You Get What You Pay For (The Tony Cassella Mysteries)

by Beinhart, Larry

  I gave the place a look as I went by. It was called Hunks. All the customers were male, and the windows had black leather drapes.

  Instead he went into McDimples, your normal semi-neighborhood, semi-singles, standard East Side bar. So did I. They served their beer in mugs. Syd had one. There were two empty stools beside him. I sat at the further one. I ordered a beer. While I waited for it, I turned and surveyed the room. When the beer came, I raised my glass to the bartender, then to Syd, being as they were the people closest to me. “Cheers,” I said. The bartender said the same. Syd nodded. Neutral.

  I looked down at his gym bag.

  “Been working out?”

  “Yes,” he said. Neutral. Careful in New York. Someone talks to you, they want something.

  “The machines, I bet. Nautilus. I can never get myself to do that. I’m a squash player,” I said. A genteel credential. Few out-and-out ruffians in the sport. Far from its roots in debtors’ prison. “You ever play?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Try it. It’s a good game.”

  “Several of my colleagues play. But I play tennis, and they say it ruins your game to play both.”

  “Could be,” I said. “I bet you are … an attorney.”

  “What are you?” Syd asked. “A detective?”

  “No.” I smiled. “An accountant.”

  He smiled. I held out my hand. We shook as I gave him my name and he gave me his. We chatted. Syd was a careful man. He revealed little, and I could feel his calculator pawing me. To what end, besides native caution, I didn’t know. I asked him what kind of law he dealt with. He was a litigator. Corporate things. Lately his firm was moving into labor law. What with business getting tougher with unions, regulations changing, and the regulatory bodies changing even more. He meant union busting, but he didn’t say that.

  His favorite sport was skiing. He had been lucky enough to have a Christmas holiday with his kids, without the ex, out in Colorado. It was beautiful. And their condo was in the same complex as Jerry Ford’s.

  “You’re lucky, having kids today, if they’re not in trouble. Dropping out, doing dope, falling in with cults and stuff. It’s scary,” I said.

  “We’ve had a couple of close calls. But they seem to be doing all right,” he said, knocking his knuckles on the wood-top bar. Then he looked at his watch.

  “Early day tomorrow,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I sighed. “Me too.”

  He threw a bill on the bar. I did too. He got up to go.

  Out in the street, he looked at his watch again. I looked at him.

  “I think I’ll have one more beer,” he said. “I have some Heineken’s in the refrigerator. Care to join me?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “A beer sounds good.”

  The first execution for “sodomitical” activity [in America, took place in Plymouth Colony in 1642]. … William Hackett, an eighteen year old servant, was observed on a Sunday copulating with a cow. Hackett confessed his crime and the cow was burned before his eyes after which he himself was hanged.

  VERN L. BULLOUGH, Homosexuality: A History

  (New American Library, 1979)

  “Sit down,” he said, and went into the kitchen to get the beer. He had gestured at the couch. But I wasn’t ready to sit there, where he could sit beside me. I chose the chair. When he came back with the beer, I wasn’t quite in reach from anywhere. He couldn’t quite decide where to position himself. So he stood over me, cool but anxious, obsequious yet macho.

  “Pretty good,” I said about the beer.

  “Yes. I find that it’s an excellent beer.” God, he didn’t want to talk about beer. And he was bulging all over his groin. Just for me. I could read his fantasy in his eyes. What he really wanted to do was pull down his zipper and pop it out in my face. “You look like you have a pretty good body,” he said. His basic mask—self-contained maturity and the dignity of corporate law—was melting across his features. The son of a bitch was leering at me like a teenager. “Squash must keep you in shape.” And as with a teenager, there was a nervous anxiety that he might handle it wrong and get put down for getting his cock up.

  It was a hiccup away from grotesque. It must’ve been what I look like when I have lust in my pocket and a woman in the corner. God save us from mirrors.

  “I like to get to know people. Find out what makes them tick,” I said. That’s what the girls say when they mean: I want to talk first; what sort of slut do you think I am?

