Third You Die (kevin connor mysteries) Read online

  Third You Die

  ( Kevin Connor Mysteries )

  Scott Sherman

  Scott Sherman

  Third You Die

  1

  Perfect Fit

  Listening to them bicker, interrupt, and compete among themselves for who had the most outrageous story, I couldn’t decide which of the sex workers annoyed me most: the busty dominatrix in her black leather halter, too-tight read-my-lips matching slacks, and spiked, knee-high boots; the spray-tanned gay porn actor wearing a muscle-clinging T-shirt and painted-on jeans; or the plushie in the purple dinosaur costume who got off dressing as one of America’s most beloved childhood icons.

  “When men come before me,” the dominatrix said haughtily, her imperious tone implying that not only they but we didn’t deserve her time, “I give them something they can’t get anywhere else. The feeling they are totally taken care of, that they no longer have to be ‘in charge.’ I give them the release that can only be achieved with true obedience. I give them the freedom of abandoning control and letting someone else-”

  “You give them a spanking and they give you a few hundred bucks,” the porn star interrupted. “You’re a kitten with a whip, honey. Not a cross between Mother Teresa and Sigmund Freud. You need to stop taking this shit so seriously.”

  The dominatrix gave him a withering look that probably sent the submissives who hired her into quivering ecstasy. Her plain features knotted into a mask of extreme displeasure, thin lips and baggy eyes narrowing with practiced precision. “I wouldn’t expect someone like you to understand,” she sniffed. While I imagined that some women in her line of work role-played their arrogance, Mistress Vesper’s bitchiness was no act. Well, I suppose there was something to be said for finding work that suited you.

  “Someone like me? ” The porn star, Brock Peters, was pretty butch, but I had a feeling that after a half hour of hearing Mistress Vesper’s pretentious characterizations of her “art,” he was about to go Real Housewives on her. The prodigious muscles in his shoulders rippled with tension. “You mean someone who has sex with guys for money? Someone like, I don’t know, you? ” He pointed his strong chin at her and pursed his mouth.

  “As I’ve tried to explain,” Mistress Vesper sighed, “what I do goes beyond the merely physical. When I’m with a man, I give him the release that only comes with pain, with the abandonment of the ego and the embrace of the id, the ultimate satisfaction of surrender, of.. ”

  I stopped listening. This time, it wasn’t my ADHD making me zone out. Rather, it was my need to find some way to rein this discussion in, to make it productive and interesting. After all, it was my job.

  Up until six months ago, I’d have been on their end of the panel. A full-time professional call boy, I earned my living fulfilling the sexual needs and fantasies of a varied and well-to-do clientele.

  It wasn’t work I was ashamed of or regretted. I made tons of money, I had a good time, and I was always safe and sensible. Like Mistress Vesper, although hopefully with less smugness and self-aggrandizement, I’d like to think I was a valuable outlet for men who genuinely needed professional companionship.

  Still, I knew it wasn’t a long-term career. Sooner or later, my looks or luck would run out. I’d seen enough boys wear out their welcome in the business to know a forced retirement from hustling is never pretty.

  Problem was, I wasn’t qualified to do much else. Although I’m no dummy, my attention deficit disorder made completing college really hard for me. So hard, in fact, I dropped out year one.

  At the time, I hadn’t even been diagnosed. I just thought I was stupid and lazy. It was a potential-client-turned-friend, Allen Harrington, who realized the ditziness that everyone else attributed to my being blond was more likely a treatable disorder. He referred me to an appropriate doctor, and for the first time in my life, the mental haze through which I wandered parted enough for me to get stuff done. It was revelatory.

  Now, liberal doses of Adderall make it a lot easier for me to focus and succeed. Someday, I tell myself, I’ll go back to school for my degree. But you know how it goes-“someday” is a moving target, and so far I haven’t hit it.

