Triangulation, p.6
Triangulation, page 6
part #2 of Borealis Investigations Series
At one point, however, Mike began shaking his head. Shaw could still feel tremors running through the man’s back, but Mike hadn’t moved away from his touch, and so he stayed where he was. “No, that’s not right.”
North gave him a quizzical look. “Chuck said you talked on the phone Friday, and neither of you was particularly worried. Then she said you showed up on Saturday at Iris and that’s when both of you started to think something might be wrong.”
“I knew something was wrong. I was very upset on Friday—very upset—and I told her that. I knew what was happening, of course; he’d hooked up with one of those boys he’d been seeing. He was staying out of the house because he knew things between us were over. But I was still angry. He could have called. He could have told me he didn’t want to have dinner, he could have told me he didn’t want to try to work things out. We could have handled it like adults. By Saturday, I was livid. I wanted to tell him in person that we were done. So I went to Iris.”
“Chuck said—”
“Well, of course she did,” Mike snapped, scrubbing at his face with the paper towel. “She would have said anything to get you to see her as poor, innocent Chuck. She just wants to help those kids. She just wants to do what’s right. But she’s a snake. Do you understand that? A snake.”
“Why?” Shaw asked.
“Because she was stealing from Iris. Gobs of money, not just pocket change. She’d been doing the accounting, making sure nobody else handled the paperwork, and it was easy for her to make the money disappear.”
“Why do you think she was stealing?” North said.
“They had it out right here in the living room. Shep confronted her. He told her she had to pay it all back or he was going to the police. And he told her she was fired. He didn’t want her anywhere near Iris. It wasn’t just the money, you know. If she was willing to steal, Shep couldn’t trust her around those kids.”
“When was this?” Shaw asked.
“Wednesday,” Mike said, a viciously triumphant note in his voice. “Right before I went to work.”
Chapter 7
BY THE TIME THEY LEFT the house in Holly Hills, the day hung between late afternoon and early evening. North’s stomach rumbled as he got in the Caravan and started back to Benton Park: Kingshighway north to Gravois. He didn’t remember eating lunch, and all that talk about soufflés and shift meals had gotten him thinking about food. His stomach growled again, louder this time, and Shaw glanced over.
“I skipped lunch.”
“No, you didn’t. You got Jack in the Box tacos. You got ten of them.”
“They’re tiny. That’s really only like, two or three normal tacos.”
“They’re made with kangaroo meat.”
“That’s an urban legend.” A few blocks north, a red-and-white Jack in the Box sign spun slowly. “But we could pick up a few, just to check.”
“No way. Jadon and I are doing that Pure15 diet, and I’m not going to cheat now.”
“Like we did in college, remember? We ordered so many that they actually ran out of tacos. You only have to eat one.”
Shaw shot a glance at the dashboard clock and shook his head. “We’re going to dinner after . . .” A blush settled across his high cheekbones. “Could you drop me back at the office?”
“After what?”
“Oh, nothing. We’re just going out. Do you think Shep’s really just off with a younger guy?”
“That was a very smooth change of subject.”
“Thank you.”
“I hardly noticed it.”
“I’m serious, North.”
But North was serious too. He wanted to know where Shaw and Jadon were going. We’re just going out. No fucking way, North wanted to say. Of course they were going out. North wanted to know where, and he wanted to know why Shaw was embarrassed to tell him. Were they going dancing? Were they going clubbing? Were they going drinking? Unlikely; Shaw and alcohol didn’t mix, and North doubted Jadon wanted to spend a night with a pathetically sick Shaw. Although North wouldn’t have minded. He had been down that road before. North knew how to pull Shaw’s long, chestnut hair back and loop it around his hand so it wouldn’t knot. He knew when Shaw was going to throw up. He knew how Shaw liked his back rubbed—low, slow circles near the small of his back, more pressure at his shoulders, digging into the knots of tension.
