P'town Murders: A Bradford Fairfax Murder Mystery Read online

  "I'm not afraid of Democrats," Arnie declared in a fervent interview. "I married one."

  Isabel was a woman of fewer words, but her 150-mph winds kept the country's attention regardless.

  It wasn't until he reached the back page of section one that Brad found a brief write-up on the Dalai Lama's upcoming lecture series in New York. To conclude his visit, the guru-in-exile had scheduled an open-air talk in Central Park the following Sunday. If Grace was so worried about him, Brad wondered, why didn't she just advise him to cancel his trip? Of course there could be any number of reasons, but it seemed the sensible solution.

  He'd just finished the article when a loud squawking burst from the back of the cabin. He looked up to see Marilyn Monroe charging through the room. It was the man in boxers, now wearing a platinum wig and false eyelashes. He teetered through the cabin on high heels, a pink boa trailing behind.

  "Help! Save me!" Marilyn cried to the room as everyone erupted in laughter.

  "Norma Jean, I am not finished with you!" the makeup artist screamed as he raced after the charging figure.

  The fugitive spied Brad sitting with his paper and suddenly turned coy. He sashayed over and ran the boa's feathery tip across Brad's cheeks.

  "Hey, big boy!" he whispered in imitation of a very-Hollywood Marilyn. "How's about a little fun later, just you and me?"

  "Norma Jean!"

  Brad suddenly found his face pressed into the man's taut midriff.

  "Please don't let them take me," Marilyn cooed in mock fright. His voice lowered and Brad thought he heard the man say, "I know who you are. I've got to talk to you about Ross Pretty."

  Before Brad could react, the irate makeup artist reached his prey. "I'm not finished with you!" he cried, grabbing the unfinished Marilyn by the biceps and pulling him out of the room.

  Marilyn gave Brad a last reluctant glance.

  "And I'm not finished with you, honey," he crowed over the crowd's approving roar. "By the way, everybody," he said, turning to the room. "I'd like to take this opportunity to invite y'all to my show at the Post Office Cabaret, starting tomorrow night!"

  Brad watched, intrigued, as Marilyn disappeared in a flurry of high heels and feathers.

  3

  Every time Bradford stepped off the Provincetown Ferry he felt as though he'd come home. He merged with the circuslike atmosphere of merrymakers, gleeful children, souvenir hawkers, roving dogs, arts-and-crafts collectors, professional escape artists, and the occasional genuine tourist swelling the crowded streets.

  Every year, for five long months from May through September, Provincetown endured a throng of visitors so mighty it stopped traffic the entire length of town. The bustle started just after sunup and lasted all night long, barely resting for a few tranquil minutes at the beginning of each day. If you were straight, homophobic, and arriving unaware from the wilds of New Jersey, you might think you'd been plunked down in Sodom. But if you were one of the chosen few, you knew you'd reached the Promised Land.

  After visiting Provincetown it was difficult, if not downright impossible, to go back whence you'd come and resign yourself to coping with 'normality' again. I never want to go home, Judy told her audience that final night in Carnegie Hall. She might have been talking about P'Town. It had an allure that got in your blood and wouldn't leave you alone.

  Residents can tell you that anyone who comes to Provincetown will return before long. Bradford was happy to be made a case in point, returning again and again to the gingerbread houses and salt air, the crowded streets and friendly cafes, the buoys and the boys.

  On his first trip he was just another twinkie lucky enough to have booked a tiny room in one of the town's myriad guesthouses. He'd lodged at Romeo's then, a nondescript but entirely functional abode where any number of boys with limited means have rested their weary heads after long nights spent carousing and indulging in P'Town's thousand-and-one distractions.

  For young Brad, simply being in P'Town had seemed more than enough reason to be thrilled, but whenever people asked where he was staying they looked genuinely distressed by his answer: Those shoes with that dress? their expressions demanded. Impossible!

  He'd just announced the name of his residence to an ebullient crowd partying in the Atlantic House one evening, when a drunken queen in casual wear sidled over and placed an arm over his shoulder. A jeweled finger strayed across Brad's chest, tracing the outline of a boyish nipple through his Banana Republic T-shirt.

