Bloodletting, Part 13
13- Cosmopolitan
Although the rich and powerful always had it much easier, in this day and age, it was hard to hide.
This was doubly true of local celebrities, a phenomenon that continued to strike Holden as incredibly weird. Was that something to be proud of? You were famous in a two thousand mile radius, and then, after that, progressively less so, until you were just another schlub again at the state line. It made you an egotistical asshole and an emotionally needy asshole at the same time.
Holden knew something about John that most people didn’t. He visited the Pacific Queen Casino (oh, the jokes he could have made …) almost every night. He had many luxury cars, but when he came to the casino, he always drove an old Mercedes, black with a dented fender. He didn’t want everyone to know he was a high roller up front; he tried to keep his true wealth a secret. Considering how much he blew in the casino, Holden had no idea how he thought he kept that all a secret. But at some point, someone was humoring him.
A security guard, an overweight guy with a polyester uniform and a posture that suggested he’d been broken long ago, desultorily prowled the lot in a marked sedan, but the parking lot was fucking huge, so he only had to wait for him to go on by, continuing his rounds further on, before working on the lock of John’s passenger door. It was incredibly easy.
All he had to do was wait. He came late enough that he didn’t have to wait long, although he was regretting not having his iPod with him. Finally John came walking through the parking lot, talking on a cell phone, completely oblivious to everything around him. Why did Holden even hide? He didn’t need to. He could have been following him and he’d have never noticed.
John was busy lying. He was telling someone – his wife, presumably – that the meeting finally got over and he was on his way home. He talked about someone named Dan going on and on about boring shit, an attempt to give the lie some realistic detail. Holden had heard this done a million times, by men he had just fucked, men calling their wives and family – and, in one notable case, congress – and assuring them they were having a boring, awful trip and couldn’t wait to get home. Sometimes they’d glance at Holden and roll their eyes, sometimes they’d pretend he was already gone. So was the way of men – men, by nature, lied. Did women? Maybe. Maybe it was just a Human condition, a compulsion that couldn’t be resisted. But from what Holden knew and experienced, men were generally pieces of shit. That’s why he didn’t feel bad about what he had to do.
He waited until John had gotten in his car and finished his call before he came up and opened the passenger side door, sliding into the seat before John had realized he had an unwanted hitchhiker.
“Hey,” John said, and Holden pulled out the gun and pressed it against his forehead, shoving him back until his head was pushed up against the window.
“You know who I am,” Holden told him. “Just like I know who you are. But if I blow your fucking brains out right now, it’ll never be connected to me. You’ll be a mystery, much like the death of your brother. The curse of the Newberrys. Although considering your gambling debts, they’ll probably think that finally caught up with you.”
“Wh-what … who are -”
Holden shoved the barrel even harder into John’s head, and the back of his head thunked against the glass. “Not this shit. I want to kill you enough as it is. Don’t make me lose my temper.”
“I- I have money.”
“I know you do. That’s your problem. Now tell me why you’ve had me followed and who tried to kill Roan McKichan before I just start breaking things.”’
John swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing in an unstable manner, as his eyes nervously studied his face. Maybe he was serious about not knowing him at first, because Holden could see recognition click into place now. His wariness was tempered by fear, and a modicum of sneering contempt. Holden could read his mind in this second – he was thinking “Filthy whore”. Maybe because he was gay, there was an extra fear of cooties, or worse yet, contagious gayness. Maybe if they shared air too long, he’d get the gay too. “I had nothing -”
Holden hit him with the gun barrel. Just drew his wrist back sharply and turned the gun just slightly, so when he made contact with his skin the sight hit him first. Skin ripped along his forehead, making John yelp, and a small seam of blood opened, trickling down his face. “I’ve already decided to kill you,” he told him. “You know, I’m as liberal as anyone else in the sex trade, although we love you conservative repressed guys. If not for you, we’d be out of a job. But I’ve been studying people long enough to know that there are some who are a waste of flesh; they do nothing but steal oxygen and cause misery for everyone else. They have no reason to exist, and really shouldn’t, for the greater good of us all. You’re one of those people, John. You’re a cold blooded fuck who extorted his own brother for money. Did you kill him too? Not personally; you’re a ball-less wonder if I’ve ever seen one. But did you pay someone to do it for you? Or is making sure your brother gets an overdose of potassium an easy thing? I wouldn’t know. I’m an only child. Well, I wasn’t really, but I was raised one, so I missed out on all the sibling bonding. Tell me why Joel had to die, John.”
