The Hidden Law (8 page)

“I guess he just couldn’t keep off the hootch,” Freeman said. “You know the guy?”

“He’d asked me to represent him up in Sacramento,” I said.

“There’s one fee you won’t be getting.”

T
HE SATURDAY AFTER PEÑA’S
murder was May 5, Cinco de Mayo, a holiday commemorating Mexico’s victory over the invading French army in 1862. In Los Angeles, it was the occasion for the Chicano community to display the cultural nationalism that lay just below the surface of a city that retained its Spanish place names but had otherwise entombed its origins beneath the Hollywood sign. With Peña’s murder, the celebrations took on an edge. There was a rally downtown in Peña’s honor that turned violent when rival gangs starting shooting each other up. At another rally in East LA, Tomas Ochoa attempted to incite the crowd against the police who’d been called out to prevent further gang violence. Even at the pricey Chicano Bar Association dinner I attended on Saturday night there was muttering about whether the police were pursuing their investigation with the same dispatch as they would have had Peña been an Anglo politician. To me, this was bad news. The more pressure that was put on the police, the likelier it was that they would scapegoat someone. By the time Monday morning rolled around, the day of Peña’s funeral, the city was braced for violence.

I made my way across a police barricade to City Hall where I was picking up Inez Montoya for the short walk to the church where the funeral was being held. A metal detector had been set up at the entrance. Inside, police officers were posted beneath the eight civic virtues, shiftily eyeing the few bureaucrats who had bothered showing up for work that day. Inez was on the phone in her inner office, so I waited outside.

It had been at Inez’s table at a fund-raising dinner two years earlier where I’d first met Gus Peña. He’d come over to congratulate his one-time administrative assistant on her election to the city council out of the same district which he represented in the state senate. There had been a certain amount of condescension in the gesture, which, Inez had later told me, pretty much summed up his attitude toward women in general.

I’d known Inez for years, from her days, and mine, as public defenders. I’d worked up north at the time, and she was in Los Angeles. We’d met at a statewide meeting of the CPDA, California Public Defenders’ Association, a group loftily dedicated to promoting the best legal services possible for indigent criminal defendants, back in the days when young lawyers thought this was a worthy goal. A long time ago, obviously.

We’d gotten drunk together—I was still drinking then—and she had tried to seduce me. She’d always had terrible luck with men. But we’d stayed friends and I’d watched her career, helping in whatever small ways I could, as she made her way through the political maelstrom on brains and guts and a passionate commitment to the disenfranchised. She was an altogether admirable, if sometimes scary, human being.

As I sat leafing through an issue of
Hispanic
magazine, I heard her shouting in her office.

“Don’t give me any bureaucratic excuses,” she was saying. “This guy’s the worst slumlord in the city.”

One of her staffers looked at me and smiled. From within her office, she growled, “Yeah, well you are the Building and Safety Department, aren’t you?” After a moment’s pause, she resumed her tirade. “Well if I don’t have an answer by the end of the day I’m going to haul your ass down here to explain why.” There was a jangle as she slammed down the receiver.

“I guess you can go in now,” her aide told me.

“Thanks.” I went to the door and knocked.

“What?” she demanded.

I pushed the door open and said, “Building and Safety inspector, ma’am.”

She smiled, “Was I being a little loud? A little unladylike?”

“You ready to go pay your respects to Gus?”

She pulled a cigarette out of the pack on her desk and lit it, sucking greedily. “Is it time, already? Do I look OK?”

In her dark suit, her hair pulled back and tied with one of her trademark ribbons, she could have passed for a schoolgirl.

“You look fine.”

She got up and hoisted her purse over her shoulder. “Let’s go, then.”

“This place looks like a scene out of that Costa-Gavras movie,
State of Siege,”
I said as we crossed the rotunda, past the unsmiling countenances of the police guards.

“Oh, them,” she said, dismissively. “It’s safer than working the streets.”

Outside, it was hot and clear, the early signs of another scorching summer. The trees on the grounds of City Hall sagged listlessly. The grass had been allowed to die, a concession to the drought, but it was still heavily populated in equal measure by street people and city workers eating lunch. A grizzled old man stood on the corner of Main and First, shrieking passages from the Bible, a Styrofoam cup balanced on his head. As we approached him, he stopped in mid-imprecation, reached for the cup and took a drink from it.

