Goldenboy (23 page)

I left Josh the next morning and
returned to Larry’s house. I found him sitting at his desk writing checks.

“Did you see Tony
last night?” he asked in response to my greeting. In the watery morning light
he looked haggard but formidably alive, not at all the cadaver I had dreamt of
the night before.

“Yes,” I said,
sitting down across from him. “He says Sandy Blenheim killed Brian Fox.”

“That’s
unbelievable,” Larry said.

I recounted for
Larry the story that Good had told me. When I finished he nodded but his face
remained skeptical.

“It sounds
plausible,” he said, finally.

“A plausible lie?”
I asked.

He shook his head. “No,
that’s not it. Tony only lies to his advantage. I can’t see how this would help
him.” He looked thoughtful. “And it’s true about Sandy’s taste for young boys.”

“But you’re not
convinced.”

“I still think Jim
did it,” he said quietly.

I stared at him. “Didn’t
you bring me down here to prove Jim’s innocence?”

He smiled wanly. “Not
exactly,” he replied. “I wanted you to get him acquitted.” He picked up a
crystal paperweight from his desk and ran his fingers across its surface. “Look,
I know what’s bothering me about this Sandy business. It’s that everyone knows
Sandy’s gay. The fact that he was caught having sex with a kid would have been
embarrassing but not especially damaging.” He set the paperweight down. “Not in
this town, anyway. And another thing, Henry, don’t you think the way Brian Fox
was killed showed incredible rage?”

Remembering the
pictures I had seen of the body, I nodded. “Would Sandy Blenheim have that much
anger inside of him?” he asked.

“How well do you
know him?” I countered.

Larry shrugged. “Not
very,” he conceded.

“Well, someone who
knows him better told me that she thinks he’s crazy.”

Larry squinted at
me. “Who?”

“Irene Gentry.”

He was silent for a
moment. “Maybe,” he said. “She would know, if anyone does, what he’s really
like. He practically lives with Tom and her.”

“You want to
believe it was Jim,” I said. “Why?”

He looked away from
me and said, slowly, “Because I want to believe that he was capable of fighting
back.”

“But not that way,
Larry. Not by killing someone.”

“You have
strictures about killing that I don’t share,” he replied.

This seemed odd
coming from a dying man.

“And anyway,” he
rubbed his eyes, “I loved him and you didn’t.”

“Who? Jim?”

He nodded.

“You never met him.”

“I know,” he said
and looked past me to the window with its still view of the lake. “It’s
ridiculous, isn’t it? A sick man’s fantasy. I dreamed of bringing him here to
live with me. I thought we could heal each other. How absurd.”

“No,” I said. “It
isn’t.”

As if he hadn’t
heard, he said, “Does God give us life to want such things? It seems cruel.”

“To love someone?”

“To fall in love
with a picture in the newspaper,” he said, “and to lie in bed at night like a
schoolboy, unable to sleep because of it. To ask you to put your reputation on
the line in the hope that you could work a miracle.”

“But you were
right,” I said, fiercely. “Jim didn’t do it.’’

“You don’t
understand, Henry,” Larry said. “I wanted him to have done it, and I wanted the
world to understand why.”

“Meanwhile someone’s
dead,” I answered.

“And how many of us
have died at the hands of people like Brian Fox?” he demanded.

I glanced at the
bills on his desk, from the newspaper, the utility companies, his gardener.
Across the top of each of them he had written, “Discontinue service.” I
remembered he had told me that he was willing to trade his life for Jim’s. At
the time it had merely seemed like impassioned rhetoric. Now I knew he had
meant it.

“I’m sorry,” I
said. “I’d like to agree but it goes against everything inside of me.”

Larry smiled. “It’s
all right,” he said. “I know you, Henry. You believe in the law the way other
people believe in God. Not me. I’m dying. I only believe in balancing the
accounts.”

I went into the
kitchen to call Freeman Vidor. He wasn’t at his office. A moment after I hung
up, the phone rang. It was Freeman.

“I’m at Tony Good’s
apartment with the L.A.P.D.,” he said. “You better get over here.”

“What happened?”

“He’s been
murdered,” Freeman said. “Someone took a knife and rammed it up his guts.”

“Up his—” I began
to say, then I understood. “My God.”

*****

Over Tony Good’s
bed was a framed poster that showed James Dean walking down a New York street
in the rain. On the bed were sky-blue sheets soaked with blood.

“He bled to death,”
a small man in wire-rimmed glasses was telling me. I wasn’t sure who he was,
the medical examiner maybe. There was a faint chemical smell in the air. Tony
had been using poppers. My stomach heaved.

“Someone stuck him,”
I said, to say something.

“A twelve-inch blade,”
the little man said, “inserted into the anus.”

