The Death of Friends Read online

  The Death of Friends

  A Henry Rios Mystery

  Michael Nava

  For Katherine V. Forrest

  The death of friends, or death

  Of every brilliant eye

  That made a catch in the breath—

  Seem but the clouds in the sky

  When the horizon fades;

  Or a bird’s sleepy cry

  Among the deepening shades.

  W. B. Yeats

  The Tower

  Jesus said, “If you bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth will save you. If you don’t bring forth what is inside you, what you don’t bring forth will destroy you.”

  The Gospel of Thomas

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  Preview: The Burning Plain

  1

  I WOKE TO FIND THE BED SHAKING. SOMEWHERE IN THE HOUSE, glass came crashing down, and on the street car alarms went off and dogs wailed. The bed lurched back and forth like a raft in the squall. The floorboards seemed to rise like a wave beneath it, and for one surreal second, I thought I heard the earth roar, before I recognized the noise as the pounding of my heart. My stomach churned and fear banished every thought except get out. And then it stopped, the bed slamming to the ground, a glass falling in another room. Outside, the car alarms still shrilled, the dogs whimpered and the frantic voices of my neighbors called out to another, “Are you okay? Are you okay?” I sat up against the headboard and drew deep breaths. My heart beat slowly returned to normal, and I became aware that someone else was in the room. I reached for the lamp, but the power was out.

  “Who’s there?” I called out.

  My eyes accustomed themselves to the darkness, but I could not see anyone among the familiar shapes of the room. Yet I was sure someone was there, hovering at the foot of the bed, watching me. It moved, and then a great wash of emotion passed over me. Sadness. Relief. Regret. I felt them but they were not my feelings. I reached out my hand, but there was nothing. The room began to rattle, shaken by an aftershock. It lasted only a few seconds and when it was over, I was alone again.

  I hopped out of bed and ran into the closet door. The blow stunned, then focused me. “Think,” I commanded myself. Clothes. Shoes. Flashlight. Get outside. I pulled on some clothes and headed for the kitchen for the flashlight. The usual hum of appliances was stilled. Glass crunched beneath my feet as I crossed the room to the small pantry, where I found the flashlight in a utility drawer. I shot a beam of light across the kitchen. The cupboards had swung open, cans and boxes spilling out of them. The refrigerator had been knocked a couple of feet from the wall. I was suddenly very thirsty, and I opened the refrigerator to find its contents spilled and shaken. I drank some orange juice out of the carton and thought of Josh, alone in his apartment. I picked up the phone but, as I’d expected, the line was dead. I got out of the house.

  The street where I lived ran along the east rim of a small canyon in the hills above old Hollywood. On maps of the city, it was a curving line off Bronson Canyon Drive, hard to find and seldom traveled. My house, like other houses on the block, dated back to the 30s, but, unlike them, possessed no particular architectural distinction. It was down a few steps from the street, behind a low hedge, the bland stucco wall revealing little of the life that went on there.

  I’d bought the house when I’d moved to Los Angeles from San Francisco seven years ago and I’d lived there with my lover, Josh Mandel. Now I lived alone, Josh having left me thirteen months earlier for another man who, like Josh, had AIDS. It was Josh’s belief that, because of this, Steven could understand him in ways that were inaccessible to someone like me who was uninfected. But then Steven died and Josh’s own health began to deteriorate. I would gladly have taken him back but he insisted on living on his own. Still, we’d had something of a reconciliation, drawn back together by memories of our shared life and the impending end of his.

  As I closed the door behind me, I considered driving to West Hollywood to check up on him, but I doubted whether I would get that far. The quake had undoubtedly knocked out traffic signals and the roads would be filled with panicked motorists and nervous cops. I remembered the spooky presence in my bedroom and wondered anxiously if it had been Josh, but that was absurd. It had been nothing more than a trauma-induced hallucination; a momentary projection of my terror.

