by Michael Nava
I leaned against the wall and looked around. Half a dozen of the bar stools were occupied. A handsome man’s reflection smiled at me. I smiled back and continued inspecting the other customers. Tom Zane was not among them.
As I started out the door, I heard someone say, “Ambassador.”
I stopped. “Zane,” I replied.
The skinny bartender jerked his head toward me, his long earring dangling against his cheek.
“You say something?” he asked me.
I shook my head and walked back to where I had been standing. The man in the mirror was still smiling. He wore a plaid shirt beneath a black leather jacket. He had dark hair and a moustache. His eyes were brown.
Holding his eye in the minor, I stepped forward until I stood directly behind him. His smile widened.
“Zane?”
“Ambassador,” he replied, and swung around on the bar stool until he faced me.
“I didn’t recognize you at all.”
“Were you trying to?”
“As a matter of fact, I was. Rennie sent me to find you.”
He frowned. “Rennie?”
“There was a call tonight, threatening you. She brought your matchbook collection to me and sent me looking for you.”
“Goddammit,” he breathed. “What’s wrong with her?”
“She was worried, Tom. The caller was Sandy.”
He narrowed his eyes. “What did she tell you about Sandy?”
“That you had a fight and kicked him out of your house.”
“Let’s get out of here,” he said. He dropped a ten dollar bill on the bar and we went out to the street. It was drizzling. The bar was in a warehouse district and, as we headed down the street toward Cahuenga, a Doberman sprang out from a fenced- in lot and barked. A woman in the tatters of a coat hurried by, stopped, and screamed invectives at the dog. We reached Cahuenga and Tom’s car, a red Fiat Spider with a plate that read “Drifter.”
“Where are you parked?” Tom asked.
“Just down the street.”
“I think you should forget any of this happened,” he said, reaching to the moustache and pulling it from his face. I watched, fascinated.
“What about the eyes?” I asked.
“Brown contact lenses. The hair’s just a colored mousse. Washes right out,” he smiled. “It’s Hollywood, Henry.”
“Seems like a lot of trouble just to have a drink at a place like that.”
“Haven’t you ever wanted to be invisible, Henry?’’ he asked, opening the car door.
I shook my head.
“No,” he said. “I guess you wouldn’t miss what you haven’t lost. Me, I can’t walk down the street without some girl throwing her tits in my face or some fag groping me. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not like I’m down on sex, but I like to choose the time and the place.” He got into the car and smiled. “You heard what I said about forgetting about tonight.’’
‘‘I heard,” I said, “but Sandy’s about to have some other problems.”
“Don’t tell me anything,” he said, starting up his car. “I’m finished with Sandy.”
I looked at him. “Then you know,” I said.
He shook his head. “I don’t know anything. See you around, Henry.” He put the car in gear and skidded off down the wet black street toward Sunset and, I hoped, home. I stood there for a minute, as if on an empty stage, and then started back to my car.
*****
It was two-thirty-five when I knocked at the door to Josh’s apartment. There was some noise from within and then he opened the door, drawing his robe around him. His hair was a sleepy tumble and his eyes beneath his glasses were tired.
“Hi,” he said as I stepped into the warm room. There was a lamp on over the sofa and an open book on the floor.
“I’m sorry I’m so late.”
“That’s okay,” he said and kissed me. “I’m happy you’re here. I was just reading.”
I took off my coat and tossed it to the sofa. The day had begun in the Mandels’ kitchen, included Larry’s revelation that he had contracted Kaposi, took in Tony Good’s allegation that Blenheim killed Brian Fox, and ended in a Hollywood bar where a man with brown eyes watched me in a mirror. Images drifted across my brain with a lot of darkness between them.
“I’m exhausted,” I said, smiling at Josh who watched me with dark, serious eyes. “How are you? How did things go with your folks after I left?”
He smiled, wearily. “As soon as you left they started in on me.”
