The Hidden Law

by Michael Nava

  “They don’t let you off,” he said, looking at me very hard, waiting for me to lie.

  “Not entirely,” I said. “It’s a classic second-degree plea. Fifteen years to life, two years for the gun. In nine years you’d come up for parole.”

  “Nine years,” he said softly. “I’d be thirty-five.” He shook his head, “And that’s if you’re right, but you can’t promise anything.”

  “No, I can’t. But ask yourself this, Tino, whose interests would be served by sending you to death row? Who would be calling for your blood? Your mother? She’s the only one who would have the moral credibility to demand that you be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. But she won’t do that, will she?”

  “No,” he whispered.

  Because she knew, I thought. That’s why she’d had Inez Montoya try to call me off, to protect her son.

  “It’s already a nightmare for your family,” I said. “No one is going to want to make it worse.”

  He looked down at his hands, his shoulders trembling. When he looked up at me, he was crying. “I can’t take the chance, Mr. Rios.”

  “It’s your only chance, Tino.” I drew a deep breath and played my last card. “Killing me will only make it worse. You might be able to live with your father’s death, but not the death of an innocent man. Give me the gun, Tino.”

  Now he wept loudly, his body shaking. “I can’t.”

  “You’re not a killer, Tino,” I said, hoping that Freeman would stay put. “Give me the gun, Tino. I can help you. I understand what it’s been like. Kill me, and there won’t be another chance to make peace with yourself. Give me the gun, now. Tino, give me the gun.”

  He pulled the sweatshirt up, revealing the butt of a .22, and pulled it out of his waistband, holding it in his hand. I forced myself to remain perfectly still, though my guts had turned to liquid, and my brain screamed, get down.

  “Put it on the desk,” I said.

  He looked at me, then at the gun. We sat there for the world’s longest minute, and then, slowly, he lay the gun on the desk, and pushed it toward me. Slowly, I reached out and took it, opened my desk drawer and dropped it in. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Freeman standing at the doorway, tucking his own gun back into his holster. He moved back into the corridor.

  I came around the desk and put my hands on Tino’s shoulders. He hugged my waist and wept. I stroked his head, murmuring, “It’s OK, son. It’s OK. It’s OK.”

  Much later, I sat in my office with the tape that Freeman had made of the conversation. I played it back, and after it finished I sat there for a long time, thinking about the price I had almost paid to give Tino a chance to finally be free of his father. My father would have called me a fool for taking the risk. But he would have been wrong, as he had always been wrong about me, so blinded by his notion of what it meant to be a man that he had never seen his son’s courage. I pushed the erase button.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  I STOPPED TAKING CASES after Tino’s which, at any rate, took most of the summer to try. The DA went after him with special circumstances, but the case was only half-heartedly prosecuted. Day after day, the revelations of Gus Peña’s private persona filled the news. By the time I began the defense, there were letters to the editor demanding to know why the family was being subjected to further suffering. The jury came back with a second-degree conviction. He was sentenced to fifteen years to life in the medium security prison at San Luis Obispo. I went up to visit frequently the first few weeks he was there. So did Edith Rosen, who had gone into private practice.

  SafeHouse closed its doors shortly after the trial ended, pending an investigation by the state arising from testimony about Gus Peña’s stay there. Last I heard, Chuck Sweeny was trying to open a place in Nevada.

  Michael’s probation was violated in his armed robbery case and he was sentenced to the California Youth Authority until he turned twenty-one. Angela Peña was not, as it turned out, pregnant. The Ruizes settled their bill with me promptly, and that was the last I heard from them.

  Inez was elected to fill Gus Peña’s unexpired term in the state senate.

  By the end of August, I had finished my last case. I closed up my practice, helped find Emma another job, and went home.

