The Hidden Law (12 page)

He came back with two tumblers, saw where I was looking and said, “Textbooks to a new life.”

“Does that include Proust?”

“Here, sit down,” he said, and I heard a twang, something Southern in his voice. “I been carrying that book around for ten years,” he continued. “You see how far I got. They tell me he’s one of the great queer fathers.”

The remark was an invitation for me to reveal myself.

“I tried reading him for that reason, too,” I said, “but I didn’t get as far as you did.” I sipped my Coke. “You were Michael Ruiz’s roommate at SafeHouse.”

“Sure was. You mind if I smoke, Mr. Rios?”

“It’s your house, Lonnie. Call me Henry, OK?”

He went over to the bed, picked up the ashtray and a pack of Merits, came back, lit one. “You want me to take your coat?”

I removed my coat and tossed it onto the bed. “That OK?”

“Yeah,” he said, smiling. “It’s good there.”

“What about Michael, were you friends with him?”

He waved smoke away. “He was friendly enough at first but after I told him I was gay, he kept his distance. I guess he was afraid I would jump him.”

“Was he afraid or was he hoping?”

“Mike was straight. I’m sure of it. Even before I told him about me he talked about a girlfriend.”

“A girlfriend? Do you remember what her name was?”

He tapped ash into the ashtray which he had settled on the chair between his legs. “I don’t remember right offhand. He only mentioned her a couple of times, after he called her. Like I said, that was in the beginning, before he knew about me. After that…” he shrugged.

“This is kind of important.”

He ran stubby fingers through close-cut hair. “Let me think on it.”

“Did he ever say anything to you about Gus Peña?”

“The senator? No. Is this about him getting killed?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Was there anyone else in the house that Michael may have been close to?”

Lonnie smiled gamely, but shook his head, “Sorry, I know I’m not being much help.”

“The girlfriend’s name would help a lot, if you remember.”

“Here,” he said, rising from the chair. “Maybe I wrote it down.” He walked across the room and opened the door to a closet. Back turned to me, he said, “I kept a journal while I was there. Coulda put her name in there.”

He lifted his arms to a shelf, and I studied the muscles moving in his shoulders. The light in the room was changing, deepening. Shadows creased the jumbled sheets on the bed. I got up and went to the window, opening the blinds. Whoever had been swimming in the pool was gone, leaving wet footprints across the pavement and the water churning in its bed. Lonnie came and stood beside me. The notebook in his hands was filled with big, loopy writing.

“What are you looking at?” he asked.

“The water. You find anything?”

“Give me a minute.” He bent his head over the book, slowly turning the pages. “Boy, was I fucked up,” he said, and kept reading. “Hey, here it is. Her name was Angie.” He pointed to a line in the book. I could make out the names Mike and Angie.

“Is there anything else about her?”

“Let me see. No, just that he said he called her that night.” He closed the book. “Look, I wouldn’t feel right giving this to you, but I’ll finish reading it tonight, see if there’s anything else in it about her.”

“I’d appreciate it.”

“Hey, you want to go swimming?”

I looked at him, ready to refuse.

“You really look like you need to cool off,” he said. “I’ll loan you a suit.”

“OK,” I said.

The water was as cool as I had imagined; the sky was blue and starless overhead. Lonnie had kept up with me for a couple of laps, then drifted over to the corner from where he watched me. When I’d had enough, I swam over to him.

“When you swim,” he said, “you really swim.”

“It feels good to use my body for a change.”

“I know all about using my body,” he answered. “That’s how I ended up at SafeHouse.”

“What do you mean?”

He hoisted himself up to the ledge of the pool, the water running streams down his thin, hard body. “I came out here from Tennessee to go to school, a long time ago. I was eighteen and pretty and there wasn’t anything I wouldn’t do in bed. I had a lot of friends.” He pushed wet hair from his forehead. “Thing is, you don’t stay young and pretty forever. It began to take more and more booze to keep up the illusion, not that anybody but me was fooled. The friends drifted off, the party moved on, and I woke up one morning and I was thirty-one, broke and a drunk.” There was rue but no self-pity in any of this. “It was either pop a handful of pills or start over.”

“You made the right choice,” I told him.

“Some days that seems truer than others,” he replied. “What about you? What’s your story?”

