Guilt and Innocence

Chapter 2-2

Archie hadn’t been the only one who’d been anxious at the end of it all. While Mr. APP Westchester dealt with some HR paperwork from the county, I’d decided to sneak out and do a little protective surveillance. In my car, driving at about the same speed I did during the town’s Memorial Day parade most Mays, I’d followed Archie home and waited outside across the street—inconspicuously, I hoped—while Archie had showered and dressed. I’d tracked him back to the diner, too. “You ought to be safe and sound there for the next six hours or so,” I’d whispered at the windshield.

While out that first time, I’d also checked with most of the business owners downtown, to see what they’d witnessed. For a nosy little ‘burg, no one had been aware anything out of the ordinary had happened. The most important interrogation would come with Ralph, himself. I knew where I could find him. I just had to bide my time a bit longer and told my stomach to shush when it rumbled. Suddenly, thanks to the smell wafting out of Dawn’s, I was hungry.

“Hey, Captain Becker.”

Shoot! Now, I was gonna lose my mark.

“Afternoon, Freddie.”

The proprietor of Freddie’s Fabulous Flowers barely met my shoulder in height. His hair was snow-white, what there was left of it. A horseshoe shape from ear to ear, Freddie joked it was why he always had good luck, save for the going bald thing. Currently, he was deadheading the window box geraniums that faced the street opposite the storefront. Freddie had introduced me to the term “deadheading” just recently, when I’d stopped one morning to ask why in hell someone would purposely decapitate their poppies.

“First, dear Justice, let me school you in the many varieties of red flowers.”

“The only bloom I recognize immediately is a rose,” I had said.

Presently, Freddie was all smiles, as usual. “That new cop in town may be yummy, but you’re still tops in my book. Glad to have you back on the beat. You are on the beat, right?” He pulled back one side of my sports coat to check for my badge on the inside pocket and my gun on my hip.

“I am.” I covered up both, thinking how sports coat might be another old man word, while also wondering why I still wore one every day.

Freddie DeVito had been running his flower shop since 1979. At age of forty-nine, he’d decided to live his life as an out and proud gay man. Despite being only five at the time, I remembered the grand opening like it was yesterday. My mother had dragged me there so she could partake in a course on flower arranging. I had no interest in flowers, but even as a boy, I’d been fascinated by Freddie, by his colorful clothes, his even more colorful personality, and especially so when I saw him kiss another man a few years later.

As a teenager, I had looked up to Freddie, too. In the days before the internet, Will and Grace, or Ellen, I considered myself lucky to have a role model and confidant when discussing my burgeoning sexuality, something that seemed totally impossible to do with my own parents. It was nice to be open and honest with someone. It was life-saving, perhaps, and that wasn’t just hyperbole.

A chat wouldn’t hurt, I decided. Since Freddie was always up on the latest gossip. I’d have checked with him later on, anyway. If someone was out to get to Archie for some reason, if something had happened while I was out of town, Freddie might know who, what, and why.

“Ames Preston is fine.” Freddie made a guttural noise of approval. “You think he’s on our team?”

I recalled that one top and bottom comment. “There may have been a hint to support that theory. Have you met him?”

“Just a seductive wave.”

“Him or you? Should I try to set you up?”

“Is he nice?” Freddie asked.

“No.”

“In that case, send him right over.” Freddie did a great Groucho Marx and an even better Mae West. When he combined the two, with the flick of an imaginary cigar and the back and forth of a hip, there was no way to keep a straight face. “There’s that Justice Becker megawatt smile.”

“If anyone can bring it out in me, it’s you, Freddie.”

“So, why aren’t we married, then?”

“Well, you know…”

“The age thing?”

I brushed Freddie’s cheek. “It’s more like the husband thing.” I smiled at Curtis, Freddie’s mate, who had snuck up behind him.

“I have one of those?” Freddie’s hand was over his heart with mock shock, his tongue in his cheek.

“You do.” Slightly hard of hearing, Freddie had obviously missed Curtis’s words and was startled when the love of his life kissed the top of his pink, shiny head. “You do have a husband,” Curtis said louder.

“Do I love him?” Freddie whispered.

“Very much.” Curtis’s hearing was just fine.

“Does he love me?” They were now eye to eye. Though over a decade younger, age had gnarled Curtis a bit. The two said it was from so many years of Curtis having to lean down for kisses.

“He loves you more than anything in this world,” Curtis vowed.

“Ah.” The two kissed then. “Lucky me.”

“Yes,” I said. “Lucky you.”

Freddie’s smile was sincere. He and Curtis would be celebrating thirty-five years of marriage in just a couple of weeks. From all outward appearances, they were as happy as a couple of teenagers. Freddie even watched Curtis walk away to wait on a customer purchasing a bouquet of lilies. Eighty-nine-year-old Freddie was checking out his seventy-six-year-old husband’s ass, much like I had focused on Preston’s just minutes ago. Good for them, I thought.

