Jon Michaelsen's Blog: Ramblings, Excerpts, WIPs, etc., page 6

Implications: A Lesbian Detective Novel (Carpenter/Harding Series Book 9) by Barbara Winkes

Excerpt:

It was with some regret that
Ellie extracted herself from Jordan’s
embrace only a few hours later. She wanted to get to the station early. With a
little luck, she could find something to present to the lieutenant that
convinced him it was worth talking to the A.D.A.

Despite the interrupted sleep,
she felt like she had a lot more energy than in recent days. After having to
deal with Natalie, assessing and coping with the damage she’d done, Ellie
welcomed the opportunity to focus on more important matters.

The baby plan, first and
foremost.

Maybe, she’d have the opportunity
to clear an innocent man’s name.

The officer working in Records
regarded her with wide eyes when she made her request.

“Wow. That was a long time ago.
What you need might not even be in this building.”

“Could you take a look?”

“Yes, of course. Give me a
minute.”

The woman typed something on her
keyboard. She looked up at Ellie, giving her an apologetic smile. “You might
want to sit down for a moment. First, we’ll have to check if the file was
already digitalized.”

Ellie had to admit that she
hadn’t even considered these possible obstacles, but it made the case all the
more intriguing.

“That’s okay.” She hadn’t snuck
out of bed at 5:30 for
nothing. Ellie hid a yawn behind her hand.

“Okay, there’s a file here. I can
get it for you, but for the rest, you’ll have to go to the Archives. They open
at eight.”

“Thank you, that’s very helpful.”

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The officer disappeared behind a
door, and Ellie was left alone. Ten minutes later, she had to sit up straighter
in her chair to make sure she wouldn’t fall asleep. Another five minutes later,
the officer reappeared.

“I’m sorry about that,” she said.
“Can I get you anything else?”

“No, thanks. This is great. I’ll
go to the Archives later.”

Ellie found Maria Doss at her
desk. Her night seemed to have been fairly uneventful.

“Good morning. I take it you
didn’t have to notify the lieutenant about anything.”

“Why are you here already? What’s
wrong with you?”

Ellie laughed. “I was just about
to get myself a coffee. I take it you’d like one?”

“I shouldn’t, as I’m going to a
brunch later, but yes, please.”

A few minutes later, Ellie was
back, enjoying her coffee as she went over the specifics of the Wilder case.

These forms had been filled out
on a typewriter. She noticed the names of the investigators, who would be long
retired by now—or dead. She hoped she’d be able to find the retired ones and
talk to them.

George Wilder was a
twenty-year-old college student, accused of and convicted for killing his
girlfriend Stella Brown after a party. He claimed he was innocent, but the
evidence was damning: The murder weapon wrapped in a bloody shirt, hidden in
the closet of his dorm room. There was the mention of a witness who had seen
him go into Stella’s room the night of the murder. Where was the motive? Some
of their classmates suggested that jealousy might have been a reason, but if
Stella had been seeing someone else, no one knew about it. It remained unclear
whether this theory was valid.

Ellie assumed that she might find
more information at the courthouse. Something about Wilder had made the jurors
think that he had committed the atrocious crime. He had admitted that both he
and Stella had been drinking, but that he’d said goodbye to her at the door to
her dorm room and left. He appeared devastated over her death, and never
confessed.

Ellie tried to imagine the scene,
a young couple enjoying a night out together, going home to their respective
dorms, then…what? Someone had stolen into Stella’s room with an axe? That was a
big risk. She might wake up, try to defend herself, scream…unless there had
been more in her blood than alcohol.

She needed more of a background
on both the victim and convicted suspect. She started to jot down notes—Archives, Investigators, Family, Prison, Newspapers—when
a soft kiss to her neck alerted her to the fact that Jordan had finally made it to work.
The gesture was tender and quick, but of course Maria had noticed.

“You two are so adorable, it’s
annoying,” she said. “I’m out of here. Thanks for the coffee, Ellie, and good
luck.”

“So did you find anything?” Jordan was in a
much better mood than she had been when Allen approached them about the case.
Of course she had slept longer and taken the time for breakfast. Ellie also
prided herself in having to do something with Jordan’s much improved spirits,
including their conversation about the future and subsequent activities the
previous night.

“It’s too early to say, but for
one, the motive is still unclear to me from what I’ve seen. I have a list of
places to go.”

“It will be tough to find most of
the people involved at the time.”

“Yeah, but we already have Doreen
Byrd. She might be able to tell me where to find some of those people. And I
want to talk to the prison employees. I’ll take it up with the lieutenant when
he comes in, and he’ll hopefully agree that we talk to Valerie.”

Jordan looked doubtful. Ellie
thought that unfortunately, she had a reason—A.D.A. Esposito wouldn’t follow
along on a vague hunch, but Ellie needed her on her side.

“I can’t help it,” she said. “I
keep thinking about what Jill said—what if it was someone we cared about? We
can’t just forget about it because it happened sixty years ago. There might be
a murderer out there who’s been enjoying his freedom while this man spent his
life in prison.”

“It’s a shame if that’s what
happened. The system isn’t perfect.”

“Such dark thoughts on a
beautiful morning,” Valerie Esposito joked.

Ellie jumped to her feet.

“You’re here! Could I talk to you
for a second?”

“Actually, I was here to speak to
your boss for a second, and then I have a working brunch later. If you could
come to my office this afternoon?”

“Perhaps I could join you in the
lieutenant’s office? I swear this won’t take long.”

Lieutenant Carroll was already in
the room, observing the scene with amusement.

“You see, Counselor, it’s almost
impossible to say no to Detective Harding. Five minutes.”

“That’s all I need for now. Thank
you so much.”

She sent a triumphant smile to Jordan before
joining Carroll and Esposito.

Ellie usually got what she wanted. If there was anything new to find about this case, she’d find it.

Blurb:

Did George Wilder die in prison serving a life sentence for a crime he didn’t commit? A reporter asks Ellie on behalf of Wilder’s family to look into the decades old murder. When initial inquiries raise doubts about Wilder’s guilt, Ellie thinks that the real killer might have gone unpunished, but she doesn’t have much time to prove her theory.

Jordan gets more than she bargains for when she accepts a tip from a detective with another precinct. The murder of a local store owner turns out to have international implications.

Together, Jordan and Ellie work on the most important project of their lives…

More about author, Barbara Winkes :



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Barbara Winkes writes suspense and romance with lesbian characters at the center. She has always loved stories in which women persevere and lift each other up. Expect high drama and happy endings. Women loving women always take the lead.

Exclusive: Carved in Bone: A Henry Rios Novel (Henry Rios Mysteries Book 2) by Michael Nava and Giveaway!

Exclusive Excerpt:

(Chapter) 4.

Framed
by a million-dollar view of the Bay Bridge in the window of her
eighteenth-floor office on California Street, Ruth Fleming regarded me
skeptically. The large, gleaming desk that served as a buffer between us held
an in and out box and a complicated, many-buttoned phone but not a single
personal item; no framed family photographs or fancy paperweights for her. Her
desk proclaimed she was all business, as did the woman herself. Her makeup had
been painstakingly applied to project attractiveness without a trace of
sensuality just as the silk burgundy shawl that draped the padded shoulders of
her jacket seemed calculated to soften her authority. The nameplate on her desk
identified her as a vice president. The only other women I had seen when she
led me from the foyer to her office were secretaries. Larry Ross’s words may
have been good enough for her boss, Myles Landon, in L.A., but Fleming tapped
with doubtful fingertips the résumé she had asked me to bring her.

“I
have to say, Mr. Rios, you don’t seem to have any relevant qualifications for
this job,” she observed in a firm but modulated voice.

“That’s
what I told Myles Landon,” I replied. “He seemed to think my experience as a
litigator would be sufficient. You don’t agree?”

She
frowned. “No, I don’t, but Myles is the boss, so here we are.”

Clearly,
having an unqualified man foisted on her was a reminder that the old boys
network was alive and well. I sympathized but was hardly in a position to
concur. I needed the work.

“Look,
Ms. Fleming—”

“Mrs.
Fleming,” she said, automatically.

“Mrs. Fleming, give me a chance and if you think I’m not up to the job, I’ll quit and tell Landon it was my decision.”

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She
seemed a fraction less annoyed with me. “I’ll hold you to that, Mr. Rios.” She
picked up a folder from her in box and slipped it across the desk. “This case
involves a claim of accidental death which would require us to pay double the
policy amount.”

“How
much?”

“A
hundred thousand dollars. A lot of money, obviously, but not in and of itself
the reason for us to investigate. The cause of death is accidental
asphyxiation—apparently, there was a gas leak in the insured’s apartment. His,
uh, male companion was also in the apartment but he survived. The companion is
also the beneficiary. The claim was filed on his behalf a few days after the
accident, but we haven’t been able to reach him since.”

“Who
filed the claim?”

“The
agent who wrote up the policy. Not one of our agents. We bought the policy from
Confederation Insurance.”

“You
bought a policy from another insurance company? Is that a common practice?”

“Yes.
It’s called reinsurance. The selling company wants to spread the risk of loss
by carrying fewer policies and the buying company wants the business. It works
out for everyone. Anyway, we called the Confederation agent and he said he
can’t find the claimant either. Obviously, we’re not going to take any action
on the claim until we have a beneficiary.”

“That’s
all you want me to do? Find the beneficiary?”

She
allowed herself a tight little smile. “Well, to start. After that, I expect you
to do the standard investigation.”

“Which
involves?”

She
swiveled her chair away from me and reached for a fat binder on the credenza
behind her. “This is our operations manual. You’ll find a chapter on
investigating death claims.”

I
took the binder and the manila folder. “May I call you if I have a question?”

“I’m
vice president in charge of operations,” she said. “Perhaps you could call
Myles.”

I crammed the operations manual and the case file into
my briefcase and lugged it into the Gold Mountain Café, a Chinese-American
restaurant near Civic Center. The restaurant was close by the county law
library and within walking distance of both the civil and criminal courthouses.
I was drawn by its cheap prices, decent food and the willingness of its elderly
owners, the Chus, to let me camp out at a back booth for a couple of hours and
work when it was inconvenient to walk back to my office. If I was being
entirely truthful, Gold Mountain held one other big attraction for me: Adam,
the Chus’ twenty-three-year-old grandson. Adam was their jack-of-all-trades who
cooked, waited tables, ran the cash register and even, I saw, passing the place
late one night, mopped the floors after closing time.

The Gold Mountain was never crowded and often almost
empty. The menu featured both American diner food, burgers and Denver omelets,
and standard Chinese food, wonton soup and beef with broccoli, and hadn’t been
changed in years; new prices had simply been taped over the old ones. Unlike
the retro fifties diners springing up elsewhere in the city, Gold Mountain’s
long, Formica counter, checkerboard linoleum floor and red vinyl booths
appeared to actually date to the second Eisenhower Administration. Cracks in
the vinyl were covered with duct tape and Adam’s best efforts could not lift
the decades of scuff marks on the floor.

Adam was a fresh and vivid presence in the dim,
shabby, somnolent restaurant. He towered over his diminutive grandparents and
he was massively muscled, his big thighs and powerful chest straining the seams
of his black trousers and white dress shirt waiter’s uniform. His square-jawed,
big featured, broad face, topped with a close-cropped bush of inky hair, had a
warrior’s fierceness in repose but when he smiled, which he did frequently,
dimples and a natural sweetness emerged. Our brief conversations about the fate
of the Giants took a turn toward friendship when I asked him about the
photographs that inconspicuously lined the walls the restaurants; old
black-and-white images of Chinatown. The one that hung above the booth where I
usually sat depicted a counter restaurant filled with Chinese laborers, some in
Western clothes, some in Chinese garb, their hair in queues, plainly taken in
the late nineteenth-century.

“That was our first restaurant,” he explained. “On
Grant Street. There’s only a counter because back then most of the Chinese were
guys without families so they’d come in, sit down, eat and leave. You can still
find a few of those old counter restaurants in Chinatown.”

“What happened to their families?”

“The guys came over to work and make money to send
home. The women and kids stayed behind in China. Then the exclusion act kept
them out.”

“How many restaurants has your family owned?”

“Gold Mountain is number four. The one in the picture
was destroyed in the earthquake. We opened another one in North Beach but the
Italians burned it down.”

“They what?”

His good-natured expression soured a little. “The
Italians didn’t want any Chinese in their neighborhood so they torched the
place. The third one opened in Chinatown. Then my granddad opened this one in
the sixties. The Chinatown place got sold, so Gold Mountain is the end of our
little empire.”

“Are you going to take it over?”

Adam laughed. “No, this isn’t the life for me.” He
glanced toward his grandparents who were having an animated conversation in
Cantonese at the cash register. “A couple of years ago, he had a stroke and she
told him it was time for them to retire, but this place is more to him than a
business. This is what his dad and granddad handed down to him and he was ready
to die at the grill. She asked me to talk to him because,” he said with a grin,
“I’ve always been his favorite grandkid. I’m the only one who listened to his
stories. We made a bargain. I’d come and work for him and he’ll retire next
year, after New Year’s. Chinese New Year’s.”

“None of their children want the place?”

He laughed again. “My dad and his brothers and sisters
had to work here when they were kids. They hated it.”

“So, basically, you’re putting your life on hold to
work here until your grandfather’s ready to retire?”

“Sure,” he said with a quizzical grin as if my
question puzzled him. “It’s for my family.”

After that, he’d linger at my table and talk after he
took my order or, if he was in the kitchen, he’d come out and take his break
with me. I quickly realized there were two Adams. One was the easygoing,
all-American boy with the quick smile who loved sports and joked about being
too tired from his twelve-hour days to look for a girlfriend. The other was the
serious young man who had learned from his grandfather the difficult history of
the Chinese in San Francisco and who, when he spoke of it, showed flashes of
the warrior I had first taken him for.

Once when we were talking, I mentioned Yick Wo versus Hopkins, an 1886 Supreme
Court decision I had studied in my constitutional law class. In Yick Wo, the court ruled that a San
Francisco ordinance requiring permits for laundries violated the equal
protection clause because it was administered in a way that denied almost all
Chinese applicants. Adam knew all about Yick
Wo and its aftermath.

“That was just one law,” he said. “There were lots of
them to keep us in our place and when they didn’t work, the mobs did things
like burning down my family’s restaurant. The city’s always been a tough place
for us.”

“Even now?”

He frowned. “You ever really looked at Chinatown? I
mean, past the tourist joints? It’s a slum. San Francisco’s always been a tough
place for us.” The easy smile reappeared. “But there’s good and there’s bad,
right? You know why my granddad named this place Golden Mountain Café?”

“No, and I was curious since there aren’t any
mountains around.”

“In Cantonese, Gold Mountain is gam saan. That’s what the Chinese immigrants called San Francisco,
before they got here. They thought they’d come over and get rich.”

“Find streets paved with gold?”

“Yeah,” he said. “They didn’t find that but a lot of
our families found a home. Hey, is that all you’re going to eat?”

“Are you trying to fatten me up for a reason?”

He grinned. He’d made it clear he thought I was too
thin and often piled my plate with more food than I could possibly eat, then
packaged the leftovers.

