When North knocked on the door, he could already hear the sounds of a successful brunch in progress: voices and laughter and the click of steps on wood floors. The door opened a moment later, and the man who answered was tall, attractive in the way some men were as they approached middle age: glasses, salt-and-pepper hair, but still toned and trim. “Yes? Hello?”

  “North McKinney.”

  “Oh, right. Hello. The detective. Yes, come on in. I’m Josh,” he said, taking North’s hand and pumping it once.

  “This is my date, Jack.”

  “Jack, nice to meet you.” The question was written all over Liebowitz’s face, though. He must have been expecting Shaw. Or Tucker. The gay community in the city wasn’t that large, and even though North hadn’t met Liebowitz personally, the other man had clearly expected something else. “Please come in, make yourselves at home. Cassie and Eddie are straight back.”

  “Katzenstein?” North said. They were among Teddi’s closest friends, and if they were here, then Teddi was right: someone had intentionally disrupted Teddi’s brunches.

  “Yes, of course. Cassie said I absolutely had to meet you. She said you have these incredible stories about your work. You have a gay detective agency, is that right?”

  North could almost hear what Shaw would have said, and he said the words because they hurt so damn much. He deserved a little more hurt. “It’s a detective agency that specializes in helping LGBTQ people. Not a gay agency.”

  “Right, right,” Liebowitz said gravely, nodding as though North had said something significant. “Well, let me tell you, our city needs someone like you, and I would love to—”

  “Joshua,” someone called from back in the house, in a campy voice set to one hundred.

  “Rory is going to kill me if I don’t help him with the champagne. Please make yourselves at home. I’d love to catch up with you in a bit.”

  “Joshua,” the voice shrieked again.

  With a small grin and a shrug, Liebowitz made his way down the hall. North watched him go, taking stock of their interaction.

  “He seems nice,” Jack said.

  North rolled his shoulders.

  “He seemed a little surprised when you introduced me.”

  “He was probably expecting Shaw.”

  “Or your husband,” Jack said.

  “Or him.”

  Jack looked like he wanted North to say more—it was obvious that he wanted some kind of reassurance. Instead, North set off down the hallway after Liebowitz, his Red Wings loud against the polished floorboards.

  Like so many renovated homes, this house had been redesigned to feature a large, open space for entertaining that connected a living area with the kitchen. Two French doors were open, allowing the summer morning breeze to carry into the house, and out in the yard, another flock of pretty boys was sitting on the grass, bare-chested to the morning sun, laughing and passing around a pitcher of mimosas and looking like someone had just taken them out of their plastic packaging a few hours before.

  “Get something to eat,” North said, tilting his head toward the buffet. “And a drink if you want. I’ll catch up with you in a minute.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Does he have whiskey?”

  “At brunch?”

  “I was kidding.”

  “You look hungry. I’ll get you something.”

  “I’m fine. Just give me a few minutes.”

  North peeled off from Jack before the boy could protest, steering toward the far end of the house. Cassie and Eddie Katzenstein were the prototypical mold for Teddi’s straight friends: Eddie, slouched in a wingback chair and staring out a window, made an obscene amount of money doing something with stocks; he also had less personality than the chair he was sitting in. Cassie was toned and tan and wearing a summer dress that was too girlish for a woman her age—it was to her credit that she almost pulled it off.

  When she saw North, she blanched and tried to get her husband’s attention, but his gaze was riveted on something outside. Then a sparrow fluttered down on the sill, and Eddie’s head moved to track it. He never seemed to notice his wife’s attempts to get him to his feet.

  “Hi, Cassie,” North said.

  “Hello. We’re just—Eddie, dear, if you could forget about the bird for a moment—we were about to leave.”

  “Your eyes look better.”

  “Thank you. Dr. Gutierrez really is wonderful; I tell all my friends about her. But really, Eddie, we’ve got to go, we’ve got that thing this morning and we’ve stayed far too long.”

  “What thing?” Eddie said absently, his gaze still tracking the sparrow hopping along the sill.

