The Hidden Law

by Michael Nava

  “Yes, I saw the Times this morning.”

  Michael’s arrest had made the front page. I had left Emma instructions to fend off the press until after the arraignment.

  “So what you got?” Freeman asked, drawing lazily on his cigarette.

  “A paradox,” I said. “I have a client who wants to cop to a crime I don’t think he committed.” I related my interview with Michael.

  “So, why don’t you think he did it?”

  I sipped some coffee, going over the reasons that had occurred to me as I had driven from the jail to the office. I was glad Freeman was there. He could test their plausibility for me.

  “Let’s start with the factual inconsistencies,” I said. “First, Michael says there was gang involvement, but he doesn’t belong to a gang. According to my source,” I continued, thinking of Tomas Ochoa, “the Dogtown Locos don’t want anything to do with him. Also, the cops have been sweeping the gangs for the past two weeks, since Peña was killed, and they haven’t been able to turn up anything connecting the gangs to the murder.”

  “You trust your source?” Freeman asked.

  “Not entirely,” I admitted.

  “Look, if some gangbanger was involved,” he continued, “that don’t mean the cops are going to find out about it. And didn’t you tell me the other day about some placas with Peña’s name in them?”

  “That doesn’t prove anything,” I said.

  “OK, what’s your next point?”

  “Michael says he waited for Peña a couple of hours out in the restaurant lot before the shooting. That’s a long time. There must’ve been people coming and going, but no one’s come forward to the cops and said anything about seeing a car out there.”

  “Like you said, Henry, it’s only been two weeks. Someone could still turn up, ’specially now that there’s been an arrest. The cops will put out the details and people will start remembering.”

  “Three,” I continued, undeterred. “He said he was smoking crack and drinking but he managed to hold the gun steady long enough to blast Peña five times. As far as I can tell, Michael has no experience with firearms.”

  “That’s thin,” Freeman said. “All he had to do was point it.”

  “I just don’t think he did it,” I said.

  “On those facts?”

  “Look, Freeman, you take the investigation report and read it. This murder took guts and a cool head. Michael Ruiz is a drug addict, a loser. OK, maybe I can’t come up with facts why he didn’t do it, but I trust my instincts.”

  Freeman said, “You’re good, Henry, and I’m not saying you’re wrong, but why would a kid cop to something this serious?”

  “He wants respect from the gangs,” I said. “He wants to belong. His therapist says he wants to be loved. What could get him more respect than this? We both know there are gangs in the prisons, and if he goes down on this, he might be a hero. Particularly if he’s protecting the real killer, who is a gang member.”

  “Man, he would have to be desperate,” Freeman said.

  “He is that,” I said. “Look, I don’t trust my source on the gang connection. Maybe you can do better. He says the guy who was with him was a Dogtown vato called Shorty. Can you find out about that?”

  “Sure, I can ask around. Bound to be a lot of Shortys out there, though.”

  “This one would have been in Griffith Park two weeks ago.”

  He scribbled some notes in a pad. “Anything else?”

  “Peña had a universal reputation as an asshole,” I said. “See if he pissed anyone off in the days before he died. Someone who would know his movements. You might start with his staff.”

  “Sure, what about the family?”

  “They were with him when he was killed,” I said.

  “You think you could get your kid a deal?” he asked.

  “Not at this rate,” I said. “If he was as high as he said he was, there might be some kind of voluntary intoxication defense. That might bring it down to second-degree, but I’d have to take it to a jury even for that. The only other thing I can think of is to try to shake the eyewitness ID by doing a live lineup.”

  “That’s risky,” Freeman said. “He could pick your kid out again.”

  “Well, that would at least end my doubts about his guilt.”

