How he shook his head wildly and neighed and swallowed hard, and neighed and huffed as he shuttered and strangled his spastic and rock-hard eight inches.
How he shot all over her chest and his neck and his chin. How he lay there for what seemed like forever. But never long enough for her.
And then when Collier moved in it was almost too good to be true. Especially in the beginning, when their beautiful bodies were new to each other, ravenous and unquenchable; when they could not keep their hands off each other, could not keep their tongues and their fingers and their dicks out of each other; could not keep enough lube and clean towels in the cabinet.
How they grew beyond the hunger and learned to kiss with so much learned caring. How they learned to touch delicately because the delicateness of their perceived love must be adhered to.
And how they grew apart.
She saw it coming. Over the months she saw the signs even when they did not, way before they knew it. And there was no way to warn them.
Yet she stayed with them, prayed with them, mourned with them, and sadly chronicled the decline of their relationship. And if indeed the sex they started having near the end was an expression of their feelings for each other, then no wonder they parted company.
And yet…
That one special time when they made love knowing that it would be their last. That was a special time for them and for her. They cried in each other’s arms. And Selma Fant cried as well when she viewed it on the discreetly installed and discreetly retrieved spycam.
Chapter Thirty
The new winter sun was typically bright and warm on this particular day in L.A. Senior Father Lacey Cannon’s hillside terrace faced downtown, where the fantasy cluster of pastel buildings known as the Civic Center sparkled.
Brando always liked standing out here on Senior Father’s terrace. It always seemed so peaceful here, this house so high up on Don Tomaso Drive. Even when filled with people, with party, it was eclectically peaceful with oxymoronic calm. Slow mellow jazz and a joviality special to vintage black homosexuals permeated the air.
Brando sipped his drink and listened to Kran Baxter and Delroy Meeks talk about the cruise along the Mexican Riviera they had just returned from.
The aroma of Senior Father’s down-home cooking flowed through the house. Guests took turns peeking into the kitchen and licking their lips, engendering the wrath of their aproned host. Even out on the terrace Brando, Kran, and Delroy got a whiff, causing Kran to lose his place in his verbal home movies.
Omar and Shane arrived an hour after Brando, causing Senior Father to beam with Big Mama glee. They acknowledged their host’s hardy greeting with equal robustness and a bottle of good Napa Valley Chardonnay.
From the terrace, Brando saw them. He could tell that there was tension between Omar and Shane, again. He excused himself from Kran and Delroy and approached the new arrivals cheerfully.
“ ’Bout time you guys got here,” he teased, giving them both a big brotha man hug.
“Yeah, well, you know,” Omar mumbled.
“He tried to talk me into not coming,” Shane snapped, “but it didn’t work.”
Each year on November’s third Sunday, Senior Father Lacey Cannon gave his winter supper. It was a warm and friendly affair, peopled by a core circle of black same-gender-loving men and their significant others, good girlfriends, new boyfriends, and loose trade; a well-heeled clique called the Older Set. Brando and Omar were but youngsters here. Shane was in swaddling cloth.
Every time the doorbell rang and the door opened a vintage high-pitched swell would soar gleefully above the soft jazz and cozy hum of conversation, announcing the arrival of yet another clubhouse member. Salt-and-pepper queens and other royals of great dignity held court here annually and lamented the passing of the golden post-penicillin, pre-AIDS days of skin-to-skin sex, cum swallowing, and back-to-back orgies. Gleeful reminiscences about Sylvester and Two Tons of Fun were lost on some of the DL youngsters too cool to know they were no more than house dressing.
“Man, this is really getting silly,” Omar confessed to Brando when he was able to get him alone. “This thing with Shane.”
“So what’s the problem now? Why didn’t you want him to come?”
“Look around, Bran. Everybody’s drinking. He’s a fucking alcoholic.”
“He seems to be handling himself all right.”
“Yeah, for right now. But you don’t have to deal with the shit later on, when like I get the blame for exposing him to all this.”
