The Little Death hr-1

by Michael Nava

  “Jesus, Aaron. I completely forgot. I should’ve called from the city.”

  “The city? Is that where you’ve been?”

  “Yes, at Hugh Paris’s.”

  “He lives there? Where?”

  “Why?” There was a long silence on the other end of the line. “Aaron, are you still there?”

  “Are you going back up?”

  “Tonight,” I said.

  “I need to see you before you go,” he said in a strange voice.

  “Sure. When?”

  “I’ll meet you in an hour at Barney’s,” he said.

  He was already at the bar when I got there, staring, a bit morosely over a tall drink with a lot of fruit jammed into the glass.

  “You look like you’ve lost your best friend,” I said, sitting down. Touching his glass, I said, “What’s that you’re drinking? A Pink Lady?” He said nothing. I added, to provoke him, “Jews really don’t have the hang of ordering alcohol.’’

  “You’re pretty chipper,” he said, sourly. The waitress came over and I ordered a Mexican beer.

  “I’m happy, Aaron.”

  “Hugh Paris?” he asked, with almost a sneer in his voice. “Tell me, what do you really know about him?”

  “I’m not sure I understand what you mean.”

  He waited until I had my drink, then said, “You’ve heard of Grover Linden.”

  “In this town,” I said, “you might as well ask me if I know who my father is.”

  “Great-great-grandfather,” he said. “That’s his relation to Hugh Paris.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  Gold merely nodded.

  The first time I heard Grover Linden’s name I was a fourth- grade student in Marysville. His picture appeared in my social studies book and the caption beneath it identified the broad-faced bearded man as the man who built the railroad. The railroad that connected the west and the east, I learned in high school, took ten years to construct and cost the lives of hundreds as an army of Chinese coolies worked feverishly to break through the Sierras during three of the coldest winters in the nineteenth-century. It was the railroad that raised San Francisco from a backwater village to an international city. It was the railroad from which Grover Linden, who began his adult life as a blacksmith in Utica, derived the wealth that made him the richest man in America.

  Linden rose to become a United States senator and bought the Democratic nomination to the presidency. He lost that election, too opulent and corrupt even for that opulent and corrupt era, the Gilded Age. Popular opinion turned against him and he was forced to divest himself of his railroad in a decision by the Supreme Court that I read in my law school anti-trust course. He died in 1920, having nearly lived a century, leaving an immense personal fortune. Almost incidentally, he donated a vast tract of land on the San Francisco peninsula to found the university that bore his name. The first president of the school, Jeremiah Smith, Linden’s son-in-law, raided the Ivy League luring entire faculties to California with the promise of unlimited wealth to support their research. In less than a century, Linden University had acquired an international reputation as one of the country’s great private schools. The year Gold and I graduated from the law school, the commencement speaker, a United States Supreme Court justice, addressed a distinguished audience that included half the California Supreme Court as well as the sitting governors of three states, all of them alumns. And Linden, statues and paintings of whom were everywhere, lay entombed on the grounds of the school in a marble mausoleum along with his wife, daughter and son-in-law.

  “Hugh hasn’t told you who his family is?” Gold asked.

  “No, not really. I mean — he mentioned money, but I had no idea.”

  “He didn’t tell you his grandfather was Judge Paris?”

  “Robert Paris, you mean?”

  Gold nodded.

  “He told me that, but it’s a far cry from someone named Robert Paris to Grover Linden.”

  “It’s complicated,” Aaron said. He pulled the slightly soggy cocktail napkin from beneath his drink and got out his pen. “Look,” he said. “This is Linden’s family tree.”

  At the top of the tree were Linden and his wife, Sarah. The next generation consisted of their daughter, Allison, who married Jeremiah Smith.

  “Then,” Gold said, “there were two kids, John Smith and Christina Smith, Linden’s grandchildren. Christina married Robert Paris.”

  “John Smith never married?”

  “No,” he shrugged. “Linden’s descendants aren’t prolific. Christina and Robert Paris had two sons, Jeremy and Nicholas.” He traced the tree down into that generation. “Nicholas married Katherine Seaton. Hugh is their son.”