  I went around the side of the house and turned off the gas. When I returned to the street, my next-door neighbor, Jim Kwan, approached me, flashlight in hand, and asked, “Hey, Henry, you okay?”

  “So far,” I said. “Of course the night’s still young. How about you?”

  “We came through in one piece. Knock on wood,” he said, rapping his forehead. “I’m going to check on Mrs. Byrne down the street.”

  “I’ll come with you,” I said, anxious to keep busy.

  We passed a group of our neighbors huddled around a radio. The radio voice was saying, “…is estimated to be a six-point-six quake centered in the San Fernando Valley, with the epicenter near Encino…” I was relieved to hear that because it meant Josh was at least as far away from the epicenter as we were and there didn’t seem to be any major damage to the hill.

  I heard the clatter of metal against the street and trained my light on Kwan’s feet. He was wearing cleated golf shoes.

  “What’s with the shoes, Jim?”

  An embarrassed smile crossed his round, good-natured face. “I was scared shitless, man. I grabbed the first shoes I could find.”

  I shone the light on my own scuffed Nikes and recognized them as a pair Josh had left behind.

  “Is your phone out?” I asked Kwan.

  “Look across the canyon,” he said. “Everything is out.”

  Through a gap between two fences I could see the west rim of the canyon, where far grander houses than ours commanded breathtaking views. Darkness. The October night was beautiful, cool and mild. Without the distracting blaze of city lights, the stars glittered in the deep blue sky. A damp herbal smell came up from the undergrowth. I reached down, tore a sprig of rosemary from a bush and crushed it between my fingers. The scent calmed me.

  “Spooky, huh?” Kwan said. “Like the city was clubbed in its sleep.”

  “Did you feel anything strange in your house after the quake?”

  “Like what?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “Like a ghost?”

  Kwan laughed. “Something must’ve come down on your head, Rios.”

  I felt the bump on my forehead where I’d hit the closet door. “Maybe so. Maybe I just imagined it.”

  Mrs. Byrne was sitting on her porch steps reading her Bible by candlelight. She was an old woman, her mottled, veiny face framed by stiff white tufts of hair. She had lived in Los Angeles for over forty years, but still pronounced the name of the city with a hard Midwestern “g.” Once or twice a month she went door to door with a sheaf of religious tracts of the hell-and-brimstone variety, and raved at the neighbors polite enough to let her in about God, Satan, kikes, spies, niggers and chinks. I barred the door when I saw her coming but Kwan, whom she usually caught while he was out gardening, suffered her rants with good humor. When I kidded him about it, he said she was lonely. With good reason, I replied.

&
nbsp; “Mrs. Byrne, are you okay?” Kwan asked.

  She looked at him with rheumy eyes and said, “Didn’t I tell you, Kwan, it’s the last days. Earthquakes, fires, plague.” Her voice got high and a little crazy. “Jesus is coming.”

  “Just in case he doesn’t come tonight, I’m going to shut off your gas,” he said. “Keep an eye on her, Henry.”

  She squinted at me. “Who are you?”

  “Your neighbor from down the block,” I said. “Henry Rios.” I sat down beside her and asked, “The quake scare you, Mrs. Byrne?”

  “Knocked me clean out of my bed,” she replied. “But I’ve been through worse, and worse is coming, young man.” She rattled her Bible. “Now you take this AIDS—”

  I trained my light on her Bible and said, “Why don’t you read to me until Kwan gets back?”

  She opened the book and began reading in her high, shaky old woman’s voice. As I listened, I felt the kind of euphoria people feel when they survive a disaster. I realized then that I’d thought I was going to die in the quake. My mind drifted back to that moment after the quake ended when I’d imagined there was someone else in the room. Was it just a hallucination? It—whatever it was—had seemed so real. Then Kwan came back and put an end to my ruminations.

