day and night, writing nutty letters.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said, not without a twinge of anxiety that the allegations were true.
Gold dug into his breast pocket and withdrew a wad of rubberbanded letters. He tossed them at me. “Read them,” he commanded.
I leafed through the envelopes. They were postmarked San Francisco, addressed to Robert Paris in Portola Valley but gave no return address. It occurred to me that I did not know what Hugh’s handwriting looked like. Clinging to that thread of doubt, I dropped the letters on the table.
“Where did you get these?”
“Afraid to read them?”
“Go to hell,” I said, rising, but Gold was on his feet first.
“Fine,” he said. “You can shut me out but you have your own doubts about the guy, don’t you?” It was a fair statement but I was not inclined to concede the point. “Keep these,” he said, indicating the letters. “They make enlightening reading.” He drew himself up and walked out. I saw him pass in the window, looking straight ahead. I resisted the impulse to go after him — since I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say — and finished my drink. Then, I gathered up the letters and put them in my coat pocket as I rose to leave.
The letters were heavy in my pocket as I walked to my car. There had not been enough time to know Hugh well, particularly since I saw him through the haze of infatuation, but my mind hadn’t gone entirely out of commission. Hugh was a troubled man, troubled enough to make threats if not to carry them out. His hatred with his grandfather was fused with his sexual awakening, and his grandfather remained for him a figure who was frightening but seductive. Then, too, the years of drug addiction had taken their toll. Beneath the charm and humor, there was ruin. I saw all this and it made my feeling for him more intense and protective. The letters — and really, I had little doubt he’d written them — complicated matters. They were a sign that the sickness was deeper than I thought, but, even so, he deserved the chance to explain or deny them.
I called Hugh as soon as I got back to my apartment. The phone rang and rang; I pictured the empty room in his house, the phone wailing into the silence. The anxiety I felt in the bar was increasing by the minute and growing more diffuse; fed by emotional and physical exhaustion, it now verged on simple, unthinking panic. Throwing some clothes into a duffle bag, I hurried out to my car and headed for the city.
I was hardly aware of the other traffic on the road or the fading light of late afternoon. By the time I got to Hugh’s house it was sunset. The first thing I noticed was that the lights were out. Walking up the stairs to the porch, my hands shook. I searched the door quickly for signs of forced entry but found none. I knocked, much too loudly and for too long. There was no answer. I craned my neck around the side of the porch and looked into the front window. The living room filled with shadowy gray light and the emptiness of the place was an almost physical force. I knew no one was there.
I went back to my car and got in, telling myself he would have to come back eventually. All I had to do was wait. So I waited. The streetlights came on. A police car rolled by. I heard a dog bark. A man and a woman walked by, hand in hand, glancing into my car as they passed. I checked my watch. It was ten. The next time I checked it was nearly six in the morning and I was cramped up behind the steering wheel. My panic had dissipated but, as I looked at the house, it seemed to emanate a kind of deadness.
I went back up the stairs to the porch and knocked on the door. I waited a few minutes, watching the neighborhood awaken to another perfect end of summer day. Defeated, I turned away, went down to my car and left. The drive home seemed endless.
A tall, sandy-haired policewoman was leaning against the wall outside the door to my apartment. She asked me if I was Henry Rios, and, when I agreed that I was, she asked me to step over to her patrol car.
“What’s going on, officer?”
“A man died,” she said, simply, “and he had your business card on him.”
“Who was he?” I asked, as a chill settled along my spine. The bright morning light suddenly seemed stale and unreal.
“We don’t know,” she said, briskly. “He wasn’t carrying a wallet. We’d like you to come down to the morgue and see if you can identify the body.”
We went over to the patrol car. Her partner was standing alongside the car drumming his fingers on the roof. He opened the back door for me and I got in. They got into the front and we swept down the quiet street.
“You’re a hard man to track down,” she said. “We’ve been trying since last night.”
“I was out,” I said.
“A bachelor,” her partner said, smiling into the rearview mirror. I smiled back.
The coroner was a black man, his dark skin contrasting with his immaculate white frock. He had a round, placid face and his eyes were black and bright. It was a decent face, one that kept its secrets. He led me down a still corridor that stank of chemicals. The officers followed a few steps behind, talking softly. We came to the room and he instructed the police to wait outside. He and I went in.
“They’re like kids in here,” he said, speaking of the officers. “They get into everything.”
I merely nodded and looked around the room. One wall had several metal drawers in it. On the drawers, just below the handles, were slots into which there had been fitted squares of cardboard with names typed on them. There was a row of steel tables, set on casters, lined up against another wall. It was quite cold in the room. A white room. White lights overhead. The coroner moved around quickly and efficiently.
“When did all this happen?” I asked as he put his hand on the handle of a drawer marked John Doe.
“Estimated time of death around 10:30 last night. They found him in San Francisquito Creek just below the footbridge leading out of campus. Drowned.”
“In three feet of water?” I asked incredulously.
“We took some blood,” he explained quietly. “There was enough heroin in his system to get five junkies off.” I opened my mouth but nothing came out. “Are you ready now?”
“Yes.”
He pulled at the handle. The drawer came out slowly, exposing first the head, and then the torso, down to the sunken genitals. The coroner stopped and took a step back, as if inspecting death’s work.
The elegant body was as white as marble. I could see a dark blue vein running up the length of his arm, and a jagged red mark just beneath his armpit where the needle went in. There were bruises on his chest. His head rested on a kind of pillow. Death had robbed his face of its seductive animation but I recognized him.
“His name is Hugh Paris,” I said, and the coroner took a pencil and pad of paper from his pocket and wrote. “His grandfather’s name is Robert Paris and he lives somewhere in Portola Valley. I don’t know where.” I heard the pencil scratching but I could not take my eyes off of Hugh’s face.
“Is that it?”
“Yes, that’s all.”
“The police will want a statement.” I looked at the coroner. The dark eyes were impassive but remotely sad as he studied Hugh. “Such a young man. It’s a shame.”
I agreed that it was a shame and excused myself, hearing, as I left, the drawer slide shut. The two officers were at the far end of the corridor, smoking. They looked up when they saw me and the woman smiled. As I approached, I saw the smile leak from her face. I stopped, ran the back of my hand across my eyes and inspected it. It was wet. I hadn’t realized I was crying.
4
“The coroner says it was an accident.”
“The coroner also said he was drugged.”
“The guy was a hype. Whaddaya expect?” Torres blew a cloud of cigar smoke across the small, windowless room, then tilted back in his swivel chair revealing an enormous stomach that poured over a heavy metal belt buckle fashioned from the letters USMC. The desk between us was piled high with papers but he had cleared enough space for the plastic nameplate that identified him as Samuel Torres, Detective, Homicide.
Torres and I went back a long way. I had once dissected his testimony on cross-examination in a murder case on which he was the investigator. He was lucky the jury hadn’t hissed him when he got off the stand. Neither
