Lucinda is in shock. If Pete had just told her then what happened with Corey… my God, how their lives would have been different. The suffering we would have been spared. Needless, so needless.’ She paused. ‘I’m sorry I’ve been so testy. Frankly I could use about seven hours in bed with you.’
‘Faith… do you believe the note?’
A silence. ‘Of course I do. I feel horrible for Pete now, imagining what he must have gone through. Why he decided to steep himself in what passed for pleasure. Why he couldn’t tell me…’ Her voice broke for a moment and then she laughed, one of those soft laughs, not funny, made at the sadness of the world. ‘I always considered him a failure as a husband. I must have been an equal failure as a wife.’
‘After Corey vanished, did Pete seem different? Troubled?’
He could hear Lucinda’s voice in the background, apparently talking on another line, soft and mournful. ‘Pete was never the same. But all I can worry about is Sam, okay?’
‘I’m sorry. Faith.’ Condolences never counted for much with him. They always seemed designed to coddle the giver in the face of mortality. But he tried. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘At least it’s over. Thank you, Whit. Bye.’
He unlocked the cafe doors and headed back to Irina’s office. An untidy whirl of papers covered her desk. A calendar from the local branch of the Texas Coastal Bank was pinned to one wall. Framed on her desk was a selection of photos of family in faraway Russia. A dour mother, a sunny brother who needed orthodontic work and wore his hair in an unstylish chop. Irina rarely spoke of them, as though they were from a chapter of life best forgotten.
He powered up her iMac, accessed the Internet, and found himself on the Yahoo! Web portal. He began with a search for ‘Big Pete Majors,’ the film name Pete Hubble had used for his career.
A number of Web sites popped into view, along with brief descriptions. Most of the sites appeared to be online businesses selling pornographic videos. The site with the highest relevance in the search proclaimed itself as ‘THE Big Pete Majors site for the Truly Devoted Fan.’ Whit clicked on it.
The site belonged to a Truly Devoted Male Fan of Pete’s. It offered reviews of Pete’s cornucopia of movies, a message board where Pete’s fans could post deep thoughts, and a gallery of downloadable pictures of Pete, both by himself and in action with his co-stars.
No banner proclaimed on the site’s front page that Pete was gone. The copy below the BIG PETE MAJORS UNOFFICIAL TEMPLE OF APPRECIATION read: If you’re a Big Pete Majors fan, you’ve come to the right place! This is a labor of love for me (I’m Kevin). ALL Pete’s fans are welcome here str8, gay, bi, whatever! Enjoy!!!!!!!! str8? Whit studied the arcane code a moment before realizing it meant ‘straight.’
Kevin certainly had scads of free time. Whit explored the message board: there were a few dozen messages, some months old. Several messages were titled PETE LEAVING PORN?
It was a hot rumor, and Pete’s devotees promulgated reason after reason: AIDS, erectile dysfunction, drying out in Betty Ford, conversion to fundamentalism, an ongoing bicker with porn directors. The final message was posted by Kevin: It is my privilege (as you know) to know Pete slightly, because he’s appreciated my efforts on-line, and I just talked with him via phone and he said NO WAY is he cutting out from porn!!!! He said to tell you all he really appreciates our concern, but he is due back in L.A. in a few months. He is doing some so-called legit work (hush hush) back in Texas (where one MAY surmise that everything is indeed bigger!). Don’t know if he’ll still be exclusive with director Velvet Mojo, but some Pete is better than no Pete. So stop the rumors, he’s not sick and he’s not dead and he should be back in front of cameras soon.
The message was dated last Monday, early afternoon. Hours before Pete died.
Whit found nothing of interest in the rest of the messages – mostly discussions of which films showed Big Pete Majors to advantage (films of particular merit were awarded a ‘two dicks up’ by one enterprising pair of critics), comments on his acting skills, discussions of which starlets he had the hottest sex scenes with. All from participants with odd code names such as lovergrrl and madforpete and boyslut69. Consumers of sex – as opposed to those actually having sex – needed reviews before plunking down their hard-earned money, Whit supposed.
