The Death of Friends Read online

  I was standing at the edge of the dance floor, a little drunk and feeling a bit sorry for myself, when someone bumped into me. He said, “Sorry.” I turned around and said, “That’s okay,” and saw it was Chris. For a moment, neither of us said anything, then Chris smiled, a slanting, embarrassed grin, and said, “You’re Henry, right?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Henry Rios. You’re Chris—”

  “Chandler,” he said. “You’re in my Corporations class.”

  It was a small thing, that exchange of last names, but in that world of one-night stands and first names only, it made running into him there seem perfectly natural.

  “Buy you a beer?” he asked.

  “That would be great,” I said.

  We made our way to the bar, got the beers and found a relatively quiet spot where we could talk without shouting. As if we were sitting at the pub in the student union, Chris kept up a steady stream of chat about classes, professors, fellow students and even, I remember, the Security Exchange Act of 1935. Later, he told me he’d chosen those innocuous subjects to relax me because I seemed so unsure of myself. It worked. I loosened up, and eventually we moved to more personal matters; places of origin, families, and finally, “You’re gay?” and “How long have you known?” and “I would never have guessed you.”

  Last call was called. Chris smiled at me and said, “How did you get up here?”

  “I took the train,” I said.

  “Can I give you a lift back to school?”

  “Sure,” I said, and because I was uncertain, I didn’t know how to ask whether he wanted to spend the night.

  He smiled again and said, “My place is quiet and I live alone.”

  I woke up the next morning on a mattress on the floor of Chris’s tiny apartment, which was over the carriage house—now converted to a garage—of an old stone mansion in downtown Palo Alto. It was a typical student apartment, orange crates for bookshelves, a trestle-table desk, books and records everywhere and that mattress. Chris was asleep beside me. For half the night we’d just talked, and then there’d been that moment when the next most natural thing in the world was to kiss. There was none of the awkwardness with him that I’d felt with other men; the small voice in the back of my head trying to remember the man’s name or the mumbled negotiations about who would do what to whom. It had never felt so good before to be with another guy, so easy and friendly—“We two boys forever clinging…” Well, no, I didn’t think that exactly, but what a difference it made to make love to someone I could also imagine as a friend.

  I got up and went to the bathroom. When I reached for the soap to wash my hands, I heard a metal clink in the wash basin. I fished around and found a ring, a plain gold band. There was an inscription inside, To Chris from Bay, and a date from earlier that year. I took it with me back to the bedroom. Chris was awake. I showed him the ring and joked, “What’s this, you’re married?”

  He took the ring from me, slipped it on his finger and said, “Not yet. Just engaged.”

  “Zack,” I said to the sleeping boy. “Wake up.”

  He opened his eyes, yawned and mumbled, “Sorry, I’m really tired.” He sat up and cradled his head in his hands, his long hair spilling like a veil across his face.

  “It’s been a long night for everyone,” I said. I pushed a cup toward him and said, “Here, this isn’t very good, but it’ll wake you up.” He sipped the coffee and made a sour face. I said, “So you’re Chris’s boyfriend. I didn’t know he had one.”

  He put the cup down with a clatter, looked at me with his too-blue eyes and blurted out, “Chris is dead.”

  I was so tired that it occurred to me I was dreaming this conversation, and that any moment I would wake up, my head filled with the receding image of bright blue eyes and the echo of “Chris is dead.” But then Zack began to sob, loudly and uncontrollably, and his body shuddered as if someone had picked him up and was shaking him, and I realized I was not dreaming.

  “Stop that,” I said sharply.

  Zack looked at me, and whatever was in my face at the moment silenced him.

  “I’m sorry,” he stammered.

  “What happened to Chris? Was he killed in the earthquake?”

  He shook his head. “Someone killed him.”

  That stopped me. “What do you mean?” I said sharply. “Killed? Who killed him?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, on the verge of tears again.

  “Calm down,” I said. “Okay? Take a deep breath. Now let it out. Again.”

  He gulped air with an almost comic intensity, but it quieted him. For a moment, we sat looking at each other. There was something about Zack Bowen that struck me as childish or, rather, childlike; an exaggeration of affect, a pop-eyed emotionality.

  “Feel better?” I asked him.

  He nodded.

  “Now let’s start over,” I said. “Tell me about Chris.”

  He took another deep breath and said, “He was working late last night. In the courthouse? I went to talk to him, but when I got there, he was on the floor and there was blood all over the place.” He rushed the words as if they had a bad taste. “I felt for a pulse but he was already cold.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “I went home,” he said. “I didn’t know what else to do. My clothes were—I had to change my clothes.”

  “Why didn’t you go to the police?”

  Shamefaced, he said, “I didn’t think of it.”

  “You didn’t think of it?” I asked incredulously.

  “I was afraid…” his voice trailed off.

  “That they would arrest you for killing him?”

  Now he really did get pop-eyed. “I swear I didn’t do it. I would never hurt Chris.”

  But I wasn’t inclined to let him off so easily. I said, “If you didn’t kill him, why were you afraid to go to the police?”