A series of worse possibilities popped North’s reverie. What if Jadon were taking Shaw to meet other cops? What if Jadon were taking him to meet other friends? What if Jadon were taking Shaw to meet his family? North could imagine them: all model gorgeous, the perfect nuclear unit, mom and dad and Jadon and one sister who probably had attended Vassar or Bryn Mawr and was now doing civil rights work in the Bronx. The thought sent a wave of heat through North, like an infection rising in his chest and prickling in his throat and at the back of his mouth. He thought, for a moment, he might be having a panic attack. The deeper Shaw got in with Jadon—meeting other cops, meeting other friends, meeting his family—the farther he drifted out of North’s galaxy. What if he drifted too far?
North had tried, eight years ago, to stop this from happening. He had tried the minute he knew how hard he had fallen for Shaw, the minute he knew that this man was tied up in his life, tied so tight that the only way to remove him would be to cut him out, and that kind of cutting would have killed North. He had asked Tuck, begged him—this was before North had even considered dating Tucker—to talk to Shaw. Find out if Shaw was interested in him. And then Tucker had come back, and North could still remember the horrible edge of expectation as Tuck stood in the doorway. North still remembered that first, definitive shake of the head as Tuck cleared his throat and then started to talk.
But that was long past. North had let that go; he had moved on and made peace with the fact that Shaw might not be interested in him romantically, but at least they could be friends. At the very least, North thought, they could be best friends, and Shaw could be part of his life every day, He could be part of North’s life, in some ways, more than Tuck. And that had seemed possible—it had seemed like an almost perfect solution—until Jadon Reck had shown up, and Shaw had started to drift. What if Shaw drifted so far that one day, he was living in Jadon’s Tower Grove house and they had two dogs and Shaw said things like, We were at the Montgomerys for dinner like we are every Tuesday or But you know it’s Friday and Jadon and I always get pizza on Friday or Oh, yeah, we’re getting a little place out at Innsbrook because we want somewhere the dogs can run.
“You are definitely going off dairy.”
“Huh?” North blinked; his hands tightened reflexively around the wheel, and he stomped once on the brakes. The Caravan shrieked, shuddered, and then he realized they were still driving, still on Kingshighway. Too late, North tried to feed the minivan a little more gas, but the engine chugged and died, and they coasted onto the shoulder in front of a Save-A-Lot.
“What is going on with you?”
“What? Um. The van. I don’t know. Something’s wrong.”
“Yeah, something is definitely wrong. With you.”
“The van—”
“The van is a piece of junk,” Shaw said. His hazel eyes fixed on North; this close, every fleck of jade and gold was visible to North. “You’re totally off in space.”
“I was thinking.”
“No more dairy.”
“I was just—”
“No more. It thickens the myelin sheath. It makes your thinking slow.”
“That is definitely not true.”
“It has something to do with the proteins—”
“No,” North said, his voice stronger. This kind of shit, this was easy. This made it easier to think clearly. “That’s bullshit. Who told you that?”
“I was reading in the Pure15 guidebook, and it said—”
“Bullshit.”
Cars whooshed past them; tires threw up pebbles that pinged against the Caravan’s paneling.
“So,” Shaw said, drawing out the word, “are you stroking out on me, or—”
“I was thinking about Shep,” North said, starting the van again. It lurched out into the street, and they continued north. “About what happened with Chuck. And the fight with Donny. And the fact that things with Mike are a lot worse than Beau or Chuck suggested. And his ex-wife showing up just a few days before he disappears and they get into a screaming match.”
“You think something happened to him.”
“I think if I were Shep Collins, I would probably want to disappear.”
“He ran away? That’s what you’re saying?”
“Not necessarily. I just mean that he had a lot of reasons to want to be gone. And it’s not like he hasn’t done this before. Remember, that’s what he did to his wife and kids? When he decided he was done with the conversion center, he split. No explanation. No forwarding address.”
