Howtown (7 page)

“Isn’t it obvious? Someone kills a dealer in kiddie porn and the cops ‘round up the usual suspects.’ ”

“You were there the night he was killed,” I pointed out.

“That’s not a crime,” he said flatly.

“Therein lies our defense,” I replied.

“The real crime is that I have to defend myself at all.”

I said, “The police think you had a motive to murder John McKay. Blackmail.”

He grinned. “ ‘Police think’ is an oxymoron. They don’t think any more than sides of beef think.”

“Nonetheless you were carrying quite a bit of money with you.”

A little irritably, he said, “I thought Sara explained all that to you.”

“She told me what you told her,” I replied. “That you’d gone to see McKay to purchase a child.”

He laughed. “Does that sound like something I’d make up?”

“I don’t know you well enough to answer that, Paul.”

He got serious. “The only thing I’m guilty of is being different.”

For now, I wanted to skirt that issue so I said, “Were you serious about buying this child, Paul?”

“Why do we have to go into that?”

“It could come out in trial.”

“Only if I testify. Surely, you’re not going to put me on the witness stand,” he said caustically.

“It’s a little early to decide that,” I replied. “After the prelim we’ll have a better idea of the strength of the prosecution’s case.”

He wasn’t listening. “You just don’t want to talk about it, do you?” he sputtered.

“About what, Paul?”

“You’re talking as if there’s some truth to what they’re saying. I’ve been set up for one reason and one reason alone, because of what I am.” He glared at me. “This is bullshit.”

I let a moment pass before I answered so it wouldn’t appear that I was arguing with him.

“Maybe you’re right, Paul, I don’t know. It wouldn’t be the first time the cops have taken the easy way out on a difficult case. But here you are and, like it or not, there’s only one way to get you out that I know of. We go into court, we listen to their evidence, we show that it’s insufficient to prove the charge.” I allowed myself a faint, disparaging shrug. “It’s tedious. You won’t feel vindicated. But you will be free.”

In a calm, bitter voice, he replied, “Do you give that speech to all your clients?”

“In one form or another. To orient them.”

Rubbing his eyes, he said, “This is different.”

“How so?”

“You’re assuming I’ll be treated fairly here. I won’t. Mark will see to that.”

For all his apparent intelligence and self-possession, it occurred to me that maybe Paul really was paranoid. That would certainly complicate his defense.

“Paul, it’s asking too much of me to believe that Mark arranged this murder to set you up.”

He shook his head derisively. “That’s not what I said. I didn’t say he had McKay killed. He read about the murder and made some calls. Maybe money changed hands—it wouldn’t be the first time he bribed a bureaucrat—and I’m arrested.”

“No one fabricated your fingerprints in McKay’s room,” I pointed out.

“I’m not denying I was there,” he said angrily. “That’s what gave Mark the idea. But I didn’t kill McKay.”

“Someone did.”

He turned his face away in contempt.

“I want you to tell me about McKay,” I said. “How you came to know him, what happened that night. Everything.”

Tight-lipped, he stared at me for a moment, then began. “I didn’t actually know McKay, not the way you think. I mean, we never discussed
Lolita
over drinks, or anything like that. I talked to him over a computer bulletin board used by people who have my particular interests. He was a dealer in certain materials that appealed to me, and I bought things from him occasionally.”

“Pornography?”

“If you like.” He paused, eyes roaming the room for a moment before they rested on my face. “You of all people, Henry, should understand that sexuality is more than a matter of wiring.”

“You might as well know now that I have the same biases as most people when it comes to pedophilia.”

He smiled, fleetingly. “Maybe I can change your mind.”

“I doubt it.”

“I want you to understand anyway,” he said. “Society tells a lot of lies about children, but the biggest one is that they’re not sexual. They are, and it’s the purest kind of sexuality because they haven’t learned it’s dirty.” He pointed a finger, lecturing me. “When one is with a child sexually, one becomes a child, too. Everything’s immediate, every sensation is the first sensation. I can’t begin to describe how it feels.” His face was utterly naked. “They taste different, they smell different….”

“Stop it,” I said, surprising myself with my vehemence.

Startled, he gaped at me, then said, reproachfully, “You disappoint me, Henry.”

