The Death of Friends (29 page)

I pulled up to the curb beside Alex Amerian’s house, which, like its neighbors, was a single-story whitewashed building with a red-tile roof, thick walls and arched windows. There was a plaster escutcheon above the front door: crossed swords and fleur-de-lis. I rang the bell, heard the shuffle of bare feet across a wooden floor and then the door was opened by a pretty, long-haired girl with beautiful but spacey eyes, wearing Levi cutoffs and a tee shirt that advertised a gay disco. Her pale skin was flawless but waxen, a drug addict’s pallor.

“Hello,” I said. “My name is Henry Rios. I’m here to see Alex.”

She glanced at my wilted seersucker suit and surmised, “You’re the lawyer?”

“Yes, is Alex here?”

“Uh-huh. I’m Alex’s roommate, Katie.” She offered me a damp, firm handshake. “Come on in.”

The small, sunny living room was furnished with a futon, a ficus tree and two director’s chairs. Rice-paper blinds on the windows diffused the light. On one wall was a framed poster advertising the Chicago Film Festival: a coy photograph of a nude elaborately muscled man and an equally sleek woman. The room was slightly musty, as if rarely used, and cobwebs clung to the corners. Katie called Alex’s name, and a moment later, from the back of the house, down a long, dim hall, came a young man in a white linen shirt and gray slacks. His skin was olive-colored, his hair was a toss of damp, black curls and his face had a delicate, Mediterranean masculinity, like the face of an archaic Apollo. His eyes were black and gleamed like dark water. He had the rumpled air of someone who had just awakened. There was a second, as he emerged from the shadows, when I felt the stunned certainty of someone witnessing a miracle, that the young man approaching me was Josh, alive again. But then Josh’s face melted into Amerian’s features and was gone.

“Uh, Mr. Rios,” he said, his extended hand unshaken. “Are you okay?”

I took his hand, shook it. “Yes. Glad to meet you, Alex.”

I released his hand, but could not look away from his face. My eyes reported that his resemblance to Josh was nothing more than a matter of height and coloring and bone structure, but there
had
been something else, a flicker of Josh that had briefly illuminated this other man like a light passing beneath his skin.

He exchanged a nervous glance with the girl, who blurted out, “You want a beer or something?”

“A glass of water would be fine,” I said, looking at her. When I looked back at him, the spell was broken. “Is there somewhere we can talk, Alex?”

“It’s cooler in the courtyard.”

I followed Alex down the hall, across a narrow dining room furnished with a picnic table and out through French doors to a shaded courtyard between his house and the adjoining house. The courtyard was paved with bricks and covered by a trellis overgrown with morning glory. The bricks were loose in the mortar, the trellis sagged beneath the weight of the vines. In the corner was a dry fountain. The wrought-iron table was dusty and in need of a new coat of paint. We sat down. I opened my briefcase and removed the police report, a pad of paper, a pen. I felt his eyes on me, and when I looked up I half-expected to see Josh again, but there was only an anxious young stranger on the other side of the table.

“It is cooler out here,” I said. “Are the two houses joined or do they just share the courtyard?”

“They just share,” he replied. “They were built by the same guy, for his family. You can see they’re falling apart. With rent control, the landlord doesn’t have much incentive to keep the place up.”

“You’ve lived here a long time?”

“Two years,” he said.

At that moment, Katie emerged from the house with a glass of ice water and two beers. “You’re sure you just want water?”

“Yes, thanks,” I said.

“Should I stay or what?” she asked.

“She already knows everything,” Alex said.

“Do you want her to be called as a witness against you?”

“I’ll be inside,” she said. “Call me if you need me.”

After she left, I said, “Tell me about the night you were arrested.”

He repeated, without significant deviation, the story that Richie had told me, while I scribbled notes.

“Let me see if I understand this,” I said. “You tried to explain to the security guard that all you wanted was a phone, but you say he got aggressive with you.”

“Yeah,” he said, peeling back the label on his bottle of beer.

“What did he do exactly?”

“He was screaming he was going to call the cops and then he shoved me a couple of times.”

“What did he look like?”

“He was a big guy, six something, beefy. Fat neck.”