Larry had warned me not to get romantically involved
my first year of recovery but I figured even he wouldn’t object to my discreet
infatuation with this smiling straight boy. Because clearly, Adam was a straight guy, cluelessly friendly
and open and at ease in his big body as only straight guys can be. A gay guy
who looked like him would have carried himself with the slightest bit of
theatricality to show off the gym-built muscles, and the eyes of gay men in the
city at that moment were all touched with a drop of anxiety, like a tiny tear that
never fell. Adam’s eyes were clear.

I felt Adam’s meaty fingers digging into my shoulders
and briefly massaging me. “Hey, what you got there?”

The operations manual was open on the table before me.
I explained to him what it was and the job I had taken on.

“I thought you did criminal law,” he said, positioning
himself in front of me, order pad in hand.

“Business is slow and a man’s gotta eat,” I said.

He smiled. “Speaking of eating, what’ll you have
today?”

“Surprise me?” I ventured.

“Tuna melt and tomato soup.”

“I have that most days. What’s the surprise?”

“Side of salmonella,” he said. “Kidding!”

He went off and I stared appreciatively at his broad
back and big, tight glutes, and then, with a sigh, turned my attention to my
work.

Compared
to the opaque legal documents I was accustomed to, the operations manual was
refreshingly to the point. Thus far I had learned that every life insurance
policy contained a contestability clause that allowed the insurer to challenge
the validity of the policy within two years of the death claim. Whether the
company exercised that option depended on the results of a preliminary inquiry
called a death confirmation investigation. This investigation centered on three
areas: whether the insured’s information on the original application—name, age,
gender, address—contained any material misstatements that would void the
policy; confirmation of the insured’s identity to make sure the insured and
decedent were the same person; and verification of cause of death. If those three
things checked out, the claim was paid.

I
opened the file on William Ryan, the man whose death I was investigating. There
wasn’t much there: a copy of the application, the policy itself, and the death
claim. At the time he applied for the life insurance policy, a year and a half
earlier, Ryan was thirty-two years old, lived on Eureka Street and listed his
occupation as businessman. Under intended beneficiary was the name Nick Trejo,
a twenty-two-year-old who lived at the same Eureka Street address. Beneath the
space for “beneficiary’s relationship to insured” was the word “roommate.”
Reading between the lines—two unrelated men, one older than the other, living
together in the heart of the city’s gay neighborhood—it was obvious Trejo was
Ryan’s lover and the older man had taken out the policy to provide for the
younger one in the event of his death.

“Roommate,”
“companion,” “friend,” “lover,” “partner.” 
I thought about all those words, some innocuous, some salacious, and
always pronounced with a slight, mocking hesitation that simultaneously
acknowledged and dismissed the bond, the way Ruth Fleming had paused before
describing Nick Trejo as William Ryan’s “male companion.” A man joined to a
woman was a love story. A man joined to a man was a smutty joke. Well, at least
the company wasn’t trying to withhold payment because Trejo was Ryan’s lover as
it might have in an earlier time. That was progress, I guess.

I
called Brendan Scott, the insurance agent who had issued Ryan’s policy, from
the restaurant payphone and made an appointment to see him at three. That gave
me an hour to kill. What could I learn about William Ryan in that hour? It
occurred to me I could look up his obituary at the nearby city library.

Mrs.
Chu was working the cash register. She took my money and made change and I went
back to the booth and left a five for Adam who was back in the kitchen.

“Will
you tell Adam I said goodbye?” I asked Mrs. Chu on my way out. She smiled and
nodded.

The
last of the city’s Indian summer had been washed away in a violent storm over
the weekend. The damp streets were filled with small tree branches and the
gutters were clogged with leaves. The gray sky cast a funereal pall across the
city where everything and everyone, cars, buses, streetcars, pedestrians,
seemed to move in slow motion. I pushed open the doors to the gloomy library
building with cold fingers. A reference librarian directed me to the fourth
floor reading room where back issues of magazines and newspapers were piled on
wooden shelves.

Ryan
had died three weeks earlier. I pulled a month’s worth of issues of the city’s
gay newspaper and flipped through the first one to the obituaries. They took up
two pages, ranging in length from a full column to a couple of paragraphs, all
illustrated with thumbnail black and white photographs of the eulogized
men—they were all men—some no more than blurred snapshots, others studio
portraits.

I
scanned the names and didn’t find William Ryan among them but I did see a
familiar face grinning at me from one of the photographs. Tom Rustin. He’d been
in his last month of residency at the halfway house when I’d arrived. I noticed
him immediately because he and I were the only guys at the house who weren’t
white. I remembered his imperturbability and how, when he spoke at a meeting,
he always began, “Hi, family.” Now he was dead: “Complications from HIV. His
only regret was not being able to pick up his nine-month AA chip at the Show of
Shows.”

I
leafed through three more issues of the paper and fifty-seven obits before I
found William Ryan’s notice. The accompanying photograph showed an attractive,
dark-haired man with light-colored eyes, a sharp nose and a forceful jaw,
wearing a dress shirt and tie, a phone pressed to his ear.

Bill Ryan was born on August 18, 1955, in Eden Plains,
Illinois. He came to San Francisco in 1971 and never left. He got an Associate
Arts degree from City College and worked as real estate agent with Bay Realty
before opening his own office in the Castro in 1977. Many of the neighborhood’s
Victorians were sold by Bill. In 1980, Bill turned his agency into the
successful property management company he was running at the time of his sudden
death. He is survived by his faithful office manager, Doris Chen, and his
partner of five years, Nicholas Trejo. In keeping with Bill’s wishes, there
will be no memorial.

It
took me a couple of readings to decode the terse notice. Bill Ryan was clearly
a guy in a hurry. He would only have been twenty-two when he started his own
real estate agency and got caught up in the boom years when gay men were
transforming a quiet Irish neighborhood called Eureka Valley into the epicenter
of the city’s gay life they renamed the Castro. Property management implied
property to manage which made me think he had not just been a seller but a
buyer. Like many other young men before him, going back to the Gold Rush, Ryan
had come to California to make his fortune.

He
was only eighteen when he uprooted himself from the Midwest and moved across
the county. Surely, his reason for such a dramatic migration wasn’t to attend a
community college or work in real estate, things he could have done anywhere.
No, I surmised that he, like thousands of other young men in the ’70s in
similar situations, had fled his small-minded Midwestern town for San Francisco
to find a community of his own kind. And, because he was so young, I had to
think there had been some serious trouble at home behind his move. The
likeliest scenarios were either that he’d been discovered and his family had
thrown him out, or, fearing imminent discovery, he’d run off before the shit hit
the fan and become another gay refugee in a city filled with us.

Unlike
other refugees, however, it did not appear he had immersed himself in that
community. Their obituaries were filled with mention of gay clubs and groups to
which the men had belonged, gay charitable organizations in which they had been
active, and included long lists of surviving friends and personal messages of
grief from them. Nothing like that for Bill Ryan. A casual reader of his
circumspect death notice might not have even realized he was gay. Even the
mention of his lover, Nick Trejo, was cast as his “partner” suggesting a
professional rather than a personal relationship.

No
family was mentioned among his survivors, confirming my suspicion that he was
estranged from it. We were a generation of men who, when we had come out as
gay, had been stricken from our family trees, and become non-persons whose
names were spoken, if at all, in shamed whispers. Both my parents had died
before I had to come out to them, and my only sibling, my sister, Elena, was
also gay. But I did have uncles, aunts and cousins—none of whom I had seen
since my mother’s death a decade earlier because I hadn’t wanted to come out to
them. Maybe my Mexican, Catholic relatives would have been okay with a gay
nephew and cousin but more likely they would have been disgusted or appalled.
Even before my parents had died, and after I’d left home for school, I’d seen
my relatives so rarely, it hardly seemed worth risking rejection, so I drifted
away. The habit was so ingrained, I had even drifted away from my sister,
though she had probably saved my life.

Brendan
Scott’s insurance agency was on the same block of Market Street as Ryan’s
property management company. Their two businesses were separated by a
dry-cleaners, a camera shop and a coffee shop where, Scott was telling me, the
two men sometimes met for coffee.

“Not
that Bill had much time for socializing,” Scott said. He was fiftyish, paunchy
and going gray but he had a salesman’s easy smile and twinkling eyes, as if he
was about to tell you a particularly good joke. “Nope, it was always business
with him. Terrible how he died, though I guess it was better than AIDS.”

“What
does that mean?”

The
smile flickered off. “People would have thought he was one of those sleazy South
of Market guys hanging out in bathhouses with their legs up in the air and a
bottle of poppers stuffed up their nose.”

“I
don’t think the virus limits itself to them,” I said mildly.

He
shrugged. “All I’m saying is Bill wasn’t like that. He was about the
straightest gay guy I knew. He worked long hours and then went home to Nick.”

“You
know Nick Trejo?”

“I
only met him a couple of times,” he corrected me. “Cute kid. Younger than
Bill.”

“You
sold the policy to Bill.”

He
nodded. “Sure did. He came in one day out of the blue and said he wanted to
make sure Nick was taken care of if something happened to him. Lots of gay guys
do that, you know, to make sure there’s something for the boyfriend the family
can’t get to.” He frowned. “Of course, these days, with the virus, it’s getting
harder and harder to write a life insurance policy if the applicant’s gay.”

“How
would your company know if someone’s gay?”

“Red-lining,”
he replied. “If an application for life insurance comes out of certain zip
codes where there’s lots of gay men, the company rejects it.”

“That’s
okay with you?”

“No,”
he replied firmly. “It’s not. There are ways around it—” he paused. “I think I
better keep them to myself.”

“Sure,
I understand. Getting back to Bill Ryan’s policy. You filed the claim when he
died. Did Nick ask you to?”

He
shook his head. “I left him messages but he didn’t call back so I went ahead
and filed the claim to preserve his rights.”

“Do
you have any idea where he might be?”

“Sorry,
no, but you let me know if you find him.”

“Of
course,” I said, standing up. I noticed the gay paper on his cluttered desk was
opened to the obituaries.

He
noticed me noticing it. “My granddad called the obits the old man’s sports
page. Didn’t think I’d be paying much attention to them before I was his age.”

“Hard
times,” I said.

“You
keep safe now,” he replied.

Maybe
too late for that, I thought, but did not say, not wanting him to write me off
as one of those South of Market guys.

I
went around to Ryan’s office but the door was locked with a handwritten sign
taped to it: CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.

A
light drizzle fell from the darkening sky onto a narrow street in Hayes Valley
where I stood before the tumbled-down, uninhabited, nineteenth-century cottage
where Hugh Paris had lived. My lover. A recovering junkie, ex-rent boy, the
black sheep of a wealthy family, whose murder remained officially unsolved.
When I’d first returned here after leaving rehab, it was for evidence that Hugh
had really existed and not been simply a figment of my alcohol-soaked
imagination. In my mind, I walked myself up the creaky steps, through the door
and the oddly barren living room into the bedroom. There, on a mattress on the
floor, Billie Holiday crooning in the background, the damp sheet twisted around
our feet, we had what was now called unsafe sex but which, at the time, I had
thought of as making love. Standing there in the drizzle, I wondered if, in our
heedless exchange of fluids, one of us had passed the virus to the other. Not
that it mattered to Hugh. He lay beneath the snow in a Boston graveyard. He was
twenty-six when he was murdered and I remember thinking, how can that be? Who
dies that young? Now the city was filled with gay men wondering if they would
live to see thirty.

What
if I got sober just so AIDS could kill me, I asked Larry one particularly
anxious morning. Have you been sick, had any of the symptoms? he asked. No, I
said, but—He cut me off. If you start down the road of what ifs, it’s going to
lead you back to the bottle. I’m afraid, Larry. Afraid of what? A possibility?
Something that might never happen? It’s more of a probability, I said. Is it
happening today, he demanded with an asperity I realized later was a measure of
his own anxiety. No, I said. Then stop these fantasies and learn to live in
your body. What? You heard me, he said. Your mind lives in fear and regret but
your body can only live right now, in this moment. So, take some deep breaths
and live in your body. It’s a safer place to be than in your head.

The
drizzle turned into a cold, pelting rain. I opened my umbrella and headed home.

Author, Michael Nava



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Michael Nava is the author of an acclaimed series eight novels featuring gay, Latino criminal defense lawyer Henry Rios who The New Yorker, called “a detective unlike any previous protagonist in American noir.” The New York Times Book Review has called Nava “one of our best” writers. He is also the author of an award-winning historical novel, The City of Palaces, set at the beginning of the 1910 Mexican revolution. In addition, he is the writer/producer of the Henry Rios Mysteries Podcast which adapted the first Rios novel, Lay Your Sleeping Head into an 18-episode audio drama. In 2019, he also founded Persigo Press, through which he hopes to publish LGBTQ writers and writers of color who write genre fiction that combines fidelity to the conventions of their genre with exceptional literary merit.

Excerpt: The Yellow Canary (The L.A. After Midnight Quartet) by Steve Neil Johnson

Excerpt:



December, 1956



Chapter 1

He heard the music, wisps of sullen jazz that ached with loneliness, through the open back window as the unmarked patrol car cruised past the bar. No name above the bar door, just a flashing sign in the shape of a caged bird, the glow of neon reflecting yellow ripples in puddles on the gum-scarred sidewalk.

Jim Blake leaned back in the rear seat and told himself to relax.  All he had to do was wait for someone to ask him home.  How hard could it be?  He rested his right hand on the armrest, but his fingers couldn’t keep still.  He lit a Chesterfield and tossed the match out the window.

The Santa Anas had kicked up that evening, a restless wind scuttling leaves and litter in the gutter, an arid heat that blew through the window and left his face taut and his throat dry.

At the wheel Sergeant Hollings slowed to a stop down the block, nestling the Plymouth Savoy between two parked cars.  He glanced over his shoulder at Jim and beamed.

“You ready to get lucky?”  Hollings’s grin was wide.  His bristly dirty blond crew cut and chubby cheeks gave him a boyish look, despite being nearly forty.  But Blake had heard around the precinct house that the sergeant’s amiable manner belied a stubborn streak and an unerring sense of right and wrong.  It had kept him from involvement in the gambling, prostitution, bookmaking, and loan sharking payoff scandals that had almost brought the department down.  Hollings wasn’t one to ever back off, and that had gotten him in trouble with the brass and left a once promising career floundering in Vice.

Blake wasn’t going to let that happen to him.

Riding shotgun, Detective Ryan shifted in the front seat to look back at him.  He had a beer keg for a belly, so it wasn’t easy.  “Let’s look you over, you handsome devil.”  He raised one bushy eyebrow—thick as a mustache—and licked his lips.  “Mmmmm, they’re going to eat you up.” He was enjoying himself too much to even try to wipe the smirk off his face.

“The tie will get them,” Hollings commented, playing along and nodding approvingly.

“Yeah, they like bright colors.”

Blake felt his cheeks flush and smiled gamely; he had expected a hazing on his first night on the job, and it looked like he was going to get it.

Hollings gave him a wink.  “Go get ‘em, tiger.”

