How Town

by Michael Nava

  “We were talking about McKay.”

  “You’re anxious to change the subject,” he said. “Maybe I’ve said something that strikes home.”

  “Maybe you’re full of shit, Paul.”

  He shrugged. “McKay was not a nice man. He lacked my refinement and his own tastes ran to boys.” He made a face. “He was always going on about his latest twelve-year-old conquest. It’s not that I begrudged him his boys but,” he smiled again, “I’m straight. Anyway, we talked from time to time, and then, a couple of months ago, he told me about a girl. It seems that she’d been sold by her father when she was nine but she was too old for the man who’d bought her.”

  “How old was she?”

  “Thirteen,” he said. “A delicious age in a girl.”

  “This isn’t a circle jerk. Let’s confine ourselves to McKay. So he offered to what? Be the middleman?”

  “Yes, exactly. It was all arranged. She would be delivered to him and he would bring her to me. He was asking twenty thousand dollars. That was reasonable, I thought. So I went to the motel. No girl. Just a seedy man in a seedy room. He said there’d been a problem with delivery but he expected her in a day or two. Meanwhile, he wanted half the money, to show my good faith.” He laughed at the recollection.

  “Evidently, you didn’t believe him.”

  “You only had to look at the man to see he was lying. He was a tub of lard with all his brains in his balls.”

  “What happened then?”

  “I left,” he said.

  “What time?”

  “I got home at around one, so I must’ve left there no later than midnight.”

  “The police estimate the time of death between midnight and three.”

  “He was alive when I left him,” Paul said. “Maybe he went out and picked someone up. That’s another disadvantage of being attracted to boys. Sometimes they put up a fight.”

  “The coroner says McKay’s head was bashed in. And his testicles had been crushed, probably while he was still alive. Someone was very disappointed with him. How disappointed were you not to find the girl there?”

  That wiped the smile off his face. “You can’t believe that I killed him.”

  “If I disliked you enough I could,” I said. “If I was a juror with a child, a daughter, I might convince myself no matter how weak the evidence is.”

  “You’re like everyone else,” he said bitterly.

  “Right now we’re not talking about me. We’re talking about the judge who’ll try this case and the jurors who’ll decide it. They’re not going to regard pedophilia as normal, much less something to be proud of, and they’ll be fighting against their sense of decency to put you back on the streets. So let’s not make it any harder than it is.”

  “What kind of a faggot are you?” he shot back.

  I smiled. “One with no illusions, Paul. I tell my gay clients the same thing I’ve just told you, and my black and Latino clients, too, for that matter. You don’t need to invent a conspiracy against you by Mark. Society is a conspiracy and everyone who’s different is its target.”

  “So you admit that you and I are the same,” he said.

  “I only admit that people in the mainstream don’t cut very fine distinctions about those of us who aren’t. I do.”

  “In order to feel superior to me?” he asked, smugly.

  With some asperity, I said, “No. I acquired my values through trial and error. There isn’t much margin for feeling superior when you do it that way. Now, let’s get back to work.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “I want you to keep your mouth shut about little girls and the joys of pedophilia.”

  His face flared red, but he nodded.

  “Now, the preliminary hearing’s in two weeks. I’m flying back to Los Angeles tonight to settle some business and free myself up. Do you have questions?”

  He shook his head, sullenly.

  “All right. By the way, when was the last time you saw Ruth Soto?”

  He stared in surprise. “What?”

  “Sara seems to think Ruth’s brother may be mixed up in all this.”

  “I haven’t seen her since that day in court when she wouldn’t testify.”

  He was lying. “You’re sure.”

  “I just said it, didn’t I?”

  I got up to leave. “Well, if you change your mind, let me know. Good-bye, Paul.”

  My thoughts were jumbled as I left the jail. The long summer day seemed to be going on and on. I made my way across the street to a Winchell’s, ordered a cup of tea and wedged myself into an uncomfortable, sticky booth. The tabletop was littered with bits of sugared glaze and bright-colored sprinkles, like confetti. At another table sat the inevitable cops, a tall fair one and a bulky dark one. They glanced at me and then went back to their crullers and coffee.

