Early Graves (13 page)

“Braille Institute. This mine?” Cecil stretched an arm for the snifter Dave had set on the raised brick hearth. “Some kind of event happening there tonight.” He glanced at the elaborate black watch on his wrist. “I have to pick her up at ten o’clock. I waited a long time for you. Where have you been?”

“Max’s,” Dave said, “with Ken Barker. I hope you ate.”

Cecil sipped the brandy. “I had something else in mind.”

“Forget it,” Dave said. “To make that easier, let me tell you about my day.” He told it. “He got away. It took them hours to patch Samuels up, but they say he’ll be all right. I wonder why the change of weapons—knife to gun?”

“Maybe it wasn’t the same cracker,” Cecil said.

“Looked the same, moved the same, angular but girlish.”

“Some of us can’t help that.” Cecil touched his mouth with the brandy again and frowned. “What’s his thinking? Put them out of their misery? Friends he knew. Can’t bear to see them suffer. Is that why they let him get so close?”

“There was a spray-painted slogan on the front wall of Haven House,” Dave said. “Crofoot was trying to paint it out. ‘
FAGS CAUSE AIDS. KILL ALL FAGS
.’”

“Oh, wow.” Despair was in Cecil’s voice. “When Baby shot at me,” Dave said, “he hit those words.”

“Stay home, Dave,” Cecil said. “Please. Barker’s got half the police department on it. Let them catch him. Don’t go out there making yourself a target. No more, all right?” He drank off the brandy, set down the glass, rose. “I have to go. Take me forty minutes from here to Braille Institute.” He bent, kissed Dave’s mouth made for the door. At the door he turned back. “You be all right alone here?”

“I’m not alone,” Dave said. “They’re risking the lives of two more officers to guard me. Out front.”

“Good,” Cecil said, and left.

The front of the Tiberius Baths was gray stucco, the forms of Roman columns and arches molded shallowly into it. Spotlight from police cars jamming Melrose Avenue glared on the pillars and arches and the plastered-up windows of the place. Light strips on the roofs of the police cars winked fitfully, red, amber, white. Police officers stood around in clumps among the cars. Some of the officers wore bulky protective vests and crash helmets and cradled rifles in their arms. It was a scene from a bad dream.

Officers Gregory and Munro had brought Dave here. They had wakened him by banging on the door of the rear building while Miles Davis played “Someday My Prince Will Come” softly through the stereo rig on the sleeping loft under the starlit skylight and Dave was drifting off to sleep, forgetting the ache in his shoulder, the day’s alarms and excursions. He had moaned, flapped into a corduroy robe, limped down the stairs, unbolted the door, scowled at the two young uniforms, growled at them. Gregory stammered.

“Sorry to bother you, but we just got a call from the Lieutenant. Down in Hollywood. They’ve got the knifer, the one that tried to kill you, the one that killed all the AIDS victims? They’ve got him cornered. The lieutenant thought you’d like to be there when they bring him out. He said for us to drive you, if you want.”

“I want,” Dave said. “I’ll get some clothes on.”

When they reached the block where the action was, Munro had to thread the unmarked car between television news vans, had to tap his horn to herd men with cameras on their shoulders, reporters with microphones and recorders out of the way. Dave got a glimpse of Cecil, who stood talking to a blond young woman from a network news team. Cecil’s back was turned. He didn’t see Dave pass. Munro drew the car to a halt near the red paramedic van. Next to it lurked the black coroner’s wagon, bony Carlyle standing beside this, peering up at the roof of Tiberius Baths, the surrounding lights flickering off his thick glasses. His two helpers, the young Latino, the young Asian, stood talking with attendants from the paramedic vehicle, from the police ambulance, whose rear doors gaped open, waiting.

Jeff Leppard broke from a huddle with the SWAT team, came over to the car, opened the door for Dave to get out. “I thought you’d come,” he said. “Here’s the situation. We got a call from the night manager. A man stabbed another man in a hot tub. Manager thinks victim is dead. Lots of screaming and running around, and the manager was able to jump the dude. He had him locked up in a cubicle. He’s got a gun, the manager has. All the same, he wants the cops, right?”

“He got them, didn’t he,” Dave said. “Only why are they all out here?”

