Early Graves

by Joseph Hansen

  12

  SOPHIE SAMUELS WAS PLUMP and pale like her husband. She wore a yellow sweater, faded blue jeans, jogging shoes. And she held on her lap a plump, pale child of maybe three. The child slept with its head of pale curls nestled under Sophie Samuels’s chin, and its thumb in its mouth. Beside mother and child on the couch where they sat lay the mother’s pink raincoat and the child’s very small red plaid one. The mother stared over the baby’s head at a pottery jar of flowers that stood on a coffee table strewn with tattered magazines and empty paper cups. The place was an alcove for anxious people to wait in off a hospital corridor near the rooms where surgery was done.

  Dave waited there too, smoking, trying to remember not to smoke. Jeff Leppard wore tweeds again, and found it hard to sit still. He kept jumping up and walking down the corridor to its end, and walking back again. Now and then, his eyes met Dave’s. Nothing friendly was in their look. If Dave had stayed home and minded his own business, Samuels wouldn’t have been shot. Leppard had let himself say this much to Dave in the rainy areaway between those two scabby apartment buildings on Novello Street while blue uniforms in clear plastic raincoats beat the neighborhood searching for the suspect, and ambulance attendants hustled Samuels off on a gurney in his bloody fly-front coat. Leppard was wrong to say it, and he knew it, and said no more. But Dave didn’t blame him. He also didn’t blame himself. He hadn’t asked for Samuels to guard him. Or anyone else.

  Samuels’s partner, Dugan, had come and gone earlier. The surgery was taking a long time. It was Dugan who brought the flowers, hoping they’d speak for him. A leathery older cop, his husky voice stammered when he tried to express his concern to Sophie. She’d scarcely looked at him. She’d sat staring at the flowers. Captain Ken Barker arrived later, and was better when it came to finding the words, the tone to talk to the frightened wife, to lend her comfort, reassurance, a sense that someone cared. Still, she’d said little in return, murmured thanks, a wan try at a smile. “He’s only thirty-two,” she said. “Too young to die.”

  “Who said anything about dying?” Barker said.

  “He didn’t want to be a cop,” she said. “He wanted to be a lawyer.” Tears ran down her cheeks, she chewed her lip. “But he wasn’t smart enough.”

  Barker laughed gently. “Neither are most lawyers. Don’t cry.” He found tissues in a pocket and bent and dried her tears. “He’s only gunshot. It hurts but not forever.”

  She nodded tearily. “Thank you for the flowers.”

  Barker turned to Dave. “Whoever it was,” he said, “it wasn’t Michael Moorcock. He’s in jail, waiting trial for peddling crack. He was in jail the night Drew Dodge was killed, still there when you were attacked at your house. We don’t know where he was when Eddie Vorse was killed, but we didn’t find any knife among Moorcock’s possessions.”

  Dave nodded glumly. “Stein’s description fit, so did Crofoot’s, but nothing ever comes that easy, does it?”

  “You’d hate it if it did,” Barker said.

  “Not really,” Dave said. “I’m tired. I’d like to get it over with.”

  “Tell me about it,” Barker said. He rubbed his broken nose, moved his blocky shoulders restlessly, looked up the corridor. “I could use a drink. And you sure as hell look as if you could.”

  Dave glanced at the young woman. “I can’t go. She’s got to think the way Leppard thinks—that this is my fault. I’ll stay here until it’s over.”

  “What’s the prognosis?” Barker said.

  “Fifty-fifty. He took it in the chest, almost in the sternum. Maybe it got his heart. Maybe not.”

  Then the double doors marked SURGERY pushed open, and a tired-looking tall man in a green surgical gown came out, pulling a green mask down so he could show a weary smile to Sophie Samuels. “It took some fancy needlework, but he’ll be all right,” he said. “Good as new.” He glanced at Ken Barker. “Captain—you’ll have him back on the job in six weeks.” He pulled off the green cap. His gray hair was tangled and sweaty. “What happened to bulletproof vests?”

  Barker said, “Nobody was expecting bullets on this assignment.” He looked grimly at Dave.

  The double doors of the surgery room slammed open, and a gurney was pushed out into the hallway by green-clad help. One of them held high a plasma bag. They wheeled the gurney swiftly away. Sophie Samuels gave a cry. “Joey!” She struggled to her feet, made awkward by the burden of the child. She took steps, meaning to catch up with the gurney, but the surgeon stopped her. “You can see him when he’s in post-op. For just a few minutes, all right?”