  Summer was over. I could feel the change of season in the slight chill beneath the breeze that blew through the sycamores on the quiet side street in West Hollywood. I walked slowly, letting the breeze curl around my chest, and thought of Lonnie’s fingers tracing the plate of my torso as we lay in bed watching the light deepen in his room where I had spent the previous night. I didn’t delude myself into thinking that being with him meant anything more than it did, but it was enough. When I wasn’t with him, I was spending time with Eric and Andy in Santa Barbara, trying to remember what it had been like when I was eighteen and the world had laid its possibilities at my feet.

  I came to the front of an apartment building, searched the directory for Josh’s name, and when I found it, called up on the security phone.

  “Henry?” he asked.

  “Hi.”

  A buzzer sounded and I pushed the door open. I rode the elevator up to the third floor and he was standing on the breezeway, waiting for me, relaxed and comfortable in blue sweatpants and a yellow tank top. I hadn’t seen him since May. For a time, he hadn’t even called, and I’d had to let that go. Then, yesterday, he had asked me to come over. Seeing him, all the sadness came back, and all the regret. He walked toward me, grinning, and hugged me, then led me into the apartment he shared with Steven.

  “This is very nice,” I said, observing the polished surfaces of the expensively furnished room.

  “Yeah,” he said, “not bad for two guys on disability. Most of it’s Steven’s,” he added, seriously. “Souvenirs of when he was a junior executive at a studio. They dumped him when they found out he had AIDS. Actually, he lives off the settlement money from his lawsuit against them. Do you want something to drink?”

  “Mineral water?”

  He ducked into the kitchen and reappeared with two glasses of mineral water. “Your cocktail.”

  He sat down beside me, put his hand on my leg. “You look great, Henry.”

  “You, too,” I said, tracing a bulging biceps. “You’ve been working out.”

  “I’ve got lots of time to spend at the gym.”

  “What about school?” I asked him. When we broke up, he had been in his last quarter at UCLA.

  He sipped his Calistoga. “I had to drop out.” He tapped his head. “The mind is going.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, smiling, ready to play along.

  “I’ve lost about ten percent of the use of my brain already. The other day at dinner I couldn’t remember the word for salt.”

  I stopped smiling. “This isn’t funny.”

  “I’m not joking,” he replied.

  I started to cry. He put his arm around me, and let me sob against his chest, hard and muscular now from lifting weights, the chest of a beautiful young man with fifty years ahead of him. He stroked my hair and called me by the small names he had invented for me while we lived together. After a few minutes, I pulled myself together and leaned back into the sofa, wiping my face with my hands.

  “It’s not fair.”

  He sighed, drank some mineral water. “There are some things I need to take care of while I still can. I need a will, Henry.”

  “That’s why you asked me to come, about your will?”

  “Not just that, but to tell you. To ask for your help.”

  “Anything.”

  “Let’s start with a will. There’s not much. My grandfather set up a trust for all us kids, and I have a few stocks, that sort of thing. I want it to go to AIDS organizations, to Act Up and a couple of other places. I know you’ve been doing wills for PWAs for a couple of years.”

  “I never thought I’d do yours.”

  His expression was complex. “I guess we were both kind of living in a fantasy. You thou
ght if you didn’t let me grow up, I wouldn’t ever die. I thought you were strong enough to do it.”

  “I never meant to keep you from growing up.”

  “I know that,” he said, with a trace of the asperity of our last days together. Then, more gently, he added, “It was the only way you knew how to take care of me, by being the grown-up for both of us.”

  “I’m sorry, Josh.”

  He looked at me for a moment. “I think you’d do it differently now.”

  “Yes, I think you’re right.”

  He got up and walked over to a desk, returning with a folder. “I’ve written out what I want, basically. I thought you could take this and put it into legalese.”

  I opened the folder. He had filled pages with his sloping backhand. “Yes, I can do that.”

  “I want to be cremated, Henry,” he said, “My parents won’t like it, but if you tell them it’s what I wanted, they’ll respect it. And I want my ashes divided up into five parts, one for them, two for my sisters, one for Steve—if he’s still around—and one for you. Take them someplace that was special to us.”

