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bastard, you know.” He grinned at me, and the best I could muster was a weak half-smile.
    “But I figure I’ve worked my ass off for the department for seven years. I’ve been tiptoeing around this gay thing all that time and realize now that my breaking up with Kent had a large part to do with my believing that staying locked in the closet would protect me. And it didn’t. I’m not going to live my life like that anymore. I can’t.”
    I nodded again. “There’ll come a time when you won’t have to. I don’t know when that’ll be, but things are starting to change. I suspect Stonewall just might be our ‘shot heard ’round the world.’ At least, I hope so.”
    I finished my Bloody Mary and pointed to the empty glasses in an unasked question. Tom shook his head.
    “Enough for me, I think. So—ask away.”
    “Well, first, when is the department going to release whatever they know to the insurance companies? I imagine Bob Allen’s not the only bar owner out there whose life is pretty much in limbo. The insurance companies don’t give a shit, of course—every day their money sits in the bank, they’re getting interest on it.”
    “As far as the department’s official stand, they don’t want to release any information to anybody, including the insurance companies, until they have dotted all the Is and crossed the Ts. They’re just applying this ‘policy’ a little more stringently to the bar fires. And if the bar owners have to wait, who cares? The longer those fag bars stay closed, the safer our streets will be for decent people.”
    “Huh?”
    Tom just grinned and shrugged.
    “What about the basics? Do they or do they not know who’s behind the fires? And are they all linked to one source—as I’d imagine they all have to be? I noticed that what little media coverage there has been has given the impression they’re all just spontaneous, random acts of moral outrage against an uppity gay community’s daring to think it has rights like other people.”
    “They’re pretty sure they’re all by the same guy. I’ve been on about two-thirds of the bar fires, and they’re strictly by the numbers—Molotov cocktails using a Valley Vineyards Chianti bottle with the label removed. Which is stupid as hell, because it’s the only bottle with that shape—long neck, extra-wide base. I suspect he does that just so we’ll be sure to know it’s him.
    “And in case you think his choice of wines might be a clue, I will point out that Valley Vineyards Chianti is available in almost every liquor store in the city, and in a quarter to a third of all restaurants.
    “He’s a pretty vain bastard who really gets a kick out of thumbing his nose at us. Rag wick from an old one-hundred-eighty-thread-count white sheet—all the arsonist’s little personal trademarks known only to him and to us. All tossed in back windows between three and five-thirty in the morning. The Main didn’t have a back window, so they tossed it on the roof.
    “Oh, and if the window is barred, and the bars are too close together to fit the bottle through, he breaks the window and uses the extra long neck of the bottle to pour the gas down the inside wall. Then he leaves the bottle sitting on the ground under the window where we’ll be sure to find it. No fingerprints, of course.”
    “So, they do know who’s doing it?”
    Tom nodded. “It’s the classic MO of a well-known fire-for-pay professional by the name of Jerry Tamasini.”
    He was quiet a minute, apparently waiting for me to say something.
    “And…? Are there plans to arrest Mr. Tamasini anytime soon?”
    Tom picked up his glass and tipped it back to get at the last piece of ice at the bottom. He munched it loudly and, after swallowing, said, “They don’t have to. He’s currently serving twenty-five-to-life downstate. Been there two years now.”
    I sat looking at him without speaking for much longer than I’d intended. Finally, I managed to say, “Then, why the