Page 21

Sunny—last name unknown—was having a party. A quarter mile from his house, the line of cars began. They were parked on the shoulder of the road, in the shade of the old trees: Lexuses, Audis, Mercedes, BMWs. I slowed, inspecting the cars as I passed them. Some of them looked familiar, but I couldn’t put a name to any of the vehicles. It made sense, though. If Sunny was having a party, at least some of the guests would be local.

The question, though, was what kind of party it would be. It was early afternoon. Hard to imagine the kind of party Tip had expected—a full-blown orgy, with sex swings and stockades and Sunny leading somebody around on a dog collar—with the sun still shining. Hell, it was even hard to imagine the kind of party I’d been at, not that I remembered much of it. Did rich people do that kind of stuff in the middle of the day? Maybe it left their evenings free for charity work.

When I got to Sunny’s drive, I stopped and studied the house. It looked different by daylight. More expensive. Calling it a lake house didn’t really do it justice. It was huge, and every detail reinforced the point that somebody rich lived there: the “architecturally interesting” roof, the enormous windows, the rustic wood trim, even the big, fieldstone boner of a chimney.

The drive was a circle, and a car was parked in front of the house. As I watched, a woman got out, handed the keys to a teenager dressed in what looked like a lot of black polyester, and went inside. The teenager, who had to be cooking inside that uniform, jumped in the car and followed the circle drive away from the house. A moment later, I saw him pull out onto the road ahead of me. He turned away from me, following a line of even more cars parked on the shoulder, and parked. Then he jogged back to the house. I was guessing there was some serious chafage going on.

I rolled past the house and followed the line of parked cars. When I got to the end of it, I stopped. I sat there for a moment, trying to think of how to play this. I wasn’t exactly dressed for the occasion. Shorts. Tee. No underwear, not even a jock. I was going to get my homo license revoked.My mom would have been disappointed; she’d been big on clean underwear, mostly because she was big on the idea that we could all die at any time. The brake pedal was rough under my bare foot. I hadn’t driven without shoes since I was sixteen and my dad caught me and tore my hide off in front of Roman Wallace, who I was trying to impress. Roman hadn’t been impressed. And he hadn’t been gay either, which hadn’t stopped him from letting me suck him off every week the summer before senior year.

First things first: clothes.

I turned the car off and opened the trunk. The thing about being a detective—hell, being a police officer—is that you learn pretty quickly to carry a change of clothes. I grabbed the duffel bag I kept there, dropped trou, shucked my shirt, and stood there, as Pastor Ribbons would have called it, with my glory on display for God and man. Or, as my dad would have said, ass in the wind and trawling for queers. He liked that one a lot. He had a joke, I couldn’t remember how it went, about how a guy’s dick in the water was like a worm on a hook.

A clean pair of chinos. A button-up. I even had a tie, although I left that in the bag. Socks. Shoes. The wingtips were a little scuffed, which was why they’d been benched in the first place. I cuffed the sleeves at the elbow, fixed my hair in the mirror, and decided no underwear had been a good choice. Unless I died in the next few hours.

I made my way back to the house. In the distance, music played, and the wingtips clip-clopped along the pavement. I studied the woods as I walked. Old growth. Probably oak. Not that I knew an oak from—what was another kind of tree? I mean, I knew it wasn’t a pine. Brush grew thick along the edges, but from what I could see, once you got under the trees, it thinned considerably. This was where Tip had said it had happened. He’d been out walking near the woods, in the dark, and a man had stepped out and hurt him. Could it have happened that way? A breeze rolled through the trees, carrying a hint of the lake and breaking the worst of the heat. Branches rippled in the wind, sending the shadows rippling.

When I got to the front door, the teenager was on his phone, hitting a vape. He looked like he was slowly melting inside the black polyester uniform. The sound of my steps made him glance up, and then he looked past me for a car.

Before he could speak, I said, “Gray Dulac, Wahredua PD.”

The kid froze. The vape, I guessed. Or the weed that he had—either on his person or in his car. Or maybe more than weed. I mean, this was one of Sunny’s parties, after all.

It’s too easy sometimes. I didn’t even have to get out my badge.

“Vehicles parked on the side of the road need to have all four wheels on the far side of the line,” I said. “I’ve got to have a quick chat with Sunny, but when I come back, I’m going to start writing tickets.”