Brando’s cell phone vibrated in his pocket. He ignored it. Even checking the caller ID while his friend was bloodletting would be ill-timed.
“I’m sure you guys’ll work it out. I mean, I’m sure he knows underneath that your intentions are caring.”
“Yeah, right. He thinks my intentions are suspect.”
“Are they?”
‘“Man, please. Come on, let’s get a drink.”
When Shane came out of the foyer guest washroom, he saw Omar and Brando out at the terrace bar, laughing and drinking like the old buddies they were and the new lovers they could easily be.
As far as Shane was concerned, this was just salt in the wound, especially considering what had happened the night before on Catalina Island.
“Well of course most gay men have money,” Senior Father declared, holding court in his den, tipsy on after-dinner cocktails.
“How you think that?” Shane challenged, even as Omar tried to quiet him down. Senior Father smiled with a mixture of lust and condescension. Omar’s beautiful young Puerto Rican was right up Senior Father’s alley, though he would never think of trespassing.
“So many of us spend so much time isolated and ostracized, young man,” Senior Father continued, a lecture for Shane, unneeded counsel for the cosigning, half-drunk guests in the room. “We are left to nothing but our own imaginations and our books and our plots and our drive to achieve in the face of monumental obstacles. And that drive, unencumbered by wives and girlfriends and unplanned parenthood, gives us an edge. And so we professionally focused men, who will hook up more often than not with other professionally focused men, create this great man gauntlet. And everybody knows that good, bad, or indifferent, the most powerful thing in this world is men united against everybody else. Of course most gay men have money. They’re men squared.”
“That is such a cliché,” Shane tisked.
“It’s a cliché because it’s true, my beauty. Don’t you agree, Brando?”
“I don’t know, Senior Father,” Brando answered. “It is a bit of a stereotype.”
“Then you’re a living stereotype, dear Bran,” Senior Father declared triumphantly. “You’re a successful entertainment lawyer, you drive a hundred-thousand-dollar Mercedes, you probably have a portfolio thick enough to choke a horse, your house is twice as big as mine—and I know what mine’s worth, and I don’t have a swimming pool. Now if I have money, which I do, thank you very much, I know you have money. Look around this room. There’s not an under-six-figure sissy household up in here.”
“Hold up, G.” Shane spoke up. “First of all, I ain’t no sissy, and second, this room ain’t representative of anything but a small segment of the black gay community, ’cause I ain’t makin’ no six figures.”
“Sorry about the sissy part, my sweet, but if you combine your computer analysis and troubleshooting income with Omar’s literary and journalistic booty, I’m sure you’d be well over six figures.”
“Yeah, but who says me and Omar a couple?” Shane shot back.
A nervous pang shot through Omar so fiercely that he almost lost his high.
“No rings yet, but you’re getting there.” Senior Father was on a roll. “And when you and Collier were together,” he continued, back on Brando, “what was he? A dentist? Not getting into your business, but I would have estimated your combined annual income at somewhere around half a mil? Close. You gay bros got buck. Lots of downpouring, disposable bucks, and no depe
ndents to spend it on.”
“Actually, ain’t that kinda sad?” Shane asked facetiously.
“Now that’s a cliché,” Senior Father retorted, and there was an outburst of applause and cheers throughout the room. Omar stood up and let out with a drunken wolf yelp. Shane was embarrassed and pissed.
“You drink too damn much,” he muttered to Omar under his breath, when Omar fell back down on the sofa next to him, laughing.
“And you don’t fuckin’ drink enough,” Omar blurted out, causing a pair of silver heads to look up and pause in synch.
The argument over whether Shane should have attended Senior Father’s winter supper, or even this snippy social debacle, was not the source of Omar and Shane’s latest quarrel. Tension had been brewing since they had made love on Catalina Island.
These are the facts.
Omar wanted to be bottom, which he did on occasion. But Shane obliged him so thoroughly that Omar called him out of his name. He called him Brando. Shane, however, was too deep in the get-good to stop, not insulted enough to pull out from the fabulous nut he was busting. Not insulted enough, that is, until the after-sex lull. He then grew quiet, and Omar could not figure out why.