  “Yes,” he said, trying to calmly put his mask back. “I have the same inclinations.” He decided he was going to have to sit down after all and looked around for the best spot, tactically speaking.

  We made chitchat. His work. My work. Very dull. We sipped our beers.

  “How about another beer?” he said.

  “Sure,” I said.

  I spotted photos on the wall. His kids. I got up to look at them. When he returned, he found me there and came up close. Close enough so that his body brushed mine when he handed me the beer.

  “Your kids?”

  “Yes,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder. I could feel his warm breath against my neck. It made my hair stand and my stomach churn. I tried not to let that show.

  “Do they know?”

  His mouth tightened. “We’ve never really discussed it,” he said shortly. His hand moved across my back.

  I slid away from his hand, turning to face him. I looked him squarely and sympathetically in the eye. “It must be especially tough. Someone of your generation, and situation, coming out. Your ex knows, doesn’t she?”

  “Yes,” he said shortly.

  “I bet that was nasty. Vicious divorce, I bet.”

  “No, actually,” he said, “it was quite civilized.”

  “This is a nice apartment,” I said, “but not for the kind of money you’re making. She got the house, right?”

  He nodded.

  “Hefty child support,” I said, looking at the portraits, “and some heavy alimony. Right?”

  “I don’t see that that is any of your business.”

  “Just making conversation. You know … hey, things are tough. I’m sympathetic.”

  “Sure,” he said, willing to ignore the trespass. If he could just get into my pants.

  “She used it against you, didn’t she?” I said. “They’re such bitches.”

  “If it makes any difference, she knew. I knew that she knew. We didn’t make an issue of the matter. Yes, there was a very generous settlement, but that is because I felt generous. I am happy to provide a good home for my children. Whatever their needs might be, whatever that may cost, I am fortunate enough to have the means to provide. Having the means, I am happy to do so.”

  “Sounds reasonable,” I said. So many things that aren’t true sound reasonable.

  Our little chess match in sexo-space went on. I sat on the couch. He followed me eagerly, certain my queen was exposed.

  “And the job—they know on the job?” I asked casually.

  “It’s one of those things,” he said, man of the world, “that’s understood, where necessary, and properly unspoken.” He put his hand on my knee.

  One cool sliver of brain acknowledged irrationality. With my eyes closed, we could put orifices and appendages together in ways that were virtually indistinguishable from places where I had been before with great pleasure. But what has sense got to do with it? I felt his touch like a disease.

  I took his hand. Lifted it off my knee and held it from the back.

  “Your clients,” I said. “Do they know you like to fuck men?”

  He yanked his hand away. “I keep my private life private.”

  “Tell me, Syd,” I said, “are you into ‘safe sex’?”

  “What kind of game is this?” he said warily. “I’m not into games. I am a very straight person.”

  “What a bitch it must be, Syd.” I was going to shake him up. “All those years in the closet. Closing your eyes and pretending that the wife
underneath is a guy. And the sneaking around. Sucking anonymous cocks in men’s rooms. Going down to Forty-Second Street and paying little hustlers to suck yours. Is that what it was like—”

  “I think you’d better go now,” he said, standing up, the bulge in his crotch deflated.

  “ … And then you finally come on out. Only to find the plague waiting for you,” I said lazily, putting my feet up on the coffee table. “Jesus, you got handed a tough one.”

  “I think you’d better go now,” he said.

  “Sit down, Syd. I want to talk to you.”

  “Perhaps you think I’m not capable of throwing you out,” he said.

  “Oh, man,” I sighed, “it doesn’t matter. That’s not what it’s about.”

  “Out. Now. Before I call the police.”

  “Five years, Syd,” I said. “You got five years, from the last time you fucked a guy, of fear. Wondering if you got It.”

  He crossed the room and picked up the phone from the end table. I was right behind him. As he picked up the receiver, I reached for the clip connection in back and pulled it out. Enraged, he swung.

  I thrust my shoulder up to protect my head, instinctively.

