Howtown (9 page)

“What does he feel for the kid he molests?”

“If you ask him, he’d probably tell you affection, and that may be true to some extent, but, basically, he’s a narcissist, so intent on getting what he wants that he is incapable of empathy with his victim, or with anyone, for that matter.”

I stopped writing and digested what Nick had told me. Soft rock drifted in from the radio on Emma’s desk, the Eagles singing about “Hotel California.”

“A sociopath,” I said.

Nick chided me. “Let’s not get sloppy with our labels. Compulsive behavior isn’t the same thing as an inability to distinguish right from wrong.”

“Would he kill?”

“Well,” Nick said, “if there’s no history of violence I don’t think the fact he’s a pedophile is any indicator that he’d be more likely to kill than anyone else. And I don’t really see much provocation in what you’ve told me about the circumstances of the murder.”

“Disappointment at not getting the girl?”

“Pedophiles don’t have a lot of trouble finding kids. Well, that’s’ your quarter’s worth from me, Henry. An equivocal ‘I don’t think so.’ ”

“You guys are worse than lawyers.”

“You flatter yourself,” he replied. “You know,” he added, “there is one thing that’s kind of interesting.”

“What’s that?”

“You said you were friends with Paul’s brother. A close friend?”

“I guess we were best friends. I had a crush on him.”

“And Paul hates his brother, you said.”

Uncomfortably, I asked. “What are you getting at?”

“Paul must enjoy having his brother’s best friend defending him in a kind of case that’s bound to be a real embarrassment to the family. You think?”

“Never talk to a therapist. They always end up by turning on you.”

“You owe me lunch, counsel. I’ll call to collect.”

I put down the phone full of sour admiration for Paul Windsor.

W
HEN I CAME HOME
that night, Josh was in the kitchen, standing at the sink, looking out the window.

“Josh?”

“Shh,” he whispered. “Come here, Henry. Look.”

I came up behind him and looked. Not more than twenty feet from us in the wooded slope of the hill that descended down to a ravine at the end of our property two deer grazed in the underbrush. One of them lifted its head and seemed to look back at us. It nudged its partner, who also looked, and then they moved off into the dusk like figures from a dream.

“How long have you been watching them?” I asked.

“Five, ten minutes,” he said, turning to me.

“Where do they come from, I wonder?”

He put his arms around my waist. “You look tired.”

“There was lots to catch up on. Do you want to do something tonight? Dinner? A movie?”

He kissed me. “No,” he said. “I’ll make us dinner—later. Unless you’re hungry now.”

I shook my head, and put my arms around him. “Have you ever thought about sexual attraction, Josh?”

“I’m thinking about it now,” he said, nuzzling me, his beard brisk on my neck.

“I’m serious.”

“Me, too.” He let go of me and smiled, wearily. “Okay, tell me about sexual attraction.”

“Do you think part of it is that we’re trying to recapture something?”

“Is this your idea of foreplay?”

“I was wondering why an adult would want to have sex with a child.”

His smile faded. “That’s rape, not sex.”

“Sex is part of it.”

He shook his head vigorously. “It’s just plain violence, Henry, with a dick instead of a gun.”

I thought about this. “If that’s right, then maybe a pedophile would be more inclined to violence than the average person. On the other hand, if I’m right, and sexual attraction is partly nostalgia, then maybe not.”

Josh hoisted himself onto the kitchen counter. “What are you nostalgic for, with me?”

I looked at him. “I didn’t mean it personally.”

“But as long as you brought it up.”

I laid my hand on his thigh, touching taut muscle beneath the fabric of his jeans. “I was almost nineteen when I had my first sexual experience.”

He laid his hand over mine. “So?”

“But I’d been in love for years before that, with my best friend. Was it like that for you?”

He cracked a smile. “I chose my friends better than you did, Henry. I had sex with my best friend when we were ten.”

“Slut.”

“You knew I had a past when you married me. So are you saying that I remind you of your best friend? Little Tom, Dick or Harry?”

“His name was Mark,” I said, thumping his leg. “And no, you’ve never consciously reminded me of him, but you are a lot younger than I am.” I looked up at him, feeling vaguely ashamed. “That was part of the excitement for me.”

“I should be taping this.”

“Does that mean I have pedophile tendencies?” I asked, joking at my discomfort.

“Henry, I was twenty-two when I met you.”

