by Michael Nava
“Much of our evidence is circumstantial. Logs of phone calls and so forth. Some of it is necessarily inferential, perhaps even conjectural. But we are certain of the basic facts. Barron and Gold killed Hugh, and then Barron turned on Gold. We’ll give you everything we have so that in the event Barron is ever apprehended you can prosecute him. I think that’s all Mister Smith has to say at this time.”
“Thank you, Mister Caldwell, Mister Smith,” the DA said.
Now everyone was on their feet. There was much portentous shaking of hands and solemn “Thank you’s” and “You’re welcome’s” and then we were all firmly moved toward the door. Was I the only one who had noticed that Smith had given a statement without ever having said a word? But then he spoke. He laid a hand softly on my arm and subtly pulled me away from the others.
“You were Hugh’s friend,” he said quietly.
“I was,” I replied.
“He spoke about you. If there is anything I can ever do for you, Mr. Rios, you must let me know. You can reach me through Caldwell.”
“Thank you, sir. May I ask you one question? Are you sure that Aaron Gold was involved in Hugh’s death?”
“Oh, absolutely,” he said. “Did you know him?”
“He was a friend,” I said.
“Ah,” he said. “Then you have a double loss. My condolences.”
“Henry,” Terry said. “Come on.”
“Goodbye, Mr. Rios,” Smith said. “Don’t forget what I told you.”
“What was all that about with Smith?” Terry asked me on our way back to Linden. We were on Interstate 280 passing through the thickly-wooded hills where private roads and locked gates marked the enclaves of the rich. It was a perfect autumn day. In the woods, knots of trees were beginning to change color, red and orange and yellow. Thin, vaporous clouds unfurled themselves across the sky. I thought about John Smith and his 44-room mansion. How many of those rooms did he actually occupy? What did he do with the others? Fill them with priceless gewgaws and leave them to gather dust? Except, of course, they wouldn’t gather dust. That’s what the maids were for.
“He said Hugh had spoken to him about me, and that if I ever needed anything to let him know.”
“That’s a big chip,” she said.
“I don’t plan to cash it in,” I said. “He doesn’t have anything I want. It’s strange Caldwell didn’t mention Hugh’s other allegation against the judge.”
“The murders?” she said. “Maybe Hugh didn’t tell him.”
“He told me he did,” I said. “He told me Smith didn’t believe him.”
“Then that’s why Caldwell didn’t say anything about them.”
“Did I understand correctly that the DA really called off the search warrants on Barron to let Smith’s people do a private investigation?”
“Yeah,” she said curtly.
“That’s okay with you?”
“No one asked my opinion.”
“When Caldwell turns over the evidence implicating Aaron in Hugh’s murder I want to see it.”
She glanced at me. “You know that’s not going to happen, Henry. You’re a witness in this case. We’re not going to have some defense attorney claiming collusion.”
“I don’t believe Aaron had anything to do with it.”
“We’ve always thought two people were involved,” she reminded me. “The killer and the driver of the getaway car. My money is on Barron as the killer.”
“The driver would have the same liability as an aider and abettor,” I said. “Both of them would go down for murder. That’s not Aaron Gold.”
“He would only be an aider and abettor in murder if he knew that’s what Barron had in mind.”
I grunted. It was a slender reed, but I hung on to it.
She exited the freeway and drove me home. When I got out, she said, “I’ll let you know what I can. I’m sorry about your friend.”