Climbing out of the back seat, Blake hesitated on the sidewalk, pulling on his sport jacket.  He was a big man, six foot two, with broad shoulders.  He had bought the jacket hurriedly this morning from a men’s store on Vermont, and it felt a little tight.  It was hard to find jackets off the rack wide enough to accommodate the span of his shoulders, and he hadn’t had time for alterations.

“Oh, a little piece of advice,” Ryan said, leaning out the window, his expression suddenly serious.

Blake bent toward the front passenger window expectantly.

“If you have to pee, hold your dick tight and your buns tighter.”

Shaking his head, Blake forced a grin, and turned down the street.  Hollings rolled down his window and stuck his head out.  “And if they ask you if you’re butch or fem, be sure to tell them you’re fem.”  He chortled loudly.

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He made his way toward the bar.  The sidewalks were nearly empty tonight, but it was early.  A few figures, their voices scarcely carrying above the din of traffic, huddled at the corner, and across the way a man exited a tavern, quickly put a hat on his head obscuring his face, and strode rapidly away.

Blake remembered this strip from shore leave during the war, spanning Fifth Street from the downtown central library to the blocks east of Main, where dozens of bars had been plastered with warnings for service members, off-limits to military personnel.  The queer run.  The streets had been filled with people then, carousing from bar to bar, the all-night coffee shops packed, the parks alive with shifting shadows.

He wondered briefly if he’d made the right choice.  He’d also been offered a position in the abortion unit in the homicide division, but had turned it down.  Investigating and arresting the victims of botched back-alley abortions—mostly poor women, Negro and Mexican, who didn’t have the money to go to the legit physicians who clandestinely performed the procedure—left a sour taste in his mouth.              Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad.  And in a short while, he would be out of Vice, and he could forget the whole thing.  He’d had bad memories before.  The war.  The war, and other things.  No, he’d made the better choice.

The city had changed so much in the last decade that he hardly recognized it upon his arrival last week.  The sprawl spread straight to the ocean, and gas rationing and the tops of headlights painted black to protect the city from bombing had given way to a building boom and streets snarled with traffic.  The new super highways promised to change all that, and construction was underway all over the city.

Gone were the days when servicemen squeezed two to a bed in overcrowded Ys, and the sound of snoring young men would follow him down to the communal bathroom late at night, where a constant commotion of soldiers coming and going from the ports in Long Beach and San Pedro left the showers busy all night long.

After what had happened here, it was a wonder he could come back.  But ten years was a long time, and the city had called to him, first in his nightmares after the war ended and he had returned to Wisconsin.  And then, as a gnawing ache that wouldn’t let go until he gave his notice to the Milwaukee Police Department and hopped a train to the coast.  Yes, a short stint in Vice, and then he would be on to better things.  He’d be making $464 a month, one dollar and eighty-two cents per hour after taxes, social security and his contribution to the Widow’s Fund were taken out.

And all he had to do was sit at the bar and wait for someone to ask him home.

Though sodomy was a felony that could carry a life sentence in California, none of that would even come into play this evening, he had been assured during training.  Section 647 of the Penal Code prohibited soliciting a lewd act.  A misdemeanor.  A vag-lewd rap.

A sudden gust of dry wind lashed at his face, and he closed his eyes against grit flung upward from the sidewalk.  It had always been a dirty city, that hadn’t changed.  Bits of litter squabbled in the gutter, and the front page of a tattered tabloid darted up and pressed against his ankle, then was swept away.  He had seen the scandal sheet earlier that evening: an obviously doctored photo of a city councilman and a sultry blonde B-movie actress cropped in the shape of a heart below the masthead, and the blazing headline proclaiming the two had run off to a secret love nest in Mexico.  The whole city was talking about it.

As he approached the bar, his stomach didn’t feel right, and he drew deeper on his cigarette, as if that might soothe him, exhaling a plume of smoke through his nostrils.  He tossed the spent cigarette into the street and quickly lit another.

Blake hesitated at the door, gazing up at the neon sign above, momentarily mesmerized as the yellow glow played on his face.  He couldn’t tell if the bird was supposed to be flying, or just trying to escape his cage.

Music drifted through the closed door.  Now it was rock and roll.  He recognized the song by a singer who was raising a ruckus with young girls—the one who sounded like a Negro—and had been popping up on The Ed Sullivan Show.

He took one last drag—forgetting he had just lit the cigarette—flicked it in the gutter, and stepped inside.  It took his eyes a moment to adjust to the dimness of the bar, a lazy pall of smoke hanging in the air and softening the shadows.   The establishment was filled with well-dressed gentlemen, alone and chattering in groups; at first, it seemed like any other after-work spot, most of the men in suits and ties, a few more casual.  An ordinary layout: a pool table to the right, a brightly lit juke box opposite, and beyond the crowd of men, a liquor bar and stools at the far end.  A bit better heeled, perhaps, than the cop bars he’d frequented in Milwaukee.

But then something happened he wasn’t so used to.  He felt every eye in the bar drift his way, assessing him in a manner that was hard to define; a bold stare, then the gaze shifted away.  There had been a lot of that during the war, in commissaries, in the barracks, in the holds of aircraft carriers, in the open shower stalls at the Y.  Eyes that lingered, then drifted.

His face felt suddenly hot and the room overbearingly oppressive.  He found himself avoiding the glances of the men he passed and headed straight for the men’s room.  His training had led him to think this would be easy, but now that he was here, inside the bar, he felt something strangely like panic.  The can was in an alcove off the far end of the bar counter, next to a side door that led to the alley.

Blake was relieved to find himself alone in the bathroom.  He splashed water in his face at the sink and patted his cheeks on the revolving cloth towel from the wall dispenser.

He gazed into the small mirror.  A crack, snaking diagonally across the glass, seemed to separate his head from his body in a disturbing way.  He had never liked the way he looked—seeing too much of his father in his square jaw and wide-set eyes that seemed too dark to be blue—but others seemed to differ, and he had noticed people’s admiring glances since the days he played football in high school.  His hair was black and wavy—sometimes to the point of unruly—and an unrepentant curl often looped down on his forehead that no amount of Brylcreem could keep in place.

He was a lot older now than when he’d last been in L.A., nearly thirty.  He’d been a kid back then—with fake papers to get him into the Navy—but tall and broad and scrappy enough to convince his commanders he belonged there.

Jack Spencer had been young, too, just a few years older.  His terrible death still haunted him for so many reasons.  His death, and the long, hot train ride to Barstow, where Blake told lies to Jack’s parents, maybe the best thing he had ever done.  They had been kind people with hurt in their eyes, and he’d wondered at how different Jack’s childhood must have been from his, in this small desert town surrounded by brothers and sisters.

His own mother was barely a memory, the Ivory soap she smelled of long after she bathed him, the flowered cotton apron she wore in the kitchen when baking him brownies.  And after she was gone, only his father, always with a bottle; he’d seen him only once upon his return from the war.

When he went back into the barroom, nobody seemed to notice him.  He found an empty stool at the far end of the bar near the restroom and sat down.  He glanced around casually as he waited for the bartender, who stood at the other end of the counter mixing a drink, to fill his order.

Idly he wondered why his training officers had chosen this particular bar.  There were so many along this strip, like the Crown Jewel, with its neon crown above the front door and a strict coat and tie dress code.  Maxwell’s, near Pershing Square, with its unsavory crowd of self-pitying drunks, shrieking queens and young studs looking for an extra dollar and a place to sleep for the night.  And further west, the bars on La Brea, lots of them, and the Pink Poodle on Pico and the Red Raven on Melrose.  He’d heard about them all in training.  His eyes came to rest on a cage hung above the bar, fluttering with yellow canaries.

“I think it’s sad, keeping them like that, stuck in a smoky room.  They ought to be out, making things more beautiful in the world.”

Blake turned to the speaker, who was sitting on the next stool, noticing him for the first time.  He was slight, somewhere in his thirties, nattily dressed in a crisp business suit, his hat lying beside his drink on the bar.

“My name’s Jim.”  Blake offered a firm handshake.  The man’s eyes brightened and he looked heartbreakingly glad someone was talking to him.

“I’m Charlie.”

“Good to meet you, Charlie.  Come here often?”

“Not so much.  I’m not really a bar person, you see.  I work downtown, with the Department of Transportation.  Accounting.  How about you?”

“I’m new in town,” Blake drawled.  He remembered what he’d been taught.  Be friendly.  Engage them in conversation.  Gain their confidence.  Act like they’re the most interesting person in the world.  Wait for the pass.  Or any attempt at physical contact.  “Still looking for work… and a place to stay.”

Maybe he had gone too far too fast, because the man swallowed nervously, an expression of longing on his face, as if he wanted to ask Blake home but didn’t dare hope, and looked away shyly.

Suddenly he felt sorry for the guy, and wondered if there was someone else, anyone else, he could snare.  His eyes began to wander around the room, pausing on a figure who looked like none of the others, standing aloof, leaning in a dim corner by the juke box, the neck of a beer bottle gripped in one hand, his thumbs planted in the pockets of his Levi’s.  He had on a skin-tight black T-shirt that showed off his narrow waist and muscular chest.  His biceps were large and in the dimness Blake spotted a tattoo, something winged, like so many men got in the war.  The man was pointedly ignoring everyone in the bar; when his eyes rose and he surveyed his surroundings, it was as though he saw through them.  Trade, Blake thought.

A queeny young man who appeared underage kept passing by the man, looking him up and down in undisguised admiration.  The boy’s shirttails were tied in a knot at his abdomen like a calypso dancer, and his pastel lavender Capri pants could get him arrested on the street.

The man in the black T-shirt continued his pose of utter indifference, but that didn’t seem to deter the kid.  Through the fog of smoke and milling bar customers, the boy seemed to sense he was being watched and caught Blake looking his way.  He tilted his blond head, his eyes narrowing, his mouth forming a frown.

Blake turned away.  He didn’t want to arrest a kid.  Finally the bartender approached, the sleeves of his white dress shirt rolled up, and asked for his order.

“Draft beer would be fine.”

“You got it.”

The bartender nodded, looking him over in something akin to recognition, and went down the bar.  Just then, the kid in the calypso shirt leaned over the bar and spoke to the bartender in a hissing tone, glancing over at Blake.  There was a knowing smirk on the young man’s face, and Blake couldn’t be sure, but he thought he heard the words, “Hollywood Reject.”

The bartender didn’t seem to need a moment to think about what he’d been told; he went directly to a high shelf behind the bar, rather ceremoniously picked up a glass, and filled it from a tap and set it on the counter before Blake.             Blake couldn’t be sure, but he thought a murmur arose from the crowd behind him.  To Charlie, the bartender said, rather pointedly, “Can I refresh your drink?” He gazed down at the slight man and subtly—so subtly Blake wouldn’t have noticed if he wasn’t alert—shook his head at him, warning.

Charlie swallowed and blinked, and looked over at Blake, his eyes suddenly filled with anxiety.

“Oh,” he said, in almost a whisper.

Blake peered down at the dry glass in front of him and realized he had been made.  Glancing down the bar, he saw all the other glasses were dewy with condensation, taken from a refrigerated box under the bar.

The music on the juke box had stopped and the room was strangely quiet.  He looked around and was struck by the realization that everyone in the bar was watching him.  Not directly, but out of the corners of their eyes.  Waiting.  He had seen that look before, like cattle in a slaughterhouse.  Several men broke from their friends and headed for the front door, putting their hats on before they got outside.

Charlie swiveled toward him, as if to get off his stool, panic written on his face.  He lost his balance and his knee touched Blake’s and his right palm landed briefly on Blake’s shoulder.

It was enough.

Blake slid his badge and identification onto the bar beside his glass.  “You’re under arrest,” he announced.  “I want you to get up quietly and follow me.  Do you understand?”

Charlie nodded, but he couldn’t seem to stand on his own, and Blake had to grip his arm with both hands to keep him from collapsing.

The bar patrons stared at them, openly now, and there was something in their gaze Blake hadn’t seen before, and it wasn’t the look of cattle.  Suddenly he felt unsafe.  The front door appeared way too far to him and the path too crowded, so Blake pulled Charlie past the restroom and to the side door.

The door slammed shut behind them, and when nobody followed, the sense of alarm Blake had felt just moments before quickly dissipated.  A stale wind blew down the dark cobblestone alley lined with dumpsters overflowing with garbage.  It brought a fetid smell to his nostrils and he could feel slick grease on the stones under his feet.  One direction led to utter darkness, the other, the lights and traffic of Fifth Street a dozen or so yards away.  A scattering of stars rose overhead.

Charlie collapsed to his knees, clinging to Blake’s legs.  “Please,” he begged.  “Please don’t do this.”  He looked up pleadingly.

“It’s just a vag-lewd charge,” Blake said gruffly.  “You pay the fine and you forget it.”

“I’ll lose my job,” he whimpered.  “I’ll lose everything.”

Blake looked toward Fifth helplessly and wished he could just get out of this stinking alley.

The grip of Charlie’s hands tightened on his slacks.  “I’ll have to register for the rest of my life.  I won’t be able to get another job.”

“Not if you plead.” He wasn’t actually sure of that, but he felt a strange need to reassure this slight little man who had looked at him with such longing minutes before.

“Please,” Charlie whispered.  He looked up at Blake and light from Fifth Street glinted on his darkened face, catching the tears welling in his eyes.

Blake was getting annoyed now.  His training officers would be wondering what was taking him so long, and that sick feeling in his stomach had come back.  “Look,” he said, shaking his head, “it’s just the way things are.”

Then Charlie’s entire body began to shake.  Blake had seen grown men cry before, in the war, in battle, but not like this.  His whole body seemed to convulse as he clung to Blake’s legs, and a deep sound came from his throat, an eerie wail that floated in the darkness all around them.

“Aw, c’mon.  Get up.”

Charlie shook his head, silent now, cowering at his feet.

“You knew what you were doing, coming here.”

“I’ll never come back here again.  I promise.”

Blake sighed.  His mouth was dry and more than anything he needed a cigarette.  Reaching into his jacket pocket, he found his Chesterfield pack and lit up.  He tossed the match on the ground.

He looked to the far end of the alley, lost in darkness, a darkness pure and deep.  He could let him go, he thought.  Just let him walk into the night.  No one would know.  Tell Sergeant Hollings and Detective Ryan there had been no nibbles tonight.  Try as he might, he couldn’t get any of the fruits to make a pass.  He wasn’t cut out for it.  He must not have whatever they were looking for.  Then he could just up and quit this job and forget the whole thing, forget the assessing eyes that lingered, the smoke hanging low, the hot oppressiveness of the bar, forget that ache that had brought him back here in the first place.  Just hop the next train to Wisconsin and crawl on his knees to get his old job back.

He sighed again, exhaling a plume of smoke.

Charlie looked up at him hopefully.  His voice croaked.  “Please?”

Then Blake heard something in the opposite direction, perhaps the backfire of an engine, and he turned his head and saw the unmarked Plymouth crawling down Fifth.  It stopped there, at the entrance to the alley, and through the windshield he could see Hollings and Ryan gazing at them and knew his decision had already been made for him.

Chapter 2

Paul Winters loved their nights out with the girls.

