Lies With Man

by Michael Nava

He shouted back at me, “Your guy killed himself. Period. End of the story. Now, get out. I have work to do.”

  I got up. “This isn’t over.”

  “I said get out.”

  ••••

  There was still the matter of my pending discovery motion in Judge Mayeda’s court. When I arrived in the courthouse, Theo’s mother was sitting on a bench outside the courtroom. I knew immediately from her hopeful expression that the cops hadn’t informed her of her son’s death.

  “Mr. Rios,” she said, rising. “Will Theo be here?”

  I took a breath. “We need to talk. There’s a conference room at the end of the hall.”

  ••••

  I made it into the courtroom just as the bailiff was calling the court into session. I hurried to the counsel table as Mayeda entered from behind the dais and took his seat high above us. Other than the court staff, the only people in the room were Novotny and me. Theo’s mother had left after we talked, to locate Theo’s body. The last thing she’d said to me, repeating it over and over, still echoed in my head: “Theo wouldn’t kill himself.”

  “People versus Latour,” Mayeda said. “We’re here for a disposition on the defense’s discovery motion. Mr. Novotny, you’d asked for time to consult your office and the Los Angeles Police Department.”

  Novotny glanced at me. “Uh, Your Honor, there’s been a development in the case. Maybe Mr. Rios—”

  “My client is dead, Your Honor.”

  Mayeda’s clerk and the court reporter both abruptly stopped what they had been doing to stare at me. Mayeda’s fingers reached to his face automatically to smooth his moustache. After a moment, he asked, “What happened?”

  “He was apparently found dead in his cell,” I replied.

  I felt Novotny’s eyes on me, evidently waiting for me to continue, but when I didn’t, he spoke up. “He hanged himself, Your Honor.”

  “That’s what I was told,” I said. “But I cannot confirm the manner of his death. The sheriffs ignored my request to preserve the scene until I arrived and took no photographs. I was also told they aren’t going to conduct an investigation.”

  “Mr. Rios,” Mayeda said, leaning forward. “Are you suggesting he didn’t hang himself?”

  “I’m saying I have no personal knowledge of the circumstances of my client’s death.”

  Novotny scoffed, “I think we can take the sheriff’s word on it.”

  I turned to him. “Maybe you can.” I turned back to the judge. “I want to put something on the record. After Friday’s session, I was asked to meet with Marc Unger, the city attorney in charge of the Police Litigation Unit. Mr. Unger told me that, in exchange for withdrawing my discovery motion, the District Attorney would agree to a plea in this case to second-degree murder, dropping all other charges and special circumstance allegations. I conveyed that news to my client who agreed to the plea. He was very happy and relieved, but seven hours later he was dead. With his death, the case is over, and both the discovery motion and the plea agreement mooted.”

  A long, heavy silence followed my remarks. Eventually, Mayeda turned to Novotny and asked, “Was your office going to make that deal?”

  “I believe the district attorney was in discussions with the city attorney.”

  “Is that a yes?” Mayeda pressed.

  “Before I found out that the defendant was dead, my instructions were to request a short continuance to try to work out a plea.”

  “The plea Mr. Rios talked about?”

  “Basically,” Novotny said.

  “It does seem odd that a defendant who was about to escape death row would kill himself,” Mayeda mused. “But then, we can’t really know what’s in anyone’s mind.”

  Novotny piped up. “He had AIDS.”

  I turned on him. “You son of a bitch.”

  “Counsel!” Mayeda snapped. Then, to me, “Is that true, Mr. Rios?”

  “Judge, you know better than to ask me to disclose that information. It’s both privileged and protected by state law prohibiting disclosure of someone’s HIV status.”

  “Of course,” Mayeda said, quickly, but we both knew my response amounted to a yes.

  “At the time of his death, my client was in good health, physically and mentally, and he was not suicidal. That much I can say.”

  For a long moment, no one said anything; then Novotny piped up, “Your Honor, in light of the defendant’s suicide,” he emphasized the word, “the People move to dismiss all charges.”