  He tucked his pen back into his coat pocket. I studied the napkin.

  “Hugh’s the last living descendant of Grover Linden?”

  “No, John Smith is very much alive. He controls the Linden Trust,” Gold said, referring to the megafund, the income of which supported the university’s research which ranged from cancer cures to bigger and deadlier nuclear bombs, with the emphasis on the latter.

  “John Smith,” I repeated, and, suddenly, it came to me. “He bailed Hugh out of jail.”

  Gold lifted an eyebrow but said nothing.

  “Are there any other descendants?”

  “Hugh’s father, Nicholas.” “Hugh told me his father was dead.”

  “He might as well be,” Gold said. “Nicholas is locked up in an asylum. A basket case.”

  “And Hugh’s mother, Katherine?”

  “The parents divorced twenty years ago. I don’t know anything about her.”

  “You seem to know a lot. Why?”

  “Robert Paris is one of my firm’s clients,” he said glumly. “I’m telling you more than I should have as it is.”

  “Why tell me this much?”

  “For your own good. Hugh’s a black sheep.”

  “Meaning?”

  “He has a serious drug problem.” I nodded and sipped my beer. “And he’s been hospitalized for — I guess you’d call them emotional problems.” This I hadn’t known but, swallowing my surprise, I nodded again.

  Gold looked annoyed, probably having expected shock from me.

  “I know about those things.”

  “And you still plan to see him?”

  “I’m not an eighteen-year-old coed,” I said, to irritate him further. “What I want to know is your source of information. Robert Paris?”

  “Don’t ask me to violate a client confidence.”

  “A strategic attack of ethics, Aaron?”

  “Look, Henry, I’m going out on a limb for you. The guy’s crazy. He’s been threatening his grandfather, calling day and night, writing nutty letters.”

  “I don’t believe you,” I said, not without a twinge of anxiety that the allegations were true.

  Gold dug into his breast pocket and withdrew a wad of rubberbanded letters. He tossed them at me. “Read them,” he commanded.

  I leafed through the envelopes. They were postmarked San Francisco, addressed to Robert Paris in Portola Valley but gave no return address. It occurred to me that I did not know what Hugh’s handwriting looked like. Clinging to that thread of doubt, I dropped the letters on the table.

  “Where did you get these?”

  “Afraid to read them?”

  “Go to hell,” I said, rising, but Gold was on his feet first.

  “Fine,” he said. “You can shut me out but you have your own doubts about the guy, don’t you?” It was a fair statement but I was not inclined to concede the point. “Keep these,” he said, indicating the letters. “They make enlightening reading.” He drew himself up and walked out. I saw him pass in the window, looking straight ahead. I resisted the impulse to go after him — since I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say — and finished my drink. Then, I gathered up the letters and put them in my coat pocket as I rose to leave.

  The letters were heavy in my pocket as I walked to my car. There ha
d not been enough time to know Hugh well, particularly since I saw him through the haze of infatuation, but my mind hadn’t gone entirely out of commission. Hugh was a troubled man, troubled enough to make threats if not to carry them out. His hatred with his grandfather was fused with his sexual awakening, and his grandfather remained for him a figure who was frightening but seductive. Then, too, the years of drug addiction had taken their toll. Beneath the charm and humor, there was ruin. I saw all this and it made my feeling for him more intense and protective. The letters — and really, I had little doubt he’d written them — complicated matters. They were a sign that the sickness was deeper than I thought, but, even so, he deserved the chance to explain or deny them.

  I called Hugh as soon as I got back to my apartment. The phone rang and rang; I pictured the empty room in his house, the phone wailing into the silence. The anxiety I felt in the bar was increasing by the minute and growing more diffuse; fed by emotional and physical exhaustion, it now verged on simple, unthinking panic. Throwing some clothes into a duffle bag, I hurried out to my car and headed for the city.

