Goldenboy hr-2

by Michael Nava

  “Is anything wrong, Jim?”

  “I don’t like lawyers,” he announced.

  “You’ve got lots of company.’’

  His face remained expressionless. “She didn’t believe me,” he said. “Do you?”

  “That you didn’t kill Brian Fox?”

  He nodded.

  I make it a point not to lie to my clients, but this can involve something short of the truth. I said, “I’m willing to start from that assumption.”

  His face was suspicious. “What do you mean?”

  “What matters is convincing a jury that you’re innocent,” I explained.

  Now he understood. “You don’t believe me, either.”

  “I have an open mind,” I replied.

  He withdrew again into a sulky silence. I decided to wait him out and we sat there as the minutes passed.

  “I can’t sleep at night,” he said abruptly.

  “Why?” I wondered if he was going to confess.

  “They leave the lights on. It hurts my eyes.”

  “It’s just so the guards can keep an eye on things.” “Nothing happens in there.” He looked at me. “I’m with the queens. That’s what they call them.”

  “You’re safer there than in the general population.” “They’re like women,” he continued, ignoring me. “They say things that make me sick.” He shuddered. “I’m not like that.” “Not like what, Jim?”

  “Gay.” He spat out the word. Once again, his eyes drifted away. He seemed unable to look directly at anything for longer than a few seconds.

  “Whether you’re gay doesn’t make any difference in jail,” I said. “There are guys here who would claw through the walls to get at you.”

  His face shut down. “You’re gay,” he said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Gay lawyer,” he said, mockingly. “Do you wear a dress to court?”

  The taunt was so crude that at first I thought I’d misheard him. It was something that a six-year-old might say.

  “I don’t give a damn whether you think you’re gay or not, Jim. That’s the least of your worries.”

  “I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “You made me mad,” he added. “I didn’t kill Brian.”

  “Then who did?” I demanded.

  His shoulders stiffened. “Someone else.”

  “Someone else is not going to be on trial. You are. And you are also the only witness to what happened in the cellar. So unless you cooperate with me, I’d say your chances of getting out of here are pretty damn slim.”

  “I don’t remember,” he whined.

  “Then you might as well fire me and plead guilty,” I replied.

  His face began to disintegrate into a series of jerks and twitches. At that moment, his father’s theory of demonic possession seemed almost plausible.

  “My head hurts,” he whimpered. “I want to go back to my cell.”

  “All right. We’re not getting off to a very good start but I’ll be back tomorrow. I’ll be back every day until you remember what happened that night.”

  “I’ll try,” he said.

  I sat in my car in the parking lot beneath the jail surprised at the violence of my dislike of Jim Pears. I didn’t usually speak to a client the way I had spoken to Jim. Part of my anger was a response to his childish insult which would have been comical except for what it revealed about the state of his self-awareness. He told me he wasn’t gay with the desperation of someone who could not allow himself to believe anything else. His panic had calcified and become brittle. He was on the verge of shattering. But instead of sympathy for him I felt impatience. With his life at stake there was no time to waste while he sorted himself out.

  Then I thought of how he had been unable to even look at me, and my impatience thawed a little. He had been alone in the dark for a long time and now, abruptly, he’d been yanked into the light. All he wanted was to cover his face as if he could make the harsh world disappear simply by closing his eyes to it. Perhaps he could be reached by a simplicity equal to his own. But simplicity was not among my bag of tricks.

  Larry’s Jaguar was already in the garage when I pulled in. I found him in the kitchen watching a portable tv as he chopped boiled potatoes into cubes.

  “You’re a star,” he said.

  I watched myself on the tv. A reporter explained that Jim’s trial had been continued because he changed lawyers. Larry washed lettuce in the sink, drowning out the set. I turned it up.

  “… accused of the brutal slaying of Brian Fox. Today, prosecutors moved to seek the death penalty.’’

  Larry shut off the water. “The death penalty?”

  “Wait. I want to hear this.”