“That’s to my credit, I think.”

“Henry, Henry,” he said, shaking his head sadly. “Are you going to tell me that a child can’t consent to sex? Don’t you think they have sexual fantasies?”

“A thirteen-year-old’s sexual fantasy is different than a thirty-year-old’s,” I said. “A child can’t fantasize adult sexual activity. You can’t talk about consent in that situation.”

“Someday you’re going to meet a very pretty boy, Henry, who will change your ideas radically.”

“We were talking about McKay.”

“You’re anxious to change the subject,” he said. “Maybe I’ve said something that strikes home.”

“Maybe you’re full of shit, Paul.”

He shrugged. “McKay was not a nice man. He lacked my refinement and his own tastes ran to boys.” He made a face. “He was always going on about his latest twelve-year-old conquest. It’s not that I begrudged him his boys but,” he smiled again, “I’m straight. Anyway, we talked from time to time, and then, a couple of months ago, he told me about a girl. It seems that she’d been sold by her father when she was nine but she was too old for the man who’d bought her.”

“How old was she?”

“Thirteen,” he said. “A delicious age in a girl.”

“This isn’t a circle jerk. Let’s confine ourselves to McKay. So he offered to what? Be the middleman?”

“Yes, exactly. It was all arranged. She would be delivered to him and he would bring her to me. He was asking twenty thousand dollars. That was reasonable, I thought. So I went to the motel. No girl. Just a seedy man in a seedy room. He said there’d been a problem with delivery but he expected her in a day or two. Meanwhile, he wanted half the money, to show my good faith.” He laughed at the recollection.

“Evidently, you didn’t believe him.”

“You only had to look at the man to see he was lying. He was a tub of lard with all his brains in his balls.”

“What happened then?”

“I left,” he said.

“What time?”

“I got home at around one, so I must’ve left there no later than midnight.”

“The police estimate the time of death between midnight and three.”

“He was alive when I left him,” Paul said. “Maybe he went out and picked someone up. That’s another disadvantage of being attracted to boys. Sometimes they put up a fight.”

“The coroner says McKay’s head was bashed in. And his testicles had been crushed, probably while he was still alive. Someone was very disappointed with him. How disappointed were you not to find the girl there?”

That wiped the smile off his face. “You can’t believe that I killed him.”

“If I disliked you enough I could,” I said. “If I was a juror with a child, a daughter, I might convince myself no matter how weak the evidence is.”

“You’re like everyone else,” he said bitterly.

“Right now we’re not talking about me. We’re talking about the judge who’ll try this case and the jurors who’ll decide it. They’re not going to regard pedophilia as normal, much less something to be proud of, and they’ll be fighting against their sense of decency to put you back on the streets. So let’s not make it any harder than it is.”

“What kind of a faggot are you?” he shot back.

I smiled. “One with no illusions, Paul. I tell my gay clients the same thing I’ve just told you, and my black and Latino clients, too, for that matter. You don’t need to invent a conspiracy against you by Mark. Society is a conspiracy and everyone who’s different is its target.”

“So you admit that you and I are the same,” he said.

“I only admit that people in the mainstream don’t cut very fine distinctions about those of us who aren’t. I do.”

“In order to feel superior to me?” he asked, smugly.

With some asperity, I said, “No. I acquired my values through trial and error. There isn’t much margin for feeling superior when you do it that way. Now, let’s get back to work.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to keep your mouth shut about little girls and the joys of pedophilia.”

His face flared red, but he nodded.

“Now, the preliminary hearing’s in two weeks. I’m flying back to Los Angeles tonight to settle some business and free myself up. Do you have questions?”

He shook his head, sullenly.

“All right. By the way, when was the last time you saw Ruth Soto?”

He stared in surprise. “What?”

“Sara seems to think Ruth’s brother may be mixed up in all this.”

“I haven’t seen her since that day in court when she wouldn’t testify.”

He was lying. “You’re sure.”

“I just said it, didn’t I?”

I got up to leave. “Well, if you change your mind, let me know. Good-bye, Paul.”

