Lay Your Sleeping Head

by Michael Nava

  The bright morning light blurred. “I don’t understand.”

  “The university police found a man in his car this morning. He was dead. His wallet was gone but he had your card on him. We thought he might have been coming to see you.”

  “Give me ten minutes,” I said.

  I ran back into the apartment, splashed my face with cold water, rinsed the booze out of my mouth, threw on some clothes. They were standing beside their patrol car, the male cop drumming his fingers on the roof. The woman had a cup of coffee.

  “Here,” she said, handing it to me. “You need this more than me. It’s black, that okay?”

  “Thanks. Yeah, that’s fine.” She opened the back door for me and I got in.

  “What kind of car?” I asked as we swept down the quiet streets.

  “Little blue BMW coupe,” the male cop replied.

  “Oh, fuck,” I said.

  Nice drive, I teased him. Bet that leather back seat can be slippery.

  We’ll have to see about that.

  It was a twenty-minute drive to the coroner’s office in San Jose. Beyond the generically furnished reception room was a white corridor, antiseptic and silent, lined with gray, numbered doors where autopsies were performed. At the end of the corridor was an unnumbered room; the cooler. A medical examiner was waiting for us and we introduced ourselves. Mr. Rios, Doctor Harris. He told the officers to stay outside to their clear disappointment and let me into the room where three covered gurneys were perfectly aligned.

  “Are you ready?” he asked, approaching the table nearest me.

  I stopped him. “What can you tell me about his death?”

  “University police found him in his car around six and called the Linden police,” he said. “Needle in his arm. Old and new track marks. We sent a blood sample out for toxicology but it looks like an overdose.”

  “They found him at the university?”

  “Yessir.”

  I shook my head. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “You were expecting someone last night?”

  “Yeah, my friend coming down from the city. He never made it.”

  The medical examiner threw me a curious, rather hard look and I realized what he thought.

  “I don’t use drugs,” I told him. “That’s not why he was coming down and he would know better than to show up high.”

  “Well,” he said, skeptically, “maybe it’s not the same person. Are you ready?”

  I nodded.

  “There’s a sink behind you if you have to—” he said, and pulled back the sheet.

  I felt all the breath leave my body in a sharp, high-pitched yap, the sound a wounded animal makes. I turned away and pressed my head to the wall, struggling for air.

  The medical examiner came up behind me. “Mr. Rios, can you tell me who this young man is?”

  I nodded, not trusting my voice. He gave me a moment.

  “The sooner we know, the sooner we can inform his family.”

  I’m his family, I thought. “His name is Hugh Paris,” I said.

  “Do you know who his next of kin would be?”

  I turned back and walked to the table. The beautiful body was pale and still. I waited for him to breathe, but no breath came. There were bruises on his chest, light discolorations. A fresh needle mark on his right arm, just below the bend in his elbow. His eyes were closed. Next of kin? His grandfather? No. Uncle John? I had never learned his last name, was it Paris? Linden?

  “His mother, Katherine Paris,” I said. “She’s teaching at the university.”

  “Thank you,” he said, making a note. “Until I can confirm the cause of death, the police are treating it as suspicious. They’ll want a statement from you.” He drew the sheet over Hugh’s body. “It’s such a shame. He was so young. Thank you, Mister Rios. I’m sorry for your loss.”

  I left the room and walked into the corridor where the two young cops were waiting to drive me home. They were giggling over something but when the girl took a look at me, the smile leaked from her face.

  FIVE

  Someone opened the front door, came into the apartment and shouted “Henry!” I tossed aside the pillow covering my head, rolled out of bed and staggered, naked, into the living room where I found the manager of the apartment complex and Aaron surveying the wreckage.

  Aaron said, “Put some clothes on, man.”

  “Fuck you,” I said. “You’re in my house.”

  The manager said, “Uh, I think I’ll leave you guys to it,” and hurried out the door.