“Because when the first car got here, and the officers tried to go in, the perp had made it out of the cubicle and taken the gun away from the manager, and he stood at the top and fired at the officers down the stairs. The door you see is the only way into the whole place. Stairs go up from there to the second floor. And that’s it.”

“I see a fire escape at the side,” Dave said. In the light beams of police cars, five or six officers stood at the foot of the iron fabric in a narrow alley strewn with trash from overflowing dumpsters. “What about the windows?”

“Painted over from inside,” Leppard said. “No way to foresee what they’d step into. We voted for the roof. A team is up there now. Skylights are painted over too, but it’s better to drop on him from above. Catch him by surprise.”

“Maybe,” Dave said. “You going to keep him alive?”

“We want to keep everybody alive.” Leppard gazed up at the roof. Shadowy figures moved there. “We don’t know how many men might be inside. Phone’s off the hook. But if we have to, we’ll shoot the perp to save the bystanders.”

“He’s your only chance to find out who killed Vorse and Prohaska and Bumbry and the rest. Hasn’t that been the hangup—no witnesses?”

“No witnesses but you,” Leppard said.

“What about the officers he shot at tonight?”

Leppard’s laugh was short and grim. “They’re still patting themselves all over to be sure they weren’t hit. You want him tall and skinny, with long blond hair, right? Hell, they don’t even know if he was a human being.” He read his Rolex. “Time’s up.” He walked back to the SWAT team, took a walkie-talkie from one of them, spoke into it, handed it back. The men around him glanced at the roof, and moved across the street toward the Tiberius Baths, helmets glinting in the fitful lights. They bunched at the door. High above them, metal shrieked, glass shattered, there were thuds, gunshots. The SWAT team burst in at the door, and ran up a narrow stairway. It was brightly lighted. The walls were gold. The carpeting was purple.

Out the window onto the fire escape a figure stumbled. The beam of a spotlight caught and held him. He was short, frail, almost bald. He raised his hands for a second to shield his eyes. Officers started up the fire escape. It clattered under their heels. The man at the top reached behind his back, brought out a handgun, screamed, and fired down at the officers. They fired back. Echoing off the alley walls, the noise was ragged and loud. Dark spots appeared on the grubby sweatshirt of the man at the top. He staggered backward, hit the rail, and toppled over. His body landed on its back in a dumpster, which slowly shed some of its overflow to accommodate him.

M
Y NAME IS LEONARD
Lynn Church. I was born November 13, 1960, in Creon, North Dakota, population 4,500, a farm town, as if there was any other kind in North Dakota. My father was Warren Ross Church, from English people who originally came to Massachusetts in the seventeenth century, and my mother is Elizabeth (Melgard) Church, of Swedish stock from Wisconsin. My musical talent comes from her. She has a nice mezzo voice and plays the piano. It was from her I learned to love classical music. But we fought all the time when she tried to teach me to play, so she hired Victoria Gimbel at five dollars a lesson to teach me. That worked fairly well until I got better at playing than Miss Gimbel—which did not take long. Then I was on my own. I am talking about when I was ten years old. The next year, my sister was seventeen, and went away to college in Northfield, Minnesota, and it was my turn to work in the café.

The café is the “Eat and Run” on Main Street in Creon, and a very popular place, but no one in Creon expects to pay more than a quarter for a cup of coffee or more than two dollars for lunch, or three dollars for supper, and this means the café paid (and I suppose still pays) its owners too poorly to allow them to hire help. After I left Creon, maybe they had to close it down. I hope so. I hated the place. My father cooked, my mother and sister waited on tables, my father kept the books at night.

When I went to work, I knew I wasn’t going to be happy, and I dropped and smashed dishes and glassware until keeping me there was simply too expensive. So, except in emergencies, until I got my growth I was allowed to stay home and play the piano and listen to records, which was all I wanted to do at that time. Later on in life, I found I liked sex even more than music, and that was when I left Creon and came to Los Angeles. I will write more about my childhood in Creon later, if I have time.

