The Death of Friends (25 page)

And yet, I had the same problem with Joey as murderer as I had with Zack; imagining the actual act of killing. Of course, sons killed their fathers, but even at his worst, Chris was hardly the kind of father who drives his children to parricide.

Ultimately, the problem with either scenario was not so much what it required me to think of Zack or Joey, but what it required me to think of Chris. He was a complicated mix, no doubt about it, decent but self-aggrandizing, courageous but also cowardly, a man who lived a lie for most of his life but managed admirable achievements nonetheless. I’d known him at every stage of his adult life, sometimes intimately while at other times there had been something akin to enmity between us. I’d loved him once when we were boys, had pitied him, been contemptuous of him and come to admire him again. He was for me, as I was for him, a kind of doppelganger, the ghostly reverse images of ourselves. No one could have felt more ambivalent about him than me, but even at my most disdainful I never doubted that at root Chris Chandler was a good man and a man who strove toward goodness. His idea of the good wasn’t my idea, but it was one that I understood.

We obeyed different imperatives. Chris took the world as he found it and believed he could not make his mark on it without denying his sexual nature. It wasn’t that he thought being gay was immoral or unnatural; he’d assured me of that from the start. Instead, I think he viewed it as a disadvantage he had to overcome to succeed, something on par with growing up poor. Nor was his idea of success a matter of crass materialism. He wanted a family, children, to be the kind of husband and father he wished his own father had been. Those were the wrongs he wanted to right, and they were far more urgent for him than sexual expression.

But that was where we disagreed. I couldn’t equate being gay with sexual practices alone, because I was gay whether or not I was having sex, when sex was the last thing on my mind. It wasn’t separate from who I was; it was part of who I was. Chris thought he could sacrifice a little pleasure for a stable place in the world, but to me the sacrifice would’ve been of the thing that made me human, the ability to love and to be loved, the drive toward connectedness. No position in the world was more important to me than that, because without it all positions would have been empty.

It wasn’t that I thought these recognitions made me a better person than Chris. Certainly, in the judgment of the world, there was no comparison between his achievements and mine. He was a respected judge, a good husband, a loving father, while I was an alcoholic homosexual who defended criminals for a living. Over the years, I’d occasionally envied him his apparent happiness and wondered if I hadn’t thrown away my own potential for happiness, but then I realized I could not have done other than I’d done because to do so, I’d have had to be a different person. Maybe I had taken the path of least resistance and Chris the more courageous course, and the success he’d reaped was a tribute to his virtue and not, as I had sometimes bitterly thought, rewards for his hypocrisy. Maybe he was right and I was wrong, if those words have any real application to the experience of living, but if I was wrong, it was not out of moral evil, or sickness or criminal disposition, that much I was sure of. I had followed my truth as I understood it, and if my life was a failure, it was because I had misunderstood.

But I didn’t think my life was a failure. It was different from the lives of most people, and for that reason often more difficult than I observed their lives to be, but it was a life largely without regrets or fear. I knew I had done, was doing, the best I could. Chris, too, had done the best he could. Anyone who knew him knew that much. And anyone who knew that much about him would not have harmed him.

Not Zack.

Not Joey.

The person who had killed Chris was a stranger to him. With that premise in mind, I went over and over the facts of the case, with Josh and alone, but no conscious solution would come. And then, three days after I’d talked to McBeth, I woke up from a dream, the details of which evaporated as soon as the light touched my eyes but for a name that seemed both obvious and inexplicable. I reached the same conclusion when I applied the facts to it; everything fit except for a motive. I could see how he’d done it, but not why. So I called the one person who I was certain could supply the reason.

B
LIGH’S LIVING ROOM WAS
filled with fresh-cut flowers, spilling their fragrance across the white spaces where the only sound was the occasional passing of a car on the street below. Courteous as ever, he poured me coffee and then settled into one of the elegant chairs. He’d been apprehensive on the phone when I insisted that I had to see him alone, but now he’d regained his composure and studied me with a polite expression, only the faintest trace of guardedness in his clear blue eyes. I took my time, looking around the room, cataloging the artifacts of his comfortable life. Their opulence had something to do with why I was there; he’d acquired a taste for opulence, but he wanted it on his own terms.

