The Split Man (Holden Burke #2)

Five

Gene laughed without sound or humour. 'Maybe I should've hired you first, if I gave enough of a shit about someone ghosting me like that.'

I rubbed the back of my neck and turned away, trying to figure a way to breach my next line of inquiry. 'Your relationship with Sebastian,' I said, 'by the information I've been told already, it seems as if he was...'

I couldn't think of a polite euphemism. Gene was looking coolly at me. I looked back at him.

'He might have been with you at the same time as this other man, down at his place in Pillar Bay,' I said.

'Keeping us both on the line? Never crossing paths?'

'Seems that way,' I said.

Gene sat up, put his elbows on his knees, and crossed his eyes in thought. 'I know it's nothing to call in the brigades about,' he said simply. 'Just a couple of guys caught up moving too fast. We weren't in love, or anything, so I know I shouldn't care about that. If he had another guy, he had another guy, simple as that. But...I don't know, I guess I wouldn't be so curious about Seb if he didn't split right after that whole fucking thing that happened with dad—'

He caught his words and melted back into the sofa. Then it made sense to me.

'Don Randolph?' I said.

Gene sat back and sighed.

'He's your father?'

'I won't say anything about it. Everything I've said has already been twisted by those vultures.'

I nodded, and didn't expect him to. The Don Randolph story was one that was already old news, even if it only broke about a week and a half ago. He was a senior politician in state government, and it was the standard fare that had come out about him: an exposé on decades of affairs, bribes, collusions, political intimidations. The entire career-sinking works.

I cleared my throat. 'It's no business of mine what happened to your father,' I said. 'Not if it has nothing to do with Sebastian Abbott.'

'It doesn't.' Gene Randolph had a hard look, but it was brief, and it soon drifted away. 'But he did leave right after that—maybe he didn't like the attention it was gonna bring.' Gene stood up and put his hands in his pockets and wandered out of the room, toward the back patio.

I followed him. 'How long were you with him?' I asked.

Gene shrugged a little, but didn't turn back to me. 'About a month or two, maybe. I wasn't really keeping track.'

'Was that a long time for you?'

'I guess. Not really. No, it wasn't.'

'What kind of a relationship was it, just casual?'

'I have no idea what kind,' Gene said. 'Sebastian kept changing it, kept running toward me then running away.'

'Did you never knew about his personal life, anything about his background?'

He shook his head. 'He never let me in. Do you know about his background? You're the investigator.'

'I found his parents—two pretty nasty things. If I had to take a guess, I'd say he came from a pretty barbed home life. Then he ran away from home at seventeen, was registered as a missing person, but never turned up. Until now.'

Gene looked across at the cold yard of short-cut grass, under the pastel light of the setting sun. He smiled a little, but grimly. 'My dad bought me this place,' he said. 'He wanted me to go into politics too. I told him no. I said politics rots your soul, turns you into a shell of a person obsessed with power and money. I guess I was right, huh?'

He walked outside and sat on one of the white chairs at the edge of the yard. I sat in the other. 'Did Sebastian ever come here?'

He nodded. 'Sometimes. But mostly we went to his little rented place at the Bay. He liked the beach and the wind and the smell of the ocean, all that stuff.'

'I've been there. It is a nice place.'

'How long have you been working this?'

'Since this morning.'

He laughed a little. 'You must be a good detective.'

'The good detectives live in movies. I just do my job.'

'Running around in the sex lives of rich little queer boys, it sounds like. Who was the other one Seb was tangled with? He was rich too?'

'The son of a publishing tycoon,' I said.

Gene smiled grimly. 'God, he has a type, doesn't he?'

'Did you ever feel like Sebastian was exploiting you in any way?'

'Like some kind of gold digger? I have no idea. I don't think so—but I'm not very perceptive. What're you going to do after this?'

'I don't know,' I said, 'if I can't find anything more on where he might have run off to. You don't have any more information about where he could've gone, what he might be doing?'

'He could've found some other gullible bait to hook on to by now,' Gene said. 'That seems to be his forté from the sounds of it. Professional slut.'

'Well, I should thank you for your time, then, Gene.'

I stood and he walked me through the door, and back through the house. His head was hung in dim thought the whole way, until he rose at the front door and said, 'His parents—what were they like? I was just curious.'

'Just the standard,' I said. 'Class-A bogan homophobes with personalities like buckets of mud. From the sounds of it they got along with their little Sebastian like a car crash.'

'Figures,' he said. 'I guess it's no wonder he turned out the way he did. Did they help you at all?'

'A little,' I said. I leant against the frame of the front door and looked at him. 'They told me that the day their son ran away, he jumped into the passenger seat of a big car that was waiting for him outside.'

'A car?'

I nodded. 'They gave me this as well, since no one else I've spoken to seems to have a picture of him.'

I unfolded the picture from my pocket and handed it to Gene. He took it and studied it closely, an odd look falling over his face. When he looked back up at me, his expression was one of cautious doubt. 'Are you sure you met his parents?' he said.

I nodded. 'The parents of some missing person named Sebastian William Abbott, at least. Why?'

Gene looked at the photo again with uncertainty, then shook his head. 'This isn't Sebastian,' he said.

I stood straighter. 'Are you sure? It's from a couple of years ago, remember.'

'This is not the person I was with for two months. The face is completely different. You sure you're searching for the right person?'

'The name is right, and so is the age...'

I took the picture back and looked at it again. Someone named Sebastian Abbott looked back at me with a flat and ghostly glare.