The Little Death hr-1

by Michael Nava

  “Not on house calls,” I replied. “Where can I find Mrs. Paris?”

  “Third floor, English department in the Old Quad. I’ll walk you there if you like, okay?”

  “Sure, just let me pay for the book.”

  Between the bookstores and the Old Quad I learned quite a bit about Danny’s tastes in poetry, his life and his plans as well as receiving a couple of gently veiled passes. I steered the conversation around to Katherine Paris.

  “She had this great lady persona,” he was saying, “but don’t cross her.”

  “You did?”

  “Anyone with any integrity does sooner or later. Her opinions are set in stone.”

  “Not writ in water?”

  “That’s Shelley. That was pretty good. Anyway, she doesn’t let you forget who has the power.” We had reached the English department. He smiled at me, sunnily. “What do you want with her anyway?”

  “Her son was killed on campus a couple of days ago. He was a friend of mine. I want to ask her some questions.”

  “You mean the guy that they found in the creek?” I nodded. “That’s too bad. Was he a good friend?”

  I reached out and touched the button on his chest. “We were good friends.”

  His look said, “And here I’ve been cruising you.” Aloud, he said, “You must think I’m a real jerk.”

  “How could you have known?” I asked, reasonably. “And thanks for the help.’’ We shook hands, he a little awkwardly and I remembered how rare the gesture was among students. “The poem with the phrase writ in water, that was about Keats, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Shelley wrote it when Keats died. He called it ‘Adonais.’” He started to say something else, thought better of it, smiled again and walked away. I watched him go and then turned and climbed up the stairs to the third floor.

  Katherine Paris did not look like a woman anyone ever called mother. Her small feet were encased in gold slippers and she wore a flowing white caftan that obliterated any sign of a body beneath it. The string of blue beads around her neck was probably lapis lazuli. It was the only jewelry she wore. Her face had the false glow of a drinker but none of a drinker’s soft alcoholic bloat. It was a hard angular face I saw as I entered her office; deeply wrinkled, deeply intelligent. She instructed me to sit down. I sat. She continued writing.

  The walls of the office were bare. The curtains were drawn against the afternoon light and the only source of light was her desk lamp. She worked at an elegant writing table whose spindly legs hardly seemed able to bear the weight of the books piled on top. At length, she looked up at me from beneath half-glasses evidently surprised to find that I was still there.

  I introduced myself, to her obvious pleasure, as an admirer of her work. She accepted the volume of her collected poems and signed it for me.

  “How were you introduced to my poetry?” she asked. Her voice was a low, whisky rumble.

  “Your son, Hugh,” I replied and, at once, the pleasure vanished. Her eyes narrowed.

  “I see. Tell me, Mr. Rios, which of my poems is your favorite? Or have you actually opened this — brand new book?”

  “In fact I have, Mrs. Paris, but you’re right, I didn’t come here to discuss them. I’m a lawyer.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “Mrs. Paris, I was Hugh’s friend “Hugh was rather generous in that regard. He had altogether too many friends. Were you one of his — special friends?” she asked archly.

  “I cared for Hugh,” I said.

  “Mr. Rios,” she said, mockingly, “spare me the homosexual sentimentality. What is it you want from me?”

  “I believe Hugh was murdered. I’m not sure by whom but the first thing to do is determine the exact cause of death. The body was moved before an autopsy-”

  “That’s enough,” she said. “You walk in from nowhere, tell me someone killed my son and ask permission to cut open his body?” These last words were delivered in a tone of rising incredulousness. “Just who the hell are you? One of his boyfriends? Do you think there’s money for you in this?”

  Unable to suppress my hostility, I said, “Mrs. Paris, I sympathize with your deep grief, however, I’m talking about a crime.”

  “My deep grief? Getting himself killed was the most unselfish thing Hugh ever did. As for the body, it was cremated yesterday. As for crimes, Mr. Rios, you’re now trespassing and in one minute I’m going to call campus security and have you thrown out.” She picked up the phone.

  “Why was he cremated?” I asked, rising.

  “That is not your business,” she said, “now get out.”

  “Thank you for your time, Mrs. Paris.” She put the phone down and went back to her writing.

  *****

  Sitting on my patio an hour later, I finished a gin-and-tonic, watched clouds move in from the ocean and counted up my leads. They amounted to about nothing. There were Hugh’s allegations against his grandfather and the coincidence of his death under odd circumstances. Gold knew more than he was saying, but either he could not say any more or really believed that our interests were sufficiently different for him not to confide in me. Katherine Paris was a dead end. I needed something tangible. It seemed to me that Hugh Paris moved through life like a nomad, using life up as he lived it, and leaving very little behind.

  And then I remembered the letters. They were still in the pocket of the coat I had worn three days earlier. I finished my drink and went to the closet to retrieve them. Even as I spread them out on my desk a voice within begged me not to read them. I was afraid of what they might contain. I made myself another drink and circled my desk, vaguely, looking at them — thirteen in all, arranged from the earliest, in June, to the most recent, only a couple of weeks earlier. Finally, I sat down and started reading.

