Psychic Detective 34 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 34 The Mérida Detective
Back in Mérida, Göran moved into Señora Dorothea's bed-and-breakfast where the Papantla acrobats were residing. He shared Pablo Rivera's bed. Jack kept the room in Juan Carlos Hotel, along with Jésus and Xiu Seven-Macaw.
When they returned to the hotel before dusk on Tuesday, a sign in the lobby announced that the bar was closed. Jésus asked why, and was told that there was a staffing problem. The head bartender had either quit or disappeared, and two assistant bartenders called in sick. Jésus suspected a labor dispute. Maybe the proprietor wouldn't give them raises, so they punished him by closing the bar during Holy Week, the busiest time of the year.
"It would be a shame to close the bar during Holy Week, quite damaging to the reputation of Juan Carlos Hotel," Jésus told the man in charge. "You're the proprietor. There must be some way you can make peace with your bartenders." He offered to tend bar for two or three evenings, time enough for him to reconcile with the bartenders, or hire new ones. He didn't discuss compensation— he just offered to help out. Jésus had his reasons. First, he wanted to test the moral fiber of the proprietor. If he worked without pay, that would be a sign that he should find a way to help his fellow bartenders in their labor dispute. He suspected, in fact, that he wouldn't get paid, but never mind about that. His second, more important reason was that he wanted to make friends with a group of cops who hung out in the bar with beer or tequila on weeknights around eight o'clock. He was especially interested in the oldest officer, a man in his fifties, a detective.
Jésus knew he had to tread carefully. On his first evening in the bar, when he was there with Göran and Jack, two feminish maricónes approached the bartender and three of the cops dropped their beer bottles to the floor. Homophobic slurs accompanied the clash of brown breaking glass. While the bartender swept up shards with a broom and a dustpan, the two mariposas beat a retreat from the bar. Jésus did not fail to notice that the oldest officer, the detective, did not participate in his colleagues symbolic gay-bashing, nor did he laugh at their jokes. Jésus and Göran stood mute, but Jack remarked, in the safety of English, "the sun also rises and sets, and glides back to where it rises."
Jésus knew what to do on this occasion. He brought a bottle of Patrón tequila plata to their table, and four shot-glasses. —Etas noche, caballeros, beber en la casa, he said, "Tonight, gentlemen, you drink on the house." —Pero si rompes las grafas, no voy a limpiar el desastre. "But if you break the glasses, I won't clean up the mess."
Patrón plata was the most expensive tequila in the bar, so the cops were in no position to take exception to Jésus's impertinence, unwilling (as they were) to reject such a generous gift. The detective and Jésus exchanged gaydarish glances, unnoticed by the others, who asked if he was from Sonora or one of the other northern states. —Yo vivo en Minnesota y trabajo en Wisconsin, Jésus said.
—Americano?
The detective seemed relieved that as an American, Jésus was out of bounds for gratuitous taunting by the other cops. Besides, he had heard a rumor that Jésus's two companions were lawmen, and one of them was a sheriff— secrets that had leaked from the registration desk. The youngest cop asked— rather indiscreetly— if Jésus was working under cover. "Oh, no," he replied in Spanish, "I really am a bartender. The hotel's barmen went on strike, so I'm volunteering as a favor to the owner, and to all of us, to keep the bar open through Holy Week."
"In that case, no one will criticize you for your generosity with the proprietor's tequila," one of the cops said.
"I'll cover the cost with my tips," Jésus retorted. "I'm not working here to make money. I own half-interest in the saloon where I tend bar in Wisconsin."
The bar was busy that evening, but Jésus chatted up his new friends whenever there was a lull. When the tequila bottle was empty, the three younger cops went home in high spirits. The detective moved to a stool at the counter, where Jésus served him Italian coffee. "I don't want you drunk, I want you sober," he said. "Do coppers in Mérida have names? I won't spend the night with you if I don't know your name."
"Salvador Marcos Gutierez."
"Wow, Jésus Salvador, what a pair for Holy Week... Jésusalvadorus," Jésus said, running the names together in a suggestively infixed ungrammatical dvandva compound.
