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  “What would happen to us?”

  “The courts are unlikely to do anything that would remotely resemble looking positively on a young gay teen couple. You would most likely be sent to different foster homes, where they might or might not be amenable to you seeing each other.”

  “We won’t put up with that.”

  “Which part, the fact that you’re underage, being involved in the court system, or the possible hostility from foster home personnel?”

  Max glowered.

  Abdel said, “Aren’t there gay couples who have foster kids?”

  “On television. I’m not sure about around here.”

  Abdel said, “Maybe we’ll have to run away. I’ve got enough money to start us out.”

  “How much?”

  “Four hundred bucks.”

  I said, “I’m afraid that wouldn’t last long.”

  “Are you going to help us or not?” Max asked.

  “You came to me. I’m not going to say things simply to please you. I cannot change the reality you’re going to have to deal with. There are a multitude of things to consider and not just for today and next week. You’ve got to think about college and beyond.”

  Max looked at Abdel. “I don’t care what happens to me as long as I’m with Abdel.” Their arms went around each other and they hugged.

  Abdel said, “I’ll never leave you.”

  Max murmured, “I love you.”

  No question in my mind, they were in love in that teenage way that is so passionately intense. I’d been there. Heady stuff when not a little nauseating. I doubted if they were ready to listen to anything but their own passion. Emma Bovary, move over.

  At least neither of them indicated any thoughts of suicide, a problem endemic to gay teens. A problem we saw too often at the clinic.

  We talked for nearly an hour. At the end they decided to do some more thinking, and after several more pleas for my complete silence, I walked them to the door. In the clinic they had their arms around each other. At the door they un-clinched, thanked me, and left.

  I thought their fears of their families’ reactions were likely very well founded. Both sets of parents could look at their age, combine that with fears for their future, add fundamentalist blindness about gay people, and come up with a lot of pain and agony for their kids and themselves.

  Those considerations left aside the normal strains in any teen relationship. Straight or gay, how often did such bonds last beyond high school? I didn’t have a lot of hope for their future as a couple. Still, I would help them as best I could.

  I returned to my office. Max was right. The reek was stronger than usual today. The window had enough coats of paint around the edge to keep it from opening with anything less than a nuclear device. I propped open the back door to get the warm breeze in the hall and left the office door ajar to catch any chance whiffs of freshness from the corridor.

  I decided to try wading through the blizzard of papers and do some filing. I reached for a stack. Shuffling through them, I realized they were case histories from several years ago. I thought I had put these away myself the last time I was in. I fumed about people who used files but didn’t put them back while I carried them back over to the file cabinet.

  I opened the top drawer. A severed head grinned horribly up at me.

  2

  I slammed the drawer shut and backed away. I stumbled over several heaps of useless junk as I staggered into the hall. I’d been in the Marines and seen a lot of grim things. But a decapitated head where you don’t expect one, no matter how hardened you are, would give anyone pause. I paused.

  I spent some time breathing deeply. For a few seconds I thought maybe it was just a mask and some special effects, a sick joke done by somebody who knew I came in early. There were several theater majors who volunteered in the office.

  The picture of the head flashed in my mind. It was no fake. I sat on a stack of papers and put my head between my knees. I waited for the feeling of nausea to pass.

  I realized that I recognized the face. It was Charley Fitch, the clinic’s executive director. His nickname was Snarly Bitch. He was a jerk of the first order, first place in the Rude Olympics for years. The nickname was almost inevitable, but nobody had ever called him that to his face that I knew of. Now nobody would have to worry about him being rude to them again.

  Snarly had founded the clinic, donated the majority of its money, and was the major mover and shaker in fundraising for the rest. The board of directors never went against his wishes. Snarly was notoriously friendly to possible donors and almost pathologically cruel to anyone else—all the meanness of Boys in the Band and not a smidgen of redeeming humor. It was almost impossible for him to keep volunteers. His verbal abuse made George and Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? look like saints. Asking him the simplest question could set him off on vast tirades. His management style included heavy doses of status consciousness and nasty bitchiness. Why being snotty and rude isn’t a class A felony, I have no idea. The slightest break in his routine could cause explosions of volcanic proportion. But get rid of him and the money would go too and so would the clinic.

  While working there, I thought about him barely at all. Avoiding him was reasonably simple. If he was rude to me, I wasn’t much interested. He made little difference to my happiness.

  I had some fame connected with my lover, Scott Carpenter, the openly gay baseball player. Nobody said it out loud, but I’m sure people at the clinic hoped that large donations might gush in around me. I often thought they’d rather have our money and not have me hanging around. Sometimes I got the notion that many of the paid staffers were jealous about my connection to fame, or worried somehow that my being Scott’s lover might diminish them somehow.

  I got along better with the kids than many staffers, but not as well as some. Snarly Bitch wasn’t the only problem. I learned firsthand what Lee and the kids had told me about the clinic. Many of the people on the staff were dedicated to infighting, territoriality, creating bureaucracy, undercutting each other, and hating the boss.