  "Don't worry, sweetie," the queen cooed over the din of the bar. "We'll get you into a really..."—the finger strolled across to the other nipple—"...good house next year."

  "But I like where I'm staying," Brad replied, for he hadn't yet learned to recognize a queen out of drag. "They even have chocolate donuts for breakfast."

  He'd thought himself clever, but the horrified faces surrounding Brad told him he'd just committed social hara-kiri.

  "You know nothing!" the queen shrieked, retracting her arm and banishing him with an imperious finger to the outer circle of the bar.

  The queen transformed. Majesty and Presence towered before Bradford where moments before there'd been a dumpy sod in shorts and a shapeless golf shirt.

  The queen's nostrils flared."Style! Grace! Position! These things matter!" she screamed, as though to say he knew not what dangers lurked.

  She regarded him, eyes narrowed, as the bar shifted nervously. "But," she purred. And then again, "But!" giving the word its fullest meaning. "You're cute. And you're... young."

  The queen faltered, for young is the one thing before which all queens will allow themselves to weaken.

  "So!" She nodded slowly."Just so. We will give you another chance."

  Breaths were exhaled. The chatter resumed and people laughed again. Brad had been spared. Moreover, he'd been called upon to join the inner circle of a Queen of Some Standing—nothing to snort at for the impudent upstart that he was.

  As Brad was to learn, in every young man's passage into The Life there arrives a moment when he realizes that all is not as it appears. To the uninitiated, The Life may seem a hall of mirrors in which one can be lost forever without a knowledgeable friend or a Wise Queen to act as guide.

  Just so!

  A Wise Queen stands before one, then, disguised in shorts and a T-shirt. A Wizard stalks the glen without his wand. Alice peers into a looking glass and beholds another world entirely. And Dorothy peeks behind the curtain and sees... well!

  One must take care not to misinterpret such things. The Life can be an uncharted voyage, a bottomless bog waiting to trap the unsuspecting twink who presumes that a modicum of looks and a certain flair on the dance floor are a substitute for style, or that mere panache might be a match for true wit. The Wise Queen in the A-House had been trying to convey just such to her largely undiscerning novitiate.

  Meaning is attached to everything, she'd implied. One must learn to read into. A label queen is not simply one who knows the price of your outfit at a glance, but sees its social standing as well. True, it takes talent to see "Burberrys of London" rather than "Designer Knock-Off' sewn onto a tag inside a man's long-sleeved linen shirt, but that's only the beginning. Avrai label queen can read meaning into that shirt as well.

  Has it been donned casually so as to suggest the vie d'esprit of the well-to-do, or is it being worn avec hauteur to disguise the fact that its owner has gone bankrupt purchasing this exclusive novelty item to wear to uptown cocktail parties? Or!—Listen carefully, the Wise Queen advises, for herein lies the danger—As it being worn by a young Gangsta Rapper whose world holds its own private associations of meaning and power? The beholder must beware of confusing them! Those stunning mahogany chest muscles bulging beneath that creamy Touch-Me-There Burberrys cotton may seem to have been made just for you, but much is at stake if you risk running your hands over them uninvited. And only a real queen knows such things with unfailing instinct.

  That evening had been the beginning of Bradford's initiation into
P'Town's gay life. And now, more than a decade later, a bag slung over his shoulder, he strode down Commercial Street with something like a hometown boy's pride. Weaving in and out among the colorful crowds, he noted the passing landmarks: Cabot's Salt Water Taffy Store, Whaler's Wharf, and the Seamen's Bank. He paused outside Spiritus Pizza where the handsomest of men gathered in the evenings all summer long, talking and laughing late into the night. There was no place quite so fine as P'Town.

  It was here, Brad knew, that America had the first inkling of what it was to become when a gang of unruly pilgrims dropped anchor offshore to make the peninsula's tip their home for a month. They stayed just long enough to write the Mayflower Compact, declare their divine right to annex the New World and finally realize they were straight, and therefore didn't belong in the Gayest Place on Earth, before moving inland to nearby Plymouth and its momentous rock.

