How Town

by Michael Nava

  “The new publisher. He bought out the Storey family about ten years ago. He’s not a native.” Not a native, the ultimate Los Roblean insult. “When Paul was arrested, they dredged up the molestation case as well as every infraction of every code that Mark was ever fined on and turned the election into a referendum on the Windsors.”

  “I’d like to see those stories.”

  “Sure,” he said, “but why?”

  I tapped the file. “I’m beginning to have my doubts about the quality of justice in Los Robles. Maybe the best thing I can do for Paul is get the case moved out of here.”

  “A motion to change venue?” he asked skeptically. “Good luck.” He jotted a note and asked, “When do you want it?”

  “I’m flying to LA after I see Paul and I won’t be back until next week. Could you have it for me tonight?”

  He lifted an eyebrow. “My people aren’t used to big-city hours.” He thought. “I’ll give it to Peter. He’s a hot dog.”

  Rising, I said, “Thanks.”

  “Henry,” he said, stopping me at the door. “A word of advice.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Don’t push old friendships too hard.”

  “Does that come from Mark?”

  “I think I can speak for him.”

  Too many years of living in temperate climates had cost me my tolerance for the heat. I took off my tie and jacket and rolled up my sleeves as I walked to my car. The Parkway had once been lined by trees. These had apparently been uprooted to widen the street. As a result, the grim blocks stretched shadelessly into town. I got into my rented car and the vinyl rose up to meet me, grabbing at the seat of my pants and the back of my shirt. I drove to my next stop, lunch with Sara Windsor.

  The address she’d given me was in River Park, but wasn’t the white wedding cake house that Herb Windsor had built for his family. Instead, these lesser Windsors lived in a rambling structure that looked like a Norman farmhouse on steroids. I pulled up to the curb, got out and crossed a wide lawn, past flower beds, low hedges and the three oaks that shaded the front of the L-shaped mansion. Where the two wings broke was a kind of turret where a heavy, paneled door, sporting a lion’s-head knocker, provided entrance. I dropped the lion against the door. A moment later, a brown-skinned woman with plaited hair, wearing a servant’s frock, eyed me suspiciously.

  Without thinking, I addressed her in Spanish. “Quiero ver la Señora Windsor, por favor.”

  Her expression grew sharper and I pictured myself in her eyes, a tall, sweaty Mexican in a not-too-clean white shirt and wrinkled trousers, demanding in Spanish to see “la señora.”

  “I’m Mr. Windsor’s attorney, Henry Rios,” I said, in English.

  “Who’s there?” I heard Sara ask. “Carrie?” She came up behind the maid. “Oh, Henry. Come in. It’s all right, Carrie.”

  The maid let me pass. Carrie? I thought, looking into that broad, dark face.

  “Carrie?” I asked Sara as she led me to an opulent living room.

  “Caridad,” Sara said, moving toward an antique credenza crowned by rows of bright glasses. “Do you want a drink before lunch?”

  “No, thank you.”

  She poured bourbon into a tumbler and directed me to sit. “Lunch will be ready in a minute. Have you seen Paul yet?”

  “No, I got tied up at Clayton’s office.” I sank into a large white chair. Sara sat across from me on a sofa about the length of an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Between us was a lacquered table on which I could have napped. It was a lot of house for two people but then again, based on what I knew about these two people, maybe not.

  “Was he helpful?” Her dry tone was its own answer.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “I know what you mean,” she said. “He’s absolutely convincing until you try to remember what he said to you.”

  I smiled. She seemed to be in good spirits, spirits being the operative word. The whiff of liquor I caught on the air-conditioned breeze seemed to emanate from her pores. Still, in loose-fitting linens she looked more relaxed than she had in San Francisco the day before.

  “You sure you won’t join me?” she asked, raising the glass to her lips.

  “A glass of water.”

  “I’m sorry. Carrie?” she called. Caridad, Charity, appeared. “Would you bring Mr. Rios a glass of ice water.”