He grinned and winked at David across the table in the Roman Room of the Biltmore Hotel.  David took a sip of wine and grinned back at him.  Earlier that evening they had picked up Jeannie and Pat, Jeannie sitting across from him in the front seat of his Ford, Pat with David in the back, just like a real double date.  They had joined a dozen of their crowd at a long table under wrought iron chandeliers in the Pompeii-inspired sunken dining room and to all intents and purposes they appeared to be a group of married couples sitting side-by-side enjoying a night on the town.

After a toast to Paul for winning another high-profile case and sending a Sunset Strip gangster to life in prison for the killing of a mobster rival, the conversation turned to the other headline everybody was talking about.  City Councilman Bullock had run off with a starlet named Victoria Lynn and they were reportedly holed up in a love nest in Tijuana.

Paul had seen her in supporting roles in several films—she made at least three a year—and remembered her as a rather stiff blonde beauty.  Jeannie, who worked as a make-up artist at Universal and knew all the Hollywood gossip, was holding court.

“It’s all a big lie,” she announced breathlessly.  She had a shiny turned-up little nose, bouncy auburn hair, and a petite frame.  Paul had brought her as his date for last year’s Christmas party at the D.A.’s Office, and they’d had a big laugh together when everybody said what a great couple they were.  “None of it even happened.  It couldn’t have happened.”

Parker Huston, two seats down, leaned his chubby torso forward in his seat, his cheeks red from a bit too much to drink, and picked up a steak knife as if readying himself for battle.  He rarely suffered being wrong about anything regarding movies or the film industry’s social scene.  The fact that he worked as a librarian and had no connections whatsoever in Hollywood or to movie stars was beside the point.  “Now, dear, how is that possible?  It was in Confidential, and everybody knows that particular publication has spies everywhere and pays for information.”

Pat suddenly came to attention.  Nobody—especially Parker—was going to question her girlfriend’s credentials on anything Hollywood.  Or maybe she was just wrangling for a fight because her high heels fit too tightly.  She had looked so miserable in full make-up, a frilly dress and a stole that evening, instead of the jeans and checkered shirt she usually wore for her landscaping business, that Paul felt sorry for her.  Even her short hair, usually straight and the color of straw, had a limp wave in it.  Everybody had been instructed to make a big fuss about how good she looked, but Paul just saw a boy forced into drag.

David had known Jeannie for quite a while through his political activities and a homophile magazine the two volunteered at, but the girls had become close to them only after a frantic call in the night from Jeannie that Pat had been arrested for masquerading.  Paul had quietly advised her attorney that the late nineteenth-century law against wearing the apparel of the opposite sex had been ruled unconstitutional in 1950—despite the fact that vice officers continued to use the statute to arrest men and women whose clothing violated gender norms.  Pat had been released the next day.

“Go ahead,” Pat urged, eyes shining, “Tell them.  Tell them about Victoria Lynn.”

Jeannie glanced around at the surrounding tables to make sure no one was listening, then bent low in a conspiratorial whisper.  “She’s a Lizabeth Scott, if you know what I mean.”

That caused a buzz around the table, and Paul crooked his head at David quizzically.

In response, David grinned and cupped his hand to the side of his cheek and mouthed the word dyke.

Then Paul remembered.  A nasty exposé in Confidential the year before had sent Scott’s career into freefall.  According to the tabloid, her name and number had been found in the top secret address book of a madam who provided a stable of gorgeous blondes to male—and female—stars.

“That doesn’t surprise me,” Parker put in, clearly trying to wrestle back control of the conversation.  “The most glamorous stars are.  Dietrich, Hepburn, Garbo…”

“You think everybody in Hollywood is,” David said.

“I think everybody is, because…” Parker replied, refilling his glass, “everybody is.”

“Victoria Lynn is a goddess” Pat announced.  “I love that woman!  And she’s one of us.”

“Don’t get her started on Victoria Lynn or we’ll be here all night,” Jeannie warned.  Her lower lip pouted.  “I’m totally jealous.”  But Paul noticed the two women were playing footsy all the while under the table.

The maitre d’ brought a note to David, who read it silently, frowned, glanced up at Paul, squinted his eyes meaningfully, then rose and excused himself.  Paul watched as David made his way across the restaurant, past the standing filigreed candelabra, and into the main lobby.  He wondered what he was going to do about David.  He was so adorable, and they had such a great time together, but he was way too young for the deputy district attorney.  Just out of college, and the seven year age difference was a huge gap in maturity and sensibility.  Despite David’s rather conservative Jewish upbringing, he could be impulsive—and indiscreet—and that was dangerous in a lot of ways.  And the political stuff… just this evening on their way to pick up the girls he’d carped about how wrong it was that they had to pretend to be Normals—as David called them—in order to be welcomed in a group in restaurants and nightclubs.

“But you love going out with Jeannie and Pat!” Paul had pointed out.

“That’s not the point!” David had groaned.

Paul took a Marlboro pack from his pocket, lit up, and laid the red-and-white box beside his wine glass.

Pat began to sing melodiously, “You get a lot to like, filter, flavor, flip-top box!” mimicking the commercials on TV.

Parker added his two cents worth, only after making sure the waiter was beyond hearing range. “Oh, my, my.  You do know, Mr. Marlboro Man, Mr. Paragon of Masculinity, Mr. Tall-Dark-and-Handsome, Mr. Future District Attorney, back in the twenties that particular cigarette was originally marketed to women… and nelly queens.  The slogan back then was ‘Mild as May!’”

“It’s poison,” Jeannie said disgustedly.  “Did you read that article in Reader’s Digest?”

“That’s what the filter’s for,” Paul countered, grinning good-naturedly, and tapping an ash into a glass tray at the center of the table.  “It’s to keep all that muck from going into your lungs.”

Parker’s eyebrows rose theatrically.  “You do realize that filter used to have a red band printed around it… to hide lipstick stains?”

“Only you would remember that,” Paul said.  “From experience, no doubt.”

“I know what I know, and once a cigarette for nelly queens, always a cigarette for nelly queens, no matter the packaging.”

Paul noticed David had returned to the dining room, but was hesitating by the door, signaling to him, and he knew by the expression on his face that something was wrong.  Here we go again, he thought.

He put his cigarette pack back in his jacket pocket, and said, “Excuse me.”

“If you’re planning a jaunt across the street to Pershing Square, count me in!” Parker quipped, taking a sip of wine.

Paul crossed the room quickly and found David in a state of agitation.  He’d seen him like this before, and knew what was to come.  He couldn’t help but be a little annoyed.

“I got a message from Billy,” David began excitedly.  “I think it sat at the front desk for about an hour because they weren’t sure where I was seated.  A fellow was arrested at a bar downtown tonight and taken to Lincoln Heights.  I just called the jail…”

Paul glanced at his watch wearily.  It was getting late and it had been a long exhausting day.  All he really wanted to do was go home and climb into bed with David.  He felt that spike of resentment he got every time his boyfriend pressured him to get involved in these situations.  He couldn’t help everybody.  It didn’t look good at the D.A.’s Office: so far nobody had asked any questions, but he never knew when his interference might get noticed and come back to haunt him.  And, anyway, he had only so much influence in cases like this.  “What does he want?  Legal advice?”

“No,” David said.  “He’s dead.”

Blurb:

LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST FOR BEST MYSTERY

Los Angeles, 1956. It’s a dangerous time to be gay. Nobody knows that better than closeted prosecutor Paul Winters, the rising star in the L.A. District Attorney’s office. But when the police insist a gay man arrested for soliciting committed suicide in custody–and Paul knows it was murder–he risks everything to uncover the truth. Thrown together with a strikingly handsome vice cop with a dark past, the two men race to expose a conspiracy at the highest levels of government that threatens to tear the city apart. THE YELLOW CANARY is the first book in The L.A. AFTER MIDNIGHT Quartet, a four-book four-decade spanning saga of gay life from the 1950s to the 1980s in the City of Angels. The second book in the series, THE BLACK CAT, is also available.

Author, Steve Neil Johnson

Steve is the author of the bestselling Doug Orlando mysteries, FINAL ATONEMENT (Lambda Literary Award finalist for Best Mystery) and FALSE CONFESSIONS. The books grew out of his experiences working for the District Attorney of Brooklyn. His other books include the occult thriller THIS ENDLESS NIGHT, the young adult novel RAISING KANE, and the middle-grade book (under the pseudonym Rathbone Ravenford) EVERYBODY HATES

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EDGAR ALLAN POE! He was honored by ONE/National Gay & Lesbian Archives for his contributions to gay literature. He is a longtime resident of Los Angeles, where he is writing his four-book four-decade spanning saga of gay life from the 1950s to the 1980s, The L.A. AFTER MIDNIGHT Quartet. The first book in the series, THE YELLOW CANARY, was a Lambda Literary Award finalist for Best Mystery. THE BLACK CAT is the second book in the series and THE BLUE PARROT the third book. Steve is currently writing the forth book in the L.A. AFTER MIDNIGHT Quartet.

Love You To Death (Stan Kraychik Mystery Book 2) by Grant Michaels

Excerpt from the Foreword by Frank W. Butterfield

When I came across Grant Michaels’s first novel, A Body to Dye For, at Now Voyager in Provincetown, I plunked down my nine bucks and snatched it right up. I took it back to my little room above the guest house on Commercial Street where I worked for $75 a week, plus room and board, and, with a bag full of salt-water taffy, devoured it and the candy in one long, lazy October afternoon.

Excerpt of Love You to Death

I sat for a long time with my eyes
closed, letting the white noise of the surf lull me into a state of alpha
consciousness. Awake in a dream, I sensed someone approaching me, and I happily
assumed it was my lively subconscious, once again beckoning my incubus.
However, rather than ravish me as usual, my loving other-self decided to speak
to me this time.

“Did you like the chocolate?” he asked,
with a French accent.

I opened my eyes and turned my head. The
sun blinded me for a moment, but I could still make out Rafik, in all his tall,
handsome glory. He was wearing a grey warm-up suit, without an overcoat or
jacket. The wind caused the soft flannel to hug his body and reveal a slender,
well-formed physique, much like a dancer’s.

“Hi,” I said, perhaps too
enthusiastically. “I figured you had sent it.”

“You did not like?” His eyelids drooped
sadly.

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“I took it to the police to have it
checked for poison.”

“Ah, non, I
will not poison you.” Then, with an inviting smile, he asked, “You are coming
to see me?”

“I came to see Prentiss Kingsley. I’m
curious why you’re here though.”

“I am here with Dunny.”

“And Mr. Kingsley? Is he here too?”

With a wink Rafik shook his head no. What
a charmer! It could be easy

to
say yes to any demand of his.

I began, “I just wanted to, uh …” Control
your yapper, Stanislav. Don’t

tell
this gorgeous man you came here to warn Prentiss Kingsley that someone is
trying to kill him. “I wanted to plan a little surprise for Liz and Danny, so I
thought Prentiss could help me with it. But don’t tell Dan, okay?”

“We have secret then?”

“Yeah, that’s right. A secret.”

“So maybe we can have one more secret?”
he asked with a sly look.

“What do you mean?”

“You like to go to bed?” He pushed his
right hand up under his sweatshirt, lifting it slightly so that I could watch
him caress his taut belly and finger the short, black hair there. Damn! Why was
this guy so interested in me, first at the party, now out here by the ocean?

“What about Danny?” I asked.

“Dunny? He’s not home.”

“But aren’t you two …?”

Rafik shook his head no. “We are not
lovers anymore.

“I thought you said you were here with
him?

“I am with him, but not together.”

“Then why are you here?”

Rafik grinned self-contentedly. “Mr.
Kingsley invite me.

“But you just said he’s not here,” I
said, trying to get his story straight.

“Yes, he is not. I work at his company,
driving the truck, you know?”

“Yes, I know, but does that qualify you
to stay at his summer place, in the middle of winter?”

“Oh, sure.” His hand pushed the jacket up
further to show a well-formed pectoral. “So you want to go inside?”

“I would like to get warm.”

“I have good idea,” he said, and suddenly
peeled off his sweatshirt. His muscular chest had a neatly trimmed, fan-shaped
mat of coarse hair, clipped short and bristly. The cold air set it all on end,
and the rest of his skin also went bumpy in the breeze. His nipples greeted the
frigid air with a perky salute through the dark hair. “Come,” he said, and
undid his sweatpants as well. He jogged away from me, then stopped momentarily
to pull off the sweatpants, leaving only his robin’s-egg-blue jockstrap. I was
right. He did look like a dancer, and he moved like one too, as though this
were all a familiar sequence of steps rehearsed and performed many times
before. But I’ll confess, his furry limbs sure were appealing against the
patchy snow. He turned toward me and beckoned. “We go to bed now.” He ran
toward the solarium attached to the back of the big house.

Being a lonely pile of flesh and bones,
I’d be a fool to pass up a chance like that. I got up from the bench and headed
toward the house, picking up Rafik’s discarded clothing along the way— already
the wife. As I got near the house, Dan Doherty emerged from the pathway that
led around from the front of the house.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he
demanded. Then he saw Rafik’s near-naked body entering the solarium, while I
stood there holding his clothes. Dan frowned and said, “Figures you’d get your
way with him, Vannos.”

“Uuuuhhhh …”

“Don’t worry,” he said, irritated but
resigned. “I’m used to it. He’s good for nothing.” Dan watched Rafik waving
energetically from inside the solarium. “I take that back. Rafik is certainly
good for one thing.”

“Danny, I didn’t come here to have sex
with him. I came to talk to Prentiss and you. I even tried to find you at your
place last night. I’ve got some unpleasant news, I’m afraid.”

“Vannos, you can cut the crap. You don’t
need an excuse to have sex with Rafik. Really, it’s ‘anything goes’ out here in
the ’burbs.”

“I’m not making excuses, Danny. And you
can call me Stan now. Vannos is okay in the shop, but this has nothing to do
with the shop.”

His face relaxed slightly. “You mean it,
don’t you?” he said with less  anger in
his voice. “You’re serious.”

“Yes, this is serious.”

“We’d better go inside then.”

We walked by the solarium. Rafik stood
within, exposed and appealing in his glass cage. Cripes, I’d just about got my
sludgy juices moving again, and yet again I had to interrupt the flow. I don’t
know why my parents didn’t  just name me
Frustration.

Inside the house Dan removed his
down-filled parka and hung it in a fastidiously organized closet. “Take your
coat off, get comfortable,” he said. I dropped my jacket on a chair, but Danny
picked it up and hung it—arranged it—alongside his in the closet—ever the
designer. Then he led me into a large, bright room with numerous bay windows,
complete with window seats and chintz-covered cushions, all facing out onto the
bluff and the ocean beyond. The fireplace was blazing, even though it was
mid-afternoon.

Through one of the front windows I saw
Danny’s car, easily identified by the vanity plates: D D D E S I G N .

Danny flopped himself onto one of the
sofas. I sat in a high-armed chair that enveloped me luxuriously as the down-filled
cushions wheezed out their air. “Is Prentiss here?” I asked.

“No,” he said, reclining and stretching
himself out provocatively. I hoped it wasn’t for my benefit.

“Danny, it’s important that you both hear
this. Will you promise to tell him?”

“Depends.” His eyes seemed to be
flirting, and I soon recognized a behavior pattern that I’d often seen with
other couples: Love my spouse, love me.

