The Hidden Law (7 page)

“Why didn’t you explain this to the police?”

“Listen, Rios, I’m a Chicano from East Los Angeles. When I saw the cops, the old homeboy instincts kicked in, and I wasn’t about to tell them squat.”

“You’ve had weeks since then to bring this to their attention,” I observed.

He didn’t miss a beat. “I had to convince Frank to come forward and accept responsibility. Without him, the story doesn’t hold up.”

“That’s true,” I said.

“You sound like you don’t believe me, Rios.” There was an edge to his voice.

“It’s just that less than a week ago you told me you had killed the man.”

“Yeah,” he said, after a moment. “Well, I was protecting Frank. He’s my homeboy, you know. That’s all.”

“I’d have to talk to both of you,” I said.

“Sure, no problem. How about tomorrow?”

I checked my schedule. I was starting a trial downtown. “No, not tomorrow. Thursday afternoon, around four.”

“You got it,” he said. “We’ll be there.”

I hung up and doodled on the sheet of paper in front of me.
People versus Peña,
a defense lawyer’s dream; high-profile case, cooperative client, an ironclad defense. All in all, it sounded too good to be true.

J
OSH CALLED ME THE
next day and we agreed to meet for dinner that night. I went downtown to start jury selection in a truly pathetic theft case: my client, a homeless wino, was accused of stealing a ring from a corpse that had been dumped in an alley off Spring Street. The cops had tried to pinch him for the homicide but, failing that, took what they could get. The deputy district attorney was not anxious to try the case to a downtown jury likely to be composed of black and Latino jurors from crime-ridden neighborhoods who would perceive the trial as another instance of the system’s misplaced priorities. The judge was equally unhappy at having his court tied up by what he had described in chambers as a “chickenshit case.” As the jurors filed in, the DA passed me a note that read. “How about a drunk in public with time served?” I scribbled back, “OK, with no probation.” She frowned, then shrugged, and asked to approach the bench. Ten minutes later, my man pled and the case was closed.

Leaving the court, I got tied up in traffic and was twenty minutes late to the restaurant where I was meeting Josh. The place was a typical Westside bistro, whitewashed walls, black lacquered chairs and tables, concrete floors and atonal music, like drips of rain, falling between syllables of trendy conversation. It was hard to believe that this was in the same city where dead bodies were dumped in alleys and looted for the price of a bottle of Tokay.

A pretty girl in a white Spandex dress pointed me toward Josh, who sat against the wall at a back table. He was wearing a black leather jacket over an Act Up T-shirt, black denim pants and clunky black shoes, that season’s garb for the gay urban revolutionary. In my gray pinstripes I felt conspicuously Older Generation though, in fact, we were simply at opposite poles of the same generation.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” I said, sitting down.

“I just got here myself,” he said, sipping absently from a glass of white wine. Ordinarily, he refrained from drinking around me, and I was irritated at how quickly his habits were changing.

“You order yet?”

“No, I was waiting for you.”

I grunted acknowledgment. We spent a couple of minutes on the hand-written menus and then gave our orders to the handsome waiter who, after he took it, told Josh, “Love your shoes. Doc Marten’s?”

“Yeah, Zodiac’s having a sale.”

The waiter grinned, “Good deal.”

I hadn’t the faintest notion of what they were talking about. Sourly, I reflected that Steven would have understood. A busboy brought us water and I took a drink to wash down the bile before trying to hold a conversation.

“I’m glad to see you,” Josh said. “Sorry about the misunderstanding yesterday.”

It was hard to sustain my irritability, but I tried. “What misunderstanding; I was just a little late.”

“No,” he said, “not that part. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you Steven would be there. I wanted to introduce you.”

“Why?”

The force of my hostility startled him, but only for a moment. He said, “Because I care about both of you.”

“Sorry, I don’t mean to be a bitch. I’m just tired, and this isn’t a situation I’ve ever been in before. I don’t know the rules.”

“There aren’t rules, Henry,” he said. He picked up his wine and drank some nervously. “I know it’s naive but I thought if you met him you wouldn’t be so mad at me.”

“I’m not mad at you,” I replied.

“If you were any tenser, you’d explode.”

