The Greatest Lie Part 3

They gave me a ride back to Jon’s: thank god he wasn’t there yet. "We’ll be by in a few days to pick up your notes." I promised them they would be ready by Monday. "If the body hasn’t been claimed in two weeks, we’ll release it to you. Otherwise, it gets a John Doe burial." "You mean Jane," I said angrily." "Yeah, right," he said as he left.

I was still banging away on Jon’s keyboard when he arrived three hours later. He was so exhausted that he went straight to bed until two in the afternoon. When he awoke I sucked him and let him fuck me, but without much passion or enjoyment. He asked me if something was wrong, and I said "yes, someone I know has been killed." Elaborating on the clever lie I had invented for the cops, I told him that I had started to research the behaviors of transgendered sex industry workers, that I had gotten one of them to really open up to me, and she had let me observe and interview her at length. Now, she had been killed, and I was crushed.

He very sympathetic and comforted me. He promised that if her family didn’t claim her body he would pay for a proper funeral. He was really impressed and happy that I was doing such a socially and personally relevant research project. He promised me he would try to get me a grant through the Alliance to support my work, and he even thought he could hook me up with a professor in the sociology department to get independent study credit.

This was looking like my most brilliant lie yet. The best kind of lie is the one that you can spin into reality: then it can provide a screen for still more secrets. "Behaviors of Transgendered Sex Workers" would be my project: no one else would know that I was both the author and one of the subjects. My sex industry research project would be the perfect way to merge the street life of Hennepin Avenue that I craved with academic research on a politically correct topic. If I was lucky, I might even be able to investigate the murder of Daylene. It would be all the more fun pulling it off right under everyone’s noses. I smiled inwardly. Maybe college wasn’t going to be so dull after all.