  But he was better than I thought he was. He was balanced, and that swing was just a feint. The real blow came from his right hand. A karate-trained thrust, with a twisting fist at my solar plexus. I never saw it coming. It’s what you get from underestimating people. Just because they’re old and take it up the ass from time to time doesn’t mean they can’t hit.

  I went down, with the wind half knocked out of me.

  Gasping, sitting on the floor, I looked up at him, in his spread-foot karate pose. “You’re over … reacting,” I said.

  “Out,” he said.

  “We have some things to talk over, Syd,” I said, letting my breath come back.

  “No we don’t,” he told me, reasserting his karate pose.

  “Oh, man,” I said, “don’t make this difficult.”

  “On your feet, and out! Now!”

  “Slow down, Syd.”

  “Out. And you can tell that bitch, not another nickel. Nobody’s gonna bleed me.”

  “I’m not—”

  “Out! Out!” he screamed.

  Moving slow, calm, getting to my feet, I said, “Take it slow. Take it easy.”

  “Out. I want you out.”

  “Why don’t you hit me again, motherfucker,” I snapped. “Come on, faggot.”

  I faked with my right. He yelled, “Hai!” Blocked with his left. Stepped in and hit with his right. Which is what I was waiting for. I snatched his forearm and, holding it, turned hard. I had the weight and, in spite of his Nautilus machines, the strength. It spun him off his feet, and he went stumbling past me. I slammed him hard, with my forearm, across the spine. He lost it and went face down on his rug.

  I came down on top of him, my knee in the small of his back. I snatched his wrist and bent his arm up.

  “Syd, Syd, why you wanna do it the hard way?”

  “Get out of my house. I’ll call the police. Don’t think I won’t.”

  “Fuck it, Syd.” I jammed his arm up, hard. “Stop and listen. I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want your money. I don’t work for that bitch. … Now you gonna listen to me?”

  “Let me up,” he asked.

  “No more fuss?”

  “What do you want?”

  “I just want you to listen. Then I’ll go.”

  “OK.”

  “No more fuss?”

  “No. OK,” he said.

  I released his arm and moved off him. I stepped back far enough to watch him get up. “You all right?” I asked him.

  “Just a little … stressed, in the shoulder,” he said.

  “Sorry. I’d massage it for you, but you’d get the wrong idea.”

  “I already had the wrong idea, didn’t I,” he snapped.

  “It’s the Gunderson thing,” I said. “I saw the report of the special prosecutor.” I was thrusting my finger at his face. “A farce. A cover-up. I want that report. The whole thing. Without the blackouts.”

  He shook his head no.

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s the only way for the rest of the world to find out the truth.”

  “That would be a breach of ethics,” he said stubbornly, wrapping his face in his mask as well as he could.

  “Tell me something, Syd,” I said, suddenly soft, reasonable. “What did you think of Gunderson? You think this is an honest kind of guy? Who should be the highest legal officer in the land?”

  “That is not for me to judge. That was not our mandate.” He had found his balance again. His role.

  “Man, it’s such a goddamn shame,” I said like I meant it, and I probably did. “After a couple of hundred years of hiding, it’s finally OK to be a homosexual … and bam! They’re slamming the closet doors again. They’re coming back after you guys. They’re gonna use AIDS, family values, anything they can. It’s pariah time again. You got to protect yourself. Not Gunderson. He’s not worth protecting.”

  “I have ethic—”

  “I’m talking ethics,” I rode over him. “Real ethics. You know what I want this report for? Just to show it to the public. Just so the world knows the truth. Let the people judge.”

  “I cannot—”

  “You stupid shit,” I snapped, switching back to bad guy. “I don’t know if you’re bullshitting me or you’re crapping on yourself. I want that report. Complete.”

  “I don’t have it,” he said weakly, down to his second line of defense.

