The Hidden Law (13 page)

“He was smart,” I said. “That’s what made him different.”

She nodded absently. “Smart and angry. Even that’s not always enough. To tell you the truth, Henry, I don’t know what it is with someone like Gus. All the statistics were against him, but look what he made of himself.”

I hazarded a guess from my own experience. “Maybe he looked around and saw what was possible. Maybe he imagined becoming someone.”

“Yes, but how and when, that’s the mystery. Wherever his ambition came from, it was ferocious. And unforgiving. Of him and others.”

“This must be where Michael Ruiz comes in,” I said.

“Michael had all the outward privileges that Gus never had,” she said. “His family’s well-off, and whatever else his parents may be, they aren’t alcoholics. From Gus’s point of view, Michael had squandered his advantages. Of course, Gus only knew half the story.”

“What’s the other half?”

We were interrupted by someone shouting in the hall, which ended as abruptly as it had begun, with the slamming of a door.

Edith said, “I think I already told you that Michael’s parents were also strivers, like Gus, and just as successful. Michael paid the price for that.”

“You told me he was basically raised by his grandmother.”

“There’s more to it than that,” she said. “When he was three, he was rushed to the hospital with a concussion. His mother said he had fallen down the stairs. His father wasn’t at home at the time. Child services investigated and he was eventually placed with his grandmother. Later, he was returned to his parents and the records were sealed. I only found out about it—,” she stopped herself. “Well, it’s not important. There is a record, and I found out about it.”

“Did the abuse stop?”

“When I brought it up, Michael claimed he didn’t know what I was talking about, but his behavior proves he was abused. If you tell a child he’s bad long enough and often enough, he will act it out.”

“‘Those to whom evil are done, do evil in return,’” I quoted. “A line from a poem.”

“The only evil Michael’s ever done has been to himself,” she said. “Anyway, you had Gus on the one hand playing the enraged father and Michael on the other playing the defiant son. And they were both Chicano, of course, which added that whole cultural element of standing your ground.”

“I’m familiar with it,” I said.

“I don’t believe Michael killed Gus,” she said. “I don’t think he had it in him but, if he did, it came out of that struggle.”

“We have to find him,” I said.

“I know,” she answered. “Why don’t you try the parents. Maybe you’ll have better luck than I did.” She reached for her Rolodex and turned it to
R,
then searched for a card. She jotted down an address in the valley and a phone number. “His mother’s name is Carolina and his father’s called Bill.”

I pocketed the slip of paper, thanked her, and left.

Although I left a couple of messages at the Ruizes’ house, Carolina Ruiz didn’t return my call until the next afternoon. I was at my desk dictating notes from a reporter’s transcript of a murder trial into a hand-held tape recorder. Another dozen volumes of transcript sat on my desk waiting to be gone through. I had picked up this appeal from a colleague who had tried it, assuring me that the judge’s errors would leap off the pages. So far, however, all the record had revealed was a bad case of judicial temperament. I was relieved when the phone buzzed.

“Carolina Ruiz,” Emma said in the tone of voice she reserved for assholes.

“OK, thanks.” I pushed the button to the outside line. “Mrs. Ruiz?”

She opened with, “Who the hell hired you as Michael’s lawyer?”

I marked my place in the transcript and shut it. “The director of SafeHouse tried to kick Michael out. Edith Rosen asked me to talk to the man. We worked something out and Michael stayed. When it became clear that the police were looking for him in connection with Gus Peña’s murder, Mrs. Rosen asked for my help again. No one’s actually hired me.”

“You’re damn right,” she said. “If Mikey needs a lawyer his father and I can take care of it.”

“I think he needs a lawyer.”

“He hasn’t done a thing,” she replied.

“Mrs. Ruiz, at minimum, he’s in violation of his probation for leaving SafeHouse, and he’s also a suspect in Gus Peña’s murder. The moment the police find him, they’ll put him on a probation hold and lock him up. That’ll give them all the time they need to interrogate him.”

She wasn’t as quick to answer, but her tone was still rancid when she did. “My son didn’t have anything to do with Gus Peña getting himself killed. If that woman hadn’t talked to the police Mikey would still be at SafeHouse.”