“So what’s up?” Omar broached the mood.
“What’s my name, Negro?”
“Huh?”
“What’s my damn name?”
“Shane. What’s up, baby?”
“Next time you wanna be bottom, go get Brando to dick yo’ ass down! Pentejo!”
Brando watched the Omar and Shane drama from the other side of the room, not aware that he was the wind causing the storm.
His cell phone vibrated again. Discreetly he pulled it out of his pocket and checked the caller ID. It was Jeanette Bell. He stepped out onto the terrace and answered the call.
“Brando,” Jeanette answered with a strange calm.
“Hey, Jeanette, what’s up?”
“I killed a man.”
“What?” Suddenly everything was surreal. Brando looked back into the house where late-afternoon revelers were partying hardy while a friend was on the phone confessing the unthinkable.
“He raped me,” she continued, suddenly allowing the strange calm to shatter under the weight of the scene brought back so vividly by her own words. “I killed him.”
And then he heard the sobs.
“Baby—” He heard Clymenthia’s soothing tone in the near distance. Then it was Clymenthia on the phone.
“It was self-defense, Brando.”
“I’m sure the circumstances will support that,” he stuttered, shaken but fighting it. “We need to get her someone to discuss this with, a lawyer.”
“You’re a lawyer, Brando.”
“I’m an entertainment lawyer, Clymenthia.”
“You’re also a criminal lawyer.”
“Used to be.”
“You still are. We need you, Brando.”
“When did this happen?”
“Last Sunday, after we left the restaurant. Near our hotel in Culver City.”
“Has this been discussed with anyone else?”
“No.”
“Good. Don’t. I’m on my way.”
Brando made his apologies to Senior Father. Omar, seeing Brando rush toward the door, caught up with him, leaving Shane in a funk back in the den.
“Bran, what’s going on?” Omar could see the concern on his friend’s face.
“Something’s come up. I gotta go.”
“Anything I can do?”
“Not right now, man, thanks.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, thanks.”
The two friends hugged, and then Brando was out the door.
Chapter Thirty-one
The hour-long flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco could not have been smoother, but Brando’s emotional turbulence brewed from anxiety and trepidation. Criminal law was a lot different from working out royalty points on a record deal, fine-tuning foreign book publishing rights, and jostling with the suits in the tinsel town towers. It had been a long time since he’d tackled criminal law. The dread of it all was reacquainting itself, reminding him why he had abandoned it for the pastel world of entertainment law.
But Jeanette was his friend and she needed him. He could only imagine the devastation she was experiencing after so heinous an attack. He only hoped he still had what it would take to serve her well.
His flight arrived in San Francisco at 10:39 PM. Forty-five minutes later a cab dropped him off at the Mark Hopkins Hotel on Knob Hill.
“I’m falling apart,” Jeanette confessed to Brando after nearly an hour of tearfully retelling her terrible tale, “and you know me. I’m not used to falling apart. I’m not used to being like this.”
“Would you like some more tea, baby?” Clymenthia asked her gently.
“Please,” Jeanette answered.
“Bran?”
“No, thanks. I’m fine.”
Clymenthia squeezed Jeanette’s hand reassuringly, then got up and went into the service area of their hotel suite.
“I’m strong, a rock, resilient,” Jeanette said to Brando, trying to convince herself. “But this thing?…I don’t know…” She turned to Brando and looked him in the eye. “It’s taken something out of me, Brando. I’ve been robbed of something I’ll never get back.”
“What you went through, Jeanette, nobody should have to go through. What you did to defend yourself was what you had to do. You’re going to get through this.”
“I will, Brando. I have to.”
Throughout the night the three strategized. Brando convinced the two women that it was in Jeanette’s best interest to return to the jurisdiction of the incident and to both file a complaint and surrender to what most assuredly would be charges ranging from third degree manslaughter to first degree murder.
