kicking in. “He could be in a million different places. If he thought the inquiry might implicate him in a murder, he very likely absconded back to … where is he from?”
“Cuba,” Charles supplied.
“Cuba. Hmm. Maybe not then. You don’t willingly go back to Cuba, from what I hear.” He considered. “Well, he’d go wherever Cuban expats go. Maybe there’s an enclave in Montreal, for all we know. Did he have money?”
“Not his own,” Charles said. “He was living off Yuri.”
“Maybe he killed Yuri and stole the money,” Donny suggested, looking more than a little excited by the thought.
“You should be the sleuth,” Dan told him.
“Thanks, but I’ll stick to fashion.”
Dan turned to Charles. “Give me some addresses and maybe a few phone numbers. Whatever you have.”
He copied the information in a small notebook.
“You’ll look into it?” Charles asked hopefully.
Their waiter passed by with a flirtatious smile. Charles palmed him a JP Morgan Palladium credit card. Private bank and an extremely high spending threshold, Dan noted. The waiter registered the card for a mere second before resuming his expression of unruffled winsomeness.
“I’ll ask around,” Dan said. “But I can’t promise anything.”
“Whatever the cost, Lionel and I will pay. Just let us know what it’s worth to you.”
Dan stood, marvelling again at the tendency of men to think their clothes and credit cards were anything like indicators of their true worth.
Two
Tall in the Saddle
The sun threw long shadows as Dan left the sake house and headed down the stairs. He passed a skinhead seated on the bottom step beside a mangy dog, some ersatz version of a pit bull. The kid’s boots reminded Dan of the Doc Martens of his youth, except these looked far more pricey. Make-believe punk. Someone born three decades too late trying to be the person he imagined himself to be. How do you liberate your inner anarchist? You could change your outer self, but not your internal reality. Dan dropped a loonie in his outstretched palm and walked on.
Richmond Street lay a good fifteen minutes south. For years he’d never been able to recall which of the one-way streets between King and Queen was which, until someone told him the city planner’s secret: boy-girl-boy-girl. King, Adelaide, Richmond, Queen. That cemented it for him.
He passed Massey Hall, that gloomy, neo-classical tribute to Canada’s premier family of days gone by. Back when Dan was growing up amidst Northern Ontario’s mining industry sprawl, the joke went that Canada had no social classes, just the masses and the Masseys. All that was long gone. In these days of rampant consumerism, the country’s social compact had splintered beyond any chance of reunification. Dan thought the old system highly preferable.
The Saddle — or more correctly the Saddle and Bridle, as it was christened — had opened at the outset of the first AIDS decade. Back then it catered to a generation of gay men who felt they’d found themselves at last, only to discover that in finding themselves many would lose their lives and their friends far too early and in extremely unpleasant ways. The ugliness of the disease in its early years could not be overstated, before drug cocktails and therapies commuted a death decree into a life sentence, albeit one with no foreseeable chance of pardon.
Nevertheless, the bar thrived, becoming one of Toronto’s pre-eminent dance clubs, changing hands and owners several times along the way before ending up in the clutches of one Yuri Malevski, a Macedonian immigrant who had come to Canada seeking freedom from discrimination in the Old World. Malevski happily embraced all that was forward-thinking about his adopted home, even while a fearsome virus was decimating his community in ways far more atrocious than even the worst politicians and religious fanatics had been capable of devising.
Like nearly everyone else in the gaybourhood, Dan had heard of the murdered nightclub owner. Who hadn’t? Over the years, Malevski’s reputation grew. He was praised for being a hard-working community entrepreneur, a generous AIDS-charity benefactor, even while rumours proliferated about the deteriorating physical condition of the bar as well as its notorious after-hours activities. And the band played on. Few blamed Malevski for what happened behind the scenes in his club. Drug use was rampant, and, despite the risks it entailed, sex had become a free-for-all. One pair of eyes could not be everywhere, they said. Not his place to try and stop it, they said. This was back in the days when the gay community was still reinventing itself, looking for greater acceptance from the world at large as it transformed from social pariah to business success. Who would dare to interfere?
The old millennium ended and another began. All the while, the club thrived. Malevski became a solid part of the establishment, entrenching himself in the bedrock of the community. Then the murder happened. It was a shock to many, but not to all. The real bombshell was the way his reputation got served up to public censor. It was messy, semen-splattered news of the coarsest sort: a rich pervert — who entertained hustlers, drug dealers, drag queens, and transsexuals — found murdered in his luxury home. The media feasted on it. What newspaper wouldn’t splash it across their front pages, wringing every last cent from a curiosity-starved public? Strangely, in all this, the police were unusually reticent, treating it as an everyday incident, a run-of-the-mill murder rather than the sensational headline material it was proving. That in itself, Dan thought, made it noteworthy. Why downplay the case when publicity might help catch a killer? Still, chasing illegal Cuban boyfriends and other potential murderers wasn’t his thing. Let someone else be heroic — the Dan Sharps of this world needed to be practical.
He passed a muffin shop, letting his eyes roam over the display while noting a dozen ways to flavour something he didn’t particularly want before deciding he didn’t actually need another sugar high. He pictured Donny’s fingers tapping restlessly on the counter whenever he ran out of cigarettes. If he wanted to criticize his friend’s bad habits, it wouldn’t do to have too many of his own.
Dan found the Saddle and Bridle looking as forlorn and neglected as a cast-off lover. Sheets of bare plywood covered the windows. Concert posters had been pasted over the exterior like a second skin. From outside, it appeared to be little more than an overgrown, neo-gothic pub, heavy on the brickwork. Passing by on the street, you might not even register the nature of its clientele unless you stopped to consider the giant mural of two moustachioed men seated together on a black stallion, their smiles gleaming three storeys above the parking lot. Inside told a different tale. The walls were covered with far more revealing artwork of men in various states of undress and sexual postures — nothing extraordinary for a gay bar, though Dan recalled a rumour the place contained a labyrinthine basement suitable for torture, long-term imprisonment, and the deepest, darkest acts of fetishistic carnality, all just waiting for Vlad the Impaler to return.
He skirted the building, trying first the front then the back door. Both were locked. He was about to step aside and be on his way when he heard a staccato tapping from within.
A dim recollection surfaced through the bric-a-brac of memory: himself as a twenty-something clubgoer, right before he became a dad and his social life virtually ended overnight, having just had a pass made at him by a drunk whose hands wouldn’t accept “no” for an answer. He’d been upstairs in a corral-like area, surrounded by cowboys-in-drag with their chaps and spurs and Stetsons. This particular wrangler had a lasso strapped to his belt, though he’d looked too inebriated to use it even if he
