Howtown (28 page)

Ben Vega’s voice cut through the fog. “About what, Ben?”

“Not on the phone,” he said. His voice was tight with anxiety. “I’m at a bar on the Parkway.”

“I think you want to be talking to the cops.”

“I want to talk to you,” he said, edgily. “I’ve got to make you understand.”

I sat up and switched on the light. The only noise in the room was the hum of the air conditioner. “I think I do understand, Ben. But I’m not the person you have to convince.”

Vega rushed on. “I want you to defend me.”

“Ben,” I said softly, “I may be a witness against you.”

“Then just listen,” he whispered harshly. “He used to take me camping up in the mountains. Fishing. Like that.” He paused. “He taught me how to shoot.”

“He was your friend,” I said.

After a moment’s silence, he said, “Morrow says they’re all like that, taking advantage. They prey on kids that don’t have dads. My old man never had time for me. Coach always had time.” He stopped and I heard the rasp of his breathing. “That time in the mountains it was just me and him, like a lot of other times. We hiked to a lake and went swimming bare ass. I didn’t think nothing of it. We came back, made some dinner and talked for a long time. Then he goes, ‘I forgot to pack my sleeping bag. We’ll have to double up.’ ” He stopped again. “I was just starting to get wet dreams and I was all nervous that I might get one, so I kept trying to get away from him when we were in the bag. He got pissed and said, ‘Settle down,’ and kind of pulled me over to him. Then we went to sleep.”

“I’m listening, Ben.”

“When I woke up it was still dark and I felt something between my legs. It was his dick, man. I thought I was dreaming, then I figured, maybe he was asleep so I tried to move, but he held on to me. Then I knew he was awake and I wasn’t dreaming.” His voice broke. “He hurt me, man. He hurt me.”

“I know, Ben. It was wrong. It wasn’t your fault. There was nothing you could’ve done.”

“He made me … he made me …” he sputtered.

“Ben?”

“A queer. I’m a queer.”

“Where are you now?”

“At the bar, in the B of A building.”

“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” I said.

In a choking voice he said, “Thank you.”

“Ben, is Morrow with you?”

“I don’t know where he is.”

I got dressed and went downstairs. Outside, River Parkway was largely deserted. The office workers had already gone home, leaving only a few harried-looking stragglers and the street people who roamed among the glass towers looking for a companionable doorway in which to bed. The Bank of America building was at the far end of the Parkway, its sign lit in blue neon on the roof.

The streetlights flickered on, illuminating the broad road in a greenish light. A bus rumbled by, its brightly lit interior empty. The few cars on the road sped by, through a row of traffic lights flashing yellow overhead. I set out on foot, thinking about Ben Vega, the boy in the giant’s body, and I understood that the muscles were armor against his horror at his own sexual nature.

I knew about the horror because I had felt it myself, at about the same age Ben was when McKay got to him. Twelve, thirteen. I remembered standing in the shower one morning and looking down startled and disturbed to see wisps of public hair on my groin.

More disturbing had been the midnight awakening to damp sheets and my underwear caked to my skin. I’d risen quietly, gone into the bathroom and scrubbed my underwear and then taken a washcloth back into my bedroom to work on the sheets. Without ever having been told, I knew this was something I didn’t want my mother to discover. I never associated it with the dreams that preceded my awakening, nor did I remember the dreams very clearly. They seemed composed of sensations more than images: a deep rumbling sensation that began in the pit of my stomach and seemed to flood my chest and then my entire body, a seizure of emotion at once terrifying and thrilling. And somewhere, in all of that, were brief images of myself and a neighbor boy naked, about to dive into the river on a still, hot summer afternoon. I saw the long dense curve of his thigh, his lank penis swinging free as he jumped into the water, splashing me.

This, I knew, instinctively, was even a more dangerous secret than the damp sheets, the soiled shorts. For hours afterward I’d lie in bed trying not to think about it, praying to be free of these impure thoughts. But always, exhausted and confused, my mind wandered back to that picture and the weight of the sheets against my body became like the weight of another’s body pressed against me. I hadn’t understood what I was trying to tell myself, only that what I felt was physical, like hunger or fatigue, and there was more to it, a kind of wild loneliness and a deep, scary sense of being different.

