The Death of Friends (24 page)

“Of course I am,” I said, irritably. “What do you think, I’m going to let him die in here?”

He touched my arm and replied, “Excuse me for saying this, but you look terrible.”

“I haven’t been able to sleep,” I said. “I’ll sleep better if he’s with me.”

“He’ll need full-time nursing.”

“I’ll arrange it,” I said.

Singh nodded. “All right. Once we get him some nursing, I’ll arrange his release. Actually, going off his meds may be a good idea at this point. He might even rally a bit once they work their way out of his system and you’ll have him back for a while. But only for a while.”

I closed my eyes against the tears and said, “I’ll take whatever I can get.”

So I brought him home. The days that followed were hectic, as I tried to adjust myself to the demands of his sickness, including the constant flow of people in and out of the house, nurses, his family, friends. As Singh predicted, once the extremely toxic drugs he was taking passed through his body, he regained some of his mental acuity and he even felt better physically than he had in a long time, though he remained very weak. Although it was now late November, the weather remained mild and he spent as much time as he could on the terrace. I brought my work outside and sat with him, or read to him or watched him as he dozed. Not that it was always so serene. He’d wake in the middle of the night, disoriented and frightened, and I’d have to calm him down. Or he’d stumble out of bed and fall and wake me with his cries. There were days when the pain was so intense he’d lash out at me or threaten to kill himself, after all, and other days when he was rendered mute by depression. As for me, I realized I was not as prepared as I thought for his death; that at some level, I did not believe he would really die. Now, the actuality of it washed over me like a cold wave and left me numb with shock.

One morning, we were sitting on the terrace, and he said, “What really happened to your friend, the judge?”

“Chris Chandler?” I hadn’t thought about the case in weeks.

He pulled an old, bulky sweater around him. “You got that guy off. Zack? If he didn’t kill him, who did?”

“I can’t prove it, but I think it was his son.”

“His son,” Josh repeated. “His own son killed him because he was a fag. Why do you think they hate us so much, Henry?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think I’ll ever know.”

“The worst thing about it is you start to think maybe they’re right to hate you.”

“You don’t believe that, do you?”

He frowned. “The guy who infected me wasn’t some crazy fundie, Henry. He was another fag.”

“It wasn’t intentional,” I said.

“How do you know?” he replied. “Maybe he knew he was HIV when we had sex, but he figured we deserved it for being queer.”

“That may happen,” I conceded, “but I’d like to think it’s rare.”

“Maybe, but you have to admit gay men can treat each other with as much contempt as straights do.”

“Who do you think we learned it from,” I said. “There’s a line from a poem by Auden, ‘Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return.’ We’re not immune. It takes incredible strength to withstand hatred without internalizing some of it.”

“Or acting it out,” Josh said.

“Why are you thinking about this?”

He looked out to the canyon, gathering his thoughts. “I’m dying,” he said, “and the man who’s responsible for it was also gay. I’m not saying I’m not responsible, too,” he added quickly. “But the bottom line is another gay man did this to me.”

“What about the gay man who loves you,” I said.

He looked at me tenderly. “That’s what’s keeping me alive.”

A couple of days later, I had to go to court for a hearing in an old case of mine on which the Court of Appeals had reversed the sentence because the trial judge had made a technical error the first time around. It took the judge ten minutes to correct his mistake and resentence my client to exactly the same term. On my way out of the courtroom, I saw Yolanda McBeth sitting by herself in the back row. I glanced away and kept walking, but halfway to the elevator, I heard her call my name. I stopped, turned and waited for her to catch up with me.

With a faint smile, she said, “You could at least have said hello.”

“Did you really want me to? What are you doing here?”

“I’m still a cop,” she said. “Suspended without pay until they figure out what to do with me. Meanwhile, I still have to show up on my cases, not that I’m worth much as a witness since word got around about what you did to me.”

“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.

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.