Cobalt Read online

  COBALT

  Nathan Aldyne

  FELONY & MAYHEM PRESS • NEW YORK

  Contents

  Prologue

  PART I The Garden of Evil

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  PART II The Lost and Lonely

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  PART III Rhythms and Blues

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  PART IV Prostitution through the Ages

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  Wednesday, 3:00 P.M.:

  “HELLO. THIS is not Daniel Valentine, but his disembodied voice brought to you through the miracle of printed circuitry. When you hear the beep tone, please leave your name, number, and a short message. When I return I will erase the tape. Thank you.”

  “It’s Clarisse at three o’clock. Life or death.”

  Wednesday, 7:00 P.M.:

  “Hello?”

  “Whose life, whose death?”

  “Thank God you’ve called, Val!”

  “Whose life, whose death?”

  “Veronica Lake.”

  “She’s dead? Oh, Clarisse, I’m so sorry, I—”

  “She’s not dead, she just threw up in the fireplace.”

  “I don’t know how you expect to keep a dog in the city anyway. Why did you really call?”

  “I was feeling sorry for myself. When Veronica Lake got sick I took her out to my brother’s, and now I’m completely alone. I wish I were with you in Provincetown! Boston is awful. The Esplanade is not Herring Cove, Newbury is not Commercial Street, the city is filled with tourists who are apparently seeing concrete sidewalks for the first time, the health club has closed the pool for renovations, and the rental season is unmercifully slow.”

  “Hate to say this, but the rest of the summer isn’t going to be any better if you insist on staying in Boston. Why don’t you come down to Provincetown? Quit your job, pack your bags, lock up the flat, and hop on the ferry.”

  “The utter stupidity of that idea has considerable appeal for me. But, Val, where would I stay?”

  “You can stay with me.”

  “You just want somebody to help with the rent. And you forget, I wouldn’t have any income down there. I’d need a job, I’d—”

  “I’ve already got you a job.”

  “Doing what?”

  “There’s a shop right across from the bar where they need somebody, and I’ve already mentioned you.”

  “What sort of place is it?”

  “Gift shop—rare and beautiful things. Come on, Clarisse, I guarantee that you will be completely happy here. Absolutely nothing will go wrong the entire summer. Sun, fun, and romance—that’s what life is like in P’town. And besides, the first big party of the season is Saturday night. Private. Invitation only. Open bar.”

  “Who’s giving it?”

  “The Crown. And of course, this being Provincetown, there’s a theme.”

  “What is it?”

  “Garden of Evil.”

  “It’d take me two days to get up a decent costume.”

  “So you’ll come?”

  “If you promise to get rid of the answering machine.”

  “Hear that sound? It’s me, ripping the plug from the wall. I’ll see you Saturday then?”

  “Oh, why not? Tell Noah I’m coming, and put some clean sheets on the bed. Oh and by the way, how much does that job pay?”

  “A third of what you make now. Poverty will stare you in the face.”

  “I don’t care. I’ll take it. I have to be in P’town. Valentine, I love you. It’s a real problem.”

  “Come live with me then. That’ll get you over it.”

  PART I

  The Garden of Evil

  Chapter One

  AT A QUARTER PAST one the following Saturday afternoon as the Provincetown ferry was being secured to the wharf, Clarisse Lovelace, attired in a white sailor-suit top with blue piping and matching white bell-bottomed pants, was first in line to disembark. A little girl had tried to slip in front of her, but when Clarisse pointedly remarked that it wasn’t too late to be hurled overboard the child retreated. The ankle strap of one of Clarisse’s heavy-heeled sandals was loosened to lessen the pressure on a large blister that had developed on her heel since the morning, her cascade of black hair was tangled about her shoulders from having been whipped by the salt wind for the past three hours, and her oversized octagonal sunglasses were perched awry on her nose—the right-hand stem had been broken by an ecology freak rushing to the railing when whales were sighted off the port bow. Her sailor’s cap had blown off before the ferry had even left Boston harbor. Clarisse’s back ached from carrying her overstuffed leather bag, and when she hoisted it over her shoulder, a thick strand of her hair caught in the zipper.