He was right; my shoulders were hunched to my ears. I took a long breath and dropped them. “He’s younger than me by ten years and he has the kind of body you see advertising 976 numbers,” I said. “I don’t see that meeting him would make me feel better.”

“You’re not giving me a lot of credit if you think that that’s what this is all about,” he said. A peal of faked laughter cut through the chatter around us. “I’ve never had any complaints about our sex life.”

“Oh, thanks.”

He rolled the stem of the wine glass between his long fingers. “Could you try not to be such an asshole, Henry?”

“Maybe you’d better tell me why it is you asked me here while there’s still time to cancel our orders.”

He got up and started out of the room, bumping against the packed tables. I got up and hurried after him. I found him in the parking lot leaning against his car, crying.

“Josh.”

“You think this is some cheap faggot farce, don’t you,” he said thickly. “This is my goddamned life.”

“It’s my life, too.”

He wiped his nose on the sleeve of his jacket. “Just listen to me. I don’t want to die, Henry. I want to be like everyone else. I want my seventy-five years or whatever, but I know I’m not going to have them and it makes me crazy.” He tipped his head back and swallowed hard. “I can’t help resenting you. You’re going to be alive after I’m dead and you’ll find someone else.” He drew a deep breath. “It’s not fair. I had to get away from you. I had to get away from my own resentment.”

“This isn’t the way,” I said, moving toward him. I put my arms around him and pulled him close. “There’s never going to be anyone else.”

I heard the ‘thwack’ of the newspaper against the front door and opened my eyes. Josh lay beside me on his stomach, his face turned away from me. He was a restless sleeper and the sheets had fallen away from him, exposing the full length of his body. He was a little man, five-eight on a good day, he liked to say, three inches shorter than me, but in far better shape. He had taken an anatomy class and learned the names of the muscles. Taking my hand, he would place it somewhere on his body and say, “This is a deltoid. This is a latissimus dorsi.” The ripple of muscle beneath smooth skin was like a slow burning fire.

It was the mystery of my sexual nature that a body which was the mirror image of mine could be so compelling and feel so unfamiliar, as if it belonged to a separate gender. When I was younger, it had seemed urgent to unravel this mystery because I believed that if it could be explained, the haters would stop hating us. Now I believed that they had no more right to an explanation about me than I did about them and, in any case, they would find other reasons to hate. Now I was simply grateful for his body beside me, known and unknown.

I kissed the nape of his neck and got up, put on my pants and went out to get the paper. Tossing it on the kitchen table, I started the coffee, poured myself a glass of orange juice, swallowed some vitamins. I unrolled the newspaper and the headline stopped me cold: SENATOR PEÑA MURDERED, Legislator Shot to Death in Restaurant Parking Lot.

I started reading:

Popular politician Agustin Peña who represented East Los Angeles for the past fifteen years in the state senate was shot to death in the parking lot of an Eastside restaurant late last night. Peña, who had been dining with his family at La Playa Azul on First Street, was killed while walking to his car. No one else was injured. Although he was rushed to a nearby hospital, he died early this morning. Police have no suspects…

Although the story went on at some length, all the known facts were in that first paragraph: a killing with no motive, no suspects, and no witnesses. The rest was the usual police disinformation, speculation that he might have come upon a car burglar who shot in panic; things the cops said when they didn’t have anything. My first thought was about Michael Ruiz, who was, after a fashion, my client. I picked up the phone and called. Edith Rosen had just arrived.

“Do you know about Gus?” I asked.

“It’s horrible, Henry. It’s just horrible,” she said. “I can hardly believe it.”

“Does Chuck know?”

“He was at the hospital with the family,” she said.

“What about Michael Ruiz?”

“Michael was here last night,” she said. “He had nothing to do with it.”

“Is he being a little more cooperative around there?”

“He knows it’s his last chance,” she said evasively.

“I hope that means yes.”

“The police don’t seem to know anything about who killed Gus,” she said.

“That won’t last long. Peña was an important man, they’ll do everything they can to catch his killer as quickly as possible.”

“I hope they do,” she said, sincerely. “I have to go, Henry. Perhaps we’ll talk later.”

