Later in the morning I woke up in my bed with a heavy head, no doubt the result of my excesses at the party and at The Depot. There seemed little point in vowing to ‘never do that again’, as past experience had taught just how hollow those words could be.

It was something of a shock to the system to realise that the morning had not yet reached double digits, and I was momentarily impressed by my own stamina. That is, until I sat up and the room around me proceeded to spin in ungainly fashion. I moaned low and slowly rose to my feet, stumbling out to the kitchen in my boxers, where I fixed a cup of coffee.

While the jug boiled, I reflected over the evening; I’d broken up with Drew (well, was reasonably sure I had), had witnessed Goldie get the better of Nicky, though suspected that Nicky’s retaliation would be swift and terrible, and had learned that a hitherto unknown connection existed between Michael and ‘Count’ Sevastian Von Dahl. All in all, a fairly typical evening.

After the Revitalising Cup of Coffee there came the Revitalising Shower, followed by the Frustrating Search for a Clean T-shirt. In a scene reminiscent of the film Raiders of the Lost Ark, complete with cobwebs I might add, I dug through the wardrobe furiously until at last I settled upon a vintage purple coloured polo top.

“Yes,” I replied with a warm smile. “I’m here to see Leo Clarke. Could you tell me where I might find him?”

“Um… I’m kinda;’ new here,” he confessed sheepishly. “Can you tell me what area he works in? What he looks like?”

“He’s one of the managers,” I said. “And he looks like an arsehole with a tie.”

His face brightened. “Oh yeah!” the youth – who’s name badge dubbed him Kevin - cried with wide-eyed realisation. “I know who you mean,” he said, his dreadlocks bouncing as he nodded enthusiastically. “He’s walking the floor somewhere,” he informed me, gesturing behind him, to the rows of aisles.

“Thanks, Kevin, you’ve been fabulous,” I said gaily, and made my way towards the aisles. I walked along the thoroughfare at the bottom of the aisles, near the checkout points. As I passed each aisle, I looked down its length, scanning them for Leo. Eventually I found him.

Pushing back my shoulders and setting my Attititude-O-Meter to ‘Scary-Son-of-a-Bitch’, I marched down the aisle while Leo, unaware of my presence, concerned himself with the task of straightening a display of toilet paper as though he were performing brain surgery.

As I drew along side of him, and he remained oblivious, I spoke up: “Huh… how appropriate,” I began and Leo jumped, startled, then turned towards me. “I find a piece of shit hanging around the toilet paper aisle.”

Leo’s eyes grew large and despite the fact that he was three inches taller, and considerably broader than I, not to mention between ten and fifteen kilograms heavier, he appeared remarkably agitated.

“Um… Puck,” he mumbled, looking around the aisle, perhaps searching for any indication that I’d brought a pose of bouncers along with me.

I stepped closer to him. “Let’s have a little chat… And relax, Leo, I’m here alone,” I told him. “This time.”

He visibly relaxed, his shoulders dropping an inch or two. “Puck… I’m working…. I can’t really talk here…”

But I cut him off: “Michael told me everything, Leo,” I said, lying him while looking him in the eye. “You called him on Monday morning – drunk out of your skull,” I reminded him. “And then you rocked up to his flat…”

Leo’s eyes bugged out, as if on stalks. “Oh… ok,” he said thoughtfully. “Didn’t know he’d regained consciousness. That’s good news,” Leo added, shifting uncomfortably as he stood, glancing at he passing shoppers as they meandered down the aisle. I offered no further comment, preferring him to believe the lie.

“Look... we can talk, but not here,” he said. “Outside the store, ok? In a couple of minutes. I just can’t risk it in here, y’know what I’m saying…?”

“Fine,” I replied. “Two minutes, Leo. But you keep me waiting and I’ll come back in. And you so do not want that to happen – trust me.”

“Ok, Ok,” he said agreeing, and I noted the small beads of sweat popping out on his forehead.

I used her concern as a pretext to suggest that we meet for coffee at Bubble Butt in about an hour’s time. Lydia, sounding harried but otherwise friendly enough, agreed to the meeting. I told her I’d be sitting at one of the table outside the café and gave a rough description of my attire and appearance.

I was just getting off the phone to her when Leo stepped out of the automatic sliding doors of the supermarket. He passed me and kept walking by, giving me a sideways glance. I rolled my eyes as he went by, but played along – clearly he was feeling somewhat precious about risking exposing his sexual identity at his work place. Personally, I found it hard to fathom why – it was common knowledge in the Gay World that Wednesday nights was the night to go shopping if you were a gay guy and looking to pick up, as it seemed every gay guy in the Pink Triangle did his shopping on Wednesdays nights. Hell, I knew gay guys who dressed up and so forth, who put more effort into preparing for Wednesday nights than they did for a night out at The Depot or The Commercial Hotel.

I followed Leo across a small side street to a park. We took up a seat on a bench where he turned to me and said: “How is he? How is Michael? Will they let me see him?”

“Whoa!” I cried. “Before you have any chance at all of seeing Michael, you have to tell me what I want to know,” I informed him.

He considered this for a moment, then nodded. “OK, shoot.”