  “Thank you.” She didn’t look at him. She looked at the gurney, disappearing into an elevator. “Oh, God.” She sank down on the stiff little couch again and began to weep. Not from worry now. From relief. Leppard came down the corridor from somewhere. He stopped and stood over her. “Will you be all right?” he said. “Have you a ride home? Is there someone to stay here with you tonight?”

  “I have my car.” Sophie was making a soggy wad of the tissues Barker had given her. Sniffling, she looked up and gave Leppard a wet, wobbly smile. “My parents are coming. From Simi Valley.” Blinking back tears, she read her watch. “They’ll probably be at the apartment before us.” She kissed the sleeping child and shook it gently. “Wake up, Pepper. We’re going to see Daddy now.” She set Pepper on his small feet, worked at getting his limp short arms into the sleeves of the little plaid coat. The child kept nodding, leaning drowsily against her knees, eyes shut. Leppard crouched to help out. He said, “That’s quite a name, Pepper.” He tickled the pudgy little tummy, and Pepper giggled. “That’s all right,” Leppard told Sophie. “I’ll carry him.” He took the baby up on his arm. Sophie snatched her own raincoat off the couch, and hurried away up the corridor after him. At the elevators, she remembered, turned, waved to Barker, smiling. “Thank you, Captain,” she called. She didn’t call anything to Dave. He didn’t expect her to.

  He got heavily to his feet, and said to Barker, “I think I can use that drink now.”

  A car with its lights off sat half in the drainage ditch on Horseshoe Canyon Trail when Dave reached home. He made out two figures seated inside the car. If there had been only one, he’d have worried. He jounced the Jaguar down onto the bricks. Cecil’s van sat in its old familiar place. He moaned inwardly. He wasn’t up to a confrontation tonight. The drinks with Barker at Max Romano’s, and the good food afterward, had left him in a mood to listen to music and drift off to sleep. It had been a long day. He parked beside the van and clambered out. A man from the unlighted car stood at the trail’s edge. He said: “Leppard sent us. I’m Officer Gregory. My partner’s Munroe. We’ll be here all night if you need us. Don’t worry if you hear us walking around. That’s part of the drill.”

  “Thanks,” Dave said, locked the Jaguar, and walked across rain-matted leaves on the bricks, around the end of the front building. The cookshack was dark. He hoped Cecil had fed himself. Cooking he was no more in the mood for now than a confrontation. He liked the idea of cooking right this minute as much as Crofoot liked it all the time. The back building was lighted. Not the front.

  He unlocked the door of the front building, a broad, heavy door of thick glass panes clinched in strong wood—switched on lamps, crossed thickly carpeted floor, down steps, up steps to the stereo rig. He peered through reading glasses into little drawers of cassettes, rattling their brittle plastic cases, filing through them, seeking quiet music, settling on Miles Davis ballads.

  He dropped the cassettes in a jacket pocket and left the front building. When he stepped into the back building, he didn’t see Cecil. A lamp glowed on a table at one end of the long corduroy couch that faced the fireplace, and that was all. He walked down the room to hang hat and coat on the rack by the bar. “Whatever it is,” he called, “I’d rather we talked about it down here.” He poured brandy into two small snifters.

  “You sure?” Cecil said from the sleeping loft.

  Dave looked up. Cecil was naked. Th
at had figured to happen, sooner or later. Dave carried the brandies to the couch. “Put your clothes on, please,” he said.

  “You didn’t ask if I’ve told Chrissie,” Cecil said.

  “If you had, you wouldn’t be trying desperate measures,” Dave said. “There wouldn’t be any need.”

  Cecil muttered and vanished from the rafter-shadowy light. Dave heard the whisper of cloth as he dressed. He came down the raw pine plank steps barefoot, carrying shoes and socks in his hand. He brought these to the couch, plumped down grumpily, bent forward to put them on. Dave sat at the other end of the couch, tasted his brandy, lit a cigarette. “Where is Chrissie?” he said.

  “Braille Institute. This mine?” Cecil stretched an arm for the snifter Dave had set on the raised brick hearth. “Some kind of event happening there tonight.” He glanced at the elaborate black watch on his wrist. “I have to pick her up at ten o’clock. I waited a long time for you. Where have you been?”