  “What are you doing here, Gold?”

  “I heard about your friend,” he said. Then, almost pleading, “Henry, please, put something on.”

  I considered saying no because he was so obviously distressed at seeing me naked, but I was beginning to feel foolish.

  “Whatever,” I said, and left him standing there while I went back into the bedroom.

  I had not left my apartment in five days except when, on day two, I made a liquor run. On day three, I’d stopped having any feelings, so that was all right. By day four, no amount of alcohol could get me drunk and the feelings started to seep in again. I took the last remaining valium and went back to sleep. That was—what?—twelve hours ago? I took a long piss and decided a shower might wash away the stink of booze sweating from my pores. Gold could wait. Or not. I didn’t much care one way or the other.

  I made it into the shower, turned on the hot water full blast, and let it scorch me until I couldn’t bear it. Then I turned on the cold and stood in the stream of warm water, weeping. As I dried myself and got dressed, I heard Gold muttering in the other room, and the clink of glass and metal as he cleared away empty bottles and cans of half-eaten ravioli and creamed corn.

  I found him at the sink, washing glasses.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Cleaning up,” he said.

  “Leave it. What do you want?”

  He dried the glass in his hand on a paper towel. “I heard about your friend. I’m sorry.”

  “His name was Hugh.”

  “Yeah, about Hugh.”

  “Okay,” I said, turning my back to him. “Condolences accepted. Let yourself out.”

  He grabbed my shoulder. “Henry,” he said. “You’re scaring me.”

  I shrugged off his hand, went into the living room, fell onto the couch. “What are you talking about?”

  He sat beside me. “Look at yourself. You’re a wreck. I’m really worried about you.”

  I saw the worry in his eyes and etched in the furrows across his forehead. My anger evaporated. He was my friend, maybe my only one.

  I shrugged. “I’ll be all right.”

  “What can I do?”

  “Pour me a drink.”

  He said, gently, “I think you’ve had enough for now.”

  “Yeah, you’re probably right. Maybe some coffee.”

  “Sure,” he said.

  A few minutes later we were sitting outside where I’d last sat with Hugh. It was a hot day, too warm for coffee but I guzzled it anyway.

  “You put a lot of sugar in this,” I said.

  “You need the calories. You have anything to eat besides Chef Boyardee?”

  “I’ll order a pizza or something later,” I said. “Not really hungry right now.”

  “So? Wanna talk about it?”

  “Do you really want to hear about?”

  “I’m your friend, Henry.”

  The internal conversation that had been going on in my head since the coroner pulled down the sheet on Hugh’s body poured out of me, “You grow up and everyone around tells you how it’s supposed to be, how it’s gonna be, but then, for you, it’s different. The question is, how different? And now I know. It isn’t different at all. People fall in love. People, Gold. Men with women, women with women, men with men. People.”

  “That’s how it was with you and Hugh?”

  I choked back a wave of grief with a clipped, “Yes.”

 
; “I’m really sorry.”

  I watched a hummingbird dart through the air, a blur of blue and green. I saw his body laid out in the morgue.

  “It doesn’t make sense, Aaron.”

  “What’s that, Henry?”

  “He was on his way here and he knew how I felt about drugs. He wouldn’t have shown up strung out. That’s the part I don’t understand.”

  After a moment, Aaron said, “My cousin’s a coke addict. Drug addicts use drugs. They can’t help it.”

  “If he was going to use, he would’ve done it in the city and stayed there,” I sipped my coffee. “Something’s not right.”

  “I know it must be hard to accept, Henry, if you cared for him, but there’s nothing you can do for him now.”

  “I’m still a lawyer,” I said. “I know how to ask questions. I need to be asking some.”

  Gold looked dismayed. “Henry, whatever you find out will only make it worse.”

  “You don’t know that,” I said. “Anyway, as painful as the truth might be, it can’t be any worse than what I’ve been imagining. I’d like to be able to sleep without having to knock myself out with booze.”