“I’m sorry, Josh,” I said, and held him.
“It’s okay,” he replied uncertainly.
I kissed his warm cheek, feeling the faint stubble there against my lips. “Do they think I corrupted you?”
“It’s not fair. I was gay before I met you.”
“You can’t expect them to be fair.”
“Don’t defend them,” he said, momentarily annoyed. “Sorry, Henry. I’m just tired.”
“Let’s go to bed then.”
He yawned in agreement and we went into the bedroom. He got into bed while I undressed and washed my face and mouth at the bathroom sink. I slipped into bed beside him and we reached for each other, pressing the lengths of our bodies, one against the other, everything touching, foot, groin, belly, chest. In my mind — my relentless mind — I pictured our embrace, my exhausted thinness against his young sumpture, like a Durer etching of the embrace of youth with middle age. Thirty-six: that’s middle age, isn’t it? Midway down the road of life?
“You’re thinking again,” Josh whispered into my ear. “I can tell because your whole body gets stiff except one part.”
I relaxed.
*****
This dream I entered unwillingly because I knew where it would take me. I was sitting at the bar of The Keep, as thirsty as I had ever been. The bartender with the dangling earring refused to serve me because he said that I had stopped drinking. I looked into the mirror behind the bar. A stage illuminated by three blue lights formed in it.
As I watched I saw Tom Zane, naked, doing the last scene from Edward the Second, but instead of the black actor, Sandy Blenheim played the part of Lightborn. Blenheim was hugely fat, flesh almost dripping from his body, and wore only a jock strap. The scene was so grotesque I began to laugh.
“You think I’m funny?” Blenheim shrieked. “Then watch.”
Suddenly he was holding a poker, with a red hot tip. He began to insert it into the anus of the body lying on the pallet on the stage. It should have been Zane, but it wasn’t. It was Jim Pears, comatose and unable to protect himself.
“Stop it,” I shouted. “Stop it!”
“Isn’t this funny, isn’t this funny,” Blenheim yelled back.
I turned away from the scene to another part of the mirror. There, instead of my own reflection, I saw Larry’s cadaverous face.
“Why is this happening?” I demanded of the bartender.
He looked at me. Now he had Mr. Mandel’s face and he said, “Because you’re a queer. A queer. A queer.”
The last thing I remembered was ordering myself to wake up.
I opened my eyes. Josh, wide-eyed, had lifted his face above mine.
“Henry,” he said.
I expelled a gust of pent-up breath. “It’s all right. Bad dream.”
He held me. I smelled his smells, felt his skin beneath my fingers and his hair against my face. At that moment, he was the only real thing in the world.
23
I left Josh the next morning and returned to Larry’s house. I found him sitting at his desk writing checks.
“Did you see Tony last night?” he asked in response to my greeting. In the watery morning light he looked haggard but formidably alive, not at all the cadaver I had dreamt of the night before.
“Yes,” I said, sitting down across from him. “He says Sandy Blenheim killed Brian Fox.”
“That’s unbelievable,” Larry said.
I recounted for Larry the story that Good
had told me. When I finished he nodded but his face remained skeptical.
“It sounds plausible,” he said, finally.
“A plausible lie?” I asked.
He shook his head. “No, that’s not it. Tony only lies to his advantage. I can’t see how this would help him.” He looked thoughtful. “And it’s true about Sandy’s taste for young boys.”
“But you’re not convinced.”
“I still think Jim did it,” he said quietly.
I stared at him. “Didn’t you bring me down here to prove Jim’s innocence?”
He smiled wanly. “Not exactly,” he replied. “I wanted you to get him acquitted.” He picked up a crystal paperweight from his desk and ran his fingers across its surface. “Look, I know what’s bothering me about this Sandy business. It’s that everyone knows Sandy’s gay. The fact that he was caught having sex with a kid would have been embarrassing but not especially damaging.” He set the paperweight down. “Not in this town, anyway. And another thing, Henry, don’t you think the way Brian Fox was killed showed incredible rage?”