  Allen did me another kindness. Before his death (his murder, actually, which I, ironically enough, was instrumental in solving) he left me a sizable inheritance for tuition when I was ready to resume my studies.

  I have plenty of other uses for that money, but, out of respect for Allen’s wishes, and as a promise to myself, I’m letting it sit and gather interest. Someday, I tell myself.

  I tell Allen, too, if he’s listening.

  My world changed half a year ago when my mother appeared as a guest on That’s Yvonne, a morning talk show named after its host. At the time, Yvonne was America’s third most popular female celebrity. A sexy and spirited Latina, she enjoyed a carefully crafted public persona that was warm, caring, generous, and just risque enough to titillate without being offensive. She was a saucier Oprah.

  Then, in a disastrous meeting that rivaled that of the Titanic ’s introduction to the inglorious iceberg, the beloved daytime diva crossed paths with my mother.

  Shortly afterward, Yvonne’s career sank lower than the luxury liner had.

  Like most of my stories, it’s a long one, but I’ll try to give you the ADHD version. A boy I used to have a crush on in high school, Andrew Miller, was working as a producer on Yvonne’s show. He booked my mother as a guest, partly as a way to see me again. Turned out, he’d known about my interest in him and was ready to follow up.

  Had I known back then, I’d have been on him like pasties on Lady Gaga. Unfortunately, his timing was bad. By the time he contrived our reunion, the last thing I needed was another guy to juggle. Which was too bad, because Andrew was still hotness on legs. Long, muscled legs, that carried him with the confident grace of the natural-born athlete he was. Legs that even under loose khakis revealed rippling thighs you couldn’t but imagine nude as you…

  Okay, I’m getting off track here.

  Focus, Kevin, focus.

  So, my mom was talking with Yvonne when the hostess revealed herself as a homophobic, anti-Semitic bitch. Unknown to both of them, the conversation was being videotaped. When Yvonne threatened to sue my mother for making her bald (I told you it was a long story), Andrew, who had long suffered under Yvonne’s imperious rule, leaked the video online. That was pretty much it for the woman formerly known as “The Darling of Daytime.”

  When the producers of That’s Yvonne sacked her, they needed a new talker to take her place. By this time, the online video of her meltdown had achieved over five million views. Who better to replace Yvonne than the Long Island hausfrau who took her down? By then, my mother had appeared on Good Morning America, the David Letterman show, and even on 60 Minutes. It turned out her brash tell-it-like-it-is style, lack of personal boundaries, and borderline vulgarity that so embarrassed me growing up made her a natural for TV. Audiences found her a genuinely likable character-easy to relate to and impossible to look away from.

  Of course, people stare at car crashes, too.

  My mother made it part of the deal that Andrew be promoted to head producer and, thus, her TV career was born. The show, named after her, was now Sophie’s Voice. (Apparently, I was the only person in the world who thought a pun based on a book about the Holocaust was in bad taste.)

  Four months after going on air, Sophie’s Voice was an undeniable hit. No one could say how long the ride would last (remember Ricki Lake?) but, for now, my mother and everyone else involved in the show was riding high.

  “I’ve always known I was a star,” my mother told me calmly in her office, as her staff whooped and hollered
after the show’s first month’s shockingly high ratings hinted that her fame was possibly more than a passing fad. “I’m just glad everyone else figured it out, too.”

  “The only saving grace about your mother’s newfound notoriety,” my long-suffering father told me on the phone later that day, with his trademark blend of pessimistic optimism, “is that she was already impossible to live with. It’s not like she could get any worse. Plus, this fakakte TV show keeps her out of the house. So, that’s good.”

  Meanwhile, the show was an opportunity for me, too. I’d been getting away with calling myself a “consultant” for the past few years, but I knew I’d eventually need a “real” job. When Andrew approached me about working on my mother’s show, I was initially reluctant. For one thing, the idea of spending that much time with my mother, in a high-pressure environment, was about as appealing as a colonoscopy, only with more crap involved. It’s not that I don’t love her-I do-it’s just she drives me crazy.