She put her arm through mine and said, “I’ve always wondered what he had in that cup.”

“God’s work is thirsty work, I guess.”

“LA, don’t you love it?”

“It got to be a hot weekend,” I said, not referring to the weather.

“I know, I know. I’ve spent the last five days trying to keep people in my district calm.”

“Tomas Ochoa didn’t help matters.”

“That shit,” she said.

“I saw you on TV last night talking about Gus,” I said, pulling her toward me to avoid a broken bottle of Gallo port on the sidewalk. On the tube, she had praised Peña as a friend of the poor and leader in the continuing fight for the civil rights of all people. “Did you mean it?”

“You’re so cynical, Henry. You should go into politics.” Waving away a panhandler, she said, “Of course I meant it. Gus had an excellent record on social legislation. In his own way, he was a powerful advocate for the community. The fact that he was also an asshole is neither here nor there. Besides,” she added, thoughtfully, “there aren’t so many Chicano politicians that we can afford to lose one.”

“Who do you think killed him?”

She wasn’t listening. We’d crossed First and were heading down Main, past boarded-up storefronts that reeked of urine, and a parking lot where the homeless lived in tents made out of plastic garbage bags and cardboard boxes.

“Look at this,” she said, indignation darkening her voice. “In one of the richest cities in the world people live like this.” She looked at me, frowning. “Gus wore thousand-dollar suits, but he knew what it was like to be poor. Unlike the gringos who run this town.”

“I’m on your side,” I reminded her.

Traffic had been diverted around the church, and a line of black limousines was parked alongside it. Police officers patrolled the area keeping the crowd at bay. I began to hear chanting. As we approached I saw that it was coming from a contingent of black T-shirted, placard-waving Act Up members. One of them read, “Save the Minority AIDS Project.” Others repeated in Spanish the group’s motto, Silence = Death.

Separated from them by a line of cops was another group, mostly Chicano kids, holding up their own placards denouncing the police. Some of them had started shouting “Faggots,” and “Queers,” at the Act Up contingent. I thought I caught a glimpse of Ochoa among them.

“What’s Act Up doing here?” Inez asked.

“They’re pushing funding for the Minority AIDS Project,” I said, repeating what Josh had told me. “They figured there’d be a big contingent of politicians at the funeral.”

“It looks to me like there’s going to be a fight,” she said.

We’d come to the police line. I looked over to where the cops had contained the Act Up people, searching to see if Josh was there. He was, one hand raised in a fist in the air, and the other around Steven Wolfe’s waist. He saw me and began walking forward, but a black cop pushed him back with the edge of his baton.

“There’s Josh,” I said, pulling her with me as I hurried over to him.

Josh was arguing with the cop, Steven coming up behind him, when we got there.

“Excuse me, officer,” I said. “This is a friend of mine.”

The cop looked me up and down in my black suit, and glanced at Inez. “Sorry, sir, the demonstrators have to stay behind the lines.”

“I just want to talk to him,” I said.

“Officer,” Inez said, pulling her wallet out of her purse. “I’m with him.” She flipped her wallet open, showing some kind of badge. He looked at it.

“OK, but just you,” he said to Josh, letting him through. Steven smiled at me with unmistakable disdain.

“Hi, Inez,” Josh said. “What was that you showed him?”

“City council members carry a badge,” she said. “It gets us out of traffic tickets. You want to come inside with us?”

He shook his head. “Hi, Henry.”

“Hi. It looks like there’s going to be trouble here, Josh,” I said, indicating the Chicano demonstrators.

“The cops will keep them away from us.”

“I’d feel better if you came inside.” After a moment, I said, “You could bring Steven, too.”

“Sure, if you don’t mind that we disrupt the funeral.”

Inez said, “That would not be a good idea.”

Josh touched my lapel. “Then I guess we better stay out here.”

“Why don’t we both go home, then,” I said.

He shook his head, “Those days are over, Henry. You can’t protect me anymore.”

Inez tugged my elbow. “Henry, let’s go.”