Over the years I had learned that only a few of us come to accept that difference. Most of us struggle against our homosexuality and never learn to trust our natures. And if a John McKay comes into our lives, precisely at that moment when we first awaken to what we are, what chance would we have at all? I heard Ben saying, “He made me a queer.” A child’s sexual innocence isn’t moral, it’s literal: he has no context for it. From the adult who uses him sexually, he learns a context in which pleasure alternates with brutality, until the two begin to merge. Who wouldn’t want to kill that horror? Was that what Ben had done?

I walked on, aware of my reflection in the dark glass of the building next to me. Someone was approaching. I smelled him before I saw him—a stooped-over black man with a soiled kerchief around the frayed explosion of his hair. He looked up at me with bloodshot, hopeful eyes. It was the panhandler I’d given money to weeks earlier. John? No, James.

“Spare change, mister,” he said blocking my way. He looked at me without recognition.

“Hello, James,” I said.

“I don’ know you,” he replied, alarmed.

“Yes, you do. My name’s Henry, same as your brother up at Folsom.”

Slowly, he smiled, revealing yellowing stumps of teeth.

“Oh, yeah. Sure, Henry. You got some spare change for me, Henry?”

I reached for my wallet and he put out a grimy hand. Suddenly, glass was blowing up behind us. I dropped the wallet as something hard went through my shoulder. In the same second, with shocking speed, James crashed into me, knocking me to the ground, glass flying around us. “Jesus, Jesus,” he moaned. Then there was silence, total, dark silence. My shoulder throbbed. I worked my head around to see blood gushing through my sweater. James lay on me like a stone, his face inches from my face. He wasn’t breathing.

I heard a siren and panicked. Morrow was coming. Vega. I’d been set up. The dead man pressed against me reeking of booze and piss as his bladder emptied. Blood and urine seeped through his clothes. I began to push him off me, then froze. What if they were still there? The siren got closer, and I heard footsteps running toward us. The blood kept coming from my wound. I laid my head against the pavement and closed my eyes and thought, first of Josh and then of Ben. Ben had set me up. All my fault, I thought, and slipped into the black.

I
WAS WRONG ABOUT BEN
. He was waiting for me at the bar in the bank building. Hearing the sirens, he’d gone out to investigate. He saw what happened, figured it was Morrow and turned himself in to a fellow cop at the scene. He’d figured right about Morrow.

Morrow was the second person to die that night, after James Harrison. After he shot at us he kept driving, catching the I-80 east, toward Reno. A CHP car clocked him at eighty-five miles an hour and tried to flag him down. When he wouldn’t pull over, the chippies gave chase. About twenty miles out of Los Robles, Morrow went through the median strip divider, skidded across four lanes of oncoming traffic and ran into the side of a granite hill. That wasn’t what killed him, though. What killed him was the bullet hole through his head. Self-inflicted, the chippies swore.

Of all the characters in the cast of
People v. Windsor
, Morrow was the one I’d known the least and yet it was he who haunted me. I’d think about the two photographs I’d seen of him, pictured in a high school yearbook as a teenage jock and then, fifteen years later, with the kids in the Police Athletic League. Here was a man who had bleakly shouldered the blame for what had been done to him and spent his life in expiation. Had we ever been able to talk, I believe we would have understood each other.

I never did get to have my chat with Ben Vega. He was represented by a public defender in the criminal case against him for McKay’s murder. He laid the blame on Morrow and, for whatever reason, maybe just to get the thing off the books, maybe because he believed in him, the DA let him plead to voluntary manslaughter, for a five-year term at Folsom. I’d written him a couple of times, but my letters had gone unanswered.

Meanwhile, the man everyone wanted in prison was free. The charges against Paul were dismissed, of course. Two weeks later he filed a suit against the city for conspiracy to violate his civil rights and a raft of other causes of action. Bob Clayton represented him. After a last appearance for the dismissal I didn’t talk to Paul again. He seemed to harbor a resentment against me and I think he blamed me for not having figured things out earlier. I didn’t lose much sleep over the loss of his friendship. I did have some problems with the thought that he might try to harass Ruth again so, before I left Los Robles, I put her in touch with a lawyer who got a permanent injunction against Paul, preventing him from coming within a thousand feet of her or Carlos.

