The Little Death

by Michael Nava

  “He’s on thirty-nine, sir,” the guard said. “Take one of the elevators to your right.”

  On the thirty-ninth floor I played a variation of the same trick with the receptionist, a stern-looking young Chinese woman who sat at a desk beneath a large brass engraving of Pegasus in flight.

  “Hello. Do you know if Mr. Barron’s gone out to lunch yet?”

  She glanced at a sheet of paper. “No,” she said, reaching for the phone. “You have an appointment?”

  “Wait,” I said, briefly laying my hand over hers as she touched the phone. “Peter and I roomed together in college ten years ago and I haven’t seen him since. I’m in town for the week and wanted to surprise him. Understand?”

  She nodded.

  “Do you know when he goes out to lunch?”

  “Any minute now. You can wait here.”

  “Okay, but—well, when I saw Peter he still had hair to his shoulders and was as skinny as a pole. I’m not sure I’d recognize him.”

  She nodded again as gravely as if I were administering a quiz. Or maybe it was my antiquity that intimidated her. Her own college years could hardly be more than a few months behind her.

  “Can you describe him to me?” I asked.

  She looked at the wall behind me, thinking. “He’s about six feet,” she began hesitantly, “blond hair and blue eyes. Nice build.” She giggled. “Very handsome.”

  Her description added nothing to what Grant had already told me and it fit about ten thousand men in the financial district alone.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’ll sit here with a magazine pulled up over my face and wait for Peter. You just carry on with your job. All right?”

  “All right,” she said and answered a call.

  I looked at my watch. It was twelve-five. Six minutes later, behind a flock of secretaries, a blond man stepped into the room from a door beside the receptionist’s desk. I recognized him at once. He informed the receptionist that he would be out for the rest of the day.

  She replied loudly, “Thank you, Mr. Barron.”

  He started walking out into the corridor. I put my magazine down and fell into step beside him.

  “Hello, Peter.”

  He glanced at me and stopped. “Henry. I was just going to pay you a visit.”

  He spoke in the same soft reasonable tone of voice with which he had addressed me only three weeks earlier, the night he and his three friends abducted me as I was leaving Grant Hancock’s apartment and shot me up with sodium pentothal. Peter was the one who wielded the needle and told me he wanted information for his employer, who I had then thought was Robert Paris.

  “You work for Smith,” I said.

  “You’re surprised?”

  “It doesn’t make sense to me, especially if you also killed Aaron Gold.”

  “Killed who?”

  “You killed Hugh Paris and you killed Aaron Gold.”

  “Henry,” he said with a small, hurt smile. “I have never killed anyone and as for our last meeting, you might at least give me a chance to explain.”

  “One doesn’t explain away two murders.”

  He sighed impatiently, “Damn it, Henry, I don’t know what you’re talking about. All right, Hugh was murdered, but not by me. This other guy I’ve never even heard of.”

  My curiosity overcame me. “Then who killed Hugh?”

  He shook his head. “We—Mr. Smith and I—have been trying to find out. I don’t know. That’s why I—what did you call it—abducted you—that night.”

  I looked at him. We were standing in the corridor while people rushed around us. He seemed calm and rational for someone just accused of two murders. I, by contrast, was beginning to sound hysterical even to myself. And he worked for Smith. Smith, in my scheme of things, was a good guy.

  Perhaps sensing my uncertainty he said, “There’s a lot I have to tell you about Hugh’s death, Henry, and you have the most urgent right to know. You were his lover.”

  “How did you know that?” I demanded.

  “We’ve been working the same field. You know about me. I know about you.” He reached out and laid a hand on my shoulder. “I’m gay, too, Henry. I understand.”

  I didn’t want to believe him but no one, not even Grant, had acknowledged my right to grieve. The weight of Hugh’s death and the frustration I felt at not knowing who killed him all closed in on me. I brushed aside a tear. Barron tactfully looked away.

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s go somewhere and talk.”

  We walked to an elevator and stepped inside.

