Manhattan Lockdown by Paul Batista Page A

for a rehab in California, Gabriel had the first exciting experience of his life. Jerome Fletcher was a partner in a huge law firm and the father of Bobby Fletcher, one of Gabriel’s classmates. One school night, after a short run in Riverside Park when he was first learning the running that he later pursued throughout his life, Gabriel showered in one of the four bathrooms in the Fletcherapartment. Jerome was in his mid-forties. He had been a track star at Cornell and a serious decathlon athlete who almost qualified for the 1992 Olympic team. He volunteered that spring to help Gabriel train as a distance runner. It was exactly the kind of lonely, demanding sport that Gabriel was born for.
    When Gabriel emerged from his shower after that first run in the park, Jerome Fletcher, with muscles in his legs and arms like chain meshing, was standing naked just outside the door. Gabriel realized in the instant before Jerome embraced him that he had found the excitement, comfort, and love he wanted. As Jerome rubbed his heavily veined, fully engorged penis against his, Gabriel was deliriously happy, somehow freed from the craziness of his mother and father, the wrecked apartment, the insanity of that life.
    Jerome, in love with this boy who was exactly his own son’s age, carried on his affair with Gabriel for two years before arranging to send him to Stanford on a full scholarship. Gabriel felt he had been sent into exile. He wanted to go to Columbia, only fifteen blocks away from Jerome’s apartment, but Jerome’s wife, Carol, who had learned about the affair between her husband and her son’s best friend, insisted that Gabriel leave for the West Coast or she would tell the police and Jerome’s law partners about her husband’s involvement with a boy. Even though Carol Fletcher had no intention of leaving Jerome, she was jealous and angry. Jerome told Gabriel that his wife was deadly serious about the threat, she had pictures of them together in bed, and copies of sweet notes Jerome had regularly slipped into Gabriel’s gym bag. “I’d go to jail for life if the police found out, Gabe. That’s the world we live in. We have to do what she wants.”
    Gabriel spent his first semester at Stanford lovesick and homesick. He was in love with Jerome and called him often at the office. For months Jerome happily took the calls. Then one day Jeromestopped accepting them and stopped sending e-mails and text messages. Gabriel became not only lovesick and homesick, but heartsick as well. The pain was acute; he was obsessed with it.
    And then after two weeks of silence Gabriel received an envelope with no return address. Inside was a copy of the
New York Post
. The headline on the front page read,
Deadly Sex Games of the Rich and Famous
. There were three long articles on a murder, in a pay-by-the-hour Bronx motel next to the Major Deegan Expressway in the Bronx, of the leading corporate partner in the whitest of white-shoe New York law firms. According to the
Post
, Jerome Fletcher had been a frequent guest at the motel under the name Robert Smith. He was found strangled with a belt and stabbed fifteen times, mainly in the face. A seventeen-year-old black boy, who had arrived at the motel just minutes after Robert Smith checked in, was under arrest for the murder. He had several prior arrests for prostitution.
    Jerome’s death was searing to Gabriel. He had lost, violently, a man he loved. He was also angry. Jerome’s cruel and abrupt suspension of the letters, e-mails, the texts, and the cell calls had wounded Gabriel profoundly in the two weeks before the killing. Gabriel had never been in love before Jerome and so had never been spurned or hurt in that way. He had no equipment in his life for dealing with a lover’s rejection, the abrupt and painful fact of separation; he had written a series of e-mails and texts, even a letter, to Jerome that expressed his longing, asked questions, and