by Michael Nava
“So, what do we do now, Tommy?”
He got up, kicked off his shoes, pulled his shirt over his head and peeled off his jeans and said, “You’ll think of something.”
“I just have one question.”
“What’s that?”
“Did you really think you’d get away with murdering Chris Chandler?”
His face went blank. He pulled away from me and groped for his pants. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, as he stuffed himself into them. “But you better get out of here before Sam comes back.”
“We have time,” I reminded him.
“What do you want?”
“I want to tell you a story,” I said, “and I want you to tell me how it ends. Sit down.”
He hesitated, calculating the situation, then smiled at me and said, “You must be crazy. If you don’t leave, I’ll have to call the cops.”
“Don’t worry about the cops,” I said. “They’ll be along. Now sit down.”
He sat.
“So this is my story, Tommy. There was a kid from a pretty good family who had a mean streak in him. He spent most of his teenage years in and out of juvenile hall for petty stuff, at first, but gradually it escalated and he ended up doing some serious time because it seems he killed someone, an older man who the boy said had tried to sexually molest him. Are you with me, so far?”
He watched me without expression, as untroubled as if we were discussing the weather. I didn’t think it was a put-on; as far as he was concerned, we could have been discussing the weather.
“That was a clever defense,” I continued, “what with everyone concerned about child molesters, but the victim had some good friends who came into court and said, yes, he had a sexual relationship with the boy, but it was consensual.”
“They lied,” he said. “He hurt me.”
“The judge didn’t buy it,” I said. “He convicted the boy of second-degree murder and shipped him off to youth camp for a couple of years. Then the boy was released and the juvenile court record sealed to protect the boy from having this unfortunate incident follow him around for the rest of his life.”
“This is really boring,” he said.
“It gets better,” I said. “The boy was released and managed to stay out of trouble for a while. Legal trouble, anyway. He did have a lot of problems with his parents and they finally threw him out. The boy knocked around and ended up in Hollywood where he was picked up a couple of times for prostitution and once for an assault on one of his tricks. It was a pretty serious assault, but the trick decided against testifying because he wanted to avoid the publicity. I think, though I can’t prove it, that the boy beat up some of his other customers, too, but they were too afraid even to press charges. Am I right?”
“I never hurt anyone,” he said.
I watched the flicker of muscle beneath the skin; his body was like tensile steel.
“Not in a fair fight, maybe,” I said, “but some half-drunk, beer-bellied closet case wouldn’t have been any match for—this boy. Anyway, he learned a valuable lesson on the street. He learned that men with secrets are easy targets for all kinds of intimidation. Eventually, it occurred to him that maybe there was more to be gained here than the pleasure of beating someone senseless. Maybe there was money to be made. At any rate, he was tired of the streets. So, when the old guy in a wheelchair approached him about being in the movies, he went for it.”
“I never made a video,” he said, angrily.
“No, the boy saw there was not much future in that, so he concentrated on making himself invaluable to the old man who’d taken him in. And, as luck would have it, the old man needed an assistant just then. Since the old man was in a risky kind of business, he made a point of entertaining powerful, closeted men who could protect him from police harassment, and one of the services he provided to these powerful, closeted men was the occasional companion. So, from time to time, our boy was expected to bed one of these guys. Being an observant kind of boy, he soon noticed that many of these men, despite their power, were as scared of being found out as the tricks who used to pick him up on Santa Monica Boulevard.”
Tommy picked up his shirt from the floor and made a show of putting it on.
“Be patient,” I told him. “I’m almost through. The point is that the boy figured out he could blackmail some of these men. So that’s what he did, behind the old man’s back, of course. After all, the old man was doing a little blackmailing of his own and he wouldn’t have appreciated the double-dipping. The boy was careful who he put the squeeze on. He chose married men. Well off, but not so rich they could afford to lose their jobs in a scandal. Men with the kind of jobs that kept them in the public eye. Say, an anchorman for a local TV news show. Or the pastor of a big church in the South Bay.”
He opened his mouth to speak, but thought better of it.
“Surprised, Tommy?” I asked. “You shouldn’t be. Most people get sick of being blackmailed eventually. You know that. Take this judge. He came to a couple of Sam’s parties and he had victim written all over him. Our boy made his move, put on a private show for him, maybe, like the one you put on for me earlier. That would’ve been hard to resist. You’re good.”
“Let me show you how good I am.”
“I haven’t finished my story. The boy put on his show and the judge fell for him. They carried on for a while and then the boy began to hit him up for money. The judge paid. He couldn’t risk exposure, not with a wife and a family and his respectable career on the line. But it sobered him up. He realized that as long as he continued to lead a double life, he would also be prey to the scum.”
His eyes darkened in anger. “Who was the scum when my dick was in his mouth and his wife was sitting at home with the kid?”
“You are a sensitive boy,” I said. “I had no idea.”
“Fuck you, faggot.”