“That’s, more or less, a formality,” Brando reassured them. “The burden is on the prosecution to disprove a self-defense claim instead of forcing a defendant to prove the action was justified. And the concealed weapon is a nonissue. You were duly registered and licensed as a rural resident of Connecticut with special circumstances related to previous harassment. The state of California is a cooperative to your home state’s CCW statute.”
Still, this was not going to be a Cakewalk, and Brando knew it. He stayed up all night and researched legal precedents on his laptop. The case of Patricia Carbone was chilling. In 1985 the Somerset County, Pennsylvania, woman was sent to prison for life on a first degree murder charge for killing the man she alleged abducted her and tried to rape her. Her defense? Self-defense.
The next morning Jeanette and Clymenthia flew back down to Los Angeles with Brando. Later that afternoon Brando entered the Culver City Police Department and filed rape charges on behalf of his client. He also informed the recording detective that his client had killed her assailant in self-defense. Detective Franklin looked up from an unrelated report she was filling out. She approached Brando.
“I’d like to talk to your client, Mr. Heywood.”
“She’d like to talk to you, too, Detective. I’ll have her here in an hour.”
For the third time Jeanette Bell told the gruesome story, this time into an old police cassette recorder that whizzed coldly.
A court hearing was held the next day at 10 AM. By 10:15 Jeanette Bell was charged with a perfunctory second degree murder charge and released on her own recognizance. Awaiting Jeanette, Clymenthia, and Brando on the steps of the courthouse was a small group of reporters, tipped off that the lesbian partner of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist had been arraigned on murder charges stemming from the death of a Desert Storm war hero and alleged rapist. Brando shielded them as best he could and scurried them to his car. He had insisted that they stay at his home during the ordeal.
Dee heard about the case on the five o’clock news. She called Brando. He was just getting Jeanette and Clymenthia settled in when his cell phone rang.
“Unbelievable,” Dee said whe
n Brando answered the phone. “How’s she doing?”
“Pretty good, considering.”
“Give her my best, Brando.”
“I will.”
“And if there’s anything—”
“Thanks, Dee. Listen, I gotta go.”
“I understand.”
That night Brando, Jeanette, and Clymenthia sat in Brando’s dark den before a crackling fireplace. Orange light illuminated the furrowed brows, the searching eyes, and the brave and comforting half smiles on their silent faces. They each held and occasionally sipped at a glass of Merlot.
“You know something, Bran?” Jeanette finally said. “At first…at first I was just going to let it pass. I killed the man who did this to me…didn’t I? He paid with his life…didn’t he? Just let it pass. Let it pass. That’s what I was thinking. But that’s not what I was feeling. I couldn’t. I couldn’t let it pass. Killing him? All I got was blood…now I want justice.”
Chapter Thirty-two
Vanessa Ellerbee sat in the third pew of her husband’s church and half listened to the sweet lies and slick garbage he spewed during the service. Her mind was filled with thoughts she knew were as wrong as his sermons, but she simply could not mask those feelings of growing desperation. William had spent the night out again, and the good sex she was usually rewarded with once he got home from fucking and getting fucked was diminishing. William had come home that morning a beaten man, unfulfilled, his thirst unquenched for what he fully needed, and so when he crawled in bed next to her, and then crawled inside her, he was only half there. He had not been spurred on. These mystery men of the night were now pulling him all the way over, and it was scaring her.
Oh, she believed that William was the genuine article, a bona fide bisexual who couldn’t have one side and not the other. But this morning, when he came in, smelling of another man’s soap and cologne, he only half made love to her, with that half of himself he doled out after giving too much to the male lover he had spent the night with. His lovemaking was mechanical, dutiful, distant, and distracted, as if suddenly it was a take-it-or-leave-it kind of thing, something that he could do without. He fucked her as if he expected her to fuck him back with dick she of course did not have. When he finished with her, it was the least fulfilled she had been after he had been with a man. Oh how she missed the fucking she got once her man was fucked down by the late DuPré Dixon.
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