  “Move it, lady!” urged the three dozen or so day-trippers directly behind her, who were desperately eager to trample Provincetown in the three hours they had before the ferry began its voyage back to Boston.

  She turned with a glance of loathing for them all.

  When she reached the wharf, she stepped quickly to one side. As she painfully disentangled her hair from the zipper of her leather bag, she watched her fellow passengers swarming off the ferry. The travel bag was dropped onto the rough weathered boards and the costume for that night’s party, in a suit bag, laid carefully over it. Behind her a gaggle of adolescent boys in swim trunks and diving goggles were splashing in the water, shouting “Coins, coins!” up at the passengers. Several amused women stopped to toss pennies, but the divers contemptuously allowed these to sink, and screeched, “Quarters! Throw some quarters!”

  The teenaged voices had anything but a salutary effect on Clarisse’s headache. She stepped to the edge of the wharf and, when one boy whose voice was particularly harsh shouted, “Throw, throw!” Clarisse ripped off her broken sunglasses and flung them at his head.

  She picked up her bag and moved down the long pier. Before her, Provincetown was spread in a multicolored crescent along the inside of the Cape Cod hook. As she trudged along with her bags she watched eagerly for a sight of Daniel Valentine, but saw neither his face nor form. One of the very few handsome men she had seen on the ferry moved along beside her almost in step. He was of medium height and size, and much more than medium good looks, with short dark hair and a carefully trimmed mustache. His skin was flawless and though the summer was just under way, already well tanned. He wore black sneakers and button-fly jeans. His shirt dated from the fifties: bright red, patterned in lines of small black tulips, with the long sleeves carefully rolled to encircle his large biceps. But it was his eyes that most drew Clarisse’s attention: they were a startling cobalt blue. When Clarisse paused, exhausted, he stopped and offered to carry her bag for her. She accepted gratefully.

  “My n
ame’s Jeff,” he said, then amended, “Jeff King.”

  “I’m Clarisse,” she replied, but did not offer her last name.

  “Are you down for the weekend?”

  “No, I’m here for the summer. But the fact is,” she added confidingly, “I hate resorts.”

  “Where are you staying?” Jeff asked.

  “At my uncle’s place.”

  “You’re lucky. I tried to get a reservation, but there wasn’t anything available. I’ll have to see what turns up.”

  Clarisse looked him over and laughed. “I imagine you’ll come across someone with an extra pillow.”

  Jeff smiled at the compliment. “I hope so. I used to come down here a lot, and I had a lot of friends here. I guess I’ll have to see who’s in town this season.”

  They had reached the municipal parking lot, and Clarisse thanked Jeff for his assistance.

  “Where does your uncle live? I’m not doing anything, I might as well take it on for you.”

  Clarisse, sensing that Jeff wanted nothing more in the world than for her to offer her uncle’s living room couch as a place to stay the weekend, smiled warmly, and said, “Thank you, but a friend is supposed to be meeting me. Of course, if he’s not here in five minutes, I have every intention of murdering him.” She collapsed onto a piling that looked to have a tolerably clean surface. “I’m just going to sit here for a few minutes and put myself together. A woman resolved to commit a capital crime can’t be too careful about her appearance.”

  “You look great,” said Jeff. “I noticed you on the ferry. Your outfit looks great.”

  He seemed disposed to linger, perhaps to see if the compliment had assisted his cause, but Clarisse put her hand around the handle of her bag and politely wrested it from him. “Thank you again,” she said in a tone of voice that did not brook argument.

  After an awkward moment in which he swung his own bag to and fro, Jeff said, “There’s a big costume party tonight.”

  “I know,” replied Clarisse.

  “Maybe I’ll see you there,” Jeff continued lamely.