“And now things are bad with Mike,” Shaw said, “and things are bad at Iris—you don’t really believe Chuck stole, though, do you?”
“I don’t know. Something’s weird with Chuck.” He thought about how she had cut her hand while washing dishes—a cut that was so perfectly timed that it had to be intentional. “She’s lying. Or she’s hiding something, which is the same as lying.”
“She didn’t steal.”
North shrugged.
“She didn’t,” Shaw said. “I know she didn’t.”
The brick houses of Benton Park rose around them, the streets lined with stunted trees. The asphalt was a collage of weekly circulars, four sticks of Old Spice deodorant, a knotted bundle of Aldi bags, and what North was fairly sure was the hindquarters of a Beanie Baby. When they reached the Borealis offices—which was also Shaw’s home—North stopped in front of the tall brick building and let the van idle.
“Have fun on your date tonight. Where’d you say you’re going?”
“We’re just—” Shaw froze, his hand on the door. “Nice try.”
“Come on. It can’t be that big of a secret.”
Sliding out of the van, Shaw threw North a crooked smile. “Bye.”
“Make him work for it.”
Shaw slammed the door, waved, and trotted up the walk.
“Don’t give it up too easily,” North called after him, and he liked the fact that Shaw was blushing as he darted through the door.
North drove six blocks to the parking lot in front of a pair of matching Quonset huts. The corrugated metal buildings had been repurposed over the years; judging by the signs, one was now serving as a laser tag venue, while the other simply read Bjorn Graphic Design. North had chosen the lot because it was empty and because, when he finally had to do it, it would be easy to turn out and get back on Gravois and head home.
The dashboard clock read a quarter to six, and that meant Tuck would probably be home. Probably. If he weren’t getting drinks with the boys. If he weren’t finishing up the back nine after taking a half day. If he weren’t—North briefly, vividly, pictured the bikini briefs he had found under the bed a few weeks before—doing something else.
Wiping sweat from his face, North found a gum wrapper and settled it in front of the dashboard clock. He didn’t want to see the time. The Caravan’s A/C was shot, and the July heat was brutal, hammering on the glass like it meant to slow roast North inside the Caravan’s frame. He didn’t have anything to drink. He didn’t have anything to eat. But still, this was better, in a way. Better than the big house in Webster Groves.
A semi rolled past on Gravois, kicking up a wall of air and twigs and a flattened Circle K cup. North ran his thumbs inside the steering wheel; there was something soothing about the bumps of molded plastic under his touch. North heard himself asking Mike Llagas, How long have you two been having trouble? And he heard Mike’s answer: I don’t know. I mean, that’s the thing, right?
North understood that answer. He didn’t know either. That was the whole problem. The first time Tuck had hit him, really hit him, and it hadn’t been a game, it couldn’t be disguised as trying out something new, something that might be sexy, had been the first time Tuck failed the internal finance exam at the firm where he worked. Tuck had spent months before the exam, months, with the test prep book on the nightstand, unopened, unread. And when he came home after the test, when he knocked the clock off the wall and kicked over the recliner and grabbed a bottle of Jack like he meant to chug the whole thing right then, North had tried to intervene.
Intervening made sense; after all, it had been North’s intervention that had brought them together in the first place. They had been friends, of some kind, before Tucker had beaten the shit out of Joey Manakowski. But when North stepped in, when he stopped the assault, things had changed. Tucker had cried. He had sobbed. He had explained everything, all the things in his life that had taken him to that point. And by that point, North already knew how Shaw felt about him; he knew that Shaw would never feel the same way North did. So it had almost been a relief to find himself attracted to Tucker. There had been something intoxicating about the power North had over him; to the rest of the world, Tucker was an invincible asshole, but to North, he was broken, vulnerable, and he needed North so badly.
