Lay Your Sleeping Head

by Michael Nava

  “Thanks, Mary.” She looked at me. “You having anything?”

  “Yeah, I’ll have the same.”

  When the waitress left, she said, “So, tell me why you think your friend was killed.”

  “It’s your party,” I replied. “You go first.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I was first detective on the scene. Your friend was sitting behind the wheel of the car with a needle in his arm. The rest of his works and a baggy with residue were on the passenger seat.” She looked at me, frowned. “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said, trying to shake the picture out of my head.

  “Then Torres got there. He’s senior so it became his case but I thought I’d poke around anyway. I saw some things that bothered me.”

  The waitress returned with the coffee and pastries, set them down, scribbled a check, tore it and set it on the table.

  Ormes said, “Thanks, Mary,” and applied herself to putting cream and sugar in her coffee.

  “You saw some things that bothered you,” I pressed.

  “Hmm.” She sipped coffee, put the cup down. “The passenger’s side windshield was cracked from the inside. The glove compartment was dented. One of the tail lights was broken. Maybe they were like that before. Do you know?”

  “I was in his car a couple of days earlier,” I said. “It was immaculate. He loved that thing. No cracked windshield or dented glove compartment. Definitely no broken tail light.”

  “Was that the last time he drove it, when you were in it?”

  “Yes, as far I know he didn’t drive it again until that last night.”

  “As far as you know,” she said, not skeptically but factually. “There was something else that looked out of place.”

  “What was that?”

  She shook her head. “Footprints leading away from the car. Not your friend’s and not the university cops. They pulled up in front.”

  “Someone walking away from the car,” I said.

  “Possibly,” she allowed. “The car was off road, in the woods not far from the crypt. That part of campus is overgrown and the ground is always damp and covered with leaves, twigs, like that. The footsteps looked recent to me. Of course, someone could have stumbled onto the car before the campus cops got there, freaked out and taken off without reporting it.”

  “That’s true,” I admitted. The woods were a known spot for every juvenile miscreant in a twenty-mile radius. High school kids came there to drink, smoke pot and have sex. Since it was summer and school was out, the woods were probably busier than usual. Finding a dead body in a car in the middle of the night would have sent some stoned kid running.

  “The ground was also disturbed around the car,” Ormes was saying. “From the passenger’s side, around the back, to the driver’s side.”

  “So, what did you think?”

  “Drag marks, maybe,” she said. “But before I could take a closer look, the paramedics had arrived and walked all around the car. Whatever I thought I saw was gone.” She broke off a piece of her pastry. “Your turn.”

  “Before I tell you, I need to know, do you share Torres’s prejudices?”

  She stopped chewing, swallowed, and took a sip of coffee. “Henry, right? Henry, I’m a thirty-three year old unmarried female cop. I can’t begin to count how many times I’ve been called ‘lesbo’ and ‘dyke,’ and I’m not talking behind my back. Which is funny because it’s my dress designer sister who’s the gay one in our family. That answer your question?”

  “I had to be sure. Hugh was my lover. It hadn’t been that long but long enough for me to know that he would never have shot up before coming to my place knowing how I felt about his drug use. He’d relapsed a few days earlier and we talked it through. Plus, he’d been clean the nine months before that and he’d almost overdosed when he used again. So, one, he wasn’t going to use and two, even if he had, he wouldn’t have used enough to overdose, not after what he’d just been through.”

  “Except,” she said, “if he had miscalculated once, he could have miscalculated again.”

  Grudgingly, I conceded. “Yeah, I guess that’s possible. But you don’t think it was an overdose.”

  “I think,” she said, carefully, “there are questions that should have been asked and answered before this got written up as accidental death. How was the tail light broken? If he was the only person in the car that night, who cracked the windshield and dented the glove compartment on the passenger side? Were there drag marks around the car? Did someone walk away from the car?”

  “Bruises,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I identified Hugh’s body. There were bruises on his chest. I know for a fact they weren’t there that afternoon when I left him. Is there an autopsy report yet?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “But I’ll make sure I get a copy. See if there’s anything else about the body that wasn’t there the last time you saw him.”

