by David Stukas
Adrianne was one of those frightening women that straight bodybuilders seemed to attract. The dyed-blond hair was poofed up and sprayed even though we had entered the twenty-first century years ago, the skin, perma-tanned, and the waist was just big enough to allow her stomach and upper intestines to pass through to her lower extremities. Fingernails were painted an unearthly shade of white—as if she had been clawing at chalky walls with her fingers. You get the idea—not the kind of girl you’d find on an Outward Bound camping expedition. Being a gay man, I had no attraction to this type of woman—or any, for that matter. But I just couldn’t see why men were attracted to these life-size Barbie dolls. I suppose it was their forced, hyperfemininity. Me, I preferred tough but sophisticated women like Lauren Bacall, Rita Hayworth, and Katharine Hepburn, who were smart, self-assured, and knew how to make an entrance in a stunning gold lamé gown at a rooftop nightclub—not someone who was proud of the fact that she knew the difference between a 1991 Camero and one built in 1992.
“Adrianne?”
“Yeah?”
“I’d like to express my condolences about Eric,” I said in tones that would make an undertaker sound like a cheerleader at a UCLA football game.
“Yeah, well, it was so sudden, like.”
The babe was from Brooklyn—and apparently, hadn’t ever left it except to come to a gym in New York. I had to think up some bullshit to keep Adrianne’s attention. I though of swinging a tube of Maybelline lipstick in front of her face, but decided it would be too rude. It would do the trick, but it would be rude.
“I just wanted you to know that I always respected his ... training abilities ... with his clients ... here ... here in the gym ... and he always dressed nice.”
“Oh yeah, tanks. I’m shu-wah Eric would’ve been happy to heer dat,” she managed to get out, then sniffled into a tissue, blowing her nose at the finish like you’d expect a miniature poodle to sneeze: quick and tiny.
“He was always on time, you know—ambitious,” I added, running out of adjectives.
Sniff, sniff.
“Oh yeah, he was ambitious. He had big plans. He was just about to come into a lot of money from a great awnt,” she said, giving the word aunt such an out-of-place British accent that I almost started laughing. The Brooklyn returned as quickly as it had gone. You can take the girl out of Brooklyn ...
“Just about to inherit?” I repeated. “That’s so sad.”
“Well, I guess I’ll get his Hummer. Almost new. A really nice car ... great sound system ... sad-e-lite guidance system. . . seats dat adjust a hundred ways ... not dat any of dat stuff will replace Eric!” she added, remembering that while she would never dress like a grieving widow, she should at least sound like one.
The thought of this bubblehead driving a car of immense weight around the streets of New York and Brooklyn made me shudder. From that moment on, I would walk as far away from the curb as possible.
“Well, I thank you for your time, Adrianne. Again, my condolences.”
“Yee-ah, well, tanks,” she said, and I left the building.
I had just learned a valuable piece of information: that Cody wasn’t the only personal trainer who seemed to be making more money than was possible for a personal trainer to make.
I got on the subway and rode it to work. There, at the entrance to the building where my agency was ensconced on floors fifteen through twenty-three, were the reporters again. Instead of rushing me like they had at my apartment, they stood waiting for me to come into their gaping jaws like a great white shark too lazy to chase its prey. They knew, after all, that I had to enter the building this way and I’d have no other choice but to confront them.
But again, I said nothing. The embarrassing thing wasn’t that I was being made to feel like a criminal, but that dozens of my colleagues at work passed by and saw the reporters trying to extract information from me. Clearly, I had something to hide or had murdered someone. I waded through the crowd and entered the building with camera flashes popping from behind the glass lobby doors while I waited for the elevator. And if all this wasn’t enough, when the elevator arrived, people feigned excuses for not riding up with me. So up I went alone. Great.
I spent the day writing several ads for a new feminine hygiene napkin that promised thirty percent more absorption. After a day of this kind of thing, it made being thrown out the window of a thirty-second-floor apartment look inviting. But I did it day after day, five days a week, because like ninety-nine percent of the population, I didn’t know what else to do—and because I was too afraid to try something else. I was the master of inertia. At five-thirty, my energy returned and I flew out of the building, got on the subway, rode it up to the Ninety-Sixth Street Station, and walked the three blocks home.
When I rounded the corner of my block, they were there again: the reporters. I don’t why I hadn’t anticipated them being there. Like any normal person, I felt that the Middle Ages were over and you didn’t have to live in constant fear of being attacked by anyone who wanted to do so.
I followed my usual routine. I donned my sunglasses, passed through the crowd, and said nothing. I wearily trudged up the four flights to my squalid apartment, put the key in the lock, opened the door, stepped inside, and noticed that there was something different about my place. Instead of being neat and tidy as I had left it, it looked as if Courtney Love had just had sex there. The contents of every drawer, closet, and cardboard box lay strewn on the floor, and every piece of furniture I owned lay on its side with its upholstery slit and the stuffing torn out or the legs broken off.
It’s difficult to know what to do at times like this. The average person would walk slowly through the apartment, surveying the aftermath from the depths of a trance-induced stupor. An alternative was to go into hysterics and lean dramatically on walls for balance. Luckily, I kept my head.