Peter was able to obtain a copy of the coroner’s inquest report on Sara. I went over the report carefully and could find no reason to quarrel with the conclusion of accidental death.

And that was how matters stood on
People v. Windsor
the third day of December, two months after I’d closed my file. My office was in chaos, half of it packed into boxes and the rest waiting to be packed. With Peter Stein coming into the firm, we’d had to find more space, so we were moving upstairs. Still, move or no move, there was work to be done and I was at my desk, poring over a toxicology report. I made a note and felt a twinge in my shoulder, a souvenir of my last encounter with Detective Morrow.

“Mail call,” Emma said, flopping a stack of mail on my desk. “If you’d take the day off, Henry, the movers could get their work done a lot faster.”

“I’m leaving in a few minutes,” I replied without looking up.

I heard the chair squeak as she sat down. “You are?”

I looked up at her, smiling. “Josh goes in for some kind of new treatment. I’m taking him to the doctor.”

She smiled pro forma and then, with worried eyes, asked, “Is he okay?”

“His T-cell count dropped again. This is all preventive. He was pretty cranky when I talked to him. That’s a good sign.”

She didn’t look convinced. “Well tell him—” She stopped. “Tell him I care.”

“He knows, and so do I. Thank you.”

After she’d gone, I couldn’t get back to work. I studied the picture of Josh I kept on my desk—who knew what the movers would make out of that. It wasn’t a great picture; he was in midlaugh and, consequently, a little blurred. But he looked joyously happy and it was impossible to believe that anything bad could happen to him.

I picked up the mail, tossing the solicitations, the offers of computers and fax machines and luxurious office space in Century City. Emma had separated out the bills and fees—we’d go over those later. That left the usual handwritten pleas from the imprisoned asking me to take on some hopeless appeal or complaining, for pages and pages, about the quality of my representation. These would all have to be read, and some of them answered. Finally, there were two oversized envelopes. Christmas cards, I thought, tearing open the first one, which had no return address.

The cover featured a reproduction of a medieval painting of the Nativity. The slender Virgin cradled a child who looked at her with ancient, knowing eyes. I opened the card: “May your holidays be blessed,” it said, and was signed, “Elena.” I weighed the card in my hand. It was as light and flimsy as the bond between my sister and me. But it was palpable, real. I set it aside and picked up the other envelope. This one came from the federal penitentiary at Lompoc and bore, in accordance with prison rules, a stamped “Previously Opened.” The return addressee was prisoner number 2136534592-X, or, as he had been christened, Mark Lewis Windsor.

Mark. He’d done less well by the criminal justice system than Ben Vega. Indicted by a federal jury on charges arising from his looting of Pioneer Savings & Loan. The best he could do was a plea and eight years. He’d be out in two and a half if all went well. The envelope contained a cheap dime-store Christmas card with Santa on the cover. A folded sheet of plain white paper slipped from inside the card.

“Dear Hank,” it began in the backhanded, slanting script I recognized from a long time ago. “Justice has been done, ha-ha, but maybe you already heard about that. I should’ve taken you up on your offer to defend me. This place isn’t as bad as I thought it would be, but it’s bad enough. The drill is, up at 6, slop for breakfast, work (I’m a clerk), lunch, some time in the yard, dinner, lights out at 9. My module’s all so-called white collar criminals so it’s pretty low-key. I’m getting to be friends with an ex-congressman. That kind of place. I’m getting in shape, lifting weights, they call it ‘driving’ around here. Pretty soon I’ll be strong enough to break a hole through the walls. (Note to the censor: that’s a joke.)”

I smiled and continued reading. “Still have too much time on my hands. I do a lot of thinking. If I had thought this much in high school I would’ve passed trig, but I never did catch on, even with your help. What I’m thinking is, maybe this is a break after all. It was like everything was out of control out there and it was all going down. I don’t know, sometimes I feel like that, other times, I don’t. You were a good friend to me, Hank. I just wanted to tell you that. Take care, Mark.” Below his signature was a “P.S. Lompoc’s not that far from LA.”

I put the sheet down. He never did know how to ask for things directly. Well, Lompoc really wasn’t that far from LA, and I made a note on my calendar to call about visiting hours.