  I thought about Paul Windsor. The intelligence and charm he’d shown at the beginning of our interview were clearly in the service of something darker. Evidently, he belonged to a breed of pedophiles who not only defended their proclivity but proselytized on its behalf. Could this aggressive obsession have led him to murder McKay in a rage of disappointed lust? Or was I just reflecting my biases?

  A woman I’d once worked for—an excellent lawyer—used to say that the best lawyers were guided by ethics, not morality. What she meant is that since moral judgments are by nature absolute, once you’ve made one, you’re stuck with it and that doesn’t leave you much room to do your job. Ethics, on the other hand, are boundaries, not judgments; they allow you to be impersonal without becoming inhuman.

  Sipping tepid, bitter tea, I thought about boundaries and sex. I heard Paul saying, “They taste different, they smell different….” And then another fragment of conversation drifted through my mind, the first man I’d ever had sex with telling me, “It takes a man to know what a man likes.” Both statements of sexual chauvinism, but were they really comparable? I found myself staring at the dark cop. For all his bodybuilder’s bulk, he had a child’s round, large-eyed, pretty face. I looked away, quickly. “They taste different, they smell different….” What I’d meant when I told Paul my values were acquired through trial and error was that they were learned, not given, and came out of my own experience. I was not a pedophile, nor had I ever consciously entertained those fantasies, but I was a sexual being and for a moment in the jail I’d felt Paul’s excitement and it terrified me.

  6

  MY DAY WASN’T OVER YET. I still had to pay a call at the district attorney’s office. I walked over to the county building and was directed by a janitor to the third floor. There, I told the girl at the counter that I wanted to talk to the DA assigned to the Windsor case. She disappeared for a moment and then told me to go back to Mr. Rossi’s office.

  Dominic Rossi was one of the two names painted on the frosted glass of a door halfway down the corridor. I knocked.

  “Come in.”

  I opened the door and looked in. The office was standard government issue, square, windowless, walls painted an indeterminate pale color; two fake wooden desks, rotary phones, a girlie calendar on one wall and an autopsy picture on the other; bright lights overhead and a scuffed linoleum floor at my feet. The sole occupant of the room was a portly man in a rumpled blue shirt, skinny tie at half-mast. A big styrofoam cup of coffee sat on the desk in front of him with wadded-up pink Sweet ’N Low packets surrounding it.

  “Mr. Rossi?”

  “Dom,” he said, taking the card I extended across the desk. His round, pale face was distinguished by a thick mustache and heavy glasses. His thin hair gleamed with sweat. “Henry Rios,” he said, “I’ve heard of you.”

  “I’m substituting in on the Windsor case,” I said, lowering myself into a naugahyde chair.

  “I bet Bob Clayton’s glad to be rid of that sucker,” he said, tossing my card onto a stack of papers. “So what can I do you for?”

  “I wanted to talk to you about discovery.”

  He
blinked. “Discovery?”

  “Am I going to have to file a motion or can we handle it informally?”

  He half-smirked. “Do I look like the U.S. attorney?” he asked, grabbing a legal pad. “You tell me what you want and I’ll get it to you.”

  “I have the complaint, the police report, the search warrant and affidavit,” I replied. “I don’t have the complete coroner’s report …”

  “Okay,” he said, jotting a note.

  “I’d also like a list of your witnesses, the investigating officer’s notes, any other reports prepared in the case, the …”

  “Wait a sec.” He scribbled madly.

  “Any forensic or toxicological reports,” I continued, “any and all written statements by any witnesses, a list of all property seized during the search, are you getting this?”

  “Mmm,” he replied, still writing.

  “A list of any other evidence and the file on Windsor’s previous arrest.”

  He looked up, stopped writing. “That’s not really kosher, Mr. Rios.”

  “Henry,” I replied. “It could be relevant.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I won’t know until I see it.”

  I could tell by his expression he wanted to give me an argument, but then he smiled and said, “Sure, why not.” He made a final note. “I’ll have the IO put together a packet.”

