Shattered Glass(19)

Then there was the gay. The second part of the Austin Glass is Fucked equation. I wanted to tell Luis the truth, and while I trusted him implicitly, I was terrified. Lie or truth? To me, both options could mean the end of my career, and of our partnership. So I just sat there, suffocating from the combined heat and silence. I didn’t know when or where, or even how, to begin. I wasn’t someone who lied about important things. Cheat, yes. Lie, no. A fine line, but distinct in my mind. Instead of lies, I used off-color humor to make the truth sound ridiculous, so I didn’t have to lie. But even after wracking my brain, I still couldn’t come up with a way to do that here. Or even use humor to diffuse the situation. I was too nauseated to be funny.

“Did you compromise this case?”

Did I?

“Probably,” I admitted. “Or, at least, my involvement in it.” I could have made excuses about how I hadn’t known he was a prostitute. Or that he was involved with Alvarado. How I hadn’t sleept with him. How I was having an identity crisis, and it had all begun as something very innocent. Really.

But Luis didn’t care about those things. Luis wasn’t worried about the fact that I had traded cash for the services of a whore. Luis probably didn't care that I might be gay. No, Luis was worried that there was a person close to Alvarado who we now wouldn't be able to pressure into answering questions because I had paid him money for sex. Luis cared about this investigation, and his career. And right now he was deciding if his partner’s ass was worth covering or if he should feed me to the wolves.

“Tell me,” he said.

And so I did. I told him, as succinctly as possible, about Peter, me, and everything that had happened between us. I didn't leave anything out.

And speaking of out, apparently I now was. Some people maintained it was very freeing to take that step. I didn’t share their assessment. It did make me wonder, though. How did one go about being out when they weren’t gay?

“He knows you’re a cop?” Luis asked.

“Unless he’s blind and stupid.” I lifted my jacket to reveal the obvious badge and gun clipped to my belt.

“He solicited a cop?”

“He didn’t know then, maybe. But even if he knew, he also had to have known that there was no chance I’d actually bring him in. Not if it meant confronting questions about why a hustler was in my car after hours, soliciting sex.”

“Or maybe you’re not the first cop on the down-low to approach him,” Luis mused.

“I’m not on the down-low!”

Luis barreled on past my denial without acknowledging it. “So we go with that. A cop on the down-low to another gay. Maybe he’ll be more receptive to questions.”

“A gay? I don’t think it’s a noun.” Not that I hadn’t just used it in exactly the same context.

“You prefer homo?” His expression was so deadpan I couldn’t tell if he was serious or not.

“I’m not—”

“Nah. You’re not gay. Straight guys always chase around hustlers.”

“An aberration. And you’re taking that part very well.”

He shrugged and looked out the window. “Querida is gay.”

“Your daughter is gay? Where are all these gay people coming from? Gay friends. Gay daughters of friends. Gay sisters-in-law. Gay suspects. I ask one guy for a kiss and suddenly I’m living in Ancient Greece.” I was going to hyperventilate. Panic will do that. “Maybe that’s what happened. Maybe all these gays rubbed off on me or somethi— Ow!” I rubbed the back of my head.

Luis gripped the steering wheel so tight his knuckles blanched. “When my daughter comes to me at eighteen and says she wants to take a girl to prom, Denise tells me, ‘God gives us difficulty to prove we’re worthy of heaven.’ Things will work out if we just love Querida more. Then Querida marries this girl, and now I have a beautiful grandson. Okay, I think, Denise was right. Then my son gets arrested for stealing cars, and she tells me it’s God’s way of saying I need to be paying more attention to my children. So I spend more time with Carlos, and now he’s in college, his second year he made dean’s list. Right again.” When he became silent, I didn’t chime in; he was going somewhere with this.

“When I complain to Denise that my partner makes our nine-year-old look mature,” he continued, “she tells me ‘God has a plan’ and I need to figure it out. It turns out he’s not so bad—this kid. He’s a little dumb about some people, a little too soft about street kids, but after only six weeks as my partner, he makes himself a target so I can crawl to safety after being shot. He chases down suspects in two thousand dollar suits. Snitches trust him for some reason, and he asks a lot of questions no one else seems to ask. He’s got good instincts. I start thinking that maybe God’s plan is I make him more of a man and less of a boy. And then, one day, he can be an even better cop than me.”