Lay Your Sleeping Head

by Michael Nava

  The door to my apartment was cracked open and there was a glimmer of light from within but I couldn’t hear anyone moving around inside. I pushed the door open and called out, “We’re coming in!”

  Silence. The lights were on in every room, drawers and cabinets were open, clothes and papers tossed to the ground. My keys and wallet were on my desk but the documents I had taken from Hugh’s apartment were gone.

  Behind me, Grant said, “Someone was here looking for something.”

  “Yeah, and they found it.”

  “What’s missing?”

  “Documents I took from Hugh’s apartment after he died,” I said.

  “What kind of documents?”

  “They were related to the investigation of the death of his grandmother and his Uncle Jeremy in a car crash fifteen years ago.”

  He frowned. “You asked me about that last night. What’s going on here, Henry?”

  “I appreciate you coming to my rescue last night, and everything else, but I can take it from here. You don’t need to get involved.”

  He sat down on the couch. “I’m already involved. Don’t blow me off now. Or is it that you don’t trust me? If you think I’m going to the judge, you’re wrong. He wasn’t a friend even before I knew what he did to Hugh. I think I deserve an explanation.”

  “Okay,” I said, sitting beside him. “Hugh told me his grandfather had his grandmother and uncle killed to get control of her money because she was going to divorce him. He’d been collecting evidence and when he died, I used the key he gave me to his place and brought it here.”

  He absorbed this. “Was he right?” he asked. “Did the evidence support his claim?”

  “I couldn’t find proof that the judge was involved in the accident,” I said. “Until last night, I would’ve said Hugh had imagined it.”

  “You mean the mugging?”

  “It wasn’t a mugging, Grant. Someone followed me to your place, waited until I came out, abducted me and shot me up with sodium pentothal, probably to find out what I knew about Hugh’s allegations against the judge. I must have told them about the papers.”

  “So they came here and took them,” he said. “But you said the papers didn’t prove anything.”

  “They wouldn’t have known that without looking at them. They were worried enough about what Hugh knew to kill him.” I glanced at him. “Hugh was murdered.”

  “I admit this makes his death look suspicious,” Grant said. “What are you going to do now?”

  “Call the cop I’ve been working with, tell her what happened, see if she’s got any new leads about Hugh’s death,” I said. “Talk to some other people. You know his great-uncle John. Can you get me in to see him?”

  “What are you going to tell him?” Grant asked. “That Judge Paris had Hugh murdered because he was out to expose the judge for having had his wife and oldest son killed?”

  “Something like that,” I replied.

  “Henry, this is his family you’re talking about. His sister, his nephews, his brother-in-law. If he doesn’t think you’re crazy, he’ll think you’re trying to extort him.”

  “He was the only person in his family Hugh trusted. He should know what happened to Hugh.”

  “You can’t walk into John Smith’s office and tell him his brother-in-law is a mass murderer without proof. What would you accomplish by doing that except upset him?”

  “All right,” I conceded. “I see your point. I won’t go to him yet. I should clean up.”

  “Let me give you a hand.”

  I was picking up files from the floor around my desk and putting them away when I found the accordion file Aaron Gold had given me with copies of the letters he said Hugh had written to his grandfather. The letters were still inside. In their haste, the burglars had either overlooked the file or missed its significance. I set it aside. Grant came over holding Professor Howard’s casebook.

  “I found this by the door,” he said. “You use it as a door stop?”

  “I took it from Hugh’s house,” I said. “It was with the copies of the wills.”

  “Whose wills?”

  “His grandmother’s and his Uncle Jeremy’s,” I said.

  Grant was paging through the book. He stopped and said, “Did Hugh have a particular interest in the doctrine of simultaneous death?”

  I looked over his shoulder. On page 293, a paragraph had been highlighted in yellow, typical of how law students marked up their texts.

  “He must have bought the book used.”

  Grant closed the book and tossed it on my desk.

