Mystery Tribune / Issue Nº10: Summer 2019

Fiction

Sure. Anything.

A Moe Prager Story

by Reed Farrel Coleman

Christmastime 1992

Klaus was dying.

It was so easy to forget the panic of the early ‘80s and how the smug straight world called it Gay Cancer. Looking back now, there was a lot about all the 1980s worthy of forgetting. Everything from junk bonds to crack to Iran-Contra to the crappy movies made by cocaine-fueled moguls who thought Tom Cruise was the Second Coming. The center cannot hold. Greed is good. Just say no. He who dies with the most toys wins. Indeed. I’m not sure who won, but I’m pretty sure Klaus didn’t make the Final Four.

Hey, Moe, he whispered, a pair of crystal blue eyes staring up at me out of a skin-draped skull. You know what I got for Christmas last year?

No, what?

Kaposi Sarcoma.

Klaus had a twisted sense of humor. That, his love of punk music, and his sexuality had set him apart from his family. He was from Utah or Wyoming. He was never specific about it, never talked about his family. He would always just dismissively wave his left arm and say, From out there. I thought a lot about Klaus’ family in the days surrounding his death. I suspect they were like the families in Village of the Damned. Utterly confused by the alien child dropped in their midst. I sometimes wonder if Klaus didn’t wish he had superpowers like those kids with their glowing eyes. What would his superpower be?

You’re such an asshole, I said to him after his Christmas remark.

His response began as laughter, but ended in a coughing fit that I thought would kill him right then and there. I changed the subject. As if that was even possible. How does one change the subject in St. Vincent’s Hospital, once ground zero of the AIDS epidemic?

Remember Joe Scardapane, my friend from the old neighborhood?

The guy who buys the cheap Chianti from us for his pizzerias?

That’s him.

What about him?

I admired him because he was a braver man than I ever was...

He’s divorced and he’s just started dating again. I leaned in close. His last date was with a woman from Taiwan who works for a bank here in the city. So they’re at dinner and naturally they begin talking about their kids. The woman says her son is twenty-six and is already the vice president of an investment firm in London. Joe says, ‘What a coincidence. My son is twenty-six, too.’ ‘And what does your son do? the woman asks. Joe says, ‘He lives in my basement.’"

Klaus skipped the laughter and went straight to coughing. This time it got so bad, I pressed the call button for help. The nurse calmed him down and fluffed his pillows beneath him. The pillows seemed heavier in the nurse’s hands than Klaus. He was mostly just bones and decay at that point. Gone was the handsome man who understood me better than my than my wife or my daughter, certainly better than my own brother.

I admired him because he was a braver man than I ever was. Yeah, I had been on the job. So what? A gun and a badge don’t make you brave. I admired him not because of how he had succumbed to the disease with his dignity and humor intact, but because he was a free spirit. He dressed the way he wanted to, went where he wanted to, and loved who he wanted to without worrying about judgement. For all my dreams of freedom I never had enough guts or momentum to escape the conventional. In the end, I was a shopkeeper. A shopkeeper with a PI license but a shopkeeper nonetheless.

The nurse readjusted the oxygen tubes in his nostrils and warned me not to excite him again. It was only after the nurse left that I became conscious of the oxymoron of bitter pine scented ammonia, chlorine bleach, alcohol clashing with the earthy stench of human feces and decay. Hospitals were themselves monuments to contradiction.

Did you bring my tapes? Klaus asked, bringing me back into the moment.

In addition to managing our Brooklyn store, Klaus made the mixed cassette we played in the all of the wine stores owned by Aaron and me. In the stores I oversaw, the tapes were mostly punk, New Wave, British Pub Rock, British Invasion, some prog rock, one hit wonders, and the blues. In the stores Aaron oversaw, it was Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Jerry Vale, show tunes, and the Boston Pops. Although my brother and I were only six years apart in age, he would have fit right in at an I Like Ike fundraiser.

I handed Klaus the box of tapes I’d picked up from his apartment. I also handed him a small gift-wrapped box. And I bought you this for Christmas.