  Snarly Bitch might not have thought it would be politically or financially expedient to keep me out completely. He certainly did think it was politically safe to keep me in the back.

  Mostly what I did was help file, stuff envelopes, talk to a few kids, and listen to the staff complain. They were masters at this. As a union rep at my high school, I’d heard people complain ad nauseam, but these people had turned bitching into a high art. No problem was too small or too petty that it couldn’t be magnified out of all proportion. And Snarly Bitch was always in the background, willing to throw gasoline on smoldering embers.

  After the nausea passed, I stood up and took several more deep breaths. Before dialing 911, I called my lawyer, Todd Bristol.

  His first reaction to my news was, “A what?”

  “A head. In a filing cabinet drawer.”

  “Where’s the rest of the body?”

  “I didn’t look.”

  “Maybe it was just misfiled.”

  “You can joke at a time like this?”

  “Only you, Tom. You’re my only client who has corpses plopping into his path.”

  “This one didn’t plop, and I don’t have the whole corpse. Just the head.”

  “It’s around. You’re a corpse magnet. I’m not sure I want to be in the same time zone as you.”

  “A social critic is not what I need at this moment.”

  “I suppose not. Don’t touch anything else. Call the police. Wait for me. Don’t find any more body parts.”

  “I’ll do my best to refrain.”

  I’d been told an old cop story once. I’m not sure I believed it when I was told it. A young detective was working his first homicide. He, an older detective, and a number of other cops were looking for a corpse in an alley in Chicago. The older detective lifted up a garbage can lid, pulled out a head, held it up, and called to his lieutenant, “Is this the guy?” The lieutenant replied
, “No, he was shorter.” Sitting in the reception area of the clinic at that moment, I doubted the story more than ever, but I smiled for a second. Didn’t mean it wasn’t a funny story. Finding my first severed head wasn’t turning out to be a knee-slapping laugh riot. With any luck it would be the last severed head I would ever find, tall or short.

  I decided not to call Scott. He was on a road trip to the West Coast with the team and would still be asleep. I waited for the police in the bright sunshine outside the front door on Monclair Avenue. I found myself pacing and trying to get the image of what I’d seen out of my mind. Nothing seemed to do much good.

  I didn’t bother to call any other members of the clinic staff. To do so, I would have had to touch more things to find their numbers. When Todd told me not to touch anything else, I fully intended to comply with that directive. Not for me the madness of picking up the weapon and leaving my fingerprints behind, or being caught holding it in my hand. Or, more likely, screwing up any residual evidence of the identity of the killer.

  I thought about Max and Abdel’s presence. The police would ask if I’d seen anyone else around. The two teenagers qualified. If I told, they would be questioned. If they were questioned, their parents would find out they’d been to the clinic. Full parental interrogations would follow. They’d lose the control they so desperately wanted. They had no reason to know the executive director of the clinic. They had no motive I could think of to kill him. Dismembering someone and then stopping in for a chat with me didn’t make sense, even for teenagers. They were tense and nervous, but they were concerned with love and truth and beauty, not killing.

  I wondered if someone had put the head in my room as a message to me. It could also have been a message for one of the others who used that room. I thought of several possible messages: never file anything again, never give in to the impulse to clean again. Certainly it wouldn’t take a severed head to get me to listen to either one of those messages. For a much less violent threat, I’d be willing to give up cleaning forever. Now, if they wanted to take away my access to chocolate, I might put up a fight.

  It took only a few minutes for a couple of beat cops to show up. One stayed with me while the other followed my directions to the back. A crime lab van pulled up, followed five minutes later by two detectives, Lynn Stafford and Jason Abernathy.

  They found a left foot in a cabinet in my office. Throughout the clinic’s main building they discovered body parts stashed in trash cans, file drawers, and other seemingly random receptacles. They found the site of the decapitation and dismemberment in the basement.

  Todd showed up while the detectives were still examining the interior of the building. “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “I’ve been better.”

  “Can I get you something?”

  I shook my head.

  The detectives brought Todd and me to the executive director’s office. Geographically the clinic stretched along the west side of the street for five city lots. The first three buildings in from the corner were formerly substantial homes, now all interconnected. The last two lots had been covered by a two-story office building long since past its prime. The entrance I had used in the back was in the oldest building nearest the cross street, Addison. This part of the building was nearest the stairs to the basement. They had found body parts in this first building. The director’s office was in this same first building.

  There was no crap crammed compulsively in Snarly’s office, the surfaces were clear of debris and dust other than a small stack of papers on one corner of the big desk. Snarly Bitch’s computer was state of the art, including a half-inch-thick flat monitor. He had pictures of exotic dog breeds on his walls, and photos of the dogs he owned on his desk. His favorite object was a foot-high, black cast-iron poodle, about as warm and fuzzy as he was. He’d caress it when he was nervous. His swivel chair swiveled a hundred eighty degrees with nary a squeak.

