by Michael Nava
“Are we back to mystery novels?” I asked.
“If this were,” he said, “I’m afraid the reader would find some holes in your plot.”
“What do you mean?”
“Let’s assume the antagonist in your story really did have his beloved nephew killed. Your reader will ask the same question you do. Why? Why would the antagonist have been so worried about sharing authority over this trust with his nephew that he had him killed?”
“How would you answer that?”
“Let’s say that this trust will, by its own terms, dissolve one hundred years after the death of the man who created it at which point the principal will be distributed to the institution it supports. Let’s say further that this will occur in three years. Let’s say, finally, that our antagonist, the sole trustee, has been diagnosed with a fatal, incurable but slow-moving disease like Parkinson’s.” He held out his hand and the tremor I had observed when I shook his hand took on a different meaning. “Our antagonist has devoted his entire life to his grandfather’s legacy and now he finds himself in a race with time and his own decaying body to carry out his grandfather’s last bequest. He has sacrificed everything to do this, even going so far as to accept the murder of his sister by a man he loathes and the murder of a nephew who held such great promise by the same man. And now, as the moment approaches when his life’s work is coming to an end, his grand-nephew threatens to create a scandal that will not only expose the murderer, but also expose our antagonist’s complicity in those murders. Do you think our antagonist could survive the scandal? Or would he be forced to resign his position as trustee and turn the trust over to an unstable, drug-addicted boy?”
“If the trust provides for its own dissolution in three years, what would it matter who was the last trustee?”
“Because trusts can be amended or broken or redirected,” he said. “And this boy, filled with resentment against his family, and who would suddenly have enormous resources at his command, might well have decided to rewrite the terms of the trust out of sheer spite and frustrate the purpose for which it was created.”
“Or not,” I said. “Maybe our antagonist didn’t give his grand-nephew enough credit.”
“No? Well, that couldn’t be chanced,” he said. “Our antagonist couldn’t risk his grandfather’s legacy on the possibility that the boy had finally grown up.”
“And that’s why you had him killed?”
“Me? I had no one killed,” he said. “But in your story, yes. Of course, you will have to make the reader understand that from the antagonist’s point of view the boy’s death served a greater good.”
“Be that as it may, ordinarily in mysteries, the killer is punished.”
Smith said, “Oh, the killer was. He fell from the balcony of his room on the fifteenth floor of a hotel in Jakarta.”
“Barron,” I said. “What about you? What’s your punishment?”
“Punishment takes many forms. One of them is to awaken in terror in the middle of the night, night after night, and to know the cause of the terror is not a dream or an illusion but a real thing and it is coming for you.”
“You deserve whatever happens to you,” I said.
“Perhaps so,” he said. With a hard smile, he added, “A word of advice, Henry. You shouldn’t be so trusting of your bedmates.”
“Hugh never gave me any reason not to trust him,” I replied.
“I’m not talking about Hugh,” he said. “I meant Grant Hancock.”
I went home, poured myself a drink and considered my options. I could go to Ormes and Patterson with my story but even if they believed me, I doubted their bosses would. The law likes simple problems and easy answers. Smith had given the District Attorney and the police chief a killer and a motive in the murders of Hugh and Aaron. I was certain that whatever evidence his people had fabricated to support his story would look more plausible than what I had. A legal document stolen from a client’s file by one of the men Smith said had killed Hugh. A single document and a convoluted story that had its beginning a hundred years earlier in the directive of the man who had founded one of the world’s great universities because, like John Smith, he was terrified of what might be coming for him.
The case was over, the story was ended.
Except for one final detail.
EPILOGUE
Summer arrives in San Francisco in early September after the tourists leave and the fog disperses when, for a few weeks, the days are warm and the sky is achingly clear and blue. We were in October at the tail end of Indian summer. The days were a little shorter and a foreshadowing chill had crept into the night.
We’d had lunch with Grant’s parents at their house in Sea Cliff at a table set with Talavera plates and blue goblets, from Puebla, his mother told me. I appreciated that she had intended the table settings as a welcoming gesture, so how could I tell her my family ate off cheap plates from Woolworth and drank out of plastic tumblers? When their maid brought the food to the table, I felt Grant’s gaze on me, watching for my reaction. Not wanting to be impolite, I caught his eye and smiled. The conversation was light and witty, his parents bantering affectionately when they weren’t beaming at us, and then his father mentioned having seen John Smith and how ill he had looked and my mind drifted back to his poisonous parting comment. I had tried to dismiss it as the old man’s vitriol, a curse on me for having exposed him for what he was but I couldn’t stop thinking about it and now, today, I would have to confront Grant with what I thought it meant. I hoped I was wrong.
After lunch, we went for a walk along Ocean Beach. A flock of pelicans dipped and soared above the slowly churning surface of the sea.
“There used to be an amusement park called Playland on the other side of the Great Highway,” Grant said. “My dad would bring me sometimes. It was kind of broken down but I loved it. My dad said we could see Japan from the top of the Ferris wheel.”
“And did you?”