I turned and
hurried from the room into the kitchen where

Freeman was sitting
at the table with Phillip Cresly, the L.A.P.D. detective assigned to the case.
Cresly glanced at me without much interest as I pulled up a chair.

“You satisfied?”
Cresly asked. He was a tall man with light brown hair, eyes that had been
chiseled from a glacier and a twitchy little mouth. I thought I had seen his
face before and then I remembered the picture in Freeman’s office of the three
young cops. A long time ago Cresly had been one of them.

“The bed was soaked
with blood,” I replied. “How can you say he didn’t struggle?”

“Position of the
body,” Cresly replied as if reading from a list. “Nothing disturbed in the
bedroom. Neighbors didn’t hear anything.”

“You really think
he took a knife up his rectum without fighting?”

The ice-cube eyes
considered me. “Vidor says the guy told you he was going to meet a client after
he left the bar.”

It took a moment
for me to understand what he was implying. “You think that this is something
gay men do?” I asked, unable to keep the astonishment out of my voice.

“I used to work
vice,” he said. “I seen movies where guys took fists up their ass. Jesus, I
mean, right up to the elbow.” He made a sour face. “A little knife is nothing.”

I glanced at
Freeman. A warning formed on his face. I ignored it.

“A little knife is
nothing,” I repeated. “You learn that at the academy?”

“I’m paid to do my
job, Rios,” he said, the mouth twitching. “But I don’t have to like it.”

I stood up. “What
about Blenheim?”

“He’s gone,” Cresly
said.

“You looking for
him?”

“We’ll find him,”
he said, smugly. “You have anything else to tell me?”

Freeman stood up,
quickly, and pulled at my arm. “Come on, Henry,” he said. I let him lead me
from the room

“That jerk,” I
sputtered as soon as we were outside in front of Good’s apartment building.

Freeman lit a
cigarette. “The man’s set in his ways,” he said, mildly, “but he’s a good cop,
Henry. He don’t like open files.”

Two young men came
down the sidewalk carrying an immense Christmas tree. They passed us with shy,
domestic smiles.

“No struggle,” I
said, more to myself than to Freeman.

“Look,” Freeman
said, “the guy was drunk when we saw him. And he was probably dusted, too.”

“PCP?” I said. “How
do you figure?”

“I smelled ether in
the bedroom,” he said. He blew smoke out of the side of his mouth. “They use it
to cover the smell.”

“I know,” I
replied. “But that wasn’t ether. It was amyl nitrite.”

“Poppers?” Freeman
shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

“What does it
matter,” I said. “He was obviously on something, but I can’t believe it was
enough to knock him out.”

We got to Freeman’s
battered Accord. The license plate read, PRIVT I.

“It had to be
Blenheim,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s what
I figure. How do you think he found out that Good talked to us?” He leaned
against the car, dropped his cigarette and crushed it.

“Maybe Good told
him,” I said. “Maybe he was Good’s client last night, only the appointment wasn’t
for sex but a little more blackmail.”

“Kinda stupid,”
Freeman observed.

“I doubt that Tony
Good ever got any prizes for brains,” I replied.

“What a way to go,”
Freeman said.

“Yeah. I think I
better go pay a call on the Zanes.”

“You think Blenheim
will be going after them next?”

I nodded. “I bet
Tom Zane knows everything.”

“Poppers,” Freeman
said softly, tossing his cigarette to the ground. “Is it true that they make
sex better?”

I shrugged. “All I
ever got from them was a headache.”

Freeman snickered. “Figures,”
he said. “You ain’t exactly one for the wild side, are you Henry?”

“Not exactly,” I
agreed.

*****

The Zanes were at
home. Rennie, in a gray silk robe, arranged herself in a chair near the fire.
The maid brought her tea. Tom was having his morning pick-me-up, a tall Bloody
Mary that he mixed himself. He brought his drink into the living room and sat
in the chair beside his wife. The two of them, blond, handsome, could have been
brother and sister. They watched me with still, blue eyes. A fire crackled in
the fireplace, releasing the scent of pine into the air. A Christmas tree had
appeared in the corner, near the Diego Rivera, with expensively wrapped gifts
piled beneath it.

I told them about
Tony Good and Sandy Blenheim’s disappearance. They said nothing though Rennie blanched-when
I described the manner of Tony’s death.

I looked at Tom. “You
knew Sandy killed Brian Fox,” I said. “How do you figure?” he asked, a lazy
smile curling the edges of his lips.

“You produced the
play,” I said. “Blenheim couldn’t have given Tony the part of Gaveston unless
he cleared it with you. Isn’t that right?”

He took a swallow
of his drink. “You’re a smart man,” he said. “You knew,” I repeated.