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.”

in shock. Come

of food made me want to vomit. “I — there’s no one to

to eat, Adrien. Close the shop for an

it,” I

hung up on Claude than the phone rang again.

hands. Outside the kitchen window I could

flashed through my brain in a macabre mental slide show: Robert at sixteen, in his West Valley Academy tennis whites. Robert and me, drunk and fumbling,

of the phone downstairs. I told myself to get up 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

nights. My partners in crime

up with it, let alone work on

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

from the sofa, went into the bathroom to finish my shower and shave, which had been interrupted by

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.

guy checklist. Like those “How to Recognize a Homosexual” articles circa the Swinging ’60s. Way back when I’d one