by Michael Nava
He was ten years old when it started. Around the same age I was when my father decided to beat the devil out of his bookish, quiet son. I remember lying in bed as Friday night turned into Saturday morning and the bars closed, unable to sleep, listening for the sound of his car pulling into the driveway, wondering if he would pull me out of bed to abuse me or pass out on the couch. I could vividly imagine Hugh’s terror and hopelessness as he also lay in the dark listening for his grandfather’s footsteps, knowing there was nowhere to go and no one to help him. I put the letters away, finished my drink and then another one, and went to bed listening to Billie Holiday singing she was glad to be unhappy. Two years later they would pick her up for possession of junk and handcuff her to a hospital bed where she would die of cirrhosis of the liver, age forty-four.
EIGHT
“Who did you say you were?”
The woman standing in the small office surrounded by unopened boxes and bare bookshelves bore no resemblance to the portrait she had painted of herself in verse. Katherine Paris was small, slender and elegant. Her features were a feminized version of Hugh’s, once delicate, by now hardened into middle age. Her eyes were the same bright blue as Hugh’s, but while his were warm, hers were arctic. The overall impression of coldness was accentuated by her silver hair. She regarded me with an expression of wariness bordering on displeasure.
“My name is Henry Rios,” I replied. “I was a friend of Hugh’s.”
“Hugh’s friends were generally bad news,” she said. Her voice was throaty and warm, a performer’s voice. “I will say, you don’t look like an addict.”
“I’m a lawyer, Mrs. Paris.”
“Ah,” she said. “Does he owe you money for getting him out of a jam? You can bill his estate. I’m not responsible for my son’s debts.”
“I wasn’t his lawyer,” I said. “I was his lover.”
The cold eyes got colder. “His what?”
“I identified his body,” I said. “I gave the police your name as next of kin. I’m not here to shake you down. I came to talk to you about the circumstances of his death.”
“The police said he still had the needle in his arm when they found him,” she said. “The circumstances seem pretty clear to me.”
“I know for a fact that Hugh had been clean for nine months before he died. I also know he wanted to live.”
“If you believed him when he told you he was clean, you’re a fool,” she said. “Hugh was a hopeless drug addict. It was only a matter of time before he killed himself.”
“The police investigation was perfunctory,” I said. “There were indications the overdose wasn’t accidental.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I think Hugh was killed,” I said.
“I don’t know what you want from me,” she said, “but I want you to leave. You know nothing about my son.”
“Mrs. Paris—”
Her composure broke and she screamed, “Get out, get out, get out.”
I left.
I sat in my car in the parking lot at the edge of the Old Quad. Katherine Paris had given up on her son a long time ago. She would be no help. I started my car and without any idea of where I was going, I drove.
“I’d like to see Mr. Gold,” I told the receptionist, a smartly dressed young woman sitting beneath a Rothko at a semi-circular desk with the most elaborate phone console I had ever seen.
She responded with an unsmiling, “Do you have an appointment?”
“Tell him it’s Henry Rios,” I said. “He’ll see me.”
She hesitated, then picked up the phone, pushed a couple of buttons and said, “There’s a gentleman out here who wants to see Mr. Gold.” She listened to the response, glanced at me disapprovingly and replied, “No he doesn’t, but he said Mr. Gold would see him without an appointment. His name is—”
“Henry Rios,” I said.
“Henry Rios,” she repeated.
She waited. I waited. Then she said, “Yes, all right. I’ll tell him.” She hung up, plastered a smile on her face and said, “He’ll be right out.”
In the corner of the room was an enormous globe of the world. I drifted over to it and spun it. Behind me, the receptionist cleared her voice censoriously. So I went to the window and looked at the golden hills behind the red-tiled roofs of the campus. It was one of those bright end-of-summer days when every corner of the world seemed sunlit and all darkness banished.
“Henry.”
I spun around as Gold exited a heavy door in the wood-paneled wall. He was jacketless and wearing suspenders. Under different circumstances, I would have mocked him for that yuppie affectation, but his face was grim. He was not happy to see me.
“Hello, Aaron, got a minute?”
He glanced at the receptionist. “Sure, let’s go downstairs and grab a cup of coffee.” He smiled insincerely at her. “Hold my calls?”
“Of course, Mr. Gold,” she said.
He walked me out of the office and into the elevator. When the door closed, he said, “What are you doing here, Henry?”
I hadn’t seen Gold since the day he had rescued me from the squalor of grief, self-pity and empty booze bottles. I had called him a couple of times but when he hadn’t called back, I let it drop. The truth was, the more convinced I became that Judge Paris was behind Hugh’s death, the more reluctant I was to have anything to do with Gold. Robert Paris was his firm’s client. That drew an adversarial line between Gold and me.
“Good to see you too, Aaron,” I replied. “It’s been a couple of weeks.”
The elevator door slid open. We stepped into a crowded foyer.
“I’ve been busy,” he said curtly.