  “I’m hungry,” I said. “Buy you dinner?”

  “It’s getting late, I need to get home. Will you keep in touch?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Thanks for everything, Grant. I wish we’d met under different circumstances too.”

  He smiled wryly and said, “Circumstances can change.”

  It wasn’t until after he left that I noticed the answering machine light was blinking. Terry Ormes had left a message asking me to meet her at Denny’s the next morning. I ate two bowls of cereal and washed them down with a shot of Jack Daniel’s. I looked at the file on my desk of Hugh’s letters to his grandfather. I was exhausted, physically and emotionally. I decided that whatever was in them could wait and went to bed.

  Terry was waiting for me when I arrived. As always, she wore severe attire meant to render her invisible as a woman—a black pantsuit, a white blouse. Her deliberate plainness emphasized rather than diminished her small concessions toward femininity; the thin gold chain around her neck and the gold loop earrings, her manicured fingernails, a faint floral fragrance from her soap or moisturizer. The waitress brought coffee, took my order and said to Ormes, “The usual?” Ormes smiled and nodded. When she left, we started talking at the same moment.

  “You first,” I said.

  She took a folder out of her bag and lay it on the table. “The autopsy report,” she said. “You were right about the bruises on his chest. There were also ligature marks around his wrists.”

  She opened the folder, flipped through it, and passed a set of photographs across the table. Close-ups of Hugh’s chest and arms and hands. There were the discolorations I’d observed in his chest and faint reddish rings around his wrists. I stared at his hands which looked smaller and more delicate than I’d remembered.

  “Henry?”

  I passed the photographs back to her. “It looks like his hands were tied together.”

  “It looks that way to me too,” she said.

  “What caused the bruises?”

  “The coroner tried to tell me it was from the paramedics’ attempt to revive him, but I was there when they arrived. Hugh was already dead. I think someone pushed down on him hard. And there’s something else. You said Hugh was a junkie.”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “There was bad bruising around the last injection site. It was a sloppy job of shooting up.”

  “He would’ve known exactly what to do,” I said. “Let me see the picture of his hands again.”

  She gave it to me. I remembered teasing him about the scratches he’d left on my back with his long nails. Now I looked closely at his fingers and thought I saw some debris trapped beneath his nails. I pointed it out to her. She reached into her bag and pulled out a magnifier and studied the photograph.

  “Could be,” she said. “You think he fought his attacker and got some of the guy’s skin beneath his nails?”

  “The dented glove compartment, the crack in the windshield,” I reminded her. “Hugh was fighting.”

  “You could interpret it that way,” she replied. “One other thing. I went back and examined the busted tail light on his car. I saw fresh paint transfer around the bumper. That could mean the tail light was broken when someone rear ended his car.”

  I thought about the implications. “When two people get into a minor traffic accident, they pull over. Maybe that’s how his attacker got Hugh out of his car to grab him.”


  “There would have been at least two of them,” she said. “One to drive Hugh’s car to the campus with Hugh handcuffed in the passenger seat, one to follow in the getaway car. If that’s what happened.”

  “What else could explain this evidence?”

  “The tox screen came back,” she said. “Straight heroin. The coroner is sticking to accidental overdose.”

  “How does he explain the other evidence?” I demanded.

  “Unrelated, coincidental, insignificant,” she said like she was quoting him.

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said.

  “You don’t have to convince me,” she said. “But I don’t have enough juice to get him to reconsider. It’s not even my case.”

  “So, what next?”

  “Hugh was a Linden,” she said. “If someone in his family were willing to pressure the coroner into taking a closer look at his death, that might get the investigation reopened.”

  Our food came. Ormes dug in to her bacon, eggs and pancakes. I stared at my omelet wondering who in Hugh’s family I could approach. Not his father who was in a mental institution. Not his great-uncle John who was off-limits for now.

  “Let me approach his mother,” I said. “She’s at the university.”

  “Good,” she said. “I told you what I know. Your turn.”