  “Max’s,” Dave said, “with Ken Barker. I hope you ate.”

  Cecil sipped the brandy. “I had something else in mind.”

  “Forget it,” Dave said. “To make that easier, let me tell you about my day.” He told it. “He got away. It took them hours to patch Samuels up, but they say he’ll be all right. I wonder why the change of weapons—knife to gun?”

  “Maybe it wasn’t the same cracker,” Cecil said.

  “Looked the same, moved the same, angular but girlish.”

  “Some of us can’t help that.” Cecil touched his mouth with the brandy again and frowned. “What’s his thinking? Put them out of their misery? Friends he knew. Can’t bear to see them suffer. Is that why they let him get so close?”

  “There was a spray-painted slogan on the front wall of Haven House,” Dave said. “Crofoot was trying to paint it out. ‘FAGS CAUSE AIDS. KILL ALL FAGS.’”

  “Oh, wow.” Despair was in Cecil’s voice. “When Baby shot at me,” Dave said, “he hit those words.”

  “Stay home, Dave,” Cecil said. “Please. Barker’s got half the police department on it. Let them catch him. Don’t go out there making yourself a target. No more, all right?” He drank off the brandy, set down the glass, rose. “I have to go. Take me forty minutes from here to Braille Institute.” He bent, kissed Dave’s mouth made for the door. At the door he turned back. “You be all right alone here?”

  “I’m not alone,” Dave said. “They’re risking the lives of two more officers to guard me. Out front.”

  “Good,” Cecil said, and left.

  The front of the Tiberius Baths was gray stucco, the forms of Roman columns and arches molded shallowly into it. Spotlight from police cars jamming Melrose Avenue glared on the pillars and arches and the plastered-up windows of the place. Light strips on the roofs of the police cars winked fitfully, red, amber, white. Police officers stood around in clumps among the cars. Some of the officers wore bulky protective vests and crash helmets and cradled rifles in their arms. It was a scene from a bad dream.

  Officers Gregory and Munro had brought Dave here. They had wakened him by banging on the door of the rear building while Miles Davis played “Someday My Prince Will Come” softly through the stereo rig on the sleeping loft under the starlit skylight and Dave was drifting off to sleep, forgetting the ache in his shoulder, the day’s alarms and excursions. He had moaned, flapped into a corduroy robe, limped down the stairs, unbolted the door, scowled at the two young uniforms, growled at them. Gregory stammered.

  “Sorry to bother you, but we just got a call from the Lieutenant. Down in Hollywood. They’ve got the knifer, the one that tried to kill you, the one that killed all the AIDS victims? They’ve got him cornered. The lieutenant thought you’d like to be there when they bring him out. He said for us to drive you, if you want.”

  “I want,” Dave said. “I’ll get some clothes on.”

  When they reached the block where the action was, Munro had to thread the unmarked car between television news vans, had to tap his horn to herd men with cameras on their shoulders, reporters with microphones and recorders out of the way. Dave got a glimpse of Cecil, who stood talking to a blond young woman from a network news team. Cecil’s back was turned. He didn’t see Dave pass. Munro drew the car to a halt near the red paramedic van. Next to it lurked the black coroner’s wagon, bony Carlyle standing beside this, peering up at the roof of Tiberius Baths, the surrounding lights flickering off his thick glasses. His two helpers, the young Latino, the young Asian, stood talking with attendants from the paramedic vehicle, from the police ambulance, whose rear doors gaped open, waiting.

  Jeff Leppard broke from a huddle with the SWAT team, came over to the car, opened the door for Dave to get out. “I thought you’d come,” he said. “Here’s the situation. We got a call from the night manager. A man stabbed another man in a hot tub. Manager thinks victim is dead. Lots of screaming and running around, and the manager was able to jump the dude. He had him locked up in a cubicle. He’s got a gun, the manager has. All the same, he wants the cops, right?”

  “He got them, didn’t he,” Dave said. “Only why are they all out here?”

  “Because when the first car got here, and the officers tried to go in, the perp had made it out of the cubicle and taken the gun away from the manager, and he stood at the top and fired at the officers down the stairs. The door you see is the only way into the whole place. Stairs go up from there to the second floor. And that’s it.”

  “I see a fire escape at the side,” Dave said. In the light beams of police cars, five or six officers stood at the foot of the iron fabric in a narrow alley strewn with trash from overflowing dumpsters. “What about the windows?”