  As he walked, Brad pictured the drunken queen making her regal pronouncements that long-ago night in the A-House. It was status she'd been trying to explain. At the height of summer, Provincetown's famed homes-away-from-home were all about prestige, in the same way fraternities jockeyed to reach the top social rung on campus and drag queens schemed to have the grandest hairdo at the ball. It wasn't enough to have a gilded birdcage enwrapped in one's wig. No! One must have the bird as well! And so, in Provincetown, gay men vied with one another vigorously and openly to stay at one or another of the better houses.

  And yet! Brad knew that the real prestige came when you left the heavy traffic of the downtown strip and slipped over into P'Town's residential district. While the tourist zone beckoned endlessly with its circus of delights, the far end of town withdrew from all the bustle and clamor. Here, the crowds thinned and silence took hold of the Cape once more. It wasn't quaint or inviting. It stood aloof, like the Pilgrim Monument or Garbo, wanting only to be left alone.

  Here was where the status game got mean and tough. Here a good house could cost as much as three or four thousand a week. And it was here, less than half a mile from where the first pilgrims had landed, that Bradford Fairfax stayed whenever he came to town.

  He set his bag down outside a stately house set back from the road and framed by an opulent garden. He removed a pen-like object from his pocket and aimed it at the entrance. The tip emitted a red laser burst and the front door swung open.

  Inside, he set his bag on the tiles. With a hand clap, light flooded the hall. He stamped his foot and the door closed securely behind him. Here he'd be completely safe and as alone as he chose to be.

  While other guesthouses could boast of costly antiques, famous histories, or naked room service, and one well-nigh legendary place even had original 1930's Norman Bel Geddes furniture to its credit, Brad's house offered a combination of solitude and modernity, two surprisingly compatible companions. It came loaded with the latest in technology and security, while providing a serene seafront view from its upper deck.

  Brad climbed the stairs and entered an open space where he was momentarily blinded by a profusion of flowers. The scent of lilies filled the air. A card protruded from a basket of blooms. Sorry for your loss, it read, signed simply, "G."

  He smiled. Good old Grace. She really did have a tender side under that crusty exterior. Not that he knew what her exterior looked like—they'd never met. And under the terms of his agreement, they never would. All physical identifiers, contact details, and given names had been reduced to code words, pseudonyms, and fabricated identities. She was simply Grace and he was Agent Red. He might pass her in the street and never know.

  Intelligence agents joked that NSA stood for No Such Agency. Bradford's own agency had even less to identify it by. Apart from a phone number, his only contact was via an obscure postal address. Thus the organization's nickname: Box 77.

  Like all intelligence groups, Box 77 kept a low profile. It vigorously denied its own existence, and from time to time invented fictitious organizations rumored to operate in its place. The few colleagues he'd met jokingly referred to the organization asNeverland.

  Training had been thorough and secretive. The inductees were loaded onto a plane with blacked-out windows. Brad and the twenty-four others found it impossible to tell even which direction they'd flown. On landing, they were blindfolded and driven by truck for several hours in the dead of night before being made to walk the final half hour to their destination. All they could tell of the place was that it was tropical. Apart from the camp operators, they never saw another person or even a road going in or out.

  They met their trainers on the first day. The atmosphere was convivial, relaxed. This was going to be an adventure, Brad thought. At the very least, it promised a friendly bonding session. It was the last time he thought anything like it.

  The constant physical tests—feats of strength and endurance—were engineered to mould their bodies into finely tuned and highly responsive instruments. The psychological tests were even harsher. After the first day, a subtle and not-so-subtle eroding of egos and personalities began and continued until a number of recruits begged to be returned to their private lives.

  Diamonds were being formed from lumps of coal, flaws ruthlessly weeded out. A trainee suspected of having a weakness for cocaine was offered a stash of blow that nearly blew his mind. Anyone who broke simply disappeared and was never mentioned again. Those who remained had their confidence in themselves worn down to the point where they doubted even their own names.