“I don’t think I want to talk about this anymore.”

He hopped off the counter. “Good. Let’s go upstairs.”

“Sex maniac.”

He grabbed my hand. “Given half the chance.”

We had a peaceful week until Sunday, the day I was to fly back to Los Robles. I was edgy about leaving Josh alone for a couple of weeks, and prodded him to call his parents, and me, and take his medicines, until he just exploded. Self-righteously, I blasted back. The drive to the airport was chilly and silent. Getting out of the car, I said, “Look, I’m sorry if I provoked you this morning. I just—”

He glared. “Stop it, okay? Your way of saying I’m sorry always ends up making it sound like it was my fault.”

“Suit yourself.” I closed the door a little more forcefully than suggested in the owner’s manual. He opened the trunk from the inside and I got my bags. As soon as I closed the trunk, he drove away.

“Well, fuck you, too,” I muttered, startling the skycap who’d come up to give me a hand. I brushed him away and went into the airport, only to discover that the plane was delayed. I checked in and roamed the corridors. I paused in front of a cocktail lounge. The TV was showing an old movie, and I thought maybe I could kill some time that way. I was over the threshold when I stopped myself. Who was I trying to fool? Instead, I found a phone and made a call to a friend in AA. Talking to him helped, but I was still in a foul mood when I checked into the Los Robles Hyatt a few hours later. I called Sara Windsor to let her know I was back in town.

“Henry,” she slurred, adding something which it took me a moment to decipher as, “Mark’s been trying to reach you.”

“What’s his number?” I asked, irritably.

She had to repeat it twice.

“Sara,” I said, “there’s a chance you may have to testify at Paul’s trial. Do you think you could do it sober?”

There was a pause, and then the dial tone.

“Nice work,” I told myself. I looked at the paper with Mark Windsor’s phone number on it. My first impulse was to call immediately, but in my present frame of mind I wasn’t capable of carrying on a rational conversation. Instead, I unpacked, took a shower, and gazed out my eighth-floor window.

In the late summer dusk, the sky was an enormous rose, unfolding slow, pink petals. I thought of Paul’s garden and of Sara drinking her way through another night. I knew all about nights like that. I put the image aside and continued looking. From where I stood I could see the river, silver in the coming dark, seemingly motionless between densely wooded banks. I found myself wishing that Josh were here to show this to. It never ceased to amaze me how easily anger could alternate with tenderness in our dealings with each other.

The phone rang. I picked it up hopefully. “Josh?”

“Uh, Henry Rios?” The voice was vaguely familiar.

“Yes.”

“This is Mark. Mark Windsor.”

I sat down on the edge of the bed. “Hello, Mark. I’m sorry I didn’t recognize your voice right away.”

“It’s a little deeper,” he said, laughing. He was right. “Sara called me and told me you were here. Can we talk?”

“Sure. Where are you?”

“Downstairs in the bar,” he replied, and I could hear barroom music in the background. “Why don’t you come down and have a drink with me?”

“Okay. I’ll be right down. Uh, you look pretty much the same?”

He laughed again. “Above the neck.”

I saw what he meant when I got down to the bar. In khakis and a red Ralph Lauren polo shirt, he no longer had the body of the fastest miler in Los Robles Valley. He was still in pretty good shape, respectably Nautilusized in the chest and arms and shoulders, though his waist had thickened and, as Josh had once said about me, grabbing my butt, his center of gravity was shifting. His face had changed least of all. Though his blond hair had darkened it was still lighter than his blunt eyebrows, a combination that immediately called attention to his eyes. They were hazel, shading to green when his mood was light, brown when it wasn’t, a barometer of his emotions. His face was fuller, once-incipient lines had deepened, skin coarsened, but he was still beautiful. Only now he seemed to know it, as he hadn’t when we were kids. He turned a perfectly shaped smile on me as I approached him at the bar.

“Hi,” I said, extending my hand.

He grabbed me in a bear hug. “God, it’s good to see you. You look great.”

Not wanting to embarrass either of us with my fledgling erection, I got away. “You, too.”

“How do you manage to keep your weight? Still running?”

I shook my head. “In LA running’s a slow form of suicide. It’s my metabolism, I guess. Luck of the draw.”

He pinched his waist. “I’m fat.”

“You look wonderful, Mark, really.” Was that a faggy thing to say? I wondered. “You work out?”