“Mrs. Rosen isn’t the one who told the police about Michael’s threat.”

“Look, I don’t care who said what to who. My son didn’t do anything wrong, and he doesn’t need you.”

“All right, Mrs. Ruiz, have it your way. You’re right, no one has hired me to represent Michael, so I’ll back off, but take my advice and get your kid a lawyer. When the cops catch up to him, he’s going to need all the help he can get.”

“Don’t tell me how to take care of my son,” she said and hung up.

I put down the receiver and said to Emma, who had come in at the tail end of the conversation, “How would you like to call her mommy?”

“She’s no mommy,” Emma said, making a face. “That woman’s a mother. You want to sign these checks?”

I signed the stack of checks she had put in front of me. “How did two nice people like us end up in this line of work?”

She shook her head, jangling her intricately braided hair. “I like to eat. You like to save the world.”

“Not that the world has ever noticed.”

“You just have those Friday P.M. blues, Henry,” she said. “Take the rest of the day off.”

“I’m looking for a needle in a haystack,” I said, indicating the pile of transcripts.

“They ain’t going nowhere.”

“You know what? You’re absolutely right. Take off, Emma, we’re closed.”

After she left, I sat in my office wondering what to do with the first free weekend I had given myself in months. The thought of going home to an empty house made me want to sleep on the couch in the lobby. I considered calling Lonnie Davis, but that kind of excitement wasn’t exactly what I wanted either. Then I remembered Eric Andersen and his lover Andy Otero.

I had known Eric since college. He and Andy lived outside of Santa Barbara, on an avocado ranch that had been in Eric’s family for eight generations. I saw him once or twice a year when he came into the city, and he had been urging me for years to come up and stay at the ranch. I dialed his number, already halfway up the coast in my imagination.

The ranch was deep in a canyon off the Coast Highway, accessible by a narrow rutted road that cut through bare brown hills and meadows shaded by great eucalyptus trees. Cows grazed peacefully along the road. Eric and Andy lived in a cottage that had been built by Eric’s great-grandfather, a descendent of a Mexican land grant family, in the 1890s. The two men had lovingly reconstructed it.

They had been lovers for sixteen years, from the time that Eric had returned to Santa Barbara at twenty-four to take over the ranch. He met Andy, then an eighteen-year-old high school senior, who was working as a ranch hand that summer. Physically, they could not have been more dissimilar: Eric tall and blond, the son of a Mexican mother and a Danish father; and short, black-haired Andy Otero, one generation away from a Mexican village in Guanajuato. They loved each other and the ranch, and it was hard to tell where one left off and the other began. When he wasn’t working the place, Andy painted.

In his landscapes, the golden earth rolled like waves beneath a mild, benevolent sky, bare but for wooden fences and clusters of oak and eucalyptus. In other scenes, the squat avocado trees hovered like green clouds above the dark loam. His paintings caught perfectly the silty quality of light, the dry yet fertile countryside. Although the ocean lay just over the ridge of the canyon, Andy seldom pictured it directly, but there was a quality to his landscapes in which it was always suggested, as if the land was like a shell washed up from the water. The smaller the subject of the painting, the more he implied. In a still life of avocados, one sliced open, the green and yellow flesh glistened with all the sensuality of the earth from which it had sprung.

I spent much of the weekend tramping through the ranch with one or both of them. It was good, particularly, to talk to Eric. He listened uncomplainingly while I went on for hours about Josh, acknowledging the loss to myself as I described it to him. And he understood when I talked about the confusion I felt over the direction my life had taken, because he remembered me as an eighteen-year-old boy in torn jeans and a black sweatshirt who had lived and breathed poetry.

On Sunday, while they went into town to mass—a rose window in the church commemorated one of Eric’s ancestors, and Andy’s parents still worshipped there—I took a paperback edition of W. H. Auden’s poems and went up to the top of the canyon from where it was possible to see the ocean on one side and the ranch on the other. I sat on a boulder and turned the pages, encountering lines I had not read in fifteen years.