  For the rest of the night, I huddled with my neighbors around the radio, listening to reports of the damage. Most of the city was dark and there were reports of fires, leveled buildings and downed freeways, but the worst of the damage was confined to the valley. To my relief, damage to West Hollywood was reported as minimal. For a while, the echo of sirens reverberated on the hill from the streets below, but by dawn it had quieted down. As the sky began to lighten, our little disaster party broke up and we trudged back to our houses.

  A boy was sitting at my front door, asleep. I came down the steps and I stood above him. Occasionally, homeless people wandered up the hill, but he was too clean and well-dressed for that. His arms were wrapped around his knees and his head was down, long, black hair covering his face. I had no idea who he was, but I was pretty sure he hadn’t stumbled into my doorway by accident. I’m a criminal defense lawyer and accustomed to strangers showing up at my door at odd hours of the day and night.

  I didn’t particularly welcome these unexpected visitations; I’d always seemed to attract a class of clients who were, as a disgruntled ex-partner once put, “from hunger, Henry.” I was a magnet for the desperate, frightened and reviled, who somehow or other had heard about the fag lawyer who was a sap for a sad story and let you pay on installment. Josh used to tell me, “You’re a lawyer, not a social worker,” but I didn’t take his point until after he’d moved out, leaving me with plenty of time to wonder if he would’ve stayed had I spent less time on my clients’ troubles and more on ours. So I’d taken a sabbatical from the law to ponder that, and other mysteries of my midlife. I’d gone into therapy like a good Californian, and learned that in all probability the reason I’d devoted myself to the legal lepers of the world was because I felt like an outcast myself—“queer,” in every sense of the world—and I struggled to compensate with good works.

  In the end I’d taken this insight and decided, so what. I was forty-two years old, and law was all I knew or cared about, apart from Josh and a few friends. I’d resumed my practice on a very small scale, handling mostly appeals and working out of my house. Occasionally, a fellow defense lawyer would refer me a particularly hopeless case. I wondered which one I had to thank for the sleeping boy.

  I hunched down on my heels, shook his shoulders gently and said, “Wake up, son.” He raised his head and his eyes fluttered open. They were unusually blue, which was surprising, given his dark coloring. I judged him to be in his mid-twenties and he was strikingly handsome: long hair, dark skin, blue eyes and a silver loop in either ear. Wearily, he got to his feet. He was short, no more than five-seven or -eight, but tightly muscled, a featherweight. Beneath loose-fitting jeans and a black pullover sweater, his slender body radiated tension and fatigue.

  “Are you Henry Rios?” he asked nervously.

  “Yes. Who are you?”

  “Zack Bowen,” he said. “I’m…Chris Chandler’s boyfriend. Can I talk to you?”

  For a moment, I was too astonished to answer. Chris Chandler’s boyfriend?

  “Come inside,” I said.

  As soon as I stepped into the house, exhaustion hit me. I’d been running on adrenaline since the quake and it was all used up. I left Zack Bowen in the living room and went into the kitchen to figure out some way of making coffee that didn’t require either electricity or gas. There was still some hot water in the tap, so I mixed two cups of muddy instant and carried them into the living room. Zack was stretched out on the couch, asleep again. I sipped the vile brew and thought, Chris Chandler’s boyfriend. Well, well.

  2

  CHRISTOPHER CHANDLER WAS A superior court judge whom I’d known for twenty years, since we’d been law students together at Stanford in the mid-’70s. He was married and his wife, Bay, had also been a friend of mine back then. They had a son, Joey, and they lived in Pasadena in a beautiful house on an elegant street. Chris was generally agreed to be a comer, smart, fair and ambitious—and straight. It didn’t hurt that his father-in-law, Joseph Kimball, was the senior partner at one of the city’s biggest and most politically well-connected law firms. Chris was thought to be a shoo-in for elevation to the federal bench next time a Republican occupied the White House. That had always been his goal, even when we were students, and the most casual review of his judicial career revealed a certain amount of calculation in that direction. Nothing too damning, a provident change of party affiliation, a reputation as a tough sentencer in criminal cases, that sort of thing.

