I did my best to go about my business. I saw the clients I’d scheduled. Unfortunately, none of them turned out to be the killer. I bought groceries. I went to the gym and did a really lame workout. I filled my car with gas. I wracked my brain for other things I could to do to prove my innocence; I didn’t come up with much.
Of course, I put a lot of effort into getting a hold of Jeremy. I called repeatedly, but he never called back. To be honest, the messages I left probably didn’t make returning my call all that appealing. Finally, I went over to the apartment he shared with Skye. After pounding on their door for a good fifteen minutes, their neighbor came out and told me they’d gone to Palm Springs for a few days. That threw me for a loop. It probably shouldn’t have, but it did.
I finally checked my message from David Barker on Thursday. It wasn’t what you’d call pleasant. He wasn’t the kind of man who liked being questioned by the police about his sex life. And, as he made a point of saying, one of the things he was paying for was discretion and I’d failed miserably at that. Of course, this was peppered with a lot of curse words and a few threats.
Remarkably, Barker didn’t post a negative review on massageformen.com, so I kept getting clients. They weren’t too bad, either. A couple were even kind of fun. To a certain extent they relieved some of the pressure on me, since I could concentrate on giving them a massage -- not a good one mind you, but one that wasn’t too embarrassing.
Before I started on my Friday afternoon client, he asked, “You are gay, aren’t you?”
I worried it might be a trick question. A lot of masseurs on massageformen.com claimed to be straight. This served a couple purposes. First, a lot of gay guys fantasized about having sex with straight guys, so having one feel you all over and then jerk you off fit that fantasy. Second, it covered them if they weren’t able to get an erection. Still, I decided truth was the best. “Yes, I’m gay.”
“Thank God,” the guy said. “I used to go to this guy, he was good, but then I figured out that he was actually, really straight and not just saying so. It took all the fun out of it. I mean, since I have to pay you I get that you’re not necessarily attracted to me. But when you’re not into my entire gender, it’s just weird.”
I was uncomfortable that he’d mentioned paying for sex. It was pretty much what was happening, but none of my clients ever talked about it. So, I did what I always did when a client made me uncomfortable. I told him to get onto the table and lie face down. That was the thing I really liked about massage, I was in control. The rest of my life might be falling apart, but for that hour I was the one in charge. I decided what happened and what didn’t happen.
Of course, every time I left a client’s house I felt a little bad, knowing that sometime very soon the police would close in and ask a whole lot of embarrassing questions. Did I try to hurt them? Did I put my hands anywhere near their neck? That was a difficult one. I began trying to avoid my clients’ necks so that they wouldn’t get confused and think that maybe I was actually getting off on the possibility of choking them. Except most of them would ask me to rub their necks since it was such a focal point for tension. So, I’d try to rub their necks hard enough, but not too hard.
Each time I left my house, each time I got out of my car and went into a client’s home, I looked for my tail. I never saw it. But I knew they were there. I got a couple angry calls from clients, so obviously I was still being followed. Not every client called, though. I assumed that meant they were too upset by being questioned to even bitch me out about it. Things didn’t begin to click for me until I went to the grocery store that weekend.
It was a beautiful morning; the sky a brilliant, cloudless blue, trees deep green. Even the trees that would eventually drop their leaves in winter were still green. In L.A., fall typically arrives in late December. I came out of the market with three bags of groceries, popped my trunk and put them in. As I walked the cart back to the front of the store, I looked around the parking lot for my tail. Nothing.
On impulse, I decided it was time to find them. I veered off and walked down the row next to the one I’d parked in. I was looking for a full-sized, non-descript vehicle in blue or brown. Probably a Ford. I figured there’d be one, possibly two police officers in the car. There were always two on TV, but in real life they might economize.
Every car I looked at was empty. None of them were full-sized and very few of them were non-descript. I picked another row. Nothing there, either. Nothing in the entire parking lot, as a matter of fact. No matter what make of car, none of them were occupied.
I looked across the street. All the cars were empty. There was no way I was being followed. But Tripp had said I was under surveillance, and the calls from my clients said so too. It didn’t make sense.
I went back to my car and sat for a few minutes. Flipping open the
