by Michael Nava
“Why was Ekklesia on the list?” I asked.
Jack said, “They gave twenty-five thousand bucks to Yes on 54.”
“And their pastor signed the letter in the Times endorsing it,” Becca added.
“No other reason that it was particularly singled out?”
“Isn’t that enough?” Minh said, disgustedly.
My beeper went off. I sneaked a look and saw that the call was coming from Larry’s house. It must be Josh, home from work and wondering where I was.
I looked at each of the people sitting around the table, and I sensed, knew really, that one of them was holding back on me.
“Okay,” I said. “We’re done for now. If the cops try to question you, don’t say a word to them. Call me. Day or night.”
Becca smiled. “Thanks, Henry. We know the drill.”
••••
When I got home, Josh was at the kitchen table poking at a plate of pasta. As soon as he looked up at me, I knew something was wrong.
“Hey, baby,” I said. “Are you okay? Something happen at work?”
“I didn’t go to work,” he said.
I sat down. “No? Are you sick?”
“I went to see my parents. I told them about me.”
“What? Why?”
“I was getting ready to go to work when I got a page from a police detective. He asked me if I knew where Theo was. I told him I wasn’t going to talk to him or any other police officer without my lawyer. He said if I didn’t talk to him, he’d call my father and let him know his gay son was involved in a murder investigation.” He rubbed his temples. “He knew my dad’s name. He had our home phone number.”
Shit, I thought. That had to have come from whoever Marc had spoken to in the department to keep Josh’s name out of the press conference.
“What did you tell him?”
“I hung up on him.”
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“There was no time,” he said, angrily. “For all I knew he called my folks as soon as I’d hung up on him. I drove to Encino as fast as I could. They were just sitting down to dinner when I arrived. I told them everything. Being gay. Being positive. The thing with Theo. You.”
“What happened?”
He heaved a heavy sigh from deep in his body. “My mom freaked. My dad looked at me like he’d never seen me before in his life and told me to leave. That’s all. But when he closed the door behind me, it felt like it was closing forever.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“I love my father,” he said, looking up, but not at me. Seeing, instead, his father shutting the door on him. “He’s tough, not like my mom, kissing my owies and spoiling me. Dad taught me the world’s not fair to Jews, but we have the strength of our traditions and our families and our faith to rely on. When he closed the door, it was like he was taking all that away from me.” Now he did look at me, his expression intense, almost angry. “How am I supposed to be strong without those things? How am I going to face AIDS? How am I supposed to live?”
“He loves you, too, Josh. Give him time.”
“I don’t have time,” he snapped.
I stood up. “You don’t know that.”
Now he was angry. “You’re right. I don’t know anything. How much time I have. If my parents will forgive me. If you’ll stick around when I start to get sick. I look at the future and see a black hole.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“You barely know me,” he mumbled.
“I know myself. I know I love you.”
“I’m such a mess,” in a drained voice.
I pulled up a chair, sat, and took both his hands in mine. “You had to tell them sometime.”
“Not like this.”
“Josh, can you imagine any circumstance where they would have responded differently?”
After a moment, he shook his head slightly. “No, not really. I always knew they’d take it hard. I guess I can stop worrying about their reaction. What are you always telling me? Better to deal with reality than fantasy?”
“Something like that.”
He managed a grin. “Reality sucks.”
“It also changes,” I reminded him. “Often, it gets better.”
He got up, sat in my lap and laid his head on my shoulder. I put my arms around him and held him as if he were a tired child. The silence was broken only by the ticking of the kitchen clock. I remember asking Larry once, when I was having a day almost as lousy as Josh’s, “Does time really heal everything?” Larry said, “Not if you mean does it make things right.” “Then how?” I asked. “It puts tough things behind you and into perspective and they begin to lose their power to hurt you. They become features in the landscape of your life getting smaller and smaller as you move forward.” This wasn’t the moment to say it to Josh, but the terrible, immediate pain of his father’s rejection would recede and he would see what he had to do next.
