First You Fall: A Kevin Connor Mystery (19 page)

“I think your friend is beyond help,” Michael said.

He turned to me and tried to smile, but the mask was melting.

“Why, doctor,” Freddy said, “that doesn’t seem very Christian of you.

Michael’s face twisted into a bal of rage. “You think you’re clever, don’t you, boy? You think I don’t know what kind of filth you are?”

“I think we better go,” I said to no one in particular.

“Did you just cal me ‘boy’?” Freddy asked.

“I’l cal you worse than that,” Michael said, moving toward us, his color rising.

I think he was about to take a swing at Freddy, but then the doors of the meeting room opened. Men streamed out, chatting away, making a beeline for Michael when they spotted him.

Upon hearing the crowd, Michael transformed instantly. His body relaxed and his practiced smile returned. To anyone looking, we had just had a friendly chat.

It was creepy how quickly his entire demeanor changed. As if his most intense feelings could be cycled through like premium channels on cable. In the time I had observed him tonight, I’d seen him be charming, friendly, inspiring, seductive, angry, threatening, and then charming again.

The Mirror Has Two Faces,
I thought. Only a lot more than two.

“Wel , gentlemen,” he said to us. “It looks like you’ve been saved by the
Tinkerbelles.
How appropriate.”

He turned away, but not before Freddy said, “Oh, yeah? Wel , fuck you, too.”

“Good comeback,” I told him as we walked away.

“It was the best I could think of under the circumstances,” Freddy admitted.

Over dinner at the new Chelsea restaurant Foodboys, I told Freddy about how I sensed that Michael had a real sadistic streak.

“Wel , duh,” Freddy said. “That’s why I stepped in. I think if he’d gotten you into his office, you might never have come back out.”

“I know. What scares me is that for a moment, maybe even a few moments, I was almost ready to go with him. He’s got some crazy thing going—he’s super-charming one minute, then psycho the next.

He’d have made a great hustler.”

“He kind of is a great hustler, no?”

“I guess so,” I answered. I thought for a minute about how close I had come to stepping into the lion’s den. Which reminded me: “Where were you, anyway? It seemed like you were in that bathroom forever.”

“Oh, I met that guy who left the room right before we did in there. Remember him? The one with the great hair?”

“You did a guy in the bathroom at an anti-gay conversion seminar?” I asked.

“I didn’t
do
him,” Freddy corrected me. “I mean, OK, we made out a little, but that was it.” Knowing Freddy, “made out” could cover anything short of fisting. I decided to let it pass.

“I got his number,” Freddy said. “He was real y very nice. Twenty-three years old. Real religious family. When he came out in his teens, his mother stood up, went to the kitchen, and put her head in the oven.”

“Real y?”

“Yeah. He told me she didn’t turn it on or anything, she just did it for effect. Anyway, they sent him to one of those camps they have for teenagers—you know, the ones that are supposed to make you straight?” I nodded.

“They screwed him up pretty good. Tried to make him hate himself, but it didn’t real y take. When he saw the ad for the seminar tonight, he thought he’d give it one more try, but his heart wasn’t in it. He told me that Michael sounded like one of the counselors at his camp, only a little more pop psychology and a little less fire and brimstone.”

I figured that assessment was probably about right.

“Anyway, after a couple of minutes of fooling around, Charlie—that’s his name—told me he didn’t think he was going to be trying any more conversion therapies anytime soon. We have a date next week.”

“You’re truly a giver,” I said.

“I try.”

“OK,” I said, “what’s next?”

“Wel , we know now that Michael has a real mean streak. And something about you obviously makes him nervous. To me, he looks more like a suspect than ever.”

“OK, but we have to be able to prove it.”

“I know,” Freddy said. “Oy. That’s the hard part, ain’t it?”

“What’s next?”

“Check your list.”

I pul ed out my iPhone and pul ed up my to-do list.

1. Fol ow up with Roger Folds—fight?

2. Talk to Randy Bostinick

3. Research Paul and Michael Harrington.

4. Look into those gay suicides—was that true?

5. Fuck Tony

“OK, Freddy said, “you can cross one and two off the list. Number three—we’ve gotten some information about Michael Harrington—what about Paul?”

