Compared to this near-hovel, the shabby trailer park just next door might have been Presidio Terrace.

  He got out of the car and made his way to the front door, avoiding an overturned garbage can, its contents scattered on the bare ground, and a bag of bottles—most of them vodka bottles, he noted—that had been torn open, the bottles tossed about. Some animal had been foraging. A bear? They weren’t supposed to be here, right? Just his luck, he’d meet one AWOL

  some night. Back in San Francisco, “bear” meant a big, burly guy, and hairy. He’d met one or two of those when they’d been out foraging. Them, he knew how to handle. So it wasn’t as if he had no interest in wild animals. He was just selective, was all.

  At first he thought no one was home. His knock echoed back to him the way they do from an empty house. He knocked again, just to be sure, and was surprised when the door inched open and someone said, from an interior too gloomy to reveal a face, “What do you want?”

  “Mrs. McIntosh?” Stanley asked

  “Who wants to know?”

  He held his badge up to the crack in the door. “I’m with the San Francisco Police Department. I’m in town at the request of Carl Hunter’s family…”

  “Carl Hunter? The one who killed Donnie? Is that who you mean?”

  90 Victor Banis

  “Yes, that’s the one. But, there’s some question about what really happened… would you mind if I came in?”

  “What for?”

  Which rather caught him off guard. He wasn’t altogether sure of the answer to that question himself. “Just to talk,” he said lamely. “I’m trying to learn a little more about your son.”

  The silence grew long. He half expected the door to close in his face. “You’re sure you’re not a bill collector?” she surprised him by asking.

  “Quite sure.”

  The door swung inward. “But I don’t know what I can tell you,” she said. “I probably knew him less than anyone. You wouldn’t happen to have a cigarette, would you?”

  “Sorry,” he said, pausing just inside. The door opened directly into what was obviously the cabin’s living room, but it was so shaded from the morning light outside that in here it might almost have been night. Curtains were closed at the side windows, and a worn thin plaid blanket had been pinned up over the wide front window.

  It took a moment for Stanley’s eyes to adjust to the gloom.

  He was kind of sorry when they did. Garbage was strewn everywhere, along with more of those empty bottles. Dirty dishes, cups, glasses were stacked on end tables and a scarred coffee table and, he could see through an open doorway, a kitchen counter. The floor was plain wood, innocent of any rugs or even, at a glance, broom. The air reeked of spoiled food and body odors and stale cigarette smoke. He had to resist an urge to gag.

  “So, what was it you want to know?” Amanda McIntosh asked. She didn’t look much better than her living quarters, a small, scrawny woman with unkempt hair and a belligerent expression on a badly weathered face. Her breath was wheezy, her voice the rasp of the long time heavy smoker.

  She turned away from his assessment, sorted through some glasses on one lamp table, found something of interest in one of them, and lifted it to take a sip.

  “I thought, well, maybe you could tell me a little about some of Donnie’s associates.”

  DEADLY WRONG 91

  “Associates?” She gave a hoarse whoop of a laugh that quickly deteriorated into a wracking cough. “Associates,” she said again when she got her breath back. “That’s a rich one.

  You mean all those guys around town punking him day and night? Those associates?”

  “You knew about that, then?”

  “I’d have to be deaf and blind not to know. It wasn’t like it was any kind of secret. He sure didn’t care who knew. In the woods, out in pick up trucks, alleys… this is about the only place he didn’t foul with his behavior, and only because I put my foot down, told him one John in here and he was out on his ass. He got the message. Where else would he go if I threw him out? Who else would have had him but his dear old mother?”

  “Okay, then, all those Johns,” Stanley said, “can you think of anyone who might have wanted to kill him?”

  “I expect there’s more than one who’d like to have wrung his neck. Count me among them. Nobody killed him, though, not on purpose. It was an accident. That Hunter kid, the two of them doing God alone knows what, things got out of hand.

  You go talk to the cops. They’ll tell you all about it.”

