Chapter 2

Mom, by the way, a tiny woman with a ginormous personality, is a part-time librarian. There’s humor in that, as Mom couldn’t keep her mouth shut even if it’d been stapled and Crazy-Glued. I couldn’t picture her shushing anyone so much as egging them on. Knowing Mom, she probably chose the job so she could have endless people to talk to for five minutes at a time. After five minutes, my mom finds people annoying. I’m rarely an exception to that rule.

Anyway, I did become a private eye on purpose; the drag queen thing was by chance. Perhaps fate. I mean, cheek bones like mine don’t grow on trees. And how many thirty-year-old men still have a twenty-eight-inch waist? Sure, the girdle helps, but still.

The funny thing is, the private eye business is how I became a drag queen in the first place. Though I suppose funnyisn’t exactly apt, all things considered—all things being me stuffed inside an oaken soon-to-be-coffin, sloshing around in a rather nicely blended scotch.

See, I was on a case at the time—the time I became a drag queen, that is to say. The case of the cheating husband. Presumably. Theoretically. Allegedly. I mean, my client, husband number one, thought that husband number two was cheating, and so he hired me to prove and/or disprove said presumed, theoretical, alleged belief. I’d already been a detective for three years. Licensed and everything. Trained by the best. Online. I was a barista before that. Starbucks. In person, not online. You do the math, but one and one equals anything is better than working at Starbucks, anything being detective work. FYI, the ad made it look glamorous. FYI, it wasn’t, but it paid the bills and you rarely got scalded by hot milk.

But back to the case.

Arthur, my client, was sixty. His husband, Chad, was twenty-three. Arthur looked like Mister Roper from Three’s Company. Chad looked more like Jack Tripper, John Ritter in his younger days. If you don’t watch TV Land, then, to translate, odds were good that Chad was indeed cheating. Or not. Though ten to one he was. Like I said, good odds. And even better money, easy money. Follow Chad, snap some pictures, pass Go, collect cash. Voilà, and again, easy. Or, again, not. P.S., I didn’t trust Arthur from the get-go. Call it detective’s intuition, but if he was on the up-and-up, I was guessing the up was in the up-to-no-good category. Still, I took his money. Beggars, choosers, blah, blah, blah.

In any case, Chad was at home most days. I took photos of Chad lounging by the pool, mowing the lawn, and gardening. I took photos because Chad did all these things shirtless and because Chad looked like a young version of John Ritter, with an impish grin and a sparkle in his eyes. Not to mention an ample bulge in his too-tight shorts, which often yielded an ample bulge in my slacks, which often resulted in my bulge unbulging itself, which is, yes, a distinct advantage of working alone in your car. And, no, they didn’t mention that in the online detective school ad, but they should have. Just saying.

Anyway, Chad seemed the perfect husband. Emphasis on the perfect. So that left Chad’s nights for him to get up to no good. And Chad’s nights, twice a week, were spent at a local gay bar, the Out-N-Out. On the surface of things, that alone was damning evidence, but Chad wasn’t cruising so much as working those two nights—in heels and a wig. In other words, in drag.

“Why do you think he’s cheating, sir?” I asked Arthur before I took the case.

Arthur shrugged. “He doesn’t have sex with me anymore.”

I paused, not wanting to state the obvious and more wanting the easy cash. I shrugged in reply. Mom always said, if you have nothing nice to say, don’t say anything. A shrug equated to the latter.

So that’s how I wound up at the club. But Chad worked behind stage, behind a locked door, behind a door with a sign that read: MEN IN FROCKS ONLY! Which is to say, I had no access to him, to any sort of evidence that he was cheating. Or not. Though when you’re betting ten-to-one, the one rarely rolls around.

Anyway, long and the short of it, that’s how I became a drag queen. Out of necessity. Fate might’ve had her nasty little hand in all that, but so did Goodwill. Mainly because Goodwill charged by the pound for women’s apparel; fate made me pay in other ways. Namely, slowly dying in a whiskey barrel. Fucking fickle finger of fate, ramming itself up my ass without so much as a dollop of slick lube.

“Why am I applying blush to you, Barry?” Mom asked, after she went blouse shopping with me at Goodwill.