“Tell me what happened. The night you went to Michael’s flat – tell me everything,” I demanded.

I was pursuing the articles then chuckling at the ‘personals’ ads., while waiting for Lydia Ludvich to arrive. A café latte sat near my right hand as I held a smoldering cigarette.

It was just reaching midday, and the sun was hot and the sky was cloudless and a washed out shade of blue, signaling another hot Melburnian day.

I’d already taken a call from Desi on my mobile not long after arriving at Bubble Butt. She was using her lunch hour to dash down to the Alfred Hospital, via taxi, so as to visit Michael. Depending on how long my conversation with Lydia took, there was a chance I could catch Desi at the hospital before she went back to work.

Putting the copy of MCV aside, I reflected on the conversation with Leo Clarke as I sipped the extremely good café latte.

According to Leo, he had gone out on an all-night bender with a couple of mates, and ended up at The Peel, a gay pub in Collingwood, until it had closed at around six o’clock on Monday morning. Bursting at the seems with booze and remorse, Leo found himself sending text messages to Michael throughout the night before finally succumbing to his own desires and phoning Michael’s mobile a little after 6:00am.

When he didn’t get an answer, Leo decided to take a cab across the city to his flat in Balaclava, several blocks from Michael’s apartment. But only a couple of minutes from his final destination, Leo had the driver pull over and let him out on one of the main streets in East St.Kilda. From there, Leo walked back towards Michael’s place, and on the way he phoned him one more time. This was just before the unseasonable storm hit inner-suburban Melbourne.

Once again, Leo explained that his call went unanswered. The storm broke and he was drenched by the time he reached Michael’s apartment, as the sun struggled to rise in the morning sky.

Leo also admitted that aside from being putridly drunk, he’d also consumed a more than generous amount of Special K, or ketamine, a drug often used by veterinary surgeons in sedation larger animals, such as horses. Combined with vast oceans of alcohol, the effect of the drug can be (depending on the person) nothing short of stupefying.

When Leo go to the apartment block, he walked down the side of the building on which Michael’s balcony could be located. Leo could vaguely recall calling out Michael’s name once or twice… then he hopped over the railing of the balcony and tried to French Windows. Although he claimed later to be surprised, he was in no state at the time to be amazed to find them unlocked.

He went on into Michael’s bedroom. He found the object of his unrequited obsession lying on top of the bed, fully dressed and apparently not stirred in the least by Leo’s rude arrival. Leo closed the French Windows behind him, staggered to the bed and fell awkwardly to one side of it, where he leant against the bed and proceeded to chat to Michael at length about how sorry he was, regarding their break up and the reasons behind it.

Somewhat embarrassed, Leo had told me he could not be sure just how long he’d sat there for. “But it must’ve been awhile,” he said, fishing a packet of cigarettes – Peter Jackson Extra Mild – out of his pocket. “'Cos I had a few fags while I was sitting there, yakking to him… and then I must’ve passed out for a bit,” he explained.

When he woke up – an unknown amount of time later – he found that Michael was lying in the same position on the bed. Heavy headed and reeling from the booze and drugs, Leo crawled over the top of Michael and stretched out beside him and promptly feel asleep.

“…. And that’s the last thing I remember, I swear to you,” Leo cried. “Then I woke up about 9.20am and just freaked out, because I was s’ppose to be at work by 9:00am,” Leo had revealed.

I digested all he told me with a sense of quiet skepticism, and yet so far as I could discern, Leo had been completely honest with me; his account of events meshed with what I’d pieced together myself, based on the times of his voicemail messages to Michael’s phone, the placement of the dirt on the doona, the presence of the three Peter Jackson cigarette butts in the ashtray by the bed – it all made sense. But still, I did not trust Leo Clarke.

“When I left, Michael was sleeping like a lamb, I promise you,” Leo said earnestly. “Don’t think he’d moved a muscle in the time I was there…”

“Sounds like it was lucky you woke up and got to work at all,” I mused.

He shook his head. “Oh no, no, it wasn’t luck… well... not luck exactly,” he cried, and I gave him a puzzled look. “When I heard the door to the apartment slam shut it woke me up… I saw the time on my mobile phone, freaked, and just bolted -- partly because I was late for work, but mainly because if Michael woke up and saw me there, I knew I’d be in deep shit.”

I frowned. “The apartment door woke you up?” I echoed him, and Leo nodded, so I asked him again to repeat what time he’d left the flat.

“9:20am, or thereabouts,” he replied.

But something about this was all wrong. this was where Leo’s story fell apart - the timing was completely off.

“It can’t have been 9.20am,” I informed him, but he remained insistent, and while I disliked the guy intensely, my Bullshit-O-Meter wasn’t registering even the faintest sniff of crap in his tale. That could only mean one of two other possibilities: someone else, someone as yet unknown to any of us, had entered the apartment at 9:20am, thereby disturbing Leo from his slumber and sending him scurrying away; or, that Alexander had been wrong about the time he’d returned from the lab to the apartment – and not just a little bit wrong, but wrong by some two hours; either wrong, or Alexander had outright lied.

I reminded myself as to why people lied: to keep something hidden. If Alexander had lied, what was he trying to hide?

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