I said, “Depends isn’t good enough,
Danny. I found out something about the poisoned chocolate that killed that man
the other night.”

“The one Laurett Cole gave to her
boyfriend?

“That’s the point. It was a mistake. The
truffle that killed that guy was intended for Prentiss Kingsley.”

Blurb:

A Stan Kraychik Mystery, Book 2 — Valentine’s Day is fast approaching and everyone has a sweetheart, except Stan Kraychik, Boston’s sassiest hairdresser. Ever hopeful of meeting Mr. Right, Stan attends a gala reception that culminates in a death by poisoning, and romantic problems take a back seat to murder. Then Boston police arrest Stan’s friend Laurett Cole, who leaves her four-year-old son in Stan’s care. In his quest to free Laurett from suspicion and himself from his ill-mannered ward, Stan finds himself exploring the secrets of a revered Boston institution, the Gladys Gardner Chocolate Company. There, along with the sweet edibles, he finds an assortment of not-so-delectable murder.

A Lambda Literary Awards Finalist in 1993, this edition includes a new 2019 foreword by Frank W. Butterfield.

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Triangulation (Borealis Investigations Book 2) by Gregory Ashe

Excerpt:

THE BLONDIE BRICK HOUSE on Winona never changed. North had grown up here; his mother had died
here. His father would die here too, probably sooner than North expected. As
North sat behind the wheel of the Beamer, the engine ticking as it cooled, he studied
the street and told himself he was reminiscing.

In the gray light from the street lamps, the
rough edges of the blue-collar neighborhood softened. The peeling paint was
harder to notice; the warped lines of fencing were easier to miss. Everything looked
a little more respectable, which was a good thing. Lindenwood Park was still a
nice neighborhood, still a working-class neighborhood, and that was impressive
in one of America’s most dangerous cities. Somehow, this urban slice had
survived the destitution and decay that had blighted so much of St. Louis. A
lot of that, North knew, had been possible because of men like his father, and
North wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not.

Grabbing his bag from the seat, North made his
way along the side of the house, bypassing the front door, which nobody used,
and letting himself in at the sun porch—never locked, of course. He fenced
Jasper and Jones with his foot, keeping them from sprinting out the door, and
they yowled and whined for a minute before rubbing up against his foot. He
didn’t blame them for wanting to get out; cat piss fouled the air, and North
wondered how long it had been since his father had cleaned their litter box.
If, that was, he had ever cleaned it. Maybe he didn’t even smell it anymore,
the way he couldn’t smell the black pall of cigar smoke that hazed every room
in the small house.

The small desk fan, which North had kicked
over on his last visit, was back in place. The motor made a grinding noise as
the blades turned. He lifted it onto a folding chair and elbowed open the
window a few more inches. Hot July air—a muggy heat that lingered long after
sundown, pasting itself to the skin—seeped into the house, but maybe hot, fresh
air was better than the refrigerated, recirculated cigar smoke.

“Dad,” North called into the house, passing
into the kitchen with its mountain of dirty dishes, the disconnected dishwasher
sitting in the middle of the room, and the air stinking of burned grilled
cheese sandwiches. “You awake?”

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“Jesus, it’s you.” Then the kitchen
fluorescents fluttered to life. David McKinney had slipped even farther down
the shit-hill in the two months since North had seen him. His yellow skin
sagged, and he looked much too thin. He leaned heavily on a walker now, and the
nasal cannula had slipped and hung askew. Shaking his head in disgust, he
lowered the pistol he had aimed at North and placed it in the pocket of his
bathrobe. Then, checking the oxygen tank on his walker, he shuffled past North
and into the living room.

North waited until his father was gone. Then
he closed his eyes and counted to twenty. He told himself he wasn’t a kid
anymore. He thought of what Shaw had said to him the last time he had come
here: you come back different. And
then he thought of Shaw under Jadon Reck, the cop’s muscular body tight as he
drilled into Shaw, the way Shaw would throw his head back, his long hair
spilling like ribbons of fire across his chest, his shoulders, his back. The
way Shaw would sound as Jadon tore him apart. The way Shaw would sound when he
climaxed. And the vision was so sudden and so startlingly real that North
thought he could feel the acid churning in his stomach. Then he didn’t care
about counting to twenty anymore. He opened the fridge, pulled out four Bud
Lights, and carried them into the soft, TV-glow flicker of the living room.

On the old CRT, in its massive wooden cabinet,
an episode of Gunsmoke was playing.
Marshal Matt Dillon was talking to a pretty blonde who’d gotten stranded. She
looked like she was holding up pretty well, and Matt didn’t seem to mind
talking to her very much.

“I think I’ve seen this one,” North said,
settling onto the folding chair next to his dad’s recliner. It was the same
folding chair that, two months before, he had dragged in front of the TV. Had
it been here this whole time? And if it had, what did that mean? That nobody
else had stepped inside this house except David McKinney in those two months?

North set out the beers on the TV tray between
the two seats and popped the top on his first one. “Her carriage got robbed,
isn’t that it?”

His dad grunted, popped open a beer, and
sucked spray off his knuckles.

North felt the ache in his own knuckles where
bruises were already forming and the scabs over his split skin pulled. He said,
“Isn’t that this one?”

“That’s all of them.”

“Yeah, but she’s got a friend who got taken by
the bandits.”

David McKinney punched the volume up.

With a sigh, North opened up his throat,
closed his eyes, and pounded down the beer. Then he opened the second one.

They watched Gunsmoke. Then the Wheel of
Fortune rerun. North’s dad drew the line at Jeopardy and switched the
channel to KDNL and caught the end of the news. North, for his part, got a lot
of exercise: pulling the tabs on the Bud Lite, lifting the cans, carrying the
empties to the sink. He felt like he could do this forever: stare at the TV
with the images flashing on and off against the back of his eyes; stare out the
window above the sink at the smudged light pollution above the city; stare into
the yellow glare of the fridge until he wasn’t even sure how long he’d been
there, with the cold air wicking against him pleasantly, and then come back to
himself just enough to snag a few more Buds and carry them to the TV.

“Thought you were a towel head.”

North was six beers deep by then, practically
swimming, and he had to blink and focus. “Oh. The gun. It’s ok. You can’t say
that anymore, though. People don’t . . .” He forgot what he’d been trying to
tell him.

“Bunch of them moved in on the other side of
the park. I’ve just been waiting for them to make their move.”

“People don’t say that kind of thing anymore.”
North thought he had more to say, but instead he slid down in his seat until
his neck rested on the back of the folding chair.

“Some kind of fight with Laguerre, is that
it?”

“He’s my husband.”

“I know who he is.”

“His name’s Tucker.”

“I know his name.”

After that, the TV’s murmur seemed to grow
louder and louder until North’s ears were ringing with a white hiss. It was so
much easier like this. He felt like he could do this forever. He didn’t even
remember walking, but he was in the kitchen, slumped against the fridge door,
the cold air brushing the tops of his bare feet. He didn’t remember taking off
boots and socks. He didn’t remember drinking so many beers, but the fridge was
empty except for that glare the color of egg yolk.

He wanted to call Shaw. That seemed like a
good idea, so he stumbled out to the sunroom and dug his phone out of his
pocket and after a few mistakes, managed to get Shaw’s number on the screen.
The phone rang. And rang. And rang. It was going to voicemail; North was dimly
aware that this was the most likely possibility, and again came that vision of
Shaw on his back, legs in the air, hair burning in coils across his chest, with
Jadon’s muscular frame above him.

Then the phone clicked, and a voice said,
“Hello?” And that was the clue that it was voicemail because (North’s logic was
inescapable): a) Shaw was too busy getting drilled by Jadon to answer the
phone, and b) if Shaw had answered the phone himself, he would have said
North’s name, the way he always did.

“You knew,” North said. “You knew and you
didn’t . . . you didn’t even say anything. You knew. You fucking . . .” North’s
stomach roiled again, and he wasn’t sure that this time it had anything to do
with that mental image of Shaw. “You fucking knew. You knew.” He was sweating
badly now, and he leaned up against the windows, where the swampy air trickled
in with the buzz of mosquitos and the hot mulch scent. “Do you remember
watching . . .” He gagged; a monstrous burp forced its way out. “Do you
remember watching Supernatural, do
you even remember? Do you remember anything, do you remember fucking anything
from that, back before you met Jadon, fucking Jadon, back before you met—”
North’s stomach cramped. His breath was foul as it furled against the glass and
rolled back at him. “You fucking knew and you didn’t even say anything, and I
fucking hate you.”

Something hit North’s hand, knocking the phone
from his grip. Hands gripped North and spun him.

“Jesus Christ,” his dad said, leaning on his
walker, the cannula slipping again. His face was gray in the weak light. “Are
you trying to wake the whole fucking neighborhood so they can listen to your
fucking bedroom problems?”

“I didn’t—” North tried to swallow, but his
stomach was really turning now. “Dad,” he managed to say.

“For fuck’s sake.” With surprising strength,
David McKinney dragged his son to the door, swung it open, and shoved North’s
head out into the thick, wet heat of the darkness.

North barfed long and hard. And when he’d
finished, his knees were shaking, and cold sweat dampened the shirt on his
back.

“You’re hosing that off in the morning,” his
dad said as he stomped away on the walker. “And you’re calling Ronnie. He’s
been looking for you.”

North nodded. That was a good idea. But a better idea was to lie down, right here in the sunroom. Just for a minute. And he managed to do so just before a black tide rolled in.

Blurb:

After a recent case with a treacherous client, North and Shaw are ready to go back to work building Borealis Investigations. They’re also ready to go back to dodging their feelings for each other, with neither man ready to deal with the powerful emotions the Matty Fennmore case stirred up. Everything is getting back to normal when their secretary asks for help: her girlfriend’s boss has gone missing.

Shep Collins runs a halfway house for LGBTQ kids and is a prominent figure in St. Louis’s gay community. When he disappears, however, dark truths begin to emerge about Shep’s past: his string of failed relationships, a problem with disappearing money, and his work, years before, as one of the foremost proponents of conversion therapy.

When Shep’s body turns up at the halfway house, the search for a missing person becomes the search for a murderer.

As North and Shaw probe for answers, they find that they are not the only ones who have come looking for the truth about Shep Collins. Their investigation puts them at odds with the police who are working the same case, and in that conflict, North and Shaw find threads leading back to the West End Slasher—the serial killer who almost took Shaw’s life in an alley seven years before. As the web of an ancient conspiracy comes to light, Shaw is driven to find answers, and North faces what might be his last chance to tell Shaw how he really feels.

About the Author :

Gregory Ashe is a longtime Midwesterner. He
has lived in Chicago, Bloomington (IN), and Saint Louis, his current home. Aside
from reading and writing (which take up a lot of his time), he is an educator.

Author, Gregory Ashe

Learn more about Gregory
Ashe and forthcoming works
at www.gregoryashe.com.

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exclusive content, limited-time promotions, and insider information, please
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Buy Triangulation here.

Exclusive Excerpt: The Black Marble Pool By Stan Leventhal

Excerpt:

THREE

AFTER SKIP UNLOCKED THE DOOR we entered his room, a bit smaller than the others I’d seen. The four-poster bed had a gleaming brass headboard and crocheted coverlet. The weathered plank walls and circular windows gave the impression of a ship’s cabin.

AFTER SKIP UNLOCKED THE DOOR we entered his room, a bit smaller than the others I’d seen. The four-poster bed had a gleaming brass headboard and crocheted coverlet. The weathered plank walls and circular windows gave the impression of a ship’s cabin.

“Sit,” he said.

As I lowered my butt to the bed, he searched through a gym bag. He pulled out swim trunks, T-shirts, sweat socks, bandanas and jockstraps, windmilling them into the air like a crook going through a rich lady’s lingerie in a ’40s movie. Triumphantly, he produced a notebook, thin-ruled, side spiral, rather thick.

“Read this,” Skip commanded, sitting alongside me, placing the thing on my lap.

“Now?”

“Not right this second. As soon as you can.”

“What is it?” Experience told me that it was either an autobiographical novel—probably heavy with sexual couplings, or a collection of poems—long on sentiment.

“You’ll see.”

I was in no great rush to read the collected literary works of Skip Dunnock and wondered if I could turn this encounter into something memorable. I sat there on the bed, casually, waiting to see what his next move might be. Might he pounce? Should I? Whisper sweet nothings? Tentatively brush his thigh? Was he just sitting there waiting for me to do something?

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I cautiously leaned toward him and was about to drape my arm around his shoulder when he stood up, cleared his throat. I almost lost my balance and fell off the bed.

“Well,” he said, “I’m meeting someone at Streets. Got to run.”

My passion—aroused and roaring, deflated and simpered, spiraling down like a pricked balloon.

“Okay,” I said, trying to peel the bits of rubber from the floor. I tried to rearrange the pieces into an airborne thing in my mind, holding it aloft like an emblem of dignity, and ambled to the door with the notebook under my arm.

“Let me know what you think,” he said earnestly.

I wanted to escape as quickly as I could. But I couldn’t pull my eyes from his tousled brown hair, innocent face, lithe, solid body. I tore myself away with a fast “g’night” and tried to grasp whatever pride I could as I descended the stairs and fit my key to the lock.

On the bed. Ceiling fan whirred above. Sweat on my face like a damp washcloth. The breeze from the fan cooled, then dried the perspiration.

Previously, I hadn’t wanted Skip. In the presence of Edward he’d appeared too young. But without the competition of maturity and wisdom, he became almost irresistible. I’d wanted him and he’d turned me down and I felt like a loser.

I tried to ascertain what lay at the heart of my desire. Was it his face, his physique, his youth, or simply the potential of a warm body? Any warm body. In those taut moments when I wanted to throw my arm around him and he moved away, was it Skip that I really wanted? Or was he merely a surrogate for what I couldn’t have?

I don’t understand the nature of attraction. Probably because there are no absolutes. If you can be disinterested in someone at ten o’clock in the morning, then crave their attention and affection several hours later, what does this say about you? Am I fickle? Or practical? Or just desperate?

There are certain faces and bodies that stimulate my gonads from ten feet away. There are certain personalities that do the same, regardless of the physical structure in which they reside. If there is a simple or reliable way of figuring out why I’m attracted to someone at a particular time, it remains a mystery. To me.

If Skip expected me to read his poems or novel, why hadn’t he completed the sales pitch and had sex with me? This is America. You suck my dick I read your manuscript. Happens all the time.

I tossed the notebook on the floor. Curled into a fetal crouch. Drifted like a jellyfish from wave to wave. My Melville fantasies kicked in. Pretty sailors cavorting below-decks while cruel captains and scheming first mates used hard bodies for their selfish pleasure; inflicting wounds, currying favor, toying with the pecking order of rank and beauty. I saw tough men being tender with each other. I saw men brutally take one another with abandon.

The images that had begun in the North Atlantic sea, like the travels of Ishmael and Redburn on their maiden voyages, gave way to the Caribbean setting of buccaneers. I saw parrots on the shoulders of pirates, smelled hot, spicy rum, heard boisterous voices in a sing-song patois, tasted salty flesh as I pressed my body to the warm solidity of a randy sea-dog.

