Lay Your Sleeping Head

by Michael Nava

  “I’m right, aren’t I?” I pressed him. “You knew about Christina and Jeremy Paris.”

  The movement of his head was more of a tremor than a shake.

  “I guessed,” he said, finally. “She was on her way to Reno to obtain a divorce that would have cut off his intestate rights to her estate. She’d already cut him out of her will.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I drafted the will,” he said.

  “You knew her?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “She and Bob Paris and I go back a long way.”

  “What else do you know, Professor Howard?”

  “About the will or the marriage? They were intertwined. The marriage was hell for her but she put up with it for her sons and because she was Catholic and, not least of all, because she was Grover Linden’s granddaughter and Lindens don’t acknowledge failure. Oh, but she hated Bob. He used her money and position to enrich and advance himself but treated her like chattel. When she finally had had enough, she came to me. She asked me to write her a will that would cut him from any claim he had to her fortune.”

  “How did you do it?”

  “We gave him her half of the community property. It was not an insignificant amount. That was the carrot. Everything else went to their sons. Jeremy was given his share outright and Nicholas’s share was put in a trust to be administered by Jeremy and his uncle, John Smith. That was the stick.”

  “How was it supposed to keep him from challenging the will if she died first?”

  “Bob could hardly complain he wasn’t provided for since he got everything they’d accumulated together in the marriage. If he tried to set aside the will to get at her separate property, he would be challenging the rights of his own sons. For good measure, we threw in an in terrorem clause providing that if he contested the will, he would forfeit the gift of her community property. The only other way he could have inherited was through intestacy if, for any reason, the will was declared void. To prevent that, she was going to divorce him. As an ex-husband, he would been entitled to nothing if her will failed. Her estate would have gone to her boys.”

  “Did the judge know about the will?”

  “She made the mistake of taunting him with it. When she told me, I advised her to get the divorce sooner rather than later.”

  “Were you worried he would retaliate?”

  The old man wheezed, “Well, he did, didn’t he? Let me tell you about Bob Paris. He was and is someone who takes pleasure in humiliating and degrading others. I believe sadist is the term of art for his type.” He sank into his chair. “He beat her, you know.”

  “Christina?”

  He nodded. “Beat her. Terrorized his sons. His wife and children were nothing more to him than his personal property. You can imagine his rage when she told him she was going to divorce him and cut him off.”

  “Why did you put the hypo in your case book?”

  “Do you remember footnote four in United States v. Carolene Products?”

  “Of course,” I said. “It’s the foundation of modern equal protection law.”

  “That hypo was my footnote four, the only way I had to attack the injustice of the situation. I buried it in my book and hoped that, someday, someone would find it. You have. What are you going to do with it, Henry?”

  “Hugh was gathering evidence to implicate his grandfather in the murders but something was missing. Thanks to you, I’ve found it. I’m going to the police. There is no statute of limitations on murder.”

  “Well, I’m not a trial lawyer,” he said, “but even I can see your case is circumstantial and it happened such a long time ago.”

  “Your testimony would be very persuasive, Professor,” I said.

  He arranged his face into a smile. “If you plan to put me on the witness stand, you’d better hurry it along, son. I’m dying.”

  “Won’t you hang on for her? For Christina? “

  He made a gruff noise of assent.

  “How did you know her, Professor?”

  “Many years ago,” he said, “I went to a reception given by her father, Jeremiah Smith, to commemorate his twentieth year as president of the university. He was a widower by then, so Christina acted as his hostess. I was a freshly minted lawyer who had just been hired at the law school. Bob Paris was also at the reception. He was my colleague at the law school with about three months more experience than I. We dared each other to ask Miss Smith for a dance. I did, finally. I got the dance, but Bob married her. He could be charming when the need arose and he was a handsome boy. He was also ambitious enough for ten men. Courted her father as much as he did her. In the end the old man probably wanted the marriage more than she did, but in those days, girls did what their fathers told them to do. So she married Bob, but we stayed friends. We were always friends.” He pointed at the Scotch. “Give me that glass.”