  The only way I was going to get through was simply to respond to what he was saying without thinking about it.

  “OK, what about a service?”

  “At the church where Cullen’s was,” he said. “It’s memorial service central anyway. I guess no one will mind that I’m a Jew.”

  “There’s the gay synagogue.”

  He grinned. “Let’s do it my way, OK?”

  “Sorry.”

  “I know this is hard for you, Henry. There isn’t anyone else I can talk to about it without breaking down myself. There’s a song I want them to play, from that opera you dragged me to the last time we were in San Francisco. By Gucci.”

  “Puccini,” I said. “Suor Angelica.”

  He nodded. “Where she sings about her baby in heaven. It made my heart stop.”

  I remembered. Ah! dimmi quando in cielo potro vederti? quando potro baciarti!

  “‘When shall I see you in heaven? When shall I kiss you?’ You’re going to make me cry again.”

  “There will be enough time for that later, Henry,” he said, gently. “Have you been seeing anyone? I don’t like to think of you alone.”

  “I haven’t been.”

  He smiled. “Well, tell me about him.”

  “Josh…”

  “I want details, Henry.”

  “OK, his name is—”

  I couldn’t sleep that night, so I got out of bed, carefully, not wanting to wake Lonnie. I went into the living room and opened the windows to the cool air. I found the CD of Suor Angelica and put it into the player. I sat on the floor beneath the window, skipped the disc to the right place, pushed the play button and waited for the music to begin.

  Acknowledgments

  I want to thank Rob Miller, Dale and Sharon Flanagan, and Katherine V. Forrest for their friendship, support, and assistance, and Andy Ferrero.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Henry Rios Mysteries

  1

  I WOKE TO FIND THE BED SHAKING. SOMEWHERE IN THE HOUSE, glass came crashing down, and on the street car alarms went off and dogs wailed. The bed lurched back and forth like a raft in the squall. The floorboards seemed to rise like a wave beneath it, and for one surreal second, I thought I heard the earth roar, before I recognized the noise as the pounding of my heart. My stomach churned and fear banished every thought except get out. And then it stopped, the bed slamming to the ground, a glass falling in another room. Outside, the car alarms still shrilled, the dogs whimpered and the frantic voices of my neighbors called out to another, “Are you okay? Are you okay?” I sat up against the headboard and drew deep breaths. My heart beat slowly returned to normal, and I became aware that someone else was in the room. I reached for the lamp, but the power was out.

  “Who’s there?” I called out.

  My eyes accustomed themselves to the darkness, but I could not see anyone among the familiar shapes of the room. Yet I was sure someone was there, hovering at the foot of the bed, watching me. It moved, and then a great wash of emotion passed over me. Sadness. Relief. Regret. I felt them but they were not my feelings. I reached out my hand, but there was nothing. The room began to rattle, shaken by an aftershock. It lasted only a few seconds and when it was over, I was alone again.

  I hopped out of bed and ran into the closet door. The blow stunned, then focused me. “Think,” I commanded myself. Clothes. Shoes. Flashlight. Get outside. I pulled on some clothes and headed for the kitchen for the flashlight. The usual hum of appliances was stilled. Glass crunched beneath my feet as I crossed the room to the small pantry, where I found the flashlight in a utility drawer. I shot a beam of light across the kitchen. The cupboards had swung open, cans and boxes spilling out of them. The refrigerator had been knocked a couple of feet from the wall. I was suddenly very thirsty, and I opened the refrigerator to find its contents spilled and shaken. I drank some orange juice out of the carton and thought of Josh, alone in his apartment. I picked up the phone but, as I’d expected, the line was dead. I got out of the house.

  The street where I lived ran along the east rim of a small canyon in the hills above old Hollywood. On maps of the city, it was a curving line off Bronson Canyon Drive, hard to find and seldom traveled. My house, like other houses on the block, dated back to the 30s, but, unlike them, possessed no particular architectural distinction. It was down a few steps from the street, behind a low hedge, the bland stucco wall revealing little of the life that went on there.

