It

Curtie, who cared very little about such things, that Hagarty and Mellon had a steady thing going.
Hagarty was a draftsman with an engineering firm in Bangor. Adrian Melon was a freelance writer who published anywhere and everywhere he could — airline magazines, confession magazines, regional magazines, Sunday supplements, sex-letter magazines. He had been working on a novel, but maybe that wasn’t serious — he had been working on it since his third year of college, and that had been twelve years ago.
He had come to Derry to write a piece about the Canal — he was on assignment from NewEngland Byways, a glossy bi-monthly that was published in Concord. Adrian Mellon had taken the assignment because he could squeeze Byways for three weeks’ worth of expense money, including a nice room at the Derry Town House, and gather all the material he needed for the piece in maybe five days. During the other two weeks he could gather enough material for maybe four other regional pieces.
But during that three-week period he met Don Hagarty, and instead of going back to Portland when his three weeks on the cuff were over, he found himself a small apartment on Kossuth Lane. He lived there for only six weeks. Then he moved in with Don Hagarty.
8
That summer, Hagarty told Harold Gardener and Jeff Reeves, was the happiest summer of his life — he should have been on the lookout, he said; he should have known that God only puts a rug under guys like him in order to jerk it out from under their feet.
The only shadow, he said, was Adrian’s extravagantly partisan reaction to Derry. He had a tee-shirt which said MAINE AIN’T BAD BUT DERRY’S GREAT! He had a Derry Tigers high-school jacket. And of course there was the hat. He claimed to find the atmosphere vital and creatively invigorating. Perhaps there was something to this: he had taken his languishing novel out of the trunk for the first time in nearly a year.
‘Was he really working on it, then?’ Gardener asked Hagarty, not really caring but wanting to keep Hagarty primed.
‘Yes — he was busting pages. He said it might be a terrible novel, but it was no longer going to be a terrible unfinished novel. He expected to finish it by h is birthday, in October. Of course, he didn’t know what Derry was really like. He thought he did, but he hadn’t been here long enough to get a whiff of the real Derry. I kept trying to tell him, but he wouldn’t listen.’
‘And what’s Derry really like, Don?’ Reeves asked.
‘It’s a lot like a dead strumpet with maggots squirming out of her cooze,’ Don Hagarty said.
The two cops stared in silent amazement.
‘It’s a bad place,’ Hagarty said. ‘It’s a sewer. You mean you two guys don’t know that? You two guys have lived here all of your lives and you don’t know that?’
Neither of them answered. After a little while, Hagarty went on.
9
Until Adrian Mellon entered his life, Don had been planning to leave Derry. He had been there for three years, mostly because he had agreed to a long-term lease on an apartment with the world’s most fantastic river-view, but now the lease was almost up and Don was glad. No more long commute back and forth to Bangor. No more weird vibes — in Derry, he once told Adrian, it always felt like thirteen o’clock. Adrian might think Derry was a great place, but it scared Don. It was not just the town’s tightly homophobic attitude, an attitude as clearly expressed by the town’s preachers as by the graffiti in Bassey Park, but that was one thing he had been able to put his finger on. Adrian had laughed.
‘Don, every town in America has a contingent that hates the gayfolk,’ he said. ‘Don’t tell me you don’t know that. This is, after all, the era of Ronnie Moron and Phyllis Hous efly.’
‘Come down to Bassey Park with me,» Don had replied, after seeing that Adrian really meant what he was saying — and what he was really saying was that Derry was no worse than any other fair-sized town in the hinterlands. ‘I want to show you something, my love.’
They drove to Bassey Park — this had been in mid-June, about a month before Adrian’s murder, Hagarty told the cops. He took Adrian into the dark, vaguely unpleasant– s m e l l i n g shadows of the Kissing Bridge. He pointed out one of the graffiti. Adrian had to strike a match and hold it below the writing in order to read it.
SHOW ME YOUR COCK QUEER AND I’LL CUT IT OFF YOU.
‘I know how people feel about gays,’ Don said quietly. ‘I got beaten up at a truck-stop in Dayton when I was a teenager; some fellows in Portland set my shoes on fire outside of a sandwich shop while this fat-assed old cop sat inside his cruiser and laughed. I’ve seen a lot . . . but I’ve never