The Hidden Law

by Michael Nava

  He got up and started out of the room, bumping against the packed tables. I got up and hurried after him. I found him in the parking lot leaning against his car, crying.

  “Josh.”

  “You think this is some cheap faggot farce, don’t you,” he said thickly. “This is my goddamned life.”

  “It’s my life, too.”

  He wiped his nose on the sleeve of his jacket. “Just listen to me. I don’t want to die, Henry. I want to be like everyone else. I want my seventy-five years or whatever, but I know I’m not going to have them and it makes me crazy.” He tipped his head back and swallowed hard. “I can’t help resenting you. You’re going to be alive after I’m dead and you’ll find someone else.” He drew a deep breath. “It’s not fair. I had to get away from you. I had to get away from my own resentment.”

  “This isn’t the way,” I said, moving toward him. I put my arms around him and pulled him close. “There’s never going to be anyone else.”

  I heard the ‘thwack’ of the newspaper against the front door and opened my eyes. Josh lay beside me on his stomach, his face turned away from me. He was a restless sleeper and the sheets had fallen away from him, exposing the full length of his body. He was a little man, five-eight on a good day, he liked to say, three inches shorter than me, but in far better shape. He had taken an anatomy class and learned the names of the muscles. Taking my hand, he would place it somewhere on his body and say, “This is a deltoid. This is a latissimus dorsi.” The ripple of muscle beneath smooth skin was like a slow burning fire.

  It was the mystery of my sexual nature that a body which was the mirror image of mine could be so compelling and feel so unfamiliar, as if it belonged to a separate gender. When I was younger, it had seemed urgent to unravel this mystery because I believed that if it could be explained, the haters would stop hating us. Now I believed that they had no more right to an explanation about me than I did about them and, in any case, they would find other reasons to hate. Now I was simply grateful for his body beside me, known and unknown.

  I kissed the nape of his neck and got up, put on my pants and went out to get the paper. Tossing it on the kitchen table, I started the coffee, poured myself a glass of orange juice, swallowed some vitamins. I unrolled the newspaper and the headline stopped me cold: SENATOR PEÑA MURDERED, Legislator Shot to Death in Restaurant Parking Lot.

  I started reading:

  Popular politician Agustin Peña who represented East Los Angeles for the past fifteen years in the state senate was shot to death in the parking lot of an Eastside restaurant late last night. Peña, who had been dining with his family at La Playa Azul on First Street, was killed while walking to his car. No one else was injured. Although he was rushed to a nearby hospital, he died early this morning. Police have no suspects…

  Although the story went on at some length, all the known facts were in that first paragraph: a killing with no motive, no suspects, and no witnesses. The rest was the usual police disinformation, speculation that he might have come upon a car burglar who shot in panic; things the cops said when they didn’t have anything. My first thought was about Michael Ruiz, who was, after a fashion, my client. I picked up the phone and called. Edith Rosen had just arrived.

  “Do you know about Gus?” I asked.

  “It’s horrible, Henry. It’s just horrible,” she said. “I can hardly believe it.”

  “Does Chuck know?”

  “He was at the hospital with the family,” she said.

  “What about Michael Ruiz?”

  “Michael was here last night,” she said. “He had nothing to do with it.”

  “Is he being a little more cooperative around there?”

  “He knows it’s his last chance,” she said evasively.

  “I hope that means yes.”

  “The police don’t seem to know anything about who killed Gus,” she said.

  “That won’t last long. Peña was an important man, they’ll do everything they can to catch his killer as quickly as possible.”

  “I hope they do,” she said, sincerely. “I have to go, Henry. Perhaps we’ll talk later.”

  I was uneasy about the conversation, but in the absence of any reason for suspicion, I had to let it go. I went back to the paper. On the inside pages were statements from prominent politicians expressing shock at the killing. My old friend, Inez Montoya, now a city councilwoman, went on at length about the loss to the Chicano community. Her effusiveness surprised me. Although she had once worked for Gus, he had opposed her candidacy for city council and she still spoke of him with bitterness. I didn’t know his family to call and express my own regret, so I called Inez instead.

