Dave turned off Alvarado and found a side street of hulking frame houses that had quartered USC students in the past. Very old, thick-trunked date palms lined the curbs. So did cars, sad specimens mostly, wheels to get to work on. Now and then a ten-year-old Lincoln or Cadillac had a shine to it other than what the rain put there. Bought cheap, when the price of gas went high. At last Dave found a place to park the Valiant, men trudged back through the sifting rain to the bar. He only pushed the door half open, only got half a blast of the rock music from inside, the roar of voices, jeering, laughing, howling, when a big hand was placed flat on his chest, and he was pushed back outside. A bearded young man followed the hand. He stood six foot five and weighed three hundred pounds. “Private meeting,” he said. “No visitors.”
“I’m an insurance investigator,” Dave said. “Yearly inspection.” He dug out his folder and flashed his license. “And I can tell you, I’ve got a lot to look for. The County doesn’t like gay bars anymore. Any excuse they can find, structural, wiring, hygiene, food handling, ventilation, too many customers for the room, anything, they’ll close you down, here. I can help you avoid that.”
“You don’t look like no insurance man,” the giant said. He breathed out beer fumes. “You look like a wino.”
“I didn’t want to scare the customers,” Dave said.
“Shit.” The giant looked up and down the street, as if an answer would come from there. But no one was on the sidewalk. It lay dismal in the rain, littered with soggy hamburger wrappers, pizza boxes, Coke cups. “Today? This is a business meeting, man. Come back tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow I’m busy.” Dave tried to step around him.
“Shall I break your other arm?” Goliath placed himself between David and the door. “Give you a matching pair?”
“The County thinks gay bars spread AIDS,” Dave said.
“Bullshit. You don’t get AIDS from drinking Coors.”
“Right. But I seem to remember a few years ago, on an afternoon like this when the place was closed to outsiders, a team of police kicked in that door, and found a naked boy chained facedown to the pool table. Everybody in the place had a go at him.”
“It was a frame-up,” the giant scoffed. “We should have known. It was the kid’s idea. He asked for it.”
“Maybe,” Dave said, “but it’s a way to get AIDS in a bar.”
“Chrissake, I know that,” the man said. “We cleaned up our act now. We collect toys for crippled children.”
“Uh-huh. Did you know Art Lopez? Early twenties, short, good-looking, a construction welder? He used to come here.”
Ajax shrugged. “Anybody can come here.”
“With his lover, a blond man in his mid-thirties. They wore jackets and boots like yours. Crash helmets. They rode twin motorcycles. Kawasakis.”
The giant scowled. “He was killed. By the knifer in the dark. Couple weeks ago. The other one got it the same way, when, last night, night before last? They both had AIDS.”
“They came here together, didn’t they?” Dave said.
“You’re no insurance man,” Hercules said. “You’re a cop. You’re on that case. Yeah, they used to come here—last fall. So what?” He snorted. “You should have seen them ride those bikes. Like a couple of Sunday school teachers. They didn’t kid nobody except theirself.”
“Who did they party with?” Dave said.
“Nobody,” the big man said. “Each other.”
“Never a tall, skinny kid in ragged jeans, long blond hair, a bandanna headband?”
“Is that who they think done it?”
“It’s who tried to do it to me last night,” Dave said.
“Shit.” Fafnir took a backward step, alarm in his eyes. “You got AIDS too? Ain’t you a little old for it?”
“A little,” Dave said. “No, I ain’t got AIDS too. But I seem to be frightening somebody. I wondered if, since two of the victims haunted this place, their killer did. If he chose his victims here.”
“No tall skinny kid in ragged jeans,” the big man said. “It’s leather or nothing here. We don’t serve you if you don’t come dressed right. Anyway”—again he looked along the rain-gray street—“it’s the wrong neighborhood. The killings were all in Hollywood and West LA. Pansyville.”
“It’s not that far away,” Dave said.
“It’s another fucking world,” the giant said.
“The skinny kid may be a false lead,” Dave said. “Do you own a knife?”
Samson growled, clutched Dave’s jacket, sweater, shirt in a fist, lifted him off his feet, thrust his whisker-matted face into Dave’s. “Listen up. It wasn’t me, okay?” He set Dave down, glowering at him. “I’m not into violence.”