Greed had always seemed to me the most self-defeating of vices because one cannot own anything permanently; we have, at most, a life tenancy in our possessions. But I suppose the fulfillment was in the acquisition and maybe, too, someone who’d been tossed around by life needed the cosseting that money and things provide. Someone like him.

I’d spent the last two days learning all about him, with McBeth’s help. She’d been distrustful at first, but as I spun my theory, her good cop instincts overcame her skepticism and she was soon filling in the gaps I hadn’t been able to. She ran his name with the Department of Justice and came up with a four-page criminal record going back to when he was still a kid. I had a copy of it in my coat pocket. That, and notes from a couple of interviews with other men who had allowed themselves to be seduced by him, to their ultimate detriment. As for McBeth, she was, at this very moment, at the rented house in the valley where Sam Bligh was filming his latest porn opus. The circle was closing.

“You make good coffee,” I said.

He frowned; he knew I was being patronizing and didn’t like it.

“You seemed surprised when I called you on the phone,” I continued.

“I didn’t know what you wanted,” he replied.

“Do you now?”

“I think so,” he said, his eyes steady on mine. He wore a white shirt, the top three buttons undone to reveal smooth flesh. I’d never been alone with him before. He was a different person alone than he was with Bligh, compared to whom he seemed comic relief. But alone, the contrast between the young body and old face was erotic rather than comic, conveying both innocence and availability. Nor was it crudely done; he was someone with considerable experience of being desired.

“When is Sam due back?” I asked him.

He smiled at me. “We have time.”

“Does he mind this, your seeing other guys?”

“I’m particular,” he replied.

“Oh, how’s that?”

He stretched, the slender body tilting forward for my benefit. “I’m choosy. Sam takes good care of me, but I don’t want to depend on him for everything.”

“I understand,” I said. “God bless the child that’s got his own, right?”

His eyes narrowed suspiciously. “What does that mean?”

“It’s an old Billie Holiday song,” I told him. “It means we all have to watch out for ourselves.”

“Exactly.”

“So, what do we do now, Tommy?”

He got up, kicked off his shoes, pulled his shirt over his head and peeled off his jeans and said, “You’ll think of something.”

“I just have one question.”

“What’s that?”

“Did you really think you’d get away with murdering Chris Chandler?”

His face went blank. He pulled away from me and groped for his pants. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, as he stuffed himself into them. “But you better get out of here before Sam comes back.”

“We have time,” I reminded him.

“What do you want?”

“I want to tell you a story,” I said, “and I want you to tell me how it ends. Sit down.”

He hesitated, calculating the situation, then smiled at me and said, “You must be crazy. If you don’t leave, I’ll have to call the cops.”

“Don’t worry about the cops,” I said. “They’ll be along. Now sit down.”

He sat.

“So this is my story, Tommy. There was a kid from a pretty good family who had a mean streak in him. He spent most of his teenage years in and out of juvenile hall for petty stuff, at first, but gradually it escalated and he ended up doing some serious time because it seems he killed someone, an older man who the boy said had tried to sexually molest him. Are you with me, so far?”

He watched me without expression, as untroubled as if we were discussing the weather. I didn’t think it was a put-on; as far as he was concerned, we could have been discussing the weather.

“That was a clever defense,” I continued, “what with everyone concerned about child molesters, but the victim had some good friends who came into court and said, yes, he had a sexual relationship with the boy, but it was consensual.”

“They lied,” he said. “He hurt me.”

“The judge didn’t buy it,” I said. “He convicted the boy of second-degree murder and shipped him off to youth camp for a couple of years. Then the boy was released and the juvenile court record sealed to protect the boy from having this unfortunate incident follow him around for the rest of his life.”

“This is really boring,” he said.