“Where were you when I got home?” he murmured.
I gave him the rundown of the day’s events and my meeting at the center with the Bash the Church affinity group. When I said I thought one of them was holding back, he asked, “You think they helped Theo bomb the church?”
“I think one of them knows where Theo is.”
He sat up straight. “Don’t you think he’s with Freddy?”
“There’s no evidence Freddy was involved in the bombing, and from what people said about him, it seems like he tagged along to QUEER meetings because Theo made him. Everything points to Theo. He’s the one the cops are after. He’s the one on the run.”
“Tell me again who was at the meeting,” Josh said thoughtfully.
“Laura, Bunny, Jack, Minh, and Becca. Why?”
“It’s Becca.”
“What?”
“If anyone is protecting Theo, it’s Becca.”
“Why do you say that?”
He smiled. “She’s like you, Henry. A rescuer.”
••••
She had never drank while her mother was alive. Her mother’s pitiable existence was a cautionary tale about the evils of alcohol; her life shriveled until it did not extend past the confines of the bed where she spent the last years of her life, her legs atrophied from lack of use and her mind gone to mush. Jessica nursed her, a task that consisted mainly of cleaning her when she soiled herself and providing her with alcohol to prevent seizures and delirium.
Her father had confined himself to a single nightly Scotch, poured into a heavy-bottomed crystal tumbler filled with ice that he sipped while he watched the evening news. She didn’t know whether he enjoyed the alcohol or if it was one of the habits he cultivated as part of his conception of being a powerful man— like the big black Lincoln Continental and the affairs. None of the affairs were women in the church. He probably thought he was being discreet but the occasional appearance in his life of a strange woman was more telling than if he had picked his girlfriends from among his eager female congregants. Jessica thought it was entirely likely that her childhood recollections of her father’s odd, hushed phone calls followed by urgent, late-night pastoral emergencies had led her to suspect Daniel was having an affair.
Daniel did not drink as an example of abstinence to anyone who might be struggling with alcohol. Her abstinence lasted into the third year of her marriage when she moved into her mother’s old room, leaving Daniel to sleep alone in their marital bed. Cleaning out a dresser drawer, she found hidden away among her mother’s disused stockings and undergarments a pint of vodka wrapped in tissue paper. Unwrapping it, remembering her mother, she’d felt unbearable sadness, but then it seemed as if the discovery had been providential— a message from her mother. She emptied the water glass she kept beside her bed, poured two fingers of vodka into it, and drank it down in a single, shuddering gulp. She remembered how her entire body had seemed to exhale as if it had been holding a pent-up breath for years and years; everything went soft and warm.
She made rules for herself. She ever
drank in public nor at home in front of Daniel. She bought her liquor at supermarkets far from their home and kept the empties hidden in the trunk of her car to dispose of in random dumpsters. During the day, while Daniel was at work, she allowed herself two or three drinks carefully spaced out to avoid the slightest hint of intoxication when he arrived home, choosing vodka because she believed it left the least trace of alcohol on her breath after she vigorously brushed her teeth. When they retired to their rooms, however, she poured her nightcaps with a heavy hand.
Her drunken mother had alternated between silent, sodden obliviousness and slurring, over-enunciated attempts at maintaining her propriety. But Jessica discovered there were intermediate states between sobriety and intoxication, some of them like a warm embrace while others left her crisp and clear-eyed. In the latter state, alcohol cleared her mind of all extraneous noise. Whatever moment of her life she turned her attention to, the insights and understandings flashed like lightning, illuminating areas that she had always sensed were present but had been unable to see.
Her father, for example, with his fine Scotch and big cars and mistresses. What were those things but the trappings of the successful men of his generation, the bankers, lawyers, businessmen, and politicians he liked to surround himself with? She understood that at bottom her father felt inferior to these men with his unshakable white-trash accent and little Bible college degree. He might preach the Kingdom of God but his stake in the world mattered to him, too, and it would never be as impressive, as important, as theirs. They made things happen while he could offer only commentary, judgment, criticisms, complaint. And wasn’t that, after all, more a woman’s power than a man’s? Perhaps her father suspected that this was how those bankers and lawyers and businessmen and politicians regarded him and this lingering insecurity fueled his performance of their masculinity.