  The image of the medical examiner cutting into Hugh’s body was like a jab to my solar plexus.

  “Hey, Henry.” The sympathy in her eyes forced me to look away.

  “For a minute there,” I said, “it was like any other case I’ve worked on. Piece together the evidence, test it, and come up with a theory about what happened and who did it. Then I remembered, this isn’t someone else’s life. It’s mine.”

  “This is rough on you. I’m sorry.”

  “I have to know what happened to him.”

  She nodded. “So do I.” After a moment, she continued. “You know, the biggest problem here isn’t that the evidence is all circumstantial and can all be explained away. It’s that there’s no motive. Who would want to hurt your friend, Henry?”

  The first night he showed up at my apartment, Hugh had told me two stories about his grandfather. The first story was that his grandfather had killed his wife and brother-in-law to get control of the family fortune. The second story was that his grandfather had raped him. In both versions, Hugh said he had returned to confront and expose his grandfather. I went with the one I believed was true.

  “Hugh told me he had returned to California to confront his grandfather because he’d raped him when he was a boy.”

  A layperson might have been shocked, but all she asked was, “Did you believe him?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Absolutely.”

  “If it happened when he was a kid, the statute of limitations would have run out by now.”

  I saw what she meant. Even if Hugh’s grandfather had raped him, he was no longer subject to criminal prosecution, so what motive would he have had to take such drastic action to silence Hugh?

  “His grandfather is a retired federal judge,” I said. “Hugh’s ancestor was Grover Linden.”

  Now she reacted. “Linden as in Linden?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wow,” she said. “Now that would be a scandal.”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “Had Hugh confronted his grandfather?”

  I thought about the file of unread letters in my desk. “I think so.”

  “How was Hugh going to expose him? Go to the newspapers, write a book, what?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You know what’s amazing about this story?”

  “All of it?” I suggested.

  “Yeah, there’s that, but also Grover Linden’s great-something grandson is discovered dead on the university campus and there’s almost nothing in the papers.”

  I hadn’t been reading the papers while I was on my drinking binge. “Really?”

  “Half a column in the Linden Gazette,” she said. “Nothing in the San Francisco papers. Not on the local TV news. That’s strange.”

  “His last name is Paris, not Linden. Maybe no one made the connection.”

  “In this town, someone would have made the connection,” she said, then added, darkly, “Maybe someone did and put a lid on it.”

  “His grandfather?” I suggested. “Or maybe his mother. She’s te
aching at the university this semester.”

  She nodded. “Lot of loose ends in this case. They might not add up to anything different than accidental overdose.”

  “I know,” I said. “But let’s tie them up. What next?”

  “Like Torres said, as far as the department is concerned, the case is closed,” she said. “I can’t go around interviewing people like his mother or his grandfather, but I can retrace our investigation, review the physical evidence, talk to the medical examiner, and see what comes up. You’re a civilian, you can talk to anyone you want. Find out what you can about what Hugh was planning to do with this information about his grandfather and how much his grandfather knew about it.”

  “Yeah, it makes sense to divide the investigation up like that.”

  She finished her coffee. “It’s not an official investigation, Henry. Right now, we’re just asking questions. So don’t get yourself into any jams you can’t get yourself out of because I won’t be able to help you.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” I said. “I can take care of myself.”

  Hugh’s cottage was dark, the narrow street empty, and the fog was drifting in as I sat in my car working up the nerve to enter the house. I had a key, given to me by the owner, so I wouldn’t be trespassing. The ambush I feared was from my own feelings. I’d brought a pint of liquid courage with me. I downed a slug, got out of my car and made my way up the steps and into the house. Hugh’s scent lingered in the frigid air as I moved through the front room into the bedroom. The scent was even stronger there. I switched on the bedside lamp. The unmade bed still held the imprints of our bodies. I touched the sheets. They were cold. Everything in the house was as chilly as a mausoleum. I reminded myself of why I’d come, went over to the ridiculously ornate desk and rolled up the top. The surface was covered with piles of papers, the evidence he said he’d gathered that proved his grandfather was a murderer. I hadn’t believed him, but now he was dead under suspicious circumstances. I had to consider the possibility he had been telling the truth.

