The Hidden Law (22 page)

“No one needs to know that.”

“Don’t you think the district attorney will be curious?”

He smiled. “My dad helped elect him,” he said. “My wife will swear I was with her.” His smile tightened. “Mike’s not going to talk, is he? What does he care once you get the charges dropped?”

“And you’re willing to live with it?”

He was too smart to answer. He sat back and grinned.

“You must have truly hated him.”

“I don’t think you want to say anything else, Mr. Rios. For your own good.”

“I had a father like yours,” I said. “Everyone thought he was a model family man because he provided for us, but no one knew what happened when the door was locked for the night. I never told anyone, either, not about the drunken rages, the beatings, the constant humiliation, because I didn’t think anyone would believe me, and because I was ashamed at myself for not standing up to him. I carried those secrets most of my life, Tino, because I thought they were my secrets. But I was wrong. They were his secrets. I wasn’t doing myself any favors. I was just helping him. That’s how he continued to control me, even after he died. You think your life will be better because he’s gone, but you’re wrong. He’s still calling the shots.”

“I own my life now,” he said.

I shook my head. “He took it with him when you buried him. How are you going to get it back?”

“Are you going to the police?” he asked, slowly. “Is that what this is all about?”

I chose my words carefully, mindful of the gun in his waistband. “The law is changing. It’s beginning to recognize defenses that explain why someone who has been terrorized all his life might finally strike out.”

“Premeditation,” he said. “Lying in wait. That’s special circumstances. That’s the death penalty.”

“If the entire family was involved,” I said. “If they banded together, it would be hard for a jury to convict.”

I saw doubt flicker in his eyes.

“There must be years of records,” I said. “Emergency room records, reports of schoolteachers about a student who comes in with suspicious injuries, neighbors who remembered the arguments, who maybe called the cops. There’s already a very public record of your father’s alcoholism.”

“They don’t let you off,” he said, looking at me very hard, waiting for me to lie.

“Not entirely,” I said. “It’s a classic second-degree plea. Fifteen years to life, two years for the gun. In nine years you’d come up for parole.”

“Nine years,” he said softly. “I’d be thirty-five.” He shook his head, “And that’s if you’re right, but you can’t promise anything.”

“No, I can’t. But ask yourself this, Tino, whose interests would be served by sending you to death row? Who would be calling for your blood? Your mother? She’s the only one who would have the moral credibility to demand that you be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. But she won’t do that, will she?”

“No,” he whispered.

Because she
knew,
I thought. That’s why she’d had Inez Montoya try to call me off, to protect her son.

“It’s already a nightmare for your family,” I said. “No one is going to want to make it worse.”

He looked down at his hands, his shoulders trembling. When he looked up at me, he was crying. “I can’t take the chance, Mr. Rios.”

“It’s your only chance, Tino.” I drew a deep breath and played my last card. “Killing me will only make it worse. You might be able to live with your father’s death, but not the death of an innocent man. Give me the gun, Tino.”

Now he wept loudly, his body shaking. “I can’t.”

“You’re not a killer, Tino,” I said, hoping that Freeman would stay put. “Give me the gun, Tino. I can help you. I understand what it’s been like. Kill me, and there won’t be another chance to make peace with yourself. Give me the gun, now. Tino, give me the gun.”

He pulled the sweatshirt up, revealing the butt of a .22, and pulled it out of his waistband, holding it in his hand. I forced myself to remain perfectly still, though my guts had turned to liquid, and my brain screamed, get down.

“Put it on the desk,” I said.

He looked at me, then at the gun. We sat there for the world’s longest minute, and then, slowly, he lay the gun on the desk, and pushed it toward me. Slowly, I reached out and took it, opened my desk drawer and dropped it in. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Freeman standing at the doorway, tucking his own gun back into his holster. He moved back into the corridor.

I came around the desk and put my hands on Tino’s shoulders. He hugged my waist and wept. I stroked his head, murmuring, “It’s OK, son. It’s OK. It’s OK.”

Much later, I sat in my office with the tape that Freeman had made of the conversation. I played it back, and after it finished I sat there for a long time, thinking about the price I had almost paid to give Tino a chance to finally be free of his father. My father would have called me a fool for taking the risk. But he would have been wrong, as he had always been wrong about me, so blinded by his notion of what it meant to be a man that he had never seen his son’s courage. I pushed the erase button.

I
STOPPED TAKING CASES
after Tino’s which, at any rate, took most of the summer to try. The DA went after him with special circumstances, but the case was only half-heartedly prosecuted. Day after day, the revelations of Gus Peña’s private persona filled the news. By the time I began the defense, there were letters to the editor demanding to know why the family was being subjected to further suffering. The jury came back with a second-degree conviction. He was sentenced to fifteen years to life in the medium security prison at San Luis Obispo. I went up to visit frequently the first few weeks he was there. So did Edith Rosen, who had gone into private practice.

SafeHouse closed its doors shortly after the trial ended, pending an investigation by the state arising from testimony about Gus Peña’s stay there. Last I heard, Chuck Sweeny was trying to open a place in Nevada.

Michael’s probation was violated in his armed robbery case and he was sentenced to the California Youth Authority until he turned twenty-one. Angela Peña was not, as it turned out, pregnant. The Ruizes settled their bill with me promptly, and that was the last I heard from them.

Inez was elected to fill Gus Peña’s unexpired term in the state senate.

By the end of August, I had finished my last case. I closed up my practice, helped find Emma another job, and went home.

