How Town

by Michael Nava

  I set my glass down. “You think he killed the man?”

  “Don’t you?” he replied, eyes going from green to brown.

  “I don’t think the evidence is very persuasive.”

  “Shit, Henry. Paul is a fucking madman. You know about the trouble he got into with that girl.” His eyes completed their transformation.

  “Yes,” I said. “That doesn’t mean he’d kill someone.”

  He shrugged. “You’re his lawyer. I guess you have to think that way. Now me, I know my brother. He’s crazy.”

  “Actually, I don’t think one way or the other about whether he did it except as it affects the way I defend him,” I replied, “but I’m curious about why you think he’s guilty.”

  Mark finished his drink and said, slowly, “He took twenty thousand dollars to pay the guy off,” he said, “and when he got there, the guy let him know it was just the first installment. So Paul went nuts and bashed him.”

  “The problem with the blackmail theory,” I replied, “is that after his last arrest, everyone knew that Paul was a pedophile, so what was the point of buying the man’s silence?”

  “What’s a pedophile?” he asked, signaling for another round.

  “An adult who’s sexually attracted to kids. It’s no secret that that’s what Paul is.”

  Mark shook his head. “It’s no secret that Paul knocked up a fifteen-year-old, but as far as anyone knew that was the only time he got into that kind of trouble. Now this guy was a whatchamacallit himself.”

  He interrupted himself to accept his drink. The waiter looked at me expectantly. I shook my head.

  “Pedophile,” I said.

  “Yeah. And he obviously knew something about Paul that the rest of us didn’t. That’s what Paul wanted to keep a secret.”

  This sounded plausible, more plausible than Paul’s story about taking the money to buy a little girl. “You’ve worked this out,” I said. “Do you have any evidence?”

  He snorted derisively. “What evidence, Hank? Do you think it’s something Paul would talk to me about? He hates my guts.”

  I hadn’t been called Hank in twenty years. Hearing it, I felt a surge of sentimental affection toward Mark. Paul, as he had when we were kids, receded into the distance, an unwanted nuisance.

  “He mentioned that,” I said. “He thinks you robbed him when you bought out his share of your business.”

  Mark leaned toward me, smiling. “He’s full of shit. He thinks I had lined up all these contracts without telling him but he doesn’t know anything about the business, Hank. Sure, I was negotiating those deals but they were like sand in my hand, you know. They could’ve fallen through this fast.” He snapped his finger. “Then you would’ve heard him whining about that. No, it’s not business. He hates me. Always has.”

  “Why?”

  He lowered his eyes for a moment, studying the backs of his hands. The light turned the small hairs on his wrists to gold. He looked up at me, meeting my eyes. “You never really knew my dad, did you?”

  “No, it was your mother I had the pleasure of meeting,” I replied, still smarting from the swimming pool incident, twenty-five years later.

  From the abrupt darkening of his eyes, I could tell that Mark also remembered how his mother had banned me from the pool, apparently out of fear that my brown skin would soil the water.

  “She was a drunk,” he said brutally.

  “I know about drunks,” I replied. “What about your father?”

  “He wasn’t a drunk, just an asshole. He was on us from the day we were born. Remember that time in Sacramento I ran a four-minute mile?”

  I nodded. That had been a wonderful day.

  “When I got home and told Dad he said, why couldn’t you break four.” He shook his head. “Same thing with Paul. He’d come home with straight As and Dad would tell him, I bet you can’t do that next time or, these are pussy courses. There was no pleasing him, ever. The difference between Paul and me is that I stopped taking it after a while. Dad and me had some real knock-down, drag-out fights, but I stood my ground. Not Paul. He’d cry and go running to Mom, but she was always too drunk to give a shit. So he just got worse, afraid and nervous all the time, locked himself up in his room. I tried to help him but he was—I don’t know how to say it, too much into himself, you know?”

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  We’d fallen into our adolescent habit of whispering conspiratorially to each other and the tops of our heads almost touched above the table. I could smell cologne, scotch and sweat.