  “Who is the investigating officer?” I asked.

  “Dwight Morrow. Good cop.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “His arrests are clean and they stick.”

  “Morrow,” I mused. “He’s the cop who got the search warrant, isn’t he? Good cop?” I shook my head. “I’ve never seen a search warrant issued on so little probable cause, and if you take away the money, all you’ve got are fingerprints. What kind of case is that?”

  “So are you here to make a deal, or what?”

  “No deals,” I said. “I want a straight dismissal or a trial.”

  His attempt at gravity made him look like a pouting infant. “We take our crime a little more serious here than in the big cities,” he replied.

  “Speaking of that,” I ventured, “I understand people were pretty upset when the charges were dropped against Paul in that child molest case a few years back.”

  “You could say that,” he replied. “I was the DA on the case.”

  “You nursing a grudge?”

  “I’m strictly a nine-to-five kind of guy, Henry.”

  “What happened on that case?”

  “The judge wouldn’t drop the charges. Made us put the girl on the stand and threatened to hold her in contempt if she wouldn’t testify.”

  “But she didn’t.”

  “Nope. Just sat there, crying. Judge still wouldn’t dump the case. The DA had to come into court and ask for dismissal.”

  “Who was the judge?”

  “Burton K. Phelan,” he said. “Tough son-of-a-bitch.”

  I pocketed the information. “Clayton told me the prelim’s in front of the same judge who issued the search warrant. Judge Lanyon.”

  “Yeah, luck of the draw. Not lucky for you, maybe, but you know the prelim’s just a dog-and-pony show anyway.” He picked up his coffee cup, sipped, made a face.

  “You know as well as I do that it’s unlawful for the same judge who issues a search warrant to hear the prelim.”

  “Tell him.”

  “You’re not going to make this easy for me, are you?”

  Cradling the cup between his hands, he said, “Like I said, Henry, we take our crime serious around here.”

  “What about procedure? You take that seriously, too?”

  “You ought to talk to a couple of defense lawyers before you plan anything fancy,” he said. “They’ll tell you that kind of stuff doesn’t sit well here.”

  “Frontier justice, huh?”

  He put the cup down. “You want to watch your attitude, too.”

  I got up. “No offense intended, Dom. Thanks for the cooperation. Should I pick the stuff up from you?”

  “Nah. Just go down to central and ask for Morrow. He’ll have it. Pleasure meeting you, Henry. Let’s have some fun with this case.”

  “Pleasure meeting you, Dom,” I replied, and let myself out of his office.

  After a final stop at Clayton’s office to pick up the packet of Sentinel articles about the case, I drove to the airport at the edge of town. Within the hour I was looking down at the baked landscape, declining a cocktail and wondering what I’d let myself into.

  Morning found me at my office, a shabby suite of rooms in a nondescript office building on Sunset and La Brea I’d picked up cheap. Our only neighbors were a publicist named Ronnie Toy and an actors’ agent who called himself Marc-Alan. An OFFICE SPACE FOR LEASE sign was a permanent fixture on the door to the building; we were the commercial equivalent of the motels that lined that part of Sunset and rented by the hour to the prostitutes who negotiated their deals alfresco on the street below. My secretary, Emma Austen, a regal black woman, had once demanded a raise on the grounds that she was entitled to at least as much money per hour as the hookers made.

  I was sitting in the conference room going over the Sentinel articles that Clayton had given me when I heard the radio start up in the next room. A moment later, Emma breezed in, swathed in a sort of filmy white caftan, her braided hair bright with blue and gold beads, carrying a mug of coffee in one hand and a stack of pink telephone message slips in the other.

  “Are you trying to hide from me?” she asked, setting the messages at my elbow.

  I glanced at the pile. “Make them go away.”

  She placed the mug in front of me. “I can’t, honey, but I did bring you coffee to make them easier to swallow.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t go getting used to it,” she replied, faint traces of the South in her accent. She glanced over my shoulder. “What are you reading, Henry?”