  “I know what the cops are like,” he said. “The way they ask you questions, you get totally confused and pretty soon you’re saying things you don’t mean and the next thing you know they got you.”

  This had a familiar ring to it.

  “You’ve been arrested before,” I said. “What charge?”

  He picked at a fingernail and mumbled, “Six-forty-seven-b.”

  Penal Code section 647(b): soliciting an act of prostitution. That he knew the code section meant he’d been arrested more than once. I had a sinking feeling about all of this, Chris’s murder, this kid. It began to have the ring of something sordid.

  “You hustled?”

  “A long time ago.”

  “Is that how you met Chris?”

  “I said it was a long time ago,” he replied, his eyes daring me not to believe him.

  “Okay. Tell me exactly what happened yesterday,” I said. “From the moment you got up until you found Chris. And Zack, tell me the truth.”

  “That’s what I’ve been telling you,” he said.

  3

  HE LIVED IN THE valley and he worked as a waiter at a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake. I knew the place, an upscale Mexican restaurant with a tin roof and twenty-dollar entrees frequented by gay yuppies. He and Chris had not spent the night together.

  I interrupted him. “How long have you been seeing him?”

  “About six, seven months,” he replied.

  I was full of questions about how a Superior Court judge had entangled himself with an ex-hustler, if ex is what Zack was, but the immediate issue was Chris’s murder, so I saved them for later.

  Still, I couldn’t resist asking, “Did you know he was married?”

  Zack nodded.

  “How did he manage to spend nights with you?”

  “He only did that since he left her,” Zack said guilelessly.

  “He left his wife?” I said, astonished. “When?”

  “Last month?” he said. “Yeah, last month. He was staying at a hotel until he could find a place. I wanted him to move in with me, but he thought that wo
uld be too hard on his son.”

  And too public, I thought, but just said, “I see,” remembering I’d had coffee with Chris within the past month and he hadn’t said a word to me about any of this. “Okay, back to yesterday. Did you see Chris during the day?”

  “No. He called me just before I went to work, and asked me to come to the court when my shift was over because he wanted to talk to me.”

  “About what?”

  He looked away. “I don’t know. He didn’t say.”

  “But you had an idea of what he wanted, didn’t you?”

  He looked at me as if I was telepathic. “No,” he lied. “Not really.”

  “You said you’d tell me the truth,” I reminded him.

  After a moment, he said, “I thought maybe he wanted to break up with me.”

  “Why did you think that? Did you have an argument?”

  “No, we didn’t fight,” he said. “Chris didn’t fight, he just got quiet, like he had something to say but he wasn’t saying it. That’s how he’s been the last few days. It drove me crazy trying to figure out what it was.”

  That sounded like Chris, all right, but I knew Chris. The question was, who was Zack. Most of the hustlers I’d run into were street kids with fifteen-year-old faces and sixty-year-old souls, usually violent only in their self-loathing, but sometimes capable of turning it against their tricks. I’d been thinking that something like that had happened to Chris, but Zack didn’t seem to fit the mold. I didn’t sense any banked rage in him, only a victim’s passivity.

  “How did you feel about that?” I probed. “Were you mad when you went to see him?”

  He ran his fingers through the flood of his hair in a forlorn gesture and said, “No, I was afraid.”

  “Afraid?”

  “I didn’t want to lose him,” he said, helplessly.

  “So you went to the courthouse to see him,” I said. “What time?”

  “As soon as I got off work, around eleven.”

  “Which courthouse?” I asked, testing his story.

  “The big white one,” he said, correctly. “I guess it’s on First Street. You go down into the garage on Olive. That’s where I parked, underneath.”

  “Why did you park there?”

  He looked suspiciously at me, as if I’d asked a trick question. “That’s where I always park when I go see Chris.”

  “How often have you been at the courthouse?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know, exactly. I have lunch with him sometimes. He likes that restaurant with the earthquake design in it. What’s it called, the Epicenter?”

  I had also eaten lunch with Chris there. It was, inexplicably, a favorite place of his, and the fact that Zack knew this began to make it plausible to me that he was a part of Chris’s life.

  “What happened after you parked in the garage?”

  “I went inside.”

  “How?”

  “There’s a door from the garage that goes inside the courthouse.”

  “The door was unlocked at eleven o’clock at night?”

  “I guess there were people still working there,” he said. “Like Chris.”

  “Did you see anyone? Did anyone see you?”

  He shook his head. “No. Chris said there’re guards at night, but if anyone stopped me, to tell them I was going to see him, but I didn’t see any guards.”

  “What did you do once you were inside the courthouse?”

  “There’re some stairs that go up to the big lobby where the elevators are, and from there I took the elevator to the fifth floor where Chris was.”

  The details were all right so far. “Okay, then what? Describe to me how you got to Chris.”

  “There’s that door, not the one to the courtroom, but the one next to it, the one that goes to Chris’s office? He said he would leave it open for me. I went in and then I was in the hallway with all the bookshelves. I walked down the hall to Chris’s office and the—” his voice began to break “—the door was closed.”

  And then I felt it too, the thud of grief dropping like a stone on my chest, and it all became very real. My own voice shook a little when I said, “Go on, Zack.”

