A Deadly Kind of Love Read online

  “Now there’s a thought,” Tom said. He took his cell phone from his pocket, started to dial a number, and saw the shake of Stanley’s head. “Can I use the phone?” he asked the bartender instead.

  The bartender set an old-fashioned princess-style phone atop the bar. Tom took it and dialed Detective Hammond’s number. When Hammond answered, Tom asked, “The house that Barry Palmer lived in. You said you had looked at the lease. Who owned the house?”

  Hammond hesitated briefly before he answered. “Hernando Vega,” he said.

  “One more question—make that two. How long had Palmer been living there, and what was the history of the house before that? Had it been renting regularly or sitting empty? Think you can find out?”

  “I already know,” Hammond said. “It had been empty for more than a year. He tried to sell it, but the market’s been down. Not the best neighborhood, not a great house. He leased it to Palmer about eight months ago. For peanuts.”

  “That explains that,” Tom said, hanging up the phone and shoving it back toward the bartender. “Probably Jeff Whiting did live there with Palmer, even though his name wasn’t on the lease. Instead of paying them the full amount in cash, Vega was paying them in cheap rent, for a house he was having trouble renting otherwise. Solved two problems for him. Took a dog of a house off the market, and guaranteed that Jeff Whiting would play games with him for reduced rates. Maybe Palmer too.”

  “Like I said, a real cheapskate.” Stanley was thoughtful for a moment. “I just thought of something else, maybe. We know that Mario was paying regular visits to Vega’s house, the cat hair tells us that, and I think we can assume it wasn’t to discuss real estate investments.”

  “You think Vega was getting serviced by Mario for a lot less than the boys here?”

  “Mario wasn’t a bad-looking sort. Not in a league with most of these guys, but to an old queen like Vega, and a real cheapskate, nothing to scoff at. Especially if, instead of a couple of hundred, you could get his pants down for forty or fifty.”

  “Or less,” Tom said. “What if Mario was an illegal, and Vega knew that? He’s got enough pull locally. He could probably convince Mario to come across for free.”

  “Not just a cheapskate,” Stanley said, “a real sleazebag.”

  “So then, let’s say Mario balks, he doesn’t lower the zipper when told to. And Vega gets pissed and offs him.”

  “Only, Vega doesn’t strike me as a man to act out of sudden rage. He’s too scheming. He’d be vengeful if he didn’t get his way, but it seems to me, he’d be more likely just to get Mario deported.”

  “Yeah, probably,” Tom agreed, disappointed. He really hadn’t liked Vega. He’d have been happy to pin a murder charge on him.

  THE CLUB was still going strong, but it was after midnight by now, the end of a long evening. They finished their drinks and went back to the Joan Crawford suite. Tom took the key card from Stanley and opened the door. “I’ll be glad to be finished with this place,” he said.

  “You know, it’s funny, but I think I will too,” Stanley said.

  “It’s all too much, isn’t it? I mean, sure, luxury, a nice setup for rich old men, probably it even works out well for some of the young guys… like Frederick said, if you’re stuck in a job slinging hamburgers….”

  “It didn’t work out for Barry Palmer or Jeff Whiting,” Stanley said. “You know, Wayne, my decorator friend, he likes to say there’s no point in lavishing money on the morally defeated, they only spend it on more defeat.”

  They had left the radio playing, and the music, something electric and jangling, greeted them as they came in.

  “Hey, great,” Stanley said, sitting to take off his shoes. “Let’s dance.”

  “Stanley, we just left the club. If you wanted to dance….”

  “I know, but here we can work on some new moves. Next time we’re there, we can show those desert boys how it’s done in the big city.”

  “You know I don’t do that kind of dancing,” Tom said. He took off his jacket and tossed it on the bed. Threw his holster with the Sig in it on top of the jacket. “Slow dancing is my style. A good old-fashioned two-step, I’m a pro. But this stuff….”

