A Deadly Kind of Love

  Table of Contents

  Blurb

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Exclusive Excerpt

  About the Author

  By Victor J. Banis

  Visit DSP Publications

  Copyright

  A Deadly Kind of Love

  By Victor J. Banis

  A Tom and Stanley Mystery

  Nothing bad is supposed to happen in Palm Springs.

  At least that’s what San Francisco private detective Tom Danzel and his partner Stanley Korski believe. But when their friend Chris finds a dead body in his hotel room bed, Tom and Stanley drive out to help the local police investigate.

  What they discover is a rather nasty green snake and an elegant hotel that offers delicacies not usually found on a room service menu. As the body count increases, the two detectives are going to have to rely on their skills and each other if they’re going to survive this very deadly kind of love.

  Thanks to my readers, Murphy Cutler and Nowell Briscoe, and to Martha Edgmon, executive assistant to the mayor and council of the City of Palm Springs, for much valuable information.

  And a special thanks to Laura Baumbach—she will understand why.

  Chapter One

  “WHEW. THAT was quite a party!” Chris Rafferty breathed a weary sigh and leaned back against the car’s headrest, letting his eyelids drift closed. “I’m just past the next bend.”

  “Sweet.” The car leaned gently around a final curve. “Whoa, you’re staying here?” the driver, Eddie, exclaimed. “At the Winter?”

  “Umm-hmm.” Chris’s reply was heavy with threatening sleep. He was having trouble staying awake. “Is that special?”

  “Special?” Eddie whistled faintly under his breath. “Gosh, the Winter Beach Inn is like the top place to stay in Palm Springs these days. The top gay place, for sure. I don’t know, maybe the top place period.” He turned his head to look at Chris in the pale greenish glow from the dashboard. “So are you some kind of millionaire or what?”

  “Me?” Chris laughed. “Hardly. I’m a nurse. I told you earlier. Did you ever hear of a millionaire nurse?”

  “No, but I don’t know many nurses who could afford to stay here either. It’s mostly rich, older queens. Let me guess, you’ve got a sugar daddy, right?”

  Another laugh. “Not me. My best friend, Stanley Korski, he works sometimes for this big-name decorator in San Francisco, Wayne Cotter, and Wayne drops enormous bucks here whenever he comes to town. He might even own a piece of the pie. I don’t know. Anyway, when I said I was coming to Palm Springs, Stanley called Wayne, and Wayne called the Inn, and voilà. I got a room on the house.”

  “Talk about lucky.” The car slowed. “So what suite are you in? They’re all named for movie stars, right?”

  “Right. I got the Jeanette McDonald. Oh, no, wait, they switched my room. Just as I was coming out tonight, as a matter of fact. I was headed for the door and stopped to powder my nose, and I realized my toilet had backed up, and as quick as you please, they moved me lock, stock, and barrel to the Alice Faye. I didn’t even have to lift a pinkie. You can drop me here.”

  They pulled up by the massive gates—locked at this late hour. Eddie switched off the headlights. “You sure you don’t want to, uh… you know?” he said. He glanced upward. The sky was still dark but with the opalescence that foretold the morning. “We could greet the dawn, so to speak.”

  “Ah, thanks, um,” Chris mumbled the name, afraid he wouldn’t get it right. “I would, but I’m beat. I’m not as young as I used to be. Next time, okay?”

  “Sure.” Eddie sounded disappointed, but not too. “I’m kind of ragged myself, to tell the truth. You wanna have lunch tomorrow?”

  “Too early. I’m going to sleep in. Let’s say dinner. Why don’t you call me? Only, not before noon, okay?”

  “Sounds good. Hey, you know what, can we eat here? I’ve always wanted to see inside this place. This is probably the only chance I’ll ever get.”

  “Absolutely. The food’s good too.” Chris leaned across the seat to give his companion a quick peck, which turned into something a bit more prolonged. They rubbed together for a long moment, lips locked.

  “Sure you don’t want to change your mind?” Eddie asked when they came up for air.

  “Trust me, it would be a futile gesture,” Chris said. He opened his door to slide out. “Tomorrow, okay? Not too early.”

  He used his key card to let himself through the gates and took the yellow brick path about the main building. During the day the swimming pool was sometimes so crowded with bodies that you could hardly see the water, but now it was empty, a huge turquoise kidney, smelling of chlorine. The fronds of the palm trees overhead rattled like ghostly castanets. A white napkin, missed by the cleaners, blew past his feet in the desert breeze, caught on the leg of a chair, a linen tumbleweed.

  He got to the door of the Jeanette McDonald suite before he remembered he had been moved, and half staggered to the next door over. He’d had way too much to drink tonight, plus smoking a couple of joints, and what was that pill he’d taken, anyway? Not to mention he had danced until his legs actually felt shaky.

  “Getting old, Christopher,” he mumbled, letting himself into the Alice Faye suite.

  The room was dark. From his earlier brief inspection, he remembered blue ruffles and lots of frills and a parasol for a lampshade. More frills, maybe, than he wanted to face just at the moment. He didn’t bother turning on the lights. The faint glow through the curtains was enough to show his way to the bathroom door, a first stop his bladder was absolutely demanding. Always listen when your bladder demands, was his motto.