I was uneasy about the conversation, but in the absence of any reason for suspicion, I had to let it go. I went back to the paper. On the inside pages were statements from prominent politicians expressing shock at the killing. My old friend, Inez Montoya, now a city councilwoman, went on at length about the loss to the Chicano community. Her effusiveness surprised me. Although she had once worked for Gus, he had opposed her candidacy for city council and she still spoke of him with bitterness. I didn’t know his family to call and express my own regret, so I called Inez instead.

“I can’t talk now,” she said, with her usual abruptness. “I’m on my way to Graciela.”

“Peña’s wife? Are you two friends?”

“I was always closer to her. Listen, will you be my date to the funeral?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Fine, I’ll call you with the details.”

“Hi.” Josh appeared at the doorway, naked, scratching his chest. “I smelled coffee.” He looked at me. “What’s wrong, Henry?”

“Gus Peña was murdered last night,” I said, indicating the paper.

Josh came over and glanced at the headline. “Peña,” he said. “Homophobic pig. You know he refused to sponsor a bill to fund a minority AIDS project in East LA? He actually said he wouldn’t be party to promoting homosexuality and drug use.”

I looked at the picture of Peña in the paper, tuxedoed, smiling. “No, I didn’t know that,” I said.

He yawned and looked at the article. “They shot him, huh? Assassination, you think?”

“I guess that’s always a possibility with a politician, though a state senator doesn’t exactly wield great power.”

“You never know,” Josh said. “They pass the laws. He could’ve really pissed someone off.”

The gangs, I thought, and their defenders, like Tomas Ochoa.

“Maybe it was Act Up,” he said.

“You’re not serious.”

“We talk about it sometimes,” he said, pouring himself a cup of coffee and heading to the refrigerator for milk. “Like, if you’re dying of AIDS, why not take out a few politicians. Hey, we’re out of milk.”

“Sorry, I haven’t bought it since…” I let that sentence hang. “Would you do that?” I asked.

“Only if I had a crack at Jesse Helms.” He closed the refrigerator. “Keep buying milk, OK?”

The morning TV news was full of Gus’s murder. Since the police couldn’t report any leads, most of it was filler. At one point, Tomas Ochoa was interviewed as an expert on Chicano politics to explain the significance of Peña’s murder. He used the opportunity to rail against Peña’s anti-gang bill and warn the police against scapegoating the gangs. Inez Montoya was interviewed at Peña’s house. The message she delivered to the police was that any delay in capturing Peña’s killer would be viewed as an insult to the Latino community. She brushed aside questions of whether the killing was an assassination. “It was just some punk,” she snapped. The family was not available to the press, which had to content itself with shots of Mrs. Peña being led to a waiting car by her son.

I got dressed and went to my office, half-expecting a message from someone in Peña’s office since I had been scheduled to meet with him that afternoon. No one had bothered calling. It was a moot point anyway.

I called my investigator Freeman Vidor about a witness he was trying to locate for me. We got around to Peña’s murder. Freeman, as usual, had inside information from his contacts in the police department on which he’d served for a dozen years before the racism of his brother officers finally drove him out.

“Ballistics thinks it was an Uzi,” he said. “They found a dozen shell casings in the lot.”

“That was some car burglar,” I said.

“It wasn’t a car burglar. You know who likes Uzis, the gang-bangers. Looks to me like a drive-by shooting.”

“That’s Varrio Nuevo territory,” I said. The names and territories of the Chicano gangs were familiar to every criminal defense attorney who worked downtown. The archrivals of the Varrio Nuevo gang were called the Dogtown Locos. I mentioned this to Freeman.

“That’s who I would put my money on.”

“Even in the dark, Peña couldn’t have looked like a gang member.”

“Maybe there was someone else in the lot,” he conjectured.

“Maybe they expected to find Peña,” I said.

“Hey, didn’t he run over someone up in Sacramento a couple of months ago? Maybe the guy had family in LA and it was a revenge shooting.”

“Hmm. If I were the cops I’d at least look into it,” I replied.

“You know what else is kind of interesting,” Freeman said, “I heard the toxo report came back showing the senator was drunk.”

“Jesus,” I said. “After that speech he made last week.” Not to mention the little speech he’d made to me afterwards.