If anything, the kid’s eyes got bigger.

He was scrambling up from his sprawl as I went inside.

A wall of cool air met me, freezing the sweat on my forehead, the damp hair at my temples and nape, even the case of swamp ass that had been steadily building. The music was louder, and now the sound of voices mixed with the clink of glasses, a spill of laughter, a sudden, excited cry of “Bonnie, come here!”

The house looked the way I remembered it, only different. All that white wood. All the comfortably plush furniture, the pristine upholstery, the neutral tones and the natural textures. It looked better in the sunlight, I thought. The only bit of kitsch was the nautical junk—a lamp meant to look like an old wooden pile, a decorative ship’s wheel, driftwood. I mean, we were on a lake in the middle of Missouri. It’s not like this was the case of Blackbeard’s treasure.

The guests fit the house. With a few notable exceptions, they were white, they were wealthy, and they looked about as interesting as Wonder Bread. I worked my way through the main floor. It was mostly an open floor plan, but I wanted to get a look at the people inside, and part of the kitchen was hidden from view. French doors allowed the party to spill out onto a massive patio with a view of the lake, where more people mingled, and where a full second bar had been set up to make sure the party kept going.

I recognized a few faces from Wahredua—it was a small town—but they weren’t anyone I knew personally. The really disappointing bit was that there didn’t seem to be an orgy going on. No gimps. No ladies with their tits in those tit vices. Not even anybody getting pegged on a coffee table. There was one middle-aged guy who’d clearly spent way too much on a clear-coat manicure and talked a lot with his hands. I was pretty sure he liked getting his hair pulled, but that was as close as it got.

I stopped next to a group of three: two women and a man. Like most of the people here, they were white, middle aged, and three sheets to the wind. When I said, “Excuse me,” they looked at me like I’d tracked dogshit into their house.

“I’m looking for Sunny,” I said. “Have you seen him?”

They exchanged glances. And then the man said, “He’s in his office.”

“And where’s that?”

The shared look went on longer this time until one of the women said, “Upstairs.” You could tell by her tone she thought I’d been dropped as a child.

Upstairs, I knew. Upstairs, I was intimately acquainted with. I turned toward the stairs. And that’s when I saw him.

He was outside, on the other side of the French doors, and he wore a lightweight suit, tan, not linen. Wool. Summer-weight wool. His hair was perfectly mussed. He was tanner than I remembered, but then, it was summer. He was smiling as he shook someone’s hand, but then, he was always smiling. He was always everyone’s best friend. That suit had to have been expensive, I thought, but it was like someone else was thinking it. Stupid expensive. I wondered how he’d convinced Emery to let him buy it.

His father stood next to him, nodding at something another man said. The group was all men. All white men, all middle aged, all smiling and nodding and laughing as my boy said something else. He looked good, I thought. How was that fair? After everything that had happened, how could he still look so fucking perfect?

A woman stepped through the French doors, and for a moment, the sounds of the party outside carried inside. One of the men was honking with laughter at something my boy had said, and over him, another man shouted, “Gonna be a politician just like his daddy!”

My boy just grinned. He didn’t say no. He didn’t shake his head. He didn’t look uncomfortable. He took it all like it was his. Like they owed it to him.

I stood there. I couldn’t move. The party swirled around me, and I kept staring. The afternoon light raised highlights in his hair. When he stretched out one arm to shake a newcomer’s hand, a hint of ink showed at his wrist. He wasn’t wearing a tie, either, and he made it look casually chic instead of whatever I was doing—my best impersonation of a guy who’d gotten dressed out of the trunk of his car, I guess. I recognized the way he held his head, like he was listening. Which was strange because I couldn’t seem to hear anything. And his smile. If he smiles at me, I thought. If he even looks at me.

And then a woman stepped up to join the group. His mother. He turned toward her as she spoke, and it was like something unlocked inside me.

I made for the stairs, not thinking, more because that’s where I’d been going in the first place. My body was heavier than it should have been. And something was wrong with my eyes. It was like looking out at water. The lake. Like looking out at the lake, and it was a hot, bright summer day, and the sun turned the water into a mirror, so it was like staring at a second sun. You stared at it, and you were seeing the water, but the light made it impossible to really see , if that made any sense. It was like that. Like everything I was supposed to be seeing was behind a glare.

