and a lot more nothing will happen if you stick your nose into this affair. I’ve got your address and I’ve got units in the neighborhood twenty-four hours a day. If you don’t want to develop undiagnosable internal injuries, you stay miles away from all this. Am I communicating?”
“Very unambiguously.”
“Just so we’re straight. Sorry, wrong term. Just so you’re clear on it. Are you? Clear on it?”
“Yes,” I said through a spasm of hatred that threatened to close my throat completely.
“Good,” he said. “Stephen, the pretty boy check out?”
“He’s a cop’s little brother, the bride’s. He was at the wedding, went there with her. With her all day, he says.”
“Where’s she?”
“On her way to Honolulu.”
Spurrier screwed up his face in frustration. “How long?”
“Two weeks.”
“You get a number?”
“Yeah. Maui.”
“How nice for her.”
“There was a wedding there today,” the young cop said, coming into the room. “At Parker Center, I mean.”
“My, my,” Spurrier said admiringly. “It all checks out.”
“You primitive piece of shit,” I said.
“I can understand your frustration, sir,” Spurrier said. “Wasting so much of your day this way. But I’d like to thank you for coming forward and assisting us with our inquiries.
“You’ll be wanting to get along now.” Spurrier backed away from the chair, his face tight, as though he hoped I was going to come out of it and try to rip his heart out. “I’m sure you two have a big evening planned.”
I got up more painfully than Christopher Nordine had. “I’ll be seeing you,” I said.
“I’ll be looking forward to it,” he said. “But not on this case.”
As we went down the porch steps, I heard the laugh again, and recognized it as Spurrier’s.
“Is that what they’re like, the Sheriffs?” Orlando asked twenty minutes later. It was the first thing he’d said since we left Grover’s house.
“It’s what some of them are like. Not many. There used to be more like Spurrier. Now the problem is that the better cops don’t do anything when a bad one gets out of line. White people don’t generally see too much of it, though.”
“White heterosexual people, you mean.”
“Yeah. Spurrier’s a little twisted on the subject of gays. I wonder what his analyst has to say about it.”
“He thought you were gay.” He turned on the radio and gave the indicator a skid across the dial.
“He thought we both were.”
Orlando found a station playing heavy metal, something that sounded like a head-on collision between San Diego and Tijuana, listened for a second, and turned it down. “I am,” he said.
“Oh,” I said, nonplussed. The first time I’d met him, he’d been hondling Eleanor to introduce him to a girl.
He fiddled with the tuning knob on the radio, giving it all his attention. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “About Eleanor and that Chinese girl.”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
“I was fooling myself. Telling myself I couldn’t get dates with girls because I was too young for the ones at UCLA, telling myself I was too shy to talk to women, when what was really happening was that I didn’t want to.” He threw me a quick evaluative glance. “I was in denial.”
Denial. “ You’re seeing a therapist,” I said.
“At school. She’s helped a lot. It’s hard for a Latino guy, especially when he comes from a family of cops.”
“Therapists like to tell people they’re suppressing homosexual feelings,” I said cautiously. “It gives them something to do.”
“In my case, though, it’s true.” He gave up on the radio and began to gnaw on the nail of his right index finger.
“Don’t bite your nails,” I said automatically.
He laughed. Then I started to laugh, too, and he leaned back and made hooting noises, laughing off some of the tension from Max Grover’s house.
“Was your cop okay to you?” I asked, braking to avoid rear-ending someone who was apparently multiplying addresses in his head as he drove. The laughter had hurt in several places.
“Stephen? No, he was very nice, really sympathetic. In fact, I think he might be gay. He was good-looking enough to be gay, anyway. Has anybody told you you have repressed homosexual feelings?”
“Lots of people. All therapists.”
He hesitated. “But it isn’t true.”
“If it is, they’re very repressed. I mean, I think men are interesting people, and some of them are good- looking, but there’s nothing sexual about it.”
“I think I’ve known forever,” Orlando said dreamily. “Since I was eight or nine or something.”
“Does Sonia know?”
“Of course.” He sounded affronted. “That’s why she got so mad at Al in the car.”
“Then Al doesn’t-”
“Not yet,” he said quietly. “He’s got a surprise coming.”
“It’ll raise his consciousness,” I said. “Something has to.”
“Al’s all right,” Orlando said, surprising me a second time. “He’s probably not ready for me to bring anybody over to spend the night, though.”
“No. Probably not.”
“If it was a girl he’d be all ho-ho-ho and hearty and nudgy, winking at me across the room and thumping me on the back whenever we were alone. But a guy-no way.”
“Not yet.”
“I’ve got a boyfriend,” Orlando said with pride. “My first.”
“Well,” I said banally, “good for you.”
He caught my tone and pulled away slightly. “Does it bother you?”
“No,” I said. “I just don’t know what I’m supposed to say. I’m not very good at intimacy.”
“And I’m not good at anything else. Eleanor’s the same way. That must be a problem between you.”
I was beginning to feel like our relationship was on CNN; everybody knew everything. “You could say that.”
“You never told that sergeant you weren’t gay.”
“It wasn’t any of his business,” I said. “Anyway, you know, it’s just one thing about you. Whether you like guys or girls or Eskimos or Arabian horses. It’s just one thing out of thousands, like who you voted for or whether you shave before you shower or after. It doesn’t have much to do with who you are.”
“It does when you can’t admit it,” Orlando said.
“I guess it would.”
“Here we are,” he said. “The next lot.” We negotiated the parking lane, deserted at this hour, and I braked at the curb when he told me to. He started to get out of the car, and then stopped and looked at me. “You’re okay,” he said. “Al is always talking about you being somebody unusual, but I never knew what he meant. You took everything that stunted little clown could dish out, and you never lost your dignity. I don’t know if I could have done that.”
“I got beaten up,” I pointed out.
“What you said about his shoes,” Orlando said, and then he laughed again. He extended a hand, and I shook it and watched him slide out of the car and angle across the parking lot, a slender teenager in a tuxedo, heading toward God only knew what. Then I drove home through the ragtag remnants of the rush hour, climbed the driveway to my house, and took a pistol away from Christopher Nordine, who was waiting in my living room.