“See you later,” Josh said, and kissed me. “Bye, Inez.”

“Good-bye, Josh. Keep your head down.” As we walked away she asked, “What was that all about?”

“Marital discord,” I replied, and left it at that.

Uniformed cops swarmed the entrance to the cathedral. As at City Hall, we had to pass through a metal detector. A tall man who looked like a cop in plainclothes called over to her. “Council-woman Montoya?” We walked over to him. “Fred Hanley,” he said. “LAPD anti-terrorist squad. If you’d step this way, I’ll have someone show you to your seat.”

“What’s going on here?” she asked.

“Just a precaution, ma’am,” he said, sounding exactly like Sergeant Friday. He handed us over to another plainclothesman who took us into the church and sat us four rows back from the altar. I could make out the backs of the heads of Peña’s wife and children in the front. Gus’s casket was on a flower-strewn dais. It had been left half-open, “half-couch,” in the argot of morticians with which I had become more familiar than I had ever wanted to be in the past few years of burying friends who’d died of AIDS. I could make out Gus’s stern profile.

The service began.

As far as I was concerned, the Catholic Church was just another totalitarian political entity, like the Communist Party or IBM, but I had to admit, it put on a good show. As I watched the theatrics unfold, I thought of Gus Peña. Over the past five days, the news stories about Gus had filled in the holes in my knowledge about him.

He was the son of Mexican immigrants and, as Inez had said, he knew what it was like to be poor. After high school, he’d joined the military, and done a tour of duty in Vietnam. Upon his return, he’d come back to the city and put himself through college and law school. In the sixties, he’d worked with Chavez’s farmworkers. Later, he’d come home to East LA where he opened up a law practice and began building the foundations of his political career.

I’d grown up in a place as poor as East LA, and I knew what he’d bucked to turn himself into the suave politician he had become. Inez was also right that he had never forgotten his roots. That in itself was an accomplishment; self-made men had a tendency to generalize their experience into a sour kind of bigotry against the poor. Peña could have escaped into the reaches of the upper-middle-class, the token “Hispanic” partner at some big downtown law firm, but he hadn’t. Having had to work twice as hard for what he deserved on merit alone, he’d developed a kind of rage, like an extra set of muscles, propelling him through life. The rage never went away. There was never enough to reward you for what you had suffered. And you never, ever, forgot you were an outsider, no matter how expensive your suits.

I could imagine all this because I had traversed the same trajectory. The difference was, being homosexual as well as Chicano, I’d had to learn a level of self-acceptance that mitigated my anger. Having had to overcome my own self-hatred, I couldn’t sustain hatred toward other people very long, not even the people who ran the Catholic Church, though God knows they deserved it. This inability to hate didn’t make me virtuous; it was just part of who I was.

I wondered if Peña had known who he was when he died, or if he’d died in the rage, like my father, his best instincts warring with his worst. No wonder he needed to drink.

“My father was a man with a lot to do.”

I looked up at the altar where Gus Peña’s son was standing at the podium, looking remarkably composed and touchingly young. I’d only half-listened to the parade of luminaries who’d been eulogizing Gus in phrases so general they could have applied to any politician, but this boy—Tino?—had my attention.

“When I was a kid, I resented the fact that he was so busy,” the boy said. “He wasn’t like other dads. I guess part of me missed that, but when I got older I understood why he was so busy. His work was the people’s work.” He paused, looked down at the casket, and then at the crowded church. “Dad, the people didn’t forget you. They’re here today.” He lowered his head, composing himself. “And we’re here, too, Dad. Mom, Angela, and me. To say goodbye.” He bent forward slightly, weeping. Next to me, I heard Inez’s low sobbing, too. The boy raised his head and continued. “My father believed in the God of justice,” he said. “Justice for everyone. I hope God will judge him justly and treat him with mercy. Good-bye, Dad.”

In the stillness that followed, the chants of the demonstrators outside echoed through the church.

“Are you going to the interment?” I asked Inez when we were out on the sidewalk. The crowd was breaking up. The demonstrators were gone, but the police remained in force.

Inez dabbed her eyes with my handkerchief. “No, I’ve got to get back to the office. You?”