  “I’ve already been.”

  “Then you know as much as I do, Buster. Look, I just got out of bed. If it’s all the same to you…”

  Stanley spied a framed picture sitting atop the television. He picked it up. “Is this him?”

  “Donnie? That’s him,” she said in a voice suddenly turned angry. She rummaged around again on the table, found a half smoked cigarette in a dish, and lighted it with a big wooden match. “Pretty, wasn’t he?”

  Stanley looked at the picture for a long moment. He could see why so many men had wanted a piece of the action. Donnie McIntosh had indeed been pretty. Not handsome, and certainly not masculine, but girlishly pretty—an oval face, pouty little mouth, long lashed eyes. In the photograph, probably a high school graduation picture, he looked downright cherubic. Put a wig on him, some makeup, he’d pass for a pinup queen. In San Francisco, he’d have been a hot property. There was a drag club there, The Boom Boom Room…

  92 Victor Banis

  He set the picture back atop the television and gave the room another look. There were no other pictures to be seen.

  Out of curiosity, he said, “Your husband…”

  “Was a rotten son of a bitch. Best thing that ever happened in my life, the day he died. A real blessing, that was.”

  He noticed she didn’t mention the benefit to her son. Did she care about Donnie’s life with father? Or even know?

  Another mother, blinding herself to reality? How could you love your son if you didn’t even know him?

  “Did Donnie have his own room here?”

  “Back there.” She jerked her head toward a dark hallway that ran toward the rear of the house. “Last room. You’re welcome to look, if you think it’ll do you any good.”

  “Probably not,” he said, thinking aloud more than talking to her. “If there’d been anything there of interest, the police would have found it when they looked. Still, it can’t hurt…”

  “The local cops? What makes you think they’d have been poking ‘round there?”

  “Weren’t they? You mean, they didn’t search his room?”

  “For what? It wasn’t any mystery, how he died. Those two boys were fooling around, doing queer stuff, I already told you.

  Things got out of hand. Didn’t have anything to do with his room. He never brought them here. I said to him, you bring one John into this house and you’re out on your ass.”

  “And he didn’t?”

  “‘Course he didn’t. I told him once, I told him a dozen times, you bring—”

  Stanley’s spirits brightened. “And you don’t mind if I have a look?”

  “Go ahead, makes no difference to me.” She dismissed him with a wave of her hand and walked to the kitchen. He heard the refrigerator door open and close as he entered the hallway to the rear.

  In contrast to the rest of the house, Donnie’s room might have been a spread out of House and Garden. Not that the decorating was anything special: a teen’s bedroom, posters on the wall, a surprisingly new looking computer (a gift from a DEADLY WRONG 93

  John?) on a battered wooden desk, a worn but clean throw on the single bed.

  No garbage, though, no clutter. Except for a light film of dust that had probably collected since Donnie had died, the room looked neat and clean. He’d have bet money Donnie had been as careful of his person and his clothes as he was about his room. He’d run across people like that before. Scrupulously neat, compulsively clean on the surface. The garbage all trapped inside.

  The stale cigarette smoke had followed him in from the front room. Stanley crossed to a window, opened it and breathed gratefully of the fresh air. Outside, the mountain slope climbed sharply. A narrow path of worn down grass led upward to a dirt road that slashed like a dueling scar across the hillside—one of the rugged fire roads used by the rangers in the event of a forest fire.

  At the point where the road disappeared into the trees, a man all in black sat motionless on a motorcycle. Silhouetted as he was against the sunlight sky, Stanley could see nothing of his face—yet he had the uncanny feeling that the man was watching the house. Or him

  He stared back, and was about to call out a greeting when the motorcycle roared to life. The driver turned it sharply about, sending pebbles scattering, and in a minute bike and rider were gone, leaving a cloud of dust and a diminuendo of noise in their wake.

