Small Town

He said, “Oh, I’m glad you’re in. There’s something that’s driving me crazy, and I really need to talk to you about it.”

“So talk.”

“Could I come over? Or meet you someplace?”

“Well...”

“I’m probably being paranoid, but I’d rather not do this over the phone.”

“I’ve got somebody coming at six-thirty,” she said, “but if you come over now we’ll have time. I’ll even fix you a sandwich, because I’m planning to have one myself.”

The conventional wisdom in AA was that one ought to choose a sponsor of one’s own sex, to keep sexual tension from undermining the relationship. That was fine for straights, but it wasn’t that simple in gay AA, where the term pigeon-fucker had been coined to label sponsors who took sexual advantage of sponsees. (He’d heard the term at his first meeting, and thought it was some kinky practice he’d somehow missed out on.) Most gay men did in fact have gay male sponsors, and it worked out most of the time, but, when his first sponsor had looked him dead in the eye and said, “Jer, I think I’m going to have to resign as your sponsor, because I’m starting to have feelings that get in the way,” he’d decided his next sponsor wouldn’t ever have to face that problem.

Lois Appling was a forty-something lesbian, a professional photographer and a serious amateur bodybuilder, who shared a loft on Greenwich Street with a woman named Jacqui. They’d both been sober a dozen years, and had been together for ten of those years, and sometimes he found himself wondering whether they’d reached that stage of Sapphic intimacy called Lesbian Bed Death, where you feel closer together than ever but, for some unfathomable reason, never have sex anymore. It was, he’d decided, none of his business, but he couldn’t keep from wondering.

He’d called from a pay phone at Fourth and Charles, and Lois and Jacqui’s loft was on Greenwich Street between Tenth and Christopher, so he would ordinarily have walked west on either Charles or Tenth. But that would have meant walking past either the front or the rear of the Sixth Precinct station house, which would ordinarily not have been something to think twice about, or even once, but not today, thanks all the same. And he didn’t want to walk over to Christopher, which was a little bit out of his way, because at this hour on this nice a day it would be a little bit cruisier than he could stand. So he walked a block back to Perry Street, which added a full two blocks to the trip. He asked himself if he was being neurotic, and decided that he was, and so what?

“I went to two meetings today,” he said, “and I wound up deciding I didn’t want to share this at a meeting. But I have to talk about it, and I need advice, or at the very least a sounding board, because I don’t know what I should do.”

“If you’re thinking of selling your story to the National Enquirer,” she said, “I’d advise against it.”

“My story?”

“ ‘I Cleaned Up after the Charles Street Strangler.’ ”

“Oh, please. You’re going to think I’m an idiot.”

“What I think of you,” she said, “is none of your business.”

“I feel better already. Oh, this is stupid. What it is, there’s something I forgot to tell the police.”

“ ‘I love you, Officer.’ ”

“Ha! No, I don’t think so. Lois, there was something I saw that maybe was a clue, and I didn’t say anything.”

“Why?”

“Because I forgot. Because I was flustered, and I already felt like such an idiot, and they clearly thought I was hopeless, and it slipped my mind.”

“If it was a clue,” she said, “maybe they stumbled on it themselves, without Lord Peter’s invaluable assistance.”

“Lord Peter?”

“Lord Peter Wimsey, the talented amateur, without whom Scotland Yard would be powerless in the fight against crime. Don’t you read books? Never mind, sweetie. Maybe they worked it out on their own.”

“They couldn’t have,” he said, “because it wasn’t something that was there. It was something that wasn’t there.”

“Huh?”

“A little turquoise rabbit,” he said, “about so big, and it was one of three fetishes she had, and they were always together, grouped around the little dish of cornmeal, and when I got there the place was a mess, the bison and the bear were lying on their sides and the cornmeal was spilled, and—”

“Whoa,” she said. “Cornmeal?”

“Yellow cornmeal, like you’d make cornbread with, in a little china saucer. Oh, why the cornmeal? That was for them to eat.”

“For...”

“The three of them, the bison and the bear and the rabbit.”

“Was she some kind of a flake?”

“It’s traditional,” he explained. “You’re supposed to put out food for them.”

“Like milk and cookies for Santa?”

“I suppose so. Anyway, the rabbit was missing, and since they never would have known it was there in the first place—”

“I get it. Maybe the killer took it.”

“That’s what I was thinking.”

“As a souvenir. Instead of cutting off an ear or a clitoris, like any halfway normal person would do—”

“Jesus!”

“When you thought of it,” she said, “how come you didn’t call them?”

“Because I’m a cowardly custard.”