  “Here’s some unsolicited advice from an old friend,” Gold said. “Grieve and move on, Henry. Don’t wallow in this.”

  “You really don’t understand, Aaron. One minute I’m holding him in my arms and the next minute the coroner’s pulling back the sheet on his body. He was twenty-six years old. Grieve? No, I’m fucking furious. I want to know why he had to die.”

  “Okay,” Gold said, “all I’m saying is if you start asking questions, you might not like the answers.” He got up. “What do you want on your pizza?”

  We ate pizza, watched a baseball game on TV, and then Gold sacked out on the couch. Only the next morning, after I promised him to stay off the booze, did he go home. I tried to pull myself together with a long run. I steered clear of the campus, not yet prepared to be anywhere near the scene of Hugh’s death.

  Instead, I ran through Linden, beneath the canopies formed by the branches of the great oaks that lined the older streets dominated by rambling houses Grover Linden had built for the first faculty members. Solid nineteenth century residences that looked like little Tudor country houses or rose-covered Mitteleuropa cottages or turreted Newport-style mini-mansions. Grover Linden came from upstate New York, one of the tens of thousands young men drawn to California by the Gold Rush of 1849 and after he struck it rich—in railroads, not mines—he looked east and to Europe for his idea of civilization. A full-length portrait by John Singer Sargent hung in the entrance of the administration building that showed Linden standing at a table covered with blueprints of his university. Solid, massive man, body encased in a black suit, intelligent countenance, bearded like an Old Testament prophet, receding hairline, blue eyes. Blue eyes. Hugh’s blue eyes. I was still trying to put my head around Hugh’s ancestry. From robber baron to the gentle gay man in four generations? Comparable to the evolution of dinosaurs to birds. I quickened my pace, trying to exhaust body and mind, both of them aching for my friend.

  I ran south, away from the old town to the 1950s suburbs of cookie-cutter ranch houses that students rented during the school year. Gold and I, and a couple of other friends, had lived in one of these flat-roofed, thin-walled tract houses our last year of law school. Strange year. All of us had job offers by Thanksgiving and we were running out the clock to graduation, the bar exam, and what we laughably called “real life.” I spent a lot of time in San Francisco that year, in the bars and bathhouses, scratching an itch with this boy or that one. Waiting for my life to begin. Until I’d met Hugh, I hadn’t realized I was still waiting.

  I urged my body on, trying to quiet the questions. Was he on his way to see me? Or to make a drug connection? Why didn’t he call when he was leaving the city? How had he ended up on campus? Deeper and more painful doubts assailed me. Hugh had warned me not to trust him. Had I only seen what I wanted to? Did I know him at all? Was it as simple as what Gold had said—drug addicts use drugs? Those questions I couldn’t answer but someone, somewhere had answers to the others. I just had to figure out who to ask.

  One of the unanswered calls on my message machine was from a robbery/homicide detective with the Linden Police Department named Sam Torres asking me to come in and make a statement about Hugh’s death. Maybe if I answered his questions, he could answer some of mine. I called and made an appointment to come in the next day. In the meantime, I cleaned my apartment, bought some food, limited myself to a couple of weak drinks, watched another baseball game, tossed and turned half the night until sheer exhaustion closed my eyes and, for a few hours, shut off my head.

  The Linden Police Department’s building looked like a 1960s bank building, straight, simple lines, constructed from glass and concrete, fronted by planters overflowing with seasonal flowers. Not homey, exactly, but not unfriendly either. The kind of place you wouldn’t be afraid to enter. But once you got past the pansies and impatiens and forget-me-nots and entered the building, the martial atmosphere asserted itself in the blue uniforms, rigid bearing and barely concealed bellicosity of the cops. The thing about cops I had learned as a defense lawyer is that they regarded all civilians as potential criminals which begged the question of who exactly they served and protected. The short answer was situational; they protected whoever they perceived to be the victim, but that could change from one second to the next. The long answer was, like a lot of bureaucrats, they mostly protected and served themselves and their own interests. The difference was, unlike other bureaucrats, they carried guns. As a rule, I did not like cops.

