Dan Sharp Mysteries 4-Book Bundle (117 page)

“Whatever the cost, Lionel and I will pay. Just let us know what it’s worth to you.”

Dan stood, marvelling again at the tendency of men to think their clothes and credit cards were anything like indicators of their true worth.

Two

Tall in the Saddle

The sun threw long shadows as Dan left the sake house and headed down the stairs. He passed a skinhead seated on the bottom step beside a mangy dog, some ersatz version of a pit bull. The kid’s boots reminded Dan of the Doc Martens of his youth, except these looked far more pricey. Make-believe punk. Someone born three decades too late trying to be the person he imagined himself to be. How do you liberate your inner anarchist? You could change your outer self, but not your internal reality. Dan dropped a loonie in his outstretched palm and walked on.

Richmond Street lay a good fifteen minutes south. For years he’d never been able to recall which of the one-way streets between King and Queen was which, until someone told him the city planner’s secret: boy-girl-boy-girl. King, Adelaide, Richmond, Queen. That cemented it for him.

He passed Massey Hall, that gloomy, neo-classical tribute to Canada’s premier family of days gone by. Back when Dan was growing up amidst Northern Ontario’s mining industry sprawl, the joke went that Canada had no social classes, just the masses and the Masseys. All that was long gone. In these days of rampant consumerism, the country’s social compact had splintered beyond any chance of reunification. Dan thought the old system highly preferable.

The Saddle — or more correctly the Saddle and Bridle, as it was christened — had opened at the outset of the first AIDS decade. Back then it catered to a generation of gay men who felt they’d found themselves at last, only to discover that in finding themselves many would lose their lives and their friends far too early and in extremely unpleasant ways. The ugliness of the disease in its early years could not be overstated, before drug cocktails and therapies commuted a death decree into a life sentence, albeit one with no foreseeable chance of pardon.

Nevertheless, the bar thrived, becoming one of Toronto’s pre-eminent dance clubs, changing hands and owners several times along the way before ending up in the clutches of one Yuri Malevski, a Macedonian immigrant who had come to Canada seeking freedom from discrimination in the Old World. Malevski happily embraced all that was forward-thinking about his adopted home, even while a fearsome virus was decimating his community in ways far more atrocious than even the worst politicians and religious fanatics had been capable of devising.

Like nearly everyone else in the gaybourhood, Dan had heard of the murdered nightclub owner. Who hadn’t? Over the years, Malevski’s reputation grew. He was praised for being a hard-working community entrepreneur, a generous AIDS-charity benefactor, even while rumours proliferated about the deteriorating physical condition of the bar as well as its notorious after-hours activities. And the band played on. Few blamed Malevski for what happened behind the scenes in his club. Drug use was rampant, and, despite the risks it entailed, sex had become a free-for-all. One pair of eyes could not be everywhere, they said. Not his place to try and stop it, they said. This was back in the days when the gay community was still reinventing itself, looking for greater acceptance from the world at large as it transformed from social pariah to business success. Who would dare to interfere?

The old millennium ended and another began. All the while, the club thrived. Malevski became a solid part of the establishment, entrenching himself in the bedrock of the community. Then the murder happened. It was a shock to many, but not to all. The real bombshell was the way his reputation got served up to public censor. It was messy, semen-splattered news of the coarsest sort: a rich pervert — who entertained hustlers, drug dealers, drag queens, and transsexuals — found murdered in his luxury home. The media feasted on it. What newspaper wouldn’t splash it across their front pages, wringing every last cent from a curiosity-starved public? Strangely, in all this, the police were unusually reticent, treating it as an everyday incident, a run-of-the-mill murder rather than the sensational headline material it was proving. That in itself, Dan thought, made it noteworthy. Why downplay the case when publicity might help catch a killer? Still, chasing illegal Cuban boyfriends and other potential murderers wasn’t his thing. Let someone else be heroic — the Dan Sharps of this world needed to be practical.

