Baton Rouge Bingo Read online

  I loved them.

  I tried not to think about what their jobs entailed. It was the only way I could handle it. I just told myself whenever I did think about it that they were all three highly trained professionals.

  I knew Colin was very good at his job, and whenever I worried about him, I just reminded myself over and over again he’d come home safely.

  He had every time so far, after all.

  “It’s a shame they couldn’t stay another few days,” I said as Frank signaled and swung around a slow-moving pickup truck. “The Ninjas have never seen you in the ring.”

  That was another reason Frank wanted us to get a car—his professional wrestling career was really taking off. He was currently champion of the Gulf States Wrestling Association and had to travel a lot for appearances and title defenses. The reason we were heading to Baton Rouge was because Frank was defending his title against his archenemy, Kid Karisma, there. The GSWA was doing a live broadcast from the Pete Maravich Assembly Center on the LSU campus. The center had sold out less than a week after tickets went on sale. This was a big deal for the league—their biggest show thus far, and it was going to air on pay-per-view. Stephen Wamsley, the promoter, had said the subscriptions were so high he was already planning another one in a few months at the New Orleans Arena.

  When Frank first started with them, the shows had been at Knights of Columbus halls and high school gyms, with the occasional show at a casino. They taped some of the shows for broadcast on a little-watched regional cable network. But Stephen, who’d taken over for his father shortly after signing Frank, was a hustler. He’d moved the broadcasts to a national cable network, and they were starting to catch on. Every time the ratings went up, more money flowed into the GSWA coffers. This meant better production values for the broadcasts and more money for the guys.

  I was so incredibly proud of Frank. It was hard enough for someone to start a career as a professional wrestler in his late forties. Not only had Frank done so, but he’d become the biggest star in his promotion. He was always swarmed after his matches with adoring fans wanting autographs and pictures. Stephen was even talking about adding a merchandise page to their website, which was getting a ridiculous amount of hits.

  Frank had over five thousand fans on his wrestler’s Facebook page.

  It was no surprise to me that Frank was becoming such a big star.

  Of course, Frank looked phenomenal in his shiny black pleather trunks with the lightning bolt across his perfectly shaped hard ass, the knee pads, and the shiny black leather boots.

  I loved sitting in the crowd listening to them cheer for my guy, you know? And always smiled to myself when I heard the women talking about how sexy he was.

  If you only knew, I would think, how sexy he looks out of the tights.

  “Yeah,” Frank replied, accelerating as he pulled back onto I-10 West. “It was good seeing them again.”

  “Are you nervous?” I asked, putting my knees up on the dashboard and scrunching down in my seat. The match wasn’t until tomorrow, but Frank always experiences a little stage fright before a match—and this one was bigger than any other show he’d ever done.

  Hell, I was nervous for him.

  “Not really,” he replied as we left dry land and headed out over Lake Pontchartrain. He glanced over at me and smiled. “I’m actually feeling remarkably calm. It’s going to be a great show, I think. Jeff and I have worked out some pretty great stuff for the match.” Jeff was Kid Karisma’s real name. Despite the big feud that was the main part of their current story for the promotion, both Frank and I were really fond of Jeff Protheroe. He was in his late twenties, was former military, and lived with his wife and baby daughter near Pensacola in the Florida panhandle.

  He was also really good-looking, with an amazing body.

  “Nothing too crazy, I hope—nothing where either of you might get injured,” I said, glancing over at him.

  “Nah.” He looked in the rearview mirror and fell silent again.

  “You’ve been acting kind of weird all day, Frank. Want to tell me what’s going on with you?” It was true. Frank always got weird on days when Colin was leaving for a job—he generally just kind of shut down. It was how he dealt with his fears about Colin not coming home. But today had been a different kind of weird, a kind of forced cheerfulness that was somehow worse than his silence.

  Frank glanced over at me and gave me a rather faint smile before turning his attention back to I-10, where it belonged. “You know me too well.” He turned down the volume of the car stereo, cutting off Amy Winehouse in mid-lyric. “I’ve been trying to figure out how to tell you something all day, and really, there’s no better way than just coming out with it.” He exhaled. “I got an e-mail from my sister this morning.”