  They were not exactly the rantings of a lunatic. On the other hand, there was little in them that could be called civilized discourse. Mostly, they were excruciatingly detailed invective of a psycho-sexual nature — literate but profoundly disturbed. I refolded the last letter and tucked it back into its envelope. It seemed impossible these could come from Hugh, but the details told. I said to myself that I was now his advocate, not his lover, and an advocate accepts revelations about his client that would send the lover running from the room. It’s part of the masochism of being a criminal defense lawyer to want to know the worst, in theory so the worst can be incorporated into the defense, but in actuality to confirm a blighted view of humanity. If I believed that people are basically good, I would have gone into plastics. People are basically screwed-up and often the best you can do for them is listen, hear the worst and then tell them it’s not so bad.

  It wasn’t so bad, Hugh, I said, silently. I’ve seen worse. And the letters contained solid information. Hugh believed his grandfather was responsible for the deaths of his grandmother and his uncle, Jeremy. He also accused the judge of imprisoning his father, Nicholas, in an asylum. Finally, he accused the judge of depriving him of his lawful inheritance. There wasn’t much elaboration since, obviously, Hugh expected his grandfather to understand the allusions. It wasn’t evidence but it was something. A lead. A theory. Hugh’s death was part of a cover-up of earlier murders. All right, so it was melodramatic. Most crime is.

  I collected my thoughts and called Terry Ormes. Her crisp, friendly voice was a relief after the dark muttering voice of the letters. I told her, briefly, editing out the lurid details, what the letters contained.

  “That’s still not much,” she said.

  “Well, it’s something. Apparently, Hugh’s grandmother and his uncle were killed up near Donner Pass on interstate 80 about twenty years ago. Can you contact the local police agency in the nearest town up there with a hospital?”

  “Sure,” she said, “but if it happened on 80, it was probably a CHP case. What am I asking for?”

  “Everything you can find out about the circumstances of their deaths. Any reports, death certificates, anything. And find out anything you
can about Hugh’s life the last six months. Rap sheets, DMV records, any kind of paper.”

  “Call me in two days,” she said. “What will you do?”

  “I have one other card to play,” I said. “I’ll be in touch.”

  The line went dead. I gathered up the letters and buried them beneath a pile of papers in the bottom drawer of my desk. I closed and locked it. For a long time I sat, nursing my drink, thinking about the hole where my heart had been.

  5

  The next morning I sat down to dial a number I’d not called in four years. The receptionist I reached announced the name of the law firm in the hushed tones appropriate to old money. I gave her the name I wanted and waited the couple of minutes it took to work through the various intermediaries until a deep unhurried male voice spoke.

  “Grant Hancock here.”

  “Grant, this is Henry Rios.”

  There was the slightest pause before breeding won out and he said, “Henry, it’s been a long time.”

  “Four years, at least.”

  “Are you in the city?”

  “No, I’m calling from my apartment. Grant, I need your advice.”

  “Surely you don’t need the services of a tax lawyer on what you make with the public defender.”

  “I’m not a P.D. anymore,” I replied, “and what I want to talk about is death, not taxes.”

  “Anyone’s in particular?”

  “Yes, Hugh Paris. I thought since you’re both — well, old San Francisco stock — that you might have known him.”

  “Indeed I did,” Grant said slowly. “How well did you know him?”

  “Well enough to think that he was murdered.” The line buzzed vacantly. “Grant? Are you still there?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I don’t want to discuss this over the phone. Can you come up here tonight?”

  “About nine?”

  “Fine. I’m still at the same place. You know the way.” I agreed that I did.

  “Henry, did Hugh mention me? Is that why you called?” His voice was, for Grant, agitated.

  “No, he never said anything about you. It was my own idea to call. I know how thick the old families are with each other.”

  “I knew him a long time ago,” Grant said in a far-off voice, and then stopped himself short. “I’ll talk to you tonight.” The line went dead.

  Grant Hancock, along with Aaron Gold, had been one of my two closest friends at law school. His name was the amalgamation of two eminent San Francisco families and he grew up in a mansion in Pacific Heights. He was one of those San Francisco aristocrats who, for all their culture and worldliness, never move a psychological inch from the tops of their hills. Among those families that gave the city its reputation for insularity, “provincial” was a compliment.

  In the normal course of existence, I would never have met someone like Grant since his world was far removed from mine and hardly visible to the untrained eye. Its tribesmen recognized each other by certain signs and signals meaningless to the outsider. However, Linden University was an extension of that world and the law school was a kind of finishing school from which he entered a law practice so leisurely and refined that it would have befitted one of Henry Fames’ languid heroes.

  Grant cultivated a certain languor and part of it was real, growing out of a sense of belonging that was deep and unshakable. Part of it was an act, a way of masking real passion and a strong if confused decency. His decency was as simple as the desire to treat everyone fairly and civilly but it was undercut by his knowledge that, from his position of privilege, he could afford to act decently at no cost to himself. He wondered how he would treat others had he not been so privileged, and, I think, he assumed the worst about himself.

