Lauro shook his head. “Bill never got over what happened to him when he was eighteen. In a way, he was eighteen his whole life. Hurt and scared and ashamed of himself. Waldo used to say we queens are born behind enemy lines and once you figured that out, you had to blend in ‘til you could make a run for the border. The thing is, the more you blended in, the more you could pass for one of them, the harder it was to shake it off when you finally escaped. Now, take me. I was always a little bit of a sissy and Waldo, well, he came out of the womb singing show tunes, you know. We didn’t blend in so good. That made it really hard while we had to live with the breeders, but at least we never figured ourselves for one of them. We always knew who we were and once we got out we could be ourselves and, you know, fuck them.” The anger in those last words was still fresh. “But Billy, he blended in until his dad caught him with that boy’s dick in his mouth. Until then, everyone thought he was a straight jock kid, and it wasn’t just pretending either. He drank the Kool-Aid. He thought if he couldn’t be like them, then something was wrong with him. Even after they threw him away, he thought it was all his fault because he was…”

“Defective,” I said.

Lauro nodded. “Yeah. Like that. Waldo said Billy was held together with spit and baling wire. Waldo was always telling Billy there was nothing wrong with him. He was gay, is all. And Waldo kept telling him that, day after day, month after month, year after year, until Billy almost believed it.”

“Almost?”

“Yeah, almost,” Lauro said. He crossed his legs and leaned back against the couch, like an actor in a play. “Now I’m gonna to tell you something about Bill you have to swear you won’t tell anyone else.”

“I can’t promise that if it’s relevant to my investigation.”

Lauro waved an unconcerned hand at me and plunged on, almost gleefully. “Bill had a secret life.”

“What kind of secret life?”

“Drugs,” he said. “Rough sex. He liked—” he arranged his mouth into a moue, “to be humiliated.”

It bothered me that he was enjoying this.“Yeah, it’s not relevant.”

“Waldo told me,” he continued, oblivious of my disinterest, “but I didn’t believe him until—well, I went to the baths one night and saw Bill laying naked in a bathtub in the orgy room getting pissed on by—”

“As I said, that’s not relevant to my investigation.”

“But this happened when he was already living with Nick. What does that say about their relationship? Bill wouldn’t have needed that if he was happy with the kid.”