  “Cassie, I’m surprised to see you here. A weekday brunch isn’t exactly common in St. Louis.”

  “Oh, yes, well, you know they’re quite popular these days. It’s not like it used to be.”

  “With Teddi, you mean?”

  “No, I didn’t . . .” She was tugging on Eddie now, trying to hoist him out of his seat to no avail. “That’s not what I—”

  “I just want to know why. Then I’ll leave you alone.”

  “Why what, dear?”

  North laughed. “Very good. ‘Why what, dear?’ That’s very good.”

  Cassie was frowning now, putting those new eyes at risk of more wrinkles. “Eddie, I really don’t like how this man is talking to me, and I think we should go.”

  The only answer was leather creaking as Eddie leaned forward for a better look at the sparrow.

  “Come on,” North said. “Or I’m going to say something very loud and very appalled about all those fur coats I saw in your closet.”

  “I don’t—I would never—” She cut off with a strangled gasp for breath. “You can’t!”

  “You looked lovely in the mink.”

  “Fine, you horrible man. Fine. It’s . . . it’s become quite well known that Teddi isn’t who he says he is. In fact, he’s . . . he’s quite reprehensible, in fact, what he’s been doing, what he’s been lying about, pretending. And once word got around, well, we simply couldn’t be part of it any longer.”

  “I remember this game from the playground. All the cool kids are playing on the jungle gym, but you have to play on the swings. Something like that?”

  Her chin came up—it looked like it needed another touch or two from Dr. Gutierrez—and she said, “That is absolutely not the case at all. It’s a matter of principles. Morals.”

  “Principles? Morals? Gee, a hard-sell detective like me, a guy who takes money to snap pics of cheaters, well, I couldn’t understand that in a million years.”

  “This is unbearable, Eddie, really—”

  “But why don’t you try to explain it for me? Use small words. I’ll get my dictionary ready just in case.”

  “There’s no call to be snide. It’s straightforward; anyone would have done the same.”

  “So straightforward it’s taking about twenty miles for you to get to the point.”

  “He served chicken sandwich bites at a recent brunch.” She sniffed—the nose needed a touch too—and added, “From Chicken Busters.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Chicken Busters. It’s a chicken sandwich place, a chain, but it started somewhere southern.”

  “I know what Chicken Busters is,” North said. “What’s the dilemma?”

  “They donate to a variety of anti-LGBTQ organizations.”

  “Ok.”

  “And it’s absolutely unconscionable to buy their sandwiches. Everybody knows that.”

  North laughed softly. Then, when her expression didn’t change, he began to laugh harder. “That’s it?”

  “What do you mean? It’s disgusting. He doesn’t have any sense of social responsibility. And feeding it to the rest of us, making a mockery—”

  “Oh for the love of fuck, Cassie. Teddi calls himself the queen of the gays. He wouldn’t do something that stupid.”

  “But he did. Paul Schroeder saw the receipt; he told me so himself.”

  North fought another laugh. It seemed so petty. But then he glanced around the room, checking faces, and the urge to laugh sank. Peter and Paul were by the champagne flutes, laughing as they talked to a man North didn’t recognize. Emilia Rottenberg was cutting into the brie. Sophie Wu—no relation to the actress of the same name—wore scrubs, either intending on going straight to the hospital after brunch or perhaps just coming off an overnight shift. Billy, the young man North had met at Teddi’s last brunch, waved forlornly from where he stood, alone, at the far end of the kitchen, but his partner was nowhere in sight; North ignored the wave. He didn’t see Rufus, another of Teddi’s mainstays, but he saw Gabe, Philip, and Francisco standing on the back lawn, watching the pretty boys tease each other about body fat percentages or some dumb shit like that. It was just one brunch, and it was the middle of the week, but so many of Teddi’s standard guests were here that North realized Cassie was right. Chicken sandwiches might not seem like a big deal, but it had overthrown Teddi’s little kingdom.

