Free The Dream Ender by Dorien Grey

carry me?”
    “Sure!” he said, undaunted.
    *
    Just before dinner, Mario called to say the guy he’d mentioned to me—Allen somebody—had been in for Happy Hour, and Mario had given him my work number. The guy had said he’d call.
    Not having heard anything from him by half-past ten Thursday morning, I took out the list of the Male Call’s fired bartenders. I dialed the number Brewer had given me for the first name on the list, Ted Murray. No answer and no machine. I figured if he was working at another bar, he might still be sleeping, so I made a note to call later.
    Even though I’d put Daddy-O’s on our Friday bar tour, I decided that as long as I was on the phone, I’d try to give Scotty DeVose a call and maybe be able to substitute another bar on Friday. However, I got a “the number you have reached is no longer in service” message, and information had no new number for him. I knew Daddy-O’s didn’t open until around four, so made a note to call there when I got home to see if Scotty was still around.
    I’d already talked to Val and planned to talk to Ray Croft during our bar rounds on Friday. The last name on the list was Clayton Poole, the one Brewer thought might have left town. His number, too, was disconnected, and again, information didn’t have a new number for him.
    I took an early lunch then tried Ted Murray’s number again. I was in luck.
    “Yeah?” a voice said after the third ring.
    “Ted Murray?” I asked.
    “Yeah? Who’s this?”
    “My name’s Dick Hardesty,” I said, “and I’m a private investigator. I understand you worked at the Male Call.”
    “Yeah? So?”
    “So, I’m checking with everyone I can locate from the Male Call about these rumors of someone from there deliberately spreading AIDS. Bartenders hear everything, and I wondered what you might have heard.”
    “Hell, you know rumors. I normally just ignore ’em, but this one’s coming out of the woodwork. I’m at the Tool Shed now, and I’m still hearing ’em.”
    “Any specifics?”
    “Like I said, you know rumors—they’re pretty short on specifics. But they all involve the Male Call.”
    “Any idea why?”
    “You’ve been there, right?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Well, then, you know it’s almost a glorified bath house for all the sex that went on there before they closed the back room. You remember how dark that back room was? Two lousy little twenty-five-watt light bulbs, plus any light that might come in when the doors opened.”
    I didn’t tell him I’d never actually been in the back room, but I did remember the dark hallway and thought that even opening the door all the way wouldn’t have let in much additional light.
    “Well, somebody was always unscrewing the two bulbs so the room would be pitch black—everything’s done by feel, if you know what I mean. There might be ten, fifteen guys in there at any one time. Not knowing who you’re with adds to the mystery, I guess. Carl always threw a shit fit when that happened—fire laws say every room has to have some sort of illumination.
    “Anyway, I started hearing stories from guys who’d been in the back room when all the lights were out saying that someone was going around screwing guys in the pitch dark, then whispering, ‘And now you’re dead,’ after he’d finished.”
    “And nobody wondered what he meant by that?” I asked.
    “Who knows why anybody says anything?”
    “Any idea who it was?”
    “Hard to tell in the dark, other than that the guy was really big. The Male Call’s got a lot of really big guys as regulars, and a lot of them were in and out of the room. But I’ll bet you anything it was Cal Hysong.”
    I was beginning to suspect that might be a fairly safe bet. But whether it was Hysong or not, if what Murray said was true it would clinch both the rumors of someone deliberately spreading AIDS and the tie-in to the Male Call. I couldn’t be sure Val wasn’t just saying it to get back at Brewer for firing him, but