“You shoved him back and then he knocked you down?” I asked, consulting my notes.

He nodded. “It was a reflex when I shoved back. I wasn’t trying to pick a fight with him because I knew he could beat the crap out of me, but then he laid into me and knocked me down …”

“And called you a faggot. Do you have any idea why he called you that?”

“I guess it was the worst thing he thought he could call another guy.”

“So it was just a general insult, but because you’d been gay bashed, you didn’t hear it that way, right?”

He nodded. “He was standing over me, calling me a faggot, and it was like a flashback to those punks with their baseball bats. I thought, any second now and he’ll start kicking me, so I pulled my gun …”

“Where was the gun?”

“In my waistband,” he said.

“What happened then?”

“I got the gun out but before I could point it at him, he stepped on my wrist and I dropped it. He kicked it away. Then he rolled me over and got me into handcuffs. He pulled me to my feet and locked me to the fence until the cops came.”

“You’re sure you didn’t point the gun at him.”

“I didn’t have a chance.”

“Tell me about when you were attacked. How serious were the injuries?”

“Six broken ribs and a concussion, plus I was black and blue for weeks.”

“And the psychological damage?”

He frowned. “I’d like to find those punks and kill them.”

“Richie said the police wouldn’t take a report. Is that right?”

He nodded. “That’s right.”

“So there’s no record of the attack.”

He stared at me. “You don’t believe me?”

“If I’m going to be arguing to the DA or a jury that you pulled the gun on the security guard because you were in fear of your life based on the previous attack, they’ll want evidence.”

“Incredible,” he muttered. “This was a misunderstanding, that’s all.”

“Misunderstandings that end up as felonies take on a life of their own.”

He brooded into his beer. “What about the article about me in Richie’s magazine? Is that evidence?”

I thought about it. “It depends on whether the reporter corroborated your story. Do you have a copy of the article?”

“I have lots of copies,” he said. “I’ve been sending them all over the place. My congressman, the mayor, the sheriff. No one writes back.”

“Where were you treated for your injuries?”

“The emergency room at Cedar-Sinai.”

“Then there are those records, too,” I said.

“What’s going to happen to me, Mr. Rios? I don’t want to go to jail behind this. It’s not fair.”

“The problem is the gun,” I said. “Where did you get it?”

“It’s not hard to get a gun in LA.”

“I assume the cops kept it.”

“As far as I know,” he said.

“Would you agree to its destruction?”

“What do you mean?”

“If I can find a sympathetic DA, I might be able to work out a deal because, based on what you’ve told me, this isn’t the kind of case a prosecutor’s going to want to take to a jury. I can’t guarantee you no jail time, but it’s pretty unlikely unless you have a record. Do you?”

“I’ve never been in trouble before,” he said, quickly.

“Then that’s not a problem,” I replied. “You want to get me a copy of the magazine piece?”

While he was gone, I went over my notes. Alex had provided a sympathetic and plausible account of the incident, one I could easily sell to a jury if it came to that. Was he telling the truth? Most of my clients lied to me, people in trouble usually do. Over the years I’d developed an intuition about how much was being concealed. My bullshit detector had twitched a couple of times with Alex, but no major alarms had gone off. I thought he might be lying to me about whether he had a rap sheet, but that was easy enough to check. One other thing bothered me, and when he returned, I asked him about it.

“Did you carry this gun with you everywhere you went?”

“Yes,” he said, passing me the article across the table.

“But the attack was six months ago?”

His eyes were cold. “Have you ever been gay bashed, Mr. Rios?”

“No.”

“I thought I was safe in West Hollywood,” he said, “but once I was attacked I knew I wasn’t safe anywhere. I had to protect myself.”

I nodded. “And if I run a rap sheet on you, I’m not going to come up with any surprises.”

He was more wounded than angry. “No.”

“I have to make sure. I don’t like surprises.”

A dusty leaf drifted from the vine and settled in his hair. He was drenched in cologne. I recognized the fragrance—it was popular that year—but I couldn’t remember what it was called.

“You looked pretty surprised when you first saw me,” he said. “What did Richie say about me? Did he tell you I was crazy?”

“It wasn’t anything Richie said. You reminded me of someone.”