He scooted back to the Temple of Appreciation’s main Web page. He found a link to send E-mail to Web master Kevin. Whit clicked on the link and typed in: Hi Kevin, I’d like to talk to you about your recent conversation with Pete. I know Pete here in Texas, and I’m afraid I have some unsettling news and would prefer to talk rather than E-mail you. Would you please call me – my phone will pay the bill if you call my cell phone. 361-555-6788. Thank you. Judge Whit Mosley, Justice of the Peace, Encina County, Texas, He hoped his title might induce a more rapid response.
Curiosity got the better of Whit, and he clicked on the gallery’s front link. The pictures were organized by action. Pete alone. Pete receiving oral sex. Pete masturbating. Pete doing it doggy style. Pete doing it with Asian girls. With black girls. With bottle blondes. With two girls at once. A wide menu, to appeal to the widest possible lack of taste.
Whit remembered the boy that Pete had been: fun, carefree, quick to tease, helping to toilet-paper the oaks in front of Delford’s house, high-fiving the Mosleys after the infamous Pepto-pink paint incident with Delford’s house. That boy was gone. Maybe all this sex, all this pleasure, was a dam against the grief over what he had done to his brother.
Whit returned to the search engine and typed a search on ‘Velvet Mojo.’ The list returned a number of sites selling videos and one site entirely devoted to Velvet herself.
This site proclaimed itself to be VelvetRocks! the only site for America’s preeminent female director of porn. A picture of Velvet that was at least five years old, dressed in a leather biker garb with carefully moussed platinum hair. She sat astride a gleaming motorcycle. A sternness hardened her face instead of the wanton pucker of the rising starlet. The site included a listing of the movies she had directed (over sixty), links to purchase her videos, a listing of awards she had garnered from the adult film industry (seven), and a whole bevy of reviews by the pornorati, as Whit mentally termed the more slavish fans. She had performed on the other side of the camera at the beginning of her career for ten films, two of which were described on the site as ‘classics.’
There were pictures from her appearances, available for download.
A guiltiness Whit hadn’t known since he’d stolen peeks at his older brothers’ carefully stashed Playboys when he was young rumbled along his bones. He had never seen naked photos of a woman he knew socially. But curiosity won the advantage over refinement, and he clicked on a thumbnail-size photo.
What slowly filled the browser’s screen was a color still from a movie that portrayed postal workers breeding at will. Velvet was in a badly buttoned clone of a mail deliverer’s uniform, her breasts about to break out from the confines of the cloth. Her blond hair was combed huge, her lips painted crimson, her cheeks rouged. One hand crept down from the flat plane of her stomach to the too-tight serge of her uniform’s skirt.
Whit swallowed. Velvet looked far prettier in person, in her sweats and jeans and her hair not a cumulus cloud. In the picture she was a Barbie doll maddened with lust. She didn’t look like any real woman he knew. The true woman lay buried beneath the trying-too-hard stance and the stage paint. He selected a second picture for download. As the picture slowly built, Whit could see that Pete lay atop her, her oversize breasts jabbing into his over-pumped chest, both of them grinning with ecstasy so faked it looked like pain.
A kiss gone bad, she had called it.
He clicked off the downloading picture before the whole bonanza presented itself. He knew these people. He couldn’t watch them this way.
On a whim, he did a Web search on Pete Hubble instead of Pete Majors. He slowly paged through the results. Zip that was relevant: only a cluster of genealogy sites that listed various Peter Hubbles from the past three hundred years in their databases. He did a similar search for Corey Hubble and got one result back other than the regular cluster of genealogy sites. The enthusiastic Kevin’s Pete-tribute site. Odd.
He moved the mouse toward the link at the same time the office lights went black and a finger of God shrieked past his ear. The iMac’s screen burst with a bright, blinding nova. Whit fell behind the desk, clutching his head.
‘Hello, Judge,’ a voice rumbled from the doorway. Low, throaty, a man’s voice, hoarse, neutral of accent or drawl. ‘Stay down on the floor and you won’t be hurt.’
Whit stayed exactly where he was, his heart pounding hard against the thin carpet. The desk shielded him, but in the pitch-dark he couldn’t see his assailant. A faint electric crackle served as the dying gasp of the ruined computer. Whit heard his own ragged breathing, far too loud.
‘Listen, Your Honor,’ the polite voice said. ‘I could have blown your motherfucking head off now and I didn’t.