  Sam Torres was proving no exception. Detectives sat at the usual government-issued metal desks in a bull pit behind the reception area. Torres was a bland looking man, shaped like a Chicano snowman with a round face, big belly and twiggy limbs. Thinning hair, blank features except for his eyes which held the typical cop wariness. He interviewed me at his desk while the woman detective one desk over listened in while pretending to do paperwork.

  The interview started out pro forma. He asked how I knew the “deceased,” when I’d last seen him, what I knew about his drug use. Then two things piqued his interest, neither unfortunately having to do with Hugh’s death.

  He suddenly recalled my name from another context.

  “Rios,” he said more to himself than me. “Wait, aren’t you a PD?”

  “I was,” I said. “I’m not with the office anymore.”

  “Go private?”

  “No,” I said. “Taking some time off.”

  He smirked. “Uh-huh, getting dirtbags off finally get to you?”

  “I was serving and protecting, Detective, just like you.”

  With a narrow look he said, “Yeah, right.”

  He’d made me as the enemy.

  A little later, going over his notes, he said, “So, according to you, the deceased was driving down from the city to your place?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? We were friends. He was visiting.”

  “Uh-huh. He was planning to drive back later?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Staying at your place?” he asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “You said you’d been at his residence in the city the night before.”

  “Yes.”

  “You spent the night at his place, he was gonna spend the night at your place.” A light began to go off for him. “Tell me again what the deceased to you was?”

  “A friend.”

  “What kind of friend?” he asked. “Casual friend, best friend, butt buddy?”

  I thought, “no, he did not just say that,” but from the pained expression of the woman detective I realized I had heard him correctly.

  “What did you just say?” I asked him slowly.

  He smirked again. “I asked you what your relationship was with the deceased.”

  “No, the last thing you said.”

  H
e gave a little shrug. “Don’t remember. Anyway, the investigation’s closed.”

  “What do you mean closed?”

  “The coroner says your friend,” he pronounced the word snidely, “overdosed. Nothing you told me adds anything.”

  “I told you he was coming to see me and he wouldn’t have shown up high.”

  “Yeah, that’s what you told me,” he said. “Looks like you’re wrong.” He closed his notebook. “Thanks a lot for coming in.”

  I stared at him but before I could say anything, the woman detective was at my side. “Come on,” she said. “I’ll walk you out.”

  I heard the warning in her voice.

  “Sure,” I said. “Get me out of here.”

  I had expected her to leave me at the front desk but she went outside with me and as I was about to walk down the steps to the street, she said, “I want to talk to you about your friend.”

  She was as tall as me and slender. Her dark blue dress was tailored so austerely I thought it was a uniform at first. Her sandy hair was in a short, unfussy cut and she wore no makeup. I got the impression she worked hard at making herself look plain but her face radiated intelligence. She took my measure with luminous gray eyes.

  “I’m Terry Ormes,” she said.

  “Henry Rios,” I replied. “What do want to talk about?”

  “You think Hugh Paris was killed, don’t you?”

  My encounter with Torres left me wary about Linden cops. “Your partner says it was an overdose.”

  “He’s not my partner,” she said, “and I think he’s wrong.”

  “What do you think happened to Hugh?”

  She pressed her lips together and shook her head slightly. “I’m not sure, but I don’t think it was a simple overdose.” She indicated a Denny’s across the street. “You have time for a cup of coffee?”

  “I have nothing but time.”

  “Let me clock out,” she said, “and I’ll meet you there. Five minutes.”

  I nodded and we went off in opposite directions.

  Five minutes later she slid into the orange vinyl booth. The waitress came by, smiled at her and said, “Coffee and Danish.”