John grimaced in pain, bringing a hand up to his forehead. When he saw the blood that came away on his hand, he looked ashen, slightly ill. Did the sight of blood make him sick? No wonder he took to poisoning people instead: no blood, no icky bodily fluids, just a corpse. “I didn’t kill him,” he said, more a plea than anything else, his voice cracking with fear and confusion. “I wouldn’t do that. Why would I do that?”
“Because you’re up to your ass in debt, John, and you need the buy out to take place, so you can have a fresh hard cash infusion. That’s a hell of a murder motive. According to a detective friend of mine, money is usually the number one reason for death.” Or maybe it was number two – he couldn’t remember. But it didn’t matter anyways.
John was cracking, easily and quickly. He believed Holden was serious about killing him, or guilt was eating away at him, or he noticed the safety was off. Maybe all of the above. “I didn’t do it. Okay, yeah, I need the money, but Joel’s estate is all going to his bitch of a current wife and his spoiled brat kids. How do I benefit from his death?”
“The buy out.”
He let out a scoff of a laugh, breathless and mirthless. “I have to split it with the rest of the family. It wouldn’t be much. I’d get more if Joel was alive to negotiate the deal. He could get blood from a stone.”
That felt like truth. Joel had an appealing charm when he turned it on. “Why did he oppose the buy out?”
“I dunno. He said some shit about our legacy and local media, and a whole bunch of grade A bullshit that never made any sense to me. I think he was just being a fuckhead, opposing it because the rest of us were all for it. It was his way of reminding all of us he was in control.”
That too had a ring of truth. The men who hired him did so because they were trying to control the scenario. An anonymous trick might discover who you are; a boyfriend might become bitter. But a prostitute was engaged in a simple business transaction, and had much to lose if they decided to expose you. It was mutually assured destruction if the secret leaked out. Or so the johns thought, and that was fine with Holden if they honestly believed that to be true. It wasn’t, though. A whore might have been just a whore, but a man who paid another man for sex never seemed to live it down in this country. Paying a woman was almost understandable, and seemed to earn sympathy in some corners, but a man? Never. You were the eternal butt of a joke. But desire often outweighed logic, thankfully for his bank account. “What exactly did you pay Duane Malloy for? And consider your answer carefully.”
“How-” he paused, deciding that the question was irrelevant, because Holden wouldn’t answer it. The guy with the gun didn’t have to answer a single fucking thing. “We needed a new security -”
Holden punched John right in the balls. He convulsively knifed forward, slamming into his own steering wheel, a high pitched keening noise escaping him. “I said I was gonna start breaking things, John. Do you think I’m fucking around? Do you want me to prove how much I want to hurt you?”
“No,” he wheezed, still in pain. When he sat back, his eyes were red rimmed from tears, and a string of saliva dangled from his wet lower lip. Had he almost barfed? Probably. “Did Joel mean that much to you?”
“He didn’t mean anything to me,” Holden snapped, and was mildly surprised to discover that was true. There was familiarity and routine, but nothing else. Perhaps that was what marriage was like. “I was curious what happened to him, especially after what he told me. No, the reason you’re gonna die is because a good man is dying in a fucking hospital because of your family and your shit.” There it was: he was furious that they had hurt Roan. Part of him thought it should have been him that was the target, the killer should have come after him, but didn’t for an obvious reason – who cared? He was a fucking whore, a hooker, and his word would mean nothing. The cops would roll their eyes, a judge would dismiss him, a jury of wonderful straight people would regard him as a leper and every word out of his mouth as contagious garbage. He could witness a murder, and any attorney worth their ambulance chasing shoes could rip him apart. He could find the poisoner standing over Joel’s body with a container marked “potassium”, and no one would believe him or care. No lawbreaker ever had to worry about him, because he was an Untouchable, and no one would listen to him.
But Roan … Oh, poor Roan. He would be believed. Infected, gay, but an ex-cop, and a police adviser on kitty cases; he had a patina of legitimacy that no amount of boyfriends, cat jokes, and suspicions of pill popping could erase. Then there was a vague sense of unease around him since he seemed to have super human abilities, one of which – his supernatural sense of smell – was considered admissible in a court of law. On the one hand, people mocked him; on the other hand, they were terrified of him. He should have been a flaming queen, he should have been a sickly virus child, he should have been gone by now. He almost seemed to be karmic retribution, but whose was in question. The only thing everybody could agree on about him was he was dangerous, much more dangerous than you would initially think, much more than he should have been. When Malloy told the killer who was visiting Holden’s place, he must have panicked. To be fair, Holden didn’t think he’d want Roan after him either, even if he got the guarantee that he wouldn’t turn into a lion at some point.