Here was my quandary: if, as I believed, Aaron Gold was incapable of helping Peter Barron kill Hugh, then why had Barron killed Gold? What motive would he have had other than to keep Gold quiet about Hugh’s murder? I went ‘round and ‘round in my head trying out scenarios that exonerated my best friend, but in even the most generous ones, I came to the inescapable conclusion that Gold knew Barron had murdered Hugh and kept quiet. Whether he was an aider and abettor, a conspirator or an accessory after the fact, Aaron was implicated in Hugh’s murder. I thought back to our first year seminar in theories of justice. Aaron claimed to live by the principle that nothing is inherently right or wrong, but that everything is a means to an end. He liked to say there is no justice, only power. I never took him seriously. But maybe he really believed that and I refused to see it because if I had, we couldn’t have stayed friends. Ironically, the strongest evidence of Aaron’s involvement in Hugh’s murder wasn’t the possibility he was a moral opportunist; it was how he had consistently and adamantly warned me away from Hugh. Whatever else he may or not have believed in, Aaron believed in our friendship. He had tried to protect me. I was left to wonder what exactly he had tried to protect me from, and whether that included his participation in murder.
In the midst of my ruminations, Aaron’s sister Leah called me. I had given her my number at his funeral and told her to let me know if there was anything I could do for the family.
“The police said now that they know who killed Aaron, we can collect his things,” she said, after our awkward hellos.
“Ah,” I said. It made sense that since the cops thought Aaron’s murder was solved, they’d release the crime scene. “I’d be happy to help you pack up his house.”
“No, we can manage that,” she said. “but it’s just that, no one’s been in the place since he was . . . killed. To clean up, you know? I’m worried about my parents walking into the room where . . . he died and seeing . . .”
“I understand,” I said. “I have a key. I’ll take care of it before your parents arrive.”
“I would be so grateful,” she said. There was a pause and then she said, “The police say Aaron helped commit a murder and that’s why he was killed, to keep him quiet. I don’t believe it.”
“I know, it is hard to believe.”
“Do you believe it?”
“Of course not,” I said.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
After Leah’s call, I went out for a run to clear my head. When I returned, Grant was standing at my door with a paper bag in his hand. His smile was tentative. He held the bag out to me and said, “I brought you peaches.”
I opened the bag. Inside were two large, beautiful, fragrant peaches. “Why?” I asked him.
“Because flowers seemed too corny but I didn’t know what else to bring to apologize. I’m an idiot, Henry. I was wrong about Peter Barron.”
“Oh, you heard.”
“That he killed Hugh? Yeah, I heard. The other man he killed, he was a friend of yours?”
“Yes,” I said.
“And I sent you to him,” he said.
“I don’t think I was in any danger from Peter Barron, if that’s what you think. If he’d wanted to hurt me, he could’ve done it the night he abducted me.”
“He was behind that too?” Grant asked, eyebrows lifted in disbelief.
“I recognized his voice.”
“This just gets worse and worse. Do you hate me?”
“Now you are being an idiot.”
“I dated the guy and he was a murderer.”
“You didn’t know that,” I said. I took the bag. “Come inside, Grant. I’ve missed you.”
He smiled shyly. “I’ve missed you, too.”
Later, in bed, he said, “I’m crazy about you.”
“I need to tell you something.”
“What’s that?” he asked warily.
“Remember you said I didn’t want a boyfriend, that I wanted a cause.”
“That was stupid, I’m so sorry.”
“No, listen to me. My dad knew I was gay before I did,
and he hated me for it. Even when I understood why he hated me, I never felt I had done anything to deserve it, but I knew better than to admit who I was. So I lied until I could escape him. When I got to the university I thought I could finally be myself. I was right, about the gay part. I didn’t have to hide that anymore. I realized, though, that most of the kids I met assumed that everyone there was like them. I wasn’t. Just being around them and in their world made me feel like I was still lying. All that lying was hard for me because I’m not a liar. Lying violates my nature.”
“I know that about you,” he said.
“Then maybe you understand when I say I’ve never felt like I belonged anywhere because there’s never been anywhere I didn’t feel forced into one lie or another. My life feels like it’s been a struggle to tell the truth. Like I’ve been swimming up from deep water, my lungs about to burst, trying to reach the surface and breathe. Hugh understood that. He didn’t fit into the family he was born into and he didn’t fit into the streets where his addiction took him. He was trying to make his way to the surface too. He wasn’t my cause. He was my mirror.”
