, and it turned out there were a couple of different Eric Chiangs around here. But one lived on Calvin Street, and that was pretty much a “gay” neighborhood—you couldn’t walk fifty feet without getting a rainbow flag in the eye. It was also one of the neatest streets in the downtown corridor, with swept sidewalks and window boxes exploding with riots of begonias and geraniums and zinnias during the appropriate seasons... but surely that was just coincidence. As was the “adult novelty store” on the neighboring block.
He wrote down the address and phone number and figured he should give Eric a call first. Also, when he paid Eric a visit, he probably shouldn’t be wearing his leather jacket—there was no point in giving him false hopes.
After watching him write things down for a few moments, Matt asked hopefully, “Are you taking the case?”
“I’ll see if I can find out what happened to her. But I’m making no promises here, Matt. She sounds like a serious head case, capable of almost anything, and the family doesn’t sound that great either. I don’t like getting involved in family things—they always end badly.”
Matt levered himself out of his chair, looking absurdly grateful. “Thank you. I... we appreciate it.”
Roan stood, just to be polite, and didn’t know what to tell him. He didn’t have high hopes about this case; in fact, he had an awful feeling, ever since looking at Callie’s photo. It wasn’t just that she was too skinny—although he did feel like notifying the Red Cross about her—there was something desperate in her forced, capped-teeth, bleached smile, something like a swallowed scream. There were shadows in her eyes, and they weren’t all physical. She’d been crying for help for years and years, and no one had ever really noticed. The only person who had—too late to be of much help—was a former junkie turned barista turned masseur, a guy she only knew from rehab, and that was just too sad for words.
As he came around the desk to escort Matt out, Matt suddenly hugged him, fiercely enough that he thought he felt his ribcage creak. “Thank you,” Matt murmured into his shoulder. “I’m kinda afraid it’s me, y’know? That everyone around me just....” He didn’t finish the sentence, but he didn’t have to. First Ashley and now Callie. He suspected that Matt, in spite of his obvious physical attractiveness, was very lonely. He had probably been used and tossed aside by a lot of men; everybody loved to go out of their way to stomp the shit out of the eternal optimist.
Roan patted him on the back awkwardly and noticed, since they were so close, that he smelled like mousse, Calvin Klein cologne, fabric softener, and... something a bit more chemical, coming through his pores. He held him back at arm’s length and looked him in the eyes. (Those blue eyes were contacts—were the brown eyes real, or were they contacts too? Suddenly he wondered if he’d ever seen the real color of Matt’s eyes.) “Matt, are you using again?”
Matt looked deeply confused. “What? No. Why would you ask that?”
“I’m smelling something chemical on you, medicinal.”
“Medicinal?” he repeated, blond brows dropping down in confusion. “I can’t think why that would be... unless... my therapist has me on Norpramin. Are you smelling that?”
“Could be. What is it?”
“An antidepressant. Prozac did nothing for me, and Xanax gave me a headache. I feel a lot calmer on Norpramin, less like I have ADD.”
Roan nodded. “You seem calmer.” He really didn’t like therapists throwing happy pills at everyone, but they did seem to help some people. They seemed to help Matt, which was good. Obviously he’d needed some kind of help.
As Roan moved past him toward the door, Matt said, “That’s weird. I didn’t think Norpramin had a smell.”
“Everything has a smell, especially when it’s processed through the body.” He’d come back out into the main office, and Paris heard that, which made him smile charitably at Matt.
“Is he giving you the ‘how I smell things’ lecture?”
Roan scowled at him, but there wasn’t much heat behind it. It was nice to see Paris so animated, so happy. “It’s not a lecture.”
“It’s fascinating really,” Matt said, being kind. “I never thought about how we smell things and how much different it must be for you guys... umm, I mean for Roan. You don’t have the super smell thing, do you?”
Paris shook his head, still smiling. “Nope. The perfume counter at Macy’s holds no terror for me. Well, beyond the usual.”
“Lucky bastard. Rub it in, why don’t you?” It was his usual response, stripped almost bare of sarcasm.
Matt and Paris exchanged a little small talk before Matt left, and Roan assured him he’d call as soon as there were any developments. Once he was gone, Paris said, “Goddamn, puppy grew up hot, didn’t he? We should ask if he’s into threesomes. Oh hell, if you’re involved, he’ll say yes so fast you’d think his pants were attached with Velcro.”