He passed a muffin shop, letting his eyes roam over the display while noting a dozen ways to flavour something he didn’t particularly want before deciding he didn’t actually need another sugar high. He pictured Donny’s fingers tapping restlessly on the counter whenever he ran out of cigarettes. If he wanted to criticize his friend’s bad habits, it wouldn’t do to have too many of his own.

Dan found the Saddle and Bridle looking as forlorn and neglected as a cast-off lover. Sheets of bare plywood covered the windows. Concert posters had been pasted over the exterior like a second skin. From outside, it appeared to be little more than an overgrown, neo-gothic pub, heavy on the brickwork. Passing by on the street, you might not even register the nature of its clientele unless you stopped to consider the giant mural of two moustachioed men seated together on a black stallion, their smiles gleaming three storeys above the parking lot. Inside told a different tale. The walls were covered with far more revealing artwork of men in various states of undress and sexual postures — nothing extraordinary for a gay bar, though Dan recalled a rumour the place contained a labyrinthine basement suitable for torture, long-term imprisonment, and the deepest, darkest acts of fetishistic carnality, all just waiting for Vlad the Impaler to return.

He skirted the building, trying first the front then the back door. Both were locked. He was about to step aside and be on his way when he heard a staccato tapping from within.

A dim recollection surfaced through the bric-a-brac of memory: himself as a twenty-something clubgoer, right before he became a dad and his social life virtually ended overnight, having just had a pass made at him by a drunk whose hands wouldn’t accept “no” for an answer. He’d been upstairs in a corral-like area, surrounded by cowboys-in-drag with their chaps and spurs and Stetsons. This particular wrangler had a lasso strapped to his belt, though he’d looked too inebriated to use it even if he wanted to.

Freeing himself from the man’s insistent pawing, Dan pushed his way through a maze of black-lit rooms and out a private exit leading to a back alley fire escape. At the bottom, he passed a trellised garden where a clutch of drag queens slinked about, cocktails in hand, before making good his escape onto the street. It was months before he returned.

Looking up now, Dan saw the fire escape, smiling to find it intact after all those years. It touched ground in the back alley where he’d ended his youthful adventure. A quick climb up a rickety set of stairs and the exit door opened at his touch.

He stepped in and looked around. There was no one about, and therefore no one to see him doing something he shouldn’t be doing. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d overstepped his bounds and trespassed in order to get a firsthand look at something that conspired to keep him out.

Inside the bar, chaos reigned: floors ripped up, ceiling tiles missing, walls in a shambles. The police had done their worst, tearing the place apart and tossing things aside in search of evidence of the nefarious intrigues that had gone on in the after hours. There was no respect for the recently deceased, it seemed.
What is a man remembered for?
Dan wondered.
The good things he does in his life, the legacy he leaves behind, or for whether he partied to excess once in a while?
Yuri Malevski had done favours for the gay community, but he’d also been the sort of man whose life harboured dark secrets. Nothing new in the annals of time, but clearly whoever had been through the bar in the days since his death had found little about him to honour.

Dan glanced around. There, behind what was once a very busy martini bar, lay the entrance to the rumoured dungeons of debauchery and sexual abandon. He tripped the latch and opened the door. Steps led down into darkness, but the lights still worked when he flipped the switch, illuminating a swath of wooden stairs descending to who knew where. He followed, wary of broken boards and slippery footing. It wouldn’t do to twist an ankle while trespassing.

At the bottom lay an overturned burlap bag with grain spilling from a tear in its side. A large rat waddled away at Dan’s approach. Cartons of empties were stacked along one wall, the wooden shelves old and dusty. The entire space was no more than twenty by twenty feet. No whips, chains, or manacles, no implements of torture anywhere in sight, just a dusty, neglected storage space. Poor Vlad.