I had to stop halfway up. Whatever was wrong with my eyes, it was worse. My balance was off, and I thought I should grab the rail, but that was somebody else’s thought. My Xanax, I thought. And then: I can’t breathe.

But I could, obviously. And after a few minutes of standing there, trying to open up my lungs, I got one real breath. And then another. The worst of it seemed to drain out of me, and I felt hollowed out, aching with that emptiness when it was gone. I needed to go home, I thought. I needed to sleep for a week. The party was still going, the laughter and the music and the voices. Like nothing had happened. Like the world hadn’t just stopped for a second.

That was another thing I’d learned, though. The world never stopped. And people didn’t see what they didn’t want to see.

After a little while, my eyes were better. I checked my phone just to be sure; the whole thing couldn’t have lasted more than a few minutes. It had felt like an eternity. A woman came down the stairs, turning sideways to pass me, giving me one of those mildly curious looks people sometimes gave strangers. Why’s this guy standing on the stairs? Because I almost shat myself, ma’am.

When I got to the top, the room I’d been in last time was right there. That definitely wasn’t the office. Another door, to the right, opened onto another bedroom when I checked it. I followed a hallway toward the back of the house. The low roar of voices and music floated up to me. Instead of a wall to my left, a railing allowed me to look down on the floor below. I didn’t see my boy, and the angle was wrong, so I couldn’t look out the patio doors.

At the end of the hall, a door stood closed. I tried the handle, and it opened. The room was clearly an office, with no expense spared. The wall to my left had a massive bay window with a built-in bench; the window looked out over the patio and the grassy slope that rolled down toward the water. Dominating most of the space was an enormous desk, the kind that camewith bookcases and shelves as part of a set, some kind of wood with a rosy color to it. Cherry, maybe. Then, to the right, another window looked out over the woods. A pair of armchairs and a tufted chaise made up aconversation area. Two men were sitting in the chairs, and they looked up at me.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m looking for Sunny.”

I knew it was him even before he spoke; you can tell when somebody recognizes their name. He was in his late forties, maybe in his early fifties, and he was keeping it tight. Salt-and-pepper hair. What my mom had called a Roman nose, but it went nicely with the strong features of his face. He wore a summer suit that looked somehow even more expensive than the one my boy had been wearing. The jacket was draped over the chaise, and he sat with his shirtsleeves rolled up to expose nice forearms with thick, dark hair. He looked like a guy who made a lot of money without actually doing too much; plenty of time to hit the gym. He didn’t necessarily look like a guy who paid for the opportunity to hurt women, but then, you never knew.

The other man was another of the drones—you could have switched him out for any of the guys downstairs, and nobody would have noticed. He opened his mouth to say something, but Sunny spoke first.

“I’m Sunny. Can I help you with something?”

“Sorry to interrupt. I need a minute of your time.”

He seemed to consider me for a moment. He wasn’t smiling, not exactly, but…he was. It was the kind you couldn’t see, that’s all. Then he said, “We were just wrapping up. Roger, I’ll see what I can do, but I can’t promise anything.”

Roger looked like he wanted to talk about that some more—probably pleading his case—but Sunny stood, and Roger reluctantly got to his feet. I moved into the office to make way for them as Sunny walked Roger to the door.

“If it’s a question of money,” Roger was saying in a low voice, darting looks at me, “I mean, we can try—”

“Good talk, Roger,” Sunny said. “Enjoy the party.”

He shut the door in Roger’s face and turned to consider me. He smelled expensive. Not exactly nice—the cologne, or whatever it was, was too strong, too sharp. But you fuck enough gay boys, and you start to know the cheap ones from the expensive ones. His eyes took me in top to bottom and then came back to my face. They rested there and didn’t move away. Most people don’t like to hold eye contact. Some animal part of us recognizes it as a challenge. But he looked. And he kept looking. And I looked right the fuck back. What most people don’t think about is that eye contact is like a touch. You can feel it. You can make somebody else feel it.

“You didn’t introduce yourself,” he finally said.

“Gray Dulac.”

“What happened to you?”

“I walked into a door.”

He didn’t smile. Not exactly. “What can I help you with, Gray?”

“Detective Dulac. I’m with the Wahredua PD.”

He did smile then. A big, broad white smile. He walked over to a wet bar I hadn’t noticed—it was built into the conversation area, and on my first glance, I’d been more focused on the two men sitting there. As Sunny set to work mixing a drink, he said without looking at me, “And what’s so important, Detective Dulac, that you had to interrupt my meeting?”

