The Paper Mirror Read online

  “I thought the bequest was in Chester Burrows’ will,” I said.

  Glen nodded, then took several long swallows of his beer, nearly emptying it. I motioned to Bud for two more.

  “It is,” Glen said. “And Zach is none too happy about it, you can be sure. Luckily, he had no say in the matter. As the two heirs to Burrows’ fortune, he and Marv Westeen, Zach’s cousin and Chester’s other nephew, are on the Foundation’s board of directors, as am I, and it hasn’t been easy. The will actually states the bequest to the Foundation is to be ‘up to’ $1,000,000—rather odd wording, but that was Chester Burrows for you—and Zach sees that as meaning that every dollar not spent by the Foundation is fifty cents in his pocket. He couldn’t see spending good money for establishing a separate library when any number of established institutions would be happy to take the entire collection. I suspect Marv is the one who talked Chester into making the bequest in the first place. Marv convinced the old man it would mean a lot to the gay community, and it will. I’m sure there’s an incredible amount of historical material buried in there, things no one is even fully aware of yet. If the entire collection had gone to a larger institution, chances are it would have been given a lot less attention than it will have now.”

  “I gather you knew the Burrows family before all this came about?” I asked, taking a bill out of my wallet and laying it on the bar. O’Banyon nodded.

  “Not all that well, really, but I’ve handled some things for them from time to time. I actually met Chester Burrows only once. Most of my dealings with him were by phone. He was really a recluse. Zach and Marv’s mothers were his sisters, and when they died I got to know ‘the boys’ in the course of handling their mothers’ estates. Marv I like; Zach, as I may have indicated, is a real pain in the ass.”

  “He sounds like a real winner,” I said. “How does he deal with his cousin and uncle being gay?”

  O’Banyon grinned, exchanging his empty bottle for the full one Bud handed him. “Well, he doesn’t—or at least didn’t while Chester was alive—have much choice in the matter if he wanted a share of Chester’s fortune. Chester’s money had supported both Marv’s and Zach’s families, and Zach’s not stupid. He’s a closet homophobe, but always tried to cover it up while Chester was alive. He obviously hates faggots, but certainly wasn’t above sucking up to Chester every chance he got—he went so far as to name his first kid after him.

  “He and Marv aren’t exactly close, as you might imagine, but there apparently wasn’t any open hostility between them while Chester was alive. Marv’s pretty quiet, like Chester, and while Zach did his best to butter up the old man whenever he got the chance, Chester seemed more partial to Marv, though it was a little hard to tell with somebody as tightly wrapped as Chester. Marv and Zach shared equally in the will, though.”

  “How about this Evan Knight?” I asked, reaching for a fresh napkin to wipe off the bottom of my beer mug, from which the thin outer layer of ice was rapidly melting. “Where does he fit into the picture?”

  “Kind of a strange duck,” O’Banyon replied, brushing the back of an index finger across the corner of his mouth. “But I guess all writers are, in one way or another. From what I understand, he was just about the only human being Chester Burrows might have considered as being a friend. There’s about a 45-year age difference between them, so I tend to dismiss the rumors about them being romantically involved…but who knows? I have no idea how they met, but I do know Knight acted as something of a curator for the collection for many years before he published his first book.”

  “Well, he’s Jonathan’s favorite writer, I know,” I said, “and he’s really hoping to meet him.”

  “I’m sure that can be arranged,” O’Banyon said, raising his bottle to his lips.

  We talked for another ten minutes or so, then I looked at my watch. “Uh, oh,” I said. “I’d better get going.”

  O’Banyon finished his beer. “Yeah, me too. Glad we had a chance to get together.”

  “So am I,” I said. We left the bar together, stopped outside long enough to shake hands, and went our separate ways. “See you next Saturday,” I called over my shoulder in afterthought. I turned, and he waved without looking back.

