by Michael Nava
“Do you believe that?” I asked.
“I’m a drunk,” she said. “A sober drunk, but still a drunk, and there’s one thing I am very clear about. You don’t get to blame your using or drinking on someone else. No one else puts the needle or the glass in your hand. That’s a choice each addict makes. No one else can put them down for you. That’s your choice too.”
“Addiction is a loss of control,” I said.
“No,” she said, firmly. “It’s not like Nick’s schizophrenia. Using, drinking, they’re compulsions, that’s true, but as long as you’re alive there is always the option of stopping. I’m not saying it’s easy or that most people can stop on their own. I was fortunate enough to stumble into AA at a moment when I would have done anything to stop drinking. I prayed that moment would someday arrive for Hugh.” She touched the edge of the letter. “It seems like it did. He says he was clean. Is that true?”
“He had one relapse,” I said. “When he went to visit his father. Other than that, he was clean for the nine months before he died.”
“He went to see Nick?”
I nodded. “It was too much for him.”
“God,” she said. “He shouldn’t have gone by himself. Nick is—” She put out her cigarette and lit another. “Nick is as good as dead. Mr. Rios. What do you think happened to my son the night he died if it wasn’t an overdose?”
“I’d seen him earlier. We’d spent the day together. He had dinner with a man he’d known in prep school, Grant Hancock. Then he drove down here. On his way, he was rear ended by someone who I believe was following him. When they pulled over to exchange information, the other driver or someone else in the car with him grabbed Nick, restrained him and drove him to the campus where they injected him with a lethal overdose and left him to die.”
“Oh, God,” she said, and I could see her picturing the scene in her mind’s eye. “Who did this?”
“Mrs. Paris, I think it was your ex-father-in-law.”
“Bob? Why? Is this about the sexual abuse?”
“You knew about that?”
“It was one of the things Hugh blamed me for.”
“You believed him?”
She hesitated. “I don’t know,” she said, “but I do know if he planned to accuse Bob publicly, Bob would have fought back, not killed him. He would have enjoyed the chance to humiliate Hugh as a homosexual drug addict and extortionist.”
“Hugh thought he had something else on his grandfather,” I said.
“What was that?”
I told her about the accident and the wills and the simultaneous death finding that had secured the Linden fortune for Judge Paris.
“That’s incredible,” she said. “Can you prove any of it?”
“I’m think I’m getting close.”
“And you say Hugh knew about this?”
“Yes,”
“And he told Bob?”
“In a letter,” I replied.
She sat quietly for a moment, smoking. “I don’t know if any of this is true,” she said. “But I hate Robert Paris and I’m grateful to you. What do you need from me?”
“Have you buried Hugh yet?”
“His body is in a mortuary in San Francisco,” she said. “I’m flying him home next weekend to bury him with my family. I can’t stand the idea of him being anywhere near the Lindens. Why?”
“The country coroner ruled his death accidental overdose but both I and the police detective I’m working with saw indications on his body that were inconsistent with that ruling. I’d like an independent forensic pathologist to examine his body for signs that he was murdered. A second, independent autopsy.”
A look of horror briefly crossed her face, but then she nodded, slowly. “Yes, all right. What do I need to do?”
“There’s a pathologist in the city I’ve used before in some of my cases. Will you authorize the mortuary to release Hugh’s body to Doctor O’Hara?”
She nodded again. “I’ll call them this afternoon.” She stood up. “I don’t know if I should thank you.”
“I understand,” I said.
“Goodbye, Mr. Rios.” She paused at the door. “You know, Nick was right. We are cursed.”
TEN
Some of the Chinese laborers who built Grover Linden’s railroad were lowered in wicker baskets over mountainsides to set dynamite charges, and died in the explosions when the baskets could not be reeled up fast enough. Others were entombed in tunnels that collapsed on them or in avalanches. The number of the dead is not known but when their bodies were exhumed and returned to China for burial after the railroad was completed, one newspaper estimated that twenty thousand pounds of bones made the journey.
These details of the construction of the transcontinental railroad were not in my fourth grade California history text. I’d had to dig through some pretty obscure sources at the university library to find them. Among the stories were photographs of the Chinese railroad workers. I studied the faces beneath the broad-brimmed straw hats and derbies, surprised at how young most of them had been. On further thought, it made sense that Linden would have recruited the youngest and strongest men for his railroad. He had been mocked when he had first recruited Chinese workers who were considered physically weak and effeminate because of their small stature. “Linden’s monkeys,” the newspapers called them. But they proved to be tireless and disciplined and brave. That didn’t prevent Linden from paying them half the wage of white workers and cutting off their food when they struck for equal pay.
Behind every great fortune lies a great crime. Balzac’s phrase came to me as I sat in the university library’s Special Collections room, shuffling through the photographs with gloved hands. The room was so quiet I could hear the scratching of a grad student’s pencil on paper behind me. The lights were filtered to prevent the old documents preserved in the collection from fading and the room was antiseptically clean and odorless. A morgue where history came to be dissected, autopsied. A place of forgotten achievements and forgotten suffering. But for Nick Paris, the sins of the father had not been forgotten or forgiven and the suffering would not end without a sacrifice; blood for blood.