Remembering the pictures I had seen of the body, I nodded. “Would Sandy Blenheim have that much anger inside of him?” he asked.
“How well do you know him?” I countered.
Larry shrugged. “Not very,” he conceded.
“Well, someone who knows him better told me that she thinks he’s crazy.”
Larry squinted at me. “Who?”
“Irene Gentry.”
He was silent for a moment. “Maybe,” he said. “She would know, if anyone does, what he’s really like. He practically lives with Tom and her.”
“You want to believe it was Jim,” I said. “Why?”
He looked away from me and said, slowly, “Because I want to believe that he was capable of fighting back.”
“But not that way, Larry. Not by killing someone.”
“You have strictures about killing that I don’t share,” he replied.
This seemed odd coming from a dying man.
“And anyway,” he rubbed his eyes, “I loved him and you didn’t.”
“Who? Jim?”
He nodded.
“You never met him.”
“I know,” he said and looked past me to the window with its still view of the lake. “It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? A sick man’s fantasy. I dreamed of bringing him here to live with me. I thought we could heal each other. How absurd.”
“No,” I said. “It isn’t.”
As if he hadn’t heard, he said, “Does God give us life to want such things? It seems cruel.”
“To love someone?”
“To fall in love with a picture in the newspaper,” he said, “and to lie in bed at night like a schoolboy, unable to sleep because of it. To ask you to put your reputation on the line in the hope that you could work a miracle.”
“But you were right,” I said, fiercely. “Jim didn’t do it.’’
“You don’t understand, Henry,” Larry said. “I wanted him to have done it, and I wanted the world to understand why.”
“Meanwhile someone’s dead,” I answered.
“And how many of us have died at the hands of people like Brian Fox?” he demanded.
I glanced at the bills on his desk, from the newspaper, the utility companies, his gardener. Across the top of each of them he had written, “Discontinue service.” I remembered he had told me that he was willing to trade his life for Jim’s. At the time it had merely seemed like impassioned rhetoric. Now I knew he had meant it.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’d like to agree but it goes against everything inside of me.”
Larry smiled. “It’s all right,” he said. “I know you, Henry. You believe in the law the way other people believe in God. Not me. I’m dying. I only believe in balancing the accounts.”
I went into the kitchen to call Freeman Vidor. He wasn’t at his office. A moment after I hung up, the phone rang. It was Freeman.
“I’m at Tony Good’s apartment with the L.A.P.D.,” he said. “You better get over here.”
“What happened?”
“He’s been murdered,” Freeman said. “Someone took a knife and rammed it up his guts.”
“Up his—” I began to say, then I understood. “My God.”
*****
Over Tony Good’s bed was a framed poster that showed James Dean walking down a New York street in the rain. On the bed were sky-blue sheets soaked with blood.
“He bled to death,” a small man in wire-rimmed glasses was telling me. I wasn’t sure who he was, the medical examiner maybe. There was a faint chemical smell in the air. Tony had been using poppers. My stomach heaved.
“Someone stuck him,” I said, to say something.
“A twelve-inch blade,” the little man said, “inserted into the anus.”
I turned and hurried from the room into the kitchen where
Freeman was sitting at the table with Phillip Cresly, the L.A.P.D. detective assigned to the case. Cresly glanced at me without much interest as I pulled up a chair.
“You satisfied?” Cresly asked. He was a tall man with light brown hair, eyes that had been chiseled from a glacier and a twitchy little mouth. I thought I had seen his face before and then I remembered the picture in Freeman’s office of the three young cops. A long time ago Cresly had been one of them.
“The bed was soaked with blood,” I replied. “How can you say he didn’t struggle?”
“Position of the body,” Cresly replied as if reading from a list. “Nothing disturbed in the bedroom. Neighbors didn’t hear anything.”
“You really think he took a knife up his rectum without fighting?”