  “These are articles from my hometown newspaper about a case I’m taking.” I lifted the sheet I’d been looking at and handed it to her.

  “The Los Robles Sentinel,” she read. “ ‘Windsor Arrested in Killing of Kiddie Porn King. Suspect Is Brother of Developer; Was Once Arrested for Child Molestation.’ ” She shook her head, beads clattering. “Oh, my. ‘Paul Windsor, brother of developer Mark Windsor, was charged with the brutal murder of John McKay, a dealer in child pornography who was found bludgeoned in a motel room early Monday morning.’ ” she read. “ ‘Windsor, 32, was arrested at his home in exclusive River Park yesterday. Four years ago, he was arrested in a child molestation case that was dismissed when the victim, a 15-year-old girl, refused to testify, allegedly due to the pressure of the Windsor family.’ ” She handed me the paper. “Who is this creep?”

  “The brother of a boyhood friend of mine,” I replied.

  “Exclusive River Park home,” she said. “Are you doing this for the money?”

  “I’m doing it as a favor to my sister. Paul’s wife is a friend of hers.”

  “Wife?” she said, incredulously. “Poor woman. Did he do it, Henry?”

  “I don’t know. He’s not admitting to it and the case is weak. His creep quotient is pretty high but that doesn’t make him a killer.”

  She sat down. “Did he molest the little girl?”

  I nodded.

  “He should have had his balls cut off,” she said, decisively.

  “Speaking as one who knows,” I replied, “sexuality doesn’t originate in the balls. It starts here.” I tapped my head.

  Rising, she said, “Then he ought to have his head chopped off. Or examined, anyway.”

  Her remark gave me an idea. “Do you remember that psychiatrist we used in the Castillo trial?”

  “Uh-huh, the gorgeous one, Nick Trejo?”

  “Find his number, would you? I’d like to talk to him.”

  “Sure,” she said. “Why are you reading these articles? You already know what the case is about.”

 
“There’s some question about whether Paul can get a fair trial in Los Robles with all this publicity,” I said. “If it gets that far.”

  “I’ll call Nick,” she said. “Mmm, that man. Even his voice is good-looking.”

  “He’s gay, Emma.”

  “Any man that pretty would have to be.”

  The fact that there hadn’t been much hard news about Paul’s case hadn’t deterred the Sentinel one whit. The stories quickly branched out to other transgressions by the Windsors, culminating in a three-part article called “An American Family.”

  “American Gothic” would have been an apter title. I learned a lot about the Windsors, most of it damning, none of it relevant to the murder charge against Paul. In exposé style, the writer informed his audience that, among other things, their mother, Lydia Windsor (“nee Lydia Smith”), was an alcoholic, Herb Windsor was a strikebreaker allegedly with ties to “the underworld,” and Mark had been twice divorced and the defendant in a paternity suit, and, of course, dwelt on Paul’s prior arrest for child molestation, repeating allegations that the Windsors had somehow pressured the victim into refusing to testify. Side by side with the last installment of the article was a front-page editorial urging the voters to approve Proposition K, the no-growth ordinance, necessary, the editor opined, to curb the excess of unscrupulous (and unnamed) developers.

  I put the articles back into the folder. Over the years, I’d seen more and more of this kind of sensationalism in the media’s coverage of criminal cases. “The court of public opinion” had become more than just a First Amendment platitude. It was actually the forum in which many serious criminal cases were tried and, usually, lost. So, as deplorable as the Sentinel’s coverage was, in any other city it might not be enough to persuade a judge that it had effectively tainted the minds of prospective jurors. Los Robles wasn’t just any other city, however. In the first place, the Sentinel was the only general circulation paper in the entire county. In the second place, the Sentinel was doing more than just prejudging Paul’s case. It was deliberately using his arrest to promote its editor’s political agenda on the no-growth issue, which was one of the great public controversies in California.

  Maybe the combination of things would be sufficient to convince a judge that Paul could not get a fair hearing in Los Robles. This assumed we could find a judge in Los Robles who’d give us a fair hearing on whether we could get a fair hearing.