But the night after the exam, when North had said something simple—something encouraging, something about studying more, getting ready for the next time—Tucker had slapped him. And for some reason, North had let him. Later that night, when Tuck crawled—crawled—across the room, sobbing, begging, North had forgiven him. And then it had happened again. And again. And at some point, North had realized that he didn’t know how to stop this particular carnival ride. He didn’t know how to get off.
How long have you two been having trouble?
North didn’t know. Before the slap; he knew that much. The real problems, they had been there long before Tuck had first hit him. And now, even though the hitting had stopped, the punishments had simply transformed. The late nights unexplained. The texts that left Tuck smiling. The sudden, flimsy excuses to run out. The bikini briefs under their bed.
If Shaw knew.
That was as far as North could get with the thought. He had a vague sense of its conclusion—if Shaw knew, he would despise North; if Shaw knew, he would never understand—but he couldn’t bring himself to voice it. All he knew was that eight years ago, he had almost died when he found out Shaw didn’t return his feelings. And now he was losing Shaw all over again, and North could only envision his future as rubble, a burnt-out shell where he was trapped with Tucker forever.
His phone rang, shaking North out of his thoughts. As North answered the call, he eased the Caravan out onto Gravois and started home.
“Hello?”
“North? North, is that you? It’s Teddi.”
Trying to repress a sigh—after all, Teddi had been useful on North’s last major case—North said, “Yeah, it’s me. What’s going on? Why didn’t you call Shaw?”
“Oh my God, it’s a disaster. It’s an epic disaster. I can’t—I can’t even tell you.”
“What do you mean? What happened? Is Shaw ok?”
“It’s the end of the world. Everything’s over.”
“Teddi: what happened?”
“I’m ruined, that’s what happened. Do you know who came to brunch today?”
“Ok, I’m hanging up now.”
“No, wait a minute. Please.” North grimaced; he could practically see Teddi wringing his manicured hands, wiping his shining dome of a head. North didn’t have anything against manicures or against bald men. He just had something against Teddi. Then Teddi spoke again, this time with a note of desperation that sounded genuine: “Cassie and Eddie. That’s all.”
“That’s a low brunch count for the Queen of the Gays.”
“This is not the time for your sniping, North.”
“I’m not sniping. I’m observing. It’s a Monday; doesn’t that have something to do with it?”
“Of course not.”
“This really sounds like a Shaw problem.”
“Shaw answered the phone, and he was giggling.” Teddi pronounced the word like it was a sin. “He didn’t even let me explain; he just told me he was busy, and if I needed to talk to someone, I should call you.”
North could see it now: Shaw and Jadon standing at the bar—22 Rue, maybe—while they waited for tables. Jadon on his first 4 Hands of the evening, and Shaw sipping a Shirley Temple or a tonic water with lime. Maybe a Coke if Jadon was trying to get Shaw hyped up before taking him to bed.
“North?”
“What?”
“I want to hire you.”
“We’re pretty busy—”
“Shaw said you’d take the job.”
“Shaw likes to say things like that.” North groaned as he turned onto Jefferson; traffic waiting to merge onto I-44 was backed up for blocks. “Shaw is too busy batting his eyelashes and playing with his hair to make sure it’s just the way Jadon likes it, so he’s not making the decisions anymore.”
A long pause came from Teddi; somewhere up in the queue, a horn blared.
“Meee-ow,” Teddi said.
North’s face heated, and it had nothing to do with the July sun shimmering on the Caravan’s hood. “All right. Now I’m really hanging up.”
“No, wait. Please, someone’s trying to ruin me.”
“By luring people away from your brunches? I don’t really think that’s our kind of case.”
“It might sound silly, but it’s not. This is a coup, North. An honest-to-God coup. And I want to know who started it.”
The line of traffic inched forward; the Caravan creaked ominously. For what felt like the hundredth time, North decided he was going to take out a loan and get a new—well, a newer—car. “What do you think happened?”