Salvador was flattered to be propositioned brazenly by a good-looking twenty-something who, for his part, thought it unnecessary to mention that he had sharpened his wit tending bar in a gay saloon. The bar in Juan Carlos quietened around 11:00 PM, so Jésus closed early and led Salvador to his suite. From the balcony they watched Pablo and the other Paplanta acrobats engage in mock-battle on twelve-foot stilts. "After all these years, I've never been in the rooms of Juan Carlos," Salvador said. "I hadn't realized that the balcony gives such an excellent view of the Square."
Jésus waved to Göran, Jack, and Xiu in the crowd below. "The blond guy is Göran, my boyfriend, though this week he's making it with one of the Paplantas," he explained when Salvador asked. "You'll be meeting Jack and Xiu later, since they'll be sharing the other bed." Salvador eyed Jack with erotic interest.
Courtship began in earnest under the showerhead, with Salvador's sudsy lavishment of Jésus's wiry hard body. He calculated his partner's physical strength (an occupational habit); it was less than his own, but Jésus possessed an inner feistiness that would make him a formidable foe in a fight — not forgetting that they were paired for romance, not combat.
As a fellow Latino, Jésus knew that Salvador wouldn't consent to be a maricón— a fairy. He could fuck and keep his machismo, but getting fucked was another matter. Still, he could make Salvador work for it. Jésus let Salvador's hands roam freely, forbidding nothing, but he gave what he got, a prelude to foreplay in bed, which seemed a prolonged wrestling for dominance, except for rest periods when they kissed romantically. "I get it that you're macho," Salvador said at last, "but Jésus, we can't have sex until one of us donates his culo to the cause. How about it, Jésus? Take one for the team!"
"Why don't you take one for the team?" Jesus retorted, in a voice less emphatic than Salvador's, for he was thinking about his ultimate goal, to win a Mexican cop as an ally in their manhunt for Albino.
"You're the one with the cute ass," Salvador said. "If Cupid were in charge, he's say it was your duty to give it up."
They wrestled some more in a lovers' embrace. Salvador pinned Jésus on his back and lept between his legs. Suddenly he felt Jésus relax; he frog-legged, resting his ankles on Salvador's shoulders. Salvador gave him his policeman-gaze and a finger lubed for greasing the skids. Jésus's groans were music to Salvador's ears when he nailed him, nailed him. It was, after all, Holy Week. Salvador fucked triumphantly and said that Jésus had the snuggliest culo in Mérida; not that he'd tried them all, or many, but without superlatives, the praise of a lover is faint.
Salvador had two strengths in bed. One was endurance, as Jésus discovered to his dismay, and then to his delight. He fucked long enough to retrofit Jésus's culo to suit the contours of his cock, such that Jésus experienced Salvador as an extension of his own being. Salvador's second strength was psychology. In this he was a natural: "You're uglissimo as a caterpillar, Jésus, but together we're a cocoon from which you will metamorphose into a beautiful butterfly." His whispered words of endearment were all about transformation into Mericopa. "A body like yours was meant to be shared with other men. The inside is even sexier than the outside. It's a waste of nature to keep it to yourself. Make the metamorphosis, Jésus. Become Meriposa, and think about me when other men fuck you."
Jésus said he'd make the change.
"And when you do, tell your partners they have me to thank for their pleasure," Salvador said whispered in Jésus's ear.
"Fuck me," Jésus replied.
"When I breed you, you'll fly from your cocoon as Meriposa," Salvador said. He extracted from Jésus some promises that would not have been made had Jésus been less eroticized.
