The Hidden Law (9 page)

“No, I don’t think so. I’ll walk you back.”

Fred Hanley, the LAPD officer, came up and said, “Councilwoman, one of my men will drive you to City Hall.”

She looked at me impatiently. “What is going on here? Why’s the anti-terrorist squad out? And don’t bullshit me.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Hanley said. “We have some reason to believe that Senator Peña was killed by a terrorist group that calls itself the Dogtown Locos.”

“That’s the name of a street gang,” I said.

“Yes, sir,” Hanley replied. “I’m sorry I can’t say more. If you’d come with me, Councilwoman.”

“Go on,” I said. “I’ll be all right. Call me later.”

Inez nodded and went off with Hanley, whispering fiercely.

“Henry.” Edith Rosen was walking toward me, her hair covered with a black scarf. “I didn’t see you earlier.”

“It was a full house,” I replied. “How are you doing?”

“I need to talk to you,” she said. “It’s very important.”

“Sure. Have you eaten lunch?”

“What I could really use,” she said, removing her scarf, “is a drink.”

A
T THE COMMODORE PERRY ROOM
in the New Otani, a glass wall separated the bar from the Japanese Garden on the other side. A miniature footbridge forded a trickling stream shaded by small red-leaved plum trees. Inside, a big-screen Toshiba TV broadcast a soccer match from Buenos Aires and a lone cocktail waitress dressed in a black-and-gold kimono shuffled among the mostly empty tables filling little glass bowls with salted dried peas and rice sticks. I nursed a Diet Coke while, between sips of white wine, Edith Rosen told me she had lied to me about Michael Ruiz’s whereabouts the night Peña was killed.

“I got a call around eleven from the counselor on duty,” she explained, “telling me that Michael had left the house sometime earlier that night.”

“Don’t you have to sign out?”

“There’s a big AA meeting at the house from eight-thirty to ten,” she said. “Everyone goes outside to smoke on the break. He kept going. It wasn’t until bed check they found he was missing.”

“When did he come back?”

“Around midnight,” she replied. “The counselor was supposed to write him up, but I told her to hold off until I had a chance to talk to him.”

“And of course the next morning you found out that Gus had been murdered,” I said. “And you told me that Michael had been at the house the night before.”

“Look, Henry, I didn’t think the two things had anything to do with each other,” she insisted.

“Then why did you lie to me?”

“I didn’t want to complicate things before I’d had a chance to talk to him.”

“And what did he say when you did?”

“He said he went to see a movie,” she replied. “He told me the name of the theater, the movie, the time it started and when it was over. I called the theater. They confirmed it.”

“They confirmed seeing him?”

“It didn’t seem necessary to ask,” she replied brusquely.

“Did you write him up for taking off?”

“No,” she said, looking into her drink.

“Why are you telling me this?”

“He took off again this morning,” she said, lifting her face. “Just cleared out.”

“What happened?”

“The police were at the house, asking questions about Gus. They came in to talk to me but I told them I couldn’t say anything without violating the therapist-patient privilege—”

I cut in. “Did they want to know about Michael?”

“No, about Gus. I was his therapist, too. They wanted to know if he’d mentioned having received any death threats. That kind of thing.”

“That kind of thing you could have told them,” I said.

“I don’t talk about my clients, period,” she snapped. “Anyway, after they left, I saw Michael standing in the hallway. I think he must’ve seen them leaving my office. A little later, he missed group. That’s when they found he was gone.”

“Do you have any idea of where he might be?”

She shook her head. “I tried his parents and his grandmother. They didn’t know.”

“You still think this has nothing to do with Peña’s murder?”

“I don’t know what to think,” she said quietly, and finished her drink.

I studied her kind, plain face for a moment. She looked as if she had lost a child. “Edith, why did you cover for Michael? It seems out of character for someone who takes her ethical obligations so seriously.”

“One of my children got involved with drugs,” she said, after a moment.

“You’re married?”