  “Well, you could do it, if you put your mind to it. You’re just thinking about your hip, but that doesn’t have to slow you down any. You have a great sense of rhythm, and Lord knows you can move your body. Come on, let me show you.”

  He turned up the volume on the radio and, tossing his shirt aside, began to dance in a frenzy, hopping from one foot to the other and waving his arms and hands to the beat. “It’s easy, it’s just a matter of letting yourself go. Try it.”

  Tom remained where he was, unmoving. “Stanley, stop dancing,” he said in a soft but firm tone of voice.

  “Oh, come on, don’t be a stick, you can do this, you just—”

  “Stanley, for crap’s sake, freeze.” Louder, firmer. Like a Marine sergeant. “Now, damn it!”

  The urgency in Tom’s voice got through to him. Puzzled, Stanley nevertheless froze in place. Tom reached out slowly with one hand and turned down the radio until the music was little more than a murmur.

  Not until then did Stanley hear what the music had concealed—a faint, almost papery rattling sound. He rolled his eyes downward. A snake, gray-green in color, had slithered out from under the bed and lay coiled no more than two feet away from his bare feet, its head raised, its tongue darting in and out as if in rhythm to the music.

  “Tom….” Stanley’s bladder threatened to let go. He had a sudden fear he would faint, would topple right over on top of the snake, its head swaying, eyes like onyx fastened on him.

  “Don’t move. Not a muscle.”

  “Oh, sure, that’s easy for you to say….”

  Tom slowly leaned toward the bed, careful not to do anything too suddenly. He seemed not to move at all, but somehow his hand found the Sig, slipped it from the holster, brought it up to his chest. He held it in both hands, sighting down the barrel, holding his breath—and fired.

  The snake leapt into the air and fell back upon the carpet, writhing and flinging its rattling tail about. Its head was gone.

  Stanley made a great jump, into Tom’s arms. “Oh, Tom, that’s… that was a rattlesnake.”

  “At a guess I’d say one of your green Mojaves. They seem to be everybody’s favorite around here, rattlesnakewise.”

  “How did it get in here?”

  “Good question.” Tom looked around the room. Voices could be heard from outside, and a few seconds later someone banged on the door. Tom threw it open to find Frederick standing outside, his expression a combination of anger and fear.

  “I heard a gunshot,” he said. “What on earth…?”

  Tom nodded toward the snake on the floor, its body still wriggling spasmodically, its rattle only a faint whisper. “We had company,” he said.

  Frederick stared for a second or two. Then he stepped into the room and closed the door after himself. Before it closed, however, Tom and Stanley had a glimpse of a quickly gathering crowd, young men and old, faces puzzled or alarmed.

  But one of them, Tom thought, knew what had just happened. He tried to read the faces, but they were gone too quickly as the door was shut.

  “This must be kept absolutely quiet,” Frederick said in an icy whisper. “If the guests thought snakes can just slither into their rooms at will, this place would be emptied in an hour.”

  “Well, pardon me,” Stanley said, indignation overcoming the fear he’d felt a moment before, “but it looks to me as if snakes can get into the rooms—and maybe people ought to know that.”

  “Snakes do not just walk into hotel rooms uninvited,” Frederick said. “Or crawl, for that matter.”

  “I can tell you for sure this one did not knock.”

  “What he’s trying to say, Stanley,” Tom said, “is that the snake didn’t get in here of its own accord.”

  “Oh.” Stanley deflated. “Are you saying… you think some
one…?”

  “Someone wanted us dead,” Tom said. “Or scared, anyway. And if we happened to die from rattlesnake bites, out here in the desert—not phony ones like Barry Palmer’s, but the real thing—would anybody think it was homicide?”

  “I certainly would,” Frederick said. “The very idea, rattlesnakes in our rooms. It would put us out of business in an instant. Oh!” His hands flew to his cheeks, his eyes wide circles. “You don’t suppose…. Is that what this whole madness is all about? Someone is trying to drive us out?”