  That got my attention. I sat up and leaned against the door, giving him my full attention.

  I didn’t really know much about Frank’s sister. I knew her name was Teresa; she was married, had three kids, and lived somewhere in north Alabama. She sent Frank a birthday card and a Christmas card every year. The Christmas card often included a photograph of her family in front of a Christmas tree wearing Christmas sweaters; Frank always threw it into the garbage after opening it. (I am not proud to admit that I dug it out to look at the picture and read the note written inside every year—it was always innocuous and impersonal.) Whenever I asked Frank about his sister, he always brushed the question away. This, of course, drove me insane with curiosity. I’d been tempted, more than once, to research her and her family—I am a licensed private eye with an insatiable—some might say obsessive—curiosity. But I knew Frank would be pissed if he ever found out I’d snooped, and reluctantly I always decided to wait for him to discuss her with me when he was ready. I did know that his parents had both died in a car accident when he was in his early twenties. Teresa and her family were the only living relatives he had left.

  I also knew they hadn’t spoken in over ten years.

  “Oh?” It took all of my self-control to make that one syllable sound innocent and calm.

  Frank glanced at me out of the corner of his eyes and had the decency to start laughing. “You’re not fooling me a bit, Scotty.” He reached over and patted my left knee with his right hand as we loomed up behind a slow-moving U-Haul truck over the Bonnet Carré Spillway. “You’re dying of curiosity, aren’t you?”

  “Not in the least,” I sniffed, resting my head against the car window as he swung the Explorer into the next lane and passed the U-Haul.

  “Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.” He laughed. “Because you don’t have a curious bone in your body, right?” When I didn’t answer, he went on. “Seriously, Scotty, I appreciate you never pressing me about my sister.” His hand was still resting on my bare leg, and I put my own hand on top of it. Frank has gorgeous hands. They were big, with strong thick fingers. He always kept his nails clean and trimmed. I traced a vein from his wrist up to his elbow. “I’ve never really wanted to talk much about her. It hurts still, after all this time. We used to be so close when we were kids. But she said some pretty awful things to me, unforgivable things, really.” He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his tanned neck. “She’s very religious, very fundamentalist Christian.” The knuckles on the hand gripping the steering wheel whitened. “She loves me as her brother, but just can’t condone my lifestyle choice.” His voice tightened on the last two words. “And she just can’t be a part of my life until I recognize my sin, ask God for forgiveness, and follow a righteous path.”

  “Oh, how awful. She actually said that to you?” I grimaced. That explained it.

  He nodded. “Yeah, and I wasn’t exactly nice to her. I may have told her to shove her Leviticus up her self-righteous ass.” The corners of his mouth twitched.

  “Why didn’t you invite her down to meet me and Colin?” I asked. “Surely, once she met us…”

  “I didn’t want to put either of you through that. And besides—she doesn’t approve of my being gay
. You think having two partners would win her over?”

  “But, Frank, you’ve braved the Bradleys. You know how awful Dad’s family is. She couldn’t be any worse than Papa Bradley.”

  He laughed. “You always think Papa Bradley is a lot worse than he really is. He’s not that bad, Scotty. He’s always been very nice to me.”

  It took a lot of effort not to roll my eyes. I’d finally come to a kind of détente with the Bradley side of the family, but it was an uneasy truce. “If you say so.”

  “Anyway, that’s beside the point now.” He sped up to go around a pickup truck with furniture in the bed tied down with what looked like bungee cords. “It seems silly now, to have gone so long without speaking to her.” He glanced over at me as he maneuvered back into the right lane. “She’s my only family, really. Since Mom and Dad were killed…” He shook his head. “Maybe that’s why I got so angry with her, I don’t know. We’d always been close. She’s only two years older than me.” He laughed. “We drifted apart when we got older. Anyway. She is my sister, even if her religion tells her I’m going to hell.”

