After work, Brent had gone to a tai chi class (purple belt, Tony had sussed from the studio’s owner). He wore his tai chi garb with a chip on his shoulder and a stick (nunchuck?) far up his tight ass.
After showering and changing at home, Brent went right out again. Now he was drinking at Stanley’s. He’d been inside for thirty minutes.
The door of Stanley’s opened and Brent came out. He had a woman clinging to his arm—short skirt, high heels, long blond hair, and low-cut blouse. She managed to tread a fine line between slutty and stuck-up. Tony lifted his camera, with its long lens, and snapped off a dozen frames as the two of them kissed in the street and then got into Brent’s car. She looked drunk.
Brent pulled out and Tony followed. He shadowed the BMW all the way to Brent and Marilyn’s home. Brent was discreet—he pulled his car into the garage. The neighbors would not see his blondie, even if they happened to be looking out their window. Tony parked at the end of the block and waited. He couldn’t see anything through the blinds, but he didn’t have to. Obviously, Brent hadn’t brought the lady home to play cribbage or bake banana bread. At least not with actual bananas.
Almost exactly an hour later, Brent’s car reemerged. Tony followed again as Brent dropped off his lady friend at the bar and then drove back home and stayed there.
Nice one, Brent, Tony thought with a bitter taste in his mouth. Marilyn had been dead for only six weeks. Tony might have dredged up some sympathy, might have been willing to assume the hookup was the act of a desperate, grieving man, if it weren’t for the get-the-fuck-out-of-my-way expression that seemed to live on Brent’s face twenty-four-seven.
He was glad he found Brent suspicious. Mark had said Brent had an alibi, but alibis didn’t always stick. If Tony could pin this on Brent, that left the clinic and Dr. Halloran in the clear. And Tony very much wanted the good doctor in the clear.
At the mere thought of Jack Halloran, a sluggish, achingly sweet heat pooled in Tony’s groin, lifting his dick like it was attached to a construction crane. Goddamn it. He’d wanked so much in the past few days, he was giving himself flesh burns. Knock it off! he told his crotch. I mean it!
His cell phone buzzed and Tony glanced at it. It was his mother. He almost didn’t answer, but he was pretty sure Brent was in for the night, and if anything could deflate his newly enamored dick, it was talking to his mother. Small blessings. He answered the phone. “Hello, Ma? How are ya?”
“Tony! You actually picked up your phone for once. What are you, sitting in a dentist’s waiting room?”
Tony closed his eyes and sighed. Close enough. “No, Ma. I’m just chilling. Again: How are you?”
“Who, me? I’m invincible, you know that. Well, aside from the arthritis in my fingers that makes rolling dough a thing of the past. And my left knee. Remember your grandmother’s right elbow?”
Tony listened to the medical history of his ancestors, both sides, for ten minutes, grunting where appropriate. Funny how the two things that might actually have been relevant—being gay and having a picky dick—seemed to have happened to no one else in the long list of family casualties. He hated being special.
“What about you, Tony?” his mom asked. “You feeling good? No colds?”
“I’m good, Ma. Healthy as a horse. It was all that garlic you fed me in utero.”
His mother laughed. “You make fun, but it’s true. I swear! How are your BMs?”
“Ma,” Tony warned.
“Do you go daily? Because it should be daily.”
Tony hit his forehead into the steering wheel with an audible thunk . He was really, really glad he was alone in a parked car on a dark street, and that there was no reason for anyone to bug his car. “Ma, I really don’t want to talk with you about my bowel movements, okay? What am I, three years old?”
“You know what your Uncle Harvey always said,