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.”

shock. Come by

can’t, Claude.” The thought of food made me want to

the

it,”

the phone rang again. I ignored it, padding upstairs

upstairs I sank on the couch, head in my hands. Outside the kitchen window I could hear a dove cooing, the soft sound distinct over the mid-morning rush

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

No chance to say goodbye. I wiped my eyes on my shirt sleeve, listened to the muffled ring 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

on Tuesday nights. My partners in crime had finally convinced me to put out a monthly newsletter. And I had just sold my own first novel, Murder Will Out, about a gay Shakespearean actor who tries to solve a murder during

good. So good that I could barely keep up with it, let alone work on my next book. That’s when Robert had turned

ransom.” After nine years

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

are a homosexual?” As in, “But you are a lower

had a gaydar anti-cloaking device. Maybe there really was a straight guy checklist. Like those “How to Recognize a Homosexual” articles circa the Swinging ’60s. Way back when I’d one stuck to