  “So, why did she e-mail you out of the blue? To make peace, finally?”

  He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel for a moment as Amy continued to claim she didn’t have an addiction problem in the background. Finally, he said, “She wants me to take in my oldest nephew. He’s thinking about transferring to either Tulane or UNO.”

  “But, Frank, that’s great!” I burst out before realizing that he was clenching his jaw so tightly that a muscle was jumping in his cheek. “Isn’t it?”

  He sighed. “Yeah, it is, I guess. It’s just—aw, hell.” We passed the turnoff to take I-55 north to Jackson. He signaled to take the Laplace exit. There was a big hotel there, and a mega gas station. He pulled in next to one of the pump islands and switched off the engine. He turned and looked at me. “I haven’t seen my nephew since he was about six years old, Scotty. I don’t know him at all, but much as I want to, I can’t say no to her, I’m sorry.” He took a deep breath and shook his head. “My nephew’s gay, Scotty.”

  Poetic justice for a homophobe flashed through my mind immediately, and just as instantly I regretted thinking it.

  It always bothered me when anyone wished a homophobe would have a gay or lesbian child as punishment for being a homophobe. Yes, that might be an apt punishment for them, but it never takes into consideration how hellish that would be for the child. It assumes that having a gay child would magically transform a homophobe into a banner-carrying member of PFLAG.

  Sadly, it doesn’t always work that way—and the one who truly suffers is the child.

  “How old is he now?” I asked.

  “He’s eighteen, just finishing his first year at the University of Alabama.” Frank sighed. “He came out to his parents…and my brother-in-law has disowned him.”

  I bit my lower lip and counted to ten silently in my head.

  Nothing makes me angrier than a parent whose love for their child can be switched off like that.

  “So my sister wants him to come down and visit me for the summer, you know, check the schools out, see if he likes New Orleans,” Frank went on. “Since he can’t go home, and he doesn’t have anywhere else to go. She’s actually hoping my asshole brother-in-law, once he’s over the shock, will accept Taylor and they can put all of this behind them.” Frank sighed. “He’ll be heading down here this weekend, if it’s okay with us. Please tell me you don’t mind. I just can’t turn my back on Taylor.”

  “Of course we can’t! He’s welcome as long as he wants.” I folded my arms. “But why is he out of school so early?”

  “He did a semester in Paris—he’s taking a minor in French and is actually fluent, apparently.” Frank grinned. “He’s majoring in political science—he wants to work for the State Department.”

  I whistled. One of the only regrets in my life is I don’t speak a second language. “Impressive.”

  “Anyway, the semester in Paris finished, so he’s been back home for the last week or so. Apparently, he met a boy over there…that’s kind of what triggered the whole coming-out thing. I don’t know the whole story—but my brother-in-law went away on a business trip and told Taylor he had to be gone by the time he gets back. He’ll be back this coming Monday. My sister seems to think her husband will change his mind eventually—which I doubt. He’s really a sanctimonious holier-than-thou asshole, but she thinks it best if Taylor isn’t there when he gets home.”

  I’d noticed that Frank carefully avoided referring to his sister and her husband by name. “Well, he can stay in the upstairs apartment,” I said as Frank took off his seat belt. “But is it really a good idea to bring an eighteen-year-old newly out gay boy to the French Quarter?”

  Frank grinned as he opened his car door to get out. “You grew up in the Quarter and look how you turned out.” He shut the car door and started filling the Explorer with gas.

  “Exactly my point.” I mumbled, slumping down in my seat.

  To be honest, now that my outrage at how Taylor’s parents were treating them was wearing down a bit, I was starting to get a little concerned.

  I know I’m luckier than the vast majority of gay American men. I grew up in the French Quarter, for one thing, with its embrace of difference and diversity and uniqueness. I also grew up with far-left parents who most definitely would have been hippies had they been old enough in the sixties—parents who not only accepted me for being gay but were genuinely delighted their youngest child was a big old ’mo. I was getting into the French Quarter gay bars when I was seventeen. I was dancing on the bars in a thong when I was twenty. I haven’t exactly had the most conventional life.