  I held it out to him. He took it with trembling fingers and drank it down in a long, slow swallow.

  When I got back to my apartment, there was a long message from Grant. He had obtained a copy of Christina’s will and had also discovered that, after her death, Judge Paris had become sole conservator of his surviving son, Nicholas.

  “And listen to this, Henry,” he said. “The coroner who conducted the inquest was later elected to the Superior Court. Guess who was his biggest single contributor? Robert Paris. Talk to you later.”

  I went through the accident reports again and began a list of possible witnesses to testify that Christina and Jeremy had been murdered: Warren Hansen, the man who claimed to have seen a second car drive the Paris’s car off the road. The CHP officer who found the Parises and wrote in his report that Christina had died first. Professor Howard. Would it be enough to persuade a DA somewhere to pursue murder charges in their deaths? Maybe not. The case was cold, the witnesses, if they were still alive, could hardly be expected to remember the accident. Even if the evidence wasn’t enough to convict the judge for the murders of his wife and son, it could be introduced in a trial charging him with Hugh’s death to show motive. One way or the other, we would get the story out.

  I was interrupted by a knock. I shoved the papers into my desk, went to the door and opened it.

  “Mrs. Paris,” I said, unable to conceal my surprise.

  She managed a faint smile. “Mr. Rios. May I come in?”

  “Please,” I said, and stepped aside.

  She took a couple of steps into the room and paused. Standing there in her elegant clothes, dark blue silk shirt over white linen slacks, red leather bag, I could only imagine what she made of the bachelor squalor I lived in, empty pizza box on the coffee table, stench of beer in the air, lumpy sofa covered with a cheap India print, orange crate book and record shelves, framed UFW Huelga poster next to a Picasso print of the man with the blue guitar.

  “I promise you the furniture’s safe to sit on,” I said.

  She looked amused. “No, it’s not that. It reminds of my freshman dorm room. Well, except there aren’t ashtrays overflowing with cigarettes and a bong.”

  “It is my freshman dorm room,” I said. “Transported to every place I’ve lived in since.”

  “Are you quite sure you’re gay?” she asked.

  “I’m sure,” I said. “Have a seat. May I get you something to drink?”

  “No, thank you, but may I smoke?”

  “Of course,” I said. “I’ve got an ashtray in the kitchen somewhere.”

  I searched through the cupboards for an ashtray, couldn’t find one, and returned with the saucer to a cup that had disappeared a long time ago. She was perched at the edge of the armchair with Leaves of Grass opened on her lap, a cigarette burning between her fingers. I set the saucer down.

  “The book was open to the Calamus poems,” she said.

  “I was going to read them to Hugh.”

  She gazed at me steadily, then at the book, and began to read in a richly expressive voice:

  Or, if you will, thrusting me beneath your cl
othing,

  Where I may feel the throbs of your heart, or rest upon your hip,

  Carry me when you go forth over land or sea;

  For thus, merely touching you, is enough—is best,

  And thus, touching you,

  would I silently sleep and be carried eternally.

  “Were you going to read him that one?”

  “Yes,” I said. “He inspired poetry. But you know that. You wrote a poem for him, The Lost Child.”

  “I wrote many poems for him,” she said. “Maybe all of them.” She closed the book and put it on the coffee table. She tipped her cigarette into the saucer and reached into her bag.

  “I know you’re surprised to see me here after yesterday,” she said, pulling out a thick envelope. “This is from Hugh. It was forwarded from Boston. I got it just after you left. He writes about you quite a bit.” She took the letter out of the envelope, unfolded it, scanned it and read, “I know I can’t stay clean for anyone but myself, but he makes me want to be a better person, if that’s possible, if I’m not so broken that I can’t love, that love can’t heal me. When you meet him, you’ll see why I love him.”

  I looked away from her, unable to speak.