  Just a biker, then, communing with nature, and nothing to do with Stanley or the business at hand or, surely, Amanda McIntosh, who was hardly the sort he could imagine in a romantic liaison with one of those dark knights of the road. He was letting his imagination run away with him again, seeing ghosts at every turning. Tom had accused him of that often.

  He turned from the window, gave his attention back to the room, trying to get a sense of its occupant. If he hadn’t known, he’d have guessed an ordinary young man lived here.

  Until he found the porn in the cardboard box under the bed.

  Books, magazines, a couple of video tapes, with nothing that he could see on which to show them. And photos. Lots of photos, 94 Victor Banis

  most of them computer print outs. Many of Donnie, naked.

  Soft, and hard, his wienie small, little-boyish. Bending over to show his bare bottom, spreading his cheeks to show his hole, kneeling on the floor, mouth open, as if begging to have something shoved into it. A gallery of self abasement. He wondered who had taken the pictures, and made a mental note to ask Carl if he knew.

  Pictures of others, too. There were a couple of Carl, but there was nothing pornographic about these, just ordinary pictures. Carl, fully clothed, standing by a tree in one, seated on some kind of wooden bench in another. Something about his expression—tender, vulnerable, smiling, a sweet smile, really.

  Stanley was surprised once again to realize how dramatically a smile changed Carl’s appearance.

  He wondered not for the first time what the relationship between the two young men had really been. More, surely, than Carl had let on. Carl had seen something in Donnie that others hadn’t seen, apparently. Donnie, too, seemed to have seen Carl in a way differently from the other men in his life. And yet, he had died trying to give Carl a blow job. The old, crude terms came into his mind, the bitter humor of gay-dom: the dick of death. A cock to die for. In Donnie’s case, and Carl’s, maybe it had been too tragically true.

  The rest of the pictures were less circumspect than Carl’s.

  Naked men, generally with stiff organs on display, a few backside shots. Most of the men faceless, heads cut off by the camera, though in a couple hands were held discreetly in front of faces, and in one photo, a big, muscular man, naked and erect, grinned unashamedly through his beard for the camera.

  Except for the bearded grinner, who looked like he’d been snapped in a very drunken state, it would have been impossible to identify any of the men in the photos. Stanley flipped through them. Twenty, thirty shots. Who were they? What significance did they have for Donnie McIntosh? Did he come home from those frequent assaults and masturbate over them?

  Were these trophies of some sort, or a catalog of his shame?

  He went through the photos again, studying them more carefully. A couple of men showed up with some regularity—

  one recognizable by virtue of his endowment, it must have been DEADLY WRONG 95

  a good eight inches in length, and remarkably skinny, like a long pencil with testicles and an enormously thick bush at the eraser end.

  The other, shown sitting in a chair in three different shots, looked middle aged, so far as you could tell from his body, his loose belly hanging in folds, member of no distinction, soft in one shot, standing in the other two.

  What caught Stanley’s decorator eye, though, was the chair, the same chair in which he was sitting in all three photos, or what he could see of the chair. He studied each one closely, concentrating on the chair. Mostly what showed was a gracefully curved wooden arm, and in one, just a bit of a leg and, peeking from behind one stocking-clad human foot, a claw and ball chair-foot. And the merest glimpse of an ornately patterned rug, but not enough, really, to identify the pattern.

  The chair was Queen Anne, he thought. It looked authentic, what he could see of it. Maybe expensive. Not likely the sort of thing a biker would have, or your typical mountain man. It suggested someone with a little taste, at least. And probably a little money.

  He sighed aloud. What good would any of this do? Pencil dick was unmistakable. He’d know that appendage in a minute if he ever saw it, but how could he? He could hardly run around the town of Bear Mountain asking to inspect everyone’s crotch.

  And, what if he did find it, what purpose would that serve?

  He imagined a courtroom, straight out of an old Perry Mason television show, himself in the witness chair, pointing dramatically: Your honor, that dick is in the courtroom at this very moment. J’accuse…

  The same with the man in the Queen Anne chair. What did any of this prove? That Donnie liked to take pictures of his tormentors, was all. On the surface, at least, nothing linked up with Donnie’s death—or, more importantly, cleared Carl Hunter of it.