  “The D.A. also questioned the motives behind the change of attorneys. Pears’s new lawyer is Henry Rios, a prominent Bay Area attorney who is also openly gay. The D.A. suggested that pressure from the gay community to have a gay lawyer try the case led to today’s hearing.’’

  “Asshole,” Larry said.

  “Meanwhile,” the reporter continued, “there was a dramatic confrontation outside the courtroom between Rios and the victim’s mother, Lillian Fox.”

  We watched Mrs. Fox spit at me. I shut the television off.

  “You’ve had quite a day,” Larry said, arranging lettuce leaves in a big wooden bowl.

  “I’m thinking that it was a mistake for me to have taken the case,” I said.

  He opened a can of tuna fish, drained and chopped it and added it to the salad. “Because the D.A. called you a carpetbagger?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s the client. I talked to him this afternoon.”

  “And?” He quartered tomatoes, sliced green beans.

  “He says he’s not gay.”

  Larry looked over at me. “The kid killed someone rather than come out of the closet. What did you expect him to say?’’

  “He also says he didn’t do it. That’s why the P.D. got out of the case. He won’t plead to anything.”

  Larry added the finishing touches to the salad and put a couple of rolls into the microwave.

  “You of all people should know that there are ways of bringing clients around,” Larry said.

  “I don’t like him.”

  “Oh.” He wiped his hands on a towel and poured himself a glass of water. “Why?”

  “He makes me feel like a faggot,” I replied.

  “Well,” Larry smiled. “Aren’t you?”

  “Come on, Larry. You know what I mean. His self-loathing is catching.”

  “Let’s eat,” Larry said. “Then we’ll talk.”

  After dinner we sat on the patio. The wind moved through the branches of the eucalyptus trees that lined the lake. A yellow moon rose in the sky. A string of Japanese lanterns cast their light from behind us. Larry lit a cigarette.

  “Those can’t be good for you, now,” I said.

  “They never were,” he replied. “Did I tell you about the cocktail party tomorrow?”

  “If you did I don’t remember.”

  “It’s a fundraiser for Jim’s defense.”

  “I suppose I have to go,” I said, unhappily.

  “I’m afraid so,” he replied. He shrugged. “These people want to help Jim.”

  “He’s not much interested in helping himself.”

  “What’s bothering you about this case?”

  “I told you.”

  “You don’t have to like him.”

  “He tells me he didn’t do it,” I said. “Which means he’s either not guilty or he can’t bring himself to admit his guilt. The first possibility is remote.”

  “Maybe he thinks he was justified,” Larry offered.

  I shook my head. “No, I believe he thinks he didn’t do it. This amnesia-”

  “That’s deliberate?”

  “It certainly allows him to deny knowledge of the only evidence that could resolve this case one way or the other.”

  The smoke from Larry’s cigarette climbed into the air. A faint wind carri
ed the scent of eucalyptus to us from the lake.

  “What bothers me,” I said, “is that he insists he’s innocent when he so clearly isn’t.”

  “It must be a pretty horrible thing to admit you killed someone,” Larry said quietly.

  “Not someone like Fox,” I said, “who made Jim suffer and who he must hate.”

  “Then maybe it was death,” Larry said. “Being in that room with a man he had killed. Once you’ve seen death unleashed, it pursues you.” He sat forward, his face a mask m the flickering light of the lanterns. “Maybe that’s what he’s running from, Henry.”

  The next morning I went to see Freeman Vidor, who had been investigating Jim’s case for the Public Defender. His office was in an old brownstone on Grand Avenue which, amid L.A.’s construction frenzy, seemed like a survivor from antiquity. The foyer had a marble floor and the elevator was run by a uniformed operator who might have been a bit player when Valentino was making movies.