“The special collection room closes in fifteen minutes,” the librarian said in a hushed voice. “Please return your materials.”
I slipped the photographs into their folder, as haunted by the eyes of the young men as Nick Paris must have been when he conceived his anguished idea to sacrifice his son. Blood for blood. Perhaps the sacrifice had been completed when the cops found Hugh with a needle jammed into his arm.
The framed diploma from John Marshall Law School had been issued to Wendell Ronald Patterson but the nameplate on the desk identified the occupant of the office as Sonny Patterson, Deputy District Attorney. He glanced up from the autopsy report he was reading, noticed me looking at his diploma and said, “What?”
“Wendell,” I said.
He took a drag from his cigarette, scattering ashes on his pale green shirt and bright orange tie. “I been Sonny since I was two years old.” He returned to his reading.
Hick was written all over his puffy potato face, but Ormes, sitting beside me, assured me that it was an act, like his loud mismatched clothes. He had told her he got jurors to like him by letting them think they were smarter than he was. “Don’t be fooled,” she said. “He’s sharp.”
She had persuaded me to come to him with everything we had collected on Hugh’s death. I’d agreed on the condition that she not mention that Hugh was a Linden descendant or anything about Judge Paris. I didn’t want Patterson’s view of the evidence colored by the Linden family association. Patterson reached the end of Jack O’Hara’s independent autopsy report, squashed his cigarette in a frog-shaped ashtray and leaned back in his swivel chair, pulling apart the shirt buttons over his belly to reveal a white T-shirt.
“Why are you bringing me this shit, Terry?” he asked.
“Wanted your opinion,” she said. “Was it an accidental overdose?”
>
“If it wasn’t,” he replied, “someone went to a lot a trouble to make it look that way.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Someone did.”
He threw me a dismissive look. “Still not sure why you’re here.”
“I represent the interests of the victim’s mother,” I said, which wasn’t precisely untrue. “She wants to know what happened to her son.”
“So she hires a criminal defense lawyer,” he said, clearly disbelieving me.
“Come on, Sonny,” Terry said. “What do you think?”
“I think this ship has sailed, but if you’d brought this to me when the kid died, I’d have made Torres work it a hell of a lot harder than he did before writing it off as accidental.”
“You don’t think it was accidental,” I pressed.
“I didn’t say that,” he replied. “Even if you’d brought it fresh, we’d be miles away from a prosecution. What I have here is suggestive, that’s all. First thing we’d have to establish is that it was a homicide. Of course, we might be having a different conversation if you’d been straight with me. Did you think I wouldn’t recognize the victim’s name? He’s a Linden.”
“How did you know that?” I asked.
“The university is the only reason this town exists,” he said. “Biggest landowner, biggest employer, biggest taxpayer and the source of most crime. I make it my business to know everything I can about Linden University and the Linden family. What else are you holding back?”
“I think Hugh was killed on his grandfather’s orders because he was threatening to expose Judge Paris’s involvement in the deaths of his wife and son Jeremy.”
Patterson looked at Ormes. “Is he serious?”
“Hear him out,” she said.
He went through three cigarettes while we told him the rest of the story. His cramped office reeked of smoke. He crushed the third cigarette into the ashtray, then dumped the butts in a paper-stuffed trash can. I half-expected it to burst into flames.
“That’s the damndest story I ever heard,” he said.
“That doesn’t mean it isn’t true,” I replied.
He grinned. “We’re lawyers, Henry. We don’t deal in what’s true, we deal in what’s provable. Applying that standard, you got nothing.”
“Circumstantial evidence of motive,” I said.
“Straw in the wind. Even if this witness, Hansen, testified the other car ran the Paris car off the road, you’ve got nothing to connect the driver to the judge.”
“Cui bono,” I said.
Patterson smirked. “We spoke English at my law school.”
“Drop the yokel act. You know damn well what it means,” I said. “Who profits? Who gained the most by the deaths of Christina and Jeremy Paris? Robert Paris.”
“Entirely coincidental unless you have something that directly ties him to the accident. Do you?”
I shifted in my seat. “Hugh’s murder, the theft of the papers at my apartment. The judge obviously believed Hugh had gathered evidence to prove he was involved in the accident, so he had Hugh killed and ordered the burglary. That connects him to the accident.”
“Lawyers don’t say obviously unless they’re desperate,” Patterson remarked, lighting yet another Marlboro. “You’re bootstrapping, Henry, plus where’s the evidence that connects the judge to Hugh’s murder or the burglary, and don’t throw some fancy Latinism at me.”
“Who else has any motive?” I snapped. “You know, Sonny, there is a point when a chain of coincidences becomes too fucking unbelievable to be coincidental.”
“Cussing doesn’t make your case any more obvious,” he said, clearly enjoying my discomfort. “But because I like conspiracy theories as much as the next guy, I gotta tell you, you missed something.”
“What’s that, Sonny?” Ormes replied.