“Nothing yet,” I said.

“OK, so let’s leave that. What’s this about ‘gay suicides’?”

I shared what Tony had said about a rash of gay men taking their own lives.

“OK, so can you find out more about that?”

“Not without talking to Tony,” I said.

“Wel , that might get you closer to goal number five, too.”

“I’l find another way.” I had something in mind.

“Do that. And listen, while you have that thing out, don’t forget about tomorrow night.”

“Tomorrow night?” I asked.

“Sexbar?”

“Oh, right,” I said. I quickly clicked over to my calendar—yep, there it was. “I got it.”

“OK,” Freddy said, looking over my shoulder at an Asian man with the most amazing green eyes.

“What’s for dessert?”

I left Freddy at Foodboys and headed home.

Although it was 10:45 when I got there, my mother was sitting on the couch, purse in hand. She was wearing her black boots, a black sweatshirt, and, bizarrely, a black ski mask.

It was ninety-seven degrees out. This didn’t look good.

“Don’t sit down!” she cal ed as I walked through the door. “We’re going back out.”

I had, as they say, a very bad feeling about this.

A Lot More of Dottie Kubacki Than We

Expected

“TELL ME AGAIN,”
I asked, yawning in the couch-like seat of the Lincoln Continental my mother was driving, badly, down the Long Island Expressway,

“why are we doing this?”

“Your father hasn’t answered the phone al evening. Why do you think that is?”

“He’s sleeping?” I asked.

“He’s with that bitch Dottie Kubacki,” my mother hissed.

“Mom, there is no way that daddy is fu-fooling around with Dottie Kubacki.” But even as I said it, I saw my mother’s already death-like grip on the steering wheel tighten.

“Don’t say that name to me!”

“You just said it,” I reminded her.

“Wel , yes, but I was careful to cal her ‘that bitch’

Dottie Kubacki. If you say the whole thing like that, it takes the sting out.”

“Fine,” I said, exasperated. “There’s no way daddy’s seeing ‘that bitch’ Dottie Kubacki. For one thing, isn’t she kind of heavy?”

“She’s a pig!” my mother screamed, looking at me. The ear splitting horn of a tractor trailer in the lane into which she was carelessly drifting forced her to turn back to the road. “A heifer! She puts ice cream on her hamburgers!”

“Then how could you possibly be threatened by her?”

“Who knows what men like? I’d found magazines in your father’s drawers—not just naked people like that pornography you have…”

“Mom!” I cried.

“But real y dirty stuff, like two women posing together, or ladies with breasts so huge that they almost qualified for their own zip codes.”

“That’s hardly the equal to doing Dot…”

“Watch it,” my mother said.

“Sorry. ‘That bitch’ Dottie Kubacki.”

“He could be a ‘chubby chaser.’” she replied. “I saw about them on
The View.”

We exited the Expressway and drove the five local blocks to our street. But instead of pul ing up to our home, my mother turned off the engine and let the car quietly drift down the street until it stopped right in front of Dottie Kubacki’s house.

“I learned that from reading detective novels,” she said.

“Now what?” I asked.

“Now, you go out and peek in her windows.”

“What?”

“Just go up to the house and look in windows and see what they’re up to.” She reached into her handbag and brought out one of those cardboard disposable cameras you buy at the drugstore. “Take this. I want evidence.”

“Listen, you’re on your own here, Jessica Fletcher.

There is no way I’m going out there to spy on my own father.”

My mother looked at me cool y. “Do you know what an episiotomy is? When you were born, the doctors had to give me five stitches because you tore up my …”

“OK!” I said, “I’l go.”

“It’l be fun,” my mother said. “Haven’t you ever wanted to play detective?”

If you only knew, I thought.

Just as I started to open my door, we saw a light come on in one of Dottie’s second-floor windows.

“Her bedroom,” my mother hissed. “Get up there.”

“What?”

