“So what if he was? Detective—?”
“Larkin.”
“That’s right. Well, relationships aren’t my cup of tea, as they say.”
“You might want to give your PA a heads-up,” Larkin commented.
Roger colored. “Brian knows that I—look. Andy was a sweet guy, but he was a kid, and this was a lifetime ago. When he stopped calling, I was over it. There were other men. If I had thought for even a moment that something terrible had happened….”
Larkin said, “I’m not interested in hypothetical situations. What’s your relationship to Ricky Goulding.”
Roger looked confused.
“I’m asking you,” Larkin prompted.
“It didn’t sound like a question. Ricky Goulding? I have no idea who that is.”
He’s not lying, Larkin realized in a second of crystalline clarity. “Where did Andrew live.”
“East Village?” Roger asked with a shrug. “No, hang on, Alphabet City, I think. I walked him home once or twice but never stayed. He’d take the subway uptown to my place. I didn’t have a roommate.”
Larkin heard that clue—I didn’t have a roommate—and glanced at Doyle. The connection between them sparked and ignited the energy in the room. However it was that Doyle understood when to cover Larkin, when to step in and when to give space, and perhaps most importantly, how he approached the same mystery from the opposite end and still met Larkin in the middle—that magic happened again.
“Mr. Hunt,” Doyle said, a friendly smile on his face, his posture relaxed with his hands in his pockets. He tilted his head, as if in thought, and asked, “How old are you?”
“Excuse me?”
Doyle shrugged. “College kids usually need roommates to survive. But you didn’t, back then?”
“I’m fifty-two.”
“So that’d make you eight years older than Andrew, if he were alive today?” Doyle continued.
“I suppose so.”
“Jessica had told us you were all in the same graduating class.”
Roger sighed. “Andy was the cutest twink east of the Hudson. A twink is—”
Doyle cut him off with “We’re familiar with the term.”
“Okay, well, Andy was cute, but he was also wholesome white bread, middle America, and still newly out and just realizing what the scene was like after moving to the city. I didn’t want to scare him, being an older man trying to get him in bed. So I lied a little. But I did go to FIT, if you’re wondering.”
“Noted,” Larkin said dryly.
Doyle asked next, “Did you abuse Andrew?”
Roger looked surprised. Surprised and insulted and angry. He asked, in an elite-private-school-upbringing voice, “I beg your pardon?”
“Autopsy reports indicate Andrew suffered from multiple breaks in his fingers, left arm, and within a year of his death, a severely deviated septum.”
Roger was breathing hard, trying and barely succeeding to gain control of himself. He managed to spit out, “The broken nose? I didn’t do that. I didn’t raise a hand to Andy.”
“How’d it happen?” Doyle asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You were fucking him,” Larkin pointed out. “He was smitten. He didn’t tell his roommate what happened, but I think he’d tell you. He’d tell you because it’d be an act of trust, of vulnerability, the foundations necessary for a healthy, long-term relationship. And while you might not have been interested in that, he was.”
