He smiled proudly with all his perfectly straight white teeth. “ Gypsies, tramps, and thieves, that’s what the people of the town would call us,” he belted out in quite a good imitation of Cher’s voice.
There were photos of him as Barbra Streisand, Marlene Dietrich, Joan Rivers, Elizabeth Taylor, and Liza Minnelli. They were remarkable.
“Liza, that’s who I’m known for. She’s even come to see me.”
And there it was, a picture of his Liza and the real one standing cheek to cheek. It was signed by her with the inscription: If only I were this young and pretty and talented. Love, Liza.
“She’s such a doll.”
But none of the photos of Marco as other people interested me nearly as much as the photo of Marco as himself, clutched in the thick, powerful arms of Jorge Delgado. He noticed my gaze.
“We met when he was working on the pile at Ground Zero,” Marco said, taking hold of the photo and sitting down on the couch. “God, I was such a child back then. I had been in the city for about a year from Denton.”
“Texas?”
“Yes, not exactly a place that had much use for someone like me.”
“I wouldn’t think so.”
“But after the attacks, I went down there to the Trade Center to help anyway I could. Georgie and I just struck up a kind of odd friendship to begin with. We both loved working out and though you can’t tell it, I’m half Argentinean. I speak fluent Spanish. Georgie liked that and my sense of humor. That’s all it was for years, a friendship. He would come to see me do my act on occasion. Of course, he could never tell anyone about me. My goodness, he would have never heard the end of it on the job. And his family… forget it! They would have been horrified. In some ways, I think that helped him to finally give into it. He had to hide me anyway. Over the years, when he would drink a little too much, and I was still in costume, we would kiss sometimes, but nothing more. Then one night, about two years ago, it didn’t stop with kissing. I loved him very much.”
“Not to burst your bubble, Marco, but your lover over there had a funny way of dealing with being with you. He basically tormented Alta Conseco because she was a lesbian. Did you know he tried to hire a guy to break her bones?”
“Guilt,” he said without a moment’s hesitation. “Moe, I didn’t say it was all bliss with Georgie. In some ways, it was easier when it was only kissing and I was in drag. He could maintain the pretense that way, but once we were together, his world crumbled. It’s always more difficult with men like him, the married macho types who can never accept themselves for what and who they are. He was jealous of Alta, someone who could be out in the world as a gay woman. Georgie resented it and was repulsed by who he was. What’s the old saying? We hate those things in other people we detest most about ourselves.”
“Why come forward now?”
“I didn’t exactly come forward, did I? Your Mr. Doyle found me.”
“Come on, Marco. I’ve been around the block a few times myself. Brian wouldn’t have found you if you didn’t want to get found.”
“Georgie died fretting over whether he would have to tell the cops the truth to clear his name. He was afraid that if that happened, it would all come out. He didn’t want to hurt his family. He also forbade me from coming forward. He was like that.”
“And now?”
“He’s dead and buried, a hero. I need the doubts erased. I couldn’t live with myself if people continued to whisper that Georgie had anything to do with that woman’s murder.”
“You were with him that night and you can prove it?” I asked.
Marco didn’t answer. Instead, he stood up, and went into what I supposed was his bedroom. He came out holding a nine-by-twelve envelope and handed it to me.
“I can prove it and so can a hundred other witnesses. He was at both shows that night. It was a very special night, the anniversary of the first time we were together. It was also the night I premiered my Lady Gaga routine. Look for yourself.”
Sure enough, there was Marco on stage as Lady Gaga. And at one of the front tables in the time-and-date- stamped shots was Jorge Delgado’s smiling face. I put them back in the envelope and made to hand the envelope to Marco.
“No. Keep them. It will help. I want those whispers to be done with. Brian tells me you’ll know how to make that happen.”
I stood up. “I’ll try.”
He walked me to the door and thanked me for making this last gift to his lover a possibility.
“Can I ask you one thing, Marco?”
“Sure.”
“Why Delgado? It couldn’t have been easy.”
“We love who we love,” he said. “We love who we love.”
I had a sick feeling in the pit of my belly, not because of the cancer and not because of what had transpired between Marco and Delgado. On the contrary, I agreed with Marco’s view: we love who we love. The older I got, the less all the old rules mattered to me about the rights and wrongs of love and relationships. I thought about how destructive Carmella’s attitude was and who it really hurt in the end. What did any of those stupid shoulds and shouldn’ts accomplish except to ruin lives and crush hope? It was just that I was uneasy, that somehow I knew what Marco had given me as a gesture of love and absolution would be perverted into a weapon and that I would be the one to wield it.
When I got downstairs I realized I was only a block or two away from the High Line Bistro, a restaurant, frankly, I wish I had never heard of.
FORTY-THREE
In all things, success breeds complacency. It is dangerous and unavoidable. This was equally true for blackmailers and baseball players and bartenders. When you’re so sure things will go smoothly in the future because they have in the past, you’re bound to get bitten in the ass. Complacency, that’s what I was counting on as I drove Natasha around the Upper West Side in my rented Suburban, killing time until I had to drop her off.
She had been true to her word, cooperating fully without a word of complaint. As I instructed her to do, she had gotten in touch with her blackmailer as she always had, sending him an innocuous email: Package ready. Just need an address. Then, within twenty-four hours, she received a call giving her instructions. No, she didn’t recognize the voice. She never could because he used one of those voice distortion boxes.
“The first two times,” she said, “he had me mail the cash to different PO boxes. After that, he had me drop it in garbage cans or leave it on a bench.”
“How much?”
“The first payments were for three thousand dollars each. Now they’re a thousand bucks each time.”
Clearly, the blackmailer-who I couldn’t help but see as Tino Escobar-wasn’t as trusting of the mail as his late partner. That and he was impatient for his money. That was good, a nice compliment to his complacency. His focus would be on the money.
“How much are you into him for?”
“Eleven thousand.”
I didn’t press her about it, nor did I ask her about how she felt when she heard Tillman was dead or when she found out that his death seemed to be beside the point. I didn’t ask her why she hadn’t gone to the cops immediately. I didn’t ask her where she was getting the money to pay. I didn’t ask her a lot of the questions it had occurred to me to ask. What did any of it matter now?
“I was tested,” Natasha whispered.
She could see the puzzlement in my eyes.
Tears were rolling down her freckled cheeks. “For HIV. I’m okay. I had the test the porn stars use when they get checked, the one that tells you right away. And I’ve had follow-ups.”
