Psychic Detective 12 By Jake Preston
This is a work of erotic gay fiction, intended for readers who enjoy a murder mystery in which fully developed characters interact sexually and in other ways. Their sexual encounters are sometimes romantic, sometimes recreational, sometimes spiritual, and almost always described explicitly. My attention is equally divided between narrative, character development, and sex scenes. If you don't care for this combination, there are many other excellent "nifty" stories to choose from. And remember that while nifty stories are free, maintaining a website is not. Please think about donating at http://donate.nifty.org/donate.html
Writing is usually a solitary avocation, but not necessarily so on nifty.org, where a longer story appears in installments. If my characters and my story grab your attention, you can always intervene with suggestions for improvements. All sincere comments will get a response!
Jake, at jemtling@gmail.com
Chapter 12 Laramie
The next day Jack Jackson, Göran Svenson, Red Hawk, and Anna Ravitch met the elders in Tribal Council. Jack did the talking. What impressed them most was Jack's account of Göran's ritual mourning and his vision. They dispatched Jack and Göran to Oregon. They promised to communicate with the Nez Persé elders about their arrival. "Be sure to stay at nice hotels, eat at good restaurants, and buy anything that you need," they said. They gave Jack a tribal credit card. "Who would have guessed that the tribal elders were so up-to-date with the modern world?" Göran remarked to Jack. "I've never seen a corporate credit card before!"
"I wouldn't get too excited about that, Göran," Jack said. "We'll be keeping a low profile and mingling with the natives, especially the Wallowa Band" (he meant one of the Nez Persé tribal clans). "The only way to get information is to mix with the people," he said, telling Göran something that he already knew. Jack drove while Göran worked on the crime report on his laptop, in constant communication with Red Hawk, who worked on details at his end.
After driving south and west for three hours, they reached Laramie, Wyoming, early in the afternoon, and took a room at Hilton Garden Inn on Grand Avenue, close to the University of Wyoming. "We need to visit the places where Matthew Shepard lived and died," Svenson said. "This isn't tourism. We must try to understand the victims and perpetrators of hate crimes."
They walked to the University's building of Arts and Sciences, and approached the 'Matthew Shepard bench', hedged between two white granite blocks at the edge of the plaza. At the center of the back, a small bronze inscription read: "Matthew Wayne Shepard, Dec. 1, 1976 - Oct. 12, 1998. Beloved son, brother, and friend. He continues to make a difference. Peace be with him and all who sit here." Someone had left a bouquet of red roses at the center of the bench, below the bronze inscription. Jack and Göran sat on the either side of the roses.
"Matthew walked across this plaza almost every day when he took classes here," Jack mused. The place was crowded with students carrying books or wearing backpacks. He reached out to Göran. They rested clasped hands on the roses. "Growing up in Lakota, I never had a boyfriend," Jack said. "I wouldn't have dared even ask. I never had a best friend. I thought I was the only gay boy on the Res, maybe the only one in the world."
"I've had too many boyfriends," Göran replied. "I've even used sex as part of an under- cover disguise, to obtain information from a reluctant witness. I hope you won't be scared off by these disorders in my sexual history. Maybe I was looking for someone like you."
"Your past is yours. Mine is mine. But the future is ours, as friends," Jack said. "I've got two conditions, though."
"Whatever they are, I accept them," Göran said.
"First: I don't want to hear details about your past sexual exploits. Second: no more under-cover sex."
'Two men should never go anywhere in Wyoming holding hands.' That was the rule. Students saw Jack and Göran holding hands above the roses on the bench, but gave scant notice. In fact it wasn't an unusual spectacle. The bench was a shrine for many gay couples for whom a trip to Laramie was a pilgrimage, homicidal Wyoming values be damned!
They found the Political Science department on the first floor of the Arts and Sciences Building, where it had the dubious honor of sharing space with the Dean's Office. The place was quiet. Only four faculty members were there. On a bulletin board by door of the departmental office, they saw a "call for papers" poster for the Matthew Shepard Symposium for Social Justice, to be held the following April. Jack popped into the office and asked the secretary for two copies of the symposium brochure. "I've got an idea, Göran. Let's submit a proposal for a paper about investigating a hate crime? It would be nice to come back here in April." That was Jack's Emory education coming out. Svenson agreed.
