“There’s no mystery about that.”
“Then you will agree that the authorities at the jail failed to monitor whether James was, in fact, taking that medication when it was given to him?”
“I wasn’t there,” I said. “The fact is that he managed to stockpile it. You can draw an inference of negligence by the jailers if you want.”
“I do,” he said. “Indeed, I do, Mr. Rios. Not merely negligence, but gross negligence.” He pushed his glasses back against his face from where they had slipped forward on his nose. Only his eyes reminded me of Jim. “As a proximate result of that gross negligence, I have been injured.”
“You?” I asked.
He corrected himself. “My son has been directly injured,” he said, “but certain interests of mine are also implicated.”
Leaning forward, I said, “Mr. Pears, will you stop talking like a Supreme Court opinion and tell me what the hell it is you want from me?”
“I told you,” he said, stiffening. “I intend to sue the county.
I want you to represent me or, rather, to represent Jim since the suit would be brought on his behalf.”
I stared at him. “You son-of-a-bitch.”
“Don’t you dare address me in that manner.”
“The night your son tried to kill himself you didn’t even have the decency to show up at the hospital. I know that because I was there. And now you think I’m going to help you pick his bones?” I had leaned further across the table until I was within spitting distance of Pears. His face was aflame.
“We’re not rich people,” a tiny voice ventured from a comer of the room. I looked at Mrs. Pears. “Hospital care for Jim will be so expensive.”
“Don’t tell me you don’t have medical insurance,” I snapped. “Besides, if you had any respect for Jim you’d pull the plug and let him die.”
“We’re Catholics,” she peeped.
“I was raised Catholic, Mrs. Pears,” I said, “so I know all about Catholics like you who can’t take a shit without consulting a priest.”
Suddenly, Walter Pears jumped up, sending his chair skidding across the floor with a metallic shriek. I got up slowly until we faced each other.
Pears said, “If you were a man I’d kill you.”
“If you were a man,” I replied, “your son wouldn’t be a goddamn vegetable in the jail ward of a charity hospital.”
The door opened behind me. Judge Ryan’s bailiff stuck his head into the room. “Everything okay here, folks?”
Mrs. Pears got to her feet. “Yes, officer. We were just leaving. Let’s go, Walter.” She tugged at his sleeve.
Pears seethed and stalked out of the room ahead of his wife. She stopped at the door and said to me, “There’s a special place in hell for people like you.”
After she left, the bailiff looked at me. “What was that all about?”
“Theology,” I replied.
13
As I approached the door to Larry’s house I heard the unmistakable noise of gunfire. I let myself in and called his name.
“In here,” he shouted back.
I followed his voice to the study where I found him in his bathrobe, sitting on the sofa, watching a cassette on the tv. The cassette was frozen on the image of a man in a cop’s uniform holding a gun.
“That sounded like the real thing.”
“Stereo,” Larry replied. He reached for a glass containing about a half-inch of brown fluid. Brandy. It disturbed me that he had taken up drinking again. He looked much the same as he had in October and insisted that his disease was still in remission. But he went into his office less and less often. My impression was that he now seldom left his house. It was even more difficult to talk to him about being sick, because he seemed to have reached a stage more of indifference than denial.
He had asked me to spend a few days with him. Since we were entering the holiday season and prosecutors were unwilling to face Christmas juries, it was a good time for me to get away.
“How did it go in court?” he asked.
I sat down beside him. “The charges were dismissed.”
“Free at last,” he muttered bitterly.
“When are you going to forgive Jim, Larry?”
He lifted his bony shoulders, dropped them and stared blankly at the frozen action on the screen.
“His parents asked me to sue the county,” I said.
Larry made a disgusted noise. “Why?”
“For not preventing their little boy from trying to kill himself.”
“Vultures,” he said without heat.
“I thought so, too. Jim’s dad and I got into a little scuffle.”
“You draw blood?”
I shook my head.
“Too bad.” He pushed a button on the remote control and the action on the screen began again.
“What are you watching?”
“Do you remember Sandy Blenheim?”
I nodded. “The agent.”
“There’s an actor he wants me to represent. Tom Zane. He’s one of the stars of this show.”
The cop on the screen raced down a dark alley in pursuit of a shadowy figure ahead of him. He commanded the figure to stop, then fired his gun. He came to the prone body, knelt and flipped it over. He saw the face of a boy and said, “Oh my God, Jerry.” “Who’s the corpse?” I asked.
“The cop’s son,” Larry replied. “I’ve seen this one before.”
On the screen the cop was sobbing. Then there was an aerial view of Los Angeles and the words “Smith amp; Wesson” appeared as music began playing. The screen split and displayed the faces of two men, one on each side. The man on the left was a white- haired, elegantly wrinkled old party who smiled benignly into the camera. On the right was one of the handsomest men I had ever seen. At first it was like looking at two different men. His slightly battered nose — it looked like it had been broken, then inexpertly set — and firmly molded jaw gave his face a toughness that kept him from being a pretty boy. But there was prettiness, too, in the shape of his mouth, the long-lashed eyes. At second glance, though, the parts fit together with a kind of masculine elegance that reminded me of dim images from my childhood of an earlier period of male stars, Tyrone Power or John Garfield. Only his dark hair seemed wrong, somehow.
Larry stopped the picture. “The fellow on the right is Zane.”
“Who’s the other?”
“Paul Houston. He’s been on the tube for twenty years in one series after another. This was supposed to be his show but Tom Zane’s edged him out.”
“Why? His looks?”
Larry sipped his brandy. “Watch.”
He fast-forwarded the tape until he reached a scene in which Tom Zane was standing in the doorway of Paul Houston’s office. Larry turned off the sound. Even with the sound off, Paul Houston was clearly an actor at work. His face was full of tics and pauses meant to convey, by turn, cranky good humor, concern, exasperation, and wisdom. It wasn’t that his acting was obvious but merely that it was unmistakable. He was trying to reach the audience beyond the camera.
Tom Zane, on the other hand, hadn’t the slightest interest in anything but the camera. He opened his face to it and the camera did all the work. It amounted to photography, not acting, and yet the effect was to intimate that, next to Tom Zane, Paul Houston looked like a wind-up toy. Larry shut off the tape and turned to me.
“See?” he said.
“He has a lot of charisma,” I observed. “But can he act?”
Larry said, “He couldn’t act his way out of the proverbial paper sack, but the camera loves his face.”
“Well, it’s some face. I’ve never heard of Tom Zane before.”
“He came out of nowhere about a year ago and got a bit part in the pilot of this show. The response to him was so overwhelming that they killed off the actor who was originally supposed to play Houston’s partner and replaced him with Zane.”
“What’s he want with you?”
“He’s putting together a production company.”
“I thought you weren’t taking new business.”
“Sandy’s persistent,” Larry said. “In fact, he was just here a while ago to drop off the cassette and,” he picked up a paperback, “this.”