Because I am dying, I have to get the most important part of my life story told first. I want to write out everything I remember that has ever happened to me in my whole life, but there may not be time. I don’t know how long I will have the strength to push this pen, or even hold it in my fingers. I get tired quickly. I have to go out at night and find the ones on my list, and that takes a lot of strength. If I had a tape recorder now, I would just talk all of this into it. But I don’t have a tape recorder anymore. I had an open-reel recorder that cost me two thousand dollars. I had a very good cassette deck. But I had to sell them when they fired me from my programming job at Selwyn & Slaughter. I had worked for them four and a half years! It wasn’t the sick leave I had to take to be in the hospital that got me fired. It was the reason I was in the hospital. After I came back to work the second time, Red Selwyn stopped by my desk and asked me quietly to come with him to his office, and told me they had to let me go.

“Why?” I said. “I’m the best and the brightest.”

“I know that. But Personnel says you have AIDS. We have to protect the rest of the staff.”

“From what? I don’t have sex with them. God forbid. Would anyone? Have you
looked
at them? Mr. Selwyn—that is the only way they could get AIDS from me.”

“I know that,” he said, “but not everyone believes it. If you don’t go, they will. We can’t afford that. We also can’t afford the group insurance rates we’ll be slapped with if you stay. Would that be fair to the others?”

“Keep it our secret,” I said. “I’ve only got two years to live. At most. Be optimistic, why don’t you? You could be taking up a collection to buy flowers for my funeral next week. The doctors don’t know—not for sure.”

“The secret’s already out.” He sat at his desk and didn’t look at me. He put a check into an envelope and held it out to me. “I’m sorry. I’ve added two months salary to your regular severance pay. Good luck.”

A knife wouldn’t have worked with Red Selwyn. I’d have needed an ice pick to stop his heart. But I wasn’t thinking clearly then. The check came to sixty-four hundred dollars, give or take, after deductions. I never had so much money in one lump in my life, and I left stunned not just by being fired suddenly but by such unexpected wealth.

But the doctors and hospitals soon got it all, didn’t they. You have to be down to seventeen hundred dollars or something before they’ll treat you free. And I couldn’t keep a job. If I landed one, it never lasted. They learned I had AIDS, and I was back on the street again. Personnel departments ask around. Maybe doctors and hospitals don’t give out the information, but somebody does. Insurance companies tell other insurance companies. Soon all my money was gone. So I sold my tape decks, stereo rig, TV, VCR, records, tapes, books, my furniture, my car, and finally even my piano. I still cry about that. Then I got thrown out of my apartment.

I am writing this in a garage back of a vacant, boarded-up house in Venice Beach. I have a sleeping bag, a windbreaker, jeans, two sweatshirts, underwear, socks
,
a pair of worn-out Nikes. I used to dress nicely. I steal Spam, corned beef hash, beans from the Lucky Supermarket, different times, different shifts. There’s no gas or electricity out here so have to eat it cold. That’s okay. I’m not really hungry. I only eat to keep me going. This paper and pen I swiped at Lucky too. I beg people for change on Ocean Front Walk, and when I get enough, I take buses to Hollywood. If I have the money I get a shower at the Y. Then I go on the streets to find the ones that made me sick so I wound up starving in a filthy cold garage at the age of twenty-seven. I never had much luck in my life, otherwise I would be a famous pianist, but I am having some luck finding the ones I have to kill.

I joke and flirt with them, and not one suspects I’m going to stick my knife in their heart until I do it. I was nervous the first time that it would be hard, and I was so weak I wondered if I could manage it, but it turned out to be easy, and I don’t have butterflies anymore. All that worries me now is that I have fifty-eight names on my list, and I will die before I can get even with them all. I read the obit columns in the
Times,
and I have found a few names there I could cross off my list because AIDS killed them before I could, but I see others in just the places where I expected to see them, and I will get them. I have been to Junipero Serra, thinking I could kill some in their hospital beds, but that is too dangerous. I mustn’t get caught before I finish what I have to do. I wait in the dark places they go to and I used to go to. That’s best.

I had better tell about those places and what happens there, because this is the record of my life, and they were important in my life. Everybody should write out their life on paper before they die, otherwise no one will know they lived or what it felt like to be them. When my mother and sister die, and Miss Gimbel, I will be forgotten. For a while, I hung onto tapes I had made of my playing, but somebody ripped them off. They would have shown the world what I could do, that I could make beauty, but now there’s nothing. So you will have to take my word for it. All I have left is words. It’s raining again. It’s too dark. I can’t see to write anymore.