Spider Season (23 page)

I watched the sweat bead up on Wu’s forehead. His eyes slid away with seeming relief toward his briskly approaching wife.

“Even the most accomplished artists have an off day, Mr. Justice.” Angela Wu’s voice was controlled but chilly. “That’s right, I know who you are. There are a number of art writers here tonight, including one from the
Los Angeles Times
. He recognized you and mentioned your real name. I suppose I should have recognized you myself when you arrived, but I don’t really keep up on all the scandalous and sordid aspects of mainstream culture. I prefer to focus on the aesthetics of art and beauty.”

She turned her steely eyes on Ismael. “I don’t know who this imposter is. But neither of you is welcome here.”

“Because I’m so curious about Jason Holt?”

She shifted her steely eyes back to me. “I told you, I’ve never heard of that person.”

“But your husband has, Mrs. Wu.” I turned to him. “In fact, Charles and Jason were quite close at one time. Weren’t you, Charles?”

“Either you leave now,” Angela Wu said, “or I’ll have you thrown out.”

“Can’t your husband speak for himself, Mrs. Wu?”

Ismael grabbed my arm. “We need to go, Benjamin.”

His voice was plaintive but firm. I felt bad that I’d gotten him into this, but the damage was done. I wasn’t sure what I’d stumbled into, but it was something significant enough to have shaken up Wu and his wife and flummoxed his bright young assistant, Steven Reigns.

Angela Wu moved to stand between me and her husband.

“Charles was never close to Silvio Galiano, you know. And certainly not to Jason Holt.”

“I thought you’d never heard of him.”

She ignored that. “It was strictly a business arrangement.” She pointed a long, painted nail toward the exit. “There’s the door, Mr. Justice. It’s the last time I’ll ask.”

I maneuvered my eyes, trying to search out her husband, but couldn’t quite find him behind her.

“Perhaps we’ll talk again,” I told him.

“I don’t think so,” Angela Wu said, as Ismael pulled me from the gallery.

TWENTY-THREE

Ismael was quietly angry about what had happened at the gallery, and told me never to ask him to do something like that again. I felt lousy about it, and promised I wouldn’t.

Needless to say, it didn’t make for a romantic evening. Ismael dropped me off out front of the house, declining an invitation to come up to my apartment. I read for a couple of hours, grew sleepy, and was thinking about hitting the pillow when the phone rang. It was Jason Holt.

“I see you’ve taken an interest in art,” he said. “I guess that portrait in my living room piqued your curiosity about Charles Wu. Or maybe it was your new boyfriend who dragged you to the gallery tonight. Although I highly doubt it. Mexicans are more into velvet Elvis paintings, aren’t they?”

“Listen, Holt—”

“I would have gone to the gallery with you, Benjamin. All you had to do was ask. I’m personally acquainted with Charles Wu, as you’re well aware, and I’m extremely knowledgeable about fine art in general. I doubt that your boyfriend knows the difference between a Pollock and a de Kooning.”

“I’m tired, Holt. I’m going to hang up now.”

He went on quickly. “I followed him home, you know.”

That kept me on the line.

“All the way to that hovel he lives in,” Holt went on, “across the river in East Los Angeles. Is he here illegally or just slumming with the wetbacks? Maybe I’ll stop by sometime and ask him.”

“Holt, if you go near him—”

“Maybe I’ll tell him about your feelings for me, how you’ve never really gotten over your college crush.”

“You’re a sick man, Holt.”

“If you think you can ignore me, Benjamin, you’re sadly mistaken. You might treat others that way, but it doesn’t play with me.”

I couldn’t listen to any more and hung up. The phone immediately rang and my caller ID told me it was Holt again. It rang four times until my voice mail picked up the call. I heard a click but no recorded message. Seconds later, he called again. And again and again, for several minutes, until he finally gave up.

The next day, still seething, I worked out at the gym more furiously than ever, adding ten pounds and several reps to every set. When you’re pushing iron, next to injected testosterone, anger is an excellent motivator.