“You could be so lucky,” Freddie said.

“At my age?”

“I was over fifty when I met the man of my dreams,” Freddie reminded me.

“I feel older than that.”

“Dear boy…” It dawned on me only a man close to ninety would still call me boy. “You think my mind is gone? I know damned well how old you are.”

I knew damned well what was coming next.

“Thirty, fifty, seventy, a hundred…Love and romance can blossom at any age.”

“Oh, yeah?” I’d heard it all before.

“Absolutely.” Freddie motioned toward an etching on the wall just inside the flower shop and recited it aloud. “‘Flowers on a breeze flutter earthbound from the blue. Once a thousand are collected, a love reveals itself, deep, forever and true.’”

How many times had I read the sentiment over the decades? It had been there since the shop first opened. Freddie always claimed it to be an ancient Italian prophecy translated to English and one hundred percent true.

“My love story with Curtis began just one week after putting those words on that wall,” he’d offered to prove its validity twenty some years ago. “The very moment I counted the nine hundred and ninety-ninth and one thousandth flower from my stock, the very moment I picked up a red rose to add to the others, he walked through the door. ‘Are you closed?’ he asked me.

“‘Just about to.’

“‘I need a bouquet of your favorite flowers,’ he said.

“‘My favorite?’ I asked. ‘Why my favorite?’

“‘Why?’ he mimicked. ‘Because, handsome stranger, they’re for you.’”

“Wouldn’t it take a hurricane or a twister to send flowers hurdling through the air?” I’d had a smart mouth in my twenties.

“Justice, Justice, Justice…” To this day, whenever I would balk at the poem and its foolishness, Freddie would set me straight. “Don’t give up. You’re too special to be alone forever. Believe in the wall. Who knows love better than the Italians?”

There were many things to read on Freddie’s wall, including a guide to the proper color rose for the proper occasion—red for romance, lavender for charm, salmon for desire, pink for friendship, white for innocence.

“For those of us who don’t own a flower shop, it seems collecting a thousand might take forever,” I challenged for at least the thousandth time.

“Have you started?” Freddie asked me.

I chose not to respond.

“Then, don’t blame the wall.” Unlike Preston’s, Freddie’s grin was adorable.

“Do I have to do that other part, too?”

Beneath the rhyme about the flowers was another saying, less poetic and right to the point.

Write your wish down every night for a thousand nights and it will come true.

“Couldn’t hurt,” Freddie said. “As for the flowers, I’ll bet the original wording said a thousand petals and got screwed up in translation.”

That was new. Maybe years did matter, after all, leaving Freddie suddenly worried I could run out of them before collecting a thousand posies. “So, I should start with that? How many petals does the average rose have, anyway?” I picked one up from several dozen in a black plastic bucket.

“Ah, you see, Captain, a true romantic would have counted for himself by now.”

“You just now told me petals! And how is tearing roses apart romantic?”

“To scatter on the bed. You’ve read that poem many a time, and yet, you’ve never done that for a lover?”

I stayed silent again, trading my red rose for a white one.

“Maybe I won’t tell how many petals there are.” Freddie crossed his arms over his spindly chest.

“Maybe I don’t care.” I did the same, though I couldn’t help but smile.

“Pish, posh! Maybe you should.”

I felt my smile fade.

“Four to eight.” Freddie replied right away, then. He even brushed my cheek directly afterward.

“Hmm.” It felt nice. “Give me two hundred-fifty long stems, then, just in case. I’ll tear them to shreds and be in love by dinnertime. Why didn’t you change it to petals years ago?”

“If only love worked that way.” Freddie followed me a few steps down the sidewalk. “It takes two people, and it has to be at random.” We didn’t go far. “It has to be unplanned, and someone has to be willing.”

I glanced off into the distance. “I would think flowers falling from the sky would be a sign of the apocalypse or something.” I still had a smart mouth.

“It’s a metaphor,” Freddie insisted. “It means you always have to believe, and sometimes, you also have to put in some effort. Look for beauty in people, not faults. Look for love. Look for the rose. On the other hand, if you don’t plan on falling in love, there’s always sweaty, summer s*x with the new boy with a badge.”

“Shh.” I tried to quiet him.

“I picture you a s****l beast, Justice Becker.”

“Freddie!” I wondered if I could still blush.

“I picture it often, in fact.”

“Not so loud.”

“Was I loud? I really can’t tell.”

“A little,” Curtis said, rejoining us.

“Well…” Freddie did lower his voice. “I was just trying to evoke some sort of emotion in Justice here.”

“Did you succeed?” Curtis mussed my short but dark curly hair, as if my age was just a number, relative, less than his and Freddie’s but inconsequential in any other way.

“We know full well love is something he believes in,” Freddie said softly. “At least you did once.”

* * * *

“Can you love me someday, Justice? Someday…if not now?”

“I love you now, God damn it!”

“Then why can’t we be together?”