  In the harsh glare from the bathroom’s overhead light, he blinked and glowered at his disheveled appearance in the mirrors that covered all the walls—eyes bleary, hair in disarray, a big stain of some sort on the front of his shirt. Multiple appearances, he corrected himself. You could watch several of you, or maybe several of somebody else, take a leak.

  He smiled sleepily, thinking of a friend or two who would find that pleasantly kinky—but at the moment, business was more urgent than admiring, or not admiring, himself. His little playmate popped out of his trousers just in time for a noisy pee that went on and on and on. It was definitely blessed relief. He sighed and rolled his eyes heavenward. There were times he honestly believed it was better than an orgasm.

  Flushing, he avoided looking at the mirrors again. One glimpse was enough to remind him he was no longer a kid and that late-night carousing took its toll in ways it hadn’t ten years earlier. His wool-coated teeth really needed a good brushing, but he was too tired. He flipped the light off before he opened the door and went out.

  After the brightness in the bathroom, the bedroom was dark as pitch, n
othing to be seen but the pale rectangle of the window across the room, the blue-green light from the swimming pool leaking through. He felt his way in what he thought was the right direction for the bed and, bumping into it, dropped down on it with a noisy oof.

  In a minute or two, he told himself, he would get up and strip off his clothes and get under the covers like a civilized man. For the moment, though, he just wanted to lie there, catching his breath, savoring the memory of a great night on the town.

  His breathing slowed. He did not, after all, exactly feel like going to all the trouble of getting up and undressing. He thought instead he’d just snooze for a little bit. There was always time to take your pants off, wasn’t there? It wasn’t like there was somebody with him to take them off for.

  Which reminded him briefly of the young man who had dropped him off at the gate. Eddie—was that his name? Cute. Japanese, with almond skin and soft dark eyes and lips of velvet, sweet to the kiss. And horny, certainly, despite the late hour and all the entertainment. Maybe he should have…?

  Too late for that, he told himself sternly. And he didn’t think he had the energy to masturbate either. He really was getting old. He turned onto his side, let one arm flop limply across the bed—and discovered there was something in the bed with him.

  One hand went tentatively up and down. Yes, it was just what he’d thought at first, a body. As if his horny thoughts had conjured it up—a male body, lying on its back; it took only seconds of exploration to confirm the gender. A naked male body, which made the confirmation much easier than it otherwise might have been.

  Even drunk and tired as he was, he thought there was something to be said for having a warm naked body in bed with you. Pleasant to contemplate, certainly. There was just one slight problem with that scenario, however.

  This body was not warm.

  Chapter Two

  STANLEY KORSKI woke conscious of the warm body next to him in the bed. Or sort of woke, rather. He was really more asleep than awake when he answered the phone. It was nearly four in the morning, after all. He fumbled the receiver from the cradle, got it upside down at first, and reversed it.

  “Stanley?” the phone asked his ear.

  “Chris… uh, hi.” He waited for his friend Chris to say something more, explain why he was calling in the middle of the night. Beside Stanley, warm-bodied Tom Danzel stirred slightly.

  “Who is it?” Tom asked in a grumpy mumble.

  “It’s Chris,” he said in a whispered aside to Tom, then into the phone asked in a groggy voice, “So, uh, how is Palm Springs?”

  “It’s nice. Hot, though, really hot. In the daytime, anyway, but it cools down in the evening. I spent most of the day in the pool here at the hotel, very festive, and then I danced the night away. The boys down here really know how to party.”

  “That’s nice.” Another long pause.

  “What’s he want?” Tom grunted. “What time is it?”

  “Umm, Chris, honey, it’s, like—” Stanley squinted at the clock with its oversized numerals, easy to read with his contact lenses out. “—it’s like four o’clock in the morning.”

  “Three forty-eight.”

  “Is something wrong?” Tom asked, rolling onto his back and running his fingers through already tousled curls.

  “Is something wrong?” Stanley asked into the phone.

  “Yes. Stanley, there’s… there’s this guy in my room.”

  “You’re calling me at four in the morning—”

  “Three forty-nine….”

  “Three forty-nine in the morning to tell me you got lucky? Let me guess, he’s hot and he’s hard—”

  “Stiff.”

  “That’s just semantics. I don’t do semantics in the middle of the night. Sweetie—”

  “No, I mean, he’s stiff. As in, he’s dead.”

  “Dead?”

  Beside him, Tom sat up. “Huh? Who?”

  “Stanley, there’s a dead guy in my room. In my bed, to be specific.”

  “Naked?”

  A loud sigh. “Of course he’s naked, silly. Why would a man be in my bed with his clothes on?”

  “I don’t think I understand what he’s doing there naked.”

  “I don’t either.” Chris sounded as if he was about to cry.

  “But he’s there? In your bed?”

  “Yes. He’s in my bed. He’s naked.”

  “And he’s dead?”

  “As a doornail.”

  “And the police…?”