I followed him out of the building, down the street and around the corner to a coffeehouse I had never noticed before. Inside, it was all hanging Boston ferns and unpainted planks of wood. A chalkboard menu advertised dishes that all seemed to have tofu as their main ingredient. The smell of patchouli oil was heavy in the air.
“Welcome to 1971,” I said.
“It’s the last place anyone in the firm would be caught dead in,” he said. “Grab the table in the corner. I’ll get the coffee.”
When he returned, we sat there for a moment not saying anything. I broke the silence. “I was assaulted in the city and then my apartment was broken into. You know anything about that?”
I had expected outrage and a denial but he said, “Why don’t you start from the beginning?”
I told him about going to Hugh’s cottage after his death, removing his files on Judge Paris, about being drugged with sodium pentothal and the theft of Hugh’s files from my apartment. I didn’t mention what was in them and, strangely, he didn’t ask.
“You’re the criminal lawyer,” he said. “Is it theft when someone takes something that didn’t belong to you in the first place?”
“Hugh gave me the key to his place,” I said.
“He was dead,” he said. “Those papers belonged to his estate. You didn’t have any right to them.”
“Spare me the legal nitpicking. You know something, don’t you? That’s why you’ve been avoiding me.”
“I warned you to stay away from that guy,” he said.
“Yes, you did, and you gave me the letters. Did you read them?”
“Of course I read them.”
“Then you knew that Hugh believed his grandfather was a murderer.”
“I knew that the guy was a crazy drug addict working on some kind of extortion scheme,” he replied hotly. “We’d tipped off the cops. It was just a matter of time before he was arrested. Maybe I didn’t want my best friend associated with that shit storm.”
“There wasn’t a demand for money in the letters,” I said.
“It was implied,” he said. “Anyway, he would have got around to it eventually. He’s been begging money from the judge for years to support his habit. The judge cut him off. He wanted revenge.”
“Or what he said about the judge was all true and
the judge wanted to silence him.”
Gold glared at me. “What are you talking about?”
“You didn’t ask me what was in the documents that I took from Hugh’s place. It was evidence that his grandfather was a murderer. Or maybe you already knew that.”
“That’s insane,” he said.
“If it was so crazy, why did someone go to the trouble to steal the papers from me? Who would do that, Aaron, except your client?”
“There’s nothing incrim—” he stopped himself in exasperated midsentence.
“What were you going to say?” I demanded. “There’s nothing incriminating in those papers?”
He said nothing but I read the guilt in his expression.
“You’ve seen them, haven’t you?” I continued. “Fuck, Aaron. Are you part of this? Do you know who killed Hugh?”
He gave me a cold, hard look. “What are you accusing me of?”
“I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m trying to understand what’s going on here.”
“You have no fucking idea the shit you’ve stepped into,” he said. “I’m going to warn you again, Henry. For your own good, leave it alone.”
“That sounds like a threat.”
He stood up. “It’s better that we don’t see each other again.”
“Aaron—” I called to his retreating back. He didn’t turn around.
I sat there drawing conclusions I didn’t want to believe. If the documents stolen from my house had ended up at Aaron’s law firm, where he had read them, then someone at his firm had ordered them stolen. I remembered the two men who had entered Hugh’s place as I was leaving. If they’d been sent by the firm to retrieve any incriminating evidence Hugh might have had on his grandfather, and hadn’t found any, how would they have known to go after me? Who at Aaron’s firm had known Hugh and I were lovers except my best friend? Was he behind my abduction and the burglary of my apartment? Those were crimes. Real crimes, not breaches in legal ethics. Conspiracy to commit kidnapping and burglary. And if he had been a member of the conspiracy that committed those crimes, what other crimes might he have conspired to commit? Hugh’s murder? I stared at the fan slowly turning overhead. I didn’t know what to do.
“Terry? It’s Henry Rios, give me a call. We have to talk.”
I put the phone down, picked up my glass and took a sip of Jack Daniel’s. The undertow of Hugh’s death had pulled me in deeper than I had ever imagined and my feet had yet to touch ground. I had no hard proof of anything, not that Hugh had been murdered or that any of his allegations against his grandfather were true; only unanswered questions and suspicious behavior. I felt like a fly trapped in a spider web, waiting for the spider to appear. It was not a pleasant feeling. As evening sifted through the windows, darkening my apartment, a chill worked its way up my spine. Paranoia? Fear? Whatever it was, I didn’t feel like being alone. Under different circumstances, I would have called Gold. But circumstances had changed. Grant had said something like that. Circumstances can change. Grant. What was he doing tonight? I called him.
“Henry,” he said, not masking his pleasure. “Good to hear from you. What are you up to?”
“Having a drink,” I said.
“Drinking alone? Isn’t that a sign of something?”
“I wouldn’t be drinking alone if you were here,” I said.
There was a pause. “You inviting me over?”
“If you don’t have other plans.”
“On my way,” he said.
An hour later, he was at the door carrying a pizza box from a North Beach restaurant and a six-pack of Dortmunder. He looked a little windblown, as if he had air dried his hair in the car on the drive from the city. He smiled at me, an easy, happy smile, kissed my forehead and went into the kitchen where he opened the box, releasing the fragrance of tomatoes, herbs and cheese.
