His face shut down. “You’re gay,” he said.
“That’s right.”
“Gay lawyer,” he said, mockingly. “Do you wear a dress to court?”
The taunt was so crude that at first I thought I’d misheard him. It was something that a six-year-old might say.
“I don’t give a damn whether you think you’re gay or not, Jim. That’s the least of your worries.”
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “You made me mad,” he added. “I didn’t kill Brian.”
“Then who did?” I demanded.
His shoulders stiffened. “Someone else.”
“Someone else is not going to be on trial. You are. And you are also the only witness to what happened in the cellar. So unless you cooperate with me, I’d say your chances of getting out of here are pretty damn slim.”
“I don’t remember,” he whined.
“Then you might as well fire me and plead guilty,” I replied.
His face began to disintegrate into a series of jerks and twitches. At that moment, his father’s theory of demonic possession seemed almost plausible.
“My head hurts,” he whimpered. “I want to go back to my cell.”
“All right. We’re not getting off to a very good start but I’ll be back tomorrow. I’ll be back every day until you remember what happened that night.”
“I’ll try,” he said.
I sat in my car in the parking lot beneath the jail surprised at the violence of my dislike of Jim Pears. I didn’t usually speak to a client the way I had spoken to Jim. Part of my anger was a response to his childish insult which would have been comical except for what it revealed about the state of his self-awareness. He told me he wasn’t gay with the desperation of someone who could not allow himself to believe anything else. His panic had calcified and become brittle. He was on the verge of shattering. But instead of sympathy for him I felt impatience. With his life at stake there was no time to waste while he sorted himself out.
Then I thought of how he had been unable to even look at me, and my impatience thawed a little. He had been alone in the dark for a long time and now, abruptly, he’d been yanked into the light. All he wanted was to cover his face as if he could make the harsh world disappear simply by closing his eyes to it. Perhaps he could be reached by a simplicity equal to his own. But simplicity was not among my bag of tricks.
Larry’s Jaguar was already in the garage when I pulled in. I found him in the kitchen watching a portable tv as he chopped boiled potatoes into cubes.
“You’re a star,” he said.
I watched myself on the tv. A reporter explained that Jim’s trial had been continued because he changed lawyers. Larry washed lettuce in the sink, drowning out the set. I turned it up.
“… accused of the brutal slaying of Brian Fox. Today, prosecutors moved to seek the death penalty.’’
Larry shut off the water. “The death penalty?”
“Wait. I want to hear this.”
“The D.A. also questioned the motives behind the change of attorneys. Pears’s new lawyer is Henry Rios, a prominent Bay Area attorney who is also openly gay. The D.A. suggested that pressure from the gay community to have a gay lawyer try the case led to today’s hearing.’’
“Asshole,” Larry said.
“Meanwhile,” the reporter continued, “there was a dramatic confrontation outside the courtroom between Rios and the victim’s mother, Lillian Fox.”
We watched Mrs. Fox spit at me. I shut the television off.
“You’ve had quite a day,” Larry said, arranging lettuce leaves in a big wooden bowl.
“I’m thinking that it was a mistake for me to have taken the case,” I said.
He opened a can of tuna fish, drained and chopped it and added it to the salad. “Because the D.A. called you a carpetbagger?”
“No,” I said. “It’s the client. I talked to him this afternoon.”
“And?” He quartered tomatoes, sliced green beans.
“He says he’s not gay.”
Larry looked over at me. “The kid killed someone rather than come out of the closet. What did you expect him to say?’’
“He also says he didn’t do it. That’s why the P.D. got out of the case. He won’t plead to anything.”
Larry added the finishing touches to the salad and put a couple of rolls into the microwave.
“You of all people should know that there are ways of bringing clients around,” Larry said.
“I don’t like him.”
“Oh.” He wiped his hands on a towel and poured himself a glass of water. “Why?”
“He makes me feel like a faggot,” I replied.
“Well,” Larry smiled. “Aren’t you?”
“Come on, Larry. You know what I mean. His self-loathing is catching.”
“Let’s eat,” Larry said. “Then we’ll talk.”
After dinner we sat on the patio. The wind moved through the branches of the eucalyptus trees that lined the lake. A yellow moon rose in the sky. A string of Japanese lanterns cast their light from behind us. Larry lit a cigarette.
“Those can’t be good for you, now,” I said.
“They never were,” he replied. “Did I tell you about the cocktail party tomorrow?”
“If you did I don’t remember.”
“It’s a fundraiser for Jim’s defense.”
“I suppose I have to go,” I said, unhappily.
“I’m afraid so,” he replied. He shrugged. “These people want to help Jim.”
“He’s not much interested in helping himself.”
“What’s bothering you about this case?”
“I told you.”
“You don’t have to like him.”
“He tells me he didn’t do it,” I said. “Which means he’s either not guilty or he can’t bring himself to admit his guilt. The first possibility is remote.”
“Maybe he thinks he was justified,” Larry offered.
I shook my head. “No, I believe he thinks he didn’t do it. This amnesia-”
“That’s deliberate?”
“It certainly allows him to deny knowledge of the only evidence that could resolve this case one way or the other.”
The smoke from Larry’s cigarette climbed into the air. A faint wind carried the scent of eucalyptus to us from the lake.
“What bothers me,” I said, “is that he insists he’s innocent when he so clearly isn’t.”
“It must be a pretty horrible thing to admit you killed someone,” Larry said quietly.
“Not someone like Fox,” I said, “who made Jim suffer and who he must hate.”
“Then maybe it was death,” Larry said. “Being in that room with a man he had killed. Once you’ve seen death unleashed, it pursues you.” He sat forward, his face a mask m the flickering light of the lanterns. “Maybe that’s what he’s running from, Henry.”
The next morning I went to see Freeman Vidor, who had been investigating Jim’s case for the Public Defender. His office was in an old brownstone on Grand Avenue which, amid L.A.’s construction frenzy, seemed like a survivor from antiquity. The foyer had a marble floor and the elevator was run by a uniformed operator who might have been a bit player when Valentino was making movies.
Freeman Vidor was a thin black man. He sat at a big, shabby desk strewn with papers and styrofoam hamburger boxes. A couple of framed certificates on the walls attested to the legitimacy of his operation. I also noticed a framed photograph
— the only one on the wall — that showed a younger Vidor with two other men, all wearing the uniforms of the L.A.P.D. He now wore a wrinkled gold suit and a heavy Rolex. He had very short, gray hair. His face was unlined, though youth was the last thing it conveyed. Rather, it was the face of a man for whom there were no surprises left. I doubted, in fact, whether Freeman Vidor had ever been young.
We got past introductions. He lifted the Times at the edge of his desk and said, “I see you made the front page of the Metro section.”
“I haven’t read the article,” I replied arid glanced at it. There was my picture beneath a headline that read: “S.F. Lawyer to Defend Accused Teen Killer.”
“Teen killer,” I read aloud.
“Sort of jumps out on you, doesn’t it?” he replied. “Listen, you want some coffee? I got a thermos here.”