his face with both hands; the fading light caught the sheen of perspiration on his forearms, where the fine, dark hairs had lain down like wet grass after a storm.
I wanted him very, very badly but was frightened of him just as much, frightened by the poison he carried in his blood and semen, and by his mortality.
Finally, he said, “I didn’t have anything to do with Reza’s death.”
“I believe you.”
I said it knowing it meant nothing, except momentary relief for him; the most believable people in the world are often simply the best liars. I’d met my share and then some.
Danny turned to face me. His eyes showed a special fear some people would never understand; he appeared close to tears that I suspected were never very far away, but rarely spilled.
“I can’t go to jail. Not now. Not sick like I am.”
I moved to him and took him in my arms. I held him the way I should have held Jacques in the final months of his life, the way I should have held him all the time we were together, all the years, if I hadn’t been so selfish and afraid.
Danny responded passively at first, letting me pull him in as if he didn’t care, as if I’d forced him to surrender. In the end, though, I felt his arms wrap around me, holding on as tightly as I held him.
We had become fused in the sudden, perplexing way that the outlaw nature of homosexuality can thrust strangers together, welded tighter by the terrifying dimensions of a disease that either draws people closer or propels them forever apart.
I’d made my choice not to turn and run. What remained now was for me to find the courage to honor the unspoken promise.
Whatever Danny Romero was—murderer, saint, something in between—I felt bound to him until the end.
Chapter Eleven
I took a small table on the sidewalk outside Tribal Grounds, with a pen in one hand, a tall cup of the house blend in the other, and my notebook open to a fresh page.
It was a few minutes past eight. Santa Monica Boulevard was sluggish with Monday morning traffic, cars and buses filled with men and women on their way to another numbing day of work. I looked for smiles, faces of contentment. I didn’t see many.
It felt odd, sitting here again in the mode of a working journalist—freelance yet—with decent money figuring in the deal. As much as a part of me resisted, it didn’t feel half bad. If nothing else, at least for now, I’d managed to avoid the sad parade of lemmings, marching dutifully forward to the tick of the time clock.
I sipped some coffee, bent over my notebook, and printed a list of names.
Dylan Winchester
Roberta Brickman
Leonardo Petrocelli
Bernard Kemmerman
Anne-Judith Kemmerman
Gordon Cantwell
Christine Kapono
Daniel Romero
Lawrence Teal
Hosain JaFari
Each had known Reza JaFari. With the exception of Danny Romero and Hosain JaFari, each had been at the party or left messages for him in the days and weeks before his death.
Excluding Teal, I wanted to talk to each of them when I had the right questions in place. If I never saw Teal again, it would be soon enough.
I spent the next few minutes completing a list aimed at Dylan Winchester, then called him from the pay phone outside A Different Light, whose windows displayed an array of book titles of special interest to lesbians and gays. Included were unauthorized biographies of two popular actresses, Jodie Foster and Whitney Houston. There were also tell-alls on a number of late actors—Rock Hudson, Anthony Perkins, James Dean, Ramon Novarro, Montgomery Clift—who had spent their careers concealed in the Hollywood closet and tormented, each in his own way, by the need to lead a double life. Which brought me full circle back to Dylan Winchester.
I got his voice mail and left a message.
After that, I headed downtown to the Los Angeles Sun , stopping to put gas in the Mustang and buy a dozen doughnuts, which pretty much cashed me out. At half past ten, I was walking into the four-story building
I wanted him very, very badly but was frightened of him just as much, frightened by the poison he carried in his blood and semen, and by his mortality.
Finally, he said, “I didn’t have anything to do with Reza’s death.”
“I believe you.”
I said it knowing it meant nothing, except momentary relief for him; the most believable people in the world are often simply the best liars. I’d met my share and then some.
Danny turned to face me. His eyes showed a special fear some people would never understand; he appeared close to tears that I suspected were never very far away, but rarely spilled.
“I can’t go to jail. Not now. Not sick like I am.”
I moved to him and took him in my arms. I held him the way I should have held Jacques in the final months of his life, the way I should have held him all the time we were together, all the years, if I hadn’t been so selfish and afraid.
Danny responded passively at first, letting me pull him in as if he didn’t care, as if I’d forced him to surrender. In the end, though, I felt his arms wrap around me, holding on as tightly as I held him.
We had become fused in the sudden, perplexing way that the outlaw nature of homosexuality can thrust strangers together, welded tighter by the terrifying dimensions of a disease that either draws people closer or propels them forever apart.
I’d made my choice not to turn and run. What remained now was for me to find the courage to honor the unspoken promise.
Whatever Danny Romero was—murderer, saint, something in between—I felt bound to him until the end.
Chapter Eleven
I took a small table on the sidewalk outside Tribal Grounds, with a pen in one hand, a tall cup of the house blend in the other, and my notebook open to a fresh page.
It was a few minutes past eight. Santa Monica Boulevard was sluggish with Monday morning traffic, cars and buses filled with men and women on their way to another numbing day of work. I looked for smiles, faces of contentment. I didn’t see many.
It felt odd, sitting here again in the mode of a working journalist—freelance yet—with decent money figuring in the deal. As much as a part of me resisted, it didn’t feel half bad. If nothing else, at least for now, I’d managed to avoid the sad parade of lemmings, marching dutifully forward to the tick of the time clock.
I sipped some coffee, bent over my notebook, and printed a list of names.
Dylan Winchester
Roberta Brickman
Leonardo Petrocelli
Bernard Kemmerman
Anne-Judith Kemmerman
Gordon Cantwell
Christine Kapono
Daniel Romero
Lawrence Teal
Hosain JaFari
Each had known Reza JaFari. With the exception of Danny Romero and Hosain JaFari, each had been at the party or left messages for him in the days and weeks before his death.
Excluding Teal, I wanted to talk to each of them when I had the right questions in place. If I never saw Teal again, it would be soon enough.
I spent the next few minutes completing a list aimed at Dylan Winchester, then called him from the pay phone outside A Different Light, whose windows displayed an array of book titles of special interest to lesbians and gays. Included were unauthorized biographies of two popular actresses, Jodie Foster and Whitney Houston. There were also tell-alls on a number of late actors—Rock Hudson, Anthony Perkins, James Dean, Ramon Novarro, Montgomery Clift—who had spent their careers concealed in the Hollywood closet and tormented, each in his own way, by the need to lead a double life. Which brought me full circle back to Dylan Winchester.
I got his voice mail and left a message.
After that, I headed downtown to the Los Angeles Sun , stopping to put gas in the Mustang and buy a dozen doughnuts, which pretty much cashed me out. At half past ten, I was walking into the four-story building
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