“It gets better,” I said. “The boy was released and managed to stay out of trouble for a while. Legal trouble, anyway. He did have a lot of problems with his parents and they finally threw him out. The boy knocked around and ended up in Hollywood where he was picked up a couple of times for prostitution and once for an assault on one of his tricks. It was a pretty serious assault, but the trick decided against testifying because he wanted to avoid the publicity. I think, though I can’t prove it, that the boy beat up some of his other customers, too, but they were too afraid even to press charges. Am I right?”

“I never hurt anyone,” he said.

I watched the flicker of muscle beneath the skin; his body was like tensile steel.

“Not in a fair fight, maybe,” I said, “but some half-drunk, beer-bellied closet case wouldn’t have been any match for—this boy. Anyway, he learned a valuable lesson on the street. He learned that men with secrets are easy targets for all kinds of intimidation. Eventually, it occurred to him that maybe there was more to be gained here than the pleasure of beating someone senseless. Maybe there was money to be made. At any rate, he was tired of the streets. So, when the old guy in a wheelchair approached him about being in the movies, he went for it.”

“I never made a video,” he said, angrily.

“No, the boy saw there was not much future in that, so he concentrated on making himself invaluable to the old man who’d taken him in. And, as luck would have it, the old man needed an assistant just then. Since the old man was in a risky kind of business, he made a point of entertaining powerful, closeted men who could protect him from police harassment, and one of the services he provided to these powerful, closeted men was the occasional companion. So, from time to time, our boy was expected to bed one of these guys. Being an observant kind of boy, he soon noticed that many of these men, despite their power, were as scared of being found out as the tricks who used to pick him up on Santa Monica Boulevard.”

Tommy picked up his shirt from the floor and made a show of putting it on.

“Be patient,” I told him. “I’m almost through. The point is that the boy figured out he could blackmail some of these men. So that’s what he did, behind the old man’s back, of course. After all, the old man was doing a little blackmailing of his own and he wouldn’t have appreciated the double-dipping. The boy was careful who he put the squeeze on. He chose married men. Well off, but not so rich they could afford to lose their jobs in a scandal. Men with the kind of jobs that kept them in the public eye. Say, an anchorman for a local TV news show. Or the pastor of a big church in the South Bay.”

He opened his mouth to speak, but thought better of it.

“Surprised, Tommy?” I asked. “You shouldn’t be. Most people get sick of being blackmailed eventually. You know that. Take this judge. He came to a couple of Sam’s parties and he had victim written all over him. Our boy made his move, put on a private show for him, maybe, like the one you put on for me earlier. That would’ve been hard to resist. You’re good.”

“Let me show you how good I am.”

“I haven’t finished my story. The boy put on his show and the judge fell for him. They carried on for a while and then the boy began to hit him up for money. The judge paid. He couldn’t risk exposure, not with a wife and a family and his respectable career on the line. But it sobered him up. He realized that as long as he continued to lead a double life, he would also be prey to the scum.”

His eyes darkened in anger. “Who was the scum when my dick was in his mouth and his wife was sitting at home with the kid?”

“You are a sensitive boy,” I said. “I had no idea.”

“Fuck you, faggot.”

“I detect a little confusion here, but let me continue. The point is, our boy unwittingly began to push the judge out of the closet, and then the judge met another boy. A good kid, basically. The judge fell in love with him and he left his wife to try to make a better life for himself, one where he didn’t have to lie about who he was. But even then, he still allowed himself to be blackmailed. For years, he’d lived in fear of what would happen to his marriage if his wife discovered he was gay, and now he was afraid of what his lover would do if he found out about our boy and the blackmail. Fear is a hard habit to break.”

Tommy laughed, a sharp, mocking laugh. “You don’t get it,” he said. “He wasn’t afraid. He was still fucking me.”

“Not after he met Zack,” I said.

He laughed again and mimicked, “‘Not after he met Zack.’ You don’t know anything. He didn’t want Zack. He wanted me. He was fucking me right up to—” He bit off the end of the sentence. “He needed to feel guilty about something. It got him off, coming here when Zack was at work and screwing me. He couldn’t get it up without someone to cheat on.”