Dan caught the residue of lacquer on his nails. He took a second look at that bulbous, ravaged face and thought he discerned another one underneath, dolled up by layers of cover-stick and mascara for her moment in the spotlight. A transvestite by daylight. Carol Channing leered down at them, incognito, having put aside her diamonds and ermine for an afternoon’s outing.
Donny smiled. “Hey, Cherry, baby. Been off the market. Finally caught a good one.”
“How darling for you! Come and see me sometime.”
With that, Carol passed on to her own private booth around the corner.
“You lead such a colourful life,” Dan commented.
“Yes, I’m blessed.” Donny took a sip of coffee and gave an uncharacteristic look of disapproval, leading Dan to wonder if that was the first time he’d actually bothered to consider the taste. He set the cup back down. “As I was saying, I don’t really partake of the drug scene. Never have. My brain has its own permanent happy zone.”
“Tell me about Charles and Lionel.”
Donny’s face lit up with a smile. “Has Charles made a pass at you?”
“Not yet. Should I anticipate it?”
“Don’t discount it. It could happen. Though he’ll behave himself if you rap his knuckles. They’re the perfect couple, don’t you know.”
“So you keep saying.”
“They’re a powerhouse. They give great parties. Everyone wants to be on the guest list. They have a penthouse in Radio City. Best view of the city. It looks south over all the towers and high-rises. You can see the lake from all around. CN Tower, whatever. It’s all there.”
“What’s he like?”
“Charles? Mostly a pussycat, but he’s got a bit of a temper. That I’ll-get-even kind of lawyer’s temper. Slow burn. No hysterics, just a telling bop on the head at the right moment.”
“Anything violent?”
“Not that I’m aware of. What have you heard?”
“Nothing. I was just wondering.”
Donny gave him a curious look. “I never felt unsafe with him when we dated, if that’s what you mean. Not like I had to lock up the razors or anything, but I wasn’t dazzled by the warmth of his personality. You might say he’s controlling. He expects obedience from his partners and can be quite assertive. But then some people like that sort of thing.”
“What about a kid named Ziggy? I’m told he used to hang out at the Saddle and Bridle. Ever hear of him?”
“Sure, everyone’s heard of Ziggy. Cute kid, but something not quite right with him.”
“Like what?”
Donny considered then shrugged. “Apart from the Goth thing, which is worrisome enough, there’s something off about him. I can’t put my finger on it. A little spooky. He was brought up in care.” He gave Dan a knowing look. “You know what they say. When a kid goes into care they see it all: drugs, violence, prostitution. It can take decades to get over it. Sometimes the street’s preferable. I’ve seen him go off into long, staring-into-space episodes for considerable periods of time. You never know what’s going on inside his head.”
“You know him from the bars?”
Donny gave him a strange smile. “No, through Lester, actually. Ziggy’s a ghost from his street days. I don’t encourage Lester’s association with him, for obvious reasons, but he slept on our couch once or twice when he didn’t have a place to stay.”
Dan started. “When was this?”
“He stayed with us a few times last year. Lately, not so much, though he was there for nearly a week a couple months ago.”
“Mid-February? Right around the time Yuri Malevski was killed?”
Donny went silent for a while.
“Could be,” he said at last. “I gather he had a more permanent place to stay, but couldn’t get in for a while.”
“Yes. Yuri Malevski’s.”
Donny gave Dan an assessing glance. “Really?”
“In fact, I think he still lives there. In a cubbyhole in Yuri’s upstairs. I found his diary.”
“Well, I hope he gave me a good write-up. I served him a veritable feast of back bacon with blueberry-glazed crepes one morning.”
“Not to worry. He gave your cooking five stars.”
“Glad to hear it.” Donny sat quietly for a moment. “I have to ask. Is he a suspect in the murder? He really was a bit weird. Troubled, you might say.”
“Not as far as I know, but I don’t know much about the investigation yet.”
