Small Town

While, on the other hand, he’d do Susan all by himself any day of the week. And he’d make love to his wife, as he did several nights a week, though not on Tuesday, not after a night of excess like this, and Wednesday was a stretch sometimes, he had to admit. But he did it, and enjoyed it as much as ever. More, really, because he was a more sexual being as a result of everything he was doing on Tuesdays.

Oh, Jesus, that felt great. Oh, here we go, all three of us at once. Oh, wow...

So his primary orientation was heterosexual, no question about it. Gay? Him?

You gotta be kidding.

“Jay? Tell Susan about your mystery.”

“Are you writing a mystery, Jay?”

“No, of course not,” he said. “I mean, Raymond Chandler pretty much did it, didn’t he?”

“Your real-life mystery,” Lowell said. “The little man who was or wasn’t there. You know, that your aunt told you about.”

“Oh, Mr. Shevlin.”

“Who’s Mr. Shevlin?”

He yawned, stretched, felt entirely at peace with the world. He was lying between them, and he put one hand on each of them, slipped a finger into Susan, curled fingers around Lowell. “If I could change one thing,” he said, “I’d make this big old thing just the tiniest bit smaller.”

“Just wait,” Susan said. “Pretty soon you’ll be wishing it was bigger. Tell me about Mr. Devlin.”

“Shevlin. He lives in the same building as my Aunt Kate, who’s my father’s kid sister. Twice married, twice divorced, and she’s the one they thought was going to be a nun, so go figure. Anyway, Shevlin’s an older man, and a couple of years ago his wife died and he bought a boat.”

“And it turns out he murdered her?”

“Jesus, no. Woman died of cancer, by the time she died everybody said it was a mercy. The mystery is that Shevlin disappeared.”

“When he bought the boat? I’m sorry, I’ll shut up.”

“Not when he bought the boat. I don’t know when exactly. A few weeks ago. My aunt’s friend, I forget her name, she knows Shevlin better than Kate does, and I think she’s got a special interest in him. What’s the expression? I think she set her cap for him.”

“I haven’t heard that in years.”

“And her name’s Helen, I just remembered. Anyway, Helen told Kate that Peter — that’s his name, Peter Shevlin — that he hadn’t been around lately. It’s a big building, there must be a hundred, hundred and fifty apartments in it, so Shevlin was just somebody Kate would nod to in the elevator, and not seeing him for a few weeks wouldn’t set off any alarms for her. But Helen had an interest, so she noticed.”

“Maybe he went to the Catskills.”

“The Jewish Alps? Peter Aloysius Shevlin?”

“He’s making up the Aloysius,” Lowell said.

“I get the point,” Susan said, “but isn’t there an Irish Alps? Or don’t you people get any farther away than Rockaway?”

“As soon as the fucking stops,” he said, “the ethnic slurs begin.”

“Or the Inland Waterway,” she said. “Maybe he took his boat all the way down the coast.”

“Except it’s still at the Seventy-ninth Street Boat Basin. Most of the time, anyway.”

“Most of the time?”

“Helen called him on the phone,” he said, “and she got the doorman to open the door and see if he was lying in a heap somewhere, but he wasn’t. And then she called his office, and all they would tell her was that Shevlin was away and they weren’t sure when he’d be back.”

“If Mr. Shevlin was off for a dirty weekend,” she said, “with the cute little widow from 12-J, I could see where Helen could be a real pain in the ass.”

“I gather she’s persistent. Next thing she did was walk over to the Boat Basin, because maybe she got the same idea about the Inland Waterway.”

“And there it was.”

“No, it was gone.”

“So where’s the mystery?”

“She went over the next day, or whenever it was, just to make sure. And it was back again.”

“So he came home.”

“Except he didn’t. Never showed up at the apartment building.”

Lowell said, “I say he’s living on the boat.”

“And not telling his office where he is? And sleeping there, when he’s got a big two-bedroom apartment half a mile away? And wearing the same clothes every day?”

“Well?” she said. “What’s the explanation?”

“Damned if I know,” he said. “That’s what makes it a mystery.”

thirty-one

She was at the gallery, going over some numbers, when she became subliminally aware of a familiar voice. And looked up, and there he was, standing with Chloe in front of one of Jeffcoate Walker’s more alarming visions and encouraging her to tell him what the painting meant to her. He had his back to her but she recognized the jeans and the deep green polo shirt, recognized the V-shaped body, tapering from broad shoulders to a tight little butt.

She felt a tingle, and a less welcome tremor of anxiety. She was supposed to go to his place tonight, and here it was two in the afternoon, and here he was, in her space. It wasn’t as though he didn’t have a right, and she’d been planning on inviting him to see her workspace and examine her stock-in-trade, but this was unexpected, and the least bit unsettling.