“I detect a little confusion here, but let me continue. The point is, our boy unwittingly began to push the judge out of the closet, and then the judge met another boy. A good kid, basically. The judge fell in love with him and he left his wife to try to make a better life for himself, one where he didn’t have to lie about who he was. But even then, he still allowed himself to be blackmailed. For years, he’d lived in fear of what would happen to his marriage if his wife discovered he was gay, and now he was afraid of what his lover would do if he found out about our boy and the blackmail. Fear is a hard habit to break.”
Tommy laughed, a sharp, mocking laugh. “You don’t get it,” he said. “He wasn’t afraid. He was still fucking me.”
“Not after he met Zack,” I said.
He laughed again and mimicked, “‘Not after he met Zack.’ You don’t know anything. He didn’t want Zack. He wanted me. He was fucking me right up to—” He bit off the end of the sentence. “He needed to feel guilty about something. It got him off, coming here when Zack was at work and screwing me. He couldn’t get it up without someone to cheat on.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said. “He hadn’t exchanged one kind of closet for another. You went to see him the night he was killed. He told you he didn’t want to see you again. He told you he wasn’t going to give you another cent. He told you he was going to tell Zack everything. You couldn’t take it, so you reverted to your old habits and killed him. Then you heard someone coming down the hall and hid in the bathroom. It was Zack. After he left, you took the weapon and brought it here. When Zack came to see Bligh in a panic, you saw your chance and planted the weapon in Zack’s apartment, then called the cops and told them they could find it there. Bligh sent Zack up to his cabin and you called the cops again and told them he was hiding there. Those calls were recorded,” I lied. “It won’t be hard to prove it’s you on the tape.”
He made a dive for the door. I let him go. He wouldn’t get far, not with the cops waiting at the gate.
A couple of hours later, I was sitting in the courtyard of a coffeehouse on Santa Monica Boulevard. Above the mu
rmur of a fountain, Louis Armstrong sang “Lush Life” over outdoor speakers. McBeth made her way across the cobblestones balancing cups of coffee in her hands. She set them down on the table, pulled out a metal chair and sat down, reaching for a cigarette from the pack in the pocket. Her blazer fell open, revealing her gun. She tugged the coat closed.
Lighting up, she said, continuing our earlier conversation, “You didn’t exactly get him to confess.”
“I know,” I said. “But when he told me Chris was still seeing him even after he met Zack, it caught me off guard, so I threw everything I had at him. He did try to run,” I pointed out. “That shows consciousness of guilt.”
“It’s a circumstantial case at best,” she replied, flicking ash from her lapel. “We can’t even put him at the scene.”
“He was at the restaurant where Zack worked the night Chris was killed,” I reminded her. “But he lied about eating dinner there. Zack said he talked to him in the bar at the beginning of his shift and mentioned that Chris was at the courthouse, but then he left.”
She shrugged. “Circumstantial.”
“He had access to the key to Zack’s apartment while Zack was at Bligh’s.”
“I know all that,” she replied, irritably. “But no one saw him there.”
We drank coffee in silence. “What about Bligh?” I asked. “Did he say anything useful?”
She shook her head. “Bligh won’t talk. He doesn’t want to incriminate himself.”
“We’ve still got the anchorman and the priest.”
“Yeah, but all they can give us is his m.o.”
“Well, the D.A.’s just going to have to go with what he’s got,” I said.
“Yeah,” she replied, glumly. “On the bright side, you guessed right about him. That was nice work.”
“Thanks,” I said, “but I wasn’t entirely right. I didn’t figure that Chris was still having sex with him after he met Zack.”
“That really bothers you, doesn’t it?”
I nodded. “I guess Chris wasn’t as far out of the closet as I thought he was.”
“From what I understand,” she said, “it’s a pretty deep place.”
27
TWO WEEKS PASSED. TOMMY was arraigned on charges of first-degree murder. Privately, McBeth told me that the D.A. was already talking about pleading it down to second degree or even voluntary manslaughter because, based on the evidence, if the case went to trial there was no more than a fifty-fifty chance of a conviction of any kind. I shared her pessimistic assessment, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it.
Zack called and I had to break the news to him of Chris’s infidelity, if that’s the word for it. He was as upset by it as Bay had been when Chris left her for him. I couldn’t find it in myself to defend Chris to him as I had with Bay. Chris, it seems, had been a lot more troubled and self-destructive than I’d ever realized. Maybe none of us had known him after all.
At any rate, I didn’t have much time to spare for Chris Chandler. Josh had been almost a month off all his drugs and he was so weak that he now seldom got out of bed. He was lucid when he was awake, but he slept most of the time, and there was little I could do but sit with him and wait for the end. After all the dramatic ups and downs of the past couple of years, the quiet with which he was dying seemed almost anticlimactic. The house was as hushed as a hospital zone, with nurses around the clock, his parents and sisters coming and going, and Singh dropping by at least once a day. None of us had much to say to each other. Not that there was any animosity between his family and me, not even with his father; it was the waiting that exhausted us.
I was sitting in the bedroom one afternoon reading Dickens to him while he slept the dazed, light sleep into which he slipped more and more often, when I heard the doorbell ring. The day nurse, a motherly gay black man named Robin, came in and told me, “There’s a lady who wants to talk to you, Henry.”