*   *   *

That night, Ismael and I joined Fred and Maurice for dinner down at the house. If Ismael was feeling any lingering resentment from the previous evening, he didn’t show it. He’d expressed his feelings firmly but without rancor, and that seemed to have taken care of the matter. He and Maurice cooked, getting along famously in the kitchen, after banishing Fred and me to the living room so we wouldn’t be in the way.

We sat in front of the television, watching a mixed martial arts fight broadcast live from Las Vegas. MMA, as the sport was known, was the hot new attraction, combining boxing, wrestling, and martial arts into the most violent man-to-man sporting event ever televised: two well-trained men in a caged arena, wearing nothing but shorts and light gloves to protect their knuckles, trying to pound, kick, slam, twist, break, and choke each other into submission or unconsciousness. Not only was MMA the most brutal and bloody sport on television, it was also the most homoerotic—the sexual implications were unavoidable. It wasn’t uncommon to see two muscular opponents locked in intimate clinches that lasted for minutes, their sweaty bodies intertwined like two lover-warriors grappling for glory in ancient Greece. One could only wonder how far cage fighting could go and what the next phase would be as the promoters tried to both whet and satisfy the public’s seemingly insatiable appetite for violence. I was certainly getting off on it that night, although Fred, who had always been an avid boxing fan, had quickly dozed off.

“He’s mounting him from behind!” cried the announcer, as one fighter took his opponent’s back, straddling him around the waist, pelvis against tailbone, on the blood-spattered floor of the arena. “He’s going for the rear naked choke!”

Ismael appeared behind me, wiping his hands on a dish towel and staring with a troubled look as one opponent choked the other into unconsciousness.

“How can you watch that?” he asked. “Please tell me this is staged, like pro wrestling.”

I grabbed the remote and hit the power button, shutting it off.

“If it bothers you,” I said, “I don’t need to see it.”

He looked incredulous. “You’ve watched this before? I assumed you’d stumbled across it just now.”

I shrugged. “I watch it now and then, when Fred has it on.”

“Why?”

He asked the question with such directness and sincerity, it took me aback. I’m not sure I had an answer for him, at least not one I wanted him to hear. What was I going to tell him? That I got a vicarious thrill from seeing two nearly naked men locked in bloody combat, beating the hell out of each other? That it caused my heart to race and my saliva to sluice? That I sometimes got an erection when the best-looking combatants were having at it, flesh against flesh?

It was possible I didn’t need to tell Ismael anything. He studied my face like he’d already figured things out, like he was seeing me in a completely different light.

“Dinner’s ready,” Maurice said, coming from the kitchen to rouse Fred. “Bring your appetites, dear ones.”

We adjourned to the dining table, but Ismael didn’t say much as we ate, and rarely looked my way.

*   *   *

I’d hoped to lure Ismael upstairs at the end of the evening. I had fresh linens on the new bed and condoms and lubricant handy in the nightstand, should our lovemaking progress that far. But after we’d cleared the table and helped with the dishes, he begged off, claiming he had a long day ahead of him tomorrow. When we hugged, he made sure it was perfunctory.

It felt as if a small crack had opened in our friendship, like a hairline fracture in a bone that threatens to widen and split with too much pressure. It made me realize how different we were, in so many ways. Little by little he was seeing who I really was, and I think it troubled him, maybe even scared him a little.

I understood. Sometimes it scared me.

*   *   *

I woke in the morning to find the
Los Angeles Times
outside my door. Attached was a note from Maurice, alerting me to look for Templeton’s book excerpt beginning on the front page. I boiled water, stirred a cup of instant coffee, and sat down on the top step with Section A in my lap.

The editors had condensed a section from Templeton’s forthcoming book,
The Terror Within,
that focused on one domestic terrorist group in particular, an extreme, right-wing Christian group that called itself the Timothy McVeigh Crusade. The TMC, as it was known, was named in honor of the ex-soldier who had masterminded the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, which had left 168 people dead, 19 of them children—the most deadly domestic terrorist act in U.S. history to that time. According to its secret manifesto, which Templeton had obtained, the group was committed to terrorizing Jews, Muslims, African Americans, and others who “dilute and pollute the white race,” as well as leftists, abortionists, feminists, homosexuals, and other “parasites, pariahs, and enemies of a pure Christian nation.” The article was long, thorough, well sourced, and chilling. If her book was even half as powerful in its entirety, I thought, it was certain to make a big impact upon publication. She’d clearly moved to a new level as a journalist, light-years from the cub reporter I’d met when she was starting out at the
Los Angeles Sun
twelve years ago, fresh out of J-school with her master’s degree.

