Howtown (16 page)

A moment later he returned to the room smirking. “Henry, there’s a guy named Ben here.”

“Ben,” I repeated. Vega? “A cop?”

“It’s hard to tell. All he’s got on is running shorts and a T-shirt.”

I got out of bed, pulled on my bathrobe and went to the door. Ben Vega stood there awkwardly studying the carpet.

“Hi, Ben,” I said.

“I guess you didn’t get my message,” he said.

“Come in, Ben.” He stepped into the hall and stood there trying not to look into the room. “I got the message, but I just didn’t get around to calling you back.”

“I thought you might want to go running,” he said, his face reddening. “I shoulda called from downstairs.”

“That’s okay. Why don’t I take a rain check.”

“Yeah, sure Mr. Rios.” He smiled embarrassedly. “Sorry to disturb you.”

From behind me, Josh said, “Hi, I’m Josh.”

“This is my friend, Josh,” I added unnecessarily. “This is Ben.”

Josh stepped forward, still clad in his underwear and smiling impishly. “Nice to meet you, Ben.”

Ben stuck out his hand. “Nice to meet you.”

Shaking his hand, Josh said, “You can have him tomorrow, unless, you know, you want to join us.”

I glared at him.

Face clenched like a fist, Ben said, “I better get going. It heats up real early. See you.”

“ ’Bye,” I said.

Closing the door, I turned to Josh and said, “That was really unnecessary.”

“Come on,” Josh said with a smile, “he liked it.”

“That must explain why he looked like he wanted to arrest us.”

He shook his head. “Henry, he had a hard-on.”

“Please,” I said skeptically.

Josh shrugged and walked back into the bedroom. “Okay, don’t believe me, but I don’t see how you could miss it in those little shorts of his.”

We got back into bed. I turned to him. “Did he really?”

“Really, and it wasn’t for me.”

“You know how to make an old man feel good,” I said, and for the next hour gave no further thought to Ben Vega or anyone else.

Later, while Josh showered I finally pulled myself out of bed and searched for my watch among the debris on the top of the bureau on which Josh had emptied his pockets. There, amid laundry claim checks, crumpled dollar bills, his plane ticket and his beeper was a green poker chip on a small chain. On one side the chip had the words “30 days” and on the other side it said “Keep coming back.”

I picked it up and took it into the bathroom where Josh was now standing at the mirror putting in a contact lens.

“Josh, where did you get this?” I asked, holding the chip up for him to see.

He squinted at it. “Oh, that. I almost forgot. Freeman gave it to me yesterday to bring up to you. He said he found it in that guy’s apartment, the one that was killed. McKay?”

“Is that all he said?”

“No, he said you’d know what it was and to call him.” He got the lens in and blinked, then started on the other eye. “Do you know what it is?”

“Oh, yes,” I said, slipping the chip into the pocket of my bathrobe. “I have quite a collection of these myself.”

I went back into the bedroom and picked up the phone, dialing Freeman’s home number. The phone rang and rang. Finally, he picked it up and, in a voice that sounded like he’d been gargling with toxic waste, said, “Yeah.”

I looked at the clock. It was seven-thirty. “It’s Henry,” I said. “Did I wake you?”

“Do I sound like I was in the middle of aerobics?” he replied, grumpily. In the background, a female voice sleepily asked who was calling. He said something to her, then asked, “You in Los Robles?”

“Yeah,” I said, digging the chip out of my pocket. “What’s this chip all about?”

“You know what it is, don’t you?” Freeman asked, awakening.

“You get them at AA for thirty days of sobriety. So?” I dangled the chip in front of me. I kept mine in my desk at work.

“There was a whole bunch of those chips in McKay’s apartment,” Freeman said through a yawn. “Not much else. Landlord didn’t waste any time getting rid of his stuff. Said it was bad luck to keep a murdered man’s things around.”

“You say there was more than one?”

“Yeah, five or six.”

Someone knocked at the door. Josh came out of the bathroom, naked, opened it and stood back. A waiter came in wheeling a trolley with covered plates. He glanced at Josh, then me, and looked away, resolutely. Josh went back into the bathroom.

“Were there any chips with sixty or ninety days on them?” I asked Freeman, watching the waiter set up the small table near the window.

