Chapter 39
Two crocheted afghan blankets covered the couch. Kat sat on the small space between them. Anthony Parker tossed his yellow hard hat onto a spare chair. He took off one work glove, then the other. He carefully put them on the coffee table, as though this was a task of great importance. Kat let her eyes wander around the apartment. The lighting was poor, but maybe that had something to do with the fact that Anthony Parker had switched on only one dim lamp. The furniture was old and made of wood. There was a console TV on top of a bureau. The wallpaper was busy blue chinoiserie with egrets and trees and water scenes.
“This was my mother’s place,” he said by way of explanation.
Kat nodded.
“She died last year.”
“I’m sorry,” Kat said, because that was what you said under such circumstances and she couldn’t think of anything else right now.
Her entire body felt numb.
Anthony “Sugar” Parker sat across from her. He was, she guessed, in his late fifties or early sixties. When he met her eyes, it was almost too much. Kat had to angle her body away, just a little, just enough so that they weren’t so face-to-face. Anthony Parker—Sugar?—looked so damned normal. His height and build would be listed on a police blotter as average. He had a nice face, but nothing special or even feminine.
“You can imagine my shock at seeing you,” Parker said.
“Yeah, well, I think I may have you beat in that area.”
“Fair enough. So you didn’t know I was a man?”
Kat shook her head. “I’d guess you’d call this my personal Crying Game moment.”
He smiled. “You look like your father.”
“Yeah, I get that a lot.”
“You also sound like him. He always used humor to deflect.” Parker smiled. “He made me laugh.”
“My father did?”
“Yes.”
“You and my father,” she said, with a shake of her head.
“Yes.”
“I’m having trouble believing it.”
“I understand.”
“So are you telling me my father was gay?”
“I’m not defining him.”
“But you two were . . . ?” Kat made her hands go back and forth in a near clap.
“We were together, yes.”
Kat closed her eyes and tried not to make a face.
“It’s been nearly twenty years,” Parker said. “Why are you here now?”
“I just found out about you two.”
“How?”
She shook it off. “It’s not important.”
“Don’t be angry with him. He loved you. He loved all of you.”
“Including you,” Kat half snapped. “The man was just so full of love.”
“I know that you’re in shock. Would it be better if I were a woman?”
Kat said nothing.
“You have to understand what it was like for him,” Parker said.
“Could you just answer my question?” Kat said. “Was he gay or not?”
“Does it matter?” Parker shifted in his seat. “Would you think less of him if he was?”
She wasn’t sure what to say. She had so many questions, and yet maybe all of this was indeed beside the point. “He lived a lie,” she said.
“Yes.” Parker tilted his head to the side. “Think about how horrible that is, Kat. He loved you. He loved your brothers. He even loved your mother. But you know the world he grew up in. He fought what he knew for a long, long time until it consumed him. It doesn’t change who he was. It doesn’t make him any less manly or any less a cop or any less of the things you think he is. What else could he do?”
“He could have divorced my mother, for one thing.”
“He suggested it.”
That surprised her. “What?”
“For her sake, really. But your mother didn’t want it.”
“Wait, are you saying my mother knew about you?”
Parker looked down at the floor. “I don’t know. What happens with something like this, with a huge secret you can’t let anyone know, everyone starts living the lie. He deceived you, sure, but you also didn’t want to see. It corrupts everyone.”
“Yet he asked her for a divorce?”
“No. Like I said, he suggested it. For her sake. But you know your neighborhood. Where would your mother go from there? And where would he go? It wasn’t as though he could leave her and let the world know about us. Today, it’s better than it was twenty years ago, but even now, could you imagine it?”
She couldn’t.
“How long were you two”—she still couldn’t believe it—“together?”
“Fourteen years.”
Another jolt. She had been a child when it started. “Fourteen years?”
“Yes.”
“And you two were able to keep it secret all that time?”
Something dark crossed his face. “We tried. Your father had a place on Central Park West. We would meet up there.”
Kat’s head started to swim. “On Sixty-Seventh Street?”
“Yes.”
Her eyes closed. Her apartment now. The betrayal just grew and grew, and yet should it be worse because it was a man? No. Kat had prided herself on being more open-minded, right? When she assumed her father had a mistress, she had been upset but understanding.
Why should it be worse now?
“Then I got a place in Red Hook,” Parker said. “We’d go there. We traveled together a lot. You probably remember. He’d pretend to be away with friends or on some kind of bender.”
“And you cross-dressed?”
“Yes. I think it was easier for him. Being with, in some ways, a woman. Freaky in his world was still better than being a faggot, you know what I’m saying?”
Kat didn’t respond.
“And I was in drag when we first met. He busted a club I was working in. Beat me up. Such rage. Called me an abomination. I remember there were tears in his eyes even as he was hitting me with his fists. When you see a man with such rage, it is almost like he’s beating himself up, do you know what I mean?”
Again Kat didn’t respond.
“Anyway, he visited me in the hospital. At first, he said it was just to make sure I didn’t talk, you know, like he was still threatening me. But we both knew. It didn’t happen fast. But he lived in such pain. I mean, it came off him in waves. I know you probably want to hate him right now.”
“I don’t hate him,” Kat said in a voice that she barely recognized as her own. “I feel sorry for him.”
“People are always talking about fighting for gay rights and acceptance. But that isn’t really what a lot of us are after. It’s the freedom to be authentic. It’s living honestly. It is so hard to live a life where you can’t be what you are. Your father lived under that horrible cloud for his entire life. He feared being exposed more than anything, and yet he couldn’t let me go. He lived a lie and he lived in terror that someone would find out about that lie.”
Kat saw it now. “But someone did find out, didn’t they?”
Sugar—suddenly, Kat was seeing him as Sugar, not Anthony Parker—nodded.
It was obvious now, wasn’t it? Tessie knew about it. People had seen them together. To the neighbors, it meant her father had a thing for black prostitutes. But to someone savvier, someone who could use the information for his own good, it would mean something different.
It would mean an “understanding.”
“A lowlife thug named Cozone gave me your address,” Kat said. “He found out about the two of you, didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“A month or two before your father’s murder.”
Kat sat up, pushing aside the fact that she was the daughter, taking on the cop role. “So my father was onto Cozone. He was getting close. Cozone probably sent men to follow him. Dig up dirt, if they could. Something he could leverage to stop the investigation.”
Sugar didn’t nod. He didn’t have to. Kat looked at him.
“Sugar?”