My thoughts were jumbled as I left the jail. The long summer day seemed to be going on and on. I made my way across the street to a Winchell’s, ordered a cup of tea and wedged myself into an uncomfortable, sticky booth. The tabletop was littered with bits of sugared glaze and bright-colored sprinkles, like confetti. At another table sat the inevitable cops, a tall fair one and a bulky dark one. They glanced at me and then went back to their crullers and coffee.

I thought about Paul Windsor. The intelligence and charm he’d shown at the beginning of our interview were clearly in the service of something darker. Evidently, he belonged to a breed of pedophiles who not only defended their proclivity but proselytized on its behalf. Could this aggressive obsession have led him to murder McKay in a rage of disappointed lust? Or was I just reflecting my biases?

A woman I’d once worked for—an excellent lawyer—used to say that the best lawyers were guided by ethics, not morality. What she meant is that since moral judgments are by nature absolute, once you’ve made one, you’re stuck with it and that doesn’t leave you much room to do your job. Ethics, on the other hand, are boundaries, not judgments; they allow you to be impersonal without becoming inhuman.

Sipping tepid, bitter tea, I thought about boundaries and sex. I heard Paul saying, “They taste different, they smell different….” And then another fragment of conversation drifted through my mind, the first man I’d ever had sex with telling me, “It takes a man to know what a man likes.” Both statements of sexual chauvinism, but were they really comparable? I found myself staring at the dark cop. For all his bodybuilder’s bulk, he had a child’s round, large-eyed, pretty face. I looked away, quickly. “They taste different, they smell different….” What I’d meant when I told Paul my values were acquired through trial and error was that they were learned, not given, and came out of my own experience. I was not a pedophile, nor had I ever consciously entertained those fantasies, but I was a sexual being and for a moment in the jail I’d felt Paul’s excitement and it terrified me.

M
Y DAY WASN’T OVER YET
. I still had to pay a call at the district attorney’s office. I walked over to the county building and was directed by a janitor to the third floor. There, I told the girl at the counter that I wanted to talk to the DA assigned to the Windsor case. She disappeared for a moment and then told me to go back to Mr. Rossi’s office.

Dominic Rossi was one of the two names painted on the frosted glass of a door halfway down the corridor. I knocked.

“Come in.”

I opened the door and looked in. The office was standard government issue, square, windowless, walls painted an indeterminate pale color; two fake wooden desks, rotary phones, a girlie calendar on one wall and an autopsy picture on the other; bright lights overhead and a scuffed linoleum floor at my feet. The sole occupant of the room was a portly man in a rumpled blue shirt, skinny tie at half-mast. A big styrofoam cup of coffee sat on the desk in front of him with wadded-up pink Sweet ’N Low packets surrounding it.

“Mr. Rossi?”

“Dom,” he said, taking the card I extended across the desk. His round, pale face was distinguished by a thick mustache and heavy glasses. His thin hair gleamed with sweat. “Henry Rios,” he said, “I’ve heard of you.”

“I’m substituting in on the Windsor case,” I said, lowering myself into a naugahyde chair.

“I bet Bob Clayton’s glad to be rid of that sucker,” he said, tossing my card onto a stack of papers. “So what can I do you for?”

“I wanted to talk to you about discovery.”

He blinked. “Discovery?”

“Am I going to have to file a motion or can we handle it informally?”

He half-smirked. “Do I look like the U.S. attorney?” he asked, grabbing a legal pad. “You tell me what you want and I’ll get it to you.”

“I have the complaint, the police report, the search warrant and affidavit,” I replied. “I don’t have the complete coroner’s report …”

“Okay,” he said, jotting a note.

“I’d also like a list of your witnesses, the investigating officer’s notes, any other reports prepared in the case, the …”

“Wait a sec.” He scribbled madly.

“Any forensic or toxicological reports,” I continued, “any and all written statements by any witnesses, a list of all property seized during the search, are you getting this?”

“Mmm,” he replied, still writing.

“A list of any other evidence and the file on Windsor’s previous arrest.”

He looked up, stopped writing. “That’s not really kosher, Mr. Rios.”

“Henry,” I replied. “It could be relevant.”

“How’s that?”

“I won’t know until I see it.”

I could tell by his expression he wanted to give me an argument, but then he smiled and said, “Sure, why not.” He made a final note. “I’ll have the IO put together a packet.”