“I’m happy to hear it.” Dave smoothed his old clothes.
And from nowhere came Samuels in his fly-front coat and rain hat, holding up a snub-nosed detective special, and panting. “Everything all right here?” he said to Dave, and to the big man, “Police officer.”
“No problem, sir.” The giant showed his teeth and took another step backward, hands raised. “Little misunderstanding, is all. Bar’s closed today.”
“For Saturnalia,” Dave said. “A few months late, but who’s counting?”
Samuels blinked his pale eyes. “Saturn what?”
“Monthly business meeting,” Atlas said.
“We seem to be running on parallel tracks,” Dave told Samuels. “If I buy you lunch, will you drive me home?”
“You don’t look like you feel so good,” Samuels said.
“That is the understatement of the week,” Dave said.
They had moved him. This was a different room. That was all he knew. Not even whether it was day or night. He seemed to see the rainy rectangle of a window sometimes, sometimes the glare of fluorescents. Once a keen little beam of light drilled first into one eye, then the other. Once he had a wide-angle vision of a white room, one wallpapered. See that wallpaper? Billy’s hand. He loved things to be pretty. A dark face bent over him. “Dixon?” Dave said, but it wasn’t Dixon. He knew the name. Patek. A Swiss watch. That was what it was. Then everything was nothing for a long time. Or what seemed a long time.
Patel. That was the right name. The Pakistani doctor. Dave smiled and opened his eyes. Amanda stood by the bed. She wore a jacket too large in the shoulders, and a man’s hat, domed, flat-brimmed. “Dave? How do you feel?” Nothing again for a long time. Then he was riding through the rain in the unmarked police car driven by Samuels. He was gasping for breath. He was very sick. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I guess I’m going to pass out.” And a voice beside him said, “It’s okay, Dave. You’re going to be okay.” He opened his eyes, and it wasn’t Samuels, it was Cecil. He was holding Dave’s hand. He turned his beautiful head to say to someone, “He’s coming out of it.” But he wasn’t.
Kevin Nakamura grinned at him from the foot of the bed. The room was bright with sunshine. “Hey,” he said, “I got the Valiant back all right.” Then nurses crowded around in white. He was in a henhouse. He was four years old. His father had told him about all those eggs. Dave wanted the eggs. The chickens flapped and squawked around him. White feathers flew like snow. It was his last attempt at crime. No snow now. Blackness again. Then the faces beside the bed were Leppard’s blunt black one, and that of his superior, Captain Ken Barker—steel-gray hair, heavy brow ridges, a broken nose. Dave said, “I only dropped two.”
Barker said, “You’re a tough man to look out for.”
“Stay home after this, please?” Leppard said. “You put yourself out on the streets, he’s going to jump you again.”
“I’ll stay home when you’ve caught him,” Dave said.
And that was all of that. The next faces were Madge Dunstan’s handsome, horsey one, looking aggrieved, and Tom Owens’s, with the odd yellow eyes. “Have a drink,” Dave told them. “It’ll cheer you up.”
“I was the one who gave Dodge your card,” Owens said.
“Jesus.” D
ave fought a tangle of tubes and wires, and struggled to sit up. His shoulder hurt, but the pain was dim, far off. They had drugged him half to death. Owens’s bony face kept blurring and coming back into focus. Madge bent over Dave, trying to help him, poking and tugging at pillows. Dave reached out to Owens. “When?” he said. “When did you give it to him?”
“Day before he was killed,” Owens said. “He came to me. Said a blackmailer was after him. He needed advice. You were the best advice I could give him.”
Dave sagged back on the pillows. “Water, Madge? I’m so bloody dry.” He opened his eyes. It was daytime. Beyond the window he saw the tops of tall palms bending in a wind. Rain was falling again. Madge held a glass of water to his mouth. He took a few small swallows. It tired him. “What the hell happened to me?”
“Anaphylactic reaction.” Now a young man in white bent over him, bespectacled, balding, with a coppery moustache. He smelled of vitamin B. “To antibiotics. You didn’t warn the emergency room staff.”
“It never happened before,” Dave said. “I didn’t know.”
“Well, now we all know.” The doctor grinned. “And it won’t happen again, will it?”
“I sincerely hope not,” Dave said.