  As she left I wondered whether she was the same maid whose daughter Paul had molested. When she returned with the water, she looked at me without visible expression but I perceived the hostility in her eyes. Or maybe it was just my guilt at mixing with the rich Anglos.

  “What did you think of Bob?” Sara was asking.

  I said, “I would imagine he’s in a real predicament. On the one hand, Paul’s arrest for murder certainly weakens his hand in his dispute with Mark. On the other hand, it doesn’t do much for the family’s reputation. If Clayton’s the loyalist he seems to be, he must be having a hard time deciding whether to help me or stonewall. Today he did a little of both.” I sipped the icy water. “He doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to see Paul get out of jail.”

  She’d finished her drink. I could see her trying to decide whether to get another right away or to wait. I’d been in similar conundrums myself.

  To distract her, I said, “He seems convinced of Paul’s guilt.”

  Rising decisively, she headed to the credenza, returning with another drink. “That’s absurd.”

  “Is it?”

  Swiftly, she walked to the windows at the far end of the room. “Come here, Henry.”

  I got up and went over to her. She parted the heavy curtain, revealing rows and rows of roses. “Paul made this.”

  Like an Impressionist painting the still roses seemed to blend their colors in the afternoon heat and I could almost smell their heavy scent on the motionless air. She dropped the curtain.

  “An aptitude for gardening doesn’t rule out an aptitude for murder,” I remarked.

  “Don’t be stupid,” she replied and went back to the couch.

  “All right,” I said, following her. “Who do you think did it?”

  “That girl’s brother,” she replied tightly.

  “What girl?”

  She settled into her drink. “Ruth Soto. Her mother worked for us. Not Carrie, before her. Ruth used to come and help her. She liked the roses.” She cradled her glass. “I thought it was sweet that Paul taught her about them. Really sweet.” She took a drink, wiping her lips with her fingers. “If you want the details you’ll have to ask him,” she said, too loudly. “It went on for three years until she got pregnant.” Quickly she added, “She was fifteen. Obviously, her family found out about it and went to the police.”

  “The charges were dropped because she wouldn’t testify,” I said. “Do you know why?”

  She shook her head. “Everyone thinks we paid her off. We didn’t. We—” She stopped herself.

  “You what?” I pressed.

  “It was her own decision. The day the case was dropped her brother showed up in the courtroom with a gun, threatening to kill Paul. The police stopped him. He was the one who ended up going to jail.”

  “What happened to Ruth?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose she still lives here somewhere, in Paradise Slough.”

  “And the baby?”

  “I don’t know about that either.”

  “Why would her brother have killed McKay?”

  “Maybe it was a mistake,” she said, her voice unsteady from the bourbon. “Maybe he meant to kill Paul.”

  “There are some steps missing here.”

  “Ask Paul to fill them in.”

  Before I could answer Caridad appeared at the doorway and announced lunch.

  After lunch, Sara excused herself, saying she needed a nap, and gave me the run of the house. I washed up to go to the jail. On my way out, I looked for Caridad, and found her outside, in the rose garden, cutting roses with a pair of pinking shears and dropping them into
a canvas bag. The heat and fragrance made me dizzy. “Señora,” I called.

  She turned slowly, looked at me. Despite the heat, her skin was dry. “Señor?”

  In Spanish, I said, “Do you know a family named Soto who live in Paradise Slough? They have a daughter named Ruth.”

  She looked at me for a long time. “No,” she said, finally, adding, as she returned to her work, “Con su permiso.” I watched her stoop among the roses, thinking what a marvelous language Spanish was that she could convey so much contempt in a single polite phrase.