  He wondered about taking the pictures with him. Was that tampering with evidence? Most likely it was. If they were evidence, which wasn’t at all clear. The police had shown no interest in them, had they? Anyway, there were lots of them, 96 Victor Banis

  and who would miss a few? Donnie was gone, and he doubted if Donnie’s mother even knew of their existence. Maybe nobody did. Except, of course, the men in the pictures. He looked at them briefly again. Was there a clue there to why Donnie McIntosh had to die?

  He chose one of Pencil Dick, one of Chair Man, and one of Donnie himself, a rare portrait, a smiling young man caught in a moment, a mood, of innocence. On an impulse, he added one of Carl and the one of the man whose face was showing. Five pictures. That wasn’t too greedy, was it?

  He gave the room a last glance, feeling ineffably sad, and left. He finally recognized the scent, both foreign and familiar, that had teased him since he’d come into the room: furniture polish. Old Pledge. He used it himself, knew the smell well.

  If it had been used anywhere else in the house, though, it hadn’t been for a very long time.

  § § § § §

  “His funeral’s tomorrow,” the mother told him as he went out. “If you care.” She didn’t sound much, he thought, as if she did.

  It wasn’t until later that he remembered he’d left the bedroom window open.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  It was still early for The Handle Bar. Maybe too early. They might not even be open yet for business. In San Francisco, no self respecting biker bar would be open before noon.

  He passed it, turned around, cruising slowly back. A biker pulled into the parking lot, a companion following. They got off their Harleys and strolled together, chatting, to the front door, disappeared inside.

  Which meant the bar was open then. There were maybe another three or four bikes outside, and a couple of pickup trucks at one end of the gravel lot, like trucks and bikes didn’t mix. Mountain bikers were early birds, apparently.

  Okay, the truth was, he wasn’t ready for this yet. He couldn’t forget Carl’s warning about his probable welcome. Anyway, when he looked at his watch, he saw it was a little after eleven.

  Almost lunch time. Probably it wasn’t a good idea to tackle a rough bar on an empty stomach.

  He drove to The Wagon Wheel. June, the waitress who’d waited on him the evening before, was on duty again. She greeted him like an old friend, the way they do in small towns, and led him to a booth.

  “The apple pie is delicious, fresh baked,” she said. “Still warm from the oven.”

  He handed the menu back to her without looking at it. “I’ll have a hamburger, medium, with fries and a diet coke,” and remembered that he was on vacation. Surely you ought to pamper yourself on vacation. “Forget the coke, make that a milkshake, a chocolate one. And add cheese and bacon to the burger.”

  “That’s The Wagon Wheeler,” she said, looking pleased by the change in his order. Maybe they expected visitors to pig out.

  Maybe that counted as protection against the vegetarian piranhas. “It comes with our own special barbeque sauce.”

  98 Victor Banis

  “Heavy on the sauce. And I’ll have a piece of that apple pie, too, to follow. Ala mode. Two scoops.”

  The burger when it came was delicious and gloriously gloppy, the sauce leaving what was almost certainly going to be a permanent stain on his shirt front, and the fries were crunchy crisp and redolent of animal grease, exactly how he liked them.

  He ate with silent gusto, washing it all down with big draughts of sweet chocolate shake and occasionally dabbing with a napkin at the creamy moustache it left above his lip.

  While he ate and dabbed, he tried to think what he had learned. Which, when you got down to it, was not much. A man with a penis like a pencil who appeared to be among Donnie’s favorites, and another, middle aged, out of shape, with a Queen Anne chair. Tom might see some way to make use of this information, but for the moment, his mind was blank.

  Or, more to the point, for the moment his thoughts were focused on the apple pie, which June set in front of him with a flourish. She waited with an expectant air by the table while he took a tentative taste.