Summer was over. I could feel the change of season in the slight chill beneath the breeze that blew through the sycamores on the quiet side street in West Hollywood. I walked slowly, letting the breeze curl around my chest, and thought of Lonnie’s fingers tracing the plate of my torso as we lay in bed watching the light deepen in his room where I had spent the previous night. I didn’t delude myself into thinking that being with him meant anything more than it did, but it was enough. When I wasn’t with him, I was spending time with Eric and Andy in Santa Barbara, trying to remember what it had been like when I was eighteen and the world had laid its possibilities at my feet.

I came to the front of an apartment building, searched the directory for Josh’s name, and when I found it, called up on the security phone.

“Henry?” he asked.

“Hi.”

A buzzer sounded and I pushed the door open. I rode the elevator up to the third floor and he was standing on the breezeway, waiting for me, relaxed and comfortable in blue sweatpants and a yellow tank top. I hadn’t seen him since May. For a time, he hadn’t even called, and I’d had to let that go. Then, yesterday, he had asked me to come over. Seeing him, all the sadness came back, and all the regret. He walked toward me, grinning, and hugged me, then led me into the apartment he shared with Steven.

“This is very nice,” I said, observing the polished surfaces of the expensively furnished room.

“Yeah,” he said, “not bad for two guys on disability. Most of it’s Steven’s,” he added, seriously. “Souvenirs of when he was a junior executive at a studio. They dumped him when they found out he had AIDS. Actually, he lives off the settlement money from his lawsuit against them. Do you want something to drink?”

“Mineral water?”

He ducked into the kitchen and reappeared with two glasses of mineral water. “Your cocktail.”

He sat down beside me, put his hand on my leg. “You look great, Henry.”

“You, too,” I said, tracing a bulging biceps. “You’ve been working out.”

“I’ve got lots of time to spend at the gym.”

“What about school?” I asked him. When we broke up, he had been in his last quarter at UCLA.

He sipped his Calistoga. “I had to drop out.” He tapped his head. “The mind is going.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, smiling, ready to play along.

“I’ve lost about ten percent of the use of my brain already. The other day at dinner I couldn’t remember the word for salt.”

I stopped smiling. “This isn’t funny.”

“I’m not joking,” he replied.

I started to cry. He put his arm around me, and let me sob against his chest, hard and muscular now from lifting weights, the chest of a beautiful young man with fifty years ahead of him. He stroked my hair and called me by the small names he had invented for me while we lived together. After a few minutes, I pulled myself together and leaned back into the sofa, wiping my face with my hands.

“It’s not fair.”

He sighed, drank some mineral water. “There are some things I need to take care of while I still can. I need a will, Henry.”

“That’s why you asked me to come, about your will?”

“Not just that, but to tell you. To ask for your help.”

“Anything.”

“Let’s start with a will. There’s not much. My grandfather set up a trust for all us kids, and I have a few stocks, that sort of thing. I want it to go to AIDS organizations, to Act Up and a couple of other places. I know you’ve been doing wills for PWAs for a couple of years.”

“I never thought I’d do yours.”

His expression was complex. “I guess we were both kind of living in a fantasy. You thought if you didn’t let me grow up, I wouldn’t ever die. I thought you were strong enough to do it.”

“I never meant to keep you from growing up.”

“I know that,” he said, with a trace of the asperity of our last days together. Then, more gently, he added, “It was the only way you knew how to take care of me, by being the grown-up for both of us.”

“I’m sorry, Josh.”

He looked at me for a moment. “I think you’d do it differently now.”

“Yes, I think you’re right.”

He got up and walked over to a desk, returning with a folder. “I’ve written out what I want, basically. I thought you could take this and put it into legalese.”

I opened the folder. He had filled pages with his sloping backhand. “Yes, I can do that.”

“I want to be cremated, Henry,” he said, “My parents won’t like it, but if you tell them it’s what I wanted, they’ll respect it. And I want my ashes divided up into five parts, one for them, two for my sisters, one for Steve—if he’s still around—and one for you. Take them someplace that was special to us.”

The only way I was going to get through was simply to respond to what he was saying without thinking about it.

“OK, what about a service?”

“At the church where Cullen’s was,” he said. “It’s memorial service central anyway. I guess no one will mind that I’m a Jew.”

“There’s the gay synagogue.”

He grinned. “Let’s do it my way, OK?”

“Sorry.”

“I know this is hard for you, Henry. There isn’t anyone else I can talk to about it without breaking down myself. There’s a song I want them to play, from that opera you dragged me to the last time we were in San Francisco. By Gucci.”

“Puccini,” I said. “
Suor Angelica.
”

He nodded. “Where she sings about her baby in heaven. It made my heart stop.”

I remembered.
Ah! dimmi quando in cielo potro vederti? quando potro baciarti!

“‘When shall I see you in heaven? When shall I kiss you?’ You’re going to make me cry again.”

“There will be enough time for that later, Henry,” he said, gently. “Have you been seeing anyone? I don’t like to think of you alone.”

“I haven’t been.”

He smiled. “Well, tell me about him.”

“Josh…”

“I want details, Henry.”

“OK, his name is—”

I couldn’t sleep that night, so I got out of bed, carefully, not wanting to wake Lonnie. I went into the living room and opened the windows to the cool air. I found the CD of
Suor Angelica
and put it into the player. I sat on the floor beneath the window, skipped the disc to the right place, pushed the play button and waited for the music to begin.

I want to thank Rob Miller, Dale and Sharon Flanagan, and Katherine V. Forrest for their friendship, support, and assistance, and Andy Ferrero.

Turn the page to continue reading from the Henry Rios Mysteries

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.