“There’s a tree right over there. Climb up and get the picture. Do I have to think of everything?” When my mother gets like this, you can either argue or give in. In either case, you’re going to lose. I was in no mood to fight.

I got out of the car, put the camera in my back pocket, and approached the tree. I grabbed hold of the lowest branch and pul ed myself up.

Years of gymnastics made the climbing part easy.

I ascended from limb to limb until I got near Dottie’s window. I had already decided that no matter what happened, even in the inconceivable event that my father was in there, I’d tel my mother that al I saw was Dottie, sorry, “that bitch” Dottie, getting ready for bed.

The tree got me high enough that I was looking directly into Dottie’s bedroom. Which, luckily, was empty. I couldn’t hear anything through the quarter-open window, either.

I looked down and saw my mother, expectant and angry, standing at the bottom of the tree. “Wel ?” she stage-whispered.

I put my hands together in prayer position and rested my head on them in the universal sign for sleep.

“Hmmm!” my mother observed.

I was just about to climb back down when a change in the light made me look up. There, at the window, stood Dottie Kubacki.

Nude.

I had always known that Dottie Kubacki was overweight, but to see her in the al -too-real flesh was to know the true awesomeness of nature. The Himalayas would be humbled.

She was Jabba the Hutt with pubic hair.

In fact, so impressive was the sight that I gasped.

Loudly.

Dottie raised the window ful y open. “Who’s out there?” she asked.

Shit, I thought. The tree was thick with branches and leaves. Maybe if I stood very stil , she wouldn’t see me.

Dottie leaned out the window, her pendulous breasts reaching almost to the ground. Wel , not real y, but you get the picture. I tried to make myself invisible.

“Huh,” she said, turning away.

If the front view of a naked Dottie Kubacki was indelible, you can only imagine how her backside seared itself into my consciousness. Her ass could have had its own zip code.

I looked down at my mother and motioned wildly for her to go back to the car. I was just beginning to climb down when Dottie’s presence back at the window made me look up.

The only worse thing than seeing Dottie Kubacki standing naked at the window, I learned, was seeing Dottie Kubacki standing naked
with a handgun
at the window.

“I said, ‘who’s out there!’” she demanded, pointing the gun about a foot to my left.

“Gah!” I said. I put my foot down where I expected a branch but found nothing but air. “Shit!” I fel about a foot down the tree until I managed to grab hold with my right hand.

“Is there someone in that tree?” Dottie demanded.

No, I thought, it’s a squirrel that says “shit.”

“If you’re that Ferrara kid, I’m cal ing your parents right now,” Dottie yel ed. “I don’t care how late it is.” She had that right—the Ferrara kids were brats.

I got halfway down the tree when the branch I was standing on cracked off.

“Shit!” I said again, as I fel , this time al the way to the ground. I landed on my ass, cracking the cheap camera my mother gave me and sending shards of plastic into my butt. “Ow!”

My impact or the noise must have set off an alarm, because al of a sudden the lights in Dottie’s yard came on and a loud siren blared.

“Murderer!” Dottie screamed. “Rapist! Someone cal the police!”

Lights in al the neighboring houses switched on, including ours, which pretty much ruled out the possibility that my father was at Dottie’s.

My mother reached over from the driver’s seat and opened the passenger door. “Would you get in here!” she yel ed at me.

The thought had occurred to me.

I scampered as quickly as I could across Dottie’s lawn and jumped into the car. My mother took off before my feet were al the way in.

“Gah!” I cried again. “Are you trying to kil me?”

“Kil you?” she said. “Can you imagine how embarrassed I would have been to be discovered snooping in that bitch Dottie Kubacki’s yard?”

“I think your camera went into my tush,” I told her, shifting uncomfortably in my seat.

“Wel , that would be a new one,” she observed dryly. “What made you cry out like that?” I told her about seeing Dottie Kubacki naked.

“You poor thing,” she admitted. “Wel , at least you can’t say she’s turned you off to women.”

“No, but it confirms my theory that daddy isn’t sleeping with her,” I said.