Missing You(104)

“He could have divorced my mother, for one thing.”

“He suggested it.”

That surprised her. “What?”

“For her sake, really. But your mother didn’t want it.”

“Wait, are you saying my mother knew about you?”

Parker looked down at the floor. “I don’t know. What happens with something like this, with a huge secret you can’t let anyone know, everyone starts living the lie. He deceived you, sure, but you also didn’t want to see. It corrupts everyone.”

“Yet he asked her for a divorce?”

“No. Like I said, he suggested it. For her sake. But you know your neighborhood. Where would your mother go from there? And where would he go? It wasn’t as though he could leave her and let the world know about us. Today, it’s better than it was twenty years ago, but even now, could you imagine it?”

She couldn’t.

“How long were you two”—she still couldn’t believe it—“together?”

“Fourteen years.”

Another jolt. She had been a child when it started. “Fourteen years?”

“Yes.”

“And you two were able to keep it secret all that time?”

Something dark crossed his face. “We tried. Your father had a place on Central Park West. We would meet up there.”

Kat’s head started to swim. “On Sixty-Seventh Street?”

“Yes.”

Her eyes closed. Her apartment now. The betrayal just grew and grew, and yet should it be worse because it was a man? No. Kat had prided herself on being more open-minded, right? When she assumed her father had a mistress, she had been upset but understanding.

Why should it be worse now?

“Then I got a place in Red Hook,” Parker said. “We’d go there. We traveled together a lot. You probably remember. He’d pretend to be away with friends or on some kind of bender.”

“And you cross-dressed?”

“Yes. I think it was easier for him. Being with, in some ways, a woman. Freaky in his world was still better than being a faggot, you know what I’m saying?”

Kat didn’t respond.

“And I was in drag when we first met. He busted a club I was working in. Beat me up. Such rage. Called me an abomination. I remember there were tears in his eyes even as he was hitting me with his fists. When you see a man with such rage, it is almost like he’s beating himself up, do you know what I mean?”

Again Kat didn’t respond.

“Anyway, he visited me in the hospital. At first, he said it was just to make sure I didn’t talk, you know, like he was still threatening me. But we both knew. It didn’t happen fast. But he lived in such pain. I mean, it came off him in waves. I know you probably want to hate him right now.”

“I don’t hate him,” Kat said in a voice that she barely recognized as her own. “I feel sorry for him.”

“People are always talking about fighting for gay rights and acceptance. But that isn’t really what a lot of us are after. It’s the freedom to be authentic. It’s living honestly. It is so hard to live a life where you can’t be what you are. Your father lived under that horrible cloud for his entire life. He feared being exposed more than anything, and yet he couldn’t let me go. He lived a lie and he lived in terror that someone would find out about that lie.”

Kat saw it now. “But someone did find out, didn’t they?”

Sugar—suddenly, Kat was seeing him as Sugar, not Anthony Parker—nodded.

It was obvious now, wasn’t it? Tessie knew about it. People had seen them together. To the neighbors, it meant her father had a thing for black prostitutes. But to someone savvier, someone who could use the information for his own good, it would mean something different.

It would mean an “understanding.”

“A lowlife thug named Cozone gave me your address,” Kat said. “He found out about the two of you, didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“A month or two before your father’s murder.”

Kat sat up, pushing aside the fact that she was the daughter, taking on the cop role. “So my father was onto Cozone. He was getting close. Cozone probably sent men to follow him. Dig up dirt, if they could. Something he could leverage to stop the investigation.”

Sugar didn’t nod. He didn’t have to. Kat looked at him.

“Sugar?”

Sugar’s eyes slowly came up and met Kat’s.

“Who killed my father?”

? ? ?

“Number Six is on the run,” Reynaldo said.

Titus squeezed the phone. Something inside of him exploded. “How the hell . . . ?” He stopped himself and closed his eyes.

Composure. Patience. When Titus lost those, he lost everything. He fought back the anger and in as calm a voice as he could muster, he asked, “Where is she now?”

“She ran north behind the barn. The three of us are trying to find her.”

North, Titus thought. Okay, good. North was straight into miles and miles of forest. In her current condition, she couldn’t last out there. They had never had anyone successfully run from them for more than a minute or two, but one of the beauties of the farm was the remoteness and security. To the north, it was all forest. Go south from the farmhouse and you still had almost a mile before you reached the main road. The entrance was fenced, as was the land east and west.