Read Online The Dirt Peddler by Dorien Grey - Free Book Online

obviously excruciatingly uncomfortable. Finally he looked at the guy and said, “I’m with someone now.”
    For the first time the guy seemed to realize I was there.
    “Oh. Okay.” Then he turned his grin to me. Obviously he assumed I was just another john.
    “I can vouch for this one,” he said, with a head jerk to Jonathan that reminded me of a cattle auctioneer. “You’ll sure get your money’s worth.”
    On rare occasions, I can be very proud of myself. This was one of them. While a very large part of me—okay, the Scorpio part, which is a very large part of me—wanted to get up and throw the guy through the wall, which I think Jonathan was afraid I might try to do, I managed to control myself, nodded, and said nothing.
    “Well, I’ll see ya around,” the guy said, picking up his beer and moving off toward the other end of the bar, where a tall, thin kid in a worn leather jacket watched him coming over with a sly smile.
    Jonathan just stared at his Coke and shook his head slowly back and forth.
    “I’m so sorry, Dick. He picked me up here once, just before I met you, and…”
    I reached out to put my arm around his shoulder. “No problem. Don’t worry about it.”
    He gave me a weak smile.
    “Have I mentioned that I really hate this place?”
    I glanced at my watch and noticed it was ten after eleven, and no Randy. Jonathan then looked at his own watch and said, “Let’s give him ten more minutes, okay? Then we’ll go, and he can find his own way back.”
    We finished our drinks in relative silence, noting the guy in the business suit—who one of my mind-voices insisted on referring to as Jonathan’s ex —left with the kid in the leather jacket.
    At eleven twenty, we got up to leave. Just as we reached the sidewalk—the teenager was gone—a battered pickup truck pulled up to the curb and Randy got out. He shut the door without looking back and came quickly over to us.
    “Man, did you see who that guy was ?” he asked in lieu of any other greeting as the pickup made an illegal U-turn and headed back in the direction from which it had come. He directed the question to Jonathan. “Chad Brownell!” he continued without waiting for an answer. “Doctor Carstairs on Life Goes On! He denied it, but I knew it was him the minute I saw him.”
    Life Goes On was one of the most popular of the prime time New York  based soaps, and Chad Brownell was one of its hottest stars. I knew Brownell was originally from here, and that he was both widely known to be gay and had a penchant for hustlers. But what he was doing in a beat-up pickup truck I didn’t know. Good for his butch image, maybe.
    “I sure am meeting a lot of famous people lately,” Randy said as we headed for the car.
    *
    We dropped Randy off at New Eden at three minutes to twelve, and headed home, again in relative silence.
    “Not the best of all possible nights,” Jonathan said, looking out the window.
    I turned and grinned at him. “But hardly the end of the world, either.”
    He shrugged and turned to me.
    “True,” he said, his spirits obviously lifting. “Think we’ll have time to play a game when we get home?”
    “Sure. Which one?”
    “How about ‘The Asshole John and the Vengeful Hustler’? It could get a little rough.”
    “Sounds like fun.”
    And it was.
    *
    Tuesday morning, at about the same time that Tony T. Tunderew was scheduled to oil his way into the hearts of A.M. New York ’s national viewing audience, I got a call from Donna at Glen O’Banyon’s office.
    She apologized for not having gotten back to me sooner, and gave me the telephone number and address of Catherine Tunderew, Tony T.’s recently exed.
    “If you talk with her,” Donna said before she hung up, “would you please tell her that her number one fan sends her best regards?”
    “I’m sorry?” I was a little confused.
    “You don’t know who Catherine Tunderew is?”
    Should I? I wondered.
    “No, I’m afraid I don’t know of