Max Taggert had cast himself as a great man, unlike Daniel who had only wanted to be a good one. Her father had carried himself as if he were a monument; Daniel’s dimensions were human. Accustomed to her domineering father’s grandiosity and harshness, she had mistaken Daniel’s humility for weakness, his flexibility for indecision, his kindness for credulity. Now that he was gone, she saw she’d been all wrong about him.
Daniel was the true Christian, driven, however imperfectly, by love. And her father? He was a Pharisee, legalistic, intolerant, and proud. He had built the church in his image and she understood how unhappy Daniel must have been here, surrounded by her father’s men who were intent on carrying out her father’s legacy. Daniel was never supposed to have been more than a figurehead while men like Uncle Bob actually ran the church.
She had chosen the wrong side, her father over her husband. She and Daniel could have been allies, could have, in time perhaps, even come to have a real marriage. She should have gone to him when she learned about his other woman and his child. They might have achieved something like intimacy. Instead, she had betrayed Daniel by going to his enemy with his damning secret. At least, she thought, Daniel had died before he discovered her betrayal.
••••
Becca— whose full name Laura told me was Rebecca Traynor, and who was a retired social worker— lived on a quiet Santa Monica street in a small 1920s bungalow painted bright yellow with a big, welcoming porch. I parked in front of her white picket fence and admired the little garden that filled her yard with flowers and herbs and—
“Are those pot plants?” Josh asked, pointing to the distinctive jagged, spindly leaves of a cannabis shrub. He had insisted on coming with me, arguing, reasonably enough, that if Theo was with Becca, he’d be less skittish if I brought a familiar, friendly face along.
“Over by the rosemary?” I asked. “I think so. Come on, let’s see if she’s home.”
I pushed open the squeaky gate and clambered up the porch steps to a rainbow welcome mat laid out in in front of the door. I knocked. A moment later, Becca peered out of a side window. The doorknob turned and she opened the door just enough for us to see the light-filled interior behind her.
“I need to talk to Theo,” I said.
She was in an old chambray work shirt and jeans, yellow garden gloves on her hands. She brushed a strand of white hair from her face and asked, “How did you figure it out?”
I indicated Josh. “Josh guessed if he’d gone to anyone for help, it would have been you.”
A lithe white cat slipped out of the door and into the garden. Becca followed it out to the porch, closing the door behind her.
“What do you want with him?”
“I want to offer to represent him,” I replied, “and to see if I can convince him to turn himself in.”
“Sit down, you two,” she said, indicating a porch swing. She peeled off the garden gloves and stuck them in her back pocket. “Theo’s asleep.”
“Wake him,” I said. “This is important.”
“After we talk,” she replied. She leaned against the porch railing. “Why should he turn himself in?”
“For his safety, and yours. The cops are looking for him. They won’t be too fastidious about how they catch him. If they figure out he’s here, you’ll have a SWAT team trampling your garden and shooting your door open. He could be hurt; you could be hurt. At minimum,” I continued, “the pot plants will land you in jail, too. That and a charge of being an accessory after the fact to felony murder.”
“He didn’t mean to kill anyone. Freddy told him there wouldn’t be anyone there.”
“Freddy?” I said, surprised. “I thought Freddy was the reluctant boyfriend Theo dragged to QUEER meetings.”
“So did I,” she admitted, “but Theo says the bombing was Freddy’s idea.”
“It’s Theo’s fingerprint on the bomb,” I pointed out, “which proves he was there, and if he was there, he’s culpable, whoever planned the bombing.”
“He admits he was there,” she said, “and planted the bombs, but he says Freddy told him no one would be at the church.”
