The Death of Friends

by Michael Nava

  “I’d rather they kept you out of the general population.”

  “I can take care of myself,” he said.

  “But you don’t have to,” I reminded him. “You’ve got me and I’m going to tell you something, Zack. Chris was my friend, but I’ll try to help you, even if you killed him.”

  “I didn’t,” he said, without emphasis.

  “Then how did the obelisk get into your apartment?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, frustration in his voice. “I’ve been thinking about it all day, and I can’t figure it out.”

  “Listen, Zack. Sometimes people do things in a blackout and then don’t remember doing them afterwards. Could that have happened to you? Were you angry at Chris? Were you drunk or on drugs?”

  “No, no, no,” he said. “I remember everything.” He squeezed the edge of the table until his knuckles went white. “I wish I could forget how he looked, with his face in a puddle of blood and his brains coming out of the back of his head. Do you think I could do something like that?”

  “When was the last time you were in your apartment?”

  “Right after it happened,” he said. “My clothes were bloody, so I went home to change. That’s when I decided to find you and then we had the earthquake.”

  “What happened when the earthquake hit? Didn’t the building across the street from yours collapse?”

  He nodded. “It was crazy. Things falling, breaking, people screaming, then this big noise outside like an explosion. I went out to the street and that building was like a stack of pancakes the way the floors fell. I helped get people out until the cops came and then they evacuated us. After that, I drove to your house.”

  “You haven’t been back to your apartment since?”

  “From your place I went to Sam’s, then up to Arrowhead.”

  “So it’s been four days since you were home?”

  “Yeah,” he said, “less than a week. It feels like forever.”

  “Did anyone else besides you have a key to your apartment?”

  “Yeah, the manager, I guess, Karen. And Chris. I gave Sam a key, but he gave it back to me.”

  “Why Sam?”

  “I let him use my place to shoot a scene for one of his movies.”

  “You do remember leaving the bloody clothes in your apartment, right?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, I threw them into the closet and then took a shower. He was cold.”

  “What?”

  “Chris was cold,” he said. “I turned him over and wiped his face with my sleeve and then I lay down on top of him and held on to him.” He blinked hard, as if to clear away the memory. “That’s how I got blood on my clothes.”

  “When you picked up the obelisk, how did you handle it? What part did you pick up?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “It could be important, Zack. Every detail could be important.”

  “I don’t want to think about it now.”

  “All right, but later I’d like you to write down everything you remember.”

  He nodded. “It’s been a long time since I was in jail,” he said, with a trace of a smile. “I forget what happens now.”

  “The D.A. has seventy-two hours to arraign you or release you. I wouldn’t count on being released. At the arraignment, you’ll plead not guilty and I’ll get copies of the police report, the search warrant and whatever else they have at this point. By law, you have to be tried within sixty days, but we’ll continue the case until we’re ready to go to trial.”

  He’d been following closely and now he said, “No.”

  “No what?”

  “I don’t want to continue the case. I want it over with as soon as possible.”

  “Zack, I have no idea yet how much investigation this is going to require.”

  “But I didn’t kill Chris,” he said. “Can’t I just say that? Don’t you believe me?”

  “The obelisk,” I said.

  “I can’t explain that.”

  “Unless we can, we’re dead.”

  “Someone put it there,” he said.

  “You mentioned the manager of your building, Karen? What’s her last name?”

  “Holman,” he said, and spelled it for me. “What are you going to do, Henry?”

  “Drive out to your building and take a look. Maybe someone saw something.” I glanced at my notes. “Chris was the only person who had a key to your place, other than the manager?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you know if he kept it on him?”

  “I guess it was on his key chain.”

  I made a note to find out about the disposition of Chris’s property.

  “And Bligh had a copy but he returned it to you, and you’re sure of that?”

  “I remember he gave it back to me.”

  I got up. “I guess that’s it for now. I’ll give you a call tomorrow. Is there anything you need?”

  “I—nothing. Thank you. That’s all.”