  “What exactly do you do for Smith?” I asked.

  He reached his hand into his jacket, pulling out a gun.

  “Special assignments,” he replied. “Now, we’re going down to the garage, and then we’ll get off, you first with me following. You behave yourself, Henry, and maybe I’ll let you live.”

  I looked into his eyes, felt his breath on my face. He smiled and then stepped behind me, against the wall of the elevator.

  “You’re crazy,” I said. “You killed Hugh and Aaron Gold.”

  “An interesting thought,” he said. “But why would I’ve done that? Who was I working for?”

  “Maybe no one,” I replied. “You might just be a freelance psychopath.”

  “Let’s not call names,” he said nudging the nozzle of the gun into the small of my back.

  At that moment the elevator stopped. A dozen people crowded on. The gun pressed harder against my back.

  I clenched my hands into fists. “This man’s got a gun,” I shouted and jerked away from Barron.

  A woman screamed.

  “Get him,” someone shouted.

  The elevator stopped again. The doors flew open. Barron pushed his way to the front as hands reached out trying to stop him. He broke clean and ran down the corridor. Perhaps aware that he was still armed, no one followed. The elevator door closed.

  “Who was he?” a man asked me.

  “A nut with a gun,” I replied.

  Three hours later I was sitting on the floor in Grant Hancock’s apartment drinking a glass of wine while he went to the door to pay for a delivery of Chinese food. He took the small white cartons from a brown bag and set them on a tea tray between us. We opened them up and ate from them with wooden chopsticks.

  I had just told him that after getting the names of the other people on the elevator I’d gone to the police.

  “What did they do?”

  “What cops always do, they took a report and promised to look into it. By the time that report reaches the appropriate desk, Peter Barron could be in Tierra del Fuego.”

  Grant chewed a bit of shrimp.

  “I don’t understand why Barron pulled a gun on you. He works for Smith. Smith is supposed to be on our side.”

  “Does he work for Smith? I mean, he does, ostensibly, but in actuality I think he was working for Robert Paris.”

  “That sounds complicated.”

  “But it fits the evidence. What I think happened is that Hugh contacted Smith to let Smith know he was back in town. Maybe he even enlisted Smith’s help in exposing Robert Paris as the murderer of Christina and Nicholas. Smith leased the house for him, probably gave him money. Peter Barron works for the security section of Pegasus—I think Smith might have entrusted him to keep an eye on Hugh and make sure he stayed out of trouble. In fact, I remember that it was Smith who bailed Hugh out of jail when he was arrested in July.”

  “Are you positive?”

  “Yes, I called the jail and had them check.” I finished my wine and poured another glass. “At the time I thought John Smith was an alias used to avoid notoriety by whoever bailed Hugh out.”

  “Well, it is hard to believe there are men in the world actually named John Smith.”

  I poked at the carton of rice.

  “Anyway,” I continued, “Barron was supposed to protect Hugh but instead he betrayed him to Robert Paris.”

  “How would Barron have known about the bad b
lood between Hugh and Robert Paris?”

  “I’m sure Hugh told him,” I said. “It was a subject to which he often returned.”

  Grant nodded.

  “So Barron went to Robert Paris with the information that Hugh was in the city and that he, Barron, knew where Hugh was. Paris then paid Barron to murder Hugh. And that’s how it was done.”

  “And Smith? Don’t you think he was a little suspicious about the circumstances of Hugh’s death?”

  “I’m sure he was. He probably had Barron conduct an investigation. You can imagine Barron’s conclusion.”

  Grant put down the carton from which he’d been eating. “And Aaron? Why kill Aaron?”

  “Aaron worked for the firm that handled Paris’s legal work. He must’ve learned something very damaging that implicated Barron with Hugh’s murder.”

  “Such as?”

  “Pay-offs, maybe. Reports. I don’t know. Aaron never had a chance to tell me.”

  “How much of this do you think Smith knows?” Grant asked, pouring me the last of the wine.