  I had told her Hugh said there were issues with his grandfather, but I’d kept the full story from her because I didn’t think she would believe it any more than I had and that would make her less likely to investigate Hugh’s death. Now I told her everything Hugh had told me, what I found out on my own, and about my abduction, the sodium pentothal and the break-in at my apartment. By the time I finished, her plate was clean.

  “You realize that no one is going to believe someone like Judge Paris killed his wife and son,” she said.

  “Do you?”

  She turned the question back on me.

  “After what happened last night,” I said, “I think it’s worth investigating. Hugh may not have found the smoking gun that implicated the judge in the murders, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. Why else would Hugh have been murdered?”

  “To keep him from exposing the judge as a child molester,” she suggested.

  “Maybe, but you’re the one who pointed out that, legally, the judge is beyond prosecution for that. Sure, Hugh could have embarrassed him with the allegations but the judge could have fought back with a libel suit or painted them as the rantings of the family black sheep. But there is no statute of limitations on murder. That could bring him down. There’s your motive.”

  She looked thoughtful. “It’s such an incredible story, Henry.”

  “So was Watergate,” I said.

  “This isn’t Watergate.”

  “So you don’t believe it’s possible that Hugh was on to something?”

  “I believe the shortest distance between two points is a straight line,” she said. “And I don’t believe in coincidences. Hugh thought he had something on Judge Paris in the papers you took from his house, then Hugh ends up dead and the papers are stolen from you. Who would want them except the judge?” She glanced at my plate. “Your food’s cold.”

  “I’m not really hungry.”

  “Eat anyway,” she said.

  She held up her coffee cup and the waitress came by, filled both our cups, and cleared Terry’s plate.

  “I don’t know if the judge killed his wife and son,” she said, “and even if he did, that trail is cold. We need to focus on Hugh’s murder.”

  “But motive—” I began.

  She shook her head. “Motive isn’t an element of murder. You know that.”

  “It’s not a legal element,” I replied, “but I’ve never tried a murder case where the prosecutor didn’t feel obligated to prove motive. Otherwise, it’s like a telling a story and leaving out the most important part of the plot.”

  “I still say let’s concentrate on Hugh. Talk to his mother about getting the medical examiner to reopen the case.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I have a friend in the DA’s office and I’m going to try to get him interested.” She finished her coffee. “Do you remember any details of the accident that killed the grandma and uncle?”

  “I dictated some notes,” I said. “The burglars missed my voice recorder. Why? I thought you said we weren’t going to focus on that.”

  “Yeah, but you’re right about motive,” she said. “I’ll see if I can pull the accident reports.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I grabbed the check. “On me.” I asked the waitress to box my untouched food.

  I called the English Department and learned that Katherine Paris would be in her office that day. In the afternoon, on the way back from my run, I detoured to the campus bookstore. The blue-frocked sales clerk didn’t bat an eye at my sweaty running clothes but directed me to the second floor where the poetry section took up several long shelves against the back wall. For a brief time in college, I wrote poetry. Like most undergrad verse, my poems were conceived in the loins rather than the mind and when I started having sex, the poems stopped. My brush with poetry, however, left me with a permanent respect for those who wrote it well. Seeing familiar names again, from Auden to Whitman, took me back to the sunny autumn afternoons when I sat alone in my dorm room searching for language to describe my latest infatuation.

  Katherine Paris had published four slim volumes, including Whirligig, the book that Hugh had in his cottage. The collection began with a poem she called My Body.

  Throat puckered like crepe

  right hand throbbing with arthritis

  right hip permanently higher than the left, right leg shorter

  after years of books slung from one shoulder.

  I read on, immediately taken by the humane voice, at once self-effacing and courageous.

  sagging belly testament to fear, dieting, birth, abortion, miscarriage

  years of fighting booze and overeating still written in my flesh.

  Eyes needing bifocals now, no good for driving at night,

  still blue and intense, tired but my best feature—

  or maybe it’s my hands, strong, blunt with prominent veins.