He tried but couldn’t tear off the wrapping without straining. I opened it for him.

A Walkman! His face lit up, but the light quickly dimmed.

And here’s a few packages of batteries. I lifted the bag and placed them on the bed stand. So play as much music as you want.

He put the Walkman down and he reached out his hand to me. I took it.

Moe, I need you to do something for me.

Sure. Anything.

Sure. Anything. Two words. Four syllables. Very easy to say, especially to a dying friend. But dangerous words. Sometimes the most dangerous words on earth.

Open the drawer. He nodded at the bed stand. There’s a photo in there.

I took the photo out of the drawer. It was an older photo with a faded reddish-brown

patina and a white border. The man in the picture was in his mid-twenties dressed in a thin-lapelled black suit, white shirt, and black bow tie. With his short blond hair parted razor sharp on the left side of his head, green eyes, freckles, thick black glasses, and awkward smile, he looked like someone out of an early ‘60s high school year book. Only this wasn’t a headshot. The man stood tall in front of paisley, Mylar wallpaper and red velvet furniture suffocated in plastic slipcovers. He held a black book in his hand I took to be a bible.

I flipped the photo over. Wayne Hopkins 1972, I said aloud. What about this guy?

Find him.

And when I find Wayne, what?

Kill him.

My first reaction was to laugh, but I could see by the expression on Klaus’ sagging death mask

that he was serious. The words Sure. Anything. went round and round in my head, clanging against the inside of my skull like a pinball freed from its rails, the paddles swatting it from side to side until it settled in my throat, leaving me stunned and mute. I had said the words. I had meant them... up to a point. I wasn’t an assassin.

Klaus had read my expression, too.

You think the only reason I came to New York was that I was gay and that my family hated what I was. His breathing was labored, his voice barely a whisper. But there was another reason.

Wayne Hopkins.

He murdered my big sister, Rebecca.

Christ, Klaus, I was a cop. I have a million connections. Why didn’t you—

Because until I got sick, it was my mission, mine alone. When I went out at night to clubs, when I DJ-ed, I was always looking for him. I half-hoped, half-expected him to walk into Bordeaux in Brooklyn or City on the Vine one day. There’s another photo in the drawer, under the card from your brother.

Rebecca?

Klaus nodded, silent tears streaming down his face.

Later that night, Katy sleeping gently beside me, I stared at the face of a dead woman under the soft glow of the bedside lamp. Klaus, it seemed, wasn’t an alien child at all. He shared the same facial features as his big sister, only on her they were softer around the edges. She wasn’t beautiful, but she wasn’t far from it. I tried hard not to think of her as she must have been at that moment, moldering in a grave, as her brother would soon be. I did not believe in happy heavenly reunions. I believed in the impermanence of rotting flesh and death as a forever proposition.

The story of Wayne and Rebecca, as told to me by Klaus, was an old one, a tried and true variation on the theme of unrequited love and anger.

The story of Wayne and Rebecca, as told to me by Klaus, was an old one, a tried and true variation on the theme of unrequited love and anger. They had known one another since kindergarten, from church, attended the same summer bible camps. He was the slightly creepy kid with a crush on the pretty, outgoing girl. She was always kind to him, but never gave him any indication that there could ever be anything more than friendship between them. That lasted until they turned sixteen.

Wayne became... aggressive about his intentions, Klaus said. My sister was a saint, Moe. She didn’t have meanness in her and found ways to put him off without hurting him. But he wouldn’t be put off. He started showing up at the house at odd hours. He would be waiting outside in the morning, offering to drive her to school. Becky would be at the movies with her girlfriends and she’d turn around and there would be Wayne. His stalking became worse and worse. It got so bad that even my father warned him off. It took a lot for him to do that.

But...