  Freeman Vidor was a thin black man. He sat at a big, shabby desk strewn with papers and styrofoam hamburger boxes. A couple of framed certificates on the walls attested to the legitimacy of his operation. I also noticed a framed photograph

  — the only one on the wall — that showed a younger Vidor with two other men, all wearing the uniforms of the L.A.P.D. He now wore a wrinkled gold suit and a heavy Rolex. He had very short, gray hair. His face was unlined, though youth was the last thing it conveyed. Rather, it was the face of a man for whom there were no surprises left. I doubted, in fact, whether Freeman Vidor had ever been young.

  We got past introductions. He lifted the Times at the edge of his desk and said, “I see you made the front page of the Metro section.”

  “I haven’t read the article,” I replied arid glanced at it. There was my picture beneath a headline that read: “S.F. Lawyer to Defend Accused Teen Killer.”

  “Teen killer,” I read aloud.

  “Sort of jumps out on you, doesn’t it?” he replied. “Listen, you want some coffee? I got a thermos here.”

  “No, thanks.”

  He poured coffee into a dirty mug, added a packet of Sweet‘n’Low and stirred it with a pencil.

  “I read the report you prepared for Sharon Hart,” I said.

  “That’s one tough woman,” he replied.

  “She jumped at the chance to dump Jim’s case.”

  “I said tough, not stupid.” He sipped the coffee and grimaced.

  “Is there an insult in there for me?”

  He smiled. “Only if you’re in the market for one. All I meant is, that boy’s only hope is to get a jury to feel sorry for him because this Fox kid was harassing him about being a homosexual.” He finished the coffee. “But first you got to convince them it ain’t a sin to be gay.”

  “This is Los Angeles, not Pocatello.”

  He lit a cigarette. “Yeah, last election a million people in this state voted to lock you guys up.”

  “That was AIDS.”

  “You tell someone you’re gay,” he replied, “and the first thing they do after they shake your hand is get a blood test.”

  “Including you?”

  “It’s not on the list of my biases,” he said. “You want to tell me about yours?”

  “Some of my favorite clients are black.”

  He thought about this, then laughed. “You want me in the case?”

  I nodded.

  “A hundred-and-fifty a day plus expenses.”

  “That’s acceptable.”

  He blew a stream of smoke toward a wan-looking fern on a pedestal near the window. “Who’s paying?”

  “There are some people who would like to see Jim Pears get off on this one.”

  He smiled. “Your kind of people?”

  “That’s right.”

  “If my mama only knew.” He opened a notebook and extracted a black Cross pen from the inner pocket of his jacket. “What do you want me to do?”

  “I want background on Brian Fox.”

  He raised a thin eyebrow. “Background?”

  “Whatever you can find that I can use to smear him,” I explained.

  He nodded knowingly. “Oh, background. What else?”

  “I read in the prelim transcript that there’s a back entrance to the restaurant.”

  “The delivery door. It was locked.”

  “Lock implies key, or keys. Find out who had them and what they were doing that night.”

  “You’re fishing,” he said.

  “I want to know.”

  He made a note and shrugged. “It’s your dime.”

  7

  The cocktail party for Jim’s defense fund was being held in Bel Air. I heard Larry pull into the driveway at a quarter of six, straightened the knot in my tie, put on my jacket and went downstairs to meet him. He was just entering the house as I came down.

  He looked up at me and smiled. “You sure you don’t mind this?”

  “What, the party?”

  He nodded and tossed a bundle of mail on a coffee table. He looked tired.

  “Are you feeling okay?” I asked as he dropped into a chair.

  “No, not really,” he replied. He rubbed his temples and shut his eyes. His breath was shallow and strained. I switched on a lamp and sat down on the sofa across from him.

  “I could go alone,” I said.

  Without opening his eyes, he smiled. “It’s asking a bit much for the lamb to lead itself to slaughter,” he replied.

  “It can’t be that bad. Who’s going to be there?”

  He opened his eyes. “Just the L.A. chapter of Homlntern.”

  “Homlntern?”