  “I can’t,” he said, weeping openly.

  “Go on,” I repeated. “Please.”

  He took a sharp breath. “I knocked on the door.”

  “You knocked?”

  “I didn’t just want to bust in on him,” he said, almost angrily. “I knocked a couple of times, but he didn’t say anything, so I go, ‘Chris, it’s Zack.’ I waited but he still didn’t say anything, so I opened the door and I went in and he was—he was on the floor, on his stomach. And it looked like the whole side of his head was just flat.” He raised a hand to the right side of his head. “And there was blood everywhere and this thing was still buried in his head.”

  “What thing, Zack?”

  He was not crying now, but remembering, his face expressionless, his eyes distant. “This thing,” he repeated. “Like a marble pyramid, but small, like this.” He held his hands about eight inches apart. “Just buried in his head. That was the worst part. I took it out. I turned him over. There were bubbles in the corner of his mouth, blood bubbles. I thought he was still alive, because they were popping, but he was dead.”

  The way he described it I could feel the fog of murder in the air. I asked, “What did you do then?”

  “I wiped his mouth with my shirt,” he said, “and then I got out of there.”

  “How? The elevator?”

  He shook his head slowly, as if reluctant to leave the remembered room. “The stairs,” he said, after a moment. “There’re stairs that go all the way to the garage. The elevator stops in the lobby. I was afraid if I got off someone would see me.”

  “Why were you afraid that someone might see you?” I asked him. “Why didn’t you go for help?”

  “Chris was dead,” he said. “I had his blood on my shirt, my hands. I was afraid they might think I’d hurt him.”

  As gently as I could, I asked, “And did you, Zack? Did you hurt Chris? You can tell me the truth.”

  His face was so raw with feeling it was hard to look at. I would not have been surprised if he’d shrieked or broken down sobbing again, but all he said was, “No. No.”

  “Why did you come to me, Zack?”

  “I had to tell someone,” he said. “Chris talked about you. He said you were his only gay friend.”

  “Chris never mentioned you to me.”

  “He was going to tell everyone,” he said. “That’s what he told me when he left his wife. He said he couldn’t live with secrets anymore.”

  That was another surprise. After all these years? But then what about his career? Or was this just something he’d told Zack to keep his new lover happy…?

  “But it’s strange he would keep you a secret from me,” I said.

  “You think I killed him,” he said.

  “I don’t know what to think. I’m having trouble taking this in.”

  A low humming started up in the kitchen, the power coming back on.

  “I’m going to make some proper coffee,” I said, picking up the cups. “When I get back, we’ll decide what to do. All right?”

  He sagged with relief.

  The kitchen was a mess and it took me a moment to remember why. The quake seemed like something that had happened a long time ago. Then I thought of Josh and automatically picked up the phone, but the line was still dead.

  “Who are you calling?” Zack was standing in the doorway.

  “I was checking the line,” I said. “It’s still dead.”

  “You were calling the police,” he said, accusingly.

  “No, I wanted to call my friend, Josh, to see if he’s okay after the quake. He has AIDS,” I continued, wanting to talk away the tension between us. “I’m worried about him.”

  “I have to go now,” Zack said.

  “I wasn’t calling the police, Zack.”

  He spun on his heel and was out
of the house before I knew what was happening. I ran after him, but by the time I got to the street, he was speeding off in an old wreck of a car. The license plate was too grimed to make out a number. I watched him round the curve and plunge down the hill.

  “Damn,” I said.

  This was my dilemma: I knew that Chris lay dead in his chambers where, given the fact that the quake had shut the city down, he might not be discovered for several days. If I told the police, they would go after Zack Bowen. Zack Bowen may have killed Chris, but I was not prepared to deliver him into the hands of the LAPD. This was, in part, the knee-jerk reaction of someone who’d spent his professional life defending people from the police; I didn’t trust cops and, with rare exception, I didn’t like them. I knew it was a tough job being a cop and I wouldn’t want it, but they gave as good as they got and most of the time got away with it. Then there was the matter of professional ethics. Even if I decided I couldn’t defend Zack, my job was to refer him to someone who could, not have him arrested. I would’ve felt that way even if I was certain he had killed Chris, and I wasn’t. Then there was my personal interest. Zack Bowen had come to me with a story that implicated my own past and I wanted to hear the rest of it before I drew any conclusions about his guilt or innocence.

  So I thought about it for a while, and by the time the phones came up later that morning, I’d made up my mind. I called a high-ranking and deeply closeted police captain whom I’d known for several years through a mutual cop friend in San Francisco. Captain Closet and I had even had a half-hearted sort of affair after Josh and I had broken up, testing, unsuccessfully, the theory that opposites attract.

  I reached him on the first try and gave him a bare-bones and relatively truthful account of Zack’s visit, without using Zack’s name.

  When I finished, Captain Closet said, “Let me understand, Henry. Some guy you’ve never seen before shows up at your house and claims that Judge Chandler was murdered last night in his chambers, then disappears.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And he doesn’t give you his name and you have no idea of who he is.”

  “That’s right.”

  “This is total bullshit,” he said.