  “Are on their way. Oh, Stanley, I need you guys. Please.”

  Stanley flipped the bedside lamp on, kicked the covers aside, and sat up on the edge of the bed, the phone still to his ear.

  “What’s going on?” Tom asked. “Who’s dead? Where are you going?”

  “Get up, Tin Man, and get dressed,” Stanley said, already shimmying into his trousers. “We’re off to see the wizard.”

  Chapter Three

  ON HIS own, Stanley would most likely have flown from San Francisco to Palm Springs. The flight only took about an hour and twenty minutes on Alaska—but that, of course, was not counting all the hassle one went through at airports these days.

  And the hassle was particularly vexing for Tom. He had been caught in an explosion and a fire some time before, and the incident had left him with burn scars and, more tellingly, a metal plate in one hip—and Stanley’s nickname for him, Tin Man. Inevitably the steel set off alarms and created confusion at airports. Sometimes it took longer to get through security than it did for the flight.

  Tom preferred driving down the I-5 in his big Dodge Ram truck, supercharged, and considering that his attitude toward speed limits was pretty cavalier, and with those airport delays factored in, the travel time generally wasn’t all that much longer.

  Plus, as Stanley liked to put it, it gave them quality space together. They talked, or alternatively, since Tom wasn’t a chatty type, drove in comfortable silence. When the silence grew a bit lengthy, one or the other of them turned on the radio. Tom liked old jazz, and Stanley’s tastes ran to musicals, but heading through the middle of the state, both of those were the proverbial hen’s teeth. Stanley had better luck finding country music on a Bakersfield station. Hank Williams cried lonesome blues while the big wheels ate up the highway, Kitty Welles sang of faithless men in a twang you could have sliced with a butter knife, and Dolly Parton’s sweet soprano provided the leavening to all that rural angst.

  Hank and friends began to fade in and out as they left the Bakersfield station behind, climbing the Grapevine up and down again, and got closer to Los Angeles. Stanley fiddled with the dial some more, found some jazz for Tom on a Hollywood station: Miles Davis, Nina Simone, Bix Beiderbecke. The music somehow evoked an older Hollywood—dark smoky clubs, dry martinis, Bogart and Bacall sparring wittily and swapping great lines.

  They skirted the big city on the 210, which took them east through air already smeared with smog even in this early season. In summer’s heat it would be brown and poisonous, blown inland by the ocean breezes. Had always been so. The Chumash Indians, long before the city had sprung up, had called the Los Angeles basin “the valley of the smokes.” The coming of civilization had only aggravated the problem. Aggravated it greatly.

  Past San Bernardino—and back to the country music—the air got better, but the urban sprawl did not. Strip malls, casinos, and truck plazas had taken over here too, stood in for the old desert, but at least the sky was arrogantly blue, and between the malls and the commercial buildings you could still catch glimpses of spidery tumbleweeds nestled against bleached-out fences, brown sugar canyons in the distance, and sand that glittered so brightly in the afternoon sun it hurt the eyes to look at it for more than a second or two. The occasional scrub brush or mesquite broke the vast expanse, and in the far distance, mountains loomed purple-gray, their tops still capped with winter’s snow. It was the fifth of March, early spring.

  They made a brief pit stop at a rest area, a grassy stretc
h enjoying the welcome shade of cottonwoods and willows. Families ate lunch at picnic tables, and children played in that hyper way they did when finally freed from the confines of a car on a long road trip.

  Back on the highway, Stanley turned off the air-conditioning and put down the windows. The air blowing into the cab was warm, not too hot, and dry, with what Stanley could only think of as “that desert smell, pungent and sweet all at the same time.”

  He had read once that what distinguished the “primitive” painters, like Grandma Moses, was that they painted snow as white, when in reality it almost never was white but a reflection of its surroundings, or the sky above, a hundred different shades of gray or blue or green.

  In the same way, it seemed to him, amateur painters always painted the desert sand beige, but he saw a myriad of subtle shades that only the first-rate artists—Georgia O’Keeffe sprang instantly to mind—managed to capture.

  They passed the wind farms, acre after acre of whirligigs arranged on a hilltop in rows, turning lackadaisically in the faint breeze, looking like giant aliens from some other world.

  “I wonder what the archeologists will think when they discover these wind machines a few centuries from now,” Stanley pondered.

  “Probably think we worshipped them.”

  “I guess some people do.” Stanley reached across the seat and put his hand on Tom’s muscular thigh. Tom smiled briefly sideways at him—a smile that never failed to pierce Stanley’s heart—and put his hand over Stanley’s.

  It felt good to Tom, holding Stanley’s hand in his. Things hadn’t always gone well for them. Tom was straight, or had been when they had been thrown together on their first case. Now he was, he admitted to himself, he didn’t know exactly what.

  The rubbing of a couple of bits of flesh together didn’t explain love any more than the string a guitarist picks explains music. He loved Stanley. That was as much as he knew and as gay as he got. Otherwise, he had no interest in men. If it weren’t for Stanley, he’d be doing what he’d done all his previous life, and with impressive success—chasing women.