  “I know you know,” Mark was saying. “You had some trouble with your old man, too.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Your sister talked to Sara. She told me. She said you and your old man used to get into it, too. I wanted to say something but,” he shrugged, “I don’t know. I didn’t want you to think I felt sorry for you. I didn’t, you know. I thought you were tough and I respected you for it.”

  “Our fathers went to the same school of child rearing,” I said. “My dad used to call me el lloron, the crybaby. He tried to toughen me up. Didn’t take, I guess.”

  Mark’s eyes, green now, were full of admiration. “You seem pretty tough to me. And you’re a big-time lawyer. Success is the best revenge, isn’t it?”

  Our hair touched and I felt drunk. Half a phrase drifted into my mind—“the friends we make in youth”—no doubt mawkish in its entirety and probably untrue as well. Still, at that moment I wanted to reach across the table, touch his face and tell him how much I loved him. But a letter written when I was nineteen, and never answered, stopped me. I only allowed one rejection per person, per lifetime, thank you very much. I pulled back to my side of the booth. He looked at me, puzzled.

  “I guess I never thought of it that way,” I said.

  He leaned back, exhaling fumes of scotch. “I do. I wanted to be bigger than my dad ever was, and I am.”

  “By hook or by crook?” I asked.

  He lit a cigarette. Sometime between when he struck the match and touched it to tip of his cigarette, the spell was broken.

  “What are you talking about, Hank?”

  “Paul thinks you set him up, Mark. He thinks you made some calls to the police or the DA, maybe even bribed them, to get him arrested.”

  “I told you he was crazy, Hank.”

  “Henry,” I said. “My friends call me Henry, now.”

  “Henry,” he echoed, his eyes asking what had just happened between us.

  “I have to investigate every possibility.”

  He drew on his cigarette. “It’s a dead end,” he said flatly. “You shouldn’t take Paul too serious, that’s what I wanted to tell you.”

  “I appreciate the advice.”

  He rattled the ice in his glass. “I’ve got to go, Henry. I’ve got a date.” He smiled, putting a lot of charm into it. “Dating at my age, can you believe it?”

  “You’re not married?”

  “I’m between wives.” He scooted to the edge of the booth, took out his wallet and laid a twenty on the table. “Bob Clayton taking care of you?”

  “Yeah.”

  He got up. “I’m still at the old place. Come by sometime. For a swim.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I’ll barbecue.” He looked at me, his expression bemused. “You know it’s funny, Hank—Henry.”

  “What’s that, Mark?”

  “You being gay. I’d have figured that for Paul, not you. Well, I guess he became something even worse.”

  His parting smile turned him into a stranger.

  After he’d left, the waiter came back by, picked up the twenty and said, “Can I get you another Coke?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s on the house.”

  I looked at him. He was a nice-looking kid, maybe a couple of years older than Josh.

  “No thank you,” I said, “but I appreciate the offer.”

  He nodded. “If you change your mind, I’ll be here until
closing.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and got up to go.

  8

  WHEN I CALLED DOM Rossi the next morning about whether the discovery packet was ready, he again directed me to Dwight Morrow, the investigating officer on the case. I ventured out into the morning heat and made my way to police headquarters, already irritable from too little sleep. The heat only made my mood worse.

  After talking to Mark, I’d spent much of the night in the kind of “what if” ruminations that served no particular purpose except to depress me. The only constructive notion my insomnia yielded was that maybe the whole purpose of the meeting was to allow Mark to minimize his involvement with Paul and his troubles. This naturally aroused my suspicions and I made a mental note to find out more about Mark’s legal problems with Paul, perhaps from Peter Stein, Clayton’s amiable associate.

  I was, at any rate, in a foul mood when I stepped into the office of Detective Morrow. Phone pressed to his ear, he looked me up and down in the vaguely accusatory way cops do and motioned me to sit down. Clearing a stack of papers from the only available chair, I sat and waited for him to finish his conversation. He sat ramrod straight, clearly a man who confused posture with morality, as if being upright in one carried over to the other.