“Very funny. Who called?”
“Oh, that. Now that was weird.” He picked up the note he’d made and looked at it, even though it was unlikely he needed to. “It was a woman—sounded kind of old—who said her name was Doctor Petra Rosenberg. Now there’s a name for you, huh? Anyway, she said it was imperative, see, I wrote it down,”—he did, he had “imperative” in quote marks and everything—“that you call her as soon as possible. She said you’d know what it was about.”
Roan took the note with her name, “imperative,” and her phone number on it and scowled down at it in the hopes it would explain itself. Didn’t happen. Did the name Doctor Rosenberg sound a little bit familiar?
“So are you finally giving in and getting that sex change or what?” Paris teased.
Roan flipped him off, which only made Par laugh.
He wandered back into his office with the note, and finally a little bell started to ring in his head. Rosenberg. Didn’t he have a doctor named Rosenberg when he was a kid? She had worked for the state; she was one of the first to specialize in infecteds and their medical conditions. This had to be her. He tried to bring up a mental image of her, but all he really got was the same white coats with anonymous faces that he always saw when he thought of all the doctors who had tried to treat him when he was growing up. There was some association with her name and tortoiseshell glasses, though.
Why was she calling him now? He tried to remember the last time he’d seen her and figured it must have been about eighteen or nineteen years ago. How “imperative” could it be if there was a nearly twenty-year gap between her last seeing him and her calling?
Still, just looking at the name on the Post-it note made him feel uneasy, the coffee churning sourly in his stomach. What had she just figured out about him? The timing was both suspicious and ominous, what with Paris’s condition deteriorating and his own just getting stronger. The use of such an old-fashioned word as “imperative” also set him on edge. Did people ever whip those out except when they were freaked?
He was tempted to crumple up the note but didn’t. He knew he should call, but he wasn’t sure he was brave enough right now.
Roan honestly didn’t know when he’d feel brave enough to make this phone call. He almost wanted to tell Paris that see, he too could get scared. But it wasn’t anything he actually wanted to share.
3
Sucker Punch
ROAN tucked the message from Rosenberg in his pocket and decided to call her later, on the off chance he inherited some courage along the way. It was unlikely, but stranger things had happened.
He called Eric Chiang at home (he was not calling him Chi-Chi) and caught him in. As soon as he explained who he
was and why he was calling, Eric told him to go ahead and come on over, as he’d be happy to help if he could. He actually didn’t sound that enthusiastic about it; he just wanted to placate Roan on the off chance he was really a cop.
He told Paris about the case, mainly because he had to, and even Par blanched when he saw the photo of Callie. “Holy shit, are you sure she’s not sick?” That could explain her thinness, but somehow Roan doubted it. When he discovered where Roan was off to, Paris suggested he should come with Roan, since Eric was more likely to be amenable to him—actually a good point. After all, Eric had hit on Paris enough that Par not only knew his name but his personal kink.
Of course, he didn’t know if Paris was up to it, if he had the energy to do it, but Roan couldn’t think of any way to ask without offending him, so he just let him come along.
Eric lived in one of the apartments over a small ground-floor bookstore/coffee shop called Remains of the Day (which might as well have called itself “Gay Gay Gay Gay”). There was a back way to enter the apartments, so they avoided going in, but it looked interesting enough that Roan made a mental note to check out the shop sometime. Paris must have noticed him looking at the books in the display window on their way around the back, because he whispered in Roan’s ear, “You love your damn books more than me.” When Roan shot him an evil look, Par was grinning at him ear to ear. Roan nudged him with his elbow, hoping he didn’t blush at being caught in his book lust. What could he say? They had saved his life when he was a kid; books took him out of hospitals, group homes, and foster homes. They let him know that there was something other than this. He was eternally grateful.
They went up the outer stairs to an inner corridor, redolent of French roast, where four doors led to four different apartments, all marked with brass numbers. The one they wanted was number three, which was at the end of the hall on the left side. Roan knocked, but he took a step back, so the first thing Eric saw would be Paris. That was an automatic reflex now—letting Paris take the lead was a guarantee you’d get in the door, whether it was a swanky party he’d never be invited to in a million years or a reluctant witness’s home. Paris was like a magic key, and they both knew it.
