Murder at Ford's Theatre - Margaret Truman [11]
“Well, that is tragic news. I’m going there after I leave you.”
“Board of Governors meeting?”
“No. I’m meeting Annabel—I think. Maybe after what’s happened she’ll have left. Clarise Emerson is coming for dinner tonight. That might be scuttled, too. Now, what about our recalcitrant student?”
CHAPTER FOUR
KLAYMAN AND JOHNSON DROVE to Dupont Circle, where Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire Avenues intersected, and parked on Eighteenth and N, a few blocks from the circle itself. Klayman knew the area well. When not on duty, he enjoyed browsing the galleries and cafés, especially Kramerbooks & Afterwords, where he would sip strong coffee and eat small but intensely rich pastries while browsing possible selections in the bookstore portion of this funky Washington landmark.
ONE MORNING, not long after they’d paired up and while cruising in the Dupont Circle area, Klayman told his partner he’d spent the previous night in that same neighborhood with a friend.
“A buddy?” Johnson asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“What’d you do? Where’d you go?”
“We went to the movies and had dinner.”
They passed a movie theatre catering to gay men. “You go there last night?” Johnson asked, his voice forced-casual, his attention out the window.
“I’m not gay, Mo.”
Johnson turned and faced him. “Hey, man, I wasn’t suggesting you were. It’s just that—”
“Just that what?”
“Well, I mean, you’re single and you don’t seem to—I don’t know, don’t seem that interested in women, and this is where they hang out and—”
Klayman pulled to the curb and stopped. “Mo,” he said, “I am not gay. But if I were, it wouldn’t be any of your business.”
“No offense, man,” Johnson said, holding up his hands and laughing. “Just clearing the air, that’s all. Wouldn’t mean a damn thing to me if you were—one a’ them. Live and let live, I say.”
“That’s what I say, too,” Klayman said.
“What people do in their bedrooms is their business.”
“Let’s drop it, okay?”
“Okay, my man. It-is-dropped.”
The subject hadn’t been brought up again, although Klayman wondered whether Johnson still harbored those thoughts, and if it would, in fact, matter to him. If Johnson did think Klayman was gay, as well as young, white, and Jewish, it would severely test his partner’s open-mindedness.
Johnson was married—happily it seemed—to Etta, a tall, handsome woman with strong features and a glint in her wide brown eyes, and an edge to her laugh that said she’d seen it all and wasn’t surprised by anything. They had three sons—young adults a year apart, each as big and strong as their father. Klayman had been a guest at a few Johnson family gatherings, backyard barbecues, the funeral when Johnson’s father died, impromptu late dinners when they’d come off a case and Etta had insisted Klayman have something to eat before returning home.
Once, after repeated urging, Klayman brought a young woman he was seeing to a cookout at Mo and Etta’s house. It wasn’t a serious relationship—Klayman and Maryjane had met at Kramerbooks & Afterwords and forged what was basically a platonic relationship based upon mutual love of certain books—although they had made love on occasion; “We’re friends and lovers,” Maryjane had liked to say. After they’d left the party, Klayman suffered guilt at why he’d brought her. It was to show his partner that he was quite comfortable around women, thank you, and you needn’t question my sexual orientation.
Klayman and Maryjane stopped seeing each other shortly after that. She started dating a young, black attorney from the Department of Agriculture and told Klayman it was “a physical thing.” He didn’t argue, nor was he hurt. She’d lately been talking about the need to marry and to start a family—the biological clock and all, fulfillment as a woman—which had bothered Klayman. Marriage was not in his current plans.
“THIS IS IT,” Johnson said, pointing to a three-storey town house on N Street. A tiny patch of English-style garden was neatly tended, bordered by a low, black wrought-iron fence. A keyhole portico covered the front door; the sun brought stained glass in