  I glanced at the papers. Xeroxed copies of newspaper articles and police reports pertaining to a car accident twenty years earlier. The wills of Christina Smith Paris and Jeremy Paris. A thick, red-bound book with its face turned down. I turned the book over and, to my surprise, recognized it as a copy of the trusts and estates case book I had used in law school, authored by my professor, John Henry Howard. I went through the desk drawers and in one of them found three composition books. I opened the first and recognized Hugh’s handwriting. The other two were the same. I went into the closet and found a small suitcase. I stuffed the papers, the journals and Professor Howard’s case book into it. I looked around the room to see if there was anything else of interest and I saw, propped against the wall, Lady in Satin. I grabbed the album and threw it in the suitcase, too. On my way out, I detoured to the bookshelf, found The Little Prince and added it to the contents of the suitcase. I cracked open the front door, checked the street to make sure it was empty, and hurried out of the cottage to my car. There was a stop sign at the end of the street. As I waited at it, I happened to glance back at Hugh’s cottage in the rear view mirror. Two men were climbing the steps to the entrance. They were too far away for me to see their faces as one of them unlocked the door and they went into the cottage.

  Step Eight, made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

  There was a column of names beneath the sentence. The first one was Grant Hancock.

  Hugh had begun the journals when he entered the drug treatment facility in New York where he got clean. Evidently, part of the program was based on the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. I knew about AA because attending AA meetings was a standard condition of probation for my clients who had been convicted of alcohol-related offenses. I had never actually read AA’s twelve steps, much less an account of someone attempting to live in his life in accordance with them until I started reading Hugh’s journals. I had picked them out of the piles of papers I had taken from his cottage for the simple reason that I wanted to hear his voice again, even if only his written voice.

  Today they took us to an outside AA meeting on the upper west side at a big fancy church probably built by one of Grover’s friends. The meeting was in the basement, of course. No matter how fancy the church, the basements are always the same. Windowless, scuffed up walls, cheap folding chairs, smelling like stale coffee and mothballs. All sorts of weird things were tucked away in the corners, rolled up flags, choir robes, Xmas decorations. It was my first time out of the house since I detoxed and I was feeling really shaky. Paranoid. Two girls walked in behind me and they were talking and laughing. I just knew they were laughing at me. I felt like I was made out of glass and if I took one wrong step, I would shatter. My hands were shaking so hard I couldn’t hold the Styrofoam cup of crappy AA coffee and spilled it all over my hands. I wanted to cry. A guy saw me, took the cup, gave me a napkin to clean up. He took me to a chair. “Sit here,” he said. He sat beside me with my coffee. “I’ll hold it for you until you can hold it yourself.” I nodded. I couldn’t talk. Then the meeting started. The speaker was a woman in her fifties, maybe, really nice clothes, nice hair, good makeup. She looked like the house mother for a sorority. Then she told her story. She was a junkie, too, back in the 60s. Strung out and whoring herself for a fix. She was laughing, like it had all been a joke, but I knew she was telling the truth. Then she talked about how she got clean and sober. I was dying, she said, I could feel my body dying, shutting down and that was okay with me. I had nothing to live for anyway. Why not die? Then one day, one shitty day just like all the other shitty days before it, I was lying in my bed trying to think of a reason to get up and I heard someone say, oh, God, I am so tired of all this. Help me. I looked around the room but I was alone. Then I realized I was the one who had spoken, I said it again. Oh, God, I am so tired of all this. Help me. Then I started crying, crying and crying until there was nothing left, not a tear left. I called my brother, who was the last person left who hadn’t written me off and I told him, please, help me, I don’t want to die.

  That’s when I started crying. The guy with my coffee put his arm around me. That made me cry even harder. I looked at him and said, “I don’t want to die, either.” He said, “I know, son. None of us do. That’s why we’re here.”

