Www.dropdead by Richard Stevenson

Author:Richard Stevenson [Stevenson, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: gay mystery
Publisher: MLR Press
Published: 2016-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 24

I took an early train into Manhattan. I’d been up late and wasn’t my keenest. To cool off, we had taken a midnight swim off the little dock on the bay. Deb, not having brought along a bathing suit, plunged in bare-assed. Malatesta and I shyly did the same. I took note of the fact that his moist black eyes and one-time-broken nose weren’t his only appealing features.

With my Adam Tarr Jones budget at my disposal, I had called a retired NYPD cop I knew, Mike Zukowski, who did occasional security work. He agreed to drive out from Mineola and stay at the Shelter Island house for a few days, keeping an eye on Malatesta and Stoneover. I told him about the green Kia, and he said he could call a few people he still knew and they would check it out.

I dropped by to see how Fred Pine was doing at NYU Medical Center. His sister had flown up from Lakeland to try to cheer him up, as had an old boyfriend from Orlando. When I went into the room the sister and the former BF were busily exchanging gossip about mutual acquaintances, and Fred was dozing.

He woke up long enough to greet me and listen to my brief report on a certain amount of progress in finding Ken, the dire-warning purveyor. He wished me continued success. He told me he was going to have to have a kidney transplant and a donor was being sought. The sister and former BF apparently were hearing this for the first time. They sat staring at Pine wide-eyed, probably imagining some of their own innards being pried out of their bodies.

I didn’t mention the vandalism on Saturday at the KAQ office. Pine had enough on his mind. But as soon as I left the hospital I got a cab to East Eighth Street and the KAQ building. Malatesta had arranged for the landlord’s son, Sal Nunoz, to meet me at eleven, and he was out front when I arrived.

“You won’t believe this crazy shit,” he told me, as he led me up the stairs. “Whoever the mother is who did this is nobody you want to run into, minus some type of protection. Wait’ll you see.”

Temporary crude repairs had been made to the battered office door, and Nunoz undid the padlock with a key. The first thing that hit me was a wall of heat. The AC contraption in the window had been left off, and just stepping through the ragged portal into the shambles of a room made sweat break out on me in a dozen places.

Furniture had been upended and papers strewn all around. Charlie Derr’s legal pad pages were all over the place. The old desktop computers had been gone after with a hammer or steel bar. Adam Jones’s bar magazines were in messy heaps on the floor.

The worst of it was the spray-painted messages on the walls. There were the ones I had already heard about—Death to

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