  I looked around his glass-enclosed cubicle for something to break the monotony of its drab bureaucratic decor, settling, finally, on Morrow himself. Despite the Anglo name his looks were mostly Indian: the flat face, square jaw, beaky nose, russet-colored skin and black, almost Asiatic eyes. Any lingering doubt about his ancestry was dispelled by a framed caricature on the wall behind him, depicting him in headdress and loincloth, tomahawk in hand. Next to that was a picture of him crossing the finish line in a footrace, muscled torso straining with effort. A final picture concluded this triptych. It showed a row of boys in sweatsuits with the letters PAL printed across their chests. Morrow stood at the end in jeans and a windbreaker lettered COACH.

  Only in this last picture did his face show any animation at all. He was almost smiling—the lips curved upwards, but the eyes still looked as if they were examining autopsy photographs—and almost handsome. I felt something of a shock when I concluded from this picture that he was probably a few years younger than I.

  “Okay,” he said, “I’ll get back to you,” and hung up. He directed his unsmiling attention to me.

  “I’m Henry Rios,” I said. “I’m representing Paul Windsor. Dom Rossi said you had something for me, some discovery.”

  “It was on the chair.” His unfriendliness seemed impersonal.

  I lifted the stack of papers from the floor and examined the first sheet. It was a page from the medical examiner’s report.

  “This is all of it?” I asked.

  He was curt. “Rossi gave me a list. I filled it.”

  “Fine,” I replied, with equal disdain. It has never taken much for me to dislike a cop. My automatic assumption that most of them are assholes is seldom disappointed.

  “Sign the receipt.” He pushed a piece of paper across his desk toward me.

  I scanned it. It acknowledged full compliance with my discovery request. It wasn’t normally the sort of thing I argued about, since it had no real legal effect, but I didn’t care for Detective Morrow’s broomstick-up-the-ass machismo.

  “I can hardly say you’ve complied until I examine the packet.”

  “So examine it.”

  “When I have the time,” I said, rising.

  He looked up at me and said quietly, “I’m doing you a favor by giving you this stuff without a court order. In my book, you owe me a favor back.”

  I shook my head. “Discovery in a criminal case isn’t a matter of favors, Detective, it’s a matter of right. Now,” I rattled the sheet of paper, “I’m not waiving any of my client’s rights until I’m good and sure that you’ve given me everything I asked for.”

  His expression, unfriendly to begin with, turned actively hostile. In another moment he’d be giving me my Miranda rights. “Rossi warned me you’d be a smart ass.”

  I shrugged. “Well, he told me you were a good cop. I guess he was wrong about both of us.”

  He reached for the receipt. “Get out of here.”

  I gathered up the papers. “I appreciate your cooperation.”

  “You’re not going anywhere with those.”

  I glanced at the papers in my hand. “Rossi and I had a deal.”

  He picked up the receipt. “This is part of it. You don’t want to sign, you can leave the papers until you get a court order.”

  I moved toward the door. “Rossi didn’t say anything about signing a waiver.”

  “Vega,” he shouted, looking past me. A moment later a bulky uniformed cop appeared in the doorway. His face was familiar—the cop I’d seen in the Winchell’s a few days earlier, the Schwarzenegger with the baby face. “This guy is trying to walk out with police records,” Morrow told him. “What are you going to do about it?”

  The big cop looked at me in confusion.

  I said, “This is what you might call a test of your manhood, Officer, but you better be sure of your grounds before you do anything.”

  “I asked you a question, Vega,” Morrow said.

  The boy mumbled, “You want me to arrest him?”

  I was feeling better by the second. Confrontations with cops always had a tonic effect on me.

  “On what charge? Doing my job? You wouldn’t be the first cop who wanted to.” I sat down. “I tell you what, why don’t you call Rossi and talk this over with him before you give me more ammunition to cross-examine you on.”

  He stared angrily as he dialed the phone. As he explained to Rossi what had happened—putting himself in the best light, of course—and then listened to Rossi’s reply, his anger was replaced by petulance.