“I don’t know. I’ve tried. I’ve asked people who I thought were my friends. And they all tell me that they only missed last time because they had an appointment for the dog’s haircut, or they had an elderly aunt in town. On and on like that. And they’re lying right to my face. I know they are. They’d all be terrible at poker.”
North gave him a quizzical look. “Chuck said you talked on the phone Friday, and neither of you was particularly worried. Then she said you showed up on Saturday at Iris and that’s when both of you started to think something might be wrong.”
“I knew something was wrong. I was very upset on Friday—very upset—and I told her that. I knew what was happening, of course; he’d hooked up with one of those boys he’d been seeing. He was staying out of the house because he knew things between us were over. But I was still angry. He could have called. He could have told me he didn’t want to have dinner, he could have told me he didn’t want to try to work things out. We could have handled it like adults. By Saturday, I was livid. I wanted to tell him in person that we were done. So I went to Iris.”
“Chuck said—”
“Well, of course she did,” Mike snapped, scrubbing at his face with the paper towel. “She would have said anything to get you to see her as poor, innocent Chuck. She just wants to help those kids. She just wants to do what’s right. But she’s a snake. Do you understand that? A snake.”
“Why?” Shaw asked.
“Because she was stealing from Iris. Gobs of money, not just pocket change. She’d been doing the accounting, making sure nobody else handled the paperwork, and it was easy for her to make the money disappear.”
“Why do you think she was stealing?” North said.
“They had it out right here in the living room. Shep confronted her. He told her she had to pay it all back or he was going to the police. And he told her she was fired. He didn’t want her anywhere near Iris. It wasn’t just the money, you know. If she was willing to steal, Shep couldn’t trust her around those kids.”
“When was this?” Shaw asked.
“Wednesday,” Mike said, a viciously triumphant note in his voice. “Right before I went to work.”
Chapter 7
BY THE TIME THEY LEFT the house in Holly Hills, the day hung between late afternoon and early evening. North’s stomach rumbled as he got in the Caravan and started back to Benton Park: Kingshighway north to Gravois. He didn’t remember eating lunch, and all that talk about soufflés and shift meals had gotten him thinking about food. His stomach growled again, louder this time, and Shaw glanced over.
“I skipped lunch.”
“No, you didn’t. You got Jack in the Box tacos. You got ten of them.”
“They’re tiny. That’s really only like, two or three normal tacos.”
“They’re made with kangaroo meat.”
“That’s an urban legend.” A few blocks north, a red-and-white Jack in the Box sign spun slowly. “But we could pick up a few, just to check.”
“No way. Jadon and I are doing that Pure15 diet, and I’m not going to cheat now.”
“Like we did in college, remember? We ordered so many that they actually ran out of tacos. You only have to eat one.”
Shaw shot a glance at the dashboard clock and shook his head. “We’re going to dinner after . . .” A blush settled across his high cheekbones. “Could you drop me back at the office?”
“After what?”
“Oh, nothing. We’re just going out. Do you think Shep’s really just off with a younger guy?”
“That was a very smooth change of subject.”
“Thank you.”
“I hardly noticed it.”
“I’m serious, North.”
But North was serious too. He wanted to know where Shaw and Jadon were going. We’re just going out. No fucking way, North wanted to say. Of course they were going out. North wanted to know where, and he wanted to know why Shaw was embarrassed to tell him. Were they going dancing? Were they going clubbing? Were they going drinking? Unlikely; Shaw and alcohol didn’t mix, and North doubted Jadon wanted to spend a night with a pathetically sick Shaw. Although North wouldn’t have minded. He had been down that road before. North knew how to pull Shaw’s long, chestnut hair back and loop it around his hand so it wouldn’t knot. He knew when Shaw was going to throw up. He knew how Shaw liked his back rubbed—low, slow circles near the small of his back, more pressure at his shoulders, digging into the knots of tension.
