The Death of Friends (14 page)

“Did he seem upset?”

“Zack’s a quiet one,” he replied.

“I got the impression that you and Zack don’t get along,” I said.

“Zack never hurt me,” he drawled, “but he sure did a number on Sam.”

“Sam says he’s over it. Is he?”

“Whatever Sam says,” he answered. “When you see Zack, tell him I said hello.”

F
ROM BLIGH’S HOUSE, I
went to the hospital, where Josh was waiting for me to drive him home. First, though, I stopped at the nurse’s station on the fourth floor to play a hunch.

“Excuse me,” I said to the sandy-haired male nurse behind the counter, “I’m looking for someone.”

He smiled and said, “Aren’t we all? Does yours have a name?”

I smiled, and wondered if he just assumed every unattached male who wandered into the AIDS ward was gay.

“I don’t know his name. All I know is that he’s a police officer and he was still here as of yesterday.”

“Lily Law? Here? I don’t think so.”

“He had a visitor yesterday afternoon around this time,” I said. “A very pretty black woman.”

“Her I remember,” he said. “She was wandering the halls like the angel of death. I asked her if I could help her and she was quite snippy. She said she was waiting for someone, but I heard the fuck-off in her voice.” He studied me. “In fact, didn’t I see you talking to her?”

“Yeah,” I said. “You’re sure she wasn’t here to visit a patient?”

“Well, if she was, I hope she didn’t find him.”

“Thanks,” I said.

Josh was sitting in a chair in his room leafing through a magazine. I stood at the doorway and watched him. He wore baggy jeans and a white cotton cable-knit sweater that enclosed him in its bulk and made him seem thinner than ever. His skull was clearly visible in his face. It gave him an agelessness that made it hard to remember he was only twenty-nine years old. He flipped the pages of the magazine slowly, as if with effort. He sighed.

“Josh?”

He smiled at me. “Hey, here’s my boyfriend.”

“Ready to go home?”

He rose from the chair stiffly, the neuropathy slowing his movements, and grabbed his red backpack. “All set.”

“No box of medicines this time?”

“Not this time,” he said, taking my arm. “Buy me some ice cream. I’ve been wanting it all day.”

Of course, no one actually sold ice cream west of La Brea, not in the realm of the physically fit, so we ended up at a frozen yogurt stand on Santa Monica. He stood at the counter, sarcastically reading the minuscule calories per ounce of the ices, fat-free yogurts and tofuttis, while the puzzled counterboy waited for him to make his selection.

“When did they outlaw milk fat?” Josh demanded.

“Beg pardon?” the boy said.

“Don’t torment him, Josh. It’s not his fault.”

“I want a sundae with cappuccino yogurt and extra nuts,” Josh said.

“The fat-free fudge?” the boy asked.

Josh said, “Oy vey iz meir,” in perfect imitation of his father.

We sat on the sidewalk at a white plastic table beneath a pink awning, watching the late-afternoon traffic clog the boulevard. One of the big gyms was across the street, occupying nearly the entire block, and men in Lycra shorts and spaghetti-strap tank tops, hauling huge gym bags, darted among the cars on their way to cardio-funk class.

“What can those guys be carrying that requires such big bags?” I asked Josh.

“Moisturizers,” he replied. He pointed out a pumped-up boy waiting at the corner for the light to change and said, “Remember when I had a body like that?”

“You taught me the names of the muscle groups. I think my favorite was latissimus dorsi. It sounded like the title of a papal encyclical.”

“It seems silly now that I cared about all that,” he said, spooning melted frozen yogurt and non-fat-free fudge into his mouth. “But most things people care about are silly. They don’t think about the ones that matter.”

“Such as?”

“Getting from one breath to the next one. So what happened this morning up in Arrowhead? Did the cops break down the door?”

After I described Zack’s arrest, I said, “McBeth didn’t try to talk to you yesterday after I left, did she?”

“Remind me who she is.”

“The homicide detective. Good-looking black woman. I think she tailed me to the hospital yesterday when I came to see you.”

“Why?” he asked, dipping into the last of his sundae.

“Because she was hoping I would lead her to Zack Bowen,” I said. “Instead, she followed me upstairs and waited for me, then claimed she’d been visiting a friend with AIDS and implied she was a dyke.”