  “Of course. I’ll be the one with blood on my hands.” She pointedly turned her head toward the town, as if searching for her friend, and Jeff walked on.

  Clarisse sighed, opened the zipper of her bag a few inches, and rummaged inside. When she found her brush, she pulled it violently through her hair until she thought it might be just presentable, and then stood and straightened the shoulders of her blouse. She opened her bag further and extracted a bottle of aspirin and gulped three down dry. She took out her box of adhesive bandages, and placed one over the blister on her heel. She stood, hoisted her bags with a groan, and set off for the Throne and Scepter.

  The early afternoon was cloudy, and the brisk salt air was spiked with the scent of impending rain, but Clarisse was well enough acquainted with the unpredictability of Cape Cod weather to distrust her senses completely. In Provincetown you might taste rain, and still hope for a brilliantly sunny afternoon.

  Saturday afternoon had brought a full complement of tourists to the town. Commercial Street, the principal thoroughfare, which follows the line of the bay and beach for the entire length of the crescent-shaped town, was lined on both sides with families from inland states, couples who doubtless thought themselves in love, and little knots of sullen teenagers who had been told that Provincetown was the hottest place on the Cape but now were at a loss to determine what raised the temperature so. The gay men and lesbians were either still in bed, already at work, or sitting at the Boatslip feeling guilty about starting to drink so early in the day. Turning onto Commercial Street, Clarisse pushed her way along the narrow sidewalk, constantly smiling and saying “Excuse me, please, I’m pregnant,” until she found herself standing before the Throne and Scepter. It was half past one, but already the tiny tables placed among the green palms on the shaded veranda were taken up with chatting tourists who had turned their chairs so that they might watch the ceaseless parade along Commercial Street. A thin young man whose surliness qualified him for any waiter’s job in Provincetown glanced with disdain at Clarisse and her baggage, but she ignored him and barged through the open French doors into the bar.

  In the sudden dimness of the interior, she could barely make out more potted palms, lazily swirling ceiling fans, and mirrors set to catch the reflections of the street. Clarisse lurched forward to where she remembered the bar to be.

  “Pour me a drink before you die,” she gasped, and in another moment, as her vision began to take in more detail, she saw a glass of ice and clear liquid sitting on the bar before her.

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” said Daniel Valentine. His blond hair and beard were lighter than when she’d last seen him, and much more closely cropped.

  “I expected a deeper tan.”

  Valentine shrugged and automatically made a preening motion of tucking in his clinging red T-shirt. His sleek, tapered muscularity strained the cotton. “How can I get a tan when I’ve got the day shift? That’s why I didn’t meet you at the ferry. How was the ferry?”

  “The ferry was the most horrible experience of my entire life,” said Clarisse evenly. “It was insult, torture, and degradation.” In three long swallows, she had finished her drink. She hadn’t put the glass down before another took its place. Valentine drew a pack of Luckys from the back pocket of his jeans, lit two, and handed one to Clarisse.

  “I’ve never ridden the ferry,” he remarked. “I thought it was supposed to be quaint or something.” He glanced at her sailor’s outfit. “Did you keep getting mistaken for crew?”

  “There was a Dixie Cup jazz band,” said Clarisse. “It was amplified. And it played polkas. For three hours. A great number of people danced. They danced the polka. The people who didn’t dance the polka got drunk and sang sentimental Irish songs. The people who didn’t dance or sing, threw up. Oh yes, and on the upper deck, where I got to sunbathe for half an hour before the sun went behind a cloud, there was an eighty-one-year-old man who stood on his head and delivered a lecture on the dangers of tobacco.”

  “Did you meet anybody cute?”

  “Well, there were approximately nine hundred persons on board the ship. I counted three attractive persons. Two women—very sweet and doing a duet of ‘I Only Have Eyes for You.’ And one man—who wanted me to put him up for the weekend.”

  “Sounds promising.”

