darkness. As we stood there, the loudest noise I heard was Cresly’s labored breathing. He was in pretty bad shape for a thin man.
“Let’s split up,” he sputtered, and started walking down the street we had come to. I started off in the opposite direction. I glanced at my watch. It was a little after midnight.
Ten minutes later I was walking through an alley, checking the dumpsters and piles of lumber for the kid’s body. Out of the darkness beside me, I heard a car start up. I looked toward the direction of the noise and saw a covered garage, open at either end, running the length of a brick building. At the far end of the garage the headlights of a car flashed on and it rolled toward me. I threw myself against the wall into the shadows and watched the car roar into the alley, skid a turn and race out. It was the Escort. There was one person in it. Zane.
When the Escort turned out of the alley I ran down the garage to where the car had been parked and found another dark street. Hearing footsteps behind me, I turned, my hands clenched into fists. It was Cresly.
“You hear a car?” he called, running toward me.
“Yeah, it was parked here.”
We stood on the spot and looked around. There was an ivy- covered wall in front of the photo processing lab across the street. The iron gate set into the wall was slightly ajar. I glanced over at Cresly. He was also staring at the gate.
“Over there,” he said in a soft voice.
We crossed the street to the gate and pushed it open. Between the wall and the building behind it, there was a grassy courtyard centered around an elm tree. A body lay beneath the tree, a male body, clad only in a black coat. As we approached him, a strong chemical odor drifted toward us. I had smelled the same odor, though fainter, in Tony Good’s bedroom. I’d been wrong. It wasn’t amyl nitrite.
“Smell that,” I said to Cresly.
“Yeah,” he replied, sniffing the air. “Ether.”
The boy lay on his stomach. Cresly extracted a pen light from his pocket and flashed it as we knelt down beside the kid. Blood and semen trickled from his anus down his thigh. Cresly pressed his thumb into the front of the boy’s neck.
“He’s alive,” he said, “just knocked out. Let’s turn him over.”
We rolled him over and Cresly focused the light on the boy’s face. Close up, he had a faint resemblance to Josh. His lips were bloody and a slight discoloration was beginning to show beneath his right eye. A shallow gash bisected his chest below his nipples. Cresly opened the boy’s jacket and with unexpected delicacy pressed his fingers along the boy’s sides.
“No broken bones,” he grunted and stood up. “Shit, what a mess.”
“We’ve got to get him to a hospital,” I said, also standing.
Cresly switched off the pen light.
“Did you hear me?” I said.
“Yeah, I heard.” Cresly looked around and walked away, returning with the boy’s pants and shoes. He set them on the grass beside the boy. “Help me get his pants on him.”
We struggled with the jeans until we got the boy dressed. Cresly unbuttoned the flannel shirt he was wearing, took it off, and told me to help him get the boy into it. When we finished, Cresly said, “If we go to a hospital I’ll have to flash my badge around to get him admitted.”
I looked at him, shivering in his undershirt. “So?”
“I want to know there’s been a crime before I do that.”
I stared at him, slack jawed. “Rape?” I suggested. “Battery? ADW?”
“The kid’s a whore.”
“Goddammit, are you telling me that this is just an occupational hazard?”
“I’m telling you,” he said, “that I’m not about to accuse the star of a fucking cop show of anything until I talk to the kid.”
“That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard,” I said.
“You don’t have to like it,” Cresly said. “That’s the way it is.”
“You want to just leave him here, then?” I demanded.
Cresly shook his head. “Your buddy lives around here, doesn’t he?”
“Josh? Yeah “
“Let’s take the kid there. I’ll get a statement and then decide about a hospital”
“He needs a doctor now.”
“Yeah, I’ll take care of that.” He dusted off the knees of his trousers. “You stay here. I’ll go see if Vidor got that car started.” He started out the gate. “Trust me,” he said.
“Sure,” I muttered.
The boy’s name was Robert and he claimed to be twenty, but I would have staked my bar card that he was no more than seventeen. We got him into bed at Josh’s apartment where he was examined by an unshaved and slightly inebriated coroner — the only medical type to whom Cresly had ready access — who pronounced him alive and, except for superficial wounds and bruises, in good shape.
Robert said that after Zane picked him up “we drove around and smoked some grass. Then he parked and started getting all lovey, you know. Deep-kiss, that shit. I didn’t go for that ‘cause I’m not a queer but he said it was his money, so…” He sipped some water. “Then he goes, there’s a place around here where we can go. We went to that place where you found me. He tells me to take down my pants ‘cause he wants to suck me off. But he wants them all the way off. I’m getting kinda nervous ‘cause this guy’s way too good-looking to be a trick. I’m thinking he’s a cop or something so I tell him, let’s just forget it, man. Then he punches me, real hard, and knocks me on my ass. Next thing I know he’s sitting on top of me with this switchblade, big mother, too.”
Robert’s hands trembled as he lifted the water glass to his lips and then set the glass down again. “He goes, shut your fucking mouth or I’ll kill you Sure, I go, just don’t hurt me. Then he cuts me here,” the boy touched the scar across his chest. “He says, take off your pants. I take them off, still lying there on the ground. Then he goes, turn over. The next thing I know he’s fucking me, not using any lube or nothin’, just sticking it in. Jesus, that hurt, but if I scream or something he stops and pushes the knife into my neck, so I just bite my lip.” The boy bit his bruised lips, flinched, and then continued. “He’s really hurting me. It’s like he’s just fucking me to hurt me, not to get off or anything. I guess he came or something ‘cause he was lying there on top of me. Then he starts saying these crazy things like, I’m going to cut off your balls, and, I’m going to shove this knife up your ass. Shit like that. But it sounds like he’s gonna do it, really. So I start crying.” Robert stopped and looked at us. “He turned me over, still sitting on me and he’s got the knife and I’m telling him, don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me.”
I heard Josh’s quick breathing beside me. “He reaches into his pockets and pulls out this smelly rag. Next thing, he shoves it on my face and it’s all wet and cold and then…” He broke off and wiped his face with the back of his hand. “I woke up in your car.”
The boy lay his head back into the pillows. “I’m real tired,” he said. “Are you guys the cops?”
Cresly nodded. A few minutes later, Robert was asleep.
26
We were at the kitchen table. Cresly and Freeman were deep into a six-pack of Bud while I drank coffee. Josh sat with his back against the wall, quietly watching us. The little apartment was still except for the ticking of the clock above the stove and, from the bedroom, the faint, ragged noise of Robert’s breathing.
Cresly said, “If the kid sticks to his story, we got an ADW.” He rubbed his icy eyes. “You tell me how we turn that into Tony Good’s murder.”
“Zane killed Fox and Blenheim, too,” I said, hearing the tiredness in my voice. “He killed them all.”
Cresly lit a cigarette. “One thing at a time.”
“I asked Freeman to keep an eye on Zane,” I began, “because I thought that Blenheim might try something. That’s when I still believed that it was Blenheim who killed Fox and Good. But then Freeman — you tell him.”
