by Michael Nava
“You did it to yourself,” I said.
“Look, Mr. Rios, I don’t want to fight with you. I just wanted to talk. You never did hear my side.”
“Does it matter? The case is closed.”
“It matters to me,” she said, a fierceness in her eyes. “I worked damn hard to get where I am and I did it by the rules until this one time. I want you to know why.”
I gestured to a bench. “Okay, let’s sit down and talk.”
She smiled again. “It bothers you, doesn’t it?”
“What?” I asked, as we sat down.
“The case. The judge was a friend of yours, so was his wife. It bothers you that you got his killer off.”
“Zack didn’t do it,” I said.
“The weapon was in his apartment, Mr. Rios.”
“Maybe you put it there,” I said.
“Even you don’t believe that,” she said. “You read the police reports. The weapon was gone before I even got to the crime scene. What I wanted to tell you is that there was a call.”
Now it was my turn to show disgust. “Come on, Detective.”
“Hear me out,” she said. “There was a call. A man. He phoned the day after the murder and described in detail the weapon and the bloody clothes and told me exactly where I’d find them. The problem was, he wouldn’t give me any identification at all. I knew I couldn’t get a warrant on that kind of tip because there was no way to corroborate it.”
“So you got Chris’s keys from Bay and did a little sleuthing off the books?”
“Whatever,” she said. “Yeah, I got the keys and went to take a look and I found the weapon and the clothes where he said they would be. So I went back to the station and wrote up my affidavit. I did a shitty job, obviously, but the fact is, there was a call.”
“Why should I believe you?”
“Because like you said, Mr. Rios, the case is closed, and there’s no reason for me to lie. Besides, there was another call, too. Same caller.”
“And he told you what?” I asked, intrigued in spite of my reluctance to believe her.
“That Bowen was up in the cabin.”
“That’s not true,” I said, quickly. “You had me followed up there.”
She looked at me as if I was speaking Finnish. “What are you talking about?”
“I know you followed me to Midtown Hospital, hoping I’d lead you to Zack,” I said, getting angry at being taken for a fool. “And then you had me tailed up to the cabin by the San Bernardino sheriff’s department.”
She shook her head. “The hospital, yeah, I followed you,” she said, “because I figured you were lying about whether you’d seen Bowen, but I didn’t know anything about the cabin. I certainly didn’t have you followed by the San Bernardino sheriffs.”
“I was stopped on the way to the cabin by a sheriff who was with you when you arrested Zack.”
“So what?” she replied. “I was operating in their jurisdiction, so I had to tell them what I was up to and they sent along some officers. I didn’t choose them. Why don’t you want to believe this?”
Because you’re a liar, I wanted to say, but even as the words formed in my head, I knew that wasn’t the reason, not completely, anyway. If what she was saying was true, it threatened to upset my theory that Joey Chandler killed his father, because I couldn’t see how Joey would’ve known that Zack was in the cabin.
I still distrusted McBeth too much to reveal this to her, so I said, “So who do you think your mystery caller was?”
“Bowen’s accomplice,” she said.
The thought chilled me, but I wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction of letting on, so I said, “What accomplice?”
“The judge left Bowen half a million dollars in his will,” she said. “He found out and wanted it, so he talked someone into helping him do the judge, then got greedy and reneged. The second guy decided to get back at him by turning him in, but he didn’t want to get himself arrested in the process, so he made the anonymous calls.”
“There was no evidence of a second killer,” I said.
“There was damn little evidence of anything,” she pointed out. “Maybe the guy was a lookout, or maybe he was supposed to alibi Bowen. Maybe he came in afterwards and helped him clean up. I don’t know that part, but take my word, Henry, there were two of them.”
I got up. “That’s all very interesting, but I don’t believe it.”
She narrowed her eyes, assessingly, and said, “You really think Bowen’s innocent, don’t you?”
“Zack loved Chris. That’s the part you’ve never understood, Detective, because you’re too blinded by your prejudices.”
“Oh, so now I’m a bigot,” she said. “Maybe you haven’t noticed that I’m black. I know all about prejudice.”
“That’s too easy,” I replied.
“Believe what you want, Henry, but I didn’t go after your guy because he was gay. I went after him because he’s guilty.”
Later, I called the San Bernardino sheriff’s department. I spoke to the officer who’d represented the department the night Zack was arrested and he said, no, they had not been working with LAPD to conduct a surveillance of me, and had never heard of McBeth or her investigation until that night.
25
I WAS FAR FROM convinced by McBeth’s scenario, but I kept returning to it as I thought over what I knew about the case. Josh, sensing my preoccupation, drew the story out of me as we sat on the terrace in the mornings before I went into my office to work. It was a good diversion for both of us, and as we talked it over, I had to admit that as a hypothetical, McBeth’s version had a lot going for it.