  “I can’t talk now,” she said, with her usual abruptness. “I’m on my way to Graciela.”

  “Peña’s wife? Are you two friends?”

  “I was always closer to her. Listen, will you be my date to the funeral?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Fine, I’ll call you with the details.”

  “Hi.” Josh appeared at the doorway, naked, scratching his chest. “I smelled coffee.” He looked at me. “What’s wrong, Henry?”

  “Gus Peña was murdered last night,” I said, indicating the paper.

  Josh came over and glanced at the headline. “Peña,” he said. “Homophobic pig. You know he refused to sponsor a bill to fund a minority AIDS project in East LA? He actually said he wouldn’t be party to promoting homosexuality and drug use.”

  I looked at the picture of Peña in the paper, tuxedoed, smiling. “No, I didn’t know that,” I said.

  He yawned and looked at the article. “They shot him, huh? Assassination, you think?”

  “I guess that’s always a possibility with a politician, though a state senator doesn’t exactly wield great power.”

  “You never know,” Josh said. “They pass the laws. He could’ve really pissed someone off.”

  The gangs, I thought, and their defenders, like Tomas Ochoa.

  “Maybe it was Act Up,” he said.

  “You’re not serious.”

  “We talk about it sometimes,” he said, pouring himself a cup of coffee and heading to the refrigerator for milk. “Like, if you’re dying of AIDS, why not take out a few politicians. Hey, we’re out of milk.”

  “Sorry, I haven’t bought it since…” I let that sentence hang. “Would you do that?” I asked.

  “Only if I had a crack at Jesse Helms.” He closed the refrigerator. “Keep buying milk, OK?”

  The morning TV news was full of Gus’s murder. Since the police couldn’t report any leads, most of it was filler. At one point, Tomas Ochoa was interviewed as an expert on Chicano politics to explain the significance of Peña’s murder. He used the opportunity to rail against Peña’s anti-gang bill and warn the police against scapegoating the gangs. Inez Montoya was interviewed at Peña’s house. The message she delivered to the police was that any delay in capturing Peña’s killer would be viewed as an insult to the Latino community. She brushed aside questions of whether the killing was an assassination. “It was just some punk,” she snapped. The family was not available to the press, which had to content itself with shots of Mrs. Peña being led to a waiting car by her son.

  I got dressed and went to my office, half-expecting a message from someone in Peña’s office since I had been scheduled to meet with him that afternoon. No one had bothered calling. It was a moot point anyway.

  I called my investigator Freeman Vidor about a witness he was trying to locate for me. We got around to Peña’s murder. Freeman, as usual, had inside information from his contacts in the police department on which he’d served for a dozen years before the racism of his brother officers finally drove him out.

  “Ballistics thinks it was an Uzi,” he said. “They found a dozen shell casings in the lot.”

  “That was some car burglar,” I said.

  “It wasn’t a car burglar. You know who likes Uzis, the gang-bangers. Looks to me like a drive-by shooting.�
��

  “That’s Varrio Nuevo territory,” I said. The names and territories of the Chicano gangs were familiar to every criminal defense attorney who worked downtown. The archrivals of the Varrio Nuevo gang were called the Dogtown Locos. I mentioned this to Freeman.

  “That’s who I would put my money on.”

  “Even in the dark, Peña couldn’t have looked like a gang member.”

  “Maybe there was someone else in the lot,” he conjectured.

  “Maybe they expected to find Peña,” I said.

  “Hey, didn’t he run over someone up in Sacramento a couple of months ago? Maybe the guy had family in LA and it was a revenge shooting.”

  “Hmm. If I were the cops I’d at least look into it,” I replied.

  “You know what else is kind of interesting,” Freeman said, “I heard the toxo report came back showing the senator was drunk.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “After that speech he made last week.” Not to mention the little speech he’d made to me afterwards.