  For another, I didn’t have any experience in television. What would I do?

  Luckily, this time Andrew got it right. His idea was to make me the coordinator of casting. This meant it was my job to help choose and screen the guests that appeared on the show.

  I might have never worked in TV before, but years of being a call boy had taught me how to quickly size up people, figure out if they were crazy or not, and how to bring out their best.

  Those skills proved right in line with those needed to pick the kinds of guests who’d “pop” on a daytime talk show. I had a knack for getting inside the heads of potential interviewees. I could help them find their most interesting story and focus them on how to tell it. I could also craft the questions for my mother to ask and help the producers with setups that would wring the most drama from the guest’s appearance.

  Part of what made me successful at getting people to open up to me was my personality, but part was my appearance. I’m not the handsomest guy in the world, but what I am is cute. Short, boyish, with floppy blond hair and a button nose, I’m unthreatening and look trustworthy, the archetypal All-American boy next door. That image supported me for years as a hustler; now it worked for me as an interviewer.

  Hey, you gotta play the hand you’re dealt.

  Plus, no longer making my living in an illegal profession definitely made things easier with Tony Rinaldi, the cop who recently graduated from being my semi-boyfriend to full-time lover. He’d been tolerant of my work, but I knew he didn’t approve. Plus, now that we were kind of raising a kid together, it was even more complicated. So, Sophie’s Voice, while not without its challenges, was proving to be a good thing.

  Of course, we’d see how things went after today’s taping. This was a pretty far-out panel. It had the potential of being an episode that would keep people talking for days, or the kind of train wreck that would have people switching to the Food Network as fast as their remotes could carry them.

  I was about to find out.

  2

  Afterparty

  “Come on, ladies,” my mother yelled as she strode onstage, shouting to be heard over the raucous cries of her studio audience. “Let’s be real for a minute. We all like to get a little… wild.. in the bedroom every once in a while, don’t we?”

  The audience hooted their agreement as I struggled not to imagine what my mother might have done in the bedroom that would qualify as “wild.”

  Must. Turn. Off. Brain.

  “All right,” my mother said, settling into the easy chair from which she hosted the show. She dropped her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Maybe not all of us. Let’s face it, I’m pretty sure the wildest thing I’ve ever done in the bedroom was wear my rollers to sleep.”

  The audience exploded in laughter.

  “What can I say? I’m a nice Jewish girl from Long Island. But, you know what? It takes all kinds. And today, we have a panel of playful and proud entrepreneurs who’ve figured out how to turn their kinks into cash. Or, as we like to call it, fetishes for fun and profit!”

  More whooping from the suburban housewives in the stands. They knew my mother was about to give them a PG-13 glimpse into a world they’d previously experienced only through the genius of Sidney Sheldon and Judith Krantz.

  It was also a world in which I’ve done a lot more than read about it. When things got serious between me and Tony, I’d made a deal with him: I wouldn’t give up working as a paid escort, but I’d only do “non-insertive” sex work. That meant no blow jobs, no fucking. I had to get creative.

  So, I wound up specializing in guys who had more… elaborate fantasies. I acted out all kinds of doctor/patient, naughty schoolboy and look-but-don’t-touch scenes. I had sessions with a john who wanted me to pelt him with pies while dressed like a clown and got paid $500 from another who just wanted to smell my wet hair. It wasn’t a bad gig.

  I also enjoyed it beyond the financial rewards. I felt like I was doing these guys a real service. What got them off didn’t hurt anyone but them. And not physically, either-I’m talking about the emotional pain that accompanies sexual drives that don’t fit the “norm.” When one of my clients got into a relationship, there was always a tension for him-does he dare tell his partner the truth about what he wants? Or is it wiser to play it safe and not risk the rejection that might accompany telling your lover that you want him to dress up like Captain America and throw his shield at your balls?