I was happy for her, but ambivalent. I’d written some strong pieces in my time, but never anything that came close to this in significance, and I never would. Every dream I’d ever had as a journalist was behind me, while Templeton’s future couldn’t have been brighter. She was headed for glory, and I was on my way to nowhere, and I had no one to blame but myself.

I reached for the phone and dialed her number to congratulate her. Lawrence Kase picked up. When I asked for Templeton, he told me she was in New York, getting ready to tape a segment for
60 Minutes
before embarking on a twenty-city book tour.

“Already?” I asked. “She didn’t even call to let me know.”

“I guess she doesn’t feel like she has to check in with you, Justice.”

I gritted my teeth. “When you talk to her, tell her I called to congratulate her, will you?”

“Sure, I can do that. By the way, I had someone dig up the case file on the Silvio Galiano death, back in 1997. You still interested?”

“As a matter of fact, I am.”

Kase told me he didn’t want to be seen handing me documents and didn’t want me coming by the house. He said he was planning to attend a baseball game the next day and we agreed to meet down the hill from Dodger Stadium, at the lotus pond in Echo Park.

*   *   *

The next afternoon, I drove east on Sunset Boulevard through Hollywood until it swung south through Silver Lake and into the land of taquerias and
vendedores
known as Echo Park.

I left the Nash Metro on Park Avenue near Angelus Temple, the former Foursquare Gospel Church where the lusty evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson had preached in the 1920s. The park sat across the street in a canyon that had been dammed up as a reservoir in 1868, creating what was now Echo Park Lake, an elongated body of water that covered about fifteen acres. Out on the placid water, ducks drifted lazily, along with visitors in rented paddle-wheel boats. In summers past, thousands of lotus blossoms had bloomed at the north end, the product of seeds brought from China by missionaries in the 1920s. There was rich history in the park, and an aura of tranquillity, a sense that time had slowed down decades ago and never quite caught up.

Looking south across the water through the eucalyptus, willows, and palms, I could see the distant downtown skyscrapers. In front of me, dark-skinned mothers sat on the grass chatting, while their small children ran happily about and Latin music played on radios in the background. I loped down a slope to the edge of the lake, where thousands of magnificent pink and cream-colored lotus blossoms ordinarily floated on the murky water and spilled onto the shore. But not this year. The lotus plants had always thrived in brackish water, rooted down among the turtles and the muck. But now the water was so polluted with contaminants and man-made debris that only a scattering of sickly leaves had sprung up. The coots that usually nested in the big leaves were nowhere to be seen, and a foul stench rose up from the lake.

Lawrence Kase was leaning against the rough trunk of a palm, clutching a large manila envelope in one hand. He was dressed comfortably for the baseball game but still looked well put together, about what you’d expect of a middle-aged prosecutor who lived in Hancock Park and could afford to buy his casual wear at Banana Republic.

“It’s been years since I’ve been in this park,” Kase said. “I see the lotus have finally died.”

Before I could reply, the
whack-whack-whack
of a helicopter’s rotary blades cut the air. We looked up to see an LAPD chopper circling overhead. A moment later, sirens sounded up in the hills. The chopper swung in that direction and disappeared, taking its noise with it. A few mothers glanced around but without alarm and then went back to chatting and watching their kids.

“Just an illusion, this park,” Kase went on, sweeping it with his eyes. “Just like the rest of the city. Beneath the surface, there’s a lot of hot.” His eyes came back to mine and stayed there. “Not a place Alex and I care to raise a family.”

“You’re thinking of moving?”

“Planning, not thinking. As soon as I get my twenty-five years in, we’re gone. Three more years. We hope to have our second child by then.”

Once again, I recalled something Templeton had said weeks ago, when we’d talked about the nesting doves:
They must feel safe here. It’s like the Realtors say
—
location is everything.
Maybe she’d been trying to tell me something.