  After Freeman left, I began to think more about a voluntary intoxication defense. It was a technical defense that went to the intent necessary to prove first-degree murder. If the defendant was so intoxicated that it was impossible for him, basically, to have held a thought in his head long enough to act on it, it could be argued that he lacked the requisite mental state required for first-degree. Michael’s long history of drug abuse combined with his use of crack and alcohol that night might be enough to at least make the argument. His word alone, however, would not be enough. I tried to think of who might have seen him that night, after the shooting. The name I came up with was Lonnie Davis, his roommate at SafeHouse.

  I slipped through the security door at the Essex House on the tail wind of another resident who eyed me suspiciously but was too busy with grocery bags to give me any trouble. In the big picture window that looked out on the pool, I saw a lone sunbather sprawled out on a chaise lounge, his face framed by the wires of his Walkman and obscured by sunglasses. It was Lonnie. I stepped outside and watched him for a moment.

  Late afternoon shadows washed the pink walls of the buildings. The pool was a sheet of glass. The other night had faded into memories of body parts, wrinkled sheets, and restless sleep, but seeing him there brought the heat back. He reached down for a can of Coke, raised his head to drink, and stopped. A slow smile inched across his face. A moment later, I stood over him.

  Slowly, the headphones came out, and the glasses came off. He put the Coke down and moved his legs on the chaise to make room for me. The smells of suntan lotion, sweat, and chlorine came off his hard, brown body. The blue eyes were welcoming.

  “How do,” he said. “Nice to see you, Henry.”

  “You, too,” I said. “How have you been?”

  “Passable. You?” He wiped sweat from his face and dried his hand on his bathing suit, a white strip of nylon, his genitals loose beneath it.

  “I’m good. I never thanked you for the other night.”

  “Is that why you came back?” he asked, picking up the Coke. He handed it to me. “You look hot.”

  I took it from him, our fingers brushing, and gulped the sweet, sticky liquid. I remember how happy I had felt driving home from here that night—had it really been only a week ago?

  “I wish that was the reason,” I said. “This is business.”

  “Mike?” he asked. “I read about him in the paper this morning. You his lawyer?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Can you answer a couple of questions for me?”

  “I’ll try,” he said.

  “The night he broke curfew, did you actually see him when he came in?”

  “Just for a couple of minutes,” he drawled. “I was in bed already, half-asleep. He stumbled around a bit, woke me up.”

  “Stumbled?” I seized on the word. “Did he seem drunk to you? Loaded?”

  Lonnie grabbed the towel his head rested on and wiped himself down. “Could have been. I didn’t say ‘boo’ to him. Just saw it was him and went back to sleep.”

  “But he could have been wasted?”

  “Sure,” he said, easily. “He coulda been. Why are you asking?”

  “I just want to get a clear picture of what happened that night,” I said. “Have the police talked to you yet?”

  A look of alarm crossed his face. “No, why?”

  “The night Michael broke curfew was the same night Gus Peña was killed. Now that Michael’s been arrested, they’ll be questioning everyone who may have seen him.”

  He smiled. “What should I tell them?”

  “The truth,” I said.

  He dropped the smile. “This is business.”

  “You may have to testify
at the trial,” I told him.

  “I guess it wouldn’t look too good if I was sleeping with one of the lawyers, would it?”

  “No, it wouldn’t.”

  A blond girl in an electric-blue swimsuit came out of the building and dived in at the far end of the pool. We watched her for a moment.

  “Will I be seeing you again?” he asked.

  “In court, maybe,” I replied.

  He nodded. “Did you know I might be a witness when you were here the other night?”

  “The other night I was trying to find Michael,” I said. “I didn’t know until this morning how things were going to be.”

  “Can I believe you?”

  The girl was still splashing around in the pool. I reached over, pulled him toward me, and kissed him. Someone cleared her throat behind us. We didn’t stop. Finally, I let go of him, and pulled back.

  “From here on out,” I said, “we’ll have to play it by the book. That doesn’t mean I won’t be back when it’s over, if that’s what you want, too.”

  “I think you know what I want,” he said. “I’ll walk you out.”