  “My impression of Smith from reading the newspapers,” I said, “is that information reaches him through about three dozen intermediaries. Everything is sanitized by the time it touches his desk. He probably knows next to nothing about what really went on.”

  “And you’re going to tell him.”

  “Yes.” I picked up a bit of chicken with my chopsticks. “It’s strange that Hugh never talked to me about Smith.”

  “From everything you’ve said, it doesn’t sound like Hugh told you much about his family.”

  “That’s true.”

  “He wanted to protect you. Knowing how potentially dangerous the situation was, he wanted to keep you out of it.” After a pause he added, “He loved you.”

  “Instead of protecting me, Hugh left me ignorant—and vulnerable.”

  Grant sighed. “When do we ever do the right thing by the people we love?”

  When, indeed, I wondered, looking at him from across the room.

  The next day I went back to Pegasus, this time to see Smith but I got no closer than his secretary. She, unlike the gullible receptionist, was not inclined to let strange men without appointments loiter in her office. She threatened to have me ejected. Taking the hint, I went out into the corridor to ponder my next move. There didn’t seem to be any. Two middle-aged men in dark suits came out of Smith’s office and passed. Their jowls quivered with self-importance. I watched them walk to a door at the end of the corridor—what I’d assumed was a freight elevator.

  One of the two withdrew a key from his pocket and fit it into a lock on the wall. The door slid open, revealing a small plushly appointed elevator.

  The executive elevator. Of course.

  It would hardly do for Smith and his retinue to waste expensive time waiting for the public elevator or to endure the indignities of making small talk with file clerks. Smith would have to leave at some point, and, if I couldn’t wait for him in his office, I’d wait here.

  So I waited. I waited from ten in the morning to nearly six at night, fending off the occasional security guard with my business card and an explanation that I was meeting a friend from Pegasus’s legal staff. I thought that Smith might emerge for lunch until I saw a food-laden trolley wheeled off the executive elevator by a red jacketed waiter. About an hour later the waiter reappeared with the now empty trolley and boarded the elevator. Just as the doors closed I saw him finish off the contents of a wine glass.

  At about four a few lucky employees began to leave, singly, or in groups of two or three. By five, the corridor was packed. By five-forty-five when it seemed that everyone who could possibly work at Pegasus had left for the day, the doors were pushed open and two beefy bodyguard-types strode out flanking a third man. The third man was tall, thin and old. The blue pinstriped suit he wore fell loosely on his frame and was shabby with many wearings, but he wore it as if it were a prince’s ermine. They walked rapidly past me to the executive elevator. The key went into the lock. I rushed over to where they were standing.

  “Mr. Smith.”

  The tall old gentleman turned toward me slowly, examining me without particular interest.

  “My name is Henry Rios. I have to talk to you about Hugh Paris.”

  At the mention of my name, the old man raised his eyebrows a fraction of an inch, indicating, I thought, either recognition or surprise. However, he said nothing. The two men closed ranks in front of him.

  “Don’t come any closer,” one of them said, allowing his jacket to fall open, revealing a shoulder holster.

  John Smith’s employees, it seemed, were issued sidearms along with their Brooks Brothers charge plates. I stepped back.

  “All I want is ten minutes of your time,” I said to Smith.

  The elevator door opened and he stepped into it. The bodyguards followed him in. I lunged forward trying to keep the doors open. “Ten minutes,” I shouted.

  The same man who’d just spoken to me now lifted a heavy leg and booted me in the chest, throwing me backwards to the floor.

  I lifted myself up.

  John Smith was staring at me. He opened his mouth to speak just as the doors shut.

  10

  THE WINE WAS COLD and bitter. A white-jacketed busboy moved through the darkness of the restaurant like a ghost. Outside, a freakish spell of blisteringly hot weather had emptied the streets but here it was cool and dark and the only noise was the murmur of conversation and the silvery clink of flatware against china, ice against glass. It was two o’clock in the afternoon. Aaron Gold had been buried that morning in Los Angeles.