I stopped at a poem called “The Hidden Law” and read it over and over again. It was a short work, about the invisible rules that run our lives and which we, in turn, spend our lives running from.

The Hidden Law does not deny

Our laws of probability,

 But takes the atom and the star

And human beings as they are

And answers nothing when we lie.

It is the only reason why

No government can codify

And legal definitions mar

The Hidden Law.

Its utter patience will not try

To stop us if we want to die:

When we escape It in a car

When we forget It in a bar

These are the ways we’re punished by

The Hidden Law
.

The words had the impact of a revelation, and although I didn’t completely understand what it meant, I did know that it was an admonition to change my life.

I
LEFT SANTA BARBARA
early Monday morning and drove directly to Raymond Reynolds’s office in Beverly Hills for my eight o’clock appointment. The tranquility I had felt at the ranch evaporated somewhere between Oxnard and Rodeo Drive. By the time I spotted the first Armani-clad studio executive in his BMW it was as if I had never left town. I was relieved to step into Reynolds’s quiet brain cell of an office.

As I did, I again felt that there was something familiar about it from my past; then it occurred to me: each time I entered his office, I had the same sensation I’d felt when, as a boy, I entered the confessional. It was that feeling that I was going to come clean. I sat down on his squeaky couch and tried to make sense of my moment at the ridge of the canyon.

“What kind of change in your life do you think you have to make, Henry?” he asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said. “That wasn’t part of what I felt up there. It was more like a memory than a premonition.”

“A memory of what?”

“A memory of what it felt like when I was eighteen,” I told him. “The incredible sense of freedom at having finally got out from beneath my father’s thumb, and how, for the first time in my life, I felt truly alive. There were so many choices, so much to experience, and I really believed that I could do it all. That lasted until he died. After that, the choices seemed to narrow. It wasn’t that anyone said to me, ‘The fun’s over, decide what you’re going to do for the rest of your life.’ I just began to see things differently.”

He rocked forward in his armchair. “How?”

“You know, Raymond, it was as if, once he died, the weight of his life descended on my shoulders and I—”

The phone rang. “My machine will take the call,” he said.

I started to speak, but the phone rang again.

“I’m sorry, Henry, but I’d better take this.” He answered the phone, listened for a moment, then said, “It’s your secretary. She says it’s urgent.”

I got up and went over to his desk, taking the phone from him. “Yes, Emma.”

“Henry, Mrs. Rosen called. The police have arrested Michael Ruiz. She’s at SafeHouse and she says it’s urgent that you go there right away.”

“Call her back and tell her I’m on my way.” I hung up and told Reynolds, “I’m sorry, Raymond, I have to go.”

“What about freedom?” he asked gently.

“I’m really sorry.”

Just as I pulled up at SafeHouse a TV station van was pulling away. Inside, there was a loud, crowded meeting being held in the dayroom. I made my way to Edith Rosen’s office where I found her briskly cramming file folders into a floppy shoulder bag.

“Edith, what’s going on?”

She stopped what she was doing. “I’ve been fired.” Then she collapsed into her chair, muttering, “What a morning.”

“What’s going on out there?” I asked, pointing toward the day-room where someone was shouting invective at someone else.

“The house is meeting to talk about what happened this morning.”

“What did happen this morning?” I asked, dropping into a chair.

“Michael turned up looking for me. He wanted to negotiate surrendering to the police. Unfortunately, I hadn’t arrived yet. Before he could get away, Chuck saw him and had two of the staff hold him down physically while he called the police. Apparently, Michael struggled pretty loudly and roused the entire house. I got here just as the police were trying to get him out.”

“Trying?” I asked. “Was he resisting?”

“It wasn’t Michael as much as it was the other residents,” she replied. “Most of them weren’t aware that the police were looking for Michael as a suspect in Gus’s murder. They didn’t know why Chuck had called the police on him. All they saw was another resident being dragged off by a dozen cops.”

“I see,” I said. “I imagine Michael wasn’t the only resident who’d had run-ins with the cops.”

“It turned into a small riot,” she said, wearily. “The police arrested three others as well as Michael.”