  As we headed toward the door, he said, “Oh, remember you asked me about Mike’s girlfriend? Angie? I think I saw her once, for a minute. I was out on the porch smoking, and I saw a car drive up and Michael got out. There was a girl driving it. Pretty girl. He kissed her.”

  Remembering the car described at the site of the murder, I asked, “Was it old, beat up?”

  “Hardly,” he said. “It looked brand-new, one of those little Japanese numbers. Miata?”

  I opened the door. “And the girl, did she go with the car?”

  “Definitely,” he said.

  “See you in court, Mr. Davis.”

  “And I’ll see you back here afterwards, counsel.”

  When I got home that night, Josh’s car was in the driveway, the back seat packed with boxes. I walked into the house and found him bent at the oven. A thick steak lay in a pan of dark marinade. Water boiled in a pot on the stove, and asparagus lay drying on paper towels.

  “Josh?”

  He closed the oven door and turned around. “Hi, I’m making you dinner.”

  “I can see that,” I said, laying my briefcase on the kitchen table. “How’s Steven?”

  Josh said, “I brought him home today.” He poured himself a glass of wine from a bottle on the counter. “Can I get you something to drink?”

  “No, thanks.” It was strange to see him there, and then I thought of the clothes in the car, Steven going home. It all fell into place. “I saw your car out there,” I said.

  “I’d planned to be done before you got home, and just leave you a note, but that didn’t seem right.”

  “Is this the last supper?”

  He frowned, set his glass down.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Bad joke. I don’t know what else to say.”

  “When I was moving stuff out, I looked in the fridge for something to drink,” he said. “It was empty. I thought I’d make you something to eat, that’s all.”

  “I’m not very hungry.” I sniffed something burning. “Turn the broiler off before it sets off the smoke alarm.”

  He went over and shut the oven off, turned the flame off beneath the saucepan, then came and sat down at the table.

  “I didn’t know another way to do this,” he said.

  “You don’t have to apologize,” I said. “It’s been coming for a long time.”

  “I’ll always love you, Henry.”

  “Don’t cry, Josh.”

  He wiped his face on his shirtsleeve. “I just couldn’t keep pretending I was going to come back.”

  “It’s all right,” I said, stroking his face. It was an effort to talk, and all I really wanted was for him to leave. “How are you feeling? Your health, I mean.”

  “I’m down to ten T-cells. Doc’s taking me off everything. AZT. DDI. The whole alphabet. I’m going to see an herbalist tomorrow.”

  “A what?”

  “An herbalist,” he repeated, defensively. “A specialist in Chinese herbal medicine. Steven swears by him.”

  “Steven just got out of the hospital,” I pointed out.

  “He’s also lived five times longer than his doctors expected him to when he was diagnosed.” His voice was beginning to show his temper. “What’s it going to hurt, Henry? What have I got to lose?”

  I didn’t have an answer for that one. I never did. “Just be careful. Check out what he says with your doctor.”

  “Sure,” he said without meaning it. I let it go.

  “Leave me your phone number, OK, for mail, messages, that kind of stuff.”

  “It’s on your desk.” He dug into his pocket and took out a key. “The house key.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He nodded. “Are you sure I can’t feed you?”

  “Not tonight,” I said. I eyed the bottle of Bordeaux on the counter. “But take the wine, would you?”

  He went over to the counter, picked it up and emptied it into the sink. He rinsed the bottle and dropped it into the recycling bin, one of his projects that I would now have to take on as my own. I watched him, graceful as ever, short and slender, moving through a room that had always been more his than mine. When he came back to me, I saw the terrible sadness in his eyes, and had to look away, at a blue bowl that he had filled with oranges. A small elegance. Josh had an elegant soul.

  “The real reason I stuck around and waited for you,” he said, “is, I wondered if we could make love.”

  “That’s not necessary, Joshua.”