  5

  THE CITY JAIL WAS down by the train station, on a shady street otherwise occupied by bail bondsmen and fly-specked, window-front law offices advertising in both English and Spanish. This bilingualism was new. There had only been one public language when I was growing up, creating a kind of linguistic apartheid. One of my earliest memories as a child was going around with my grandmother at the end of the month to translate for her at the bank, the social security office and the utility company. Over the years, I had lost my fluency in Spanish though I could still make myself understood, albeit ungrammatically. And there were some things that existed for me only by their Spanish names, private things, small things—hands would always be manos to me and God, to the degree that he existed for me at all, would always be known by my grandmother’s loving diminutive, Diosito.

  This nostalgia was not without its bitter edge. When I had left this place I had closed my mind to it because I could not think about Los Robles without confronting the furious ghost of my father. Still, in those moments when the present opened a crevasse beneath me and I had no idea of who I was, it was because I had chosen to go through life without memory.

  I had come to a stop. Shaking myself, I made my way through the doors of the jail, grateful, for once, for the usual din and traffic: uniformed cops and their handcuffed charges, brilliant white lights and a scruffy green linoleum floor, the click of typewriters and shouts from the drunk tank. It was only a few degrees cooler inside than out.

  I explained my purpose to the cop at the front desk, a skinny black man named Robertson. While he arranged for me to see Paul I leafed through the police report, studying the box that described the victim. John McKay, Caucasian, age forty-eight, driver’s license showing a Glendale address, registered owner of a seven-year-old Honda Civic. I turned the pages looking for a rap sheet, which seemed a logical addendum considering his occupation, and was mildly surprised not to find one. Perhaps the cops had decided that he’d played his part in the case by getting killed. I made a mental note to look into it further.

  “Counsel.”

  I looked up at Robertson who jerked his head toward another officer standing at a metal door, which Robertson buzzed open as I approached. I and the other cop went through and I was taken down a corridor to a small room. Inside, at a wooden table, Paul Windsor sat in an orange jumpsuit. The officer led me in and left, stationing himself at the door outside.

  Contrary to popular belief, crime has no physiognomy. Paul was proof of that. His mild, bony face would’ve looked perfectly natural above a cleric’s collar or in a gas jockey’s coveralls. Of course, he was neither of those things. He was a pedophile and an accused murderer. I pulled out a chair and sat down.

  “Hello, Paul.”

  “Hello, Henry.” Something flickered in his eyes. Amusement? “You look like you went swimming in your clothes.”

  I glanced at the grimy cuff of my shirt. “Swimming in the heat is more like it.”

  He plucked at the collar of his jumpsuit. “You should wear one of these. They’re very cool and always in style.”

  “But not generally available to the public.”

  “That’s so,” he replied, smiling. “I appreciate you taking my case.”

  “How are you doing?”

  “Fine. Jail isn’t a new experience for me,” he said lightly. “They even gave me back my old cell. I’m in what they call high power. You know what that means, don’t you?”

  “Isolation?”

  He nodded. “Child molesters have a life expectancy of about five minutes in here. Even reformed child molesters.” His tone was bantering.

  “I wouldn’t be quite so free about tossing that around.”

  “Everyone knows about me, Henry. Hide the kids, Uncle Paul is coming to visit.”

  His calm made me wary. “That’s not why you’re here this time, of course.”

  His face grew serious. “No, it’s not. Well, not directly, anyway, but we both know that if I hadn’t been arrested before I wouldn’t be here now.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Isn’t it obvious? Someone kills a dealer in kiddie porn and the cops ‘round up the usual suspects.’ ”

  “You were there the night he was killed,” I pointed out.

  “That’s not a crime,” he said flatly.

  “Therein lies our defense,” I replied.

  “The real crime is that I have to defend myself at all.”

  I said, “The police think you had a motive to murder John McKay. Blackmail.”

  He grinned. “ ‘Police think’ is an oxymoron. They don’t think any more than sides of beef think.”

  “Nonetheless you were carrying quite a bit of money with you.”

  A little irritably, he said, “I thought Sara explained all that to you.”

  “She told me what you told her,” I replied. “That you’d gone to see McKay to purchase a child.”

  He laughed. “Does that sound like something I’d make up?”

  “I don’t know you well enough to answer that, Paul.”