“Yet? Meaning you might know more later?”
“Remains to be seen. For now, I’m concentrating on finding the missing Cuban boyfriend.”
“Ah, yes. The one with the shady past and the slipperier present. Yuri always had a taste for wild boys.”
Dan shot him a look. “As in?”
“The scruffy, dangerous ones. I gather Santiago was a handful when Yuri took him in, but he tamed him quickly enough.”
“What did you think of him?”
“Of Santiago? Not much. I met him a few times at the club. I wasn’t all that impressed, to be honest. I gather Yuri was grooming him to take over as manager. If you didn’t know better, you would have thought Santiago was the owner, the way he lorded it over the clientele. He certainly had the gold-digging gene and pretensions of grandeur to go with it.”
“Do you know anything about their history?”
Donny wiped his mouth with a napkin and set his cup down. “I’m a bit iffy on the details. I think he and Yuri met when Santiago was still a teenager. Maybe four or five years ago? Probably at the club. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I heard he left Cuba by hiding out in the cargo of an Air Canada jetliner and nearly froze to death on the way here. He’s a survivor, though, and by the time he met Yuri he was looking for a sugar daddy. A real beauty, that’s for sure. He charmed the pants off half the gay men in Toronto, not to mention a few women who were susceptible to his charms. He isn’t that discriminating. And when I say he charmed the pants off them, I mean that quite literally.”
“How did he and Yuri get along?”
Donny’s eyes had drifted outside the window where two smokers were lined up to have their nicotine levels boosted. Dan clanked a spoon against his saucer.
Donny’s eyes bounced back. “What?”
“He and Yuri. How did they get along?”
“Oh, like cats and dogs. I gather it was a rough-and-tumble relationship from beginning to end. Lots of scrapping. I can’t say over what, but probably the usual — older man meets younger boy. One wants commitment, the other wants credit cards charged to the max. A young man’s financial needs are not easy to fulfil. Nor are an older man’s demands for sexual exclusivity.”
“Nevertheless, they managed to live together for the last four years?”
“From what I heard, yes.”
“Do you think he killed Yuri?”
Donny stood up. “I would hate to incriminate anybody with a careless word spoken in haste. I’ll go get another cup of coffee and think about that before I answer.”
Dan shook his head. “You’re being far more evasive than normal.”
“It comes with domestication. You learn to keep secrets.”
Sixteen
Under the Eaves
Dan left the coffee shop thinking about Yuri Malevski’s “wild boys.” He knew some gay men liked to get close to younger guys who appeared threatening on the surface — tattoos, muscles, rough talk. It was one way of making peace with the demons who’d terrorized them in high school, but few of them expected to be murdered in the process. Malevski, it seemed, had wanted a wild boy to domesticate. Apparently he thought he’d found that in Santiago Suárez, the missing Cuban. Ziggy, on the other hand, seemed to be more of a dark horse. He was a moving target waiting for an expert marksman to hunt him down. Whatever there was to be learned about him was still inside Lockie House.
Dan parked across the street. From the front stoop, everything looked the same. He punched in the numbers. Red turned to gre
en. Definitely something to be said for all that accounting consistency.
It was still daylight, making the false twilight inside seem eerie. Dan’s MagLite swept a beam along the floor. No need to announce his presence to the world outside. Had Fred MacGregor still lived here — Dan dispensed with formalities, feeling he knew the man well enough by now — had Freddie still lived here, this might be one of his at-home days when he received callers, but Dan wasn’t in a receiving mood.
He made his way to the third floor and looked around. All was calm. He pressed the panel and watched it swing open, just the way things did in the movies. And why not? Movies had to take their inspiration from somewhere.
Ziggy’s diary lay beneath the window where he’d left it, the baggie of dope still in place. He skimmed the pages, moving backward in time to when Ziggy first came to stay with Yuri. My family, he’d called Yuri’s collection of friends and misfits. Still, he had his perspective right: All families are weird, he wrote, so this one isn’t that different from any other. At least I feel at home somewhere.