  “It’s not what you think,” he said. “It’s not a favor to you. It’s for me, if you’ll do it. I was going to feed you by candlelight and then ask, but…” He smiled, wanly. “I’ll go if you don’t want me.”

  I reached out and pulled him toward me, pressing my face against his stomach, feeling his fingers in my hair, kneading my shoulders. After a moment, I got to my feet, and we went into the bedroom.

  I tried to see everything as clearly as I could while we made love, but I was present only in the details: a sinewy, hairy thigh, the musk of his groin and armpit, the smooth expanse of his back. I ran my tongue across his teeth and touched the place where he had chipped a tooth years earlier, on a piece of hard bread at a restaurant in Carmel. For a second, I saw him wading into the ocean while I shot pictures from the shore. I held him close, his breath fluttering on my cheek. He whimpered softly as he came, and lay his head against my shoulder. Within minutes, he was asleep and then I slept, too.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “I’M SORRY I HAD to run off the other day,” I told Raymond Reynolds the next morning. “If you’ve seen the papers, I guess you know what it was about.” Michael Ruiz was scheduled to be arraigned at ten. Reynolds had agreed to see me at a very early hour. For once, the blinds on the windows were open, revealing a prosaic scene of telephone wires, a supermarket sign, a slate gray sky.

  “Do you think it’s significant that you left here because someone else needed you?” he asked.

  “I’m on call pretty much twenty-four hours a day,” I answered.

  “Even the one hour a week you set aside for yourself,” he observed. As always, his tone was mild, inquisitive, like a voice that questioned from within.

  “I think I told you that I’m not the contemplative type.”

  “No,” he said, “what you told me is that you didn’t think the purpose of life is to sit beneath a tree and wait for enlightenment. It’s a false dichotomy, Henry. It’s not either-or. Just before you left last time, you were telling me how things changed for you after your father died. Is that when you decided to become a lawyer?”

  “Not immediately,” I said. “I drifted into it over the course of a couple of years. It was the tail end of the sixties, and I got caught up in the peace movement, or what was left of it.” I thought back to those far-off days, and how, gradually, I had exchanged my books of Yeats and Auden for Herbert Marcuse and Frantz Fano
n. “I became very grim, weighed down by the world’s injustices.”

  “The world’s injustice, Henry, or your father’s?”

  “I didn’t have you around to make that distinction for me,” I replied.

  He smiled at my annoyance. “I doubt whether you would have heard it anyway.”

  “Well, anyway,” I continued, “I could see that street protest was a dead end, so I looked around for another way to change the world. I came to law. Criminal law. I never considered any other kind of practice.”

  “And have you changed the world?”

  “You know as well as I do the answer to that,” I said irritably.

  Undeterred by my tone, he asked, “So why do you persist?”

  I ran through a list of responses in my head, but none of them seemed particularly persuasive. I said, “I feel like I have to justify myself to you.”

  “No,” he said, “I don’t care if you practice law or not. I’m just asking you a question about it you’ve never asked yourself.”

  “I have asked myself,” I told him. “More in the last couple of weeks since Josh moved out than in the fifteen years that preceded it. The truth is, I don’t know why I practice law anymore. I just can’t imagine not being a lawyer.”

  “What do you think your father would think of your life, Henry, if he were alive? Do you think he would approve?”

  “My father never approved of anything I did.”

  “Then what does it matter what you do?”

  “That doesn’t follow,” I said.

  “A few minutes ago you described yourself as grim and weighed down. Last time, you said when your father died it was as if the weight of his life had descended on your shoulders. But you also said that between the time you went away to college and his death, you felt free. What do those statements indicate to you?”

  “Are you suggesting that I’ve become my father?”

  “It’s not so simple,” Reynolds replied. “Just say you’ve become someone other than who you may actually be.”

  “I can’t accept that. It would mean the last twenty years have been a waste.”

  “You’ve done commendable things in the last twenty years,” he replied. “That’s hardly a waste. They’ve all been for other people. What can you do for yourself?”