  “I made you a plate,” Jack said, coming up beside North and handing it over: cheese, crackers, salmon dip, a slice of quiche, grapes. “No whiskey, but I thought you could use a drink too.” Juggling his own food and drink, he handed over a mimosa.

  “I’m fine.”

  Somehow Cassie had gotten Eddie to his feet, and she was hustling him toward the door, casting backward glances at North as though he might run after her. He just toasted her with the mimosa and grinned when she tried to hurry Eddie even faster.

  “Friends of yours?”

  “Fuck no. But they love Shaw.”

  “He’s your partner, right? Where is he? I thought you said you wanted him to see me with you.”

  “That’s a pretty stupid thing to say, though, isn’t it?”

  “So, it was, what? A joke?”

  “Yep, just a joke.”

  They stood there in silence until North broke down and tried the salmon dip. It was pretty good, even though his stomach had been churning acid since the night before, so he kept eating.

  “So, this doesn’t really feel like your scene.”

  North eyed him. Just a kid, probably not much older than the pretty boys fresh out of the packaging. And cute. No, beyond cute. Right on the edge of hot, especially with those arms and shoulders. Would it be so bad if they left right now, drove back to Jack’s place, so that North could forget about last night and the million steps he’d taken on the road that led to that particular cluster fuck? What had Jack said? I’ve got some ideas for after brunch.

  “What do you know about Chicken Busters?”

  “The sandwich place? I don’t know. They were in the news for something in California. San Francisco kept blocking them from putting in a store, I think. Something about donations they give to religious groups.”

  “You’re really pretty.”

  Jack’s eyes lit up. “I think you’re cute too.”

  “Why don’t you take your shirt off and go talk to the pretty boys out there? See if they know anything about Chicken Busters.”

  “What?”

  “I’m trying to track something down.”

  Jack blinked. “Is this . . . are you working?”

  “Everything in my life is work. That’s the job. That doesn’t mean it’s not a date too.”

  “I don’t know how I feel about that.”

  “Feel whatever you want to feel,” North said, draining the mimosa. “This is me. I’ve got to ask some questions.”

  He dropped the plate on the table and carried the empty mimosa over to Peter and Paul. They’d been together since college. They looked alike; they dressed alike; they talked alike. They’d made some kind of fortune in tech, and the money had somehow made them even more similar.

  “I never saw the receipt,” Paul said. “I don’t know where Cassie got that idea.”

  “Emilia told me she’d seen it,” Peter said. “Right on top of the trash, like he didn’t care if people knew.”

  Emilia Rottenberg had hair that had never been meant to take red dye, and the result was an artificial color not far off from the wood floors.

  “I didn’t see it,” Emilia said. “Not see it, see it. Gabe was going on and on about how unbelievable it was, and when I asked him how he knew, he said the receipt was right there, right where anyone could see it, and I remembered that earlier I had been checking the pantry for more olives, and remembering, yes, that’s right, I had seen a piece of paper on top of the trash.”

  Gabe, Philip, and Francisco were placing bets on which of the pretty boys would top which. North didn’t know how they’d ever resolve the bet; he didn’t want to know. He did a double take of the pretty boys, though, and saw Jack sitting with them, his long legs stretched out, his sculpted chest bare to the sunlight. They locked eyes, and Jack’s gaze drifted on, as though they’d never met.

  “Teddi’s such a fucking queen,” Gabe said for the third time. “Spends half his day hysterical and the other half bitching about other people being hysterical. If he didn’t want everyone to know about Chicken Busters, he should have cleaned up the evidence. I mean, you investigate stuff like this all the time, North. Isn’t that what he should have done? He should have erased his tracks, or whatever it is you people say.”

  “So you saw the receipt?”

  “No way. Someone told me Sophie saw it. I went and checked, but somebody had already taken out the trash.”

  Sophie Wu was wiping the back of her hands on her scrubs. She smiled when she saw him, but she shook her head when North started asking. “I never saw it. I heard about it from, I don’t know, Cassie, I think.”