  It’s a terrible thing to be ashamed of your own sexuality.

  What my mother was about to expose her audience to was tame in comparison to some of the things I’d done.

  “First, we’ll hear from a woman who gets paid hundreds of dollars from men who want her to spank them!” my mother continued. The audience’s cheers went even wilder when my mother mock-whispered, “although, those of us who are married probably would be more than happy to do it for free when our husbands forget to take out the garbage for the fifth time in a row, right, ladies?

  “Then, we meet a gay man who didn’t have the courage to come out until he found out he could get paid for it-and now he’s one of the adult film industry’s biggest stars. And let me tell you, ladies, I got a look at this guy backstage as he was getting dressed for the show, and I can see why he’s so ‘big,’ in the business, if you know what I mean.” Her wink made the comment more adorable than lewd.

  “Last, but not least, we’ll be introducing you to the world of plushophiles, people who get their jollies from dressing like stuffed animals. At least, I hope we’ll be introducing you to that world. Because, if you’re already into that kind of thing, what are you doing here? There’s a Build-A-Bear Workshop not two blocks away!”

  More laughter. I’d suggested that line and was happy to hear it go over so well.

  “Then, we’ll bring ’em all together and see how they get along. Is there harmony among those who walk on the saucy side of the street, or is business the dirtiest game of all? Stay tuned, and we’ll be back with our wildest show yet!”

  The APPLAUSE sign lit up, but it wasn’t needed. As always, my mom had the crowd in the palm of her hand.

  I just hoped she could keep it there.

  “Well, my boy,” Andrew Miller said in a mock-authoritative tone, “once again, you done me proud.”

  We were standing in the back of the studio as the crowd rose to cheer the departing panel of perverts who’d entertained them for the past forty minutes. The show had gone great. My mother kept the conversation just racy enough to be entertaining without it becoming threatening. She found the humor in every kink, but was never demeaning. The guests seemed to genuinely enjoy talking with her. The last segment, where they all came out together, was raunchy, raucous, and, in the end, good-natured. The highlight was when Mistress Vesper spanked the gay porn star Brock Peters to demonstrate her craft.

  “Now I know why I like guys,” he proclaimed, and the audience screamed with delighted shock. My mother suggested the mistress might have more success with the plushie, but he couldn�
�t feel anything through his thick purple dinosaur suit.

  Andrew threw his arm around my shoulders. “That’s going to be one for the archives. Honestly, Kevin,” he said, pulling me closer, “I can’t think of anyone else who could have put together such a great panel. Or gotten more out of them.” He punctuated his praise with an extra little squeeze.

  I was too aware of the heat coming off his body. His ridged oblique muscles pressed against me-I could feel their definition through my shirt and his. He must be ridiculously shredded. I felt myself tingling in places I shouldn’t be tingling.

  I loved Tony, but I was only human.

  “Thanks,” I said, twisting my body away and turning as if I wanted to face him. Actually, I just wanted to put some distance between us. “I’m relieved. They were a pretty… colorful bunch in the pre-interview. Things got a little heated.”

  Andrew’s eyes swept me from head to toe. “What’s wrong with getting a little hot?”

  When we reunited six months ago, Andrew came on like a house on fire, and I had to hose him down. He’d behaved himself since then, but there was still an undercurrent of flirtatiousness. One which I kind of enjoyed. As long as it didn’t sweep me out to sea, that is.

  Speaking of which, we were about to be swamped by the flood of audience members leaving the theater. They gathered their things, noisily discussing how much fun they’d had.

  “Let’s go backstage,” I suggested, “and bid our guests a fond good-bye. Shall we?”

  “You got it,” Andrew agreed. “But I’m not getting too close to the plushie. Did you notice the stains on his fur?”

  I gave a little shudder. “Maybe you can handle Mistress Vesper.”

  “I’d rather handle that Brock Peters. He looks even better in real life than on my TV.”