Manhattan Lockdown by Paul Batista Page B

begged forgiveness for whatever he’d done that led Jerome to drop him. Gabriel devoutly believed that if anyone would be able to explain to him the vagaries and mysteries of love, and how to deal with the loss of love, it would have been Jerome. After all, Jerome had taught him how to run, how to think, how to relate to and assess other people, and how to spend quiet time listening to music and reading. Now Gabriel had no mentor. And no lover.
    And in the weeks before the murder, Gabriel, for the first time, had experienced the torments and pettiness of jealousy. He had no doubt that Jerome had replaced him with another lover or lovers. He found himself imagining what Jerome was doing and how: Where did Jerome and the new boy or man spend time together? Who had been the seducer? How often were they making love?
    It was three days after Gabriel read the articles in the
Post
and elsewhere, including the Internet and even the West Coast newspapers, that Detective Talbot called him.
    â€œIs this Gabe Hauser?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œI’m a detective with the NYPD.”
    Gabriel felt a rush of anxiety. He was eighteen. He had never once talked to a cop. “Yes,” he said.
    â€œNeed to talk to you about a buddy of yours, Jerome Fletcher.” In Talbot’s grating Brooklyn accent Gabriel for the first time heard the scorn reserved for gay men. The sarcastic words, the malicious tone, and the edge of mockery.
A buddy of yours
.
    Gabriel asked, “Who?”
    â€œGuy named Jerome Fletcher.”
    Gabriel tried to sound respectful, even childlike. “He was a friend of mine.”
    â€œListen, Gabe, we know he was more than a friend. We got his e-mails, texts, voice mails to you, the works. Yours, too.”
    Gabriel said nothing, thinking,
Why would Carol Fletcher give that stuff to the police?
    Detective Talbot said, “We want to help you, and you can help us.”
    â€œI don’t understand.”
    â€œCan you come back to New York? We’ll pay for it.”
    â€œI’ve got finals soon.”
    â€œYour friend was dangerous, Gabe. You’re not the only boy he did what he did to you. Your friend knew other men who liked to do what he did. We want to find them, too. Mr. Fletcher was part of a little club of guys who liked boys.”
    â€œWhat did Mr. Fletcher do?”
    â€œCome on, Gabe. He raped you. He did it to others, including the boy in the motel.”
    Raped
. That word haunted him for years afterwards. When he was in medical school his course in psychiatry described any sex between an adult male and a boy under eighteen as rape and instructed on the troubled, terrible lives that the victims later suffered. Posttraumatic stress disorder, acute anxiety, manic depression, suicidal tendencies.
    In truth, Gabriel had experienced none of that. Over time he did wonder what borders Jerome Fletcher crossed to bring himself to stand naked that day after their first run together and to initiate that first embrace, when Gabriel, his young torso almost hairless, was still gleaming and wet from his shower. As an adult, Gabriel never sought out boys, and there had to be some deep-seated reason for that restraint, some taboo that Jerome Fletcher had set aside and that ultimately killed him in a rancid motel room in the Bronx. Even as an adult, Gabriel wouldn’t apply the word rape to the two years he and Jerome had passionately pursued their afternoons together, often at the Regency on Park Avenue and sometimes in the West End Avenue apartment.
    â€œI wasn’t raped, Mr. Talbot.”
    He knew he was a continent away from New York and couldn’t be forced to return and at that stage in his life didn’t want to go back. New York was where his father had in effect barricaded himself in the grungy apartment on upper Broadway. And it was where the places were to which Jerome Fletcher had introduced him, such asthe grand Metropolitan Museum, the cobblestone