“Divorced. We had two kids, a boy and a girl. It was my son who got caught up in drugs.” She picked up her glass, saw it was empty, put it down again. “I really didn’t understand because he seemed so well adjusted, and we were comfortable, our family, I mean. Of course, there was the usual tension, but there is in every family. I started looking for answers. Eventually, it led me back to school in psychology.” She looked at me. “I was almost fifty, and my husband thought I was crazy, obsessed. I suppose he was right.”

“Did you find your answers?” I asked.

“Some, I found some. Too late for Roger, though. He overdosed.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You know,” she said, “I’ve seen hundreds of clients, all shapes, sizes and ages. I never knew that I was looking for Roger in them until I found Michael. Do you understand now, Henry? I wanted to change the ending.”

“I understand completely,” I said. “I’d like to change a few endings, too. I think you’ve just convinced me that it’s not in my power.”

“I have to get back to the house,” she said, rising. “It’s possible that Michael’s with some of his gang friends. Do you think you could find that out?”

I thought of Tomas Ochoa. “I can try.”

“Thank you, Henry.”

“If he gets in touch with you, let me know immediately. By the way, what was the name of the theater Michael said he went to?”

“The Los Feliz,” she said. “It’s in walking distance of the house.”

Driving back to my office, I called Inez Montoya to find out what further information she had managed to wrest from Fred Hanley, the Sergeant Friday clone, about gang involvement in Peña’s murder.

“You know what it is,” she said scornfully. “Over the weekend, the cops started seeing Dogtown
placasos
with Peña’s name in it.”

“What did the graffiti say?”

“‘Peña
puto’
,” she quoted.

“How is calling Gus a queer claiming responsibility for killing him?” I asked.

“They told me it was the first time they’ve ever seen a politician’s name show up in the
placasos.”

Just as she was speaking, I passed a building on Beverly whose wall was covered with spray-painted
placas,
filled with numbers and names in the serpentine script legible only to the gangbangers. The
placas
were a way of marking territory and trading insults. I, too, had never heard it used for political commentary.

“I don’t think the cops are telling you everything they know,” I said.

“Why should they?” she scoffed. “I’m only one of their employers.”

“Maybe you could press them for more.”

I heard her yelling something and then a door slammed shut. She came back on the line, “What’s your interest?”

“You represent the same district that Peña did,” I pointed out. “If I were you, I’d be concerned about the gangs turning into political terrorists.”

“Now you’re beginning to sound like Ochoa,” she said.

I said, “I have to make another call.”

I got Tomas between classes. He didn’t sound particularly happy to hear from me. When I brought up Gus’s murder, I got about the response that I’d expected.

“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” he said. “Listen, with that homicide charge hanging over him, getting killed was probably a good career move.”

“It was certainly good for your career, Tomas. You’ve been on TV almost every night since he was killed.”

“Listen, Rios, I’m busy. What do you want?”

I slowed for a red light. “I want to trade information with you.”

That got a guarded, “What information?”

“You first,” I said, stopping at the light. A man standing on the corner selling sacks of oranges shook one hopefully in my direction. I shook my head. “You’re always hyping the gangs Tomas, but do you actually have any ties to them?”

“Why?”

“Because I have a client who I suspect may be involved with the gangs, but I need to know for sure.”

“Ask him,” Tomas said.

I accelerated through the green light. “He’s disappeared,” I said. “That’s the problem. I want to know if he’s with them.”

“And what do you have to trade, Rios?”

“A warning,” I said.

“Yeah? What?”

“The cops are going to start a sweep, if they haven’t already.” The Los Feliz theater came into sight.

“That’s not news,” he said. “They’re out there every night.”

“I’m talking about mass arrests,” I said. “The day after Gus was killed the Governor signed his anti-gang bill with an urgency clause that put it into effect immediately. That’s what the cops will be using.” I pulled over just down the street from the theater. “What about it, Tomas, will you help me find my client?”

“What’s his name?”

“Michael Ruiz,” I said.

“When and where will the cops start their sweep?”

“Dogtown territory,” I said. “Tonight, if they haven’t already started.”

“How do you know this?” he asked suspiciously.

“No, now it’s your turn. Help me find Michael Ruiz.”