  *

  The intervening week flew by, as intervening weeks tend to do, though with a definite difference between pre-Joshua and post-Joshua weekends. Saturday, in addition to our routine laundry/grocery shopping/housecleaning chores, we had to add a search for some new clothes and shoes for Joshua who, I projected from his current rate of growth, would be somewhere around eleven feet tall by the time he was eighteen. Raising a kid certainly wasn’t going to be cheap. We ended up getting him two pair of shoes—one for “good” and one for school and play—plus two new shirts, and two pairs of pants.

  And Sundays had changed, too. While pre-Joshua Sundays involved sleeping in, a quiet morning reading the paper, then brunch either by ourselves or with friends at a gay restaurant/bar, we now were more likely than not awakened shortly after dawn by a hungry Joshua, his ever-present favorite toy, Bunny, under one arm. A great deal more time was devoted to reading the comics aloud and examining all the photographs in the paper than used to be. Then Jonathan would get himself and Joshua showered and dressed and go off to the M.C.C.—Metropolitan Community Church—so Joshua could attend Sunday School as he’d always done with his parents. While they were gone, I’d finish reading the paper and take my time getting showered and dressed.

  We still went out to brunch nearly every Sunday, sometimes with friends, but very seldom to our pre-Joshua places.

  As I say, I was well aware of just how drastically my life had changed since Jonathan—and now Joshua—had come into it. I wouldn’t give it up for the world, but there were times I missed my little revolving door of tricks, partying, and generally harmless debauchery.

  *

  So, before I knew it, Saturday had rolled around again and it was the day of the opening. When Joshua heard Jonathan mention the word “library,” he wanted us to be sure we would bring him back some books. (“With big words!” he insisted. He recently had become fascinated with adding multisyllable words to his vocabulary, and the bigger the better. “Constantinople” was a favorite, though it was rather hard to fit into a conversation.) Rather than explain that while this library had lots of books with big words, not many of them would be of interest to little boys, we made a conciliatory swing through The Central during our regular Saturday chore routine to buy him a couple new books for his growing collection. His parents had given Joshua a love for books, and we definitely wanted to encourage it.

  And Joshua was, of course, even more hyper than usual over the prospect of spending the night with his buddy, Craig—who, we promised him, would read him one of his new books at bedtime.

  The party started at eight, so I drove over to the Richmans’ to pick up Craig at around five thirty. Jonathan called in a pizza order shortly after I’d left so that we’d be able to eat as soon as I returned with Craig.

  I mentioned that Craig was sixteen, and gay. His parents were amazingly supportive—especially, again, considering his dad was a high-ranking police officer—and I was flattered that they tacitly passed on to me, and trusted me with, the role of surrogate dad when it came to questions involving coping with being gay in an all-too-straight world. So when I’d pick him up for babysitting, we’d spend the ride to the apartment talking about how his life was going, gay-related issues he might be coping with at school, etc. He eventually reached the point where he felt comfortable enough (though I’ll admit I was a little edgy about it) to ask some pretty sexually based questions: verification of things he’d heard, what certain expressions meant, what was safe and what wasn’t. He wasn’t all that sexually active yet, but he was a sixteen-year-old boy with the usual raging hormones, and he was meeting other kids at school who were more than willing to experiment, even though they might not turn out to actually be gay in the long run. (When you’re sixteen, sex is sex.
) He didn’t see the necessity for using condoms, but I kept hammering away at it every time I could, and I think he finally started coming around.

  *

  The pizza had just arrived when we got to the apartment, so we ate right away, then Jonathan and I got ready. Jonathan had already given Joshua his bath and put him in his pj’s so that Craig could just put him to bed when the time came.

  We left the apartment around seven thirty and headed back to The Central. As I suspected, parking was a real problem. Having been built in the early part of the century and, as an elementary school not needing student parking, the parking lot beside the old T. R. Roosevelt Elementary building would be ample for day-to-day use, but hardly for a large gathering like this one.

  We managed to find a spot a block and a half away, and walked back to join the impressive number of people going in. A nice-looking guy, in his early thirties but walking with a gold-handled walking stick, though with no sign of a limp, was coming toward us, heading in the opposite direction.