“I brought dinner,” he said. “Plates?”
I got plates, paper napkins, knives and forks. “Vegetarian pizza?”
“La Pantera is famous for its margherita,” he said. “Thin crust, sliced tomatoes, oregano, garlic, mozzarella and basil.”
“Oh,” I said. “An Italian quesadilla. It smells great.”
“We should dig in before it gets any colder.”
We ate in the kitchen at the small Formica-topped breakfast table I had inherited from the last tenant. Our knees knocked beneath the table. He stretched his long legs between mine. His face was a bit flushed, his dark eyes were bright and he smelled faintly of Lifebuoy.
“You take a shower for me?” I asked.
“I was just getting home from playing tennis with my dad when you called,” he said. “You play?”
“No. I run, and now and then I head over to the old gym on campus and push weights around so my arms don’t atrophy.”
“That all you do?” he asked, raising his eyebrows. “You must be genetically gifted.”
“Looked at yourself in the mirror lately?”
He laughed. “All I see is my dad’s receding hairline.” He took a bite of pizza and said, “You sounded a little raw on the phone. Is everything all right with you?”
“Sometimes I spend too much time in my head. Today was one of those days.”
“This about what happened to Hugh?”
“How did you guess?”
“He’s our connection. What’s going on?”
“I feel like I’m deep in a labyrinth,” I said. “Lots of dead ends and dark corners and no obvious way out.”
“You’re still convinced he was murdered?”
“More than ever,” I said. “I have no way to prove it. Not yet anyway. I’m not sure I ever will.”
“Why pursue it if you don’t think you can bring his killer to justice?” he asked, not unkindly. “I mean, it can’t make any difference to Hugh.”
“If you believed someone you cared for was murdered, would you walk away from it before you exhausted every lead?”
“Maybe, if all the leads were dark corners and dead ends,” he said.
I shrugged. “I don’t know what to do next, but I can’t let go.”
“How I can help you get out of your head?” he asked, his eyes meeting mine.
“I didn’t call you for a hook up,” I replied, weakly.
He gave me a small smile. “Yes you did. That’s fine with me. I was happy to hear from you, Henry, even if it was just because you needed a warm body to keep you company for a few hours.”
I looked at him. “Not any warm body, Grant. Yours.”
There was no hesitation, no shyness in the way we approached each other. He threw his arm around my shoulders and pulled me in for a kiss. We made our way to the couch where, within minutes, I was lying on top of him, my tongue in his mouth, my hand stroking his hard-on through his pants. He lifted my T-shirt at the waist and ran his hand up and down my back.
I got up, pulled him to his feet, and said, “Bedroom.”
I was naked on the bed. Grant was hopping ‘round removing a shoe. He undid the button on his jeans, pulled the zipper down, hooked his finger on the waistband and wiggled out of them. His thighs were as big and muscled as his shoulders. He stood before me in black briefs, the tip of his hard cock poking out of his waistband.
“I need a little help with my briefs,” he said.
I pushed myself to the edge of bed and removed his briefs. His cock sprang in my face. I got down on my knees and closed my mouth around it. He kneaded my shoulders and groaned. The scent of soap clung to his thick patch of dark pubic hair. His cock felt meaty but clean in my mouth. Not antiseptic but wholesome. After a couple of minutes, he gently but firmly separated us.
“You’re going to make me come,” he said.
“That’s kind of the point,” I replied.
He shook his head. “Not yet,” he said. “Not this way.”
“Then how?”
“Fuck me,” he said.
I scooted back onto the bed. “Come on, then.”
Our bodies and hair we
re damp with sweat and the sheet beneath us was clammy. His breath was warm against my neck, his arms around my chest, his cock, spent now, pressed against my thigh, one of his legs between my legs, the other splayed behind him. His embrace was less erotic than protective, like a big, friendly dog.
“Are you falling asleep?” I asked.
“Nope,” he said sleepily. “You?”
“I’m on the wet spot,” I replied.
“The whole bed’s a wet spot,” he observed. He rolled on his back, edged away from me. “Come over here, the sheet’s drier.”
After we had rearranged ourselves, he asked, “You feel weird about this, because of Hugh?”
“A little,” I said. “You?”
“I’m not sorry this happened but I wish—”
“You wish what?”
“I wish he wasn’t here with us, that’s all.”
“I’m sorry, Grant. He’s a mystery I have to solve.”
“You two are so different, maybe the real mystery you want to solve is why you fell for him?”
“He told me once that I was a man with a boy inside of me waiting for the kiss that would end my loneliness. Until he said that, I didn’t realize it was true, much less that he was the one I had been waiting for.”
“Then it was lucky you found each other,” he said quietly.
“Did we? I think his loneliness was different and deeper.” I hesitated, searching for the words to articulate what had been only a half-formed and painful thought. “When the cops came and told me he was dead, I was shocked but I wasn’t surprised. I think I always knew I wouldn’t have been enough for him. I would have failed him and eventually he would have ended up somewhere else with a different needle in his arm.”
