The Dirt Peddler Read Online Free PDF Page B

Tunderew had taken full advantage of the poor guy, though how Fletcher could possibly, as he apparently had done, fall for such an arrogant sonofabitch, I couldn’t imagine. Well, some guys like to be treated like doormats. And I was very curious as to exactly what sort of “research” Fletcher was doing for him. That part was fairly easy to figure out: Dirty Little Minds just happened to be about a character everyone immediately recognized was based on Governor Keene—and Governor Keene had been a client of Craylaw and Collier. I’d be willing to bet that Tunderew had quit his job the minute he knew his book was sold, to avoid being canned. And he had to get rid of poor Larry Fletcher so there wouldn’t be anyone around to verify that Tunderew had been snooping around the company’s files. Whether Fletcher was the blackmailer or not, Tunderew was sending me after him as a warning to keep his mouth shut.
    *
    Jonathan was waiting at the door with my Manhattan—I’d glanced up at our apartment as I walked through the courtyard toward the door and saw him in the window with a spray bottle he used to mist some of the 14,000 plants we’d accumulated from his job at the nursery. Apparently he’d spotted me coming in.
    We exchanged grins and a hug, and as always went directly to the couch to sit down. Jonathan already had his Coke on the coffee table.
    “I saw Randy today at New Eden,” he said, “and asked him over for dinner. I told him Friday, if that’s okay. I would have made it Thursday, but I’ve got class.”
    “Friday’s fine. How’s the Dinsmores’ new house coming along?”
    He took a sip of his Coke. “They’ve already been living there for a couple of months now. We’re just finishing up the yard. We just planted the last of the new trees today.” The look on his face told me he had something else to say, but was hesitant to do so for some reason.
    “Something else?”
    He gave me a quick, small grin.
    “Can I take the car to work Friday? That way I can go directly from work out to New Eden to pick up Randy and bring him home. But that means you’d have to take the bus, and…”
    As usual, we’d had our free hands resting on each other’s thighs, and I gave him a quick squeeze. “You take the bus every day. I think I can manage to do it for one.”
    His smile became a broad grin. “Thanks!” His face changed slightly into his “naughty little boy” look.
    “Ya wanna play a game before dinner?”
    “Sure!”
    Jonathan was very much into the “Let’s Pretend” brand of eroticism, and he’d gotten me pretty much hooked, too. It added a lot of spice—not that we really needed more—to our sex life. Usually they’d be set off by something specific—picking him up from class might spark an infinite number of variations on “The Hitchhiker,” or just coming home from grocery shopping would lead to a rousing “The Manager and the Stock Boy,” or…well, you get the idea. He always kept me on my toes, that’s for sure.
    “What do you want to play?” I noticed that my crotch was already responding enthusiastically to the prospect.
    Jonathan set his Coke aside, got up, took my Manhattan from my hand and set it on the coffee table, then pulled me up from the couch.
    “How about ‘The Hardworking P.I. and the Appreciative Lover’?”
    Sounded good to me.
    *
    I could tell Jonathan was really looking forward to having Randy over for dinner, and I realized with some sense of empathy and maybe a touch of irrational guilt that Jonathan really didn’t have any gay friends of his own—all our friends had been my friends first. He hadn’t been in town all that long when I met him, and he’d been hustling all that time, so he really hadn’t had a chance to make friends. I got the impression that he and Randy hadn’t actually been that close, but it was as close as he got. And I suspected that while Jonathan might not realize it himself, he wanted to let someone know how far he had