  He got serious. “The only thing I’m guilty of is being different.”

  For now, I wanted to skirt that issue so I said, “Were you serious about buying this child, Paul?”

  “Why do we have to go into that?”

  “It could come out in trial.”

  “Only if I testify. Surely, you’re not going to put me on the witness stand,” he said caustically.

  “It’s a little early to decide that,” I replied. “After the prelim we’ll have a better idea of the strength of the prosecution’s case.”

  He wasn’t listening. “You just don’t want to talk about it, do you?” he sputtered.

  “About what, Paul?”

  “You’re talking as if there’s some truth to what they’re saying. I’ve been set up for one reason and one reason alone, because of what I am.” He glared at me. “This is bullshit.”

  I let a moment pass before I answered so it wouldn’t appear that I was arguing with him.

  “Maybe you’re right, Paul, I don’t know. It wouldn’t be the first time the cops have taken the easy way out on a difficult case. But here you are and, like it or not, there’s only one way to get you out that I know of. We go into court, we listen to their evidence, we show that it’s insufficient to prove the charge.” I allowed myself a faint, disparaging shrug. “It’s tedious. You won’t feel vindicated. But you will be free.”

  In a calm, bitter voice, he replied, “Do you give that speech to all your clients?”

  “In one form or another. To orient them.”

  Rubbing his eyes, he said, “This is different.”

  “How so?”

  “You’re assuming I’ll be treated fairly here. I won’t. Mark will see to that.”

  For all his apparent intelligence and self-possession, it occurred to me that maybe Paul really was paranoid. That would certainly complicate his defense.

  “Paul, it’s asking too much of me to believe that Mark arranged this murder to set you up.”

  He shook his head derisively. “That’s not what I said. I didn’t say he had McKay killed. He read about the murder and made some calls. Maybe money changed hands—it wouldn’t be the first time he bribed a bureaucrat—and I’m arrested.”

  “No one fabricated your fingerprints in McKay’s room,” I pointed out.

  “I’m not denying I was there,” he said angrily. �
��That’s what gave Mark the idea. But I didn’t kill McKay.”

  “Someone did.”

  He turned his face away in contempt.

  “I want you to tell me about McKay,” I said. “How you came to know him, what happened that night. Everything.”

  Tight-lipped, he stared at me for a moment, then began. “I didn’t actually know McKay, not the way you think. I mean, we never discussed Lolita over drinks, or anything like that. I talked to him over a computer bulletin board used by people who have my particular interests. He was a dealer in certain materials that appealed to me, and I bought things from him occasionally.”

  “Pornography?”

  “If you like.” He paused, eyes roaming the room for a moment before they rested on my face. “You of all people, Henry, should understand that sexuality is more than a matter of wiring.”

  “You might as well know now that I have the same biases as most people when it comes to pedophilia.”

  He smiled, fleetingly. “Maybe I can change your mind.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “I want you to understand anyway,” he said. “Society tells a lot of lies about children, but the biggest one is that they’re not sexual. They are, and it’s the purest kind of sexuality because they haven’t learned it’s dirty.” He pointed a finger, lecturing me. “When one is with a child sexually, one becomes a child, too. Everything’s immediate, every sensation is the first sensation. I can’t begin to describe how it feels.” His face was utterly naked. “They taste different, they smell different….”

  “Stop it,” I said, surprising myself with my vehemence.

  Startled, he gaped at me, then said, reproachfully, “You disappoint me, Henry.”

  “That’s to my credit, I think.”

  “Henry, Henry,” he said, shaking his head sadly. “Are you going to tell me that a child can’t consent to sex? Don’t you think they have sexual fantasies?”

  “A thirteen-year-old’s sexual fantasy is different than a thirty-year-old’s,” I said. “A child can’t fantasize adult sexual activity. You can’t talk about consent in that situation.”

  “Someday you’re going to meet a very pretty boy, Henry, who will change your ideas radically.”