Cecil too wore a jacket too long and too wide in the shoulders, sleeves rolled halfway up the forearms, the shirt cuffs with them. Blowsy trousers, the extra material crumpled by a cloth belt cinched at his narrow waist. He looked ashamed, standing in the doorway of Dave’s hospital room, the light of the busy hallway behind him, where food carts passed, the soles of shoes squeaked, medicine carts jingled, trays of dishes and glassware. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I wasn’t ready for it. It was just too gruesome.”
Dave nodded. “You said that on the phone.”
“They put me in a surgeon’s gown and mask and cap.” Cecil came and sat by Dave’s bed. “Took me to the ward. I found the room, but I couldn’t go in.”
“The gown and mask weren’t to protect you.” Carmen Lopez stepped out of the shadows into the circle of lamplight around the bed. She wore another neat, dark sweatshirt, jeans, jogging shoes. In the soft glow of the lamp, her face shone like a smooth brown wood carving. “It was to keep you from infecting them. You couldn’t get nothing from them. Not just breathing. AIDS don’t work that way.”
“I know,” Cecil said. “It wasn’t that. I wasn’t afraid of that. It was something else. I don’t know the name of it. I couldn’t make myself go in that room. Two of them in there—Tinker and one named Faircloth. Skeletons, Dave. Tinker’s my age. He looked seventy. I couldn’t go in.”
“I’m sorry I sent you.” Dave sat in the bed and pushed at the supper on his tray. “I wasn’t thinking. When I have this need to know, sometimes I’m callous.”
“Hell, you have a right to know,” Cecil said. “I’m supposed to be a newsman.” He snorted, shook his head in disgust. “I panicked. What I saw in ten seconds through that door—I’ll never forget it. And I ran down the hall, tearing off the mask and cap and gown, and I got the hell out of there.” He gave a bleak laugh at himself. “Rain never felt so good to me, so clean. I just stood there on the sidewalk outside old Junipero Serra and turned my face up and held out my hands and let it wash me, soak me.”
“It’s how everybody feels at first,” Carmen said. “But it isn’t sewage, you know, filth. It’s just an animal you can’t see, a virus that grabs hold of the T cells and kills them. A live thing in the blood. You have to remind yourself of that all the time.”
Dave set the spun aluminum dome over his supper. It was bland, colorless. Hospital food. He wished he’d got Max to sneak him in something decent. But he wouldn’t have felt like eating that, either. Not under these conditions. He said to Carmen, “It was good of you to go. What did Tinker say?”
“I told him how they all must have known the one who stabbed him—otherwise he couldn’t have got so close to do it, otherwise they would have fought, or tried to fight.” She smiled wanly. “You know, Art was feisty. Like a little gallo—what do you say, a fighting rooster? He had to be, where we grew up in Boyle Heights. He was small, and the boys called him names because he was pretty like a little doll, all right? And he learned to fight. He wouldn’t let nobody stick him with a knife like that.”
“Art was blind,” Dave reminded her. “What did Tinker say?”
She moved her dark, thick eyebrows, lifted and let fall her chunky shoulders. “He don’t know who it was. It could have been somebody Sean had sex with sometime. But Sean had sex with hundreds of men. He lived half his life at the baths. And he didn’t stop there. He had sex in parks, alleys, cars, everyplace.”
“It made it nice for Tinker,” Cecil said.
Her laugh was sad. “He loved Sean. They started out together, came out together in junior high, okay? And Tinker, all he ever wanted was Sean O’Reilly. For the rest of his life, you know?” She sighed, trying to smile. “He could have been a priest, couldn’t he? It was like that with him. Eternal love. He lays there now too weak to get up, spots all over him, infections wrecking him inside, weighs eighty pounds, okay? Dying. And it’s love he talks about. How he loved Sean. How beautiful he was. He says he don’t believe in God, but he wishes he did, so then he’d believe you don’t die like a sheep or something, you go to heaven. He’d like to find Sean waiting for him in heaven.”
“The men’s room,” Dave said.
She blinked, then gave another sad laugh. “Yeah, right. All he gave Tinker was grief and loneliness.”
“And AIDS,” Cecil said. “So Tinker doesn’t know which of Sean’s hundreds of tricks came back to kill him, right?”