I awoke. Stiff and sweaty. Tight neck muscles. Cramped left calf. Showering helped. I didn’t shave. Looked at Skip’s notebook on the floor; at the paperback I’d started on the plane. Left the notebook where it was and took the novel—Anne Tyler—down to the pool. With sunglasses on, lying stomach-down, I read as the sun rose over the fence. As it ascended, the house sprang to life as bodies piloted by red eyes gathered by the pool. Steaming mugs of coffee. Aurelio made breakfast. I watched him. He was adorable.

Edward sat next to me at the table beneath the awning. Skip joined us. Then Frank. Aurelio scrambled eggs, buttered muffins, patted grease from bacon, fed oranges to the juicer, fixed more coffee, seasoned home-fries. Pearl netted flotsam from the pool with a long-handled scooper. We were the average American family breakfasting by the pool.

The one topic of conversation in which we could all participate—Walter’s death—was not mentioned. At first. Skip commented on the weather. Edward lamented that he’d have to be heading home in a few days. Frank said he’d had the best time of his life the night before—playing pool at Woody’s, then dancing at Streets until it had closed.

Pearl ate slowly, small amounts, infrequently administered. With the deep lines in her tanned face and her mane of white hair, she seemed like a reservoir of mystery. Without provocation or warning, she fixed her gaze on Aurelio and said, “The police are finished in Walter’s room; you can clean it up today. Couple of guys from Japan will be checking in this evening.”

“Okay, boss,” he grinned, and having been brought back to this reality, started eating with gusto.

Pearl sipped some coffee, wiped her brow and said, “On the evidence so far, the cops can’t be certain if it’s murder, suicide or accident. Until something new turns up, the case is on hold.”

I quickly scanned all the faces before me. To whom would this be good news? Bad news? Who would be indifferent?

Skip glanced at me, then stared down at his plate.

Frank shook his head, “So unfortunate.”

“Yes,” said Edward, “unfortunate. Tragic.”

The remainder of the meal was consumed in silence. Afterward we sprawled about the deck. Sunning, reading, crossword puzzles, tanning lotion, Walkmans.

Eventually, I splashed into the pool. I’d been avoiding it. The sacrilege of playing in a makeshift tomb. But I had to overcome this fear, so, putting my reservations on hold, I plunged in. It was so cool and enveloping. Diving under, I swam to the far end. When I came up for air, Skip dove in and swam toward me. When he got to the end he propped his elbows on the deck and whispered, “Did you read it yet?”

“No, not yet. Haven’t had the time. By the way, why is it that you think writers are interested in your diary or your poems or your novel or whatever?” I guess I was still miffed that he hadn’t tried to seduce me.

“It’s not mine,” he said indignantly. “It’s Walter’s.”

“Huh?” I must have rejoined, totally confused.

“It’s Walter’s journal. I got it out of his room before the police searched it.”

I recalled that Frank had said that Skip had lied when claiming that he barely knew Walter. Why then, would he be in possession of Walter’s journal?

Just then, Frank plunged in and swam toward us.

“Why did you give it to me?” I asked, hoping to get an answer before Frank reached us.

“Read it. You’ll see.”

He swam away and left the pool.

I listened to Frank yak about his insurance company for a while, then excused myself and returned to my room.

The house was so quiet it was almost scary; the kind of silence that portends evil or disaster. I entered my room and shut the door. Picked up the journal where I’d left it on the floor. As I opened to the first page, my breath came quickly, as though I was about to discover some deep, complex secret. But before I could read the first word, I heard a knock at my door.

“Who’s there?”

“Aurelio. You want me to clean now or later?”

I opened the door. He stood in the hall looking like a doll waiting to be played with.

“You can come in now and do it if you like,” I said, returning to the bed, picking up the notebook. Aurelio came in and closed the door behind him.

“If you’re too busy now I can come back later,” he said.

I looked him up and down. Moppet curls surrounded a virginal face. Nicely-shaped, solid but graceful, mocha arms and legs. Flat stomach. In his shorts and tanktop he looked about sixteen. I found out later he was twenty-one.

“If it’s best for you now I can just…” I didn’t know what I would do or where I would go if I had to vacate the room.

“Now or later. Whatever you want whenever you want it,” he grinned. Slyly.

Was he propositioning me? Or was my imagination succumbing to the bombardment of horny enzymes?

Aurelio sat on the bed. I looked down at him with lust in my soul. I wondered what to say to someone so young. Then I recalled that once I’d been that young and back then it hadn’t been a problem. A sure sign I’m aging. Then I asked myself why I was getting crazed over a kid. Because he was adorable. But he was probably a scummy hustler who’d demand money from me and break my heart.

The warmth in my soul turned to ice. “Why don’t you come back later when I’m not so busy,” I barked, not really meaning to sound so harsh.

Aurelio, with his eyes to the floor, left the room without responding.

I closed the door and felt like shit. Sat and lamented for him and myself. And eventually reined in my self-pity and picked up the notebook.

Then the telephone rang. Most guest houses don’t have phones in every room. Pearl doesn’t miss a trick. I picked up the receiver. It was Josh, the travel editor of the News. This was Saturday. At two o’clock in the afternoon. Same time as in New York. Why was he calling me?

“How’s the weather?” he asked.

“Perfect. What’s it like up there?”

“Freezing! Colder than the proverbial witch’s tit and all that…”

“How’s your brother doing? He was going into the hospital for…”

“He’s holding in there. But it’s so depressing and scary… that’s why I called. I’m trying to get my mind off it. Figured I’d call to see how your trip was, how the article is coming along.”

I had placed the article so far from the center of my consciousness, it was shocking to be reminded.

“Oh,” I must have stammered, “fine, fine.”

“Did you speak with the Chamber of Commerce people?”

“Not yet.”

“The tourist bureau?”

“No.”

“The photographer I told you to call?”

“Urn, no.”

He lectured me about my vast responsibilities as a travel correspondent and his enormous chore to make certain that travel writers did not abuse the many privileges of their sacred task. If I didn’t turn in one fucking great article he would exact his fucking ton of flesh by reporting me to the fucking editor-in-chief.

I sat there thinking: sure I’ll write a great travel article. But there are other things going on here which are a bit more thrilling. Besides, they wouldn’t fire a music critic for an unacceptable travel piece. Or would they?

I told Josh everything he wanted to hear. Said goodbye. There, under the influence of guilt, I placed the journal on the bureau and left Captain’s House to take notes for my travel article: Key West: Sun, Sand & Sex. Then I thought: Key West: Murder, Mystery, Mayhem. And Sex.

There is one main thoroughfare—Duval Street—which runs the length of the island. By the time I came to the intersection I’d forgotten all about Aurelio and his extracurricular enterprise. And I didn’t give a thought to Walter Burgess. I’d never met him, knew nothing about him, and didn’t care about him at all.

I passed one lovely house after another. Each set back from the street, each nestled in a bouquet of tropical verdure. The styles are eclectic—like taking a film studio tour and passing from the set of Gone With The Wind to Key Largo.

But Duval Street is all-American, Anytown, USA. All retail window displays and facades are designed to attract the eyes of upwardly mobile young professionals raised on television. Everything is bold day-glo colors offset with glass and chrome; angular, sharp, bold, screaming for attention, changing rapidly, these stores would not be out of place on Columbus Avenue in Manhattan. Or, on the television screen in your living room. Most of the merchandise is not utilitarian, nor is it meant to last very long, nor is there an item lacking a well-publicized designer logo. Away from Duval Street one can find an occasional small, less ostentatious, independent venue with a stock both useful and practical. But in the center of town, competitive marketing and impulse shopping prevail.

I was glad I was wearing shorts and a tanktop. But still, I was damp with perspiration in the seven or so minutes it took to get from the house to main street. I reminded myself of the pad and pen in my rear pocket. And I set off in search of something wonderful to write about.

I passed an old theater with a Hollywood deco facade, a shop with bright, hand-painted T-shirts, and an emporium that sells nothing but over-priced junk. I placed pen to pad and jotted these things down, hoping that these words would later inspire a grand aria when I switched on my word processor.

The sights beginning to bore me, I glanced at the sky. Peaceful. Clear. Quiet. Pink clouds in a cerulean setting.

Then I turned my attention to the people. The locals could be from any small, southern town. Casually dressed, slow moving, all charm and friendliness on the surface. Extremely polite to the tourists, they sometimes say nasty things about them to the other natives. America. The visitors don’t act like they’re in a small southern town. To them, it’s like San Juan, Acapulco or Bermuda. With their fashionably tortured hairstyles, expensive leisure-wear and mania for accessories, you’d think they were visiting another planet.

I perused some postcards in a tourist-trap notions outlet then glanced up to notice Officers Griffith and Simon harassing a homeless person.

The difference between New York and Key West, besides the thousand or so miles, is that at the southernmost tip of Florida you don’t have to worry about winter. I was shocked when I realized that the homeless problem isn’t restricted to the big cities. I never imagined that a classy resort town would have sidewalk residents and alley-dwellers. But after spending some time in Key West it seemed so obvious: if one is to be without shelter, better a warm, tropical place than the bitter winds and inescapable cold up north.

The guy was very young, skinny, tanned, longish hair and wild eyes. Griffith prodded him with his nightstick. Simon nudged him with his shoe. Too unsightly for main street. The kid struggled to his feet and wobbled down the sidewalk. The cops watched him moving away, then resumed their patrol.

I watched Simon’s trim, nicely-proportioned body swagger up the street. From the rear he looked appealingly sturdy: substantial calves, meaty thighs, taut butt, slim waist, broad shoulders. I turned away before anyone might notice me staring.

Then I saw the two women whom I’d overheard at the restaurant. I decided to follow them. See if “their” Walter was also “my” Walter. See if I could stay close enough to maybe catch a bit of their conversation without being detected.

Both were about the same height—a bit shorter than me—the darker-haired one more broad and bouncy. The blond, a wispy thing, looked like a starving fashion model. At the time I had no idea what their names were, but I subsequently learned that the darker, heavier one was Regina Carson and the lighter, slimmer one was Joyce Burgess. They both wore pastel shorts, white cotton blouses, sandals, broad-brimmed hats and carried shoulder bags. The newness of their apparel and accessories bespoke their status as tourists.

They touched hand-painted T-shirts, tried on outrageous sunglasses, argued about stopping in at a dress shop. Joyce was all for it. Regina claimed that they weren’t there to shop for things that could be found back home. Where was home? I didn’t know yet.

Then they went to a restaurant. A simple place without a theme or gimmick, and ordered iced-tea and English muffins. I tried to get a table in close proximity, but was unable. When they departed I followed, keeping what I believed to be a safe distance. They walked away from Duval Street, passing the house of Ernest Hemingway. After taking a few pictures, they continued walking. I couldn’t get close enough to hear anything. The next stop was the Monroe County Library. A few more snapshots. And then, to my surprise, they walked to Captain’s House. But stood on the opposing sidewalk and just looked at it. They whispered a few things to each other. I recalled that one of them had said something about entering a house. Could this be the house to which they referred? Why were they just standing there looking?

I waited until they left, then went inside. As I leapfrogged the stairs to get to the room I told myself that the answers to all of my questions were probably very neatly written out in Walter’s journal. All I had to do was read it, satisfy my curiosity, give it back to Skip and get on with my travelogue and vacation.

But when I reached my room I discovered it was gone. Nowhere in my room. I searched everywhere: under the bed, under the rug, in the closet, on the night table, on the bureau. I wondered who might have taken it? Probably whoever killed Walter Burgess. But I had no idea who that might be. And who knew I’d had it, apart from Skip?

I decided to take a nap, try to forget all of the unexpected complications I’d been confronted with. It would soon be Saturday night and I was ready to go out, party hearty, have a joyous and memorable evening.

About the Author:

STAN LEVENTHAL, author, editor, and publisher, lived in New York City. He was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award three times: “Mountain Climbing in Sheridan Square”, “Faultlines” and the current volume, “The Black Marble Pool”. He published two other novels and two collections of short stories. In addition to his previously published books, his work has appeared in several anthologies. The author was actively involved in the fight for literacy. His message to his readers: “Literature is crucial to our lives; reading is fun.” The ReQueered Tales editions mark the 25th anniversary of his death in January, 1995. This volume includes a foreword by his long-time friend, business partner and publicist, Michele Karlsberg.

P rofile of Author, Stan Leventhal:
http://www.requeeredtales.com/blog/2019/08/10/stan-leventhal-a-25th-anniversary-return-to-print/

Purchase Links:
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EXCLUSIVE Excerpt; The Deadwood Murders (Kendall Parker Mysteries – Book 2) by Jon Michaelsen

DEADWOOD

ded wood

noun

The
dead branches of a tree; dead branches or trees.

Useless or burdensome people or things.

Chapter One

Two men dressed in dark slacks, pressed white shirts, scuffless black shoes shinier than a new penny, and aviator shades pushed above their foreheads examined the crime scene. Their suit jackets remained across the backseat of the black Chevy Suburban parked behind them the shoulder of the interstate. Sweat layered their backs and pooled in droplets at the temples, soaked their armpits. Swatting at the insects swarming about proved useless.

The Georgia heat this day was stifling, the air thick with humidity, and enlaced with a putrid odor familiar to homicide investigators and most cops. They stared at the nude body about fifteen feet away, a male corpse lying face up on damp, decaying leaves. The skin of the cadaver was grayish and mottled; blood dried a Moorish brown. The eyes of the victim had been eaten away by the scavengers of the forest.  

Coming August 2019

A trio of sheriff’s deputies and a couple of attendants clad in white jumpsuits from the county coroner’s office stood on the perimeter. Forensic pathologists, the medical doctors who performed  autopsies, rarely left the morgue. The professionals watched  both FBI investigators intently, awaiting their turn with the body. No doubt they were cursing from having to wait in the stifling heat. One consolation however, was the Feebs appeared as miserable as everyone else on this blistering day in mid-July, a record ninety-degrees or better twenty-one days straight and counting.

The
sheriff, a fiftyish gray-headed man with a round belly, tie askew, and top
button of his dress shirt open to reveal a tuft of graying hair, stood a couple
of spaces off to the side of the tall agents. He had placed the call to the
headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Atlanta upon
notification of the horrific discovery. He had referenced a BOLO alert
disseminated to statewide law enforcement agencies the previous month
mentioning a string of linked and unsolved homicides. 

“Who
found the victim?” asked Special Agent Hales without looking away from the
body.

“Georgia
Department of Transportation mowing crew,” Sheriff Hinson said. “One of their
men walked up into the wooded a hundred feet that way to take a leak out of
view of the interstate. Claims he caught a foul stench and noticed buzzards
circling overhead. Figured it was a dead animal, a wild hog or such, and though
he’d take a peek. Made his way ‘round that ravine over yonder and saw something
curious. Thought it might be a decomposing animal carcass, but it looked
strange to him from a distance, so he decided to get a better look-see.
Curiosity got the best of him, I guess. It always does.” Hinson chuckled,
but lost his grin when the agents remained stoic.

Hales
snorted as his partner and Special Agent Delvecchio spoke up, obviously
frustrated with the man’s slow, winding southern drawl as evidenced by the
scowl ripped across his red face. “Go on sir.” 

