Thriller by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing

BILLIE JEAN

NEIL S. PLAKCY

“You know that sometimes I need a woman to be by my side at events,” Alex Reyes said, his Cuban accent making the words seem gentle, as we unloaded lumber from the trunk of my lime-green Chevy Bel Air. “The rules in Miami in 1968 are not as strict as those when I was growing up in Cuba, but they exist.”

“That’s a beard,” I said, intentionally making my voice a little rougher. It wasn’t hard; I came from working class stock on Maryland’s eastern shore, about as different from his private boarding school in New Hampshire as possible.

He looked at me. “Really? Where do you hear terms like that?”

I simply looked back at him. We had met at a gay bar a few months before, though at the time he was using the location as a cover for an anti-Castro group. “Oh,” he said. “The Cockpit.”

The bar was located out near Miami airport, so the name had a dual meaning. In the afternoon, it attracted airline employees who needed a pick-me-up before heading to work, or those on quick layovers. By nine o’clock, the clientele had transitioned to gay men who put different meanings on the words “cock” and “pit.”

Alex was slim and darkly handsome, with black curls he kept tamed with a pomade that smelled like bay rum. That day he wore a plaid shirt with the Brooks Brothers hanging sheep crest on the pocket, and Levi’s blue jeans. A couple of the buttons on his shirt were undone, displaying a few dark curls of chest hair I longed to run my fingers through.

But we were not at his house in Coral Gables to play—at least not yet. He wanted to build a wooden fence around his property, primarily to protect his driveway from the prying eyes of his neighbors, and I had volunteered to help.

Earlier that morning, we had laid out where the fence would go so we knew how much lumber to buy. Alex lifted one of the fence posts and carried it up close to the stucco side wall of his house.

“You were telling me about your beard,” I said, as I followed him, with a sledgehammer we had rented from Poe’s on US 1, where we’d bought the lumber.

“It was a dinner on behalf of the Historical Society.” Alex carefully positioned the post in the dirt, and then reached for the sledgehammer.

“Probably easier if you take that expensive shirt off first,” I said.

He unbuttoned the shirt, revealing a skin-tight white sleeveless T-shirt beneath it that hugged his pecs and his flat stomach. He hung the shirt off the branch of a mango tree, and I gave him the sledgehammer.

His arm muscles rippled as he raised it over his head and slammed it into the top of the fencepost, which sunk into the loamy Miami soil.

“Her name was Billie Jean, and she came here from Atlanta, where she was a debutante, to work in the bank in my building. A young woman whose family I knew in Cuba works there too and she introduced us.

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