The Hidden Law

by Michael Nava

  I was stumped. None of the answers my mind was busily articulating seemed adequate, and after a few uncomfortable moments, that’s what I told him.

  “Why do you think that is, Henry?”

  “You know, this is a funny situation for me,” I said. “Usually I’m asking the questions.”

  He smiled, but did not respond, his question pendant, awaiting an answer.

  “I guess it’s because every answer I think of seems to be starting in the middle instead of the beginning,” I said.

  “What’s the immediate cause of your being here?” he asked. “Let’s start with that.”

  His leather couch squeaked as I shifted my weight. “My lover has moved out.”

  “And you didn’t want him to.”

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t want him to. He has AIDS and he doesn’t think I understand anymore, and he’s found someone who he thinks does. I think I understand.”

  He cocked his head slightly. “What is it you think you understand?”

  “His fear of dying.”

  Reynolds nodded, then asked, “And how is it that you understand that, Henry?”

  For the second time he stumped me. I looked around the gray room, avoiding his mild, almost bovine gaze. It was very quiet in this room. It was not quiet in my head.

  “Have you faced death?” he asked.

  “I came back,” I said, after a moment. “I came back from the dead.”

  “Tell me about that.”

  “I used to drink,” I said. “About seven years ago I stopped. I was working on a case, a murder. My client was a kid who had read too much Ayn Rand, basically, and decided he was above the rules. He tried to prove it by going out one night with a butcher knife to a park where homeless people lived, and he stabbed a man to death.” I looked at Reynolds who continued to gaze at me impassively. “Anyway, I was at home one evening going over the police report. I had pictures of the dead man spread out on the table. I was on my way to being drunk, as I was every night around that time, and I happened to look at the victim’s face. His eyes were open. Have you ever seen a dead person’s eyes?”

  “Yes,” he said, softly. “I have.”

  I nodded. “Well, then you know, there is nothing as dead as a dead man’s eyes. So, I looked at that picture, and I began to shake because I had seen those eyes before, that morning looking into the mirror.” The images began to flood my mind and I had to stop for a moment. “I was thirty-three years old, and my life was working and drinking, and it had been for a long time, since I’d left home for college. Somewhere along the line, I had died.”

  “What does that mean, Henry?” he inquired in his mild voice.

  “The thing that makes us human, the recognition of being alive, I had lost that. I drowned it in bourbon and kept myself so busy with work that I hadn’t even noticed until that moment.”

  “What happened?”

  I laughed. “I had a few more drinks, to calm myself, and more or less passed out. When I came to the next morning, I was panicked. So I had a few more drinks, and a few more. For two days, I got drunk and passed out, came to, and got drunk. Finally, a friend, a policewoman, came over to check up on me because I’d missed some court appearances. She put me in the hospital, and I dried out. If she hadn’t come I would’ve killed myself, probably.”

  Reynolds nodded. “Let’s go back. Before you left home to go away to college, what was that like for you?”

  “You people always end up wanting to talk about mommy and daddy,” I said, intending a joke, but it was more hostile than funny.

  No slouch, Reynolds said immediately, “Your parents seem to be a touchy subject.”

  “Sorry,” I replied. “It’s just that I think I’m a little too old to be blaming them for my problems.”

  “Was there alcoholism in your family?”

  I smiled at him. “I can’t compliment you on your acuity because that’s almost a truism, isn’t it; alcoholic son, alcoholic father.”

  “Your father was alcoholic.”

  “Touché,” I replied. “Yes, my father was a violent drunk.”

  “Violent toward you?” he pressed.

  “Yes,” I replied, aware of the impatience that had entered my voice as we talked about my father.

  “Were you violent when you drank?”

  “Of course not.”

  He grinned like a lawyer who’s cornered a witness on cross-examination. “Why ‘of course’?”

  “I’m not at all like my father,” I said.

  “In what ways are you different?”

  “Well, I’m homosexual, for one, and I’m educated, and I’m not a violent man.”

  “Interesting,” he mused after a moment. “The first distinction is one you have no control over, and the second is one that I imagine you worked very hard for.”

  “Are you saying they’re connected?”

  “I think very frequently gay boys compensate for their homosexuality by excelling at some talent they have.”

  “Compensate,” I repeated. “That suggests a deficiency.”

  “Very few boys regard their homosexuality in any other light,” he said. “Did you?”

  “No,” I said. “No, I didn’t want to be queer, either.”

  “Did you ever come out to your father?”

  I shook my head. “I had to wait until he was dead before I came out, or I wouldn’t be sitting here now, paying you to talk about him.”

  “The third distinction you made between you and your father is that you’re not a violent man. What about the violence you directed against yourself?”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “You said that at some point during your drinking, you died. Who killed you?”

  I leaned back into the uncomfortable couch, and said, appreciatively, “You’d have made a good lawyer.”