I put the book down and asked, “Did she give you her name?”
“Bay,” he said.
“Okay, thanks,” I said, getting up. “You mind reading to him?”
Robin picked up the book. “Bleak House,” he read. “Sounds depressing.”
“It’s not,” I said. “He says it’s his favorite novel because it has lawyers and a happy ending. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
Bay was standing at the window doors looking out at the canyon. She was in slacks and a pink sweater. She turned when she heard me enter the room and smiled wanly.
“I hope this isn’t a bad time,” she said.
“No, it’s fine,” I replied. “It’s good to see you, Bay. Can I get you something to drink?”
“No, thanks, I can’t stay. Mind if I sit?”
“Please.”
We sat across from each other. “The man who answered the door was a nurse,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Josh?” she ventured.
I nodded. “He’s dying.”
“I’m so sorry, Henry.”
“I appreciate that,” I said. She looked at a loss for words, so I added, “It’s all right, Bay. There’s nothing anyone can do now.”
“I’ll pray for him,” she said.
I let a moment pass, then said, “Did I tell you it’s good to see you?”
“Yes, it’s good to see you, too, Henry. I guess the last time we talked wasn’t so pleasant for either of us.”
“You had a right to be mad at me,” I said. “I lied to you.”
She shook her head. “Chris lied to me,” she replied. “You just got caught in the middle. In your situation, I probably would’ve done the same thing. It wasn’t about you, it was about Chris.”
“Chris was a troubled guy,” I said.
She released a low laugh. “That’s an understatement. But you know what happens in a marriage is that you get so used to the other person you stop seeing him as someone separate. You just assume he wants what you want and thinks the way you think. You forget he might have his own—what? Desires? Longings? Secrets?” She tilted her head and regarded me quizzically. “Do you know what I mean?”
I thought of the morning Josh told me he was in love with another man, and said, “I know exactly what you mean. We never know anyone as well as we think we do.”
“No, never. That’s why I didn’t come sooner, to tell you about Joey.”
“Joey?” I said. “What about him?”
“You thought he killed Chris,” she said. “So did I.”
I stared at her.
“You see,” she continued, “after Chris left me, I wasn’t sure I knew anyone anymore, not even myself, so when Joey told me he’d found his father’s body that night, I didn’t know what to think.”
“What happened?”
She said, “He had dinner with Chris that night. They had a big fight and Joey ran out on him. Later, he went to the court, to apologize, he says, though I think it was probably to pick another fight with him. He says when he got there Chris was already dead. He got scared and left. He went to his grandfather and told him what had happened. Dad told him to keep his mouth shut, but, unlike Chris, Joey’s never been any good at keeping secrets from me and I suspected the worst. Mind you, I couldn’t bring myself to ask him point blank if he’d killed Chris, I just assumed it.”
“Did your father also suspect him?”
“Not until you talked to him. That really shook him up. I went to that hearing to try to make some kind of deal with you, but I lost my nerve. When Detective McBeth lied on the stand, I saw my chance to help you, indirectly, by telling the prosecutor I’d given McBeth Chris’s keys. I thought if I helped you get Zack Bowen off, you’d forget about Joey.”
“You didn’t think Zack killed Chris.”
She shrugged. “I didn’t know, because I didn’t know if Joey was telling me the truth about what happened that night. I went over it again and again and I just couldn’t say for sure.”
“What do you think now?”
“This man
they’ve arrested. He killed Chris.”
“Tommy Callen. I think so, too, but the evidence isn’t all that compelling.”
“Joey saw him that night,” she said.
“What?” I said incredulously.
“He was on the news the other night,” she said. “Joey told me he saw him in the parking lot just before he went up to see his father. He’s sure of it.”
“What exactly did he see?”
“He saw this man get into a car and drive out of the lot. He remembers because the man left in a hurry.”
“Does Joey remember whether the weapon that was used to kill Chris was still in his chambers when he went up there?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t ask him.”
“Is he sure enough about seeing Tommy to testify?”
“Yes,” she said. “Dad doesn’t want him to, but I told him he owed it to Chris.”
“Why is your father opposed?”
“Dad thinks Chris did enough damage to the family,” she said. “Chris betrayed him, too, you know. He loved him like a son.”
“I remember,” I said.
“I want this man in prison,” she said. “He deserves it. I don’t care if we have to air some dirty linen to do it.”
“Then you need to go to the police,” I said.
She nodded. “I know. But I wanted to tell you first, so we could be friends again, if that’s possible.”
“I hope so,” I said.
She got up, “I better go. I’m sure you want to get back to Josh, but Henry, there’s one more thing I have to tell you.”
“What is it, Bay?”
“The thing that got Joey so mad at his father that night, the reason I thought he might have killed him.”
Puzzled, I said, “You mean other than the fact that he’d left you?”
She nodded. “That wasn’t it. I mean, Joey was furious at Chris for that, but he wouldn’t have killed him because of it. It was the other thing.”
“What other thing?”
“He told Joey he was HIV-positive,” she said.
“Oh, God.”
“You need to tell his friend Zack to get tested,” she said.