Dan heard a series of staccato cries from above. He stuck his head through the door and looked cautiously around. Then it dawned on him: hammers and nails, saws and drills. Some sort of restoration work was being done here, probably in preparation for selling the building. In fact, the place had always been a dump whenever he’d come by as a patron over the years. As a twenty-something with a fondness for alcohol but a disdain for dancing, he’d worried over the thump-thumping of the dance floor above while he sat at the downstairs bar nursing a Scotch. It turned out it wasn’t the dancing he should have been concerned about once his drinking took on the force of a hurricane in his life, but in any case he recalled being there the night the place threatened to collapse. He’d been on his third Scotch when something plopped into his glass. He looked up as a fine dusting of plaster fell down around his ears. Many had predicted the bar would literally cave in one day, and that night it came close. Not surprisingly, it stayed closed for a month after that, probably just in time before someone met their death there. As it turned out, the death hadn’t happened on the premises after all.

As he crept forward, the cries reached a crescendo before stopping abruptly, a final cry echoing in the air. Was he too late to prevent an assault? The sound had come from the room right ahead of him.

He knelt and peered around a corner, finding himself privy to the ultimate gay voyeuristic scenario. Two hardy specimens of manhood, coveralls and T-shirts discarded on the floor but hard hats still adorning their crowns, were having a go at the old heave-ho.

Dan stared at the supple musculature being given a solid workout, barely suppressing a laugh. A decade earlier he might have asked to join them. Now, he was a middle-aged man with a teenaged son and a reputation to uphold, as boring as that might make him. Still, a little lust in the afternoon never hurt. Nice work if you could get it.

Three

Fathers and Sons

Dan drove to the Annex and pulled up the drive of an ivy-covered stone house. Kendra waved from the kitchen window.

“Come in,” she called. “I’m making
ma’amoul
!”

She set a plate of sugar-dusted cookies on the table. He looked her over, this woman from another culture who also happened to be the mother of his son. An unforeseen occurrence, the consequence of a single date brought about by a crush on her highly attractive brother. Dan seldom thought about it now, it seemed ancient history. The fact was it had happened and turned out for the best all around, though there’d never been any question of their becoming a couple in the traditional sense. Neither wanted it then and it would serve no purpose now. They simply shared in raising the child they produced.

He bit into a cookie. A flavourful wash of warm oranges and dates flooded his mouth.

“Mmm … fantastic!”

She smiled. “You always say that.”

“Only because it’s true.” He popped in the remainder and wiped the powder from his fingers.

Kendra gave him a sideways glance. “You need to talk to Ked,” she told him. “He’s thinking of turning down his acceptance to UBC because of you.”

It was always straight to business with her.

Dan sighed. “I didn’t even know he was accepted. Why doesn’t he tell me these things?”

“He probably doesn’t want to worry you.”

“Worry me about what?”

She gave him a rueful look. “He thinks you need him here. He’s afraid of abandoning you by going off to school.”

Dan shook his head. In light of their relationship, it made sense. Ked had always lived with him. They’d formed a bond against the world, making them a fully functioning unit, though perhaps it was unfair to both of them. For one thing, it kept Dan’s desire for a partner at bay with the excuse that his son needed him more, but that excuse was officially due to end when Ked went away to university.
If
he went.

Over the past few months he’d tried pushing Ked away gently, but recently he’d sensed resentment because of it. It would be hard to explain his actions to his son, especially since they were deliberate on Dan’s part.

He looked at Kendra. “What do you think?”

“I think he should go where he can get the best training, naturally. The University of British Columbia is the best for his field.” She waited. “I’ve got enough money to help him out, wherever he wants to go.”

Dan nodded. “I’ve got some, but not as much as he’ll need.”

Her jaw line was set. “Then it’s good he’s got two parents.”

Dan smiled. “I’ll say. In the meantime, what do you think I should say to him? Should I let him know you’ve told me this?”

“Don’t let him know we’ve been conspiring against him — that’s how he’ll see it, anyway. Just ask him what his plans are. He’ll tell you when he’s ready.”

She pushed the plate forward and smiled when he grabbed another cookie: men were all children under the skin. They worked best on reward and punishment.

“How’s Domingo?” she asked.

Dan’s look darkened. An old friend, a recurrence of cancer. He preferred not to dwell on it. “I don’t like it. We talk a few times a week, but it sounds like she’s resigned.”

Kendra shook her head. “I’m so sorry to hear that. It’s never good when the patient stops fighting. Did she decide to do the chemo at least?”