A series of worse possibilities popped North’s reverie. What if Jadon were taking Shaw to meet other cops? What if Jadon were taking him to meet other friends? What if Jadon were taking Shaw to meet his family? North could imagine them: all model gorgeous, the perfect nuclear unit, mom and dad and Jadon and one sister who probably had attended Vassar or Bryn Mawr and was now doing civil rights work in the Bronx. The thought sent a wave of heat through North, like an infection rising in his chest and prickling in his throat and at the back of his mouth. He thought, for a moment, he might be having a panic attack. The deeper Shaw got in with Jadon—meeting other cops, meeting other friends, meeting his family—the farther he drifted out of North’s galaxy. What if he drifted too far?
North had tried, eight years ago, to stop this from happening. He had tried the minute he knew how hard he had fallen for Shaw, the minute he knew that this man was tied up in his life, tied so tight that the only way to remove him would be to cut him out, and that kind of cutting would have killed North. He had asked Tuck, begged him—this was before North had even considered dating Tucker—to talk to Shaw. Find out if Shaw was interested in him. And then Tucker had come back, and North could still remember the horrible edge of expectation as Tuck stood in the doorway. North still remembered that first, definitive shake of the head as Tuck cleared his throat and then started to talk.
But that was long past. North had let that go; he had moved on and made peace with the fact that Shaw might not be interested in him romantically, but at least they could be friends. At the very least, North thought, they could be best friends, and Shaw could be part of his life every day, He could be part of North’s life, in some ways, more than Tuck. And that had seemed possible—it had seemed like an almost perfect solution—until Jadon Reck had shown up, and Shaw had started to drift. What if Shaw drifted so far that one day, he was living in Jadon’s Tower Grove house and they had two dogs and Shaw said things like, We were at the Montgomerys for dinner like we are every Tuesday or But you know it’s Friday and Jadon and I always get pizza on Friday or Oh, yeah, we’re getting a little place out at Innsbrook because we want somewhere the dogs can run.
“You are definitely going off dairy.”
“Huh?” North blinked; his hands tightened reflexively around the wheel, and he stomped once on the brakes. The Caravan shrieked, shuddered, and then he realized they were still driving, still on Kingshighway. Too late, North tried to feed the minivan a little more gas, but the engine chugged and died, and they coasted onto the shoulder in front of a Save-A-Lot.
“What is going on with you?”
“What? Um. The van. I don’t know. Something’s wrong.”
“Yeah, something is definitely wrong. With you.”
“The van—”
“The van is a piece of junk,” Shaw said. His hazel eyes fixed on North; this close, every fleck of jade and gold was visible to North. “You’re totally off in space.”
“I was thinking.”
“No more dairy.”
“I was just—”
“No more. It thickens the myelin sheath. It makes your thinking slow.”
“That is definitely not true.”
“It has something to do with the proteins—”
“No,” North said, his voice stronger. This kind of shit, this was easy. This made it easier to think clearly. “That’s bullshit. Who told you that?”
“I was reading in the Pure15 guidebook, and it said—”
“Bullshit.”
Cars whooshed past them; tires threw up pebbles that pinged against the Caravan’s paneling.
“So,” Shaw said, drawing out the word, “are you stroking out on me, or—”
“I was thinking about Shep,” North said, starting the van again. It lurched out into the street, and they continued north. “About what happened with Chuck. And the fight with Donny. And the fact that things with Mike are a lot worse than Beau or Chuck suggested. And his ex-wife showing up just a few days before he disappears and they get into a screaming match.”
“You think something happened to him.”
“I think if I were Shep Collins, I would probably want to disappear.”
“He ran away? That’s what you’re saying?”
“Not necessarily. I just mean that he had a lot of reasons to want to be gone. And it’s not like he hasn’t done this before. Remember, that’s what he did to his wife and kids? When he decided he was done with the conversion center, he split. No explanation. No forwarding address.”
“And now things are bad with Mike,” Shaw said, “and things are bad at Iris—you don’t really believe Chuck stole, though, do you?”