“That was Sean’s one kindness to him,” Carmen said. “He never brought them home.” She stood and went to the window to gaze into the rainy dusk. “And you know what Tinker says? I mean, he raved for a while, like I was Luke Skywalker, and we were in that spaceship. Star Wars, all right? There’s parasites in his brain. He don’t know what’s happening, sometimes. But then he knew who I was again, and he told me, ‘It wasn’t Sean gave me AIDS. It was somebody a long time ago, years ago, when I thought I should live like Sean, and I went with maybe a dozen boys. I didn’t like it. It made me hate myself, and I quit. But it was then I got AIDS. It stays inside you, waiting.’ He looked at me, tears running down his face, shaking his poor head on the pillow, like a skull. ‘It wasn’t Sean,’ he kept saying. ‘I just know it wasn’t Sean.’”
“Someone else wasn’t so sure,” Dave said. “The description of the skinny boy with long blond hair didn’t bring anyone to mind?”
“Not to Tinker,” Carmen said. “But Faircloth was listening. He had magazines all over his bed. He was cutting out pictures of naked boys and pasting them in a scrapbook.”
“For future reference?” Cecil said. “What future?”
“Faircloth isn’t going to die,” Carmen said. “That’s what he says.” She looked at Dave. “He laid down the scissors, and he said, “That sounds like Hoppy Wentworth.’”
“Good.” Cecil stood up. “Where do we find him?”
“Sit down,” Carmen said. “He died last Christmas.”
9
“WHAT TELEVISION SHOWS YOU”—a pale-skinned, unshaven man named Rogers set a carton of books inside a yellow rental truck in a Van Nuys driveway—“is some poor woman whose husband was a druggie who used dirty needles and gave her AIDS.” Rogers wore denim cutoffs, a sweaty tank top, and rubber sandals. He drew a hairy forearm across his forehead to wipe away sweat. “She’s skin and bones, right? So feeble she can hardly talk. And she’s leaving behind this brood of dear little children. Orphans. It’s pathetic.” Dave put him in his middle thirties. He was running to fat. Wind with a promise of rain in it stirred his thinning hair. “Made you want to cry. I did cry.”
“Right,” Dave said. “Moving. I saw it.”
“And that newsmagazine piece?” Rogers hiked himself up into the truck that held furniture draped in blankets, plastic baskets of clothes, mattress an
d box spring against the walls, television set, stereo equipment, cartons of pots and pans, records, tapes, books. Rogers’s voice came muffled from the truck. “About that wonderful doctor in Brooklyn, or someplace. The cover story. Damned good. But it’s mostly about this lovely young Latino woman dying of AIDS. Contracted it from a bisexual lover seven years before she met her present husband. Beautiful, tragic young woman, right? Right.” He jumped down out of the truck, grabbed one door and banged it closed, grabbed the other and banged it closed. “But is it women he really looks after most? No. Not in that area. It’s druggies.” He worked iron bolts to fasten the doors shut. “Which is also a warp.” He faced Dave again, brushing his hands together. “Who really has AIDS? Gays, that’s who. But they get shoved away inside the story, don’t they? You just know the editor was quaking in his shoes when he faced the fact he had to mention who the ones are dying like flies from AIDS. Not pretty young women. Nasty, nasty gays.”
“Now, are you sure that’s it?” A middle-aged woman came down the walk. She brandished a newly bought floor mop like a weapon. She wore jeans, tennis shoes, sweatshirt, rubber gloves. A dish towel was tied over her hair. “Because I’m going to scrub and sterilize this house from top to bottom, and I don’t want you coming back to pick up something you forgot, understand? You’re out for good as of this minute.”
“Me and my retroviruses,” Rogers told her.
“Listen to him.” The woman said this to Dave. She had knobby jaws and squinty eyes. “He jokes—about a thing like that. Spreads a deadly, disgusting disease through a house he rents from a decent, innocent person, and never says word one. Not word one.” She blinked fury at Roger. “Not brave enough to come out from the start and say what you and Frank Prohaska were to each other, oh, no. ‘We’s just bachelors.’” Her thin mouth writhed over bright false teeth when she spoke the word. “Bringing women from your office here, making believe they meant something to you.” She snapped at Dave, “Do you know what he is?”
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