I calmly walked back through the door, closed it behind me, and locked it. I made my way down the four flights to the street, where I again dove into the hostile, turbulent waters of the press, made no comment, then walked the three blocks to the nearest pay phone and placed a call to McMillan’s cell phone. Luckily, he answered and said to stay outside the building and wait for help, which I did. When the police arrived a few minutes later, the press shifted into a feeding frenzy. The reporters ran for the squad car, demanding answers as to why the police were there. The police calmly ignored them and cordoned off the front of my building with yellow do-not-cross tape. Then, one of the cops yelled my name in an attempt to locate me. I made my way through the crowd, where the police took me inside so they could learn the details of my break-in. I told them about the possible connection to Cody and Eric’s murder, gave them the keys to my apartment, and waited patiently for McMillan to arrive. I felt that it would be better if I waited in the hallway of my decrepit building then began wondering if the police might be helping themselves to any of my possessions when McMillan was admitted by a policeman into the hallway. As I was dramatizing my finding upstairs with McMillan, one of the policemen—who had probably stolen my autographed picture of Carl Hardwick, a hunky porno star, given to me by Monette—returned from my apartment and gave his report that the premises had been checked out and the perpetrator was nowhere to be found. This man was a genius. I lived in a studio apartment so small, you had to, as the old joke went, go outside to change your mind. With the exception of my sardine-can bathroom, where you hit the sink vanity with your knees when you sat on the toilet, every nook and cranny was visible from every other part of the apartment—even the roaches had a tough time finding places to hide.
McMillan said he was going to go talk to his buddies upstairs for a few minutes, then would come down and retrieve me when he was sure it was safe. I sat there in the hallway of my crummy building and waited like a good little boy until McMillan reappeared. I climbed the stairs behind McMillan up to my apartment, where I stood there relating exactly what happened when I opened the door. McMillan then conferred with the other t
wo cops about the particulars of the case, and I overheard several facts that seemed mighty peculiar indeed. None of the windows were broken or had been forced open, and the door hadn’t been jimmied. I had two deadbolts on my door, both with pick-resistant locks, so entry was unlikely that way. McMillan was about to ask me the next obvious question, whether my landlord had the keys to my apartment, when I cut him short.
“I take pride in considering myself a good and suspicious New Yorker, so after I moved in, I had new locks installed and never gave the landlord or the superintendent the keys. I had a friend who had a fur coat stolen from her apartment and she thinks the super did it, but she can never prove it. My theory was that an enraged member of PETA lived in the building, saw her wearing the fur, broke into her apartment, and stole it. This person was later planning to kidnap my friend, flay her, then sew the coat on her back and see how she liked it. But it’s just a theory.”
McMillan stared at me wordless. “I think we should call an ambulance—you’re in shock.”
I closed his cell phone for him. “I’m okay, McMillan. My mind always works that way. Frightening, isn’t it?”
He ignored my comment ... or noted it slyly for future reference. “Wilsop, Robert. Burglary victim: definitely crazy. Wise guy, too,” was the entry in the notebook of his mind. He shook his head as if trying to dislodge a stubborn thought. “I don’t get it. Not a trace of entry anywhere.”
McMillan walked over to my only unbarred window. The window was latched, just as I had left it.
“No entry here. It’s five stories down, and almost two up if you count the high parapet. Window was latched.”
I walked over to the suspect window and had to agree with McMillan: no entry there. The ledge was as clean as a whistle—no footprints, no bits of mortar from a man mountaineering down from the roof on a rope. Nothing.
“Hrrmph,” McMillan mumbled, turning his attention back to the front door. He took out a loupe and studied the lock millimeter by millimeter. “Mr. Wilsop, are you sure you locked your door this morning? You’re probably under a lot of stress and maybe you closed the door but left it unlocked.”
The detective, as much as I was slowly beginning to like him, had just stepped on a land mine and didn’t even know it. McMillan had no idea of the extent of my obsessive-compulsive disorder. I checked the locks on my apartment at least a dozen times before leaving for work or before retiring for the night. And of course, in checking them, I would also latch and unlatch them to make sure they were truly locked, which made me worry that when I latched the locks, I had perhaps inadvertently unlocked them, leaving me vulnerable and helpless in this cold, concrete jungle we called New York City. I would then open the door and inspect the locking bolts to see if they were, indeed, being thrown into the door jam, but the very nature of my opening the door to my apartment late in the night would completely negate the purpose of the door locks anyway, in which case I would slam the door only to begin the whole purpose of checking the locks again. I won’t even go into how often I checked the stove top to see if the gas burners were turned off. Me, crazy? Not a chance. The detective had some nerve.
“So how do you think the burglar got into my place?” I deduced.
“My gut feeling says the front door.”
“So you’re ruling out the window?”
“It’s still latched and doesn’t show any signs of forced entry, but I’ll go up to the roof to check that out. Is there a door leading up there?”
I leaned out of my apartment door and pointed to the stairway that continued up into the dull, white-blue haze of the buzzing fluorescent lighting that tapered off into darkness.