  I’d bought the house when I’d moved to Los Angeles from San Francisco seven years ago and I’d lived there with my lover, Josh Mandel. Now I lived alone, Josh having left me thirteen months earlier for another man who, like Josh, had AIDS. It was Josh’s belief that, because of this, Steven could understand him in ways that were inaccessible to someone like me who was uninfected. But then Steven died and Josh’s own health began to deteriorate. I would gladly have taken him back but he insisted on living on his own. Still, we’d had something of a reconciliation, drawn back together by memories of our shared life and the impending end of his.

  As I closed the door behind me, I considered driving to West Hollywood to check up on him, but I doubted whether I would get that far. The quake had undoubtedly knocked out traffic signals and the roads would be filled with panicked motorists and nervous cops. I remembered the spooky presence in my bedroom and wondered anxiously if it had been Josh, but that was absurd. It had been nothing more than a trauma-induced hallucination; a momentary projection of my terror.

  I went around the side of the house and turned off the gas. When I returned to the street, my next-door neighbor, Jim Kwan, approached me, flashlight in hand, and asked, “Hey, Henry, you okay?”

  “So far,” I said. “Of course the night’s still young. How about you?”

  “We came through in one piece. Knock on wood,” he said, rapping his forehead. “I’m going to check on Mrs. Byrne down the street.”

  “I’ll come with you,” I said, anxious to keep busy.

  We passed a group of our neighbors huddled around a radio. The radio voice was saying, “…is estimated to be a six-point-six quake centered in the San Fernando Valley, with the epicenter near Encino…” I was relieved to hear that because it meant Josh was at least as far away from the epicenter as we were and there didn’t seem to be any major damage to the hill.

  I heard the clatter of metal against the street and trained my light on Kwan’s feet. He was wearing cleated golf shoes.

  “What’s with the shoes, Jim?”

  An embarrassed smile crossed his round, good-natured face. “I was scared shitless, man. I grabbed the first shoes I could find.”

  I shone the light on my own scuffed Nikes and recognized them as a pair Josh had left behind.

  “Is your phone out?” I asked Kwan.

  “Look across the canyon,” he said. “Everything is out.”

  Through a gap
between two fences I could see the west rim of the canyon, where far grander houses than ours commanded breathtaking views. Darkness. The October night was beautiful, cool and mild. Without the distracting blaze of city lights, the stars glittered in the deep blue sky. A damp herbal smell came up from the undergrowth. I reached down, tore a sprig of rosemary from a bush and crushed it between my fingers. The scent calmed me.

  “Spooky, huh?” Kwan said. “Like the city was clubbed in its sleep.”

  “Did you feel anything strange in your house after the quake?”

  “Like what?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “Like a ghost?”

  Kwan laughed. “Something must’ve come down on your head, Rios.”

  I felt the bump on my forehead where I’d hit the closet door. “Maybe so. Maybe I just imagined it.”

  Mrs. Byrne was sitting on her porch steps reading her Bible by candlelight. She was an old woman, her mottled, veiny face framed by stiff white tufts of hair. She had lived in Los Angeles for over forty years, but still pronounced the name of the city with a hard Midwestern “g.” Once or twice a month she went door to door with a sheaf of religious tracts of the hell-and-brimstone variety, and raved at the neighbors polite enough to let her in about God, Satan, kikes, spies, niggers and chinks. I barred the door when I saw her coming but Kwan, whom she usually caught while he was out gardening, suffered her rants with good humor. When I kidded him about it, he said she was lonely. With good reason, I replied.

  “Mrs. Byrne, are you okay?” Kwan asked.

  She looked at him with rheumy eyes and said, “Didn’t I tell you, Kwan, it’s the last days. Earthquakes, fires, plague.” Her voice got high and a little crazy. “Jesus is coming.”

  “Just in case he doesn’t come tonight, I’m going to shut off your gas,” he said. “Keep an eye on her, Henry.”