Grant reached for my hand and squeezed it. “I’d like to think you’ll never feel forced into a lie with me,” he said.
“I’m through telling lies about myself or letting people make false assumptions about me. That may not always be comfortable for you.”
“I said goodbye to comfortable when I told old man Menzies I was a queer,” Grant said. “I know it’s not exactly the same as what you’re saying, but we’ve both stepped off the path, Henry. You know what I mean? Marriage and kids and a gold watch at sixty-five. Whatever our lives are going to be, they won’t be like that. We’ll have to make our own way. I hope,” he continued, taking a big breath, “that maybe we could do that together.”
In the silence that followed, I felt, for the first time we’d been together in my bed, it was just the two of us. Hugh was gone.
“I want to try,” I said.
Grant insisted on coming with me to clean up Aaron’s place. It was a bright, fragrant autumn morning but inside the house the air was dead and creased with shadows. The surfaces of the living room were covered with a fine, black film. Grant ran a finger along a bookcase, examined it and said, “What is this?”
“Fingerprint powder,” I said.
He wiped it on his jeans. “It’s like a morgue in here.”
I only half-heard him. I was staring at the armchair where Aaron had been shot. The headrest was stained black with dried blood. Grant came up beside me.
“Is this where . . . ?”
“Yes,” I said. “We have to get rid of it before his folks arrive. This isn’t going to fit into my car.”
“We passed a U-Haul on El Camino,” he said. “Why don’t I go back there and get a truck while you start cleaning up?”
“Thanks,” I said.
He slipped his arm around my waist. “I’m sorry, Henry.”
“Go on and get the truck,” I said. “The sooner we get this thing out of here, the easier it will be to deal with the rest of the place.”
“Sure thing,” he said. He kissed my cheek and left.
I cleared a space around the chair so we could get it out the door when he returned. I picked up the ottoman in front of the chair. To my surprise, the top came off. Inside was a large envelope. My name was written on it. I picked up the envelope, removed the thick bundle of legal-sized paper within and unfolded the pages. It was the copy of a document captioned “Amendment.” I flipped through the pages, uncertain of what I was looking at, until I came to the signature page at the end where there were two signatures: John Smith and Robert Paris. Below their signatures was a date fifteen years earlier and a notary public stamp. I turned back to the first page and began reading.
THIRTEEN
This time I had called ahead and Professor Howard’s nurse let me into the house without an interrogation. I found him where I had left him, sitting in his overstuffed chair, another cigar in an ashtray sending up plumes of smoke like incense in the church of the past.
“You’re back,” he said, smiling. “Are you looking for more free legal advice?”
“Something like that,” I said, pulling a chair up to him. “I have a document I’d like you to read and explain to me.”
“Okay, you’ve got my attention,” he said. “Let’s see it.”
I gave him the document I had found hidden at Aaron’s house.
Professor Howard took the papers, leafed through them and gave me a hard look. “Where did you get this?”
“From an attorney at the firm that represents Robert Paris,” I said.
He lifted a disapproving eyebrow at the violation of client confidentiality and then returned to the document, raising one page at a time to his face with unsteady hands and dropping the pages to the floor as he finished them. The last page slipped from his fingers and he said, “Extraordinary. Unbelievable.” He looked at me. “What do you want to know, Henry?”
“All I know about trusts is what I remember from your class so I’m not sure that my interpretation of the document is correct.”
“How do you interpret it?”
“It seems to amend a provision in the Linden Trust that gives the two trustees equal authority in the management of the trust and makes one trustee, Judge Paris, completely subordinate to the other trustee, John Smith. Is that right?”
Howard’s wheezy laughter ended in a coughing fit. When he recovered, he said, “Subordinate? It made Bob into Smith’s lapdog. No authority to direct investments or distribute income without Smith’s approval. It reduced Bob to a figurehead.”
“So I did read it correctly. What does it mean in the larger scheme of the trust?”