“I don’t know. Something’s weird with Chuck.” He thought about how she had cut her hand while washing dishes—a cut that was so perfectly timed that it had to be intentional. “She’s lying. Or she’s hiding something, which is the same as lying.”
“She didn’t steal.”
North shrugged.
“She didn’t,” Shaw said. “I know she didn’t.”
The brick houses of Benton Park rose around them, the streets lined with stunted trees. The asphalt was a collage of weekly circulars, four sticks of Old Spice deodorant, a knotted bundle of Aldi bags, and what North was fairly sure was the hindquarters of a Beanie Baby. When they reached the Borealis offices—which was also Shaw’s home—North stopped in front of the tall brick building and let the van idle.
“Have fun on your date tonight. Where’d you say you’re going?”
“We’re just—” Shaw froze, his hand on the door. “Nice try.”
“Come on. It can’t be that big of a secret.”
Sliding out of the van, Shaw threw North a crooked smile. “Bye.”
“Make him work for it.”
Shaw slammed the door, waved, and trotted up the walk.
“Don’t give it up too easily,” North called after him, and he liked the fact that Shaw was blushing as he darted through the door.
North drove six blocks to the parking lot in front of a pair of matching Quonset huts. The corrugated metal buildings had been repurposed over the years; judging by the signs, one was now serving as a laser tag venue, while the other simply read Bjorn Graphic Design. North had chosen the lot because it was empty and because, when he finally had to do it, it would be easy to turn out and get back on Gravois and head home.
The dashboard clock read a quarter to six, and that meant Tuck would probably be home. Probably. If he weren’t getting drinks with the boys. If he weren’t finishing up the back nine after taking a half day. If he weren’t—North briefly, vividly, pictured the bikini briefs he had found under the bed a few weeks before—doing something else.
Wiping sweat from his face, North found a gum wrapper and settled it in front of the dashboard clock. He didn’t want to see the time. The Caravan’s A/C was shot, and the July heat was brutal, hammering on the glass like it meant to slow roast North inside the Caravan’s frame. He didn’t have anything to drink. He didn’t have anything to eat. But still, this was better, in a way. Better than the big house in Webster Groves.
A semi rolled past on Gravois, kicking up a wall of air and twigs and a flattened Circle K cup. North ran his thumbs inside the steering wheel; there was something soothing about the bumps of molded plastic under his touch. North heard himself asking Mike Llagas, How long have you two been having trouble? And he heard Mike’s answer: I don’t know. I mean, that’s the thing, right?
North understood that answer. He didn’t know either. That was the whole problem. The first time Tuck had hit him, really hit him, and it hadn’t been a game, it couldn’t be disguised as trying out something new, something that might be sexy, had been the first time Tuck failed the internal finance exam at the firm where he worked. Tuck had spent months before the exam, months, with the test prep book on the nightstand, unopened, unread. And when he came home after the test, when he knocked the clock off the wall and kicked over the recliner and grabbed a bottle of Jack like he meant to chug the whole thing right then, North had tried to intervene.
Intervening made sense; after all, it had been North’s intervention that had brought them together in the first place. They had been friends, of some kind, before Tucker had beaten the shit out of Joey Manakowski. But when North stepped in, when he stopped the assault, things had changed. Tucker had cried. He had sobbed. He had explained everything, all the things in his life that had taken him to that point. And by that point, North already knew how Shaw felt about him; he knew that Shaw would never feel the same way North did. So it had almost been a relief to find himself attracted to Tucker. There had been something intoxicating about the power North had over him; to the rest of the world, Tucker was an invincible asshole, but to North, he was broken, vulnerable, and he needed North so badly.
But the night after the exam, when North had said something simple—something encouraging, something about studying more, getting ready for the next time—Tucker had slapped him. And for some reason, North had let him. Later that night, when Tuck crawled—crawled—across the room, sobbing, begging, North had forgiven him. And then it had happened again. And again. And at some point, North had realized that he didn’t know how to stop this particular carnival ride. He didn’t know how to get off.