Outside one office by the door, a portrait of Matthew hung on the corridor wall. Just as they were about to leave, a professor approached them and invited them in. Svenson and Jackson introduced themselves and explained that they were investigating a series of hate-crime murders. She introduced herself as Professor Eileen Mayfield, and said: "I remember Matthew as a free spirit. He had to work hard to earn a B, and he skipped class more than he should have done. As I remember, he took classes for a few months at Catawba College, in North Carolina, but he couldn't transfer any credits because his grades were too low. Even so, he stood out from other PolySci students at Wyoming, because of his international experience, which was extensive for a twenty-year-old boy. He attended high school in Switzerland, and traveled in Europe, in the Middle East, and in North Africa."
"Were you aware that Matthew suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder?" Göran asked. "He was gang-raped by some thugs in Morocco, and he suffered emotional problems ever since. That might explain his erratic behavior as a student."
"I didn't know at the time. Naturally I learned about it after he was killed. I'm relieved that I wasn't too strict with him about absenteeism. I'm sorry I didn't realize how much he was suffering. Maybe I could have helped him. Some of the male students get attached to me as a mother away from home. You know, Sheriff Jackson and Sergeant Svenson, in the late 1990s some feminists recommended rape as an illuminating experience for men. They never understood that men who get raped are nothing like their rapists. They never understood that rape could send a woman or a man on a downward spiral of depression that could end in ruination or death. They reduced rape to a cheap melodrama of the Wild West, as if a victim could be rescued from its consequences at the last moment. The rape of Matthew in Morocco was a prelude to his murder in Laramie."
Before they departed, Svenson mentioned his and Jackson's interest in presenting a paper at the next Matthew Shepard Symposium. "It's a series of multiple murders in three states, each one staged to look like a cult-sacrifice, but our focus will be on certain technical problems in the investigation." Professor Mayfield said she'd be interested. "Normally papers run for twenty minutes each. In your proposal, you should ask for twenty minutes apiece, back to back. That would give you enough time to explain technical issues." They exchanged business cards. It wasn't until then that Svenson and Jackson realized that Mayfield was the professor in charge of organizing the academic side of the conference.
Göran and Jack drove just outside Laramie to Sherman Hills, where they found the wooden buck-fence with three railings, upon which Matthew Shepard was hung, crucifixion- style, barefoot, bleeding, and dying from a skull-fracture, after Aaron McKinney had bludgeoned him with a .357 Magnum pistol on the cold night of October 6, 1998-assisted by another homophobe, Russell Henderson. Memorials of teddy-bears and flowers were long gone, but on a sequence of stones in the ground outlined a cross to mark the spot where Matthew died. Göran and Jack held hands and wept quietly, and passed a handkerchief between them.
Jack and Göran drove around downtown Laramie looking for Fireside Lounge, the bar where Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson tricked Matthew into thinking that they were friends; the bar from which they kidnapped him and led him to slaughter. The bar was closed, and stripped of identifying signs. They looked for a vacant yellow brick building on a corner, with a parking lot across the street. "Except for a bench and a symposium, Laramie has erased Matthew Shepard," Jack said when they looked at the building that once was Fireside Lounge.
"Erasing the visual reminders of Matthew-that has its counterpart in the shifting stories about him," Svenson replied. At first, at their trial, McKinney and Henderson said Matthew had propositioned him and they attacked him in self-defense. They had a gay-panic attack. Then they said their motive was robbery. Then they said they were high on drugs. Next thing you know, Matthew was high on drugs, too, and a drug dealer. His murder was a drug deal gone wrong. Every new version of the story got further away from the essential truth. The motive for murder was homophobia. It was a hate crime."
"But does this teach us anything about the murders at Eight Eagles and Buffalo Run?" Jack asked.
"Just this," Svenson replied: "The culprits in a hate crime have primary supporters and secondary enablers. They have primary supporters in the people who practice and condone bullying, like the Westboro Baptist Church when they picketed Matthew's funeral in Casper. Their enablers are public figures who say that gay men and lesbians have only themselves to blame for choosing a bad lifestyle. People hate gays because their leaders tell them to. Our killers at Eight Eagles and Buffalo Run feel justified in killing young men whom they presume to be gay. They're demented, but they're not off the margin. They're at the extreme end of a sliding scale."