Dan could relate.
Yuri didn’t seem to have asked for anything from Ziggy for his room and board. In fact, if the diary was to be believed, Yuri’s interest lay more in rehabilitating the boy: Need to get clean. Yuri told me that a month ago. I have to stop doing drugs and get my life in order. A little grass now and again is cool, he said, but he won’t tolerate hard drugs in the house. He said my days of drug use are over if I want to live with him.
That, Dan thought, was a different Yuri from the one everyone else seemed to think they knew. Ziggy expressed admiration for Yuri several times in the passages he read. The only note of dissent lay with his feelings about Santiago, who appeared as the villain in the pages. Santiago has another lover! I saw them together and now he hates me. He cheats on Yuri with everyone. Should I tell Yuri before he tries to get rid of me? Two days later, Ziggy confided to the diary’s pages that he’d told Yuri about Santiago’s lover: Yuri was furious. He said he didn’t believe me, but they had a fight and now Santiago is gone.
Rather than exult in his triumph, Ziggy felt remorse for having hurt Yuri: Why do I always hurt the ones I love? he lamented.Way of the world, Dan wanted to tell him. Oscar Wilde wasn’t the first to note the sentiment. He read further till he caught the name Charles again. There was no mention of sex this time, just anger that Charles had told him he couldn’t repeat the episode, being a “happily married man.” Happily married! Ziggy wrote. Ha! That asshole. Then what was he doing with me?
An apt question, Dan noted, though there seemed little concern from either party on Lionel’s behalf. He felt a surge of anger for the absent accountant. Why was it always the nice guys who got used?
He felt his emotions tug as he discovered that Ziggy had contemplated killing himself, his anger at being rejected by Charles compounded by guilt over having hurt Yuri. Dear Darkness, I want to die, he’d written. I shouldn’t care what Charles thinks, but Yuri is my friend. I need to make him see I’m the only one who treats him well, even though he doesn’t care. Instead, he treats me with disdain. Maybe I should just end this here and now. Anger, confusion, manipulation, sadness. It was a regular soap opera in those pages. But, as Donny said, that wasn’t unusual for someone brought up in care.
Dan heard a throat cleared behind him. He turned and saw large dark eyes set in a pale face. It could have been a vampire, if such things existed. Instead it was Ziggy, dressed in full Goth regalia, standing in the doorway watching him. Black velvet jacket over a black T, ruffled lace at the cuffs and collar; “Back in Black” emblazoned on his chest in case the visual hints weren’t enough. He looked like a mourner dressed for a very theatrical Victorian funeral.
“Find anything interesting?” he asked softly.
“The mysterious tenant,” Dan said.
“Yes, I stay here when I want. Yuri gave me permission.”
He crept in and sat on the futon, legs crossed in front of him.
“That permission might have expired now that Yuri’s dead.”
Ziggy cocked his head and regarded Dan curiously. “According to whom?”
Dan left the question unanswered. “My name’s Dan.”
“I’m Ziggy, as you probably know from reading my diary.”
“Is that German?”
Ziggy gave a funny, lop-sided smile. “No, just a nickname from when I was a kid. I used to run funny, sort of zig-zagging. They called me Ziggy for short.”
“So, Ziggy. Aren’t you worried about staying here since the murder?”
“I’m not afraid.”
Outside, a pigeon landed on the windowsill and began cooing to some invisible mate. Dan thought of the superstition about birds in the house.
“You’re not afraid of being killed?”
Ziggy shook his head. “What would I lose? Yuri was my only friend.” He gave Dan a close look. “If you think I’m being dramatic, I’m not. It’s the truth.”
“Who do you think killed Yuri?”
Ziggy reached for the bag of weed and produced a slender joint.
“Maybe some hustler.”
He lit it and took a toke, then held it out. Dan shook his head.
“Why do you think that?”