“I’m going to go up to the roof and check a few things out,” McMillan reported. “C’mon, Brady.” He motioned to his cohort. “Bring the camera, too.”
And up they went. While they climbed the stairs and went onto the roof that I sometimes used for sunbathing, I walked forlornly around my apartment, surveying the disaster at my feet. When I looked at the shambles of my little work desk, I noticed that my Apple laptop was missing. The burglars hadn’t bothered to take my ancient TV (not even cable ready), my stereo equipment (which looked like it had been manufactured in the old Soviet Union), or my priceless collection of rusted tractor seats that were mounted on my wall in a display of postindustrial artifacts—an idea that I had seen in an issue of Metropolitan Home. I spent a lot of time tracking those seats down in rural Pennsylvania and paying dearly for them. Now I had no idea why.
Twenty minutes later, McMillan and Brady returned. McMillan looked like his foray had answered no questions.
“No success, huh?” I asked.
“Nothing. The edge of the parapet is covered in asphalt and hot tar—any rope would leave telltale marks. No indication that anyone was lowered on ropes to your window. What I can’t figure out is how they got in.”
I was no detective, but having been involved in three murders to date, I can safely say that I do have some experience in these matters. And the one question that was in my mind sprang to my lips.
“I think the question is, Detective, why did someone go to so much trouble to get into my apartment in the first place?”
3
My God, Your Apartment Is a Mess!
I was right—terribly right. Someone had gone to a hell of a lot of trouble to break into a fetid apartment just to get their glove-covered hands on the CD that was now in the custody of some unknown person—or persons. The copy that I had made and intended to put in my safe-deposit box was gone—big surprise. I had made the copy and put it in a plastic jewel case and labeled the case (with my label maker, of course—so it would be neat) with the words Eric Bogert Pictures. It made it all too easy for the burglar. They had also gotten my laptop computer, but you had to have a password to boot it up, and mine was not your run-of-the-mill password. (I will give you a hint: It’s a Lithuanian word for an armless spirit that slams doors and does mischievous things without the use of appendages. Give up?)
Someone, whose pictures were on that CD, would do anything to keep those images from getting out into the hands of the general public, or worse, into the hands of the press. A lot was at stake.
The police finished their investigation, warned me to keep an eye out, and left—that was that. I would have to rely on my own catlike instincts and my trusty mace to protect me.
It was time to swing into action. I got on the phone and called Marc Baldwin, my long-distance lover.
“Hello? Marc?”
“Robert! So good to hear your voice!”
“We just talked yesterday,” I commented.
“Yes, but I never tire of the sound of your voice.”
Jesus, did I ever strike it rich. I thought they stopped making guys like Marc a long time ago.
Marc continued. “So what’s shaking?”
“Me in my boots. Well, my Kenneth Coles.”
“Why, what’s happening?”
“Someone wants to kill me,” I stated blankly. I said it so bluntly, I hardly believed it myself.
“Is Michael making threatening calls to you again for ‘stealing his boyfriend’?”
“No, no, he stopped doing that,” I answered.
“Oh really?”
“Yes, his psychiatrist doubled his daily dosage of Paxil. He’s fine now.”
“By the way, how did you know it was Michael calling you? You told me he was using voice-changing electronics.”
“He was, but he bought the device when I was with him. Remember, Michael isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. Plus, he forgets what he’s done in the past because he’s not interested in anything but himself or what he’s doing at the moment. What do you expect from a diagnosed narcissistic, borderline, sociopath personality?”
“Yes, he can be quite a piece of work,” Marc admitted.
“Hey, careful there ... that’s my friend you’re talking about.”
“So what’s this about someone wanting to kill you? You’re jokin
g, aren’t you?”
“No, no I’m not. Technically, they’re not trying to kill me yet. But two people who got in the way of a certain someone leaped off high terraces already.”
“Got in the way?” Marc asked, the confusion in his mind coming across the phone line loud and clear. “How about starting at the beginning. Tell me everything that’s happened.”
So I did. When I was finished, there was a long silence on the other end of the line.
“Marc, are you there?” I asked into the ether.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m here. Jesus, it just sounds too unreal. I’m coming out there right away—you need a big, strong man to protect you.”
“Marc, you can’t leave and come here, especially now. What about the Mercedes launch?”
“It’s going to be the best thing I’ve ever done. Imagine a huge room at the convention center where the walls are undulating panels of stainless steel, the tables are steel, and the ceiling is composed of panels of raw aluminum. Heavy metal.”
I was right. Marc, through no choice of his own, ended up rising to the top of one of the largest special event companies in southern California. His latest big project was the launch of the new Mercedes car models for a coalition of southern California car dealers. Germany wanted a big, splashy event and Marc was going to give it to them. He had worked long and hard and invested a lot of his own money to make his special event company one of the best, and I didn’t want to stand in the way of his progress.
“Marc, no one’s actually tried to kill me yet,” I stated, talking myself out of impending doom. “The other two guys who did their swan songs from on high were bodybuilders—I am not.”
“Robert, no one would ever accuse you of having a huge, muscular body.”
“Am I talking with Marc Baldwin or Michael Stark?”