  “Mr. Rios? Any objection?”

  “My client did not commit suicide.”

  Mayeda said, “The People’s motion is granted. The case is dismissed.”

  ••••

  “Henry?

  Josh stood beneath the archway into the living room where I had burrowed into one of the elegant leather lounge chairs that flanked the equally elegant matching sofa arranged in front of the tiled fireplace. A thick treatise on California criminal procedure lay open on my lap. He stepped out of the dimness into the lamplight in a T-shirt and blue briefs, yawning.

  “What are you doing up?” I asked.

  He pulled up an ottoman to the foot of my chair and sat down. “Me? What about you? It’s like, three in the morning.”

  A lock of sleep-disheveled hair fell across his forehead, and he rubbed the crust from the corner of his eyes. For a moment I could see the small, handsome, friendly, inquisitive little boy he must have been and felt a surge of affection toward him.

  I tapped the book in my lap. “Working.”

  “At this hour? On what?”

  “Theo’s case.”

  “What else can you do for him?” he asked softly.

  “I don’t know. Probably nothing but . . . he didn’t kill himself, Josh.”

  “You said you saw his body and it looked like a hanging.”

  “He could have been drugged or forced.”

  “Weren’t there other prisoners in the— what do you call it— the ward?”

  “Cell block,” I said. “He could have been killed somewhere else and brought back to the cell or killed in his cell late at night. Anyway, if you’re an inmate and you see the cops kill an inmate, are you going to rat them out? You could be next.”

  “Even if the police were involved, how can you prove it?”

  “I was hoping this book would show me a way to keep the case alive, but so far, nothing.”

  He picked up the book. “Criminal procedure. What does that mean, exactly?”

  “It’s the rules for how a criminal case is prosecuted from arrest to appeal. Some of the rules are constitutional, some are ordinary statutes, and some are the product of judicial opinions.” I took the book from him, closed it, weighed it in my hands. “The whole damn spiderweb.” I set the book aside. “But I can’t find anything in it to help me get justice for Theo Latour.”

  He climbed into my lap and laid his head on my shoulder. I slipped a hand beneath his T-shirt and rubbed slow circles on his back. He mumbled something into my neck.

  “What was that?” I asked.

  He raised his head and said, “I asked, aren’t there other kinds of law?”

  “Besides criminal? Sure.”

  “Could the answer be in one of them?”

  He put his head back on my shoulder and I continued to stroke his back as I thought about his question. Thought and thought and thought and then—

  “Hey,” he murmured, “why did you stop? That felt nice.”

  “Josh, you’re a genius.”

  “I am? Why?”

  “I’ll explain later. Let’s go to bed. I think I’ll be able to sleep now.”

  ••••

  Susanna Vane was one of the lawyers I’d called for background information on the history of the LAPD’s counter-intelligence operations. She was among the handful of lawyers who had represented plaintiffs in actions against the department— the police misconduct bar. Short, round and sixty-something, she looked like a grandmother, and may wel
l have been, but she was also a charter member of the generation of leftist lawyers— the Bill Kunstlers and Ramsey Clarks— who had cut their teeth representing members of radical Black and antiwar organizations in the 1960s. Since the mid-’70s she had made a specialty of taking on the cops. From behind wire-rimmed glasses, her gray-blue eyes assessed me as I finished explaining what had brought me to her modest office in Westwood. I’d come to pitch her a wrongful death action against the police and sheriff’s departments and the city and county of Los Angeles arising from Theo Latour’s death.

  “You already know the case,” she said when I was done. “Why don’t you file the suit yourself?”

  “I’m a criminal defense lawyer. You specialize in police misconduct cases; plus, if we go to trial, I’d be a witness.”

  She nodded. “Testifying to the plea bargain and to Mr. Latour’s mental state and demeanor in the hours before he died.”

  “Yes, that, and the results of my investigation into the department’s complicity in the bombing.”