Her notion that Zack had an accomplice, for instance, explained Sam Bligh, someone whose interest in Zack I had never entirely believed was purely sentimental. But suppose instead that Zack learned of the bequest and shared the information with Bligh. They conspired to kill Chris and split the money. That explained why Bligh sheltered him after the murder, but then Bligh began to suspect Zack was going to double-cross him. He sent Zack packing to the cabin, then made the anonymous calls leading to his arrest. Of course, he didn’t actually want Zack to be convicted of the crime, because the will could be successfully contested; he just wanted to teach him a lesson. Bligh was sophisticated enough to know that anonymous phone calls to the police would probably not hold up in court. Just to make sure, he hired me to defend Zack instead of throwing him to the mercy of the overworked Public Defender’s office. Now that Zack was free of the charge, the will would be probated, he would collect his money, and Bligh could guarantee his split with the threat of blackmail.
But what if I hadn’t got Zack off? Bligh would’ve wasted his money on my fee for nothing. Still, my fee was considerably less than the quarter-million he would get if I was successful, so maybe it was worth the risk to him. It was not hard for me to imagine Bligh making these calculations. His business was not for the sentimental or the faint of heart and he’d made it pay, handsomely. I was keenly aware I was operating out of my own prejudices here in making the jump from pornography to murder, but now was not the moment for political rectitude. Put another way: just because I suspected the worst of Bligh didn’t mean he wasn’t capable of it.
The problem in this scenario for me was Zack Bowen. McBeth assumed he had killed Chris for money, but if Zack had been after money, he could have exploited Chris’s infatuation as the occasion to pick his pockets. He hadn’t done that. Taking money from Chris would have seemed like a step backward to the streets where he’d prostituted himself as a boy. I thought of his lovingly decorated little apartment and the sliver of self-respect it represented. That seemed infinitely more important to him than money.
The only remotely tenable reason Zack might have killed Chris was that Chris was going to leave him. Plainly, he was haunted by the possibility; it was the reason he thought Chris wanted to see him the night Chris was killed. It wasn’t an entirely unreasonable fear. Chris kept secrets. Maybe he was planning to dump Zack
and Zack picked up on it. Maybe Bligh fed that fear for his own purposes, convincing Zack of the injustice of Chris’s treatment of him until he exploded in rage. I remembered the conversation I’d had with Josh just a couple of days earlier about how gay men acted out their self-hatred on each other. Their fears, too. And yet it was hard for me to put Zack in that room, battering Chris’s brains out.
No, not Zack.
Then who?
Joey Chandler?
That scenario still held its attractions for me. Joey had quarreled with Chris at dinner hours before Chris was killed. Maybe, Joey left the restaurant in a rage, then followed his father back to the court where he continued their argument about Chris’s abandonment of his family. Or Zack and a life toward which Joey felt contempt and hatred. In the heat of the quarrel, Joey killed his father, then panicked and left. Later, he realized he had left his prints on the obelisk and returned for it. That’s when Zack saw him. Zack didn’t recognize Joey, but Joey must’ve recognized Zack. It gave him the idea of planting the obelisk in Zack’s apartment, then calling McBeth.
What about the second call to McBeth? How could Joey have known Zack was at Bligh’s cabin? I struggled for a plausible explanation, but the best I could come up with is that Joey had been tailing Zack and followed him up to the cabin. Why would he have been tailing Zack? Maybe he was looking for an opportunity to plant further incriminating evidence on him. He might have realized that Zack’s departure from the city was itself a suspicious circumstance.
There was no way of knowing if any of this was true, short of talking to Joey, but one other bit of hard evidence tended to support my theory. After I talked to Joseph Kimball, Bay showed up for the suppression hearing. Since she was not going to be called to testify by either side, I had concluded her reason for being there was to see whether I carried out my threat of implicating Joey. When McBeth’s credibility fell apart, Bay provided the final nail in McBeth’s coffin by disclosing to the D.A. that she had given Chris’s keys to McBeth. As a result, the case against Zack was dismissed. To anyone other than Bay this would’ve been cause for alarm, because now the police might turn their attention to Joey. But Bay was a lawyer’s daughter and a judge’s wife. She would’ve understood that the dismissal was not an adjudication of Zack’s innocence or guilt, but a technical maneuver that left everyone still convinced that Zack was the killer. Thus, the case was closed and Joey protected. It seemed to me she wouldn’t have gone to these lengths except to protect Joey which, as far as I was concerned, implied his guilt.
And yet, I had the same problem with Joey as murderer as I had with Zack; imagining the actual act of killing. Of course, sons killed their fathers, but even at his worst, Chris was hardly the kind of father who drives his children to parricide.
Ultimately, the problem with either scenario was not so much what it required me to think of Zack or Joey, but what it required me to think of Chris. He was a complicated mix, no doubt about it, decent but self-aggrandizing, courageous but also cowardly, a man who lived a lie for most of his life but managed admirable achievements nonetheless. I’d known him at every stage of his adult life, sometimes intimately while at other times there had been something akin to enmity between us. I’d loved him once when we were boys, had pitied him, been contemptuous of him and come to admire him again. He was for me, as I was for him, a kind of doppelganger, the ghostly reverse images of ourselves. No one could have felt more ambivalent about him than me, but even at my most disdainful I never doubted that at root Chris Chandler was a good man and a man who strove toward goodness. His idea of the good wasn’t my idea, but it was one that I understood.