The ice-cube eyes considered me. “Vidor says the guy told you he was going to meet a client after he left the bar.”
It took a moment for me to understand what he was implying. “You think that this is something gay men do?” I asked, unable to keep the astonishment out of my voice.
“I used to work vice,” he said. “I seen movies where guys took fists up their ass. Jesus, I mean, right up to the elbow.” He made a sour face. “A little knife is nothing.”
I glanced at Freeman. A warning formed on his face. I ignored it.
“A little knife is nothing,” I repeated. “You learn that at the academy?”
“I’m paid to do my job, Rios,” he said, the mouth twitching. “But I don’t have to like it.”
I stood up. “What about Blenheim?”
“He’s gone,” Cresly said.
“You looking for him?”
“We’ll find him,” he said, smugly. “You have anything else to tell me?”
Freeman stood up, quickly, and pulled at my arm. “Come on, Henry,” he said. I let him lead me from the room
“That jerk,” I sputtered as soon as we were outside in front of Good’s apartment building.
Freeman lit a cigarette. “The man’s set in his ways,” he said, mildly, “but he’s a good cop, Henry. He don’t like open files.”
Two young men came down the sidewalk carrying an immense Christmas tree. They passed us with shy, domestic smiles.
“No struggle,” I said, more to myself than to Freeman.
“Look,” Freeman said, “the guy was drunk when we saw him. And he was probably dusted, too.”
“PCP?” I said. “How do you figure?”
“I smelled ether in the bedroom,” he said. He blew smoke out of the side of his mouth. “They use it to cover the smell.”
“I know,” I replied. “But that wasn’t ether. It was amyl nitrite.”
“Poppers?” Freeman shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“What does it matter,” I said. “He was obviously on something, but I can’t believe it was enough to knock him out.”
We got to Freeman’s battered Accord. The license plate read, PRIVT I.
“It had to be Blenheim,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s what I figure. How do you think he found out that Good talked to u
s?” He leaned against the car, dropped his cigarette and crushed it.
“Maybe Good told him,” I said. “Maybe he was Good’s client last night, only the appointment wasn’t for sex but a little more blackmail.”
“Kinda stupid,” Freeman observed.
“I doubt that Tony Good ever got any prizes for brains,” I replied.
“What a way to go,” Freeman said.
“Yeah. I think I better go pay a call on the Zanes.”
“You think Blenheim will be going after them next?”
I nodded. “I bet Tom Zane knows everything.”
“Poppers,” Freeman said softly, tossing his cigarette to the ground. “Is it true that they make sex better?”
I shrugged. “All I ever got from them was a headache.”
Freeman snickered. “Figures,” he said. “You ain’t exactly one for the wild side, are you Henry?”
“Not exactly,” I agreed.
*****
The Zanes were at home. Rennie, in a gray silk robe, arranged herself in a chair near the fire. The maid brought her tea. Tom was having his morning pick-me-up, a tall Bloody Mary that he mixed himself. He brought his drink into the living room and sat in the chair beside his wife. The two of them, blond, handsome, could have been brother and sister. They watched me with still, blue eyes. A fire crackled in the fireplace, releasing the scent of pine into the air. A Christmas tree had appeared in the corner, near the Diego Rivera, with expensively wrapped gifts piled beneath it.
I told them about Tony Good and Sandy Blenheim’s disappearance. They said nothing though Rennie blanched-when I described the manner of Tony’s death.
I looked at Tom. “You knew Sandy killed Brian Fox,” I said. “How do you figure?” he asked, a lazy smile curling the edges of his lips.
“You produced the play,” I said. “Blenheim couldn’t have given Tony the part of Gaveston unless he cleared it with you. Isn’t that right?”
He took a swallow of his drink. “You’re a smart man,” he said. “You knew,” I repeated.
He set the drink down and said, “Yeah, I knew all about Sandy’s troubles.”