  “Possible complicity,” she replied. “You never got the department to produce official confirmation of Sumaya’s undercover assignment.”

  “Judge Mayeda was on the verge of granting my discovery request before Unger made me the deal and Theo died. Once you file, you can make the same discovery request. Plus, as I understand it, discovery is a lot broader in civil cases than on the criminal side.”

  “That’s true, but even if I get that discovery, it won’t mean much without Mr. Latour’s testimony that the officer built the bombs and told Latour where to plant them.”

  “I could testify to what Theo told me about that.”

  “It’s hearsay, Henry.”

  “It falls under the exception for statements made against the declarant’s penal interest,” I argued. “Theo admitted he planted the bombs, implicating himself in the crime.”

  She smiled. “Nice try, but that exception would only get in Mr. Latour’s statement against his penal interest, not anything he said about Sumaya’s involvement.”

  “Any judge could see they’re inextricably connected.”

  “Not any judge, but maybe the right judge. I’d say we have a forty-sixty chance of getting past a hearsay objection.”

  “Even without Theo’s statements, the circumstantial evidence I gathered about Sumaya’s involvement is pretty strong, and who knows what else you might get out of the cops in discovery, like the names of officers on duty the night Theo died and a list of the inmates in the adjacent cells. Videotapes from the jail, the medical examiner’s raw notes. All the things I can’t get now that my client’s dead.”

  “They’ll fight me tooth and nail.”

  “I hear you like a little blood on the canvas.”

  She smiled. “My reputation proceeds me. But, there’s another big question. Who’s my client?”

  “Theo’s mother, Kim Phillips. She’s agreed to bring the case if you agree to take it.”

  “I don’t suppose she has any money,” Susanna said, resignedly.

  “There is some,” I replied. “About fifteen thousand raised for Theo’s defense in the criminal case.”

  “That won’t get us past the first motion to dismiss,” she sighed. “Okay, do you have your case file?”

  “In a box in the trunk of my car.”

  “Leave it with my secretary and give me three days to review it; then bring in Mrs. Phillips.”

  “You’ll take the case?”

  “A boy the cops killed in his jail cell after setting him up to take the fall for murder? Oh, yes, I’ll take the case.”

  ••••

  Persuading Susanna Vane to bring a wrongful death action for Theo was only half my strategy of exposing LAPD’s complicity in the bombing. The second half had brought me to a modest two-story stucco apartment building, indistinguishable from hundreds of other such buildings in the city, on a palm tree-lined street in Culver City. I rang the bell next to the name tag that identified the resident as “Herron.” A second later a buzzer sounded, and I pushed through the double-glass doors into a small entryway that opened up to an enclosed patio. A deserted pool glittered in the late afternoon light. I climbed the stairs to the second floor and knocked at apartment 207.

  The woman who answered the door looked nothing like the woman who had come to my office with the implausible story of how her husband had been killed by people in his own church. That woman had looked like the mother in a 1950s sitcom who pushed a vacuum cleaner around a spotless living room in heels and pearls. This woman wore a man’s oxford cloth button-down, jeans and flats; her face was bare of makeup, and her hair had been clipped into a short bob. Her bare face projected vulnerability and uncertainty— the face of a real person, not the plastic visage she had presented at our last meeting. She was also sober.

  “Mrs. Herron, thank you for seeing me.”

  “Come in,” she said.

  The living room was over-furnished with pieces that were too big and too old-fashioned for the modest space. It was as if they’d been salvaged from a shipwreck.

  “Sit down, please, Mr. Rios. Would you like coffee?”

  “Call me Henry,” I said. “I’ll have some if you are.”

  With a trace of a smile, she replied, “I’m Jess. Coffee’s all I drink since—” She stopped herself, squared her shoulders a bit and continued. “I owe you an apology.”

  “For what?”

  “I was drunk when I came to see you,” she said matter-of-factly. “I’ve since stopped drinking and as part of my— well, my new leaf, I’m required to—”

  “Make amends?” I guessed. “The ninth step.”