  “He was gay—but I don’t think he knew I knew that.”

  “Still sounds promising. Did you make an offer for me?”

  “Valentine, I am very unhappy. My new sunglasses were torn off my head and smashed. A little boy sat on the costume that I had planned to wear tonight. I have a blister on my heel and a headache that only death will cure. I’m in no condition to pick up tricks for you.”

  “Well, you’re here. That’s something.”

  Outside, in the street, cars moved haltingly, trying to make headway through the milling throngs of pedestrians. A disgruntled driver blasted his horn at three women on roller skates who banged his trunk as they went by. A child shrieked when its ice cream cone was gobbled up by a passing mastiff. Someone wearing a large felt hat fashioned in the likeness of a goose peered in the window. The sun was suddenly obscured by a thick cloud, and there was a low bellow of thunder. Clarisse looked around the dark, hot, empty bar. “For this I quit my job, and sublet my rent-controlled apartment? Where’s the sun?” she demanded. “Where’s the fun? Where’s the romance?”

  Chapter Two

  FOR A SUM HE COULD not bear to mention aloud, Daniel Valentine had rented for the summer one-third of the house that belonged to Clarisse’s uncle. Four years before, Noah Lovelace had bought the low, rambling, U-shaped house on Kiley Court as an investment. He had broken it up into three fair-sized apartments that opened onto a central court with a swimming pool. In one of the apartments Noah lived with his companion of many years, a man called Victor, but more commonly known—especially in Provincetown—as the White Prince. In the a
partment directly across the pool from Noah and the White Prince lived Valentine, and now with him, Clarisse. The third apartment, between Valentine’s and Noah’s, was rented out by the week.

  Valentine sat in the twilit courtyard relaxing with a gin and tonic after his noon to eight o’clock shift at the Throne and Scepter. The storm that had threatened earlier swept out to sea, taking with it the humidity that had oppressed Clarisse on the ferry. The evening was clear and temperate. The sun had set and the sky was a luminous azure.

  Valentine made a decent wage at the bar and consistently received generous tips—not just because he was efficient, which he was, nor simply because he was congenial and a good listener when the occasion warranted, which it often did, nor only because he was handsome and hot, but because of a smoothly balanced combination of all three of these elements. In Boston, Valentine had worked at a small bar in Bay Village, but he had considered that job as temporary as the one he had now taken for the duration of the Provincetown summer. Though he wouldn’t admit it even in the most drunken confessional, Daniel Valentine was at heart a social worker. He had lost his job in the Suffolk County prison system, working with inmates shortly to be released, when he uncovered a scandal in the Sheriff’s Department. The sheriff still held his job despite Valentine’s revelation, in the pages of The Real Paper, that he had, with state funds, purchased ten thousand dollars’ worth of crushed velvet draperies for his living room. Now, however, the sheriff was ailing, and his ailment looked to be terminal—this privileged information had been obtained from a radiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital who lusted for Valentine’s embrace. Valentine hoped to regain his position at the Charles Street Jail by the autumn or early winter at the latest. He took a long swallow of his drink to toast the destruction of the sheriff’s remaining leukocytes.

  Valentine looked around with satisfaction. Twice before he had spent summers in Provincetown, but never had he lived in such congenial surroundings. The pool took up almost half the courtyard’s area, and the house, covered in cedar shingling weathered a uniform gray, hugged close around it. Ivy rampaged over the walls, and multiflora roses of yellow and vermilion competed with the ivy in all the corners and around the doors. An enormous Kentucky coffee tree—the only one in Provincetown—stood just beside the latticed gate and its broad flat leaves sheltered the entire courtyard. The low flower beds were thick with lavender and nicotiana, plants that could take the shade and which made the whole place fragrant at night. Just beyond the latticed fence was Kiley Court, high-hedged, narrow and graveled. The only traffic here was the occasional provisions truck that scrunched its way down to the restaurant that was situated directly opposite Noah’s compound.