I pulled myself out of the water and sat next to him, our legs touching. “Not that much different,” I said, “except that when I woke up I was thirty-three, and a drunk, and I had a law degree.”

“Well, if you studied the way you swim, I’m not surprised. You’re not exactly laid back, are you, Henry?”

“No, not exactly.”

The lights went on beneath the water. From an opened window above us came the sounds of TVs and radios and the aromas of food. Lonnie pressed his hand against the small of my back and asked, “You mind?”

“No, I don’t mind.”

Unfamiliar smells rose from the tumble of the unmade bed. The sheets twisted beneath him and his head sank into a pillow as I pushed into him. He grunted, pulled his legs tighter on my shoulders. I bent down as far as I could, the hairs of my chest glancing his smooth one. He lifted his head and kissed me roughly. With his free hand, he rubbed the tip of his cock against my stomach muscles. I raised myself up to keep from slipping out of him, and he jerked himself off, his warm come spilling across my skin. I stayed in him until I also came, then pulled out slowly. He grinned as he peeled off the rubber and dropped it beside the bed.

“Don’t you wish old Jesse Helms could see us now?”

I grinned back. “No, not particularly.” I flopped down on the bed beside him. “Of course, I’m old enough to remember when fucking a boy wasn’t a political action.”

“I haven’t been a boy in a long time.”

“But I bet you were a helluva boy when you were,” I said.

He leaned into me, and I put my arm around him. “I guess we should clean up,” he said, but neither one of us moved. The smells of chlorine and semen mingled in the air.

“Thank you,” I said.

“My pleasure.” He reached down for a towel and cleaned himself off, then handed it to me. “You have a lover, Henry?”

I finished with the towel and tossed it aside. “I think we’re in the middle of splitting up. What about you?”

“I’ve never been the marrying kind.”

“You want to go out and get something to eat?”

“Sure, after we take a shower.”

After dinner I dropped Lonnie off at his place and drove home on Sunset. It was a beautiful night. I rolled down the windows, opened the sunroof, and a cool wind flooded through the car. At Sunset Plaza the sidewalk cafes were jammed with late night diners sitting in the glow of candlelight over pricey pasta dishes. Haute couture mannequins postured in the boutique windows. A woman in red leather walked a Great Dane while, behind her, the lights of the city blazed through the clear air. I was absurdly happy. For a couple of hours I had drifted on possibilities, something that had not happened in a long time, and it had been delicious.

When I got home there were four messages on the answering machine and the phone was ringing. Still buoyant, I answered it with a cheery, “Hello.”

“It’s Josh, Henry. I’ve been calling you for hours.” His voice was edgy and frightened.

“What’s wrong?”

“Steve had some kind of seizure. I’m at the hospital with him.”

I sat down, uncertain of what to say. “Do they know what happened?”

“His doctor thinks it’s toxo. They’re waiting until tomorrow to do a CT scan. Right now he’s sleeping.”

“Which hospital are you at?”

“Midtown,” he said. “I know this awkward, but could you come over, Henry, just for a little while?”

“That’s over on Third and Genessee, right?”

“Yeah, I’ll be waiting outside.”

I left without playing the phone messages.

He was standing beneath a street light. I recognized the unruly hair and hooded red sweatshirt. I drove up to the curb and pushed the passenger door open. He scooted in, looked at me and said, “Thank you, Henry.”

His hand was bandaged. “What happened?”

“I’ll tell you later.”

“Have you eaten?”

He shook his head. “Someplace close? I don’t want to be away too long.”

“I understand,” I said, and started driving.

There was an all-night coffee shop not far away. Inside, bright lights bounced off orange vinyl and brown Formica. A chalkboard listed the homey specials: liver and onions, red snapper, spaghetti. Behind the counter was a display of pies and pastries. A bee-hived waitress led us to a booth and handed us oversized menus. Josh didn’t even look at his, but told her, “Just coffee.”

“Bring him the hamburger plate,” I said. “I’ll have iced tea and apple pie.”

“All right,” she drawled.

“I’m sorry if I was hysterical on the phone,” Josh said.

“Tell me what happened.”