“I thought you were wrapping up.”

“Roger would have loved to talk longer.”

“You were done with his ass, though.”

A little red warning light went off inside me. That had been a little too loose. A little too casual. Something wasn’t right. Seeing him downstairs, maybe. The way my eyes had gone weird. And even though I could track where that comment had veered to the edge of professionalism, the recognition was clinical, detached, and I couldn’t seem to care.

Sunny only laughed, though. “I was.”

“And you didn’t even make him kiss your ring or anything.”

That little light went off again. Error. Warning. Danger.

When Sunny turned around, he was holding two drinks. “Is this how detectives from the Wahredua PD talk to people?”

“We’re having what I’d call an informal conversation.”

He handed me the drink as he said, “Then I think I’ll call you Gray.”

He was looking at me again. He had dark eyes, but his gaze was so sharp that they felt bright. I didn’t know if I wanted to look away, but I didn’t let myself. I took a drink, instead—an Old Fashioned. It was strong, and after the first drink, I thought I could feel the warmth of the alcohol drip-drip-dripping into my bloodstream.

“Well?” Sunny asked.

“It’s good.” And then for some reason I said, “Thanks.”

He laughed. “I meant, what can I help you with?”

For a disorienting moment, it was like I’d forgotten. Or not forgotten but…sidestepped. Like whatever had happened to me, it had disrupted something far more fundamental. You’re in shock, a voice inside me said. You’re having a trauma response. I’d heard Darnell say it enough times. I took another, longer drink. I was fine. Already, it was hard to remember that strange sensation of glare, that moment on the stairs. Like it had happened to somebody else. It was seeing him, that was all. It had been a—I almost thought shock. It had been a surprise.

“Gray?” Sunny asked. He had a nice voice. I hadn’t noticed that before. Deep. Masculine. Confident. Not quite a command, but not quite…not.

“I wanted to talk to you about Tip Wheeler.”

He was a good liar. There was barely even a flicker of it in his face. “I don’t know who that is.”

“Yes, you do. The boy who was attacked at one of your parties.”

Sunny sipped his drink. Pretended to think. “I remember hearing about it. I’m not sure I’m going to be able to help you. I was…occupied that night. I didn’t even know what had happened until the deputies told me.” He frowned. “I spoke to a pair of detectives from the Dore County Sheriff’s Department. I understood they were handling the investigation.”

“Like I said, this is an informal conversation.”

That made him smile, but his eyes were hard, dark glass. “I don’t know what happened, Gray. It was a party. Parties get out of hand. People lose their inhibitions. They get out of control.” He examined my face again, and in a different voice, he said, “I’m sorry.”

“That was pretty good.”

He arched an eyebrow.

“You do it very well,” I told him.

“Do what?”

“The house helps. The money. Plus, your whole schtick. The suit, the hair, the voice. I bet those two dumbasses ate it up.”

He held his drink and stared at me.

You shouldn’t have said dumbasses, that voice inside me suggested.

“Let’s try this again,” I said. “Tell me about Tip Wheeler.”

His mouth stayed relaxed, but the tightness showed in his jaw. “I didn’t know the young man.”

“See, that’s stupid. You’re probably good at whatever it is you do—making money with other people’s money, I’d guess, or some bullshit C-suite job. But that’s a stupid thing to say when it’s so easy to disprove.”

“I’m not lying. I didn’t know him.” And then he sipped his drink, studying me over the glass. “How old are you?”

“I think you did know Tip. He certainly knew you. You beat the shit out of his mother.”

The slight widening of his eyes was the only hint that something had disturbed his sense of control, but all he said was “Twenty-seven? Twenty-eight? It’s hard to tell; you have great skin.”

“Do you admit you knew Lola Wheeler?”

“Let me guess: only child.”

“I asked you a question.”

“And I asked you one. I’ve asked you two, I suppose.”

“Did you know Lola Wheeler?”

“How old are you?”

I fought the urge to grit my teeth. At some juvenile level, it felt like surrendering—letting him win by answering his question. And that adolescent side of me wanted to dig in my heels and fight it out. But I remembered—even if it was only hazily, right then—that fighting with a suspect wasn’t good policework. It definitely wasn’t a good interview technique.