  “‘Evening,” Jonathan said pleasantly as we approached him. His head jerked slightly as though he’d just been insulted. His lip curled into a sneer and he passed us without a word.

  Jonathan merely shrugged. “Friendly guy,” he said, not looking back.

  We turned our attention to the building just ahead of us. It did look great. I’d been watching its progress over the past couple of months, and merely sandblasting and tuck-pointing the exterior gave it a whole new look of elegance. Some consideration had been given to simply building an entire new facility, but they could not have done nearly as well as they had by going with the renovation. The old carved-stone “T. R. Roosevelt Elementary” had been removed from above the main door, replaced with a matching stone engraved “The Burrows Library.” It really was a feather in the gay community’s cap to incorporate its own archives with the prestige of the Burrows Collection.

  The bulk of the restoration had, of course, been in the building’s interior, which had been largely gutted and redone. The original wide stairway leading up from the entrance to what had been a first floor hallway sided by classrooms now led to a huge open space—a large two-story reading area in the middle, with a circular service desk in the exact center of the room, and a couple of informal smaller areas off to each side with comfortable chairs and sofas beneath open stairways leading to the second floor—flanked by rows of open stacks on either side of the main room. This space was devoted largely to the existing archives brought over from their old home off Beech. It was estimated that only a small portion of the Burrows Collection would be readily available to the general public.

  The second floor would house the more esoteric and valuable works of the archives and the Burrows Collection, and access to it would be limited and supervised to prevent theft or damage. The basement, which was off-limits during the opening because it housed the largely as-yet uncataloged manuscripts and documents, would never be open to the public. From what I’d heard, it roughly duplicated the layout of the main floor, but the large center area was where the cataloging took place. When the Burrows cataloging was completed, part of the room would be set up in individual cubicles for researchers to work privately. There were plans to start a personal history department, seeking the personal letters of gays and lesbians, so the cataloging would be largely an ongoing project even after all Burrows’ material had been cataloged.

  Two attractive young women, each in a white blouse and floor-length black skirt stood at either side of the top of the stairs checking the invitations. We showed ours to the one closest to us, who smiled and said, “Welcome to the Burrows.” Passing her, we entered the main room. Two small bars had been set up for the opening ceremonies, one at each side of the room, and a long table of hors d’oeuvres was in front of the service desk. All were doing a brisk business, and there must have been well over a hundred people already there when we arrived, with more coming in every minute. Off to one side of and slightly behind the hors d’oeuvre table was a raised platform with a lectern, apparently set up for the official opening speeches.

  I recognized probably half of the people there, if not from knowing them personally then from having seen them at various events over the years. There were several, however, that I’d never seen before—further evidence that the community was growing rapidly. Jonathan spotted Jared and Jake—they were pretty hard to miss in any crowd—near the bar to the left, and we went over to join them. I’d never seen either of them in a shirt and tie before, and they looked terrific.

  “Hi, Jonathan,” Jake said with a grin when he spotted him. He gave me a winking nod, then turned his full concentration back to Jonathan, saying, “You’re looking particularly hot tonight! Why don’t you ditch the old man, and we can go exploring the stacks together?”

  Jake had learned some time ago that Jonathan flustered easily under sex teasing, especially coming from someone as spectacularly sexy as Jake, so he did it every chance he had.

  We exchanged handshakes all around, and Jonathan, seeing Jared and Jake had full drinks, stepped to the bar to order a coke for himself and a bourbon-Seven for me.

  “Quite a crowd,” Jared observed with a slight gesture of his glass to indicate the entire room.

  I nodded. “Yeah, the cream of the crop. I imagine just about everybody who is anybody in the gay community is here, or will be before the evening’s over. Where are the Burrows heirs?”

  Jake gave a heads up nod in the direction of a large cluster of people near the other bar across from us. “They’re the two in the tuxes.”

  Jonathan, who had rejoined us, handed me my drink and said, “See? I told you!”

  “You’re right,” I said, “two hundred people, two tuxes. You wanna go home and change?”

  He reached over and grabbed my ass, giving it a quick but painful squeeze.