“And she’s not?”

I shook my head. “What she is, is smart. She caught me at a moment when she knew my guard would be down and tried to establish some kind of connection to get me to tell her where Zack was. When I wouldn’t tell her, she had me followed up to Arrowhead.”

“Isn’t that illegal?”

“No. Duplicitous, but not illegal. It makes me wonder if she’s shaved some other edges in her investigation of Chris’s murder.”

Josh walked into his apartment, went into the bathroom and threw up. He emerged, wiping his mouth on a washcloth.

“Food never tastes as good coming up as it did going down,” he said.

“What happened?”

“Just a touch of AIDS,” he said, glancing at his answering machine. “Seven messages. That’s all my living friends. Present company excluded.”

“I need to call the jail to see if Zack’s there yet.” I called and was told he had arrived an hour earlier, so I made arrangements to see him. When I finished, I handed the phone to Josh, who’d been writing down his messages. “I’m going down to see Zack, but I’ll be back after that.”

“You don’t have to,” he said. He touched the catheter in his chest. “I’ll just be here infusing chemical substances.”

“What if I want to?”

“Then you can bring a video. I’m in the mood for bad Bette Davis.”

“As if there’s any other kind,” I said.

An hour later, I was sitting in an attorney room at the county jail waiting for Zack, with a fresh pad of paper on the table before me. Through the supposedly soundproof walls I heard the endless clatter of the place, shouts and groans, cell doors being opened and slammed shut, trolleys being rolled down the fetid halls, heavy footsteps, jangling keys and someone whistling “Danny Boy.” The air was thick with the musk of confined and violent men, jailers and inmates alike, an incendiary combination of rage and fear and suffering. Some day a spark would set it off and the explosion would leave the equivalent of a black hole in the moral universe that decreed such places should exist.

A deputy sheriff pulled the door open and brought Zack into the room. He was in an orange jumpsuit, the laces removed from his shoes. He was glad to see me in a way that suggested he hadn’t been sure he ever would again. The deputy sat him down across the table from me and removed his cuffs, then went outside.

He wiped his nose on his sleeve, and in that gesture I saw the street kid he’d once been. It was in his expression, too, a look of defiance that didn’t quite mask the terror in his eyes.

“Where have they got you?” I asked him.

“In with the other queens,” he said, understanding me. “It’s not so bad.”

“I’d rather they kept you out of the general population.”

“I can take care of myself,” he said.

“But you don’t have to,” I reminded him. “You’ve got me and I’m going to tell you something, Zack. Chris was my friend, but I’ll try to help you, even if you killed him.”

“I didn’t,” he said, without emphasis.

“Then how did the obelisk get into your apartment?”

“I don’t know,” he said, frustration in his voice. “I’ve been thinking about it all day, and I can’t figure it out.”

“Listen, Zack. Sometimes people do things in a blackout and then don’t remember doing them afterwards. Could that have happened to you? Were you angry at Chris? Were you drunk or on drugs?”

“No, no, no,” he said. “I remember everything.” He squeezed the edge of the table until his knuckles went white. “I wish I could forget how he looked, with his face in a puddle of blood and his brains coming out of the back of his head. Do you think I could do something like that?”

“When was the last time you were in your apartment?”

“Right after it happened,” he said. “My clothes were bloody, so I went home to change. That’s when I decided to find you and then we had the earthquake.”

“What happened when the earthquake hit? Didn’t the building across the street from yours collapse?”

He nodded. “It was crazy. Things falling, breaking, people screaming, then this big noise outside like an explosion. I went out to the street and that building was like a stack of pancakes the way the floors fell. I helped get people out until the cops came and then they evacuated us. After that, I drove to your house.”

“You haven’t been back to your apartment since?”

“From your place I went to Sam’s, then up to Arrowhead.”

“So it’s been four days since you were home?”

“Yeah,” he said, “less than a week. It feels like forever.”

“Did anyone else besides you have a key to your apartment?”

“Yeah, the manager, I guess, Karen. And Chris. I gave Sam a key, but he gave it back to me.”

“Why Sam?”

“I let him use my place to shoot a scene for one of his movies.”

“You do remember leaving the bloody clothes in your apartment, right?”