“There are two hundred gangs in LA,” he said. “You expect me to ask each one of them?”

“Only the ones that operate out of East LA. Try Dogtown and Varrio Nuevo.”

“Maybe,” he said.

It occurred to me that he hadn’t asked me why the cops were coming down on the Dogtown gang. Maybe he already knew.

The girl at the Los Feliz had been working the night Gus was killed, but she didn’t remember selling a ticket to a Chicano boy with a tear-drop tattoo. I thanked her and glanced up at the marquee. The Los Feliz was showing
Terminator 2.

Although much had happened since my first session with Raymond Reynolds a week earlier, when I sat down in his gray office I wanted to pick up where we had left off, talking about my father. I announced this to Reynolds who smiled faintly, and said, “You’ve overcome your resistance to talking about mommy and daddy?”

“Don’t gloat,” I said, marveling at how comfortable I felt talking to this stranger about matters I had seldom discussed with anyone, but then, there was something about this process that seemed distantly familiar.

“Seriously, Henry, what happened this week that makes it important for you to talk about him?”

“Two things,” I replied. “I went to a funeral this morning and heard a son talking about his father, and then later, I was talking to someone about changing endings. It made me think about my father’s death.”

“What about it?”

“I was in college,” I said, “a sophomore. It was September, and I’d just turned nineteen. I hadn’t been home since Christmas. My mother called me and told me my father was dying. I hadn’t even known he was sick.” I closed my eyes, remembering that clear September afternoon, standing in the hallway of the dorm. Going home was the last thing I wanted to do, but I went anyway. “He was dying of stomach cancer,” I said. “He looked like someone who’d been in a concentration camp.”

“What did you feel?” Reynolds asked, softly.

“I was shocked,” I said. “And surprised. Shocked by the way he looked. Surprised that he was dying, surprised that he was mortal, after all.”

“You didn’t think he was mortal?”

“I didn’t think he was human,” I replied. “He seemed so big and his fury was bottomless. He was a whirlwind, like the Old Testament God, or something, ripping through my life, uprooting me, tossing me around. How could someone like that die?”

“That’s a powerful image,” he observed.

I looked out the slats of the blinds that covered the windows at the narrow bands of sky: red, orange, blue. When I was small the sky frightened me because it never changed, it was always that enormous dome of light or darkness, and I was afraid that I would be little forever, and in terror of the giant who was my father. The only prayer I had as a kid was for time to pass.

“I was glad he was dying. I thought I’d finally be free.”

“Free from what?”

“From being afraid of him, from disappointing him, from never measuring up to this idea of what a man should be.”

“Did he know you were gay?”

“I hardly knew myself at that age,” I said, still looking out the window. The sky was darkening. “Growing up, I was sensitive and strong-willed. It was a combination that didn’t make sense to his notions of being male. He thought I was simply weak and disobedient.”

“And after he died, did that free you?”

“I live with his judgments of me,” I said.

“And perhaps,” Reynolds said, “you live out his judgments of you.”

I looked at him. “What do you mean?”

“You lead an admirable life, Henry, but I wonder how much of it really gives you any satisfaction.”

“That’s not something I think about. There’s too much to be done.”

“Too much wrong to right?” he asked, with a trace of amusement in his voice.

“I just don’t think the point of life is to sit beneath a tree and await enlightenment.”

“I’m not suggesting you renounce the life you’ve made for yourself, just that you become more conscious of it.”

“Why?” I asked skeptically.

“To discover your motives in having chosen it,” he said, folding his hands in his lap like a little Buddha.

That night I dreamed about him, for the first time in years and years. I was back in the hospital room. His eyes glittered above his respirator. They were the last fully alive part of him, and I watched him focus on me as I entered the room. I sat down on the edge of the bed, trying to think of something to say to him. Then, he gripped my arm with fingers as bony as talons but with no more strength than a child and began making choking noises, trying to speak. I leaned toward him. He was saying, “Don’t let them know.”

I woke up in a fury that the last thing on earth he had asked me was to keep secret how he had terrorized me, and that I had.