P'town Murders: A Bradford Fairfax Murder Mystery Read Free Page A

five long months from May through September, Provincetown endured a throng of visitors so mighty it stopped traffic the entire length of town. The bustle started just after sunup and lasted all night long, barely resting for a few tranquil minutes at the beginning of each day. If you were straight, homophobic, and arriving unaware from the wilds of New Jersey, you might think you'd been plunked down in Sodom. But if you were one of the chosen few, you knew you'd reached the Promised Land.
    After visiting Provincetown it was difficult, if not downright impossible, to go back whence you'd come and resign yourself to coping with 'normality' again. I never want to go home, Judy told her audience that final night in Carnegie Hall. She might have been talking about P'Town. It had an allure that got in your blood and wouldn't leave you alone.
    Residents can tell you that anyone who comes to Provincetown will return before long. Bradford was happy to be made a case in point, returning again and again to the gingerbread houses and salt air, the crowded streets and friendly cafes, the buoys and the boys.
    On his first trip he was just another twinkie lucky enough to have booked a tiny room in one of the town's myriad guesthouses. He'd lodged at Romeo's then, a nondescript but entirely functional abode where any number of boys with limited means have rested their weary heads after long nights spent carousing and indulging in P'Town's thousand-and-one distractions.
    For young Brad, simply being in P'Town had seemed more than enough reason to be thrilled, but whenever people asked where he was staying they looked genuinely distressed by his answer: Those shoes with that dress? their expressions demanded. Impossible!
    He'd just announced the name of his residence to an ebullient crowd partying in the Atlantic House one evening, when a drunken queen in casual wear sidled over and placed an arm over his shoulder. A jeweled finger strayed across Brad's chest, tracing the outline of a boyish nipple through his Banana Republic T-shirt.
    "Don't worry, sweetie," the queen cooed over the din of the bar. "We'll get you into a really..."—the finger strolled across to the other nipple—"... good house next year."
    "But I like where I'm staying," Brad replied, for he hadn't yet learned to recognize a queen out of drag. "They even have chocolate donuts for breakfast."
    He'd thought himself clever, but the horrified faces surrounding Brad told him he'd just committed social hara-kiri.
    "You know nothing!" the queen shrieked, retracting her arm and banishing him with an imperious finger to the outer circle of the bar.
    The queen transformed. Majesty and Presence towered before Bradford where moments before there'd been a dumpy sod in shorts and a shapeless golf shirt.
    The queen's nostrils flared. "Style! Grace! Position! These things matter!" she screamed, as though to say he knew not what dangers lurked.
    She regarded him, eyes narrowed, as the bar shifted nervously. "But," she purred. And then again, "But!" giving the word its fullest meaning. "You're cute. And you're... young."
    The queen faltered, for young is the one thing before which all queens will allow themselves to weaken.
    "So!" She nodded slowly. "Just so. We will give you another chance."
    Breaths were exhaled. The chatter resumed and people laughed again. Brad had been spared. Moreover, he'd been called upon to join the inner circle of a Queen of Some Standing—nothing to snort at for the impudent upstart that he was.
    As Brad was to learn, in every young man's passage into The Life there arrives a moment when he realizes that all is not as it appears. To the uninitiated, The Life may seem a hall of mirrors in which one can be lost forever without a knowledgeable friend or a Wise Queen to act as guide.
    Just so!
    A Wise Queen stands before one, then, disguised in shorts and a T-shirt. A Wizard stalks the glen without his wand. Alice peers into a looking glass and beholds another world