“When
the worker got closer, he ain’t seen no dead hog at all, but a body. He told
his supervisor and 911 Dispatch got the call from GDOT’s office in Macon. A
couple deputies called out here to check.”

“Thanks sheriff,” said Delvecchio. “That’ll be all for now.” He waved the official off. “We’ll motion to you after our initial walk-through. You can inform the photographer and techs to complete their work afterward, and not a moment before. You understand?”

Hinson opened his mouth to speak, thought better of it and slunk away. They took their cue, snapped on matching opaque latex gloves and microfiber booties before moving closer to the body, careful not to disturb the scene.

“Give
me the rundown,” said Delvecchio.

Hales bent at the knees. After a thorough once over, he began reciting what he observed. Delvecchio took notes: “White male, twenty-five to thirty-five, one-seventy to one eighty-five pounds alive. Height about six feet. Dark hair cut short to the scalp, hairless torso. Signs of trauma to the neck and chest. Bruising, ligature marks visible on both wrists, ankles, and neck.” Hales lifted a stiff arm and portion of the right shoulder. “Dark patches beneath the arms, shoulders, legs and buttocks appear to be livor mortis caused by hypostasis. Abrasions caused by some ligature device; rope, twine, or a type of cord perhaps. Hard to determine without a more thorough examination.”

The younger agent swatted at the gnats and flies swarming around, then shifted his eyes lower. ” Significant defects noted to the pelvic region. Victim’s penis, scrotum and a portion of the abdomen incised.” Hales cleared his throat and continued, albeit in a more gravely tone. “No clothing or personal identification present on scene, same with any visible tattoos, scars or other identifying marks. Autopsy will determine length of exposure to the elements and possible cause of death, but my best guess is the victim has been here four or five days at most.”

Delvecchio
spotted something at the base of a thick tree-trunk approximately three feet
away and moved off, calling back over his shoulder. “No drag marks or foot
impressions I can see, but damn weather could have erased any evidence therein by
now.”

Hales followed his partner’s movements. Delvecchio bent at the waist and retrieved something from the ground. He stood, holding an object midair for closer inspection. “Looks like a piece of leather shoelace,” he said. “The kind used for work-boots. Might be the ligature used on DB.” Delvecchio inspected the area around the barnacled trunk, circling to the backside of the tree. “Hales, you need to see this.”

The
agent joined Delvecchio after making a wide arc around any potential evidence
on the ground before cutting back to where his colleague stood. On the lower
portion of the trunk Hales saw a gouge in the bark, like a wedge or deep notch.
Inspecting farther up the tree, he spotted numerous, thinner marks scored into
the rough crust. Rope burns, perhaps even from the portion of shoelace
Delvecchio held aloft.

“Victim
was either tied to or propped against this tree, strangled with some sort of
ligature device, perhaps the shoelace you found,” Hales said, bending at
the knees. “The scars in the tree’s bark suggest the UNSUB braced a foot
against the trunk for leverage to garrote his victim, but the shoelace
broke, so another device was substituted used.” Hales looked around the base of
the tree. “Body was cut down or the binding broke.”

Hales
stood after inspecting the lower impression further, then retraced his steps to
the body.

“This
our guy’s work?” Delvecchio asked, following close behind, but his tone
suggested he knew the answer.

“MO appears the same, but I cannot be sure until getting a closer inspection of the body, more specifically the throat.” Hales motioned for the crime scene photographer. A gawky shutterbug with billowing white shoe coverings joined them at once. “Get your prelims before we inspect the body. You can finish your evidence-quality shots once we’ve stepped away.”

The photographer nodded and began snapping away with a fancy digital camera, bending, squatting, and contorting his lithe frame in a bizarre dance around the corpse, positioning himself near enough, but not too close in order to avoid contamination. When satisfied, he stepped away from the body to reclaim his spot at the perimeter where he began fussing with his equipment and unpacking a tripod.

Hales withdrew a pair of chrome-plated micro tissue forceps from his shirt pocket and stepped next to the corpse. Lowering his solid frame to one knee, he leaned over the body. “Let’s find out for sure.” He used the thin instrument to pry open the purple lips, and probed the interior of the mouth, removing some dead leaves and earth. The steel prongs of the tool snagged something solid, lodged deep within the throat. Hales withdrew the forceps, held the foreign object aloft for inspection. “Piece of deadwood shoved down the throat,” he said, scowling. “Just like all the others.”

“Where
to next?” asked Delvecchio, wiping the sweat from his forehead with the
back of his meaty hand. The gnats were relentless; the heat insufferable.

Hales glanced at the interstate and sighed. Vehicles whipped past at breakneck speed; their occupants oblivious to the horrific discovery a few yards away. “Based on the UNSUB’s previous pattern and northern trajectory these past few months, and considering the body’s been here a few days, I’d say he’s already arrived at his next destination.”

Coming – August 2019

Excerpt: The Death of Friends: A Henry Rios Novel (The Henry Rios Mysteries Book 6) by Michael Nava

Excerpt:

I woke to find the bed shaking. Somewhere
in the house, glass came crashing down, and on the street car alarms went off
and dogs wailed. The bed lurched back and forth like a raft in the squall. The
floorboards seemed to rise like a wave beneath it, and for one surreal second,
I thought I heard the earth roar, before I recognized the noise as the pounding
of my heart in my ears. My stomach churned and fear banished every thought
except Get out. And then it stopped, as abruptly as it had begun, the
bed slamming to the ground, a glass falling in another room. Outside, the car
alarms still shrilled, the dogs whimpered and the frantic voices of my
neighbors called out to each other, “Are you okay? Are you okay?” I sat up
against the headboard and drew deep breaths. My pulse slowly returned to normal.
I was aware that someone else was in the room. I reached for the lamp, but the
power was out.

I called out, “Who’s there?”

My eyes accustomed themselves to the
darkness, but I could not see anyone among the familiar shapes of the room. Yet
I was sure someone was there, hovering at the foot of the bed, watching me. It
moved, and then a great wash of emotion passed over me. Sadness. Regret. Relief.
I felt them but they were not my feelings. I reached out my hand, but there was
nothing. The room began to rattle, shaken by an aftershock. It lasted only a
few seconds and when it was over, I was alone again.

I hopped out of bed and ran into the
closet door which had been shaken open. The blow stunned, then focused me. “Think,”
I commanded myself. Clothes. Shoes. Flashlight. Get outside. I pulled on a pair
of pants, a sweat shirt, sneakers and headed to the kitchen for the flashlight.
The usual hum of appliances was stilled. Glass crunched beneath my feet as I
crossed the room to the small pantry, where I found the flashlight in a utility
drawer. I shot a beam of light across the kitchen. The cupboards had swung
open, cans and boxes spilling out of them. The refrigerator had been knocked a
couple of feet from the wall. I opened the refrigerator to find its contents
spilled and shaken. I drank some orange juice out of the carton and thought of
Josh, alone in his apartment. I picked up the phone but, as I’d expected, the
line was dead. I got out of the house.

click to purchase

The street where I lived ran along the
east rim of a small canyon in the hills above old Hollywood. On maps of the
city, it was a curving line off Bronson Canyon Drive, hard to find and seldom
traveled. My house, like other houses on the block, dated back to the 30s. It
was down a few steps from the street, behind a low hedge, the bland stucco wall
revealing little of the life that went on there. Until thirteen months earlier,
I’d lived there with my lover, Josh Mandel. Now I lived alone, Josh having left
me for another man who, like Josh, was HIV positive. It was Josh’s belief that,
because of this, Steven could understand him in ways that were inaccessible to
someone like me who was uninfected. But then Steven died and Josh’s own health
began to deteriorate. I would gladly have taken him back but he insisted on
living on his own. Still, we’d had some­thing of a reconciliation, drawn back
together by memories of our shared life and the impending end of his.

As I closed the door behind me, I
considered driving to West Hollywood to check up on him, but I doubted I would
get that far. The quake had likely knocked out traffic signals and the roads
would be filled with panicked motorists and nervous cops turning them back. I
remembered the spooky presence in my bedroom and wondered anxiously if it had
been Josh, but that was absurd. It had been nothing more than a trauma-induced
hallucination; a momentary projection of my terror.

I went around the side of the house and
turned off the gas. When I returned to the street, my next-door neighbor, Jim
Kwan, approached me, flashlight in hand, and asked, “Hey, Henry, you okay?”

“So far,” I said. “Of course, the
night’s still young. How about you?”

“We came through in one piece. Knock on
wood,” he said, rapping his forehead. “I’m going to check on Mrs. Byrne down
the street.”

“I’ll come with you,” I said, wanting to
keep busy.

We passed a group of our neighbors huddled
around a radio. The radio voice was saying, “. . . is estimated to be a
six-point-six quake centered in the San Fernando Valley, with the epicenter
near Encino …” I was relieved to hear that because it meant Josh was at least
as far away from the epicenter as we were and there didn’t seem to be any major
damage to the hill.

I heard the clatter of metal against the
street and trained my light on Kwan’s feet. He was wearing cleated golf shoes.

“What’s with the shoes?”

An embarrassed smile crossed his round,
good-natured face. “I was scared shitless, man. I grabbed the first shoes I
could find.”

I shone the light on my own scuffed Nikes
and recognized them as a pair Josh had left behind.

“Is your phone out?” I asked Kwan.

“Look across the canyon,” he said.
“Everything is out.”

Through a gap between two fences I could
see the west rim of the canyon, where far grander houses than ours commanded
breathtaking views. Darkness. The October night was beautiful, cool and mild.
Without the distracting blaze of city lights, the stars glittered in the deep
blue sky. A damp herbal smell came up from the undergrowth. Rosemary. Back in
his naturopathy phase, Josh warmed rosemary oil in a diffuser because he
claimed it reduced anxiety. I tore a sprig from a bush, crushed it between my
fingers and sniffed it.

“Spooky, huh?” Kwan said. “Like
the city was clubbed in its sleep.”

 “Did you feel anything strange in your house
after the quake?”

“You mean besides my life flashing in
front of me?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Like a ghost?”

Kwan laughed. “Something must’ve come down
on your head, Rios.”

I felt the bump on my forehead where I’d
hit the closet door. “Maybe so. Maybe I just imagined it, but, for a
minute there, it sure felt like there was someone in the room with me.”

“Maybe it was Jesus,” Kwan joked. “The
Second Coming. Mrs. Byrne will know.”

We found her sitting on her porch steps
reading her Bible by candlelight. She was an old woman, her mottled, veiny face
framed by stiff white tufts of hair. She had lived in Los Angeles, which she
pronounced with a hard Midwestern “g,” for over forty years. Once or twice a
month she went door to door with a sheaf of faded religious tracts of the
hell-and-brimstone variety, and raved at the neighbors polite enough to let her
in about God’s coming and wrathful judgement on our Sodom of a city. I barred
the door when I saw her coming but Kwan, whom she usually caught while he was
out gardening, suffered her rants with good humor. When I kidded him about it,
he said she was lonely. With good reason, I replied.

“Mrs. Byrne, are you okay?” Kwan asked.

She looked at him with rheumy eyes and
said, “Didn’t I tell you, Kwan, it’s the last days. Earthquakes, fires,
plague.” Her voice got high and a little crazy. “Jesus is coming.”

“Just in case he doesn’t come tonight, I’m
going to shut off your gas,” he said. “Keep an eye on her, Henry.”

She squinted at me. “Who are you?”

“Your neighbor from down the block,” I
said. “Henry Rios.” I sat down beside her and asked, “The quake scare
you, Mrs. Byrne?”

“Knocked me clean out of my bed,” she
replied. “But I’ve been through worse, and worse is coming, young
man.” She rattled her Bible. “Now you take this AIDS—”

I trained my light on her Bible and said,
“Why don’t you read to me until Kwan gets back?”

She opened the book and began reading in
her high, shaky old woman’s voice: “‘And I saw a new Heaven and a new Earth:
for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no
more sea.’” As I listened, I felt the kind of euphoria people feel when they
survive a disaster. I realized then that I’d thought I was going to die in the
quake. My mind drifted back to that moment after the quake ended when I’d
imagined there was someone else in the room. Was it just a hallucination? It had
seemed so real. Mrs. Byrne’s voice broke into my ruminations. “‘And God shall
wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither
sorrow nor crying; neither shall there be any more pain; for the former things
are passed away.’”

“What part of the Bible is that?” I asked.

“Revelations, young man.”

“I thought that was all about the
destruction of the world.”

“It is,” she said, “and then what comes
after. The end of all suffering. The end of death.” With an unexpectedly sweet
smile, she added, “You don’t know what the word gospel means, do you?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“It means the good news. Whatever we
suffered here on earth, there is joy with Christ when we die. That’s why I
wasn’t afraid tonight. I’m not afraid to die. Are you?”

“I’m hoping I won’t have to answer that
question for many years, Mrs. Byrne.”

“Silly boy,” she said. “You don’t know how
many years you have. Best to be ready now.”

Then Kwan came around the corner, gave the
all clear, ending our conversation.

For the rest of the night, I huddled with
my neighbors around the radio, listening to reports of the damage. Most of the
city was dark and there were reports of fires, leveled buildings and downed
freeways, but the worst of the damage was confined to the valley. To my relief,
damage to West Hollywood was reported as minimal. For a while, the echo of
sirens reverberated on the hill from the streets below, but by dawn it had
quieted down. As the sky began to lighten, our little disaster party broke up
and we trudged back to our houses.

A boy was sitting at my front door,
asleep. I came down the steps and stood above him. Occasionally, homeless
people wandered up the hill, but he was too clean and well-dressed for that.
His arms were wrapped around his knees and his head was down, long, black hair
covering his face. I had no idea who he was, but I was pretty sure he hadn’t stumbled
into my doorway by accident. I’m a criminal defense lawyer and accustomed to
strangers showing up at my door at odd hours of the day and night.

I didn’t particularly welcome these
unexpected visitations; I’d always seemed to attract a class of clients who
were, as a disgruntled ex-partner once put, “from hunger, Henry.” I was a
magnet for the desperate, frightened and reviled, who somehow or other had
heard about the fag lawyer who was a sap for a sad story and let you pay on
installment. Josh used to tell me, “You’re a lawyer, not a social worker.’’
After he left, I had plenty of time to wonder if he would’ve stayed had I spent
less time on my clients’ troubles and more on ours; that question and the other
mysteries of my midlife. I’d gone into therapy like a good Californian, and
learned that in all probability the reason I’d devoted myself to the legal
lepers of the world was because I felt like an outcast myself – “queer,”
in every sense of the world—and I struggled to compensate with good works.

In the end I’d taken this insight and
decided, so what. I was forty- two years old, and law was all I knew or cared
about, apart from Josh and a few friends. I threw myself back into my practice.
Occasionally, a fellow defense lawyer would refer me a particularly hopeless
case. I wondered which one I had to thank for the sleeping boy.

I hunched down on my heels, shook his
shoulders gently and said, “Wake up, son.” He raised his head and his
eyes fluttered open. They were unusually blue, which was surprising, given his
dark coloring. I judged him to be in his mid-twenties and he was strikingly
handsome: long hair, dark skin, blue eyes and a silver loop in either ear.
Wearily, he got to his feet. He was medium height, five-seven or -eight, but
tightly muscled, a featherweight. Beneath loose-fitting jeans and a black
pullover sweater, his slender body radiated tension and fatigue.