I leave it to the reader to surmise what else transpired between Jésus and Salvador that night, and what transpired between Jack and Xiu in the neighboring bed. At dawn, Jésus awoke to the sound of sheets rustling and bedsprings squeaking in the next bed. He lay half-asleep on his side, with his back to his bedmate, who clasped him in a one-arm embrace while his warm erect cock frotted his cleft. Jésus parted his legs and admitted the probing cock. His shagmate guided him face-down and fucked. They got a romantic rhythm going. Only then did Jésus look to his left and to see Salvador fucking Jack in the same position. That's when he realized that he was getting fucked by Xiu. Salvador and Xiu had changed places in the night. Jésus scuttled away, to Xiu's dismay, but then he lay on his back and invited Xiu to mission him. The lightweight Maya
Breakfast in México is the same as dinner in America. One reason why Mexicans are physically fit compared to Americans is that they eat their big meal in the morning and work off the calories during the day. The Juan Carlos Hotel offered their guests a lavish mexicano breakfast: black bean chilaquiles, burritos, huevos rancheros (eggs sunny-side up) with chorizo and chile sauce, migas tepitana, pasta incaciata, sausage-and-egg tostades, chicken mole, guacamole garnished with the flavor of the day (today's mix was cranberries and raisins), blackberry sticky buns, café italiano and café americano, and peach cobbler for desert. For American guests there were pancakes and waffles, but by this time Jack had gone native, as Göran would have done had he not been roiling the sheets with Pablo and two other Papantla acrobats at Señora Dorothea's bed-and-breakfast.
During breakfast, Jésus announced that he had worked out the problem of the missing bartenders. It was a two-part mystery. First, the proprietor' demanded that all staff members surrender their tips so that the money could be distributed equally, but in fact he kept sixty percent of the money himself and distributed forty percent to the staff. Second, the man who called himself the proprietor' wasn't really the hotel owner. He was hired to be the manager three months earlier, and started his scam during his first week on the job. "With a manager like that, Juan Carlos is bound to go downhill," Jésus said. "I wouldn't want to see that happen to the finest hotel in Mérida."
Salvador asked Jésus if he wanted to speak to the owner.
"You're the detective, Salvador," Jésus said. "It's your case now, if you want it. It would put you in good grace with one of Mérida's leading businessmen. He's a victim in this scam, too, just as much as his staff. Keep my name out of it, if you can. Or if you can't, you can that you put me in the bar as an undercover informant."
"You guys aren't here on vacation, are you?— you two and Göran," Salvador said.
"We're on a working' vacation," Jack replied. "We're on the trail of a serial killer who was seen in Uxmal two days ago. He's killed twenty men that we know of, in three states— Minnesota, South Dakota, and Oregon. There might be other victims in Wyoming and Idaho. I've prepared a flash-drive that gives all our information. The killings go back to 2009, maybe earlier. We call the killer Albino', but we've identified him as a failed anthropologist named Howard Coleman. Originally there were two killers, but we caught one of them. Much of the information is confidential, but I'll give it to you if you'll follow up on the case. Naturally we have no authority in México."
"We get our fair share of murders in Yucatán," Salvador said.
"Have there been any killings that look like imitations of Aztec or Maya sacrifice? Bodies with a heart torn out, or skin flayed off, or a head stuck on a pole, that sort of thing?" Jack asked.
"We thought they were the work of a new gang of drug dealers," Salvador said. "They've been filtering into Yucatán from the border states up north. It's a nightmare for the tourist industry here, so we've tried to keep it confidential."
"It's a complex case," Jack said. "It will take all day to go over my computer files. We can pick up Göran at Señora Dorothea's, and review it at the police station. Jésus and Xiu are witnesses, too. Perhaps we can call them in later, if we need them, but for now we should consider it confidential police business."
Salvador was pleased with Jack's discretion and deference. He valued competence in a fellow detective who was handing him a career-building case on a silver platter. Salvador and the Mérida police chief spent the day with Jack and Göran, going over the `Albino' files and deciding on strategies hunt him down. The Mexican lawmen appreciated that the FBI would never have shared this information.
"We're planning to visit Chichen Itza on Easter Sunday," Jack said. "We think that Albino might be there, too."
"Ah, yes, to seen the serpent of El Castillo," the Police Chief said. "That makes sense. This year Holy Week coincides with spring equinox. There will be thousands of people at Chichen Itza. You might want to get there early."
Jack was inclined to agree, but Göran prevented him. "Pablo wants us to stay for the Papantla acrobatics on Good Friday," he said. That's when they're performing the Aztec creation myth, their most important pageant. Pablo's playing the part of Ometéotl-Omecíhuatl, the father- mother of the Cosmos. They'll be doing it again at Chichen Itza, on Easter, but I promised him we'd watch both performances."