  I was hardly aware of the other traffic on the road or the fading light of late afternoon. By the time I got to Hugh’s house it was sunset. The first thing I noticed was that the lights were out. Walking up the stairs to the porch, my hands shook. I searched the door quickly for signs of forced entry but found none. I knocked, much too loudly and for too long. There was no answer. I craned my neck around the side of the porch and looked into the front window. The living room filled with shadowy gray light and the emptiness of the place was an almost physical force. I knew no one was there.

  I went back to my car and got in, telling myself he would have to come back eventually. All I had to do was wait. So I waited. The streetlights came on. A police car rolled by. I heard a dog bark. A man and a woman walked by, hand in hand, glancing into my car as they passed. I checked my watch. It was ten. The next time I checked it was nearly six in the morning and I was cramped up behind the steering wheel. My panic had dissipated but, as I looked at the house, it seemed to emanate a kind of deadness.

  I went back up the stairs to the porch and knocked on the door. I waited a few minutes, watching the neighborhood awaken to another perfect end of summer day. Defeated, I turned away, went down to my car and left. The drive home seemed endless.

  A tall, sandy-haired policewoman was leaning against the wall outside the door to my apartment. She asked me if I was Henry Rios, and, when I agreed that I was, she asked me to step over to her patrol car.

  “What’s going on, officer?”

  “A man died,” she said, simply, “and he had your business card on him.”

  “Who was he?” I asked, as a chill settled along my spine. The bright morning light suddenly seemed stale and unreal.

  “We don’t know,” she said, briskly. “He wasn’t carrying a wallet. We’d like you to come down to the morgue and see if you can identify the body.”

  We went over to the patrol car. Her partner was standing alongside the car drumming his fingers on the roof. He opened the back door for me and I got in. They got into the front and we swept down the quiet street.

  “You’re a hard man to track down,” she said. “We’ve been trying since last night.”

  “I was out,” I said.

  “A bachelor,” her partner said, smiling into the rearview mirror. I smiled back.

  The coroner was a black man, his dark skin contrasting with his immaculate white frock. He had a round, placid face and his eyes were black and bright. It was a decent face, one that kept its secrets. He led me down a still corridor that stank of chemicals. The officers followed a few steps behind, talking softly. We came to the room and he instructed the police to wait outside. He and I went in.

  “They’re like kids in here,” he said, speaking of the officers. “They get into everything.”

  I merely nodded and looked around the room. One wall had several metal drawers in it. On the drawers, just below the handles, were slots into which there had been fitted squares of cardboard with names typed on them. There was a row of steel tables, set on casters, lined up against another wall. It was quite cold in the room. A white room. White lights overhead. The coroner moved around quickly and efficiently.

  “When did all this happen?” I asked as he put his hand on the handle of a drawer marked John Doe.

  “Estimated time of death around 10:30 last night. They found him in San Francisquito Creek just below the footbridge leading out of campus. Drowned.”

  “In three feet of water?” I asked incredulously.

  “We took some blood,” he explained quietly. “There was enough heroin in his system to get five junkies off.” I opened my mouth but nothing came out. “Are you ready now?”

  “Yes.”

  He pulled at the handle. The drawer came out slowly, exposing first the head, and then the torso, down to the sunken genitals. The coroner stopped and took a step back, as if inspecting death’s work.

  The elegant body was as white as marble. I could see a dark blue vein running up the length of his arm, and a jagged red mark just beneath his armpit where the needle went in. There were bruises on his chest. His head rested on a kind of pillow. Death had robbed his face of its seductive animation but I recognized him.

  “His name is Hugh Paris,” I said, and the coroner took a pencil and pad of paper from his pocket and wrote. “His grandfather’s name is Robert Paris and he lives somewhere in Portola Valley. I don’t know where.” I heard the pencil scratching but I could not take my eyes off of Hugh’s face.

  “Is that it?”

  “Yes, that’s all.”

  “The police will want a statement.” I looked at the coroner. The dark eyes were impassive but remotely sad as he studied Hugh. “Such a young man. It’s a shame.”