We obeyed different imperatives. Chris took the world as he found it and believed he could not make his mark on it without denying his sexual nature. It wasn’t that he thought being gay was immoral or unnatural; he’d assured me of that from the start. Instead, I think he viewed it as a disadvantage he had to overcome to succeed, something on par with growing up poor. Nor was his idea of success a matter of crass materialism. He wanted a family, children, to be the kind of husband and father he wished his own father had been. Those were the wrongs he wanted to right, and they were far more urgent for him than sexual expression.
But that was where we disagreed. I couldn’t equate being gay with sexual practices alone, because I was gay whether or not I was having sex, when sex was the last thing on my mind. It wasn’t separate from who I was; it was part of who I was. Chris thought he could sacrifice a little pleasure for a stable place in the world, but to me the sacrifice would’ve been of the thing that made me human, the ability to love and to be loved, the drive toward connectedness. No position in the world was more important to me than that, because without it all positions would have been empty.
It wasn’t that I thought these recognitions made me a better person than Chris. Certainly, in the judgment of the world, there was no comparison between his achievements and mine. He was a respected judge, a good husband, a loving father, while I was an alcoholic homosexual who defended criminals for a living. Over the years, I’d occasionally envied him his apparent happiness and wondered if I hadn’t thrown away my own potential for happiness, but then I realized I could not have done other than I’d done because to do so, I’d have had to be a different person. Maybe I had taken the path of least resistance and Chris the more courageous course, and the success he’d reaped was a tribute to his virtue and not, as I had sometimes bitterly thought, rewards for his hypocrisy. Maybe he was right and I was wrong, if those words have any real application to the experience of living, but if I was wrong, it was not out of moral evil, or sickness or criminal disposition, that much I was sure of. I had followed my truth as I understood it, and if my life was a failure, it was because I had misunderstood.
But I didn’t think my life was a failure. It was different from the lives of most people, and for that reason often more difficult than I observed their lives to be, but it was a life largely without regrets or fear. I knew I had done, was doing, the best I could. Chris, too, had done the best he could. Anyone who knew him knew that much. And anyone who knew that much about him would not have harmed him.
Not Zack.
Not Joey.
The person who had killed Chris was a stranger to him. With that premise in mind, I went over and over the facts of the case, with Josh and alone, but no conscious solution would come. And then, three days after I’d talked to McBeth, I woke up from a dream, the details of which evaporated as soon as the light touched my eyes but for a name that seemed both obvious and inexplicable. I reached the same conclusion when I applied the facts to it; everything fit except for a motive. I could see how he’d done it, but not why. So I called the one person who I was certain could supply the reason.
26
BLIGH’S LIVING ROOM WAS filled with fresh-cut flowers, spilling their fragrance across the white spaces where the only sound was the occasional passing of a car on the street below. Courteous as ever, he poured me coffee and then settled into one of the elegant chairs. He’d been apprehensive on the phone when I insisted that I had to see him alone, but now he’d regained his composure and studied me with a polite expression, only the faintest trace of guardedness in his clear blue eyes. I took my time, looking around the room, cataloging the artifacts of his comfortable life. Their opulence had something to do with why I was there; he’d acquired a taste for opulence, but he wanted it on his own terms.
Greed had always seemed to me the most self-defeating of vices because one cannot own anything permanently; we have, at most, a life tenancy in our possessions. But I suppose the fulfillment was in the acquisition and maybe, too, someone who’d been tossed around by life needed the cosseting that money and things provide. Someone like him.
I’d spent the last two days learning all about him, with McBeth’s help. She’d been distrustful at first, but as I spun my theory, her good cop instincts overcame her skepticism and she was soon filling in the gaps I hadn’t been able to. She ran h
is name with the Department of Justice and came up with a four-page criminal record going back to when he was still a kid. I had a copy of it in my coat pocket. That, and notes from a couple of interviews with other men who had allowed themselves to be seduced by him, to their ultimate detriment. As for McBeth, she was, at this very moment, at the rented house in the valley where Sam Bligh was filming his latest porn opus. The circle was closing.
“You make good coffee,” I said.
He frowned; he knew I was being patronizing and didn’t like it.
“You seemed surprised when I called you on the phone,” I continued.
“I didn’t know what you wanted,” he replied.
“Do you now?”
“I think so,” he said, his eyes steady on mine. He wore a white shirt, the top three buttons undone to reveal smooth flesh. I’d never been alone with him before. He was a different person alone than he was with Bligh, compared to whom he seemed comic relief. But alone, the contrast between the young body and old face was erotic rather than comic, conveying both innocence and availability. Nor was it crudely done; he was someone with considerable experience of being desired.
“When is Sam due back?” I asked him.
He smiled at me. “We have time.”
“Does he mind this, your seeing other guys?”
“I’m particular,” he replied.
“Oh, how’s that?”
He stretched, the slender body tilting forward for my benefit. “I’m choosy. Sam takes good care of me, but I don’t want to depend on him for everything.”
“I understand,” I said. “God bless the child that’s got his own, right?”
His eyes narrowed suspiciously. “What does that mean?”
“It’s an old Billie Holiday song,” I told him. “It means we all have to watch out for ourselves.”
“Exactly.”