  Reynolds’s question stayed with me through the day, as I dashed across town, from Santa Monica to Pasadena, and then to the Criminal Courts Building arguing a motion in one court, conducting a preliminary hearing in another, and working out a plea bargain in the third. A typical Monday, in other words. I whizzed through the warm, hazy day, catching fragments of the city; a glittering, deserted beach, a shopping center whose signs were all written in Korean, the spooky Belle Epoque grandeur of Pasadena’s domed city hall. Who killed Henry Rios? reverberated like the title of a pulp mystery in the corner of my head that wasn’t occupied by a hundred other matters. Of course, I was the guilty party, so the next question was, what would be my defense?

  That night I went to an AA meeting and overheard someone say he knew he was recovering when his thoughts turned from suicide to homicide. Reynolds was right, there was a streak of violence in me, and I had become my own unintended victim. The man I really wanted to kill was the father whom I had had so much trouble talking to him about. As he had done in so many other ways, my father had cheated me by dying before I could dispatch him. On that comforting thought, I fell asleep.

  The next day, I got caught up in a hearing and arrived twenty minutes late to the church on Fairfax where Cullen McArthur’s memorial service was being held. I went up the worn stairs to the auditorium and found it full of men sitting on folding chairs that creaked noisily as the mourners fidgeted in the musty heat of the dim room. Panels of stained glass cast shards of color across the dirty wooden floor. The room smelled, not of sanctity, but of Eternity, Obsession and a dozen other cloying male scents. A long table at the back held bowls of fruit, platters of bagels and cream cheese, and two mammoth coffee urns gurgling softly. I couldn’t find Josh in the crowd so I took the first empty chair.

  Cullen was known as Mary Louise to his closest friends. He had sold us our house but we really came to know him later, I through AA and Josh through Act Up.

  At the front of the room was a podium and on either side of it were floral wreaths on easels. In the center of each were photographs of Cullen. One showed him as a boy of six or seven, bristly-haired and freckle
d. The other had been taken when he was in his mid-thirties, probably, a glossy head shot of a rather ordinary-looking man lighted and airbrushed into centerfold pulchritude. My own image of him was as a man with thinning red hair, very pale skin, mouth set in a moue, eyes wide with hot dish. Just another faggot, funny and sweet, just another sissy whose only sin had been not to be ashamed of himself.

  At the podium, Cullen’s best friend was saying, “The last time I went to see him, he’d gone completely blind. So I sat down and held his hand and said, ‘Honey, I’m so sorry.’ And Cullen squeezed my hand and said, ‘Girlfriend, you don’t know the half of it. I never learned how to put lipstick on in the dark.’”

  I was laughing and crying at the same time, and then I saw Josh. He was weeping on the shoulder of the man sitting next to him. Steven. Steven lifted Josh’s face and kissed his forehead, like an old lover. I got up quietly and left the room.

  I was on the sidewalk, heading to my car when I heard someone call, “Henry.”

  It was Timothy Taylor, my AA sponsor, tall and thin, a sprig of lilac drooping from the lapel of his white silk blazer, his graying blond hair swept back in dramatic planes from his narrow, inquisitive face.

  “I thought I saw you skulking in,” he said, “and I definitely saw you skulking out.”

  “Back to work,” I answered, not wanting to talk to him.

  He put his arm through mine. “Could you believe that Rita Hay-worth shot of Mary Louise? All she needed were castanets. Josh talked to me earlier.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Is there something you’d like to tell me?”

  “I’ve been dumped, Tim, that’s all.”

  “Mm,” he replied. “Must hurt.”

  “Of course it hurts.”

  “So what are you going to do about it? Run away, just like you did when you saw Josh with Steve?”

  “Is that such an unusual reaction?”

  We were at my car. “I thought you came here to remember Cullen.”

  “I’ll call you, Tim.”

  “Don’t wait until you’ve had a drink before you do it,” he replied.

  Back at my office, I pretended to work, reading the same page of a reporter’s transcript over and over, while entertaining murderous thoughts toward Steven. I was relieved when the phone rang. Emma said, “Senator Peña’s on the line. We’re coming up in the world.”

  “Just put him through, OK?”

  “Excuse me, Mr. Rios,” she replied.

  “Sorry, Emma, I—”

  “Who’s Emma?” Gus Peña asked, jovially. “Your girlfriend?”

  “My secretary, Gus. Are you still in town? I thought the senate was in session.”

  “Right now I have more important things to think about,” he said. “Like an arraignment.”

  I closed the reporter’s transcript and pulled out a legal pad. “I take it this is a business call.”

  “Listen, Rios, I got a lawyer up in Sacramento who doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground. I’ve been asking around and I hear you’re good. Take my case, all right?”

  People versus Peña, I wrote at the top of the pad. “What do you want to do about the case, Gus? From what I hear they got you cold.”

  “That’ll be the day,” he laughed. “First thing is, I want the trial moved down here, to LA. The papers up in Sacramento already got me convicted and serving time.”

  Change of venue, pre-trial publicity, I wrote. “Moving the trial doesn’t change the evidence.”

  “You haven’t even seen the evidence,” he said impatiently.

  “You were arrested at the scene, weren’t you?”

  “There were two of us in the car, Rios, me and one of my aides. We were driving back from dinner. I wasn’t driving. He was.”

  I put down my pen. “I beg your pardon?”

  “You heard me, I wasn’t driving.”

  “You were arrested.”