  “Could be,” Tom said. “It’s no secret that you’re well protected locally, so if someone wanted you gone, legal maneuvers probably wouldn’t do it. But there’s bound to be people who disapprove. If they could raise enough of a stink, drive away your customers—”

  “Clients,” Frederick corrected him.

  Tom ignored the correction. “It would be one way to shut you down. We’ve been thinking of individual motives for killing those three young men, but what if they were just pawns in a bigger game? What if you, this place, were the real target?”

  “I’d never even imagined that possibility,” Frederick said.

  “Well, you’d better start imagining it. And while you’re at it, start thinking about who might want to do that.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  TOM PHONED Hammond to tell him about the snake in their room.

  “Someone thinks you’re getting too close,” Hammond said. “They think you know too much.”

  “I wish I knew what we know,” Tom said drily.

  “Maybe we know more than we realize,” Stanley said. “I think we need to take a step back, get away from it all for a bit.”

  “Why don’t we get away from this place, spend tomorrow sightseeing,” Tom said. “Maybe it will give us a new perspective.”

  Stanley was more than happy to get away from murder and murderous snakes and have Tom to himself for a bit. As time passed, he felt less and less enthusiasm for playing detective.

  “What I did for love,” he hummed to himself, already looking forward to the day ahead.

  BREAKFAST WAS early, after which they hit the road. They explored an Indian canyon, and, discovering a pristine waterfall in another canyon that they had all to themselves, cavorted nude in it until an aging couple—leftovers, clearly, from the hippie era—found them.

  “Rad,” the man said when he saw them, and in minutes they were naked, too, and splashing about. Tom and Stanley socialized for a bit, until the woman began to take rather obvious notice of Tom’s physical attributes, and the man began to cozy up to Stanley. The boys decided it was time to move on.

  Joshua Tree National Park was only a short drive away, and they were in luck. The trees did not bloom every year, but just now their spindly branches were covered with creamy white blossoms. The desert cacti were already in bloom, brilliant red and yellow flowers. The desert, grooming itself for its most colorful season.

  From there they drove through the nearby town of Twentynine Palms, which offered nothing of interest other than groups of young, buff men—in civilian garb, but easily identifiable as Marines from the local base. Tom hardly noticed them, but Stanley thought a single gay man might enjoy a brief visit, if only for the lovely scenery. Maybe he would mention it to Chris.

  It was late in the day when they returned to the Inn. They had agreed with Frederick to keep mum about the snake in their room. Apart from Hammond, they had told only Chris and sworn him to secrecy.

  “Frederick’s put out the story that you fired the gun accidentally while cleaning it,” Chris told them.

  “Makes me sound like a putz,” Tom said, “but the alternative is going to clear this place out, and we don’t want that to happen till we’ve got things sorted through. Whoever our murderer is, he’s someone in this crowd, and I’d like to keep him here.”

  Which meant, however, leaving the Sig in the room when they went to the club. “Otherwise, it’s going to spook everybody,” he said.

  “It’s really not a problem, though, is it?” Stanley said. “I mean, whoever put a snake in our room isn’t likely to dump a bunch of them in the club. Talk about pandemonium.”

  Tom settled for jeans and a body shirt with no jacket, so that everyone could see at a glance he wasn’t packing. When they first came into the club, some of the guys looked sideways at him, as if expecting another shooting. By the time they had been there half an hour, though, people seemed to have gotten over their nervousness.

  They saw Johnnie Nakamura across the room, but he only nodded in their direction, and Tom thought he caught a glimpse of Randy Patterson on the dance floor, but when he looked a second time, Patterson had disappeared.

  “I’m hungry,” Chris said. “How about dinner in the dining room?”

  “Nah, you go ahead,” Tom said. “Stanley and I found a place downtown that we liked. I think we’ll go there again.”

  THEY HAD again left the truck in the rear. They came out of the club by the back door and started along the walk to the parking lot. It was not quite seven but already dark.