  “Oh, Hugh,” I thought and closed the journal. I went out for a walk. Twilight suffused the sky with pinks and gray. Above them, the first stars flickered in the darker blue. Bird song filled the air. He said he wanted to live. He had trudged up from Hell clinging to the hope of a different life. No way he had killed himself. No way.

  When I returned home, I put the journals aside and read through the police reports from the CHP regarding the fatal car accident fifteen years earlier that had killed Christina Smith Paris and Jeremy Paris, Hugh’s grandmother and uncle. According to the CHP, Jeremy Paris was heading east on Interstate 80 through the Sierra Nevadas in the far left lane at dusk a few days before Thanksgiving. The road was icy, traffic was light and there had been a snowstorm earlier in the week. About twenty miles outside of Truckee, Jeremy Paris lost control of his car and went through the center divider. The car skidded across four lanes of westbound traffic, causing a pile-up as other cars jammed on their brakes to avoid hitting the vehicle before it drove off the road where it slammed into a tree. Christina Smith was dead when the police arrived. Jeremy Paris died at the scene.

  A witness named Warren Hansen, who had been behind Jeremy Paris’s car, claimed the Paris car was racing another car in the next lane and they were both speeding. He said just before the accident the second car bumped the side of the Paris car. The report noted Hansen was HBD, cop talk for had been drinking. Hansen’s statements were duly noted and dismissed. The cop who took the report concluded that Jeremy Paris had simply lost control of his car as he sped down the icy roads at dusk.

  A clipping from a Sacramento newspaper basically repeated t
he CHP report, adding that an inquest had been conducted and the deaths had been ruled accidental.

  This is what Hugh had on his grandfather? I read the reports again, and then again. What was Hugh thinking? That his grandfather had run the car off the road? It was, at most, a case of road rage and only if Hansen’s account was believable. Obviously the cop who had talked to him on the scene didn’t think it was. Did Hugh find something the cops had missed? I flipped through everything he had collected about the accident. Nothing.

  I started to go through Christina Smith Paris’s will. It was very long and detailed with pages and pages of addenda but the bottom line was clear enough. Other than charitable and individual bequests, her estate was divided among her two sons, Jeremy and Nicholas. Okay, that was interesting. Christina had left nothing to her husband. That wasn’t necessarily significant since he would have inherited their community property. Maybe she figured that was enough. Jeremy, who was unmarried when he died, left his estate in trust to his nephew, Hugh.

  I had reached a dead end with the documents. It was time to start talking to people. I would begin with the last person who had seen Hugh alive, the first person on his list of those to whom he owed an apology, the other boy in the picture Hugh had sent to me: Grant Hancock.

  SIX

  The next morning I went to the county law library and looked up Grant Hancock’s entry in Martindale Hubbell, the directory of every lawyer in the country. His full name was Grant Graham Hancock, Jr., B.A. summa cum laude, English, from Linden University. Looking at the dates, I realized he would have been a freshman at the university when I was a senior. J.D. from Boalt with honors. I wondered why UC Berkeley instead of Linden for law school. Following graduation from Boalt he had clerked for—the name of the judge stopped me short. The Hon. Robert W. Paris, District Court Judge for the Northern District of California, Hugh’s grandfather. When the clerkship ended, he went to work as a litigation associate for, Madison and Dewey, a white-shoe law firm in San Francisco that had been around in one form or another for a hundred years. Precisely the kind of firm I would have expected someone named Grant Graham Hancock, Jr. to have gone to work for. Then, a surprise. After two years at Menzies, he left and went to work for Rosenthal, Dixon, Goldman and Woods, an upstart firm known for its partners’ liberal politics and the firm’s emphasis on pro bono work. For someone with Hancock’s pedigree to have gone from Menzies to Rosenthal was like a rich kid who ran off with the circus. Then, under Associations, another surprise. Along with the usual yuppie bar and civic organizations, Grant Hancock listed the San Francisco Lawyers for Individual Freedom and Empowerment. Better known under its acronym, LIFE was the city’s gay and lesbian bar association.