  “You and his father are the only people Hugh ever told me he loved. After I read his letter, I felt terrible about how I treated you. So here I am, Mr. Rios. What do you want to tell me about my son’s death?”

  I found my voice. “Before I do,” I said, “can you tell me about Hugh and his father and you? There’s so much I don’t know.”

  She picked up her cigarette and drew on it, exhaled a jet of smoke. “The thing you need to know about our family is that Nick, Hugh’s father, is schizophrenic.”

  “Hugh told me that.”

  She crushed the cigarette into the saucer. “Nick and I were kindred spirits, Mr. Rios. We both came from wealthy, proper families. His was wealthier, mine was more proper. Money and propriety—they were straitjackets we couldn’t wait to escape. We met in college.”

  “At the university?”

  “Oh, God no,” she said. “Nick wanted to get as far away from his family as he could. Harvard for him, Radcliffe for me. I went to a mixer and there he was, handsome and wild. He took me into the garden and we shared his silver flask and talked about art and love and poetry. After that, we carried on like we were the second coming of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Eventually dropped out of school, eloped and moved back here, to North Beach, just as the beatniks were leaving and the hippies were arriving. It was a fantastic time to be young.” Her eyes clouded. “Then he got sick. When the illness first struck Nick, it was like watching a gorgeous bird suddenly drop from the sky and crawl around on the ground. You know something must be broken but the wings are intact, the plumage is still dazzling, the song is the same. For a while, anyway. And for a while, the bird manages to fly again, maybe shorter distances and not so high, but it’s still flight.”

  “And then, he falls to the earth and can’t fly at all?”

  “It was some time before I understood how sick he was. You have to understand, our friends were artists and they were all passionate and eccentric. Crazy was a compliment in our circle. So, when Nick started behaving oddly, I just thought it was temperament. But then he began to experience delusions he couldn’t shake and after that, the hallucinations started. I finally got him to a psychiatrist who diagnosed him. I thought it was the worst day of my life. I was wrong.”

  As she spoke about her husband, her glacial, patrician façade cracked and another woman emerged, a young woman, sensitive, unguarded and terrified. The poet.

  “Nick refused traditional treatment,” she said. “He believe he could cure himself by expanding his consciousness because he thought his illness was simply a figment of his ego. We went to ashrams in India where he fasted and meditated for days on end, to curanderos in Mexico who drove the evil spirits out of him with drums and rattles, to a psychiatric commune in England where patients smeared their shit on the walls and the psychiatrists administered LSD. The delusions, the hallucinations only got worse.”

  “Hugh told me his father thought the family was under a curse.”

  “Ah, yes,” she said, lighting another cigarette. “The Chinese curse. That’s what eventually led to his institutionalization.”

  “Why the Chinese curse?”

  “Nick was always deeply conflicted about his family’s wealth. He felt undeserving of it but he couldn’t bring himself to renounce it either. He said he felt like an animal in a trap whose only escape was to gnaw off its limb. What made it worse for him was how sensitive he was to the suffering of the poor people we encountered in places like India. He would draw out huge amounts of money at the bank and walk around the slums of Delhi and Mexico City giving it all away.”

  “That sounds dangerous,” I said.

  “Of course it was,” she said. “He was robbed more than once and after the Getty boy was kidnapped in Rome, I was terrified that Nick would be abducted too. I think he courted that danger. He wanted to be punished for being rich. Thus the curse.”

  “The Chinese curse.”

  She nodded. “As he got sicker, Nick became obsessed with his great-grandfather and read everything he could about him. Somewhere in his research he learned that hundreds of the Chinese workers Grover Linden imported to build his railroad were killed in accidents. The story stuck with him. He began to believe the angry spirits of these workers led by what he called a warlock were pursuing Linden’s descendants seeking vengeance. Nick became terrified of anyone Chinese. He believed the warlock was going to send people to abduct Hugh and sacrifice him to atone for Grover Linden’s crimes against their ancestors.”