“It was always too foggy,” he said. “But I did see a whale spouting out there in the ocean once. That was very exciting.” He pressed my hand. “My folks really like you, Henry.”
“I like them, too,” I said.
“My dad finally has someone he can talk to about baseball and my mom, well, my mom likes beautiful things. She wasn’t too gushing, was she?”
“A bit,” I said.
“Is something wrong, Henry? You seem a bit checked out.”
We passed circles of rocks that held the ashes of fires. At night, the beach was bright with these autumn fires, a tradition the city tolerated. A smooth log had been rolled down to the beach and left in front of a fire pit.
“Let’s sit for a minute,” I said.
We sat facing the ocean. Gulls shrieked above us, dogs ran off the leash into the water, splashed around and ran back to their owners. A line of sea foam hissed on the sand when the tide came in.
“I have some questions for you, Grant,” I said. “And I need for you to answer truthfully.”
“That sounds ominous,” he said lightly. When I didn’t respond, he said, “Of course I’ll answer truthfully. Ask away.”
“How did Peter Barron know that I’d left your apartment the night he grabbed me?”
He had pressed himself against me and now I felt him go absolutely still.
“I’m not sure I understand the question,” he said after a moment.
“Did you tell him I was coming to your place?”
His retreat was subtle, just a small movement that made a little space between our bodies. “How did you figure it out?” he asked.
“Originally, I thought Barron had followed me from Linden to your place, but he wouldn’t have had any reason to follow me unless he knew I was snooping around Hugh’s death. Someone had to have told him. Then I remembered when I asked you to talk to Smith for me, you said you couldn’t get to Smith directly, but you could get to Barron. That’s who you talked to the day I called you and told you Hugh had been killed. Not Smith. Barron.
You told him about me. Didn’t you?”
“Yes,” he said quietly. “I talked to Peter that day.”
“Did he tell you to invite me to your place to talk?”
“Peter said Smith was really upset by Hugh’s death and the last thing he needed was someone making trouble. He wanted me to talk to you and see what you were all about. I swear, I wasn’t trying to set you up.”
“But you did,” I said. “You knew it was Barron who grabbed me, didn’t you?”
“Not at first,” he said. “But yes, after we went to your place and I saw it had been ransacked, I called Peter and asked him. He admitted it.”
Now I looked at him or, rather, at his profile because he kept his eyes trained on the ocean. Slowly, he turned his face to mine. He was so handsome, so hapless, his eyes so shamed that for a moment I wanted to throw my arms around him and tell him I understood, that it was nothing. But those would have been lies and there had been enough lies between us.
“What else did you tell him?”
“I told him what you had told me, that there was nothing in the stuff Hugh had collected that proved the judge had anything to do with the car accident. I told him he should leave you out of it.”
“And none of this seemed important enough for you to mention it to me?”
The fog had begun to roll in from the ocean. The air was colder, grayer.
“You have to understand, Peter was an old friend and Smith and my dad go way back. I wanted to believe that whatever they were doing was to protect the family.”
“But you were wrong,” I said. “They did what they did to cover up Hugh’s murder.”
“I had no way of knowing that,” he said.
“Even after you knew Barron had grabbed me and broken into my apartment, you sent me to see him,” I continued, pressing him.
“I had to. You insisted on talking to Smith,” he said.
“What did you tell Barron before I went to see him?”
“That you still believed Hugh had been murdered, that you weren’t going to drop it.”
“You told the man who killed Hugh that I was after his killer. Did it occur to you that Barron might make me his next victim?”
“I didn’t know he had killed Hugh,” Grant protested.
“Are you sure?”
Now he stared at me, his face coloring. “What are you talking about, Henry?”
“Barron had an accomplice when he murdered Hugh. Smith claimed it was Aaron Gold but we know now that that was a lie. The second man, Grant. Was that you?”
“You can’t seriously believe I helped Peter kill Hugh,” he said.
“You never forgave Hugh for what he did to you when you were in prep school.”
“So I helped kill him twenty years later? What kind of a person do you think I am, Henry?”
“I honestly don’t know, Grant.”
He looked back toward the ocean, scanning the horizon as the fog continued to drift in, looking for what? Japan? A way out?
“I lied to you about Barron,” he said in a flat voice. “But I had nothing to do with Hugh’s death or covering it up. I didn’t know you from Adam when you called me and told me Hugh was dead. Of course I called Peter. Of course I agreed to help him find out who you were and what you wanted. I don’t apologize for that, but yes, I should have told you.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Your world is black and white, Henry,” he said. “Good guys and bad guys. Us versus Them. I didn’t want you to think I was one of Them.” He stopped and exhaled a long breath. “Not after I started to fall in love with you.” He looked at me. “Can’t you forgive me?”
“If I hadn’t figured it out for myself about you and Barron, would you have ever told me?”
A quick, almost involuntary shrug. “What would have been the point?” he asked softly. “It was over.”
I said, without looking at him, “Goodbye, Grant.”
I heard him get up and listened to his footsteps padding softly in the sand as he walked away. I sat there alone until the fog obliterated all traces of the sun. Then I got up and went off in search of the nearest bar.