  “I guess he just couldn’t keep off the hootch,” Freeman said. “You know the guy?”

  “He’d asked me to represent him up in Sacramento,” I said.

  “There’s one fee you won’t be getting.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE SATURDAY AFTER PEÑA’S murder was May 5, Cinco de Mayo, a holiday commemorating Mexico’s victory over the invading French army in 1862. In Los Angeles, it was the occasion for the Chicano community to display the cultural nationalism that lay just below the surface of a city that retained its Spanish place names but had otherwise entombed its origins beneath the Hollywood sign. With Peña’s murder, the celebrations took on an edge. There was a rally downtown in Peña’s honor that turned violent when rival gangs starting shooting each other up. At another rally in East LA, Tomas Ochoa attempted to incite the crowd against the police who’d been called out to prevent further gang violence. Even at the pricey Chicano Bar Association dinner I attended on Saturday night there was muttering about whether the police were pursuing their investigation with the same dispatch as they would have had Peña been an Anglo politician. To me, this was bad news. The more pressure that was put on the police, the likelier it was that they would scapegoat someone. By the time Monday morning rolled around, the day of Peña’s funeral, the city was braced for violence.

  I made my way across a police barricade to City Hall where I was picking up Inez Montoya for the short walk to the church where the funeral was being held. A metal detector had been set up at the entrance. Inside, police officers were posted beneath the eight civic virtues, shiftily eyeing the few bureaucrats who had bothered showing up for work that day. Inez was on the phone in her inner office, so I waited outside.

  It had been at Inez’s table at a fund-raising dinner two years earlier where I’d first met Gus Peña. He’d come over to congratulate his one-time administrative assistant on her election to the city council out of the same district which he represented in the state senate. There had been a certain amount of condescension in the gesture, which, Inez had later told me, pretty much summed up his attitude toward women in general.

  I’d known Inez for years, from her days, and mine, as public defenders. I’d worked up north at the time, and she was in Los Angeles. We’d met at a statewide meeting of the CPDA, California Public Defenders’ Association, a group loftily dedicated to promoting the best legal services possible for indigent criminal defendants, back in the days when young lawyers thought this was a worthy goal. A long time ago, obviously.

  We’d gotten drunk together—I was still drinking then—and she had tried to seduce me. She’d always had terrible luck with men. But we’d stayed friends and I’d watched her career, helping in whatever small ways I could, as she made her way through the political maelstrom on brains and guts and a passionate commitment to the disenfranchised. She was an altogether admirable, if sometimes scary, human being.

  As I sat leafing through an issue of Hispanic magazine, I heard her shouting in her office.

  “Don’t give me any bureaucratic excuses,” she was saying. “This guy’s the worst slumlord in the city.”

  One of her staffers looked at me and smiled. From within her office, she growled, “Yeah, well you are the Building and Safety Department, aren’t you?” After a moment’s pause, she resumed her tirade. “Well if I don’t have an answer by the end of the day I’m going to haul your ass down here to explain why.” There was a jangle as she slammed down the receiver.

  “I guess you can go in now,” her aide told me.

  “Thanks.” I went to the door and knocked.

  “What?” she demanded.

  I pushed the door open and said, “Building and Safety inspector, ma’am.”

  She smiled, “Was I being a little loud? A little unladylike?”

  “You ready to go pay your respects to Gus?”

  She pulled a cigarette out of the pack on her desk and lit it, sucking greedily. “Is it time, already? Do I look OK?”

  In her dark suit, her hair pulled back and tied with one of her trademark ribbons, she could have passed for a schoolgirl.

  “You look fine.”

  She got up and hoisted her purse over her shoulder. “Let’s go, then.”

  “This place looks like a scene out of that Costa-Gavras movie, State of Siege,” I said as we crossed the rotunda, past the unsmiling countenances of the police guards.

  “Oh, them,” she said, dismissively. “It’s safer than working the streets.”