  “The peach tattoo on Hugh’s chest was to protect him.”

  “Yes. It’s an ancient Chinese symbol to ward off evil spirts,” she replied. “Nick had Hugh tattooed without telling me. I was furious. It was one thing for me to deal with Nick’s delusions but I didn’t want him scaring Hugh with them.”

  “Hugh seemed to adore his father.”

  “It was mutual,” she said. “After Hugh was born, Nick got better for a while as if the love he felt for Hugh left no room for the disease. Hugh was too young to understand Nick was ill. All he experienced was Nick’s devotion. And then Nick tried to kill him.”

  “What? Hugh never said anything about that.”

  “I doubt if he remembered it,” she said. “Nick’s delusions about the Chinese warlock got tangled up with the story of Abraham and Isaac. You know it?”

  I nodded. “God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his only son as a test of his piety and then, at the last moment, stopped him and sent a ram in Isaac’s place. What did that have to do with the curse? I thought you said Nick was trying to save Hugh from being sacrificed.”

  “Schizophrenic delusions grow and change in the schizophrenic’s mind,” she said. “Nick got it into his head that if he showed he was willing to sacrifice Hugh himself, the warlock would intervene at the last moment, save Hugh, and lift the curse. I came home late one night and found Hugh asleep on a kind of altar that Nick had made out of leaves and flowers and surrounded by candles and incense burners. Nick was kneeling at the altar, holding a knife above his head, chanting in some made up language. I screamed at him and he dropped the knife. I grabbed Hugh and ran to the neighbors and called the police. They took Nick to a psychiatric ward. Hugh never knew what happened. Nick had apparently drugged him.”

  “How old was Hugh?”

  “Six,” she said. “When he woke up, he didn’t remember anything.”

  “What happened to Nick?”

  “The doctors put him on Haldol. It stopped the delusions but left him feeling like a ghost. So he would stop taking it and the delusions would return. One afternoon, he walked into a restaurant in Chinatown where he thought he had tracked down the warlock. He was carrying a semi-automatic pistol. Fortunately, a couple of police officers happened to be having lunch there and they overpowered him before h
e hurt anyone.”

  “Was he prosecuted?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “The great-grandson of Grover Linden prosecuted? No. Calls were made, checks were written and Nick was committed to the asylum in Napa where he was been for the last fifteen years.” She looked frail and sad. “Where he will die.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t imagine what it must have been like to lose your husband that way.”

  She stubbed out the cigarette. “The marriage was over long before that happened. I dealt with Nick’s illness by drinking. By the time Nick was committed, I was a hopeless drunk. I became as much a danger to Hugh as Nick. Bob Paris threatened to have me declared unfit unless I let them have Hugh until I straightened myself out. I agreed. Bob gave me some papers to sign that he said were necessary for him to make decisions about Hugh’s care without having to track me down and get my consent. I signed them without reading them. Only later, after I got sober, did I realize I had signed away my parental rights. I tried hiring a lawyer to regain custody but no one would touch the case, not against Bob and not with what he had against me.”

  “What was that?”

  “Adultery, alcoholism, drug use,” she drew impatiently on her cigarette. “More than one suicide attempt. Even after I got sober, no judge would have given me custody of Hugh. I begged him to at least allow me visitation rights. He refused.” She looked at me. “After that, the fight went out of me, Mr. Rios. So, yes, you could say at that point I abandoned Hugh to his grandfather.”

  “Did you explain all this to Hugh?”

  She made a derisive noise. “Mr. Rios, when a child asks ‘Why did you leave me?’ it’s not a question, it’s a shriek. No answer is ever enough. Over the years, he would show up at my place in Boston when he needed money or a break from killing himself with heroin. We’d have a good day or two and then he’d start up with the accusations and we’d get dragged back into a circle of guilt and rage that never resolved anything.” She stared at the letter. “He blamed me for his addiction. I told him that belonged to him.”