  “Sure, I was arrested,” he said, as if this was a minor detail. “But let me tell you how it happened. Frank was drunker than I was. He hit the guy and stopped in the middle of the street. When he saw what he had done, he got out of the car and started running. I couldn’t leave the car where it was, so I got in to pull it over. That’s when the cops came.”

  “Why didn’t you explain this to the police?”

  “Listen, Rios, I’m a Chicano from East Los Angeles. When I saw the cops, the old homeboy instincts kicked in, and I wasn’t about to tell them squat.”

  “You’ve had weeks since then to bring this to their attention,” I observed.

  He didn’t miss a beat. “I had to convince Frank to come forward and accept responsibility. Without him, the story doesn’t hold up.”

  “That’s true,” I said.

  “You sound like you don’t believe me, Rios.” There was an edge to his voice.

  “It’s just that less than a week ago you told me you had killed the man.”

  “Yeah,” he said, after a moment. “Well, I was protecting Frank. He’s my homeboy, you know. That’s all.”

  “I’d have to talk to both of you,” I said.

  “Sure, no problem. How about tomorrow?”

  I checked my schedule. I was starting a trial downtown. “No, not tomorrow. Thursday afternoon, around four.”

  “You got it,” he said. “We’ll be there.”

  I hung up and doodled on the sheet of paper in front of me. People versus Peña, a defense lawyer’s dream; high-profile case, cooperative client, an ironclad defense. All in all, it sounded too good to be true.

  CHAPTER SIX

  JOSH CALLED ME THE next day and we agreed to meet for dinner that night. I went downtown to start jury selection in a truly pathetic theft case: my client, a homeless wino, was accused of stealing a ring from a corpse that had been dumped in an alley off Spring Street. The cops had tried to pinch him for the homicide but, failing that, took what they could get. The deputy district attorney was not anxious to try the case to a downtown jury likely to be composed of black and Latino jurors from crime-ridden neighborhoods who would perceive the trial as another instance of the system’s misplaced priorities. The judge was equally unhappy at having his court tied up by what he had described in chambers as a “chickenshit case.” As the jurors filed in, the DA passed me a note that read. “How about a drunk in public with time served?” I scribbled back, “OK, with no probation.” She frowned, then shrugged, and asked to approach the bench. Ten minutes later, my man pled and the case was closed.

  Leaving the court, I got tied up in traffic and was twenty minutes late to the restaurant where I was meeting Josh. The place was a typical Westside bistro, whitewashed walls, black lacquered chairs and tables, concrete floors and atonal music, like drips of rain, falling between syllables of trendy conversation. It was hard to believe that this was in the same city where dead bodies were dumped in alleys and looted for the price of a bottle of Tokay.

  A pretty girl in a white Spandex dress pointed me toward Josh, who sat against the wall at a back table. He was wearing a black leather jacket over an Act Up T-shirt, black denim pants and clunky black shoes, that season’s garb for the gay urban revolutionary. In my gray pinstripes I felt conspicuously Older Generation though, in fact, we were simply at opposite poles of the same generation.

  “I’m sorry I’m late,” I said, sitting down.

  “I just got here myself,” he said, sipping absently from a glass of white wine. Ordinarily, he refrained from drinking around me, and I was irritated at how quickly his habits were changing.

  “You order yet?”

  “No, I was waiting for you.”

  I grunted acknowledgment. We spent a couple of minutes on the hand-written menus and then gave our orders to the handsome waiter who, after he took it, told Josh, “Love your shoes. Doc Marten’s?”

  “Yeah, Zodiac’s having a sale.”

  The waiter grinned, “Good deal.”

  I hadn’t the faintest notion of what they were talking
about. Sourly, I reflected that Steven would have understood. A busboy brought us water and I took a drink to wash down the bile before trying to hold a conversation.

  “I’m glad to see you,” Josh said. “Sorry about the misunderstanding yesterday.”

  It was hard to sustain my irritability, but I tried. “What misunderstanding; I was just a little late.”

  “No,” he said, “not that part. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you Steven would be there. I wanted to introduce you.”

  “Why?”

  The force of my hostility startled him, but only for a moment. He said, “Because I care about both of you.”

  “Sorry, I don’t mean to be a bitch. I’m just tired, and this isn’t a situation I’ve ever been in before. I don’t know the rules.”

  “There aren’t rules, Henry,” he said. He picked up his wine and drank some nervously. “I know it’s naive but I thought if you met him you wouldn’t be so mad at me.”

  “I’m not mad at you,” I replied.

  “If you were any tenser, you’d explode.”

  He was right; my shoulders were hunched to my ears. I took a long breath and dropped them. “He’s younger than me by ten years and he has the kind of body you see advertising 976 numbers,” I said. “I don’t see that meeting him would make me feel better.”

  “You’re not giving me a lot of credit if you think that that’s what this is all about,” he said. A peal of faked laughter cut through the chatter around us. “I’ve never had any complaints about our sex life.”

  “Oh, thanks.”

  He rolled the stem of the wine glass between his long fingers. “Could you try not to be such an asshole, Henry?”

  “Maybe you’d better tell me why it is you asked me here while there’s still time to cancel our orders.”