How long have you two been having trouble?
North didn’t know. Before the slap; he knew that much. The real problems, they had been there long before Tuck had first hit him. And now, even though the hitting had stopped, the punishments had simply transformed. The late nights unexplained. The texts that left Tuck smiling. The sudden, flimsy excuses to run out. The bikini briefs under their bed.
If Shaw knew.
That was as far as North could get with the thought. He had a vague sense of its conclusion—if Shaw knew, he would despise North; if Shaw knew, he would never understand—but he couldn’t bring himself to voice it. All he knew was that eight years ago, he had almost died when he found out Shaw didn’t return his feelings. And now he was losing Shaw all over again, and North could only envision his future as rubble, a burnt-out shell where he was trapped with Tucker forever.
His phone rang, shaking North out of his thoughts. As North answered the call, he eased the Caravan out onto Gravois and started home.
“Hello?”
“North? North, is that you? It’s Teddi.”
Trying to repress a sigh—after all, Teddi had been useful on North’s last major case—North said, “Yeah, it’s me. What’s going on? Why didn’t you call Shaw?”
“Oh my God, it’s a disaster. It’s an epic disaster. I can’t—I can’t even tell you.”
“What do you mean? What happened? Is Shaw ok?”
“It’s the end of the world. Everything’s over.”
“Teddi: what happened?”
“I’m ruined, that’s what happened. Do you know who came to brunch today?”
“Ok, I’m hanging up now.”
“No, wait a minute. Please.” North grimaced; he could practically see Teddi wringing his manicured hands, wiping his shining dome of a head. North didn’t have anything against manicures or against bald men. He just had something against Teddi. Then Teddi spoke again, this time with a note of desperation that sounded genuine: “Cassie and Eddie. That’s all.”
“That’s a low brunch count for the Queen of the Gays.”
“This is not the time for your sniping, North.”
“I’m not sniping. I’m observing. It’s a Monday; doesn’t that have something to do with it?”
“Of course not.”
“This really sounds like a Shaw problem.”
“Shaw answered the phone, and he was giggling.” Teddi pronounced the word like it was a sin. “He didn’t even let me explain; he just told me he was busy, and if I needed to talk to someone, I should call you.”
North could see it now: Shaw and Jadon standing at the bar—22 Rue, maybe—while they waited for tables. Jadon on his first 4 Hands of the evening, and Shaw sipping a Shirley Temple or a tonic water with lime. Maybe a Coke if Jadon was trying to get Shaw hyped up before taking him to bed.
“North?”
“What?”
“I want to hire you.”
“We’re pretty busy—”
“Shaw said you’d take the job.”
“Shaw likes to say things like that.” North groaned as he turned onto Jefferson; traffic waiting to merge onto I-44 was backed up for blocks. “Shaw is too busy batting his eyelashes and playing with his hair to make sure it’s just the way Jadon likes it, so he’s not making the decisions anymore.”
A long pause came from Teddi; somewhere up in the queue, a horn blared.
“Meee-ow,” Teddi said.
North’s face heated, and it had nothing to do with the July sun shimmering on the Caravan’s hood. “All right. Now I’m really hanging up.”
“No, wait. Please, someone’s trying to ruin me.”
“By luring people away from your brunches? I don’t really think that’s our kind of case.”
“It might sound silly, but it’s not. This is a coup, North. An honest-to-God coup. And I want to know who started it.”
The line of traffic inched forward; the Caravan creaked ominously. For what felt like the hundredth time, North decided he was going to take out a loan and get a new—well, a newer—car. “What do you think happened?”
“I don’t know. I’ve tried. I’ve asked people who I thought were my friends. And they all tell me that they only missed last time because they had an appointment for the dog’s haircut, or they had an elderly aunt in town. On and on like that. And they’re lying right to my face. I know they are. They’d all be terrible at poker.”