He nodded. “Yeah, I threw them into the closet and then took a shower. He was cold.”

“What?”

“Chris was cold,” he said. “I turned him over and wiped his face with my sleeve and then I lay down on top of him and held on to him.” He blinked hard, as if to clear away the memory. “That’s how I got blood on my clothes.”

“When you picked up the obelisk, how did you handle it? What part did you pick up?”

“I don’t remember.”

“It could be important, Zack. Every detail could be important.”

“I don’t want to think about it now.”

“All right, but later I’d like you to write down everything you remember.”

He nodded. “It’s been a long time since I was in jail,” he said, with a trace of a smile. “I forget what happens now.”

“The D.A. has seventy-two hours to arraign you or release you. I wouldn’t count on being released. At the arraignment, you’ll plead not guilty and I’ll get copies of the police report, the search warrant and whatever else they have at this point. By law, you have to be tried within sixty days, but we’ll continue the case until we’re ready to go to trial.”

He’d been following closely and now he said, “No.”

“No what?”

“I don’t want to continue the case. I want it over with as soon as possible.”

“Zack, I have no idea yet how much investigation this is going to require.”

“But I didn’t kill Chris,” he said. “Can’t I just say that? Don’t you believe me?”

“The obelisk,” I said.

“I can’t explain that.”

“Unless we can, we’re dead.”

“Someone put it there,” he said.

“You mentioned the manager of your building, Karen? What’s her last name?”

“Holman,” he said, and spelled it for me. “What are you going to do, Henry?”

“Drive out to your building and take a look. Maybe someone saw something.” I glanced at my notes. “Chris was the only person who had a key to your place, other than the manager?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you know if he kept it on him?”

“I guess it was on his key chain.”

I made a note to find out about the disposition of Chris’s property.

“And Bligh had a copy but he returned it to you, and you’re sure of that?”

“I remember he gave it back to me.”

I got up. “I guess that’s it for now. I’ll give you a call tomorrow. Is there anything you need?”

“I—nothing. Thank you. That’s all.”

I
SPENT THE NIGHT AT
Josh’s apartment. We watched
Beyond the Forest,
the Bette Davis movie where she delivers the line “What a dump,” beloved of drag queens everywhere. We ate Chinese food and he managed to keep his down. I managed to put Zack Bowen and Chris Chandler out of my mind for a few hours. The next morning, however, I checked my messages and found half a dozen calls from local media types who had learned I was representing Zack and had started to sniff out the tabloid possibilities of Chris’s murder. I didn’t return any of their calls, but I did phone the D.A.’s office and a deputy D.A. confirmed that a murder charge was being filed against Zack and arraignment was set for the next day. Then I drove back to the valley, to Zack’s apartment, to see what I could see.

It was a balmy autumn morning. The air was clear and visibility was good, so there was no relief at all from the seediness of Zack’s neighborhood. Both sides of the street were lined with apartment buildings put up in the 60s and apparently untouched since then. Their Disneyland pastels had long since faded to a dirty whitewash, torn awnings flapped in the breeze, the front yards were forests of overgrown banana trees and jade plants. The earthquake had accelerated the ruin, cracking walls and blowing out windows, and there, across the street from Zack’s building, behind a recently installed cyclone fence, was what the media called The House of Death.

The three stories had collapsed, one atop the other, into the subterranean garage, and twenty-seven people were killed. It didn’t look particularly lethal now, just a hulking mass of rubble. Flowers and messages had been stuck into the fence and there was a row of burned-out candles in front of it. I doubted that anyone would make a TV movie out of this disaster; the neighborhood was not photogenic, the people who lived in it were poor. But as a metaphor for the city, it had a certain chilling aptness.

There was yellow police ribbon strung across the entrance to Zack’s building. I ducked beneath it and found myself in a rectangular courtyard paved with concrete. It was bare of adornment except for a few potted plants and a half-dozen patio chairs and a couple of plastic patio tables. The building was two stories high. Along the second floor was a wooden railing. The front doors of the apartments opened onto the patio and I surmised from their numbering that Zack’s apartment, 206, was on the second floor. The place appeared to be completely deserted. I was wondering about my next step when I heard the distinctive click of a safety being released at my back.