  Detective Stafford sat in the swiveling swivel chair. We went over the basics. I didn’t say anything about Abdel and Max. Not yet anyway.

  “You called your lawyer first instead of calling us.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why is that?”

  “While I figured it might make you more suspicious during initial questioning, I wanted to make sure I didn’t screw something up. I wanted to make sure I was treated correctly.”

  “Did you think there would be cause for you to be treated incorrectly?”

  “I don’t like to take chances.” I wasn’t about to get into a pissing match with them about the ability of Chicago cops to treat suspects properly.

  “How well did you know the victim?”

  “He was the boss. In the past couple months I worked here once every two weeks on Saturday mornings. Before that maybe one or two nights a month. I also filled in at random times when they needed someone and my schedule permitted. I didn’t see him very often.”

  “How’d you get along?”

  “He was usually reasonably nice to me.”

  “How was he when he was unreasonable?”

  “He had a trick of seeming to be busy in order to avoid normal human interactions. I got that a lot. Not a big deal, but disconcerting.”

  “How did the others get along with him?” Stafford asked.

  I began, “Snarly Bitch…”

  Stafford raised an eyebrow and interrupted, “Snarly Bitch?”

  “That was his nickname among the staff.”

  “He wasn’t well liked?”

  “An understatement. He had turned being rude to people into a high art. I’d heard about his nasty reputation before I even got here. He wasn’t just snarly and rude. He felt he was above everyone else. It was as if he didn’t care enough to even bother being effectively contemptuous.”

  “How did he do that?” Stafford asked.

  “It was an attitude. A way of treating you as if you weren’t quite clean enough.”

  Why would I bother to hide this information? Certainly, others would tell them this as well. I had no reason to lie about his attitude toward the hired help.

  “But you worked here anyway?”

  “Helping gay kids is valuable work. I kept out of his way. From what I saw he was snarly and rude to everyone except huge donors.”

  “Did his being unreasonable piss you off?” Stafford asked.

  I knew she was pushing. I could feel Todd stirring. “We didn’t have any big or small fights. Several months ago, I led the group in the office that went to talk to him to try to get him to change his way of dealing with people.”

  “How come you were the leader?”

  “I had the least to lose. I’m a volunteer. If I was the spokesperson, the people on salary didn’t have to take as much of a risk. I’ve been on negotiations teams in the district where I teach. I’m used to dealing with recalcitrant management.”

  “Was he recalcitrant?”

  “Among the worst.”

  “In what way?”

  “He wouldn’t give in to any of their demands. In fact, he wouldn’t admit there were any problems.”

  “How come he was still in charge?”

  I told them about Snarly and his money.

  “But he didn’t fire you after you led the opposition?”

  I told them about Snarly’s presumed desire for loads of donations from Scott.

  Stafford nodded. “A lot of people quit or get fired?”

  “They went through a lot of volunteers, but the regular staff has been pretty much the same in the time I’ve been here.”

  “Who, besides you, had keys to this place?”

  “All the full-time staff do, and some of the volunteers have keys to that back door. They took normal precautions about security, but no self-respecting crook is going to rob this place. It’s a fairly big complex, but it’s pretty run-down. I offered to come in early on Saturdays, and they gave me a key. That back door isn’t enough to keep out a determined chipmunk, much less someone who wanted to break in.”


  “He have any fights with other people?”

  “He fought with everybody.”

  “Major fights that stick out in your mind?”

  “On the days I was here, I heard his voice raised at least once each time, toward one of the volunteers or one of the staff.”

  “Why didn’t these people all just quit?” Abernathy asked. “There’s got to be plenty of places for folks to do good.”

  “Actually, not that many that can afford to pay you a decent wage. There are the big charities that have huge budgets such as the Red Cross. Most of these small outfits are on a pretty slim budget. Snarly Bitch wasn’t the only one who fought. There were a lot of egos in a fairly tiny organization. Infighting seems to be endemic to any gay organization.”

  “Why is that?” Abernathy asked.

  “Don’t know. All I know is the reports I read in the paper. An outfit starts out with these fabulous ideals and within a very short time, it falls apart from infighting and lack of funds.”

  Abernathy asked, “Is this the group with the bicycling scandal I read about in the paper?” A number of gay fundraising groups had gone through scandals in the past few years. One of the bicycle marathons had been among the most prominent.

  “One of them,” I said. “Snarly Bitch accused the organizers of holding back on the money they owed to the clinic. One of the planners said Snarly Bitch drove as many people away as he helped recruit.”

  “Who was that?”

  “Ken Wells. I’m not mentioning his name here because I have reason to single him out. He and Snarly did have a big fight and a fundraiser fell through. You hear a lot of rumors and I learned right away to discount most of them. The rumor on this one was that Snarly had sabotaged it.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “I have no idea. I mention Ken because this was a recent dust-up. I have no reason to suspect him or anyone else.”

  “Any other fights?”

  “A lot of people in the office seemed to take turns sniping at each other. Snarly Bitch’s leadership style encouraged that.”

  “How so?”