“How much do you know about the Linden Trust?”
“Mostly that it paid for my tuition and room and board when I was an undergrad.”
“Ah,” he said. “You were a Linden Scholar. You must have been one very bright boy, Henry.”
“And a very poor one,” I said.
“Yes, that too,” he agreed.
The Linden Scholar program had been set up by the trust to give a full ride to the university to a couple of dozen students from families below the poverty line. I remembered my astonished joy when I got the letter informing me of the scholarship. It had been nothing less than a lifeline.
Professor Howard poured himself a glass of water from a decanter on the table beside him. He took a sip and said, “I suspect Grover Linden would have approved of you. He was a very interesting magnate. Have you ever read any of his writings?”
“I didn’t know he was a writer.”
With enormous effort, Howard got up from his chair and shuffled to the bookcase that lined one wall of the room. Mumbling to himself, he searched the shelves until he found what he was looking for, a musty volume in a brown leather cover with gilt lettering on the spine. He carried it across the room, sank back into his armchair and opened the book, flipping through the pages.
“Linden’s memoir,” he said, and began to read. “ ‘Immense power is acquired by assuring yourself in your secret reveries that you were born to control affairs.’ That’s not the passage I’m looking for though it does open a window into the man’s character, does it not? Oh, here it is. ‘Surplus wealth is a sacred trust which its possessor is bound to administer for the good of the community.’ ”
“That sounds remarkably charitable for a robber baron.”
Professor Howard closed the book. “He was no ordinary robber baron. When he died, he left the bulk of his fortune to the Linden Trust. The income from the trust was to support the university for the next one hundred years. He specified that there would be only two trustees and that they must be his lineal descendant or descendants by marriage to a lineal descendant. The trustees were obligated to meet annually with the president of the university to discuss the school’s funding needs but they were given unfettered discretion in deciding which of those needs, if any, they wo
uld fund. The only restraint Linden imposed on their discretion was his command that the income be spent to elevate the university to the first rank of educational institutions in the world.”
“All to the greater glory of its founder,” I observed.
“I’m sure that occurred to him,” Howard said, “but he was a genuine philanthropist, and for his time and station in life, rather progressive. From the start, he specified the university would accept male and female students at a time when women were not encouraged to obtain a university degree. As a young man, he was an abolitionist and after the Civil War he set aside money to fund a scholarship for colored students, as they were called then. Not to Linden University, of course. To black schools. And, of course, he created the Linden Scholarship for boys and girls like you.”
“How did he reconcile his abolitionist beliefs with his company’s treatment of the Chinese workers who built his railroad? When they went on strike to get the same wage as white workers, he cut off their food and starved them into submission.”
“I said he was progressive for his time. Like most of his peers, he was violently anti-labor. He thought the unionists were no better than thieves trying to steal his profits.”
“They were trying to provide a decent life for his workers,” I said. “He sent his goons to break their strikes and hired scabs to take their places. Linden Scholar or not, I know blood money when I see it.”
Professor Howard shrugged. “Most fortunes are built on someone’s back, Henry, but not all rich people worry as much as Linden did about the fate of his soul. You remember from the gospel Jesus’s colloquy with the rich young man? Jesus says it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven.” He touched the book in his lap. “Linden was obsessed with that passage. He devotes several pages in his memoir to explaining why it did not apply to him.”
“Didn’t Jesus tell the rich man all he had to do was give his money away to the poor? Why didn’t Linden do that? Why found a university?”
“He was a social Darwinist: if the poor were poor, it was because they were mentally and morally inferior to the rich.” He opened Linden’s memoirs and consulted it for a moment. “Here’s what he says about charity. ‘It were better for mankind that the millions of the rich were thrown into the sea than spent so as to encourage the slothful, the drunken, the unworthy. Of every thousand dollars spent in so-called charity today, it is probable that nine hundred and fifty so spent produce the very evils which it hopes to mitigate or cure.’ ”