  16

  I SPENT THE NIGHT AT Josh’s apartment. We watched Beyond the Forest, the Bette Davis movie where she delivers the line “What a dump,” beloved of drag queens everywhere. We ate Chinese food and he managed to keep his down. I managed to put Zack Bowen and Chris Chandler out of my mind for a few hours. The next morning, however, I checked my messages and found half a dozen calls from local media types who had learned I was representing Zack and had started to sniff out the tabloid possibilities of Chris’s murder. I didn’t return any of their calls, but I did phone the D.A.’s office and a deputy D.A. confirmed that a murder charge was being filed against Zack and arraignment was set for the next day. Then I drove back to the valley, to Zack’s apartment, to see what I could see.

  It was a balmy autumn morning. The air was clear and visibility was good, so there was no relief at all from the seediness of Zack’s neighborhood. Both sides of the street were lined with apartment buildings put up in the 60s and apparently untouched since then. Their Disneyland pastels had long since faded to a dirty whitewash, torn awnings flapped in the breeze, the front yards were forests of overgrown banana trees and jade plants. The earthquake had accelerated the ruin, cracking walls and blowing out windows, and there, across the street from Zack’s building, behind a recently installed cyclone fence, was what the media called The House of Death.

  The three stories had collapsed, one atop the other, into the subterranean garage, and twenty-seven people were killed. It didn’t look particularly lethal now, just a hulking mass of rubble. Flowers and messages had been stuck into the fence and there was a row of burned-out candles in front of it. I doubted that anyone would make a TV movie out of this disaster; the neighborhood was not photogenic, the people who lived in it were poor. But as a metaphor for the city, it had a certain chilling aptness.

  There was yellow police ribbon strung across the entrance to Zack’s building. I ducked beneath it and found myself in a rectangular courtyard paved with concrete. It was bare of adornment except for a few potted plants and a half-dozen patio chairs and a couple of plastic patio tables. The building was two stories high. Along the second floor was a wooden railing. The front doors of the apartments opened onto the patio and I surmised from their numbering that Zack’s apartment, 206, was on the second floor. The place appeared to be completely deserted. I was wondering about my next step when I heard the distinctive click of a safety being released at my back.

  “Put your hands on your head and turn around. Slow.”

  I complied. A thin, pale woman in a blue sundress stood a few feet away from me, pointing a .38 caliber handgun at my chest.

  “Karen Holman?” I ventured.

  “How do you know my name?”

  “My name is Henry Rios. I’m a lawyer for one of your tenants, Zack Bowen.”

  “You don’t look like a lawyer,” she said, indicating my jeans and tee shirt, which was what I usually wore when I wasn’t going to court or meeting a client.

  “I have a business card in my wallet,”
I said. “That’s in my back pocket. I’ll have to—”

  “Don’t move,” she said. “Teddy, come out here.”

  A tow-headed boy of nine or ten emerged from behind a door marked “Manager” and came to her side.

  “Go get the man’s wallet,” she said. “It’s in his back pocket.”

  The boy smirked and darted behind me. I felt quick, small fingers lift the wallet from my pocket and then he ran back to the woman.

  “Find his business card,” she said.

  The boy thumbed through my wallet, scattering credit card receipts and other bits of paper on the ground until he found my cards and handed one to the woman.

  “Like this?” he asked.

  She took it from him, glanced at it and then lowered the gun, setting the safety as she did. The boy, I noticed out of the corner of my eye, was surreptitiously pocketing a five he’d lifted from my wallet.

  “We’ve had looters,” she said, by way of apology. “Give him his wallet back.”

  Teddy tossed me my wallet. I caught it and stuck it in my pocket.

  “Are you the only ones here?” I asked her.

  “Yeah, since the quake,” she said. “It cracked the foundation and the city ordered everyone out. I stayed behind to keep an eye on the place until the owners decide what to do.”

  “Where are the rest of the tenants?”

  “They scattered,” she said.

  “Did you know Zack’s in jail for murder?” I asked her.

  She nodded. “The police came day before yesterday and searched his apartment. The woman who was in charge, black girl, kind of rude, she told me about Zack.”

