And There He Kept Her (Ben Packard #1)(53)

Inside Gary’s house a plug-in sandalwood air freshener and the smoke from an endless chain of cigarettes were trying to hustle the last breathable air out the door. Packard thought he felt his chest tighten when he took a breath. He cleared his throat to suppress a cough. He looked around at the dark paneled walls and the sun-faded photos hanging in frames. There was a turquoise couch and a matching armchair, both old and worn shiny, all the arms covered in antimacassars. The carpet was knotted shag nearly worn to the webbing in spots. It was as if Gary’s elderly mother hadn’t died, just taken off to Sarasota or Scottsdale for the winter. It looked like she was due back any minute.

“It’s all Mom’s stuff,” Gary said, reading Packard’s mind. “Just the way she left it. I can’t bear to change a thing or throw any of it out.”

“If you like it, then why change it?” Packard said.

“Oh, I don’t like it or dislike it. Most of the time, I don’t even see it,” Gary said.

The only signs that Gary’s house wasn’t a time machine back to 1983 were the flat-screen TV set atop a credenza in the living room and a small desk pushed against a wall in the dining room with an LCD monitor on top. A computer tower hummed on the floor next to it.

“Can I get you something to drink? Scotch? Beer? Iced tea?”

“No, nothing. Thanks,” Packard said. Then he took a breath and felt how dry and scratchy his throat was already from cigarette smoke. “Actually, water would be good.”

Gary went to the kitchen and came back with a water glass covered in gold dots that either had belonged to his mother or came from the thrift store with the 49ers sweatshirt.

Gary picked up a half-empty Grain Belt bottle next to the computer screen and took a big drink. “Well, make yourself comfortable. I need to print out a few documents and then we can get started.” He took a seat at the computer and put on a pair of plastic reading glasses on a string that split at the bridge and came back together, held by magnets.

“I saw you on the news tonight,” Gary said as he pecked away at the keyboard.

“Yeah. We got a couple of missing kids we’re trying to find.”

“You mentioned that last time you were here. They run away?”

“That’s one theory.”

“They’ve been gone for days. I’d hate to think what the other theories might be.”

Packard said nothing. He drank the tap water. His equipment belt creaked as he looked at the photos on the wall. Photos of Gary and his mother through the years, family reunions, birthday cakes, national monuments, holidays. He stopped at one framed photo of a shirtless young man in a small red swimming suit leaning over what looked like the railing of a large boat. He was smiling down at someone below holding the camera. His hair was wet and pushed back from his forehead. The photo was old and fading to greens and blues, but Packard was still able to make out the thumbprint birthmark on the man’s cheek.

“Is this you in this photo?” he asked.

Gary turned in his direction and looked over the top of his readers to see what Packard was looking at. “On the boat? Honey, yes. Can you believe it?”

Packard could not.

“When was this? How old were you?”

“Twenty, twenty-one maybe. I was on the yacht of a very famous fashion designer off the coast of Majorca. A week after that photo was taken his wife rammed the boat with a skiff and tried to shoot him with a flare gun.”

“Why did the wife try to shoot her husband with a flare gun?”

“I guess she saw one too many photos of us together at Studio 54 and fashion parties in the tabloids. She was humiliated. It was the late seventies, early eighties. Famous people were discreetly homosexual back then. He wasn’t being discreet enough for her liking. Two deckhands subdued her and put out the fire. He gave me a thousand dollars in cash and a brick of the finest Colombian cocaine to get rid of before the policia showed up. That was the last time I saw him.”

“Your relationship was…what?”

“It was a business relationship. He was incredibly generous in exchange for my company, if you know what I mean.”

Packard drank his water, remembering what Gary had said when Packard threatened to lock him and Cora in the same cell. She could hold my yarn while I scandalized her with stories from my wild youth when I worked in the skin trade.

“Prostitution,” Packard said. He looked at the photo again. It was Gary, no question. He noticed for the first time the bulge in the swimsuit. He felt his face turning red.

“I plead the fifth,” Gary said. Then in a loud stage whisper: “But yes, prostitution.”

A laser printer by Gary’s feet extruded several pages. Packard took a seat at the round dining table with straight-backed vinyl chairs in a floral jungle print. Gary handed him a pen and the papers.

Packard rushed to fill everything out. His eyes burned from the cigarette smoke. He had a thousand questions he wanted to ask Gary about being a male escort in the 1970s but he bit his tongue. He’d be there all night. Then what would Cora say?

When he was done, Gary filled out some of the sections himself, then took Packard’s credit card and entered it into the billing software on his computer. “How many more days till you pick up your dog?”

“Give me five more days. In five days we’ll have found those kids or we’ll be out of places to look.”