  Tom debated with himself about whether to go back to the room for the Sig. Probably, he decided, he wouldn’t need it while they had dinner. It would be hard for anyone to plant a snake in a restaurant.

  They had gone no more than a few feet, however, before he realized they were not alone.

  “Uh-oh, trouble,” he said, stopping.

  Three men, Asian gangster-types in black suits, got out of a dark Mercedes and came toward them on an intersecting path. They were grinning coldly, eyeing Tom and Stanley with evident delight. Their expressions said clearly that they meant business, the kind of business they would apparently enjoy and Tom and Stanley probably would not.

  Tom took a quick look around the parking lot. No one else about.

  Three on two wasn’t the worst odds—he’d fought worse ones many times—but Stanley wasn’t a fighter. Stanley liked to say he was a devout coward, but that wasn’t true either. Being scared didn’t make you a coward. Stanley was a stand-up kind of guy, especially if his partner was in trouble. Not so long ago, he’d killed someone to save Tom. So he could be plenty ballsy. Stanley might look like a flighty queen—hell, he was a flighty queen—but he was tough, too, in a way hard to define, and that was the best compliment Tom could apply to anybody.

  But he wasn’t a fighter. Which meant Stanley was more likely to get hurt than to hurt one of them. And Stanley’s safety was always Tom’s top priority. If anybody meant to hurt Stanley, they had to get past him first.

  He briefly considered running, not to save his own skin, but to get Stanley away from here—but he doubted they could outrun these guys, who had a car with its motor running just a few feet away. Worse, if you ran and got caught, it not only made you look like a coward, but a fool as well.

  Or, if there had been time and room in which to do it, he’d have told Stanley to get into the truck, but the gangsters were between them and the truck, so that wasn’t an option either. He flicked another quick glance around. The next best thing was the empty doorway beside them.

  “Stanley, get behind me,” Tom said. “In the doorway there.”

  “I don’t think—” Stanley started to argue. Stanley liked to argue, and usually at the worst times, to Tom’s way of thinking.

  “Just do what I say. That way,” Tom said, “if these guys take me down, you can still tear them to pieces.”

  Stanley actually laughed, sounding not at all scared, and stepped behind Tom into the doorway. He knew he ought to be scared, but he had great faith in Tom’s ability to deal with this kind of situation. He had seen Tom in action before, and these guys hadn’t. Boy, were they in for a surprise.

  The gangsters separated. One of them stayed back, and the other two came forward, moving in at angles. With the doorway and the building behind Tom and Stanley, the would-be assailants had every possible escape route covered, if anyone tried to escape. Meaning they had every reason to suppose they
had Tom and Stanley trapped.

  Tom glanced for only a second at the third man, hanging back. That one hadn’t moved, which meant probably he was like some kind of supervisor, or maybe he was the instructor and he wanted to see if his pupils had learned their lessons properly. In any case, for the moment he was not a problem.

  But when Tom looked again at the other two, they had just become bigger problems than they had been the moment before. Each of them had come a step closer—and both of them had knives in their hands now. The overhead light glinted off shiny blades. Tantō, he thought. Short, thrusting knives, but they could slash and cut, too, as Nakamura had informed him.

  “Oh fuck me,” Tom muttered under his breath. He hated knife fights. Most especially he hated the ones where the other guys had knives and he didn’t.

  In his experience, defending yourself against knives involved one primary rule—don’t let them cut you. Most important of all, don’t let them cut you in the gut, but getting sliced anywhere was not a good idea. Once you started bleeding, you began to slow down and lose strength. A good street fighter with a sharp knife could keep you dancing until eventually you just fell over from the loss of blood. These guys looked like they knew how to use them. And there were two of them.

  He wished now the Sig wasn’t back in their room. Had these punks somehow known that?

  He had some good weapons, though. He was a seasoned brawler, he was strong, and he fought hard. His fists were huge and his arms were long, very long. He backed up against Stanley, shoving him back into the doorway, and put one foot up against the doorjamb behind him, next to Stanley, bracing himself with his heel for purchase.