“Nope. Why?”

“Looks like McKay’s what we call a slipper.” I tossed the chip onto the bed.

“What’s that?”

“It’s an AA expression for an alcoholic who can’t stay sober—someone who slips. I still don’t understand the significance of McKay being an alcoholic.”

“That’s the only thing I been able to find out about him that wasn’t in the police report,” Freeman replied. “No rap sheet, nothing from DMV. Neighbors couldn’t tell me squat.”

“He wasn’t exactly Mr. Rogers, Freeman. There must be something.”

Grumpily, he replied, “I don’t have contacts in NAMBLA, Henry.”

I smiled. NAMBLA was the North American Man Boy Love Association, an organization of pedophiles. “No, I wouldn’t think that was your neighborhood.”

The waiter finished and left, quickly.

“What I figure,” Freeman was saying, “is that maybe we could get a lead from some of these AA meetings he went to.”

I frowned. “Even if that’s true, you’re an outsider, Freeman. Most of the meetings are closed.”

“You’re not an outsider,” he replied.

“It’s called Alcoholics Anonymous for a reason,” I said. “You don’t repeat what gets said at those meetings.”

“It’s the first break I’ve had,” he growled.

“There’ll be others. The guy was dealing kiddie porn, after all. What about your contacts with LAPD? They must keep track of people like McKay. Or the FBI, they’re always busting guys who send stuff through the mail.”

He sighed. “Okay, it’s your money. When are you coming back up here?”

“Next weekend, probably.”

“If I find anything out before then I’ll call you.”

We hung up.

I got up from bed and wandered over to the table lifting the lids of the plates. French toast, maple syrup, marmalade—Josh ate dessert even for breakfast. Fortunately, there was also ham and a couple of plain biscuits. I poured two cups of coffee and carried them into the bathroom where I found Josh standing at a full-length mirror, examining his inner thigh. I set his cup of coffee on the counter.

“When did you order breakfast?” I asked.

“While you were sleeping.” He smiled at me briefly in the mirror and went back to his leg.

“What are you doing, baby?” I asked, running the palm of my hand across his back. He was smooth as stone, but a lot warmer.

“Looking for lesions,” he replied, carelessly, straightening himself up.

I studied the beautiful body in the mirror, speechless for a moment. “Why, Josh? You haven’t—I mean, there’s no reason to think—”

He interrupted my sputtering. “I look every morning.” He pivoted on the balls of his feet and turned around, penis flopping. “Top to bottom.” As if to emphasize the point, he bent forward, spread the cheeks of his buttocks and inspected the mirrored image of his anus. “It’s just something I do,” he added, standing up.

“Since when?” I asked, trying to be as casual as he.

“Since I started on the Retrovir.” He picked up the cup of coffee, and studied his mirrored back for a moment. “I usually wait until you’ve gone to work.”

I didn’t know what else to say. Moments like this brought home to me that no matter how well I thought I knew him, how much I loved him, we were on different sides of the fence that separated the infected from the uninfected. I could see a little way over to his side, but he lived there. Not only did I feel helpless, I was afraid to tell him so, to give him the burden of my anxiety in addition in his own. Then it occurred to me—he had wanted me to see him doing this.

“Is everything all right, Josh?” I asked, propping myself against the counter.

He put on his bathrobe. It was made of cotton, striped gray and white, and made him look like an Old Testament angel. “The doctor wants to start me on some new treatment, pentamidine. It’s supposed to help prevent PCP.”

I nodded. Repeated bouts of Pneumocystis had killed my friend Larry Ross, and many others with AIDS. “When?”

“As soon as possible.” He came up and put his arms around me, laying his head on my chest. “No biggie, right?”

I held him and said nothing. My memory, a trash heap of lines from poems I’d loved as an undergrad, produced this one: “… in a country as far away as health.”

We ate breakfast, discussed the limited possibilities for tourism that Los Robles offered and went back to bed, shooing the maid away when she banged at the door an hour later. We both needed the break, I from the case and Josh from a frantic school-and-job schedule that had me worried about his health. Around noon, though, we both got restless.

“There must be something to see around here,” Josh insisted, idly flicking through TV channels with the remote control.