  The fact that he was gay added to his confusion because acknowledging his homosexuality was an opportunity to take a moral risk and he passed it up. He rigidly separated his personal and professional lives and spent great amounts of energy policing the border between them. And for all that, I had once loved him and he had loved me. There had even been a time when it appeared that we might live together, openly, but that time came and passed, and he could not bring himself to do it. We drifted apart, he back to his hill and I back to real life.

  I was thinking about all this as I finished dressing and made a pot of coffee. There was something of Grant in Hugh Paris as if Hugh had been a version of Grant more comfortable with himself and more distant from that insular world of old money and unchanging attitudes. I let the comparison lie. There was work to be done.

  The weather was beautiful, almost cruelly so, I thought as I walked across the parking lot to the courthouse. The deep and broad blue sky and the dazzling morning sun which should have looked down upon an innocent landscape instead shone above cramped suburban cities and cramped suburban lives. The sunlight brushed the back of my neck as if it were fingers wanting me only to stop for a moment and do nothing but breathe and be grateful that I was alive. Another time, I thought as I pushed open the glass door to the courthouse.

  I walked up the stairs to the clerk’s office on the second floor. Telephones screeched and voices rose in frustration at the service counter. This was the place where court records relating to criminal cases were kept. By the time I got a sullen clerk’s attention, I had forgotten the weather and gratitude was the farthest thing from my mind. Having already located the case number on a master index, I ordered the court docket on Hugh’s case to see what had happened to it. Fifteen minutes later, the docket was regurgitated from the bowels of the bureaucracy by the same clerk, who warned me three times not to remove the file from the room.

  I went over to the reading counter and flipped through the pages of the docket. The criminal charges filed against Hugh the day after his arrest were possession of PCP, being under the influence of PCP and resisting arrest — all misdemeanors. His arraignment had been set for a week after his release from jail. On that day, he appeared through his attorney, Stephan Abrams, and the D.A. moved to dismiss all charges against him. The court granted the motion and that was the end of the case. I made a mental note of the D.A.’s name: Sonny Patterson, an old courtroom adversary. I had the docket copied and went down the hall to the office of the District Attorney.

  Sonny Patterson rattled the docket sheet and dropped it on his desk. He took a drag from his cigarette, scattering ashes on his pale green shirt and bright orange tie. Hick was written all over his puffy potato face, but it was an act, like his carefully mismatched clothes. He got juries to like him by letting them think that they were smarter than he. But Sonny had a mind for detail and one that made connections. A good mind. Evasive when circumstances required evasion. He was being evasive now.

  “Come on Henry, I handle twenty cases a day in the arraignment court. You’re talking a thousand cases ago.”

  “It’s not every day that you dismiss a three-count complaint involving drugs and resisting arrest.”

  “Misdemeanors,” he replied disdainfully.

  “Being under the influence carries a mandatory thirty day jail sentence.”

  “So?” he said, shrugging. “With good time/work time figured in you’re out in twenty.”

  “That’s still twenty days longer in county than I’d care to spend.”

  “I know your position on determinate sentencing, counsel,” he said stiffly.

  I held up my palms. “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t come here to debate the point. I just want to know why you dumped the case.”

  “What was the defendant’s name again?” he drawled in a vaguely Southern accent. Another affectation. The furthest south Sonny had ever been was Castroville.

  “Hugh Paris,” I replied.

  “Isn’t he the guy they pulled out of the creek about a week back?”

  “The same.”

  “You know him pretty well?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “The papers say it was an accident.”

  “So do the cops.”

  “I know,” he said
, “I had Torres up here to tell me about it. He mentioned — in passing — that you identified the body.” He leaned forward on his desk. “Do you know anything about this man’s death that the police don’t know?”

  Police, I thought. Did he mean the cops? Any moment now he’ll be calling them peace officers. Aloud I said, carefully, “I don’t know anything about Hugh’s death the cops don’t know. I just added up the information differently.”

  “So did I,” he said, picking up the phone and pushing a button. He reeled off a string of numbers into the receiver. A couple of minutes later there was a knock on the door and his secretary entered with a thick file. Hugh’s name was written across the outside of the manila folder. She put the file on the desk and Sonny flipped through the arrest report to the three sheets of yellow paper on which the complaint appeared. He turned the last sheet over to some writing. This was the alibi, so-called because every time a D.A. dismissed a case he was required to set out his reasons on the back of the complaint in the event someone — like a cop or irate citizen — took exception to the dismissal down the road.

  “Insufficiency of the evidence,” Sonny said, lifting his face from the sheet.

  “That’s meaningless. What was the problem?”

  “The alleged PCP cigarette was analyzed by the crime lab and came back as creatively rolled oregano, dipped in ether to give it the right smell. Mr. Paris’s pusher misled him. Street justice, I guess.”

  “And the other charges?”

  “We won’t pursue the under the influence charge unless the defendant was examined by a doctor at the time of his arrest. The cops didn’t do that.”

  “What about the resisting arrest count?”

  “That was plain, old-fashioned contempt of cop. A little chickenshit charge. Not worth the paper it was written on.” He glanced at the complaint with an expression almost of distaste. I wasn’t surprised by his reaction. The D.A.’s know better than anyone what cops can be like — touchy, hostile, self-righteous.

  “Have you ever heard of that lawyer, Abrams, before?”