Svenson proposed that they test the homophobic environment in Laramie by going to downtown bars as a gay couple. He was interested in Buck Horn and JR's in particular: "the more redneck the better." Jack vetoed the idea: "If you're gonna be Gilgamesh, always full of adventure, I'll be Enkidu and rein you in. Do you want to drink some beers and get beat up, or shuld we go back to Hilton Garden and make love?"
When two guys decide to make love, a dialogue begins. Who will top, and who will bottom? Often this is predetermined unromantically, as in internet hookups and bar pickups. You know the drill: 'GWM brn/grn athletic hairy 5/11 #155 top ISO similar bottom, any race, some kink, no scat, no fats, d/d free UB2'. But Jack and Göran had a friendship that blossomed into romance. 'Top and bottom' wasn't discussed. Each man assumed that the other was a top. Neither one knew how flexible his partner would be on this point. They'd have to work it out as Nature took her course.
They stood naked in the bathtub under warm water from the shower-head-a good way to melt the ice in a new romance. It's like California wine, always reliable. Göran let Jack soap him frontally first, knowing that he'd been starved for cock for six years. Jack didn't conceal his enthusiasm for its hardened surplus, its light fleshy purple-veined tones, its mushroomy circumcised head, three times different from his own. He liked the asymmetry of Göran's fulsome balls, the left hung perceptibly lower than the right. Hairiness of chest and hardness of torso filled his heart with joy.
Differences attract. When they changed places, Göran expressed the same enthusiasm for Jack's dark-skinned intact cock, his torso-smoothness, his thirty-inch waist, a muscular-gracile litheness that he admired. He sensed that Jack felt a thrill to be touched by another man.
Jack soaped Göran's backside. "Don't be shy about my butt. Get your fingers in there," Göran said. Jack took him up on the invitation by fingering his buns and his cleft. When it was Göran's turn to scrub, he fondled Jack the same way.
They dried each other off. Göran told Jack to lead him by the hand to the bedside. During a passionate kiss-their first-they fell into bed and engaged in energized oral exploration from earlobes to ass-probes. Whenever Jack fondled Göran's butt, Göran moaned and twitched. Jack got increasingly aggressive. When he got up the nerve to insert a finger into Göran's butt, Göran invited Jack to fuck him. They experimented with missioning, doggie-style, sidling, and A- bucking. Göran orgazzed during a sidling. The fragrance of jizz filled the room. Jack face- flopped Göran and humped him furiously until he came.
The 'top-bottom' dialogue started when they lay sidled in après-sexe. Göran asked Jack which position he liked best. "The beast with two backs and two cocks," Jack said. He meant missioning.
He asked what Jack ranked second. "What lowers the roof-beams by raising them high?" Jack asked. "A-frame," Göran replied: "It turns the house upside down. This is the house that Jack built," he laughed, and swatted Göran's butt-cheeks.
Jack got horny. "This is the door to the house that Jack built," he said, and fingered the portal.
Göran fondled Jack's cock: "This is the dormouse that opened the door to the house that Jack built."
"This is the pole that the dormouse used to open the door to the house that Jack built," Jack said. He pushed his pole into Göran.
"This is the sack at the end of the pole that the dormouse used to open the door to the house that Jack built," Göran said. He fondled Jack's scrotum, and added: "These are the pods in the sack at the end of the pole that the dormouse used to open the door to the house that Jack built."
"I've got the seeds that were made in the pods in the sack at the end of the pole that the dormouse used to open the door to the house that Jack built," Jack said. They fucked.
Göran reached down and probed Jack. His fingers massaged Jack's prostate. "This is the oil-can that oozed the seeds in the sack at the end of the pole that the dormouse used to open the door to the house that Jack built."
"These are the Oglala swimmers that swam in the ooze from the oil-can that oiled the seeds in the sack at the end of the pole that the dormouse used to open the door to the house that Jack built," Jack said. He oozed himself into Göran, and pulled out.
Göran: "This is the santorum that was left behind when the Oglala swimmers swam in the ooze from the oil-can that oiled the seeds in the sack at the end of the pole that the dormouse used to open the door to the house that Jack built."
Jack fingered Göran's wet hole. "This is the gape that ejected the santorum that was left behind when the Oglala swimmers swam in the ooze from the oil-can that oiled the seeds in the sack at the end of the pole that the dormouse used to open the door to the house that Jack built."
"I can't top that one, Jack," Göran said.
"That's because I'm the top," Jack laughed.
That's how Göran and Jack managed their 'top-bottom' dialogue.