  I agreed that it was a shame and excused myself, hearing, as I left, the drawer slide shut. The two officers were at the far end of the corridor, smoking. They looked up when they saw me and the woman smiled. As I approached, I saw the smile leak from her face. I stopped, ran the back of my hand across my eyes and inspected it. It was wet. I hadn’t realized I was crying.

  4

  “The coroner says it was an accident.”

  “The coroner also said he was drugged.”

  “The guy was a hype. Whaddaya expect?” Torres blew a cloud of cigar smoke across the small, windowless room, then tilted back in his swivel chair revealing an enormous stomach that poured over a heavy metal belt buckle fashioned from the letters USMC. The desk between us was piled high with papers but he had cleared enough space for the plastic nameplate that identified him as Samuel Torres, Detective, Homicide.

  Torres and I went back a long way. I had once dissected his testimony on cross-examination in a murder case on which he was the investigator. He was lucky the jury hadn’t hissed him when he got off the stand. Neither of us had forgotten his humiliation. Now he studied me with small, dark eyes. On the wall, above his pitted, jowly face, there was a calendar distributed by some policeman’s association. It was a drawing showing two cops standing against a flowering tree of some kind. They were dressed in black uniforms, riot helmets on their heads, jaws adamantly set against the future. Fine art, cop style. That calendar drawing spoke volumes to me about the cops — they were menacing and paranoid, and not very bright.

  “A hype knows how much he can handle,” I said, resuming my conversation with Torres. It was three in the afternoon, and I had not been home since I was brought to the morgue that morning from my apartment.

  “Hey, everyone makes a mistake. The guy was just partying. And anyway, counsel” — he said the last word sneeringly — “we got this one figured out.”

  Now it was my turn to sneer. “Right. You have him wandering around the university at ten at night, shot up with dope, losing his balance, tumbling down the embankment and drowning in three feet of water. It happens every day.”

  “You’re wasting my time,” Torres said.


  “I don’t think that’s possible, detective.”

  “Watch it, Rios. This ain’t a courtroom. No judge is gonna take your punches for you.”

  “I’m terrified.”

  “Ormes, get him out of here.”

  The only other person in the office, a woman who had been quietly listening to us, rose from her desk and came over to me. Her nameplate identified her as Terry Ormes, also a homicide detective. She was tall and slender, and she wore a dark blue dress cut so austerely that I had thought it was a uniform at first. She had an open, plain face made plainer by the cut of her hair and the absence of makeup. It wasn’t the kind of face that compelled a second look, but if you did look again you were rewarded. Her face radiated intelligence. She studied me for a second with luminous gray eyes.

  “Come on, Mr. Rios,” she said in a friendly voice, “I’ll walk you out.”

  I shrugged and followed her out of the office, down a bright corridor, past the crowded front desk to the steps of the police station. It was a cool afternoon, cloudy.

  “Your colleague’s an asshole,” I said out of frustration.

  “Sam’s been around a long time and he’s set in his ways. He’s not a bad cop, just tired.”

  The mildness of her reply knocked the air out of my anger. “Well, thanks — Detective.”

  “Terry,” she said, extending her hand.

  “I’m Henry,” I said, shaking hands.

  “I think you’re right about Hugh Paris,” she said. “I think someone killed him. I just can’t figure out who or why.”

  I looked at her. “Can you talk now?” She nodded. “Let’s get a cup of coffee, then.” I gestured to a Denny’s across the street.

  “You look beat,” she said, once we were seated in an orange vinyl booth. I took a sip of coffee, tasting nothing but hot.

  “It’s been a long day and it started at the morgue. Why do you think Hugh was murdered?’’

  “I was the first one from homicide at the scene this morning,” she said. “Are you familiar with the footbridge?”

  I said yes. San Francisquito Creek ran along the eastern boundary of the campus at the edge of the wood that fanned out in both directions from the entrance to the school. As the creek flowed north into the bay, it descended, ultimately becoming subterranean as it crept into town. By the time it reached the edge of campus, there was a six-foot embankment down to the water.