  “You can get it. Do it because it’s the right thing to do. Or because if you don’t do it, you’re gonna be destroyed. Not by me: I’m the nice guy. They’ll drag you out of the closet with a dress on. Pictures, tapes. Rumors of AIDS. And your clients, they’re gonna know. All those Fortune 500 fuckers, they won’t eat lunch with you. They won’t go in a conference room with you. They won’t shake your goddamn hand. Because you’re a plague carrier! You understand? All that money, it’s gonna disappear. Your kids, they’re gonna hear—”

  “You bastard. You bastard. How dare you—”

  “Syd, Syd,” I said, soft and reasonable again. “Not me. I wouldn’t do that. I can’t fuck a guy over just because he likes to put his dick in the wrong place. I’m the one that’s trying to help you. I don’t want that to happen to you.”

  “I don’t feel well,” he said, swallowing, sweating. “I have to get my pills.”

  “Sure, go ahead.”

  He walked toward the bedroom. Hit ’em high, hit ’em low, keep ’em off balance, let ’em know they’re beat, then tell them they can trust you, and only you. I had him.

  The gun he held in his hand when he came out of the bedroom was a large-bore automatic. It looked like a Luger, authentic WW II Wehrmacht vintage. And ever so macho.

  “Oh, shit,” I said.

  “I’m gonna kill you,” he said, his voice tight and near to hysterical. That wasn’t good.

  “You don’t want to do that,” I said. “That would really ruin your career.”

  “Not killing an intruder in my own home,” he said. The same tension-filled notes were in his voice. He even sounded as if he believed himself.

  “Well,” I said, “maybe if I were black and had a rap sheet, you know, you might get away with it.”

  “You bastard, you motherfucking bastard,” he said, something close to tears in his eyes, his hands tight, too tight, on the gun. “You come up here, pretending … pretending … ”

  “No. You asked me up for a beer. And to chat.”

  “I ought to make you … ” he said, coming toward me, holding the gun in front of him. “Get on your knees, you bastard.”

  “Let’s not let this get out of hand,” I said. Smiling.

  “Oh, it’s gonna get out of hand. I may shoot you yet,” he said, not smiling at all.

  6.

  Foreplay

  We were over and under them days,

&nb
sp; then tomorrow changed,

  and even the body betrays.

  “Nashville” Katz, “Jezebel”

  (© Memphiz Muzic, Inc., 1983)

  “I WAS LUCKY TO escape with my life,” I said to Glenda.

  “Every time you come home late”—the clock over the bed said, with that excess of precision typical of digital devices, 11:56 P.M.—“you tell the most marvelous stories. And you expect me to believe them.” Though this time she did.

  “Come on. I almost lost my virginity.”

  “Oh, horrors,” she mocked. “A fate worse than death.”

  “You’re goddamn right,” I said.

  “It might serve you right,” she said, smiling. “Turnabout is fair play, hoist by your own petard, or something like that.” She snuggled against me as I lifted the covers and slid into bed. She reached for my petard. I put my arms around her. She was wearing a nightdress, a thin, soft flannel. It felt good to the touch, soft, feminine, sexy in a ladylike fashion. And I loved the way it bunched up around her waist when I raised it.

  “It’s been too long,” she said, spreading her legs as my fingers opened her lips, seeking moisture.

  She was right. It had. I wished she hadn’t mentioned it. I like my lust unalloyed. Instead of losing myself, disappearing, one layer of brain circuitry was trying to nail down the why. Another, who’s to bless and who’s to blame? Another going through back files, tangent tracking, comparing past and present, this woman and others. Another, wondering if the whole thing was a condition, which is a thing that is, or a problem, which is a thing with a solution. I didn’t disappear at all.

  NEW TV SEASON: SEX IS OUT, OLD VALUES IN.

  U.S. News & World Report

  “How did you get away?” she asked me at breakfast.

  “Get away from what?” Wayne asked.

  “There’s this attorney,” I said. “He has some papers I want. … ”

  “What papers?” Wayne asked, giving up both his cereal and his New York Times.

  “Transcript of a government report on Randolph Gunderson, the attorney general. I went over to chat with him. I ended up in his apartment, and when he found out what I wanted, he pulled a gun on me. And said he wanted to kill me, or worse.”