“When I can. Let’s get a booth, okay, where we can talk.”

I followed him to the back wall, away from the bright lights over the bar, to a booth illuminated by a recessed light and a candle in a green glass. The wall was papered with hunting scenes. In the distance I could make out a row of antlers. Beneath it was a glass case displaying rifles.

“What’s this place called?” I asked. “The Abattoir?”

He looked at me blankly, then followed my gaze to the rifles and the moose. “The what?”

“Slaughterhouse,” I said, self-consciously. Every time I opened my mouth, I seemed to take another notch out of my masculinity. It didn’t help when, a moment later I heard myself ordering a diet Coke to his scotch-and-soda, adding gratuitously, “I don’t drink.”

“That’s smart,” Mark replied. He dug a pack of Marlboros out of his pocket. “You smoke?”

I shook my head, barely preventing myself from apologizing. What’s going on? I wondered, as he lit up. Then it came to me: I had never told Mark I was gay, except in a letter, long ago, which he had never answered, or even acknowledged. With him, I was still pretending, still passing.

“When I came out,” I said, lightly, “I figured that was enough of a vice for one lifetime.”

Even this sounded apologetic.

“When you what?” he asked, smiling, wanting to share the joke.

“When I accepted being gay.”

“Oh,” he said, the smile went off like a light.

“I’m homosexual, Mark.”

“I know what it means, Henry,” he said, impatiently. “I don’t care,” he added without conviction.

Our drinks arrived. The waiter fussed with our cocktail napkins and I glanced up at him. The tone of his answering smile was unmistakable.

“Well, cheers,” Mark said. He tapped my glass and knocked back half his drink. He was nervous, too. “Listen, I want to thank you for taking Paul’s case.”

For a minute, I considered pressing the point of my homosexuality with him, but I was too unclear about what I wanted from him, so I dropped it, too. “It’s how I make my living.”

“He’s done stupid things all his life,” Mark continued, “but this is by far the stupidest.”

I set my glass down. “You think he killed the man?”

“Don’t you?” he replied, eyes going from green to brown.

“I don’t think the evidence is very persuasive.”

“Shit, Henry. Paul is a fucking madman. You know about the trouble he got into with that girl.” His eyes completed their transformation.

“Yes,” I said. “That doesn’t mean he’d kill someone.”

He shrugged. “You’re his lawyer. I guess you have to think that way. Now me, I know my brother. He’s crazy.”

“Actually, I don’t think one way or the other about whether he did it except as it affects the way I defend him,” I replied, “but I’m curious about why you think he’s guilty.”

Mark finished his drink and said, slowly, “He took twenty thousand dollars to pay the guy off,” he said, “and when he got there, the guy let him know it was just the first installment. So Paul went nuts and bashed him.”

“The problem with the blackmail theory,” I replied, “is that after his last arrest, everyone knew that Paul was a pedophile, so what was the point of buying the man’s silence?”

“What’s a pedophile?” he asked, signaling for another round.

“An adult who’s sexually attracted to kids. It’s no secret that that’s what Paul is.”

Mark shook his head. “It’s no secret that Paul knocked up a fifteen-year-old, but as far as anyone knew that was the only time he got into that kind of trouble. Now this guy was a whatchamacallit himself.”

He interrupted himself to accept his drink. The waiter looked at me expectantly. I shook my head.

“Pedophile,” I said.

“Yeah. And he obviously knew something about Paul that the rest of us didn’t. That’s what Paul wanted to keep a secret.”

This sounded plausible, more plausible than Paul’s story about taking the money to buy a little girl. “You’ve worked this out,” I said. “Do you have any evidence?”

He snorted derisively. “What evidence, Hank? Do you think it’s something Paul would talk to me about? He hates my guts.”

I hadn’t been called Hank in twenty years. Hearing it, I felt a surge of sentimental affection toward Mark. Paul, as he had when we were kids, receded into the distance, an unwanted nuisance.

“He mentioned that,” I said. “He thinks you robbed him when you bought out his share of your business.”

Mark leaned toward me, smiling. “He’s full of shit. He thinks I had lined up all these contracts without telling him but he doesn’t know anything about the business, Hank. Sure, I was negotiating those deals but they were like sand in my hand, you know. They could’ve fallen through this fast.” He snapped his finger. “Then you would’ve heard him whining about that. No, it’s not business. He hates me. Always has.”