But my father confronting him seemed to make something inside Wayne snap. Didn’t surprise me. He always seemed so tightly wound that snapping would be a matter of when, not if. He stopped going to church and grew his hair out long. He began hanging out with local bikers and got into drugs. After that, he wasn’t very polite in his stalking. He’d show up with his biker friends at like three in the morning. They’d follow Becky to school. She was scared, but she believed in the goodness of people and begged my father not to get the police involved. Klaus stopped talking and laughed a laugh sadder than ten thousand clowns. If Wayne had been gay, my father would have called out the National Guard and have the preacher over to ram a cross through his fucking heart. But since he was clearly straight... The laughing stopped and soon turned in the opposite direction. Then one night in July—

Klaus was crying again and there was nothing silent about that round of tears. He was choking on his own phlegm. His immune system had been so compromised that he was suffering from pneumonia, cancer, fungal infections, and a host of other maladies that were vying madly for a chance to end him. He seemed alive only out of habit. I got him calmed down enough before the nurse came back in and threw me out.

One night in July, Becky just disappeared. They found my father’s car abandoned on the side of a state highway, miles from where she would ever be. It didn’t make any sense. She never came home, Moe, and she never will.

I had been tempted to say all the dumb optimistic things one is supposed to say. But how do you say hopeful things to someone whose only hopes are vengeance and living long enough to go into hospice care?

The rest of what Klaus had to say was what any cop would have expected to hear. They never found her body, so there was no crime to investigate. She was a missing person, probably a runaway. The cops did question Wayne and the bikers, but they all alibied each other. There were no witnesses or hard physical evidence linking Wayne to her disappearance.

How can you be sure she’s—

—dead? I slept with one of the bikers, a guy called Growl.

You and bikers, I said, a bittersweet smile on my face. Klaus’ taste for bikers had helped me break my first case as a PI back in ‘78. Did he know who you were?

Klaus shook his head.

But you told him.

I did. I threatened to tell the gang he was gay if he didn’t tell me what happened.

And?

He beat the shit out of me, but I told him he’d have to tell me what happened to Becky or kill me to keep me quiet. He told me.

Wayne had purposely run into Becky at a local strip mall and explained that he wanted to apologize for how he’d acted, that he knew he was wrong, and wanted to make amends. He asked that she just once have a meal with him. If she did, he would never bother her again.

"Growl said that Wayne told him Becky gladly followed him. He said that Wayne had been willing, anxious, really, to describe what he’d done to my sister, but Growl didn’t want to know. ‘What I don’t know, I can’t tell.’ So I’m sure he killed her, but that’s all I know. No details. I hate thinking about her that way, alone in the woods somewhere or at the bottom of a river. Wayne split about a month after Becky disappeared.

I had hoped to track Wayne down to find out where Becky’s body was before I killed him, but now that’s never going to happen. Moe, you’re my only hope. Find out what he did to her and send the information to my parents. I know my folks must be eating themselves up alive wondering about Becky. I don’t hate them. They are who they are. For all the hurt they inflicted on me, they still don’t deserve the pain of what happened to Becky. Nobody deserves that. And when you find out... kill him. Kill him!

When Klaus settled back down, he explained how he left home with a few thousand dollars in his pocket. He’d follow Wayne’s trail, hooking up with local bikers along the way.

The trail would go cold and I would have to guess where he might be headed. Then in Tulsa, I heard he’d turned back to religion and gotten involved with some crazy sect called the Church of God the Righteous.

I know them, I said. They’re the ones who’d show up outside bars and clubs offering free conversion therapy. They hand out pamphlets on the street in front of this hospital, burning people in effigy.

That’s them. ’Die fags or be saved.’ Catchy motto, huh? Even before HIV/AIDS had been given a name, they were radically anti-Gay. They were offering conversion therapy as early as 1970. AIDS was a boon to them, it gave them a platform on which to show themselves to the public. When I found out Wayne was connected the church, I figured he was headed to either San Francisco or—

—New York.

When Klaus got to New York, he thought he might infiltrate the Church of God the Righteous, but they weren’t seeking new members, especially not, as Klaus said, Jew-Yorkers. It became pretty clear to Klaus that they were more interested in spreading hate than spreading the word. Klaus had heard some real horror stories about