“It doesn’t matter whether the pastor’s death was intentional. When someone is killed in the commission of a felony, it’s still murder. And if you use an explosive, that’s a capital crime.”
“He could get the death penalty?” she asked, shocked.
“If the DA decides to seek it,” I said. “That’s the other reason he needs to turn himself in. If he’s cooperative now, it gives me something to negotiate with. If they have to drag him in, they’ll throw the book at him. There’s also the organization to think about.”
“QUEER? We had nothing to do with it.”
“Gates’s press conference was a declaration of war on QUEER. If they can’t find Theo, they’ll go after you. You should have told me last night he was here.”
She leaned against the porch railing and sighed. “He was a wreck when he turned up, detoxing from drugs, terrified because Freddy had abandoned him. I had to take him in until he was at least well enough to make some rational decisions about what to do.”
“I’m here to help him do that,” I said.
“Come inside. I’ll wake him.”
••••
Her sun-washed living room was sparsely furnished with what looked like heirloom pieces of Arts and Crafts furniture. On one table were two photographs, one a long-ago wedding portrait of a handsome young groom and a young bride who was, identifiably, Becca. Next to it was another photograph of the same couple much later in life. He wore a gray suit and she was in a flowered dress pinned with a corsage. They were standing in this room and behind them a banner tacked to the wall proclaimed “Happy 45th Anniversary.”
She noticed me noticing the photographs.
“That was my husband, Roger. We were married for forty-five years until cancer killed him back in 1980.”
Josh said, “Uh, you’re not a . . .”
“Lesbian?” she said, smiling. “No. Roger was gay. Don’t look so surprised, Josh. That’s what gay men had to do in those days. Get married.”
“Did you know?�
� Josh asked.
“Yes, he was the best of companions. Sit down. I’ll get Theo.”
After she left the room, Josh said, “Do you believe that Freddy was behind the bombings?”
“I haven’t formed an opinion yet. What do you think?”
“From what I saw of them, Freddy was the only thing standing between Theo and complete self-destruction.”
“If that’s true, why didn’t he stop Theo and where is he now?”
Before Josh could answer, a disheveled Theo shambled in with Becca on his heels.
“Hey, Josh,” he mumbled, and greeted me with a sharp, unfriendly nod.
It had been a while since I’d seen Theo; mostly he existed for me as a topic of conversation with Josh. From those talks, I’d formed an image of him as a skinny, wired, erratic speed freak. The young man who entered the room was remarkably handsome in a fallen angel sort of way: black hair, blue eyes, lean, sculpted face. He was wearing a white T-shirt with a photograph of two young sailors kissing with the words “Read My Lips” printed across them, a pair of sky-blue cargo shorts, and flip-flops, as if he’d been strolling along the Venice boardwalk.
“Hello, Theo. I think you remember I’m a criminal defense lawyer. I’m prepared to represent you if you want me to.”
“There wasn’t supposed to be anyone in the church,” he said in a flat voice.
I indicated Josh and Becca. “You two mind leaving?”
“I want them here,” Theo said.
“They can’t be here if our conversation is going to be protected by the lawyer-client privilege. Anything you say to me— anything at all— is confidential, but if someone else is in the room who isn’t a lawyer, they can be compelled to testify.”
“Come along, Josh,” Becca said. “I could use a strong young back to spread fertilizer in the garden.”
••••
“Sit down, Theo. We’re going to be here awhile.” He sat. I continued. “The cops have your fingerprints on fragments of one of the bombs you planted at Ekklesia. They executed a search warrant at Josh’s apartment looking for evidence of the construction materials used to make the bombs. If there was anything there, they found it.” From the flicker of fear in his eyes I guessed he hadn’t been too careful about cleaning up. “They know you were the bomber. The longer you run, the worse it’s going to be when they eventually track you down. I’m advising you to turn yourself in. You’ll save the cops the time and expense of a manhunt and give me leverage when I sit down with the DA to discuss how they’re going to charge you.”
