Amanda Matetsky - Murder on a Hot Tin Roof

Now you say you love me? Now that you’ve ripped my heart out of my chest and kicked it around like a bloody football?” (Okay, so maybe that was a bit livid, but it was exactly how I felt.) I jumped out of my chair and began my own round of pacing. “Well, you can cry me a river,” I went on, feeling very dramatic, quoting the lyrics of the new Julie London song I now identified with so much. “Cry me a river. I cried a river over you.”

“Julie London,” Dan said. “I like that song a lot, too. But what does it have to do with us?”

Aaaargh!

“I saw you last night,” I said, coming to a sudden standstill and propping my hands on my hips. “In Sardi’s. You were wrapped up in the arms and lips of a beautiful redhead. And if you felt even one ounce of love for me at that particular moment, I’ll eat Hedda Hopper’s new hat!”

Dan didn’t move a muscle. He sat still as a stump in his chair, staring up at me with the eyes of a guilty, but thoroughly unrepentant, adolescent. Then he took a long, slow drink of his coffee, set the cup back down on the table, and started laughing.

It wasn’t the loud, boisterous, slap-you-on-the-back style of laughter you would hear in a bar or a locker room. It was the deep, personal, private kind… the kind that grabs you in the gut and causes intense but near silent paroxysms of glee.

“Well, I’m glad you think it’s so funny,” I said, stomping one stiletto-heeled shoe on the floor, then starting to pace again. It was either that or start crying another river.

“I’m sorry, Paige,” Dan said between spasms, “but if you knew what I was really feeling while I was-as you so eloquently put it-‘wrapped up in the arms and lips’ of that so-called ‘beautiful redhead,’ then you’d be laughing, too.”

I didn’t say a word. If Dan thought I was going to humiliate myself by asking him to explain his stupid feelings, then he had another think coming!

After what seemed like an hour but was probably no more than four seconds, Dan’s laughter subsided. He sat up straight, rubbed his face in his hands, and then gave me a dead serious look. “I was disgusted by that woman,” he declared. “She’s coarse, vulgar, demanding, ostentatious… When she was kissing me, the rancid smell and taste of whiskey was so strong I felt sick to my stomach. I went straight into the men’s room afterward and rinsed my face and mouth with cold water.”

My eyes were downcast, but my heart was soaring. He was telling the truth! I could hear it in his voice. “If she disgusted you so darn much,” I said, “why did you ask her out in the first place?”

“I didn’t,” he said. “I just met her at Sardi’s to ask her a few questions about Gray Gordon.”

“What?!” I yelped. The man was full of surprises. And I was panting for more. “How was she connected to Gray?” I begged. “How did you find out about her? Why didn’t

I know about her? Did you consider her a suspect? What’s her name?” (I’m so cool sometimes, it kills me.)

“Her name is Loretta Cuppano,” he said, “but everybody calls her Cupcake.”

Oh!

“And, no, she wasn’t a suspect,” he went on. “I just wanted to talk to her about Gray, see what I could learn about his personal life. According to Rhonda Blake, Loretta and Gray had a brief fling a couple of years ago, when they were both students at the Actors Studio, so I figured she could tell me whether or not he was a homosexual. Confirmed, or otherwise.”

“And did she?”

“She said Gray went both ways, but preferred men to women. That’s why she broke up with him. She wanted a leading, not supporting, role.”

“I take it she’s an actress.”

“And how!” he said. “She’s so showy and pretentious she couldn’t possibly be anything else. She’s appearing in

The Pajama Game now.”

That figures, I sneered to myself.

“So that’s why you met her so late at Sardi’s,” I said, thinking aloud. “You went there after the show.”

“Right.”

“Did you know that I was there?”

“Not until later.”

“Aren’t you going to ask me

why I was there?”

“Don’t have to. I already know.”

“What else do you know?”

“Plenty.”

“Do you know that I love you, too?”

“Yep.”

“Smarty-pants.”

Dan smiled, stood up, and walked over to where I was standing. “Are we okay now, Paige?” he said, putting his hands on my shoulders and piercing me to the core with his hot black gaze. “Our truce is signed? The cease-fire is in effect?”

“That’s the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” I vowed.

Then Dan took me in his arms and we sealed our agreement with a long, slow, soul-scorching kiss (openmouthed, in case you’re wondering). My knees were weak as water but my heart was going strong, leaping in unbounded delight that Dan and I had finally turned to the same page.

I NEVER FILED CHARGES AGAINST AUNT Doobie-I mean Christopher Dubin. I knew if I did, the secret of his homosexuality might come out, and I had no desire to expose him to the social persecution-or criminal prosecution-that could result from that sort of disclosure. Yes, he had assaulted me and knocked me out-but I hadn’t really been hurt all that much. No concussion; no hematoma. And, anyway, it wasn’t as if Dubin had

wanted to hurt me. He had just been trying to keep me from finding out his real name. He had been desperate to protect himself and his family from hatred and oppression. Where’s the crime in that?

Willy wanted me to keep his real name a secret, too. Although he isn’t totally closeted like Dubin-Willy’s distinctive clothes and flamboyantly girlish ways have made him a gay icon in and around the Village-he still lives in fear that he’ll lose his elderly parents’ love, his extended family’s respect, and his managerial job at Brentano’s bookstore if the truth about his sexuality comes out. So, when I wrote the story about Gray’s murder for

Daring Detective, I gave Willy a phony name. And then, when I started writing this masterpiece-i. e., the dime-store paperback novel you’re reading right now-I gave him another one. (Two aliases are better than one, I always say.)

In my story for Daring Detective I avoided the gay issue altogether. After all, it had nothing whatsoever to do with the murder. And I knew all too well what Brandon Pomeroy would do with the information if he got hold of it. He would turn it into the sex scandal of the century. He would plaster the cover of the magazine with lurid headlines like GAY LOVERBOY ACTOR SLASHED TO DEATH IN JEALOUS RAGE!, or QUEER BROADWAY STAR KILLED IN BLOODBATH OF SICK DESIRES!

And the sensational, misleading headlines would just multiply from there. All the newspapers and other crime magazines would pick up the story and run with it (I hated to think how Confidential would handle the subject!), and poor Gray Gordon would be remembered as a deranged and depraved pansy pervert instead of a nice, talented young man who’d had a brilliant acting career ahead of him.

And I couldn’t, in good conscience, allow that to happen. (Sometimes you have to withhold the truth in order to preserve it.) So I wrote the story straight-never using the words gay or homosexual, and using pseudonyms for the people whose lives would be harmed if another reporter ever learned about the sexual inclinations of Gray Gordon and company. And by omitting all homosexual references, I was able to focus all my nouns and adjectives on the true villain of the story-the envious, greedy, vain, brutal, heterosexual murderer, Barnabas (a.k.a. Binky) Kapinsky. He was, after all, the one who deserved the bad publicity.