  “Did you know Chris Chandler?”

  “Zack’s boyfriend? Only to say hi. I don’t believe it about Zack.”

  “Why?”

  She pushed her fingers through her lank hair. “Zack’s the nicest guy you’d ever want to meet. Everyone thought so.”

  “Can I take a look at his place?”

  “Well,” she said, hesitantly, “I don’t want any problems with the police.”

  “There won’t be,” I said. “As his lawyer, I have the same rights as the police to look at his apartment.”

  “Will it help him?”

  “Could be,” I said.

  “All right,” she said, decisively. “Teddy, go get me the keys.”

  While we waited for Teddy, I asked her, “Have you been here the whole time since the quake?”

  She shook her head. “They evacuated everyone. We just came back two days ago, same day that the cops showed up. I thought they had come to throw us out. I guess we really shouldn’t be here, but it’s better than sleeping in a tent in the park.”

  I calculated. “So as far as you know, the building was deserted for what, a couple of days?”

  “A couple of days after the quake, they let the tenants come in for fifteen minutes to take what they could, but other than that, there hasn’t been anyone here.”

  Teddy came out of their apartment with a ring of keys and gave them to her.

  “What did you think about camping out in the park?” I asked him.

  “It was boring,” he replied, exaggerating the word in the manner of sitcom characters.

  It was hard to tell in Zack’s apartment what damage had been done by the quake and what damage had been done by the cops, but between the two forces, the place was pretty torn up. There wasn’t much to it, a small living room separated from the kitchen by a breakfast counter and a slightly larger bedroom and bath at the end of a hall. Even in the disarray there was evidence that it had been fixed up lovingly at one time. The bedroom walls were pale green and the striped curtains matched the bedspread. The bedboards had been stripped to their original pine and lightly whitewashed. Against the wall was an armoire, also pine, that housed a TV and a VCR. The cops had emptied the closet, scattering clothes and shoes.

  The living room was decorated with a suite of wicker furniture, the cushions tossed to the floor and trampled. On the coffee table was the remains of a collection of turtles. There were turtles of all sizes, made from ceramic, metal, glass and wood. Why turtles, I wondered, picking up a small brass figurine. I tucked it into my pocket to take to him for his cell. To cheer him up.

  In the kitchen, the shelves had been emptied and drawers opened and upturned on the counter. A work schedule was attached to the refrigerator door by a turtle magnet. According to the schedule, Zack had worked the dinner shift the night Chris was murdered. I took it off the refrigerator and folded it into my pocket, dropping the magnet. When I bent to pick it up, I saw the corner of a photograph sticking out from beneath the refrigerator. I retrieved it. It showed Chris with his arm around Zack, the two of them smiling. I put that in my pocket, too.

  Karen Holman was waiting for me outside the apartment.

  “Were you in the apartment when the police searched it?”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t think they wanted me around.”

  “Really? Why did you think that?”

  “The black lady told me to stay out of the way,” she said. “So I let them in and waited out here.”

  “Did you see them take anything out?”

  “They were coming and going for a good long while,” she said. “It was kind of confusing.”

  “You said you knew Chris by sight,” I said. “Was there ever any trouble between them? Fighting? Complaints from the neighbors?”

  “No,” she said. “Nothing like that.”

  “How long has he lived here?”

  “Year and a half maybe. Zack’s a sweetheart,” she said. “He was usually home during the day, and if I had to work late he’d keep an eye on Teddy for me when he got home from school.”

  “What’s going to happen to the building?”

  “The owner’s waiting on FEMA to see if the foundation can be fixed,” she said. “Otherwise I guess they’ll tear it down.”

  “Thanks for your time,” I said.

  “Sure,” she said. “Anything I can do to help Zack, you just let me know.”

  “Why turtles?” I asked Zack the next morning in lockup, where he was waiting to be arraigned.

  He put the little brass turtle in the palm of his hand and intoned, “Slow and steady wins the race.”