  Was I a good role model for a teenager freshly out of the closet?

  I rather doubted Frank’s sister would think so—but then, in banishing her son from her home, even if it turned out to be just for the summer, hardly gave her a moral high ground from which she could cast judgment on my past.

  And I was hardly going to encourage Taylor to become a go-go boy.

  Keeping him out of the gay bars—and the bathhouse—was going to be a full-time job.

  Listen to you, getting all parental and responsible, a voice jeered in my head. It didn’t harm you, so who are you to make decisions for what’s right for this kid? As long as he knows about safer sex and to always use a condom, who am I to stop him from getting some world experience? And it’s not like kids nowadays have to go to bars anyway. He’s probably got Grindr on his phone and a Manhunt profile. If he was seeing some guy in Paris, he’s probably not a virgin, either. Besides, you don’t want to be one of those judgy adults he won’t talk to. Isn’t it better to be his friend? Let Frank be the authority figure.

  I was so completely lost in thought I didn’t notice Frank had gotten back into the car and started the engine until he looked over at me and said, “Earth to Scotty? You okay?”

  “Yeah,” I replied, forcing a smile as he drove back up the on-ramp to I-10. “It’s pretty cool of Teresa not to send him to some kind of ‘don’t be gay’ camp. I mean, that’s what I would have thought she’d do.”

  His knuckles tightened on the steering wheel, but he didn’t say anything for a while. He sped up and merged onto the highway. “She might be religious, but she isn’t stupid,” he finally said as we drove off the swamp bridge and back onto dry land again. “She has a college education, you know. Not that she’s ever used it, of course. All she ever wanted to do was be a wife and mother.” He shook his head. “And as hard as our parents tried to keep us out of Alabama, that’s where she wound up.”

  “You’re from Alabama?” I glanced over at him in surprise. “I thought you were from Chicago?” I racked my brain and couldn’t remember him ever mentioning Alabama before, except in regard to his sister.

  “I grew up in Chicago.” He sighed. “I was born in Alabama, Scotty, that’s where we’re—my family—is from. I really don’t like to talk about it much.” He put his b
ig hand back on my knee. “I’m sorry—I should have told all of this to you before. But I don’t have any really pleasant memories of Alabama.”

  Quelle surprise, I thought, but aloud said, “I figured you’d tell me about your past and your family when you were ready to. I didn’t want to pressure you.”

  “Yeah, well, I hated Alabama when I was a kid. We used to go there every summer to visit.” He made a face. “I have a ridiculous number of relatives there—I don’t know many of them, really, but that’s where we’re from, and I have a lot of aunts and uncles and first cousins. I was really skinny as a kid, and not very athletic. Sports were important to my dad, and of course, my cousins were all jocks.” The muscle in his jaw was twitching again. “They used to make fun of me. And my dad was always why can’t you be more like your cousins? He made it very clear I was an enormous disappointment.”

  “Frank—I’m sorry.” I put my hand down on top of his and interlocked my fingers with his.

  “Yeah, well. My parents moved to Chicago when my sister and I were young—I was only two, so I don’t remember ever living there—and that’s where I grew up. We lived in the city until my parents bought a house in the ’burbs. My sister and I both went to the University of Illinois. Tommy Wheeler was my cousin Bobby’s best friend, so he was always around when we were kids. She started dating Tommy Wheeler when we were in high school and went down there for the summers and it got serious. After she graduated from college she married him and moved back down there, started having kids.” He shook his head. “I’ve never had any desire to ever live there. Never. I went to work for the FBI right out of college, as you well know. Then Mom and Dad died…and I met you, and retired and wound up living in the South.” He smiled at me and patted my leg again. “I never had any doubt about wanting to live with you, you know—but I worried that New Orleans was too close to Alabama.” He laughed. “Every time I have to go to Mobile to wrestle, my stomach knots up when I cross the state line into Alabama—even after all this time!” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, I probably should have told you all of this years ago.”