The busboy brought our drinks. Josh measured milk and sugar into his coffee with his good hand. “When I went over to Steven’s this afternoon he was in bed complaining of a headache. Um, I got into bed, too. I nodded off. The next thing I knew the bed was shaking like crazy. I thought it was an earthquake.” He took a quick sip of coffee. “It was Steven, bouncing all over the bed. He sounded like he was choking. I didn’t know what to do, so I sat on him to keep him from falling off the bed and pried open his mouth. He was swallowing his tongue.” The coffee cup jerked in his hand and he set it down, the liquid spilling over the sides. “Sorry. I thought I was over it.”

“It’s all right,” I said, covering his hand with mine. He grasped at my fingers. “You stuck your fingers in his mouth to keep him from swallowing his tongue.”

He nodded. “He almost bit off my index finger, but eventually he stopped shaking, and was just sort of passed out. I called an ambulance. On the way to the hospital, he had another seizure. They took us both into emergency. They patched me up and I called his doctor. Then I started calling you.”

The food came. The waitress set a big plate with a sloppy burger and heaps of french fries in front of him. He picked up the sandwich and bit into it greedily.

“It happened so fast there wasn’t time to be afraid,” he said, through a mouthful of food. He swallowed. “Afterwards, waiting to hear something, then I was afraid.”

“I thought with toxo there were some warning signs,” I said.

“Not always,” he replied. “Sometimes a seizure is the first sign. That’s the thing about this fucking disease. One day you’re OK, and the next day you’re in the hospital fighting something you didn’t even know you had.” He looked at the sandwich in his hand. “I don’t know why I’m eating this. I’ll probably throw it up later.”

“Go ahead and eat. You’ll feel better.”

He smiled wanly. “You’re always so practical, Henry. I bet you would’ve known what to do.”

“If it’s toxo, they can treat it, can’t they?”

“Yeah, I guess.” He began on his french fries. “They can treat it, they can’t cure it. They can’t cure any of it.”

I picked at the apple pie while he ate. “I’m sorry, Josh,” I said. “I hope he comes through it OK.”

“This is really hard for you, isn’t it?”

“What’s hard is not knowing where we stand,” I said.

“I can’t come back,” he said. “Everything is different now.”

“You know you can always call me.”

“Henry, I’ve known that since the first day I met you.”

There was a fifth message on my machine when I got home that night. The first four were from Josh. The last one was a male voice saying, “Thanks for tonight.”

T
HE NEXT DAY WAS
Thursday, one week from the day that Gus Peña had been killed. The story had slipped from the front page of the first section of the
Times
to the front page of the Metro section. It had become as much about politics as it was about a murder investigation. One group of Latino leaders castigated the cops for not moving swiftly enough to find Peña’s killer while another group deplored the continuing sweeps of the gangs in East Los Angeles. As far as the investigation itself went, a new phrase had slipped into the police communiques: a “potential suspect” had been identified. On my way into work, I dropped in at SafeHouse to talk to Edith Rosen. I found her at her cluttered desk, poring over the same story that I’d read at breakfast.

“I gather that Michael is their potential suspect,” I said. “Any word?”

She folded the paper and set it down. “His parents have stopped talking to me,” she said.

“Why?”

“After the police told them Michael had threatened Gus, his mother called and demanded to know why I hadn’t told them sooner. I tried to explain that I couldn’t, but she wasn’t interested. She said if Michael’s in trouble, I’m to blame.”

“From what you told me earlier about them, I wouldn’t have thought they’d care one way or the other.”

“You’d have to meet her to understand,” she replied. She lifted a mug from the corner of her desk and drank from it. “You want a cup?”

“No thanks. I want to finish our conversation about Michael and Gus.”

“What do you mean?” She set the cup down on a folder.

“If it turns out that Michael did kill Gus, I want to know the chances of constructing some kind of psychological defense. You said they hated each other the way people in families can come to hate each other. What makes you think that?”

She rubbed her eyes wearily. By the looks of it, she hadn’t had much sleep. “Do you really think it’s going to help him?”

“I won’t know until you tell me.”

“You have to start with Gus,” she said. “A self-made man who came up from a very hard childhood. His own father was an alcoholic and violent. Gus was the oldest son, so he took the brunt of it. You know he could’ve just as easily become a gang member himself and ended up with a criminal record and zero prospects.”