“Someone you liked?” A note of flirtation crept into his voice.

“My lover,” I said. “He died a few months ago. I still think I see him sometimes, walking down the street, sitting in front of me at the movies, but of course it isn’t him, just someone who looks like him a bit. I had one of those moments when I first saw you.” I sipped some water, warm now that the ice had melted. “I didn’t mean to stare.”

The black eyes gazed at me. “What was his name?”

“Josh,” I said. “Joshua.”

“Joshua,” he repeated. “I like that name.”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s a nice name.” I gathered up my papers. “I’ll see if I can’t straighten this out with the DA tomorrow.”

He laid a hand on my sleeve. “I’m sorry about Josh, Mr. Rios.”

Each time he said Josh’s name, I felt a pang in my gut, like hunger.

“You will have a record after this,” I said, not looking at him. “You should be aware of that. It might affect your future employment.”

“I’m an actor,” he said. “I don’t think it will matter.”

“A working actor?”

“If you’re worried if I can pay you …,” he said, frowning.

“No,” I interrupted. “I’m doing this as a favor to Richie. I was just curious, but it’s none of my business.”

“I support myself,” he said.

He walked me to the front door. “Thank you,” he said.

“I’ll be in touch.”

I read the
L.A. Mode
article when I got home. Alex’s was one of four gay-bashing incidents discussed in the story. According to Alex, he’d been attacked on his way home from a bar called the Gold Coast at two in the morning on a side street off the boulevard. He managed to get to a phone and call 911. Half an hour later an ambulance and a sheriff’s patrol car arrived. As he was being loaded into the ambulance, he attempted to report the attack to a deputy sheriff. The deputy had refused either to take the report or to explain why. The writer claimed the reason was that by refusing to take hate-crime reports in West Hollywood, the sheriffs could then claim no such crimes occurred. A former deputy was quoted, anonymously, in support of this assertion. Asked for a comment, the captain of the West Hollywood station denied this was the sheriff’s policy and declared Alex’s allegation was “without merit.”

Though there wasn’t much direct corroboration of Alex’s story in the piece, the claim that the sheriff’s office was deliberately refusing to take hate-crime reports was potentially incendiary in a city where police were increasingly regarded with suspicion and hostility. In a trial, it was the kind of information that could have what some local defense attorneys were now calling “the Fuhrman effect,” after the LAPD cop who’d been used by the defense to turn the Simpson trial into a referendum about racism in the department. If I could find the right person in the District Attorney’s office to give this information, I might be able to leverage a plea in Alex’s case.

The right person: a gay or lesbian deputy DA. There were a number of them in the DA’s office, something that still seemed remarkable to me because when I had begun practicing, most prosecutor’s offices were the preserve of people to whom homosexuals were, at best, a colorful part of the demimonde, like whores and junkies. I suppose it was progress that now some of us were deemed fit to put people in jail, and I wasn’t above appealing to gay solidarity if it helped me on a case.

The next morning I made an appointment to see Serena Dance, the head of the DA office’s Hate Crimes Unit. I’d known Serena casually for a couple of years, since we’d been on a panel together at the state bar convention to discuss the impact of the then newly enacted hate-crime statutes. At the time, she’d been the director of the Gay and Lesbian Law Project, and she’d been instrumental in assuring that crimes against gays and lesbians were included in the hate crime legislation. When the DA set up the Hate Crimes Unit, he hired her to run it, to much fanfare, but then it and she had faded from public view.

Her office was on the eighteenth floor of the Criminal Courts Building, the same floor where the DA had his suite. I gave my name to the black marshal who sat at a desk in the dim corridor and waited while she tracked Serena down. A few minutes later, she emerged from a side door. In one of the many profiles that had appeared after her appointment by the DA, I’d read that Serena had played on the women’s pro-tennis circuit after college, and she still looked the part. Rangy and tall, she had the short, no-nonsense hair and sunburned face of a jock, and retained a kind of the stub-nosed collegiate cuteness. When she moved, it was with an athlete’s self-confidence and economy.

She fixed me in her bright blue gaze, extended a muscular hand and said, “Henry Rios in the DA’s office. I’m surprised you didn’t turn into a pillar of salt when you stepped off the elevator.”