  “And look!” he said excitedly, indicating a tall, handsome man about 40 with salt-and-pepper hair, standing in another group not far from the Burrows heirs. “There’s Evan Knight! I recognize him from his books!” Definitely looked like an author to me. “Can we go meet him?”

  “Sure,” I said. “But let’s wait a bit. He’s obviously busy now.”

  “Well, yeah,” Jonathan said a bit impatiently, “but I’ll bet he’ll be busy all night. He’s a famous author.”

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “Let me see if I can get Glen to introduce you.”

  “Us,” Jonathan corrected. “Us. Don’t you want to meet him, too?”

  Frankly, my one previous run-in with a famous author had not been a particularly pleasant experience. But that was then and this was now, so… “Sure,” I said.

  We all made our way over to the buffet table, and were joined on the way by Tim and Phil, both looking as though they’d stepped off a magazine cover. It never ceased to amaze me how much Phil had changed from the day I first met him when he hustled me at Hughie’s. He was a diamond in the rough even then, and he’d polished up nicely. And I don’t know what there is about a large group of good-looking guys dressed to the nines that raised their sex appeal through the roof.

  I kept watching for Glen O’Banyon, but only caught fleeting glimpses of him as he moved from group to group. Our own little group, brought to full company strength by the arrival of Mario and Bob, was having a great time talking among ourselves as though we never saw each other—and I realized again that we really hadn’t been all together very often since Joshua arrived.

  “I suppose we should go mingle,” Jake said after another round of drinks. “I for one am not above mixing business with pleasure, and there are a couple people here I really should talk to.” We all agreed, and drifted off in different directions.

  “There’s Mr. O’Banyon,” Jonathan said, gesturing toward one of the bars. “And he’s with Mr. Knight!” He immediately grabbed my free hand and pulled me toward them. I needed another drink, anyway.

  “Hi, Mr. O’Banyon,” Jonathan said a little breathlessly as we reached the ba
r.

  O’Banyon grinned. “Hi, Jonathan, hi, Dick.”

  We shook hands, and he turned to Evan Knight, who was looking at Jonathan with a bemused smile that I thought had just a touch of the predator in it.

  “I don’t think you know Evan Knight,” O’Banyon continued. “Evan, this is Dick Hardesty and his partner, Jonathan…” He hesitated and I realized he might never have heard Jonathan’s last name.

  “Quinlan,” Jonathan added quickly, extending his hand. “I’m a huge fan, Mr. Knight—I’ve read every one of your books.”

  “That’s very nice of you to say, Jonathan,” Knight said, taking Jonathan’s hand. “And it’s ‘Evan,’ please.” He cocked an eyebrow and studied Jonathan’s face. “You look familiar,” he said. “Have we met?”

  I’d have thought a writer would be able to come up with a little more original line than that one.

  Jonathan shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  After another slow scan of Jonathan’s face, he reluctantly released Jonathan’s hand and extended his hand to me. “Nice to meet you, Dick.”

  I started to say something when one of the tuxedo-wearers, looking singularly unhappy, hurried over and whispered something in O’Banyon’s ear. O’Banyon’s eyebrows rose, then dropped into a frown. The tuxedo moved off quickly, toward the front steps.

  “Something wrong?” I asked.

  “I’m afraid so,” he said.

  I didn’t know whether I should ask or not, but I didn’t have to.

  “It seems we have a body in the basement,” he said.

  CHAPTER 2

  The other tuxedo came over to consult with O’Banyon and Evan Knight. I started to excuse ourselves, assuming they’d want to talk in private, but Glen held up his hand to indicate we should stay.

  “What are we going to do?” the tuxedo asked. “The police will be swarming all over the place in a few minutes. Shall we just cancel the whole evening?”

  Glen shook his head. “No, I don’t think so,” he said. “Everyone’s here; calling it off would just stir things up more than they need to be. Unless the police have some objections, let’s just go on with it as planned.” He glanced at his watch. “It’s almost time for the dedication to start, anyway. As soon as Zach gets back, we can begin.”