Ziggy stared at him for a moment, and then shrugged. “Yuri was in love with this Cuban guy named Santiago. Santiago wasn’t very nice to him, so Yuri told him to leave. After Santiago left, Yuri went a little bit crazy. He wanted them to stay together. Like, probably forever. There were a couple of guys who stayed the night with him after that. Rent boys. Maybe he hired some hustler to come in and things got out of hand.”
“Had that sort of thing happened before?’
Ziggy took another toke and thought this over.
“Once or twice Yuri threw a couple of hustlers out of the house for behaving badly, but no one ever tried to hurt him before.”
“Did Yuri seem afraid before he died? Was there anyone in particular he worried about?”
Ziggy shrugged. “Not that I know of. But maybe he just didn’t tell me there was.”
“Are you planning on staying here in the house?”
He shrugged again. “Till they kick me out, I guess. It’s not like I have anywhere else to go.”
“I read in your diary that Yuri locked you out for a while.”
Ziggy glanced down at the pages. “He didn’t like it when I did dope. Heroin, I mean. He said it was messing up my future. So he kicked me out and told me to come back when I got clean. I wanted to apologize, but I never saw him again.”
“It’s ironic, but you stayed with some friends of mine. Donny and Lester.”
“Really?” Ziggy looked more amused than surprised. “You know Donny and Lester?”
Dan nodded.
“Cool,” he said, stabbing the joint out on a beam above his head. It dissolved in a flare of falling sparks. “Anyway, for now I’ll stay here. At least until someone changes the code. Then I’ll be screwed again.”
“How did you get back in last time?”
“Pure dumb luck. Yuri wasn’t answering my messages. I thought he was mad at me for using, so I came over to apologize just as Irma was coming by. I sneaked in when she got here. I found the code on his phone that he texted to her.”
Dan looked at him. “Who’s Irma?”
“Cleaning lady. She’s a trip. Eastern European something or other. Wicked accent, like Bela Lugosi.” He grinned. “Irma thought Yuri was evil. She used to leave religious pamphlets around for him. He laughed whenever he found them.”
Dan recalled the picture of Jesus with the exploding heart. “What did Yuri think of Irma?”
Ziggy struggled out of his jacket, revealing a thin chest and arms. But no track marks, Dan noted. He was still clean.
“You mean, like, was he afraid of her?”
“Sure.”
“Nah. Yuri thought she was a joke. He loved teasing her, but he wouldn’t fire her. I think he felt sorry for her. Santiago liked her.
They were both illegals. I guess he could relate.”
“Why didn’t Yuri marry Santiago and help him get his citizenship?”
“They talked about it. I think Yuri was testing him to see if he’d remain faithful. Santiago couldn’t be faithful to save his life. Yuri wanted to rescue everybody. He should have been rescuing himself.”
Not bad advice, Dan thought, though a trifle late on the delivery.
He felt Ziggy’s hand on his forearm. The other snaked down to Dan’s crotch. Dan pushed the hand away.
“Please!” Ziggy said. “Am I a freak? Do I look repulsive?”
“You’re not repulsive,” Dan said.
“The last guy I had sex with said I was attractive.”
“Was that Charles?”
Ziggy’s eyes flashed. “Did you read the entire thing?”
“No,” Dan said. “But I know Charles.”
“He used me.”
“He’s in a relationship.”
Ziggy rolled his eyes. “I know. He’s married to the accountant.”
“Married men don’t stick around.”
“Tell me about it.” He gave Dan a sidelong glance. “What about you? Are you married?”
“No.”
“Then why aren’t you interested in me?”
Dan looked the boy up and down. Rule number one of the gay dress code, he thought. Don’t wear make-up and skin-tight jeans unless you want to look girly. But how to tell him he was attractive, even under that garish get-up?
“Can’t you find me attractive?” he pleaded.
Dan Sharp Mysteries 4-Book Bundle Page 103
