Fatal Shadows

The phone started ringing before I could relock the front door. For a moment I thought it was Robert calling in sick again.

“Adrien, mon chou,” fluted the high, clear voice of Claude La Pierra. Claude owns Café Noir on Hillhurst Ave. He’s big and black and beautiful. I’ve known him about three years. I’m convinced he’s a Southland native, but he affects a kind of gender-confused French like a Left Bank expatriate with severe memory loss. “I just heard. It’s too ghastly. I still can’t believe it. Tell me I’m dreaming.”

“The police just left.”

“The police? Mon Dieu! What did they say? Do they know who did it?”

“I don’t think so.”

“What did they tell you? What did you tell them? Did you tell them about me?”

“No, of course not.”

A noisy sigh of relief quivered along the phone line. “Certainement pas! What is there to tell? But what about you? Are you all right?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t had time to think.”

be in shock. Come

want to vomit. “I — there’s no one to

You have to eat, Adrien. Close the shop for an

think about it,”

the phone rang again. I ignored it,

the kitchen window I could

his West Valley Academy tennis whites. Robert and me, drunk and fumbling, in the Ambassador Hotel the night of the senior prom. Robert on his wedding day.

and get dressed. Told myself I had a business to run. I continued to sit there, my mind racing ahead, looking for trouble. I could see it everywhere, looming up, pointing me out of the lineup. Maybe that sounds selfish, but half a lifetime of getting myself out of shit Robert

used and vintage mysteries, with the largest selection of gay and gothic whodunits in Los Angeles. We held a workshop for mystery writers on Tuesday nights. My partners in crime had finally convinced me to put out a monthly newsletter. And

was good. So good that I could barely keep up

over. Getting out of the marriage had cost what Rob laughingly called a “queen’s ransom.” After nine years and two-point-five children he was back from the Heartland of America, hard up and hard on. At the time it seemed like

shave, which had been interrupted by the heavy hand of the law on my door buzzer

the steamy surface of the mirror I grimaced at my reflection, hearing again that condescending, “But you are a homosexual?” As in, “But you are a lower life form?” So what had Detective Riordan seen? What was the first clue? Blue eyes, longish dark hair, a pale bony face. What was it in my Anglo-Norman

device. Maybe there really was a straight guy checklist. Like those “How to Recognize a Homosexual” articles circa the