Afterword
The Making of Henry Rios
1.
I became a mystery writer, if not precisely by accident, then not by design. I began writing this book in the summer of 1980. I had just graduated from Stanford Law School, and was cramming for the California bar exam during the day. At night, I worked at the Palo Alto jail where I interviewed arrestees to determine whether they were eligible for release on their own recognizance. There weren’t that many arrests in our sleepy university town. In the down time, there was only so much studying I could endure and so, late one night, I began to scribble a scene in my notebook about a lawyer interviewing a prospective client in a jailhouse room much like the one where I was sitting. The lawyer was as yet nameless but I already had a title for the book—The Little Death.
But let me back up.
2.
My childhood, briefly. I was born out of wedlock and never knew my father, who was a Cajun from Lafayette, Louisiana. I was raised entirely by my mother’s Mexican-American family in a Sacramento barrio called Gardenland. When I was four, my mother married a Mexican man who was a violent drunk, a sometime drug dealer and, if I understand the diagnosis correctly, a sociopath. By the time she was thirty, my mother had six children under the age of ten. We were very poor. Had it not been for my mother’s parents and Aid to Families with Dependent Children, we would have gone hungry and homeless. Like all children, I had no choice but to accept my family’s reality without any ability to improve it. From an early age, I set out making a better life for myself. I had two advantages: my maternal grandparents and my intelligence. My Mexican immigrant grandmother loved me above all her grandchildren and my Yaqui grandfather, although forbidding, provided me with an alternative model of manhood to my demented stepfather. Their house became my refuge from his sociopathy. From the start, my intelligence was verbal and literary; I have always loved words. One of my earliest memories is walking home from school repeating the word “eternal” for the beauty of its sound. For my teachers I was a dream child—the poor boy with promise—and they doted on me, providing me with the love and attention I did not receive at home.
One morning, when I was twelve, walking to school by myself, I heard a voice say, “You’re a queer.” I looked around to see who had called me that name and realized it was me. From that moment forward, I knew who I was, and while I also knew I had to keep it secret, there was never any question in my mind that I could change. Around that time, I began to write, looking for a language to express the torrent of feelings I could share with no one. I found that language in poetry. Elliptical, sentient and sensuous, poetry gave me a way of speaking without saying. I also discovered among the poets a fraternity of queers who wrote more or less openly about the themes that were all-consuming in my hormonal teens and early twenties—homosexual desire and alienation. Poets as different in style and temperament as Cavafy and Whitman, Auden and Ginsberg, Hart Crane and Frank O’Hara and Lorca wrote out of the same consciousness of difference that set me apart. I read them on many levels and for many reasons, but above all I read them because in a loneliness that often bordered on despair, they represented for me what Auden called “an affirming flame.” There were, by contrast, no comparable voices that spoke to me in fiction. So, until I was in my early 20s, I read, studied and wrote only poetry.
3.
An irritated aside: Some readers assume the Rios books are literally autobiographical; that all I have done is apply a thin veneer of fiction to events and people taken from my own life. This is not true. Beyond the obvious similarities—Rios are I are both gay, Mexican-American and Stanford-educated lawyers—the parallels between events in my life and the novels are general, not specific. By that I mean, for example, that because I lived through the AIDS epidemic as it decimated the gay male community from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, so did
Rios. While his observations of the impact of the plague were drawn from my own, our actual experiences were quite different. There was, for instance, no equivalent in my life of Josh Mandel, Henry’s HIV-positive lover, first introduced in Goldenboy.
I deliberately selected parallels between my personal experience and Rios’s to serve a narrative or thematic purpose or to illuminate character, not to expose my private life. For example, Rios’s father, like my stepfather, was cruel and violent but for a different reason. As Rios explains in The Hidden Law, his father’s violence toward him was occasioned by his father’s perception that Rios was homosexual; he was punished for a quality inherent in his nature that was morally neutral. The injustice of this punishment meted out by an authority figure helps explain why Rios chose to become a criminal defense lawyer, the archetypal defender of the despised, challenger of authority and seeker of justice.
This is not my story. My relationship with my stepfather was not the same as Rios’s relationship with his father and I have a different understanding of my stepfather’s violence—he was mentally ill—than Rios drew about his father’s.
My point is that the Rios novels are fictions, not autobiography, and they should be read that way.
4.
At Colorado College, I was befriended by Ruth Barton, an adjunct professor in the English department who taught creative writing. Ruth was the first person to give me the permission I needed to think of myself as a writer by taking seriously the work I presented to her.
Forty years after I met Ruth, I delivered one of the eulogies at her memorial service. This is how I remembered our first meeting: “Ruth Barton was my first teacher at Colorado College; I took a course from her called Creative Writing. In typical Ruth fashion, we met, not in one of the sterile English department classrooms at Armstrong Hall, but in a lounge at Montgomery Hall, a residential hall with windows that framed Pikes Peak. On that morning in September 1972, the ten or so of us young writers arranged ourselves on chintz-covered chairs and couches and waited for Professor Barton—who was late.”