  “You mean Aesop’s fable, the tortoise and the hare? You identify with the tortoise?”

  He closed his hand on the turtle and grinned. “Stupid, huh?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Can I keep it?”

  “That’s why I brought it,” I said. I took the picture of Chris and Zack from my coat pocket and gave it to him. “I thought you might want this, too.”

  He looked at it for a long time. “It’s like it never really happened,” he said, finally. “Me and Chris.”

  A few minutes later, Zack pled not guilty to the charge of murder in the first degree.

  “How’s two weeks from today for the prelim?” the judge, a youthful-looking Asian woman named Soo, asked me.

  “That’s fine with the defense,” I replied. “I’ve exchanged discovery requests with the People. Would you set that as the compliance date, too?”

  “You got it,” she said. “Anything else?”

  “I’d like to orally notice a fifteen-thirty-eight-point-five motion for the same day,” I said. “We’ll be challenging the sufficiency of the search warrant.”

  “Fine,” she said. “Is that it?”

  “Bail,” I said. “We’d ask the court to set reasonable bail.”

  “People?” she asked the D.A.

  “This case involves the murder of a judicial officer,” he said. “People oppose bail.”

  “May I be heard?” I asked.

  She shook her head impatiently. There were twenty cases behind us. “I’m going to deny bail without prejudice to your right to renew your request at the prelim. Which will be before Judge Torres-Jones.” She handed the file to her clerk and took up the next one. “Thank you, gentlemen. Defendant is re
manded. People versus Lawrence.”

  “I’ll call you later,” I told Zack, as the marshals stepped forward to return him to county jail.

  “Don’t forget,” he replied, attempting a smile.

  The D.A. gave me a copy of the information charging Zack and a stack of preliminary materials. They included the initial police report, the search warrant and the medical examiner’s report. After I escaped the press, I went downstairs to the cafeteria to take a closer look at them. The cafeteria smelled of grease and coffee. The yellow walls tried for brightness, but suggested jaundice instead. A foursome of uniformed cops wolfed down plates of chorizo and eggs. I got a cup of coffee and found a corner table that looked out, through tinted glass, on Temple Street.

  This was my dilemma; either Zack killed Chris Chandler and was lying to me about it or, contrary to the apparent evidence of Zack’s guilt, someone else did. My intuition rejected Zack as the murderer, but I couldn’t very well expect the jury to acquit him based on my word or his. So far, there was a handful of circumstances that could be developed into the classic defense known by the criminal law bar as ODDI; the other dude did it. When I narrowed the field of possible suspects, I came up with Joey Chandler.

  I wasn’t happy about it, but there it was. The troubled son, a raging little boy who’d grown into a sullen adolescent, about whom both his parents felt deeply guilty. It was mostly through Chris and Bay that I knew anything at all about Joey, and the one phrase I’d come to associate with him was “doing better,” as in “Joey’s doing better now that he” fill in the blank. Stopped wetting his bed, is in therapy, has taken up weight lifting. I doubted whether I had spoken to him more than a dozen times in his twenty years on earth. He was not the kind of child who took much interest in his parents’ friends, nor, truthfully, was I the kind of friend who took much interest in my friends’ children.

  To judge by its messiness, the crime was one of anger rather than premeditation, and Joey had expressed his anger at Chris on several occasions both before and after the murder. Joey would also have known how to get in and out of the courthouse, and it would not have been unusual for him to visit his father there. He had known that the obelisk had been used to murder Chris before it was known by the police; though, admittedly, I was stretching things here since he hadn’t actually responded to my question when I asked him about it. Zack had seen a man in a dark, four-wheel-drive vehicle entering the courthouse garage as he was leaving. Joey drove a black Jeep Grand Cherokee. If it was Joey, and he had removed the obelisk, could he have planted it in Zack’s apartment? Chris had a key to the apartment which was, as yet, unaccounted for, and there was a five-day period when his apartment building had been empty. Finally, until I prompted her, Bay hadn’t told the police that Chris had left her, thus deflecting suspicion away from Joey.