  “Painted over from inside,” Leppard said. “No way to foresee what they’d step into. We voted for the roof. A team is up there now. Skylights are painted over too, but it’s better to drop on him from above. Catch him by surprise.”

  “Maybe,” Dave said. “You going to keep him alive?”

  “We want to keep everybody alive.” Leppard gazed up at the roof. Shadowy figures moved there. “We don’t know how many men might be inside. Phone’s off the hook. But if we have to, we’ll shoot the perp to save the bystanders.”

  “He’s your only chance to find out who killed Vorse and Prohaska and Bumbry and the rest. Hasn’t that been the hangup—no witnesses?”

  “No witnesses but you,” Leppard said.

  “What about the officers he shot at tonight?”

  Leppard’s laugh was short and grim. “They’re still patting themselves all over to be sure they weren’t hit. You want him tall and skinny, with long blond hair, right? Hell, they don’t even know if he was a human being.” He read his Rolex. “Time’s up.” He walked back to the SWAT team, took a walkie-talkie from one of them, spoke into it, handed it back. The men around him glanced at the roof, and moved across the street toward the Tiberius Baths, helmets glinting in the fitful lights. They bunched at the door. High above them, metal shrieked, glass shattered, there were thuds, gunshots. The SWAT team burst in at the door, and ran up a narrow stairway. It was brightly lighted. The walls were gold. The carpeting was purple.

  Out the window onto the fire escape a figure stumbled. The beam of a spotlight caught and held him. He was short, frail, almost bald. He raised his hands for a second to shield his eyes. Officers started up the fire escape. It clattered under their heels. The man at the top reached behind his back, brought out a handgun, screamed, and fired down at the officers. They fired back. Echoing off the alley walls, the noise was ragged and loud. Dark spots appeared on the grubby sweatshirt of the man at the top. He staggered backward, hit the rail, and toppled over. His body landed on its back in a dumpster, which slowly shed some of its overflow to accommodate him.

  13

  MY NAME IS LEONARD Lynn Church. I was born November 13, 1960, in Creon, North Dakota, population 4,500, a farm town, as if there was any other kind in North Dakota. My father was Warren Ross Church, from English people who orig
inally came to Massachusetts in the seventeenth century, and my mother is Elizabeth (Melgard) Church, of Swedish stock from Wisconsin. My musical talent comes from her. She has a nice mezzo voice and plays the piano. It was from her I learned to love classical music. But we fought all the time when she tried to teach me to play, so she hired Victoria Gimbel at five dollars a lesson to teach me. That worked fairly well until I got better at playing than Miss Gimbel—which did not take long. Then I was on my own. I am talking about when I was ten years old. The next year, my sister was seventeen, and went away to college in Northfield, Minnesota, and it was my turn to work in the café.

  The café is the “Eat and Run” on Main Street in Creon, and a very popular place, but no one in Creon expects to pay more than a quarter for a cup of coffee or more than two dollars for lunch, or three dollars for supper, and this means the café paid (and I suppose still pays) its owners too poorly to allow them to hire help. After I left Creon, maybe they had to close it down. I hope so. I hated the place. My father cooked, my mother and sister waited on tables, my father kept the books at night.

  When I went to work, I knew I wasn’t going to be happy, and I dropped and smashed dishes and glassware until keeping me there was simply too expensive. So, except in emergencies, until I got my growth I was allowed to stay home and play the piano and listen to records, which was all I wanted to do at that time. Later on in life, I found I liked sex even more than music, and that was when I left Creon and came to Los Angeles. I will write more about my childhood in Creon later, if I have time.

  Because I am dying, I have to get the most important part of my life story told first. I want to write out everything I remember that has ever happened to me in my whole life, but there may not be time. I don’t know how long I will have the strength to push this pen, or even hold it in my fingers. I get tired quickly. I have to go out at night and find the ones on my list, and that takes a lot of strength. If I had a tape recorder now, I would just talk all of this into it. But I don’t have a tape recorder anymore. I had an open-reel recorder that cost me two thousand dollars. I had a very good cassette deck. But I had to sell them when they fired me from my programming job at Selwyn & Slaughter. I had worked for them four and a half years! It wasn’t the sick leave I had to take to be in the hospital that got me fired. It was the reason I was in the hospital. After I came back to work the second time, Red Selwyn stopped by my desk and asked me quietly to come with him to his office, and told me they had to let me go.