  Told repeatedly they weren't good enough, that their lives and the lives of countless others could be in danger due to their ineptitude, they began to feel they'd never make the grade. The trials seemed endless, the routines exhausting. Nothing was as it appeared. The trainees were set one against another until it seemed no one could be trusted. It wasn't until the final day that the camaraderie returned and the remaining six were congratulated for being among the finest cadets ever initiated.

  Brad never learned where he'd been or where the organization's headquarters were located. He simply returned to his old life, telling his friends only that he'd been away on business.

  The extreme secrecy had seemed a clichéd holdover from the Cold War, but Brad had quickly come to understand the need for it. The agency couldn't afford to be associated with the actions of its own agents. If anything went wrong, he had no knowledge of his superiors' identities and could never betray them. Not for gain, not even to save his life.

  Brad glimpsed his reflection in the window where it was superimposed over the dunes. Few knew his true identity. Lately he'd caught himself wondering who he really was. DNA samples were taken from everyone who joined the service and kept in secret vaults until an agent died. Other than that, their voice and retinal prints were the only foolproof means of identification. Box 77 was a shadow operation, its agents ciphers.

  Brad unpacked quickly. He wanted to settle things with Ross as soon as possible, in case he was unexpectedly recalled. He hung his shirts and trousers in the bedroom closet alongside a dress jacket, the only formal wear he'd brought. In all likelihood, he wouldn't need it. He intended to have Ross's remains cremated and assumed he'd be the only one at the ceremony. Casual would suffice. Ross would've appreciated a farewell send-off in jeans and T-shirt. A party was a party, after all.

  The fridge contained the usual bottles of Dom and a handful of Brad's favorite whites, including a hedonistic little Robert Niero Condrieu. Seductive hints of marmalade layered with honeysuckle came to mind, as did that night at a Cairo hotel alongside a supple Egyptian. A quick glance showed the wine closet to be stocked with several of the better reds. A Chateau de Beaucastel looked particularly inviting. He'd have it with supper one night—alone, no doubt, as he wasn't likely to be doing much entertaining.

  He poured a gin and tonic and took it to the living area where a surprisingly cheerful Wifredo Lam hung over the chaise lounge. The dour Cuban cubist complimented a breezy Robert Motherwell above the mantel and a Dali sketch on the far side of the room. At first sight he'd mist
aken the Dali, a male nude with scandalously enlarged genitalia, for an early Tom of Finland.

  Next to the decor, his favorite feature in the house was the loft bed set under a cathedral ceiling overlooking the dunes. Twilight lent it a soft violet glow, while mornings brought forth a spectacular golden light. It was one of the most soothing and restive views he'd ever woken to.

  The marble-tiled bathroom housed a steam room and a mammoth Jacuzzi to complete the set. Plush towels and fine toiletry articles lined the inset shelves. Guesthouses could get more costly, he knew, but not more comfortably luxurious.

  Brad finished his drink and sauntered down to the turnoff where Interstate 6 met 6A. He looked back once at the house perched on a rise, surrounded by beech trees and backlit by the fading daylight.

  He crossed the highway and leapt over the guardrail, heading across the salt marsh. Sand dunes rose in squat mounds that shifted year by year as the wind and water pushed them about like restless crabs dragging their shells along the beach.

  He climbed a ridge and the ocean came suddenly into view. Once the sun went down, there would be nothing here but starlight glinting off the licorice-colored water. The air was cooling as he stood looking over the beach where a handful of men tarried in search of love and other narcotics. He could almost taste the air. When he breathed in, it filled his lungs completely rather than simply occupying the space inside him.

  He continued toward the lighthouse sitting solitary at the Cape's outer tip. Here the point of sand curled briefly back toward the mainland, as if at the last moment it had doubted the wisdom of getting too far from solid ground just before it ran out of steam.Pentimento the Italians called it, when an artist regretted his efforts and began to paint over the mistakes of the past, concealing but not erasing his work. Never erasing. So too with love, thought Brad. You can bury it deep inside, but it never really goes away.

  The sun had long since disappeared by the time he reached the breakwater, a mile-long rock extension connecting the peninsula's tip to the western edge of town. Crossing was dangerous in the dark, he knew, but it would be faster than going the long way over the marsh where the incoming water had already reclaimed much of the land.