How did he feel about Roan? He wasn’t really sure. He’d come to believe he was a genuinely good person when he first encountered him as a cop. Holden didn’t like cops as a matter of course – tiny little tyrants, many with homosexual impulses they fought by becoming extremely homophobic – but Roan always seemed a little off. He seemed to treat everyone like a Human being, whether they were a hooker or a junkie. Holden figured then there was no fucking way he was going to last in the job, and he was right. He was strangely attractive, not a pretty boy but weirdly alluring all the same, with intense, haunted eyes. And god, was he trouble: not just infected, but an obvious depressive, too smart for his own good, a romantic turned cynic, battered by the world and not sure how to handle it. He raged at dying light, or whatever was handy, and had taken to numbing himself with chemicals. He was stubborn and moody, a total pain the ass. Holden didn’t envy Dylan, putting up with him. But that was the weird thing – he didn’t envy him, but wasn’t he still a bit jealous anyways? Yeah, he was trouble, but Holden suspected that he was rarely ever boring. The true outcasts rarely were. Nothing could ever work between him and Roan, but Holden bet it would have been a fun disaster.
“I had nothing to do with that,” John insisted, his voice still raspy with pain. Holden hoped he burst a testicle. “I wanted nothing to do with that guy. Malloy warned me off; he told me we had to shut this down before he got wind of it. He didn’t wanna follow him.”
That too was believable. He couldn’t imagine that one private detective wanted to follow another. If you knew the tricks of the trade, you could spot a tail pretty easy. “What did you hire Malloy for in the first place?”
He sniffed, wiped snot from his face with the back of one hand, and rubbed his crotch with the other. “Fuck, I think you did some real damage.”
“I warned you not to lie to me. Stop trying to change the subject.”
“I’m not. I hired him to … fuck. I hired him to dig up dirt on Joel. I needed leverage.”
“Leverage for what?”
“For what else? Convincing him to take the fucking deal. We all wanted to sell; he was the lone hold out, and for no good reason. He just wanted to remind us who was in control. So I thought I’d show him he wasn’t as the hot shit he thought he was. Of course, I didn’t know he was a fag.”
“He wasn’t; he was bi.”
John glared at him. “What’s the fucking difference?”
“The difference is gay guys really don’t want to fuck women. Joel would fuck anything.”
John winced at this and looked out the windshield. “That’s more than I ever wanted to know about him.”
“Then why hire a private detective?”
He shrugged a single shoulder. “I figured he was fucking around. No guy with money and power is actually gonna stick with just one woman. They know that, right? You’re gonna fuck around. You can have anyone you want, so why stay in and have reheated leftovers when you can go get something fresh, you know? I figured he had a mistress, probably more than one. I didn’t expect him to have … you. But he probably coulda had a guy for free – you fags’ll fuck anybody, right? You hook up in bathrooms and shit. Why didn’t he just do that?”
Holden restrained the urge to start pistol whipping him. Mainly because the gun could accidentally discharge in any direction, and he didn’t want to accidentally shoot himself. “Use the word fag again, and I’ll break your other ball. Get me?”
John looked like he wanted to say something, maybe belittle him for being so PC, but then he remembered he was holding the gun and had already done some testicular damage to him, and he managed to swallow it down. But Holden saw it in his eyes, the continued, endless contempt. He didn’t know him, but he disgusted him. “Yeah.”
“Let me get this straight: you still employed Malloy to follow me after Joel’s death. What the fuck for? Wanted my number, John?”
Holden got the reaction he wanted, the sudden, reflex revulsion. “No! I ain’t a f – that way. I thought maybe you had something to do with it.”
This was unbelievable. “With his death?”
“Yeah. I mean you’re … you’re a criminal, right? You do shit like that.”
As infuriating as that statement was, it didn’t quite fit. Why? Because of one very important thing. “I’d be perfect to frame for the crime if something went wrong. It sort of begs the question how you knew Joel had been murdered when everyone assumed he’d died of a heart attack.”
His mouth open and closed soundlessly, as he almost said something and then thought better of it. He tried again, more successfully this time. “That’s not – Joel was in too good of shape to just drop dead like that. I didn’t know he was killed, but it didn’t feel right.”
“Umm, no. You’ve told enough truth that a lie could slip through, but I lie for a living, asshole. Did you really think you could bullshit me?” He pressed the barrel of the gun against his temple with renewed ferocity. “Drive.”
There was a smell coming from John now. Not piss, not exactly, just fear sweat, a rank smell of failed deodorant and desperation. Holden wondered if people smelled like this to Roan most of the time, and if so, how did he stand them. “Drive where?”
“We’re gonna pay Duane Malloy a visit,” Holden told him. “And then we’re gonna find out if any of us are gonna live through the night.”
Oddly enough, Holden wasn’t bothered by this prospect. Maybe he’d finally found a new occupation.