  North stood for a while at the sink, staring out at the pretty boys, at the way Jack stretched out his long legs and scratched lazily at his taut stomach and laughed when one of the pretty boys whispered something in his ear. Christ, it would be so easy. And North felt like he deserved something easy after all the time he’d spent doing every single important relationship in his life the hardest way possible.

  Then he went back to Gabe and asked, “Who told you Sophie saw the receipt?”

  “Christ, look at the kid with the arms—yeah, that one. He’s going to wreck that little blond tonight. Well, this afternoon probably. Wreck him. Twenty fucking bucks on it.”

  “Gabe.”

  “And those shoulders. Thank God he finally took off his shirt.”

  “That’s my date.”

  At that, Francisco, Philip, and Gabe all pivoted slightly to reconsider North.

  “Oh. My. God,” Francisco said.

  Philip put his hand over his mouth.

  North had thought a lot over the years about punching these guys. He was wondering if this was the moment he’d been saving up for.

  “But,” Gabe began. “But, like, Tucker—”

  “Gabe, who told you Sophie saw the receipt?”

  “I don’t know his name. That new guy, the one that just started coming around Teddi’s with his boyfriend. The actor.”

  “Billy,” Philip said.

  “I know who you’re talking about,” North said. “Thanks.” He spun back toward the house.

  The whispers began before he had taken a single step.

  Inside, Billy still lingered in the far corner of the kitchen, a champagne flute held loosely in one hand, his eyes roving the room. When he caught sight of North, he smiled and waved again. Then he froze, the color draining from his face, his features suddenly waxen. His eyes were fixed on a point behind North, and North glanced over his shoulder.

  The two men stood in the hallway, talking to Sophie in voices that didn’t carry over the buzz of conversation. One was tall, dark-haired with alabaster skin, and built like he could bulldoze his way through a brick wall. The man next to him was of average height, but that was the only thing about him that was average. He had golden blond good looks and blue eyes the color of Caribbean waters; the loose button-up and rumpled slacks did nothing to hide the swimmer’s cut of his body. In spite of what looked like a strong physique, the blond man leaved heavily on a cane. North recognized the dark-haired man as Emery Hazard, one-time detective for the Metropolitan police. Judging by Hazard’s arm around the blond man’s shoulders, North guessed the other man was his boyfriend.

  “Jesus Christ,” Billy whispered in a tone of pure terror.

  North heard the panicked note, and his mind went back to the time he had first met Billy, at one of Teddi’s brunches. Teddi had been saying something about Billy and Hazard. Detective Hazmat, that’s what Teddi had called him. Billy and Hazard had been dating, North recalled. And something about Tom. Billy had broken it off with Hazard for Tom? Was that it? Well, North thought, this was bound to be interesting. North had a slight aversion to Hazard, but nothing in the way of Teddi’s obvious distaste. North and Hazard had crossed paths a few times when Hazard had still been with the Metropolitan, and the man had always come across as arrogant, cold, and abrasively calculating. By all reports, he had been an excellent detective, which had only made his sudden resignation all the more curious.

  North was still watching Hazard when the big man turned, and North saw the exact moment Hazard caught sight of Billy. Billy must have seen it too because he squeaked. Crimson stained Hazard’s ivory cheeks; he set his jaw like he was about to chew through a tractor wheel. A lock of long, dark hair spilled across Hazard’s forehead, falling almost into his eye, and now North noticed the details that he had missed in the wave of shocked recognition at seeing Hazard again: bruises, still-healing cuts, and his arm—the one not around the blond man’s shoulders—in a sling. The blond man looked like he’d been roughed up too; several of his fingertips were bandaged, and he winced when Hazard’s hand grazed a spot on his chest.

  “Oh Jesus,” Billy whispered.

  North finally spared the poor kid a glance. The waxy cast to Billy’s face had only gotten worse, and his hand was shaking like he might drop the champagne flute. North felt a flicker of satisfaction. He had expected to have to rattle the kid, shake him up a little, to get answers out of him. But this, with Hazard’s sudden appearance, was doing the same thing just fine.