  Outside, it was hot and clear, the early signs of another scorching summer. The trees on the grounds of City Hall sagged listlessly. The grass had been allowed to die, a concession to the drought, but it was still heavily populated in equal measure by street people and city workers eating lunch. A grizzled old man stood on the corner of Main and First, shrieking passages from the Bible, a Styrofoam cup balanced on his head. As we approached him, he stopped in mid-imprecation, reached for the cup and took a drink from it.

  She put her arm through mine and said, “I’ve always wondered what he had in that cup.”

  “God’s work is thirsty work, I guess.”

  “LA, don’t you love it?”

  “It got to be a hot weekend,” I said, not referring to the weather.

  “I know, I know. I’ve spent the last five days trying to keep people in my district calm.”

  “Tomas Ochoa didn’t help matters.”

  “That shit,” she said.

  “I saw you on TV last night talking about Gus,” I said, pulling her toward me to avoid a broken bottle of Gallo port on the sidewalk. On the tube, she had praised Peña as a friend of the poor and leader in the continuing fight for the civil rights of all people. “Did you mean it?”

  “You’re so cynical, Henry. You should go into politics.” Waving away a panhandler, she said, “Of course I meant it. Gus had an excellent record on social legislation. In his own way, he was a powerful advocate for the community. The fact that he was also an asshole is neither here nor there. Besides,” she added, thoughtfully, “there aren’t so many Chicano politicians that we can afford to lose one.”

  “Who do you think killed him?”

  She wasn’t listening. We’d crossed First and were heading down Main, past boarded-up storefronts that reeked of urine, and a parking lot where the homeless lived in tents made out of plastic garbage bags and cardboard boxes.

  “Look at this,” she said, indignation darkening her voice. “In one of the richest cities in the world people live like this.” She looked at me, frowning. “Gus wore thousand-dollar suits, but he knew what it was like to be poor. Unlike the gringos who run this town.”

  “I’m on your side,” I reminded her.

  Traffic had been diverted around the church, and a line of black limousines was parked alongside it. Police officers patrolled the area keeping the crowd at bay. I began to hear chanting. As we approached I saw that it was coming from a contingent of black T-shirted, placard-waving Act
Up members. One of them read, “Save the Minority AIDS Project.” Others repeated in Spanish the group’s motto, Silence = Death.

  Separated from them by a line of cops was another group, mostly Chicano kids, holding up their own placards denouncing the police. Some of them had started shouting “Faggots,” and “Queers,” at the Act Up contingent. I thought I caught a glimpse of Ochoa among them.

  “What’s Act Up doing here?” Inez asked.

  “They’re pushing funding for the Minority AIDS Project,” I said, repeating what Josh had told me. “They figured there’d be a big contingent of politicians at the funeral.”

  “It looks to me like there’s going to be a fight,” she said.

  We’d come to the police line. I looked over to where the cops had contained the Act Up people, searching to see if Josh was there. He was, one hand raised in a fist in the air, and the other around Steven Wolfe’s waist. He saw me and began walking forward, but a black cop pushed him back with the edge of his baton.

  “There’s Josh,” I said, pulling her with me as I hurried over to him.

  Josh was arguing with the cop, Steven coming up behind him, when we got there.

  “Excuse me, officer,” I said. “This is a friend of mine.”

  The cop looked me up and down in my black suit, and glanced at Inez. “Sorry, sir, the demonstrators have to stay behind the lines.”

  “I just want to talk to him,” I said.

  “Officer,” Inez said, pulling her wallet out of her purse. “I’m with him.” She flipped her wallet open, showing some kind of badge. He looked at it.

  “OK, but just you,” he said to Josh, letting him through. Steven smiled at me with unmistakable disdain.

  “Hi, Inez,” Josh said. “What was that you showed him?”

  “City council members carry a badge,” she said. “It gets us out of traffic tickets. You want to come inside with us?”

  He shook his head. “Hi, Henry.”

  “Hi. It looks like there’s going to be trouble here, Josh,” I said, indicating the Chicano demonstrators.