“Are you Henry’ Rios?” he asked nervously.

“Yes. Who are you?”

“Zack Bowen,” he said. “I’m . .
. Chris Chandler’s boyfriend. Can I talk to you?”

For a moment, I was too astonished to
answer. Chris Chandler’s boyfriend?

“Come inside,” I said.

As soon as I stepped into the house,
exhaustion hit me. I’d been running on adrenaline since the quake and it was
all used up. I left Zack Bowen in the living room and went into the kitchen to
figure out some way of making coffee that didn’t require either electricity or
gas. There was still some hot water in the tap, so I mixed two cups of muddy
instant and carried them into the living room. Zack was stretched out on the
couch, asleep again. I sipped the vile brew and thought, Chris Chandler’s
boyfriend. Well, well. That was certainly a long time coming.

Blurb

Winner of six Lambda Literary awards, the Henry Rios mystery series is iconic and Michael Nava has been hailed by the New York Times as “one of our best” writers. Originally published during the darkest years of the AIDS epidemic in the gay community, The Death of Friends received extraordinary praise both as a mystery and an eloquent work of witness. Publisher’s Weekly said, “This is a brave, ambitious and highly impressive work.” The San Francisco Chronicle described it as “A beautifully executed novel, with a classic whodunit at its core.” And People magazine said, “Nava can devise as canny a plot as he can a defense motion. His latest, though, has something special – the scent of memory that lingers as poignantly as a departed lover’s cologne.”

More about Michael Nava



Michael Nava

Michael Nava is the author of an acclaimed series of eight novels featuring gay, Latino criminal defense lawyer Henry Rios who The New Yorker, called “a detective unlike any previous protagonist in American noir.” The New York Times Book Review has called Nava “one of our best” writers. He is also the author of an award-winning historical novel, The City of Palaces, set at the beginning of the 1910 Mexican revolution. In addition, he is the writer/producer of the Henry Rios Mysteries Podcast which adapted the first Rios novel, Lay Your Sleeping Head into an 18-episode audio drama. In 2019, he also founded Persigo Press, through which he hopes to publish LGBTQ writers and writers of color who write genre fiction that combines fidelity to the conventions of their genre with exceptional literary merit.

Exclusive Excerpt: The Cricketer’s Arms: A Clyde Smith Mystery by Garrick Jones

Excerpt:

I stayed
with Trescoe for an hour, helping him put the study back into order. He was a
nice enough bloke, but over time I came to realise although the enormity of the
tragedy of Mike Hissard’s death had hit hard, he hadn’t really cared much for
the man, calling him at one stage a “misguided petty thief”. He
wouldn’t be pressed, but the more we chatted, the more I sensed he’d been aware
of something untoward going on, but had made a conscious decision to keep his
nose clean, and to mind his own business. I offered him a lift home, which he
accepted, telling me after I’d enquired about the cat that he was happy it had
found a good home. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear; as much as I liked animals,
I wasn’t sure right now was the best time for me to be tied down to regular
feeds, cat-tray cleaning, and patting sessions.

As he got out of my car and thanked me for the lift, he passed me a
key.

“Laneway behind Kellett Street, at The Cross,” he said.
“Garage marked with M.H. above the door. It’s the third one along on your
left, coming from Bayswater Road.”

“What’s in it?”

“I’ve no idea. But it was originally his father’s. Michael
always said to me if anything ever happened to him, to take everything inside
to the incinerator at the tip and burn it—and not to look at what’s
inside.”

“Would you have?”

He shrugged. “What you don’t know can’t kill you. Any fool will
tell you that.”

I smiled. It was a bittersweet smile, because during my time in the
war it had always been what you did know would save your life. Only those who
didn’t know what was coming bit the dust.

Click to purchase

“Will you be all right?” I asked. “What will you
do?”

“His parents left a proviso in their will for me, and he
promised me the same. I hope he’s honoured it. Between the two, it will keep me
going.”

“Well, thank you for the phone number and the offer to help if
need be. Detective Sergeant Telford will be in touch. If you’ve got any
queries, or are worried about anything, here’s my number.”

I scribbled it on a sheet of paper from my notebook. He touched his
hat as he waved me goodbye.

*****

I
decided the garage at The Cross could wait until another day. It was after four
and I wanted to have a quick look through both Stan Lowe’s and Philip Mason’s
home offices—assuming they both had one.

As Stan’s flat was in a short laneway off Broadway, I went there
first; I could call past Philip’s on the way home. Its back door was, like
mine, up a fire escape and on the top floor. The lock opened easily; no inner
bolts. Inside, the house was immaculate; not in the same obsessive way Mike’s
had been, but as if everything had been put away while the owner was on an
extended holiday. I checked—the fridge had been turned off and the phone was
disconnected. He had a set of suspended files in one of his deep desk
drawers—there wasn’t much there, so I emptied them into a large leather
briefcase I’d brought with me. There were only two bundles of documents. The
first was company invoices—Liu and Sons,
Importers and Exporters of Fancy Goods. The other bundle consisted of bank
statements—two separate accounts with the Hong Kong and Shanghai bank in Dixon
Street. Each bundle was held together by a sturdy alligator clip and faced with
a long strip of paper covered in Chinese writing.

Philip’s house was not so tidy. There was stuff everywhere. It
didn’t look like it had been ransacked, more like he and his wife had packed
and left in a hurry. On his study desk was a pile of manuscripts and radio
plays. I knew he did some radio theatre broadcasting occasionally. In his
typewriter was the second page of a play he’d been writing. I glanced at the
first page on the desk next to the typewriter and then read as far as he’d got
on the sheet in the machine. It was truly awful, overwritten, clueless muck, so
I wasn’t at all surprised to find a pile of manuscripts on the floor next to
his desk with rejection letters. However, taped to the underneath of the top
drawer, in which he kept his pens and pencils, was a clear-paned envelope, in
it a bank statement for the Bank of the Philippines, in the name of Mr. Mason
Phillipe—a nice enough pen name—with a recent deposit of two thousand pounds. I
slipped that into my jacket pocket.

As I was about to leave, something caught my eye. I’d noticed it,
but then not taken notice of it. It was a roll of thin, striped cord—two
hundred yards, the label said. Exactly the same type and colour of thin cord
that had been used, not only to bind up Daley Morrison’s collection of pubic hair
samples, but also his wrists when he was found dead on the pitch at the Sydney
Cricket Ground. That went into my briefcase with everything else I’d collected
that afternoon.

My mind whirred on the way home. I got out of the car, unlocked my
garage, and then drove the car inside, sitting for a moment while I got my
thoughts into order after I’d turned off the engine. I glanced at my watch to
check the time, when a soft metallic click sounded from behind my right ear.

“You know the drill, Mr. S.,” Larry the Lamb said. I knew
his voice; I didn’t even have to look. “Raise your hands slowly in the
air, and don’t try anything fancy, because my friend here, Mr. Clancy, has a
tommy gun trained on your back. He doesn’t like me much, so even if you grab me,
we’re both dog food.”

I raised my hands slowly in the air, and then a black hood slipped
over my head, and I smelled the distinctive sweet, clinical odour of chloroform
as a hand pressed a pad of something soft over my mouth.

Blurb:

“I’m sorry I have to tell you this, Harry, but Daley Morrison was murdered. It was no heart attack. He was stabbed through the heart and then staked out, naked, in the middle of the Sydney Cricket Ground as some sort of warning to someone.”

Harry Jones almost fell into his chair, such was his shock.

Clyde Smith is brought into the investigation by his former colleague, Sam Telford, after a note is found in the evidence bags with Clyde’s initials on it. Someone wants ex-Detective Sergeant Smith to investigate the crime from outside the police force. It can only mean one thing—corruption at the highest levels.

The Cricketer’s Arms is an old-fashioned, pulp fiction detective novel, set in beachside Sydney in 1956. It follows the intricacies of a complex murder case, involving a tight-knit group of queer men, sports match-fixing, and a criminal drug cartel.

Was Daley Morrison killed because of his sexual proclivities, or was his death a signal to others to tread carefully? Has Clyde Smith been fingered as the man for the case, or will the case be the end of the road for the war veteran detective?

More About Author Garrick Jones



From the outback to the opera.

After a thirty year career as a professional opera
singer, performing as a soloist in opera houses and in concert halls all over
the world, I took up a position as lecturer in music in Australia in 1999 at
the Central Queensland Conservatorium of Music, which is part of CQUniversity.

Brought up in Australia, between the bush and the
beaches of the Eastern suburbs, I retired in 2015 and now live in the tropics,
writing, gardening, and finally finding time to enjoy life and to re-establish
a connection with who I am after a very busy career on the stage and as an
academic.

Author Joe Cosentino on the release of Drama Dance, the 8th Nicky and Noah mystery & an exclusive excerpt!

Why do we love murder mystery novels so much, reveling in the murder, mayhem, and madness? I think it’s because we enjoy sorting through the clues, sifting out the red herrings, meeting the quirky and fabulously suspicious suspects, falling in love along with the lovers, laughing out loud at the sleuth’s antics, and most of all bringing order and justice to our disordered world full of injustice. As a past professional actor and current college theatre professor/department head, I know first-hand the wild and wacky antics, sweet romance, and captivating mystery in the worlds of theatre and academia. Hence, the Nicky and Noah mysteries were born.  

After seven novels, adorable couple Nicky and Noah had used their theatre skills (including impersonating others) to solve seven mass murders, direct numerous theatrical productions, travel to exotic places, and adopt a son. What was left for them to do? Direct and star in my favorite ballet: The Nutcracker! So, in book eight, Drama Dance, our handsome heroes play the Mouse King and the Cavalier in a holiday production at their TreemeadowCollege (founded by deceased gay lovers Tree and Meadow) in picturesque and cozy Treemeadow, Vermont. Their colleagues and friends Martin (Drosselmeyer) and Rubin (producer) and of course their son Taavi (Fritz) come along for the bumpy ride as hunky dance faculty and students drop faster than their dance belts. As in every Nicky and Noah mystery novel, there are lots of cracked nuts as characters, and the yule tide is definitely gay. Not to mention there are more murders than altar boys in a priest’s closet (as Nicky would say). Laugh out loud humor, sweet romance, intriguing plot twists and turns, and a shocking ending all combine in usual Nicky and Noah mystery fashion. So, take your seats. The curtain is going up on The Nutcracker Ballet Nicky and Noah style!

Click to purchase



DRAMA DANCE (the 8th Nicky and Noah mystery) by JOE COSENTINO



Special $3.99 pre-order sale on Kindle version until release day August 1



Exclusive Excerpt of Drama Dance, the eighth Nicky and Noah mystery, by Joe Cosentino:

I felt a tap on my thigh. Naabih Bahri was next to me on one knee. The Associate Professor of Jazz said, “Nicky, I think it would be more interesting if the mice and toy soldiers did a jazz number—like the Jets and the Sharks’ rumble in West Side Story.

I was not going to cave to the Cavalier. “Naabih, please go backstage with the rest of the cast.”

The sword fight music played next. Thomas and Duffy danced and waved their swords. As they came at each other, Thomas banged into the toy chest and flipped backwards out of the window.

“Stop!”

Thomas rose behind the window flat. “Sorry, Professor. I can’t see well without my glasses. Can I wear them?”

I stood in from of the orchestra pit. “Do you have contacts?”

“I did but they bothered my eyes.”

Piero groaned from the second row. “I’ve never seen a Nutcracker wear eyeglasses.”

Liz chimed in next to him. “And I’ve never seen a Clara lie so seductively on the chaise.”

“Quiet, please!” I took in a deep breath. “Thomas, wear your glasses for tonight. We’ll speak to the costumer and figure something out for tomorrow night.” I spun around to face the house. “Understudies, this isn’t a comedy club. Please watch the show quietly and review the choreography. Now let’s resume the ballet.”

I sat down. In the seat next to me, Noah took my hand and squeezed. He looked so handsome in his Cavalier understudy costume, I wanted to share a little sugar with him. Onstage, Thomas, wearing his large black eyeglasses, danced toward Duffy. They raised their swords and began the duel. Thomas grandly hit Duffy’s shoulder with the sword. Duffy waved his sword dramatically and struck Thomas’s hat, which exploded, sending Thomas into the tall gift box.

Caterina screamed from the chaise. Duffy took off the mouse head, sweat and shock filling his face. Amidst the gasps of horror all around us, Noah and I dove onto the stage. When we reached the large box, Noah cringed at the sight of the hole in Thomas’ head. I bent down to the floor and examined the fallen Nutcracker hat. Noah placed his finger under Thomas’s neck and stated the obvious. “Nicky, he’s dead.”

The Nutcracker’s cracked.

Blurb

Theatre professor Nicky Abbondanza is back at Treemeadow College directing their Nutcracker Ballet co-starring his spouse, theatre professor Noah Oliver, their son Taavi, and their best friend and department head, Martin Anderson. With muscular dance students and faculty in the cast, the Christmas tree on stage isn’t the only thing rising. When cast members drop faster than their loaded dance belts, Nicky and Noah will once again need to use their drama skills to figure out who is cracking the Nutcracker’s nuts, trapping the Mouse King, and being cavalier with the Cavalier, before Nicky and Noah end up stuck in the Land of the Sweets. You will be applauding and shouting Bravo for Joe Cosentino’s fast-paced, side-splittingly funny, edge-of-your-seat entertaining eighth novel in this delightful series. Take your seats. The curtain is going up on the Fairy—Sugar Plum that is, clumsy mice, malfunctioning toys, and murder!

More About Author Joe Cosentino:



click for J oe Cosentino ‘s website

Bestselling author Joe Cosentino was voted Favorite LGBT Mystery, Humorous, and Contemporary Author of the Year by the readers of Divine Magazine for Drama Queen. He also wrote the other novels in the Nicky and Noah mystery series: Drama Muscle,Drama Cruise, Drama Luau, Drama Detective, Drama Fraternity, Drama Castle; the Dreamspinner Press novellas: In My Heart/An Infatuation &A Shooting Star, A Home for the Holidays, The Perfect Gift,The First Noel,The Naked Prince and Other Tales from Fairyland with Holiday Tales from Fairyland, the Cozzi Cove series: Cozzi Cove: Bouncing Back,Cozzi Cove: Moving Forward, Cozzi Cove: Stepping Out, Cozzi Cove: New Beginnings, Cozzi Cove: Happy Endings(NineStar Press);andthe Jana Lane mysteries: Paper Doll, Porcelain Doll, Satin Doll, China Doll, Rag Doll (The Wild Rose Press). He has appeared in principal acting roles in film, television, and theatre, opposite stars such as Bruce Willis, Rosie O’Donnell, Nathan Lane, Holland Taylor, and Jason Robards. Joe is currently Chair of the Department/Professor at a college in upstate New York, and he is happily married. Joe was voted 2nd Place Favorite LGBT Author of the Year in Divine Magazine’s Readers’ Choice Awards, and his books have received numerous Favorite Book of the Month Awards and Rainbow Award Honorable Mentions.