“Cut that out, it gives me a headache.”

“Look, Henry, it’s Tom Zane,” he said, pointing the remote at the screen.

I watched the late Tom Zane in a rerun of the cop show in which he’d starred. “Turn the channel,” I commanded.

But Josh was mesmerized by the sight of the man who had held him at gunpoint and whom he had ended up killing. I took the remote away and switched channels to an aerobics program.

“I still think about him sometimes,” Josh said.

“So do I,” I replied.

He scooted toward me. “That was the last case of yours I helped you with.”

“Thank God for that.” I put my arm around his shoulders and we watched a spandexed starlet with big hair dance frantically across the screen. His mention of cases had got me thinking about Paul and what I still needed to do. “There’s someone I need to talk to today. A possible witness.”

“You’re not going to leave me here,” he complained.

I considered whether there would be any risks to him if I took him along while I talked to Ruth Soto. “Why don’t you come with me? I’ll show you the neighborhood where I grew up.”

“And show me the manger where you were born?”

There was a Southern Pacific railroad line across the top of one side of the levee that ran along Paradise Slough, a tributary of the Los Robles river. A wooden bridge forded the slough and led into the neighborhood which had been given its name. We came over the bridge slowly and I glanced out the window to the water, almost hidden by the thick underbrush and tall oaks and cottonwoods at its banks. Spores of cottonwood drifted across the windshield. We came down the other side of the bridge on Los Indios Way, the main road through Paradise Slough. Having just come out of River Park, the change in the character of the neighborhood was immediate and dramatic.

“This is where you grew up?” Josh asked, disbelievingly.

I looked at the houses along the road, some little more than wooden shacks with corrugated metal roofs. There were no sidewalks, and the front yards were littered with hulks of cars, stoves, busted-out TVs and doorless refrigerators. Chickens wandered through the yards with stilted dignity.

“This is one of the worst streets,” I replied. “And it’s not really as bad as it looks.”

He turned to me. “It isn’t?”

“Look at the gardens.”

Almost every house had its little garden and in them were not only beautiful flowers but also vegetables and herbs. These, and the flocks of chickens, provided many families with some of their food. When I was growing up, people had even kept cows and goats. These seemed to be gone now, victims of zoning ordinances, I imagined.

“I was joking about the manger,” Josh said. “It’s hard to believe people live this way.”

“Have you been to Watts lately? Believe me, there are worse ways.”

He glanced at me. “Sorry, Henry, I didn’t mean….”

I squeezed his hand. “That’s okay. It’s a reflex, from growing up around here and having people give me that look that poor people get when I said I was from Paradise Slough.”

“What look?” he asked.

“The look that says, if you’re poor, there must be something wrong with you.” An old dog decided to lope its way across the road and I came to a skidding stop. “Sometimes I think what people really want is to criminalize poverty. Not that the law doesn’t already do that, in a way.”

I let up on the brake and drove on. We turned off Los Indios to La Avia and, as I’d told Josh, the houses here were more durable. Paradise Slough, like everywhere else on earth had its better addresses. These interior streets were not as bad as the streets around the fringe of the community, which got the heaviest traffic, and were, for that reason, undesirable and transient. Here, the yards were better maintained, the houses not so much in need of repairs and there were fences, the universal symbol of affluence. In fact, some of these houses were scrupulously maintained, as if each mowed blade of grass was a hedge against the encroachment of poverty.

Like the house we were coming up to, visible behind a chain-link fence to which the owner had somehow attached a border of barbed wire across the top. The house was L-shaped, on a large lot that was part orchard. An almond orchard. Painted white with green trim and with striped awnings above the windows, the place was as much a monument to bourgeois aspiration as it was a residence. The shade that the awnings cast over the windows gave them a defiant opacity. It was a very private place.

“That’s where I grew up,” I told Josh as we drove past the place.

“Wait! Stop!”

“Why? None of my family lives there anymore.”

He craned his head around looking as the house flickered in the side mirror and was gone. “It looked nice, Henry.”

“The walls are paneled with slats of oak inside,” I said, “and there’s a chandelier in the dining room. My father built that house, almost by himself, room by room. He was prouder of it than anything else.”

“He must have been proud of you,” Josh ventured.