  I stopped reading, certain I was being watched. I closed the book and looked around. The boy standing at the end of the aisle quickly directed his attention to his feet.

  He wore a baggy pair of khaki shorts rolled up at the bottom over a long sinewy pair of legs. He had on a white sweatshirt with a red paisley bandana tied around his neck and a small button with the lambda—the symbol of gay liberation—on it. Short, dark hair framed a round cherubic face. He looked about nineteen. When he shyly raised his eyes to mine, I realized I was being cruised, not spied on.

  “Hello,” I said. “I’m Henry.”

  “I’m Danny,” he replied, bounding toward me. He saw the book in my hand. “I’m taking her poetry workshop.”

  “Have you met her yet?”

  He nodded. “She was here last spring to give a reading and afterwards a bunch of us went to dinner with her.”

  “Was she like her poems?”

  He tilted his head, puzzled by my question. “What do you mean?”

  “Her poems are warm and compassionate. Is she like that?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “She gave a great reading, but she didn’t say much at dinner. Just smoked and drank tea and seemed kind of tired.” He took the book from me. “This is my favorite one of her poems.”

  The scent you say is not scent

  rises from warm ports

  between neck and shoulder.

  Scent that isn’t witch hazel, vetiver, camphor, lemon

  but is just your skin,

  raises a breeze on mine . . . .

  He closed the book and gave me what I imagined he thought was a seductive smile, but which struck me as adorable and silly.

  “I can see why you like it,” I said. “It’s very sensual.”

  “Sexy,”
he said. “Like you. Are you a grad student or something?”

  “I’m a lawyer,” I said.

  He had edged toward me and was close enough that I felt his breath on my skin. “You’re not dressed like a lawyer.” He plucked the strap from my singlet. “I live close by. You want to come over?”

  “Danny, I’m probably fifteen years older than you.”

  He grinned. “I like older men. They know what to do.”

  “Sorry, baby, I’m going to have to take a rain check.”

  He made a pretend frown. “Aww.” He grabbed my hand and turned it palm up, pulled a marking pen out of his pocket and wrote his name and phone number on my skin. “In case you change your mind.”

  “Okay, then,” I said.

  “Call me, Henry,” he said, with a bright smile. He waved at me from the top of the stairs and was gone.

  I looked at my palm. Had I ever been as bold and innocent? No. I belonged to that generation of gay men still too deeply tainted by shame to have expressed our desire so openly. We didn’t wear identifying buttons. Like Hugh and me, we recognized each other from our scars.

  Billie Holiday’s voice filled the room:

  Love is funny or it’s sad

  It’s quiet or it’s mad

  It’s a good thing or it’s bad

  But beautiful . . .

  The queen of junkies, Hugh called her. The liner notes for Lady in Satin said it was her last recording but one. Her voice was little more than a husky croak, but what she had lost in range she made up for in wisdom and melancholy. I played the record over and over as I sipped Jack Daniel’s and read the half-dozen letters Hugh had written to his grandfather in the last months of his life. They didn’t have salutations, but began as if in mid-conversation, one that I imagined Hugh had been having in his head for years before he took pen to paper.

  Remember the first time? I said please stop it hurts, and that excited you, didn’t it, because you wanted to hurt me. You wanted me to cry, to beg. I couldn’t make you stop but I could refuse to give you that twisted pleasure you took in hurting me. I kept it all inside after that, let you fuck me without a word, without a sound, even when you made me bleed. How did no one notice my bloody underwear, the blood on the sheets? Did you pay off the maid? And my grandmother, she knew, didn’t she? After a while she could barely stand to look at me. Like it was my fault. Did she look at Jeremy that way? Because you did it to him too, didn’t you? Isn’t that why he hated you so much? Is that why you killed him? Yes, I know about that. You killed them both. Pretty soon everyone will know what you are. Rapist, murderer, psychopath.