  “Homosexual International,” he replied and yawned. “I told a few of my friends about Jim’s case and a couple of them volunteered to kick in money to help pay the legal costs. One thing led to another and the next I knew Elliot Fein was calling and offering his house for a fundraiser.”

  “Elliot Fein, the ex-judge?” I asked, impressed. Fein was a retired court of appeals judge and a member of a wealthy family whose patriarch had made his money in movies.

  “The same,” Larry said, kicking off his huge penny-loafers. He put his long, narrow feet on the table. “I could hardly refuse. Really all they want to do is get a look at you,” he added. “See what they’re getting for their money.”

  “You think they’ll be satisfied?”

  He gave me the once-over. “I guarantee it. How was your day?”

  I told him about my meeting with Freeman Vidor. “You know what’s beginning to bother me?” I said. “The fact that everybody — including his ex-lawyer, his shrink, and now Vidor

  — is so quick to write Jim’s chances off.”

  Larry’s smile was fat with satisfaction. “I knew I’d hired the right man for this job.”

  “Well,” I said defensively, “the presumption of innocence has to mean something.”

  The smile faded. “Oh, he’s an innocent, all right,” Larry said, and drew out a cigarette from his pocket.

  “I wish you wouldn’t smoke so much.”

  “Please.” He lit the cigarette with his gold lighter.

  “Obviously he killed Brian,” I said, picking up the thread of my earlier thought, “but killing is not necessarily murder.”

  Larry put his shoes on. “And that’s what you’re here to prove. We better get going.”

  “You’re sure you want to go?”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  The sun had already set but, as we headed west on Sunset, there was still a dreamy light at the edge of the horizon and above it the first faint stars. We passed UCLA. Larry signaled a turn and we entered the west gate of Bel Air, up Bellagio. We passed tall white walls as we ascended the narrow, twisting road. From my window I watched the widening landscape of the city below and the breathless glitter of its lights. As with most cities, Los Angeles was at its most elegant when seen from the aeries of the rich.

  At the top of the hill, Larry began a left turn past immense wroug
ht iron gates opened to reveal a driveway paved with cobblestones. A moment later a house came into view. It seemed to consist of a single towering box though, as we slowed, I could see there were two small wings, one on either side. A boy in black slacks, a white shirt and a lavender tie directed us to stop. Another boy, similarly dressed, opened my door.

  “Good evening, sir, how are you?” he asked as I stepped out of the Jaguar.

  “Fine, thanks, and you?”

  “Oh, fine, sir.” He seemed startled that I’d bothered to reply.

  Larry came around to me and said, “Ready, counsel?”

  “Let’s go.”

  The first thing I noticed when we stepped into the house was the size of the room we had entered. Its walls were roughly the dimensions of football fields and to say that the space they enclosed was vast exhausted the possibilities of the word. The second thing I noticed was that the far wall, except for a fireplace that could easily have accommodated the burghers of Calais, was glass. The city trembled below.

  “Where do the airplanes land?” I whispered to Larry as we entered the room. Little clumps of people, mostly men, were scattered amid the white furnishings.

  “None of that,” he replied. “Here comes our host.”

  I expected the owner of the house to be dwarfed by it, but Elliot Fein didn’t even put up a fight. He was a shade over five feet and his most distinctive feature was his glasses. They were perfectly round and bright red. His skin was the color of dark wood, his hair was glossy black and his face was conspicuously unlined. I guessed, from his effort to conceal it, he must be nearing seventy.

  “Larry,” he said in a wheezy voice. They exchanged polite kisses.

  “This is Henry Rios,” Larry said.

  “Why haven’t I met you before?” Fein asked by way of greeting.

  I couldn’t think of any reason except the absence of twenty or thirty million dollars on my part. This didn’t seem to be the tactful answer so I said, “I don’t know, but it’s a pleasure, Justice Fein.”

  He took my extended hand and held it. “Elliot to my friends. We’re all so glad you agreed to take the boy’s case.”

  “Thank you.” I attempted to regain possession of my hand but he wasn’t through with it yet.