  Grant asked, “Should we have sent flowers?”

  “I’ve never understood that custom,” I replied. “Are the flowers intended as a symbol of resurrection or are they just there to divert attention from the corpse?”

  But Grant wasn’t listening. His glance had fallen to the front page of the Chronicle laid out on the table between us. The contents of Robert Paris’s will had been made public. His entire estate, five hundred million dollars, was bequeathed to the Linden Trust of which John Smith was chairman. Would it matter to Smith now that Robert Paris was a murderer or was half a billion dollars sufficient reparation?

  As if he read my thoughts, Grant looked up at me unhappily and said, “There’s no justice in this. You must do something.”

  “I’ve tried everything,” I said to Grant, “everything I could think of doing.”

  A waiter set down shallow bowls of steaming pasta before us. The fragrance of basil rose from the dish reminding me of summer. I picked up my fork.

  “You haven’t tried what you’re trained to do,” Grant said.

  I lifted an interrogatory eyebrow.

  “I’ve been thinking about this,” Grant said. “The first thing you have to do is ask yourself what it is you want. You don’t want the identity of the killer, you already know who that is, but what you do want is to bring the killer to justice. And I’m not talking about Barron—he was just the instrument—I’m talking about Robert Paris. You want there to be a public record of his guilt.”

  I nodded.

  “Who is better able to make that record than a lawyer in a court of law?”

  “Unfortunately,” I said, “Judge Paris is no longer within any court’s jurisdiction.”

  “Wrong,” Grant said. “You’re thinking of the criminal side.”

  I put my fork down. “What are you thinking of?”

  “Well, I’m not a litigator, of course, but it occurred to me that you should sue him.”

  Grant picked up his fork and speared a clam. I watched him chew and swallow. My brain was buzzing. Why hadn’t I thought of this before?

  “Of course,” I said. “Wrongful death. I’ll sue Robert Paris’s estate for the wrongful death of Hugh Paris.”

  “And Aaron too.”

  I shook my head. “The judge was already dead when that happened. We’d never be able to prove it.”

  Grant
buttered a bit of bread. “You think we could prove it as to Hugh’s death?”

  “I don’t know but we’ll do a hell of a lot of damage to Robert Paris’s reputation in the attempt.”

  I thought some more.

  “In fact,” I continued, “we can do some damage to John Smith while we’re at it, or at least get his attention.”

  “How?”

  “Well, if a suit is pending against Paris’s estate which involves money damages, there should be enough money set aside from the estate to cover those damages in the event the suit succeeds.”

  Grant dabbed his mouth with a napkin and smiled.

  “You mean we can obtain some kind of injunction to prevent the judge’s executors from disbursing the estate.”

  “Exactly. The Linden Trust won’t get a penny until the suit’s resolved. And as for the executor,” I continued, “which happens to be Aaron’s law firm, we’ll plaster them with discovery motions and compel them to produce every scrap of paper they have that involves Hugh or Peter Barron or Robert Paris. We’ll depose everyone from the senior partner to the receptionist.”

  “Those depositions will make the front page of the Chronicle,” he said.

  “For months,” I replied, “if not years.” Smiling, I reached across the table and patted his head. “Good thinking for someone who’s not a litigator. It’s perfect, Grant.”

  Grant looked at me and smiled nervously. “Well, not quite perfect,” he said. “As I understand it, the only people entitled to bring the suit would be Hugh’s executors or his heirs.”

  It took a moment before I understood. “Katherine Paris.”

  “I’m afraid so,” he said.

  Katherine Paris lit a cigarette and eyed me suspiciously from across my desk. We were in my office. This was the first time I’d used it for business since I’d leased it three months earlier. There was a film of dust on the bookshelves and the file cabinets. Both were empty. The only objects of my desk were three newly purchased volumes of the code of civil procedure, the probate code and the evidence code, a yellow legal tablet, my pen and the plastic cup into which Mrs. Paris tapped her cigarette ash.