“Why was he dumped at the university?”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll bite. Why?”
“The university runs by its own rules,” he said “and it has its own interests. We poor fools out here want to solve crimes and punish the guilty. The university wants to protect its image. What do you think the university would do if one of the Lindens was murdered on campus?”
“Cover up,” I said. “But how would anyone know Hugh was a Linden? He didn’t have any ID on him.”
“Who was first on the scene, Terry?” Patterson asked.
“The campus police,” she replied.
“Do you know how long it took them to call you after they got to the scene?”
She shook her head. “I assume they called in right away.”
He dug through the papers on his desk and pulled out an incident report on university police stationery that had a lot of black lines across the text.
“Fifty-five minutes,” he said. “That’s how much time passed before they notified the department. Plenty of time to do a lot of things, including removing the kid’s wallet.”
She skimmed the report. “I haven’t seen this before,” she said. “Why is it all blacked out?”
Patterson stubbed his cigarette out. “Redacted to protect the privacy of the victim. That’s what the university lawyer told me. Which is bullshit, of course. I’m willing to bet my pension that the first cops on the scene saw the same things you did, Terry, the signs of a struggle, the drag marks, the clumsy way he was injected, and they came to the same conclusion, that something didn’t add up. For all we know, there might have been even more evidence pointing to homicide.”
“Are you saying the university cops tampered with evidence?” I asked.
“I’m saying that once someone figured out who this kid was, death by accidental overdose had to look a lot more manageable PR-wise than a Linden heir murdered on the university campus. But you’re missing the point, Henry.”
“Which is what?”
“Whoever dumped him on campus knew that his identity would be discovered and that the university would cover up any evidence of homicide.”
I nodded. “So whoever abducted and killed Hugh and dumped his body on campus knew who he was.”
“That’s right,” Patterson said.
“That points back to Judge Paris,” Terry said.
“Or is that another straw in the wind too?” I asked.
“Well, it’s not obvious,” Patterson replied with heavy sarcasm, “but as far as I’m concerned, it’s one coincidence too many.”
“Why did you ask the university for this report?” I asked.
“I told you,” he said, “I make it my job to keep tabs on what goes on at the university. When Terry told me what she wanted to talk about, I did my own little investigation. I noticed right away how long it took the university cops to call the department but it didn’t mean anything until I heard your story.”
“Do you believe me now?”
“I believe the university knows more than what it’s saying about the kid’s death.”
I indicated the blacked-out police report. “The university doesn’t seem eager to share the information.”
“That’s why I’m going after them,” he chortled.
“With what?”
“I’ll tell the university’s lawyers if they give us what they have on Hugh’s death, I’ll drop my investigation into the deaths of Christina and Jeremy Paris.”
“That case is even more circumstantial than Hugh’s murder,” I said. “Why wouldn’t they just tell you to fuck yourself?”
“Because, like I said, the university is all about image and in the court of popular opinion the standard of proof is a lot lower than guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. I’ll have them shaking in their shoes if I spin them your story about how the accidental deaths of the granddaughter and grandson of the university’s founder maybe weren’t so accidental. That’s just not the kind of publicity the university wants. They’ll cave.”
“But if there’s evidence Hugh was killed, it leads back to the judge,” I said. “You can’t separate the two cases.”
Terry spoke u
p. “Henry, you told me what you wanted out of this was to prove Hugh didn’t die a junkie’s death. You wanted to give him back his dignity. Won’t it be enough if we can change the cause of death from accidental overdose to homicide even if we can’t prove who did it?”
“That’s all we may be able to accomplish,” Patterson said. “Because even if the judge killed all those people, we’re never going to get him on it. Rich people have their own law. You know that, Rios.”
“Yeah, I do,” I said. “Okay, fine. Sometimes all you have to fight injustice is to bury the truth in a footnote and hope that someone, someday will discover it.”
“What are you talking about?” Patterson asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “What do you need from me, Sonny?”
“Everything you’ve got on Christina and Jeremy Paris. I’ll go through it and then we’ll have another meeting and make the strongest case we can before I call the university lawyers for a meeting. Rattle their cages, see what I can shake loose.”
“You really have it in for the school, don’t you?” I said.
He lit another cigarette. “Last year I had to dismiss a brutal gang rape case that happened in one of the dorms because the girl recanted after the university’s lawyers got to her. A few months later, she killed herself. Like I said, the university operates by its own rules. I don’t think it should.”
I returned Grant’s call when I got home and it led to a dinner invitation in the city that I accepted. Driving up, I was forced to admit to myself that this was a date and it felt awkward, as if I were cheating on Hugh. The awkwardness disappeared when Grant opened the door to his apartment with a big smile and the phone pressed to his ear. He covered the mouthpiece and said, “Make us drinks. I’m almost done.”
As I fiddled with ice, glass and bottle in the kitchen I heard the words “gay cancer.” When he hung up, I brought the drinks into the living room, handed him his, and asked, “What was that all about?”
“Apparently there’s a new STD going around New York that people are calling the gay cancer. One more plot to drive us back into the closets.”