  Surprised, she asked, “You’re sober, too?”

  “I’ve got just under three years.”

  “Ninety-one days,” she replied.

  “Congratulations. How’s that going?”

  “Let me get our coffee,” she said and excused herself into the kitchen.

  On a credenza behind the dining table was a small collection of framed photographs: a black-and-white studio photograph of a couple I assumed were her parents, a wedding picture of her and Daniel Herron, and a picture of a lovely African-American woman and a handsome young man who I took to be her son. I set the photo down and stepped back in the living room just as she entered from the kitchen with a tray holding two mugs of coffee, sugar, cream, and spoons. We both sat and busied ourselves with the coffee for a moment.

  “How am I doing?” she said. “Strangely enough for the daughter and wife of a preacher, the hardest part for me has been all the talk in the steps of relying on God. The church ostracized me after Daniel died. I didn’t want anything to do with God.”

  “The God references bothered me, too, in the beginning, since I was basically an atheist.”

  “But not anymore?” she asked, lifting the mug to her lips.

  “No, I’m still basically an atheist.”

  “How do you deal with the God talk?”

  I sipped my coffee and thought about how to frame a sensible answer to a difficult question. “By atheist I mean I don’t believe there’s an old man sitting on a throne in the sky keeping a list of my virtues and my vices either to torture or reward me when I die. What’s kept me going is the kindness, or maybe I should say the love, that I got in the program. That and a sense of my own truth about who I am and what matters to me. When my sponsor coaxed those admissions out of me, he said, well, there’s your God, love and self-acceptance. That’s enough for me. I don’t worry about what anyone else means by God.”

  “Your sponsor sounds like a wise person.”

  The warmth of the mug between my hands felt almost like the warmth of Larry’s hand grasping mine. “He was.”

  “Oh, is he—”

  “He died last year. Suddenly. A brain aneurysm while he was in Mexico purchasing drugs for people with AIDS.”

  I hadn’t told her I was gay, and now I watched her face as pieces fell into place. “I’m sorry for the loss of
your friend.”

  She assumed Larry was my lover. I almost corrected her, but maybe it was good to leave her with the image of two sober gay men who had made a life together, so I let it go.

  “I owe you an apology, too. I wasn’t honest with you when you came to see me. I’d met your husband.”

  “Daniel? How?”

  “I’ve been living at Larry’s house since he died. Daniel got Larry’s name as someone who could help him get experimental drugs for his son. Daniel called the house and got me. I set up a meeting with another man who has also been active in the drug underground.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “That his son was infected, and he would do anything to save his life. I told him about the drug trials that, I guess, he tried to get his son into when he called Congressman Schultz.”

  She absorbed this for a moment. “So, indirectly, you’re responsible for me finding out about Daniel’s other family because if you hadn’t told him about the drug trials and he hadn’t called Schultz, his dreadful wife wouldn’t have called me.”

  “I suppose I am. I’m sorry if I contributed to your grief.”

  “Maybe it was necessary grief. Everything that happened from the moment Daniel called you has led me here. I’m sad about some of it, but not sorry.” She wrapped her fingers around her mug, and asked, “Do any of the drugs work? The ones your friends smuggle in?”

  “For some people they provide at least some temporary symptom relief, but they’re not a cure.”

  She raised her cup, sipped coffee, set it down, and asked haltingly, “Do you think your friends would let me help them?”

  “Bringing in drugs?”

  She nodded.

  “It’s illegal.”

  She ran a hand through her clipped hair and said, “That God you talked about, the old man in the sky? I’m afraid part of me still believes in him though I may just be picturing my father. Either way, I want to free myself from him. I think one way is to help people that that God condemns. If I can find the humanity in the people I was raised to believe are sinners, maybe I can find my own humanity. Does that make sense?”

  I smiled. “You want to join us lepers?”

  Over the rim of her mug, she said, “Why not? Jesus washed your feet. He knew something I need to learn.”