  Any hint of excess ambition on his part was leavened by his and Bay’s indisputable commitment to good works. She took the lead there, serving on the boards of numerous organizations that ranged from a battered woman’s shelter to an AIDS research fund. Occasionally, flipping through the Times, I’d come across a picture of them at a charitable event, all dressed up in tux and evening gown. “Impersonating adults,” I’d tease Bay when we talked, which happened maybe two or three times a year. I crossed paths more frequently with Chris, since his courtroom was downtown where I handled the majority of my cases, but for having once been such good friends, I saw very little of them.

  I know this puzzled Bay who, over the years, made many attempts to revive our student friendship. She saw through my polite evasions of her offers of dinners with the family, and when I did accept I knew she was aware of my discomfort. I tried not to show it because I genuinely cared for her. She was straightforward and good, though not without edges. Like me, she was a recovering alcoholic and prone, as most ex-addicts are, to bouts of depression and gusts of dissatisfaction. I know she was ambivalent about having become, as she once joked, “a society lady with causes.” This, I reminded her, was an improvement on her mother, who had simply been a society lady, bone-thin, self-absorbed and distinctly without causes. She laughed at that. But I didn’t have a glib retort when she said, “We’re old friends, Henry. You know there aren’t any secrets between us.”

  She was wrong. My friendship with her had always been based on a deception. Just like her marriage.

  Chris had been a year ahead of me at Stanford, but the school was small enough so that we were on nodding terms. In my second year, we had a class together and we moved from a nodding to a speaking acquaintance. I was twenty-two years old, and when I was not in class or studying for class I could be found making timid excursions into the frenetic gay world of San Francisco in the mid-1970s. That those two parts of my life, law student and homosexual, seemed irreconcilable bothered me considerably, because I couldn’t see having to choose one over the other. I had wanted to be a lawyer from the time I was a boy, inspired by biographies of Lincoln and Clarence Darrow, and Perry Mason on TV. As for the other thing, well, I hadn’t exactly planned on being homosexual, but I knew I was by the tim
e I was sixteen; knew it, and knew I could no more change it than I could change the color of my eyes. My problem was how to be homosexual and a lawyer at a time when being gay was grounds for disbarment in most states.

  If there were any other gay students at the law school, they kept it to themselves. I often wished there were, if only to have had someone to talk to about my dilemma, but not for that reason alone. I was a reserved and inexperienced Mexican-Catholic boy from the central valley of California, whose idea of homosexuality was derived from Walt Whitman’s romantic vision of “two boys together clinging,/One the other never leaving.” In my forays to San Francisco I found a lot of boys who didn’t mind clinging to me for a night or two, but forever was not in the vocabulary of the times. I thought if I could meet someone more like myself I would not have felt so continually out of place. Sometimes, in class, I’d look around the room and speculate who among my male classmates might be gay. Some seemed more likely than others, but Chris Chandler was not one of them. At twenty-three, he was a square-jawed, fair-haired boy who looked like he’d stepped out of a Brooks Brothers catalogue; the kind of WASP kid beside whom I felt very much the brown-skinned scholarship student.

  One night I was at a gay bar in the city, a place called the Hide ’n Seek, feeling, as usual, out of place but hopeful, if only hormonally. There were white lights above the bar, but the rest of the room was bathed in red and blue and the muggy air smelled of cigarette smoke, aftershave and amyl nitrite, a drug that jumped the heart and smelled like old socks. Disco music blared over huge speakers mounted on walls in the corners of the room. A strobe light pulsed above the dance floor, catching the frenzy of the dancers. It always amazed me that there was never any violence in the bar despite all the men crowded together, lurching drunkenly into each other, spilling drinks and burning each other’s clothes with careless cigarettes. Instead, the accidental brush of male body against male body was like the striking of matches that flared and sputtered out, desire like wisps of smoke slowly thickening the air.