  He clanged down the phone. “I thought I told you to get out of here,” he snapped.

  I got up and made my way to the door, where the other cop still stood, his expression troubled as I edged past him.

  “Uh, what should I do?” he asked Morrow.

  “Let him go.”

  “Thanks, kid,” I told the cop. “See you at Winchell’s.”

  Mention of Winchell’s reminded me about breakfast, so I headed over to the doughnut shop, where I bought a large coffee and a sugary bran muffin and sat down to leaf through the packet I’d extorted from Morrow. I’d just finished the medical examiner’s report—rather well-written, considering the subject matter—when someone said. “Hi.”

  I looked up. It was the young cop, cruller and coffee in hand.

  “Hello.”

  He smiled tentatively. “You sure pissed Morrow off.”

  “You helped.”

  The kid shrugged. “He gets like that sometimes. He don’t mean nothing by it.”

  “Did he tell you to follow me?”

  “It’s my regular break.”

  It looked like he planned to stand there until I asked him to sit down, so I did. “What’s your name, again?”

  He squeezed into the chair across from me. “Ben Vega,” he said, setting his breakfast down. He extended a hand flaked with sugar.

  “Henry Rios,” I replied. His palm sported a weightlifter’s calluses. “What did Morrow tell you?”

  “He didn’t—”

  “Come on, Ben. Cut the crap.”

  He got points for grinning instead of affecting indignation. “He told me to keep an eye on you, that’s all. He’s just pissed, is all. He won’t even remember by the time I get back.”

  “You seem to know him pretty well.”

  “We’ve known each other since high school.” He tapped the papers. “What’s this?”

  “People versus Windsor. You know about the case?”

  He nodded. “Sure, everyone does. He’s the child molester. How can you defend a guy like that?”

  “If I had a nickel for every time someone asked me that question I’d be retired by now,” I replied. “So do you really want an answer
or were you just asking so you can feel superior to me?”

  Startled, but game, Vega said, “Yeah, I want an answer. Really.”

  “Well, the answer changes depending on the case,” I replied. “Sometimes I defend someone because I think he deserves a break, or maybe just because I like him. And sometimes I do it because, whatever the guy’s done, worse has been done to him.” I grinned. “And sometimes I do it for money. And sometimes I do it because no one else will. Like this case.”

  “A guy like that don’t deserve a defense,” Vega said, biting into his cruller.

  I shrugged. “Well, there you are, the bottom line difference between cops and lawyers.” I sipped my coffee. “Is Morrow always so cranky?”

  Talking as he chewed, Vega said, “He arrested Windsor the last time.”

  “In the child molest case?”

  Vega nodded. “Before he was Homicide he worked Sex Crimes.” He gulped some coffee and took another bite of cruller, eating with a child’s avidity. “He was pissed off when the DA dumped the case. I guess he took it personal and …” He trailed off, flustered. “Listen, you’re Windsor’s lawyer. Maybe I shouldn’t be talking to you.”

  “You haven’t told me anything I wouldn’t have found out anyway, Ben. Finish your doughnut.”

  He munched away, scattering sugar across his shirt. “You like being an attorney?”

  “I’ve been at it so long I’ve stopped thinking about whether I like it or not. It’s just part of who I am. What about you? You like being a cop?”

  “It’s okay,” he said, hesitantly. “I liked it better when I was on patrol.”

  “You’re not now?”

  “They got me working the counter, doing paperwork and like that. I pulled a muscle in my back, that’s why,” he explained.

  “Lifting weights?”

  He looked at me as if I were telepathic. “How did you know?”

  “Wild guess,” I replied, then felt guilty at making fun of him. “You look like a weightlifter.”

  He preened. “I’m okay now, you know, but the department don’t want me back on patrol until the union doctor says its okay.” He made a face. “And he don’t care. He figures I like being cooped up in an office. It drives me nuts, you know? The first thing I do when I get off is go for a long run.”