I left Josh the next morning and returned to Larry’s house. I found him sitting at his desk writing checks.
“Did you see Tony last night?” he asked in response to my greeting. In the watery morning light he looked haggard but formidably alive, not at all the cadaver I had dreamt of the night before.
“Yes,” I said, sitting down across from him. “He says Sandy Blenheim killed Brian Fox.”
“That’s unbelievable,” Larry said.
I recounted for Larry the story that Good had told me. When I finished he nodded but his face remained skeptical.
“It sounds plausible,” he said, finally.
“A plausible lie?” I asked.
He shook his head. “No, that’s not it. Tony only lies to his advantage. I can’t see how this would help him.” He looked thoughtful. “And it’s true about Sandy’s taste for young boys.”
“But you’re not convinced.”
“I still think Jim did it,” he said quietly.
I stared at him. “Didn’t you bring me down here to prove Jim’s innocence?”
He smiled wanly. “Not exactly,” he replied. “I wanted you to get him acquitted.” He picked up a crystal paperweight from his desk and ran his fingers across its surface. “Look, I know what’s bothering me about this Sandy business. It’s that everyone knows Sandy’s gay. The fact that he was caught having sex with a kid would have been embarrassing but not especially damaging.” He set the paperweight down. “Not in this town, anyway. And another thing, Henry, don’t you think the way Brian Fox was killed showed incredible rage?”
Remembering the pictures I had seen of the body, I nodded. “Would Sandy Blenheim have that much anger inside of him?” he asked.
“How well do you know him?” I countered.
Larry shrugged. “Not very,” he conceded.
“Well, someone who knows him better told me that she thinks he’s crazy.”
Larry squinted at me. “Who?”
“Irene Gentry.”
He was silent for a moment. “Maybe,” he said. “She would know, if anyone does, what he’s really like. He practically lives with Tom and her.”
“You want to believe it was Jim,” I said. “Why?”
He looked away from me and said, slowly, “Because I want to believe that he was capable of fighting back.”
“But not that way, Larry. Not by killing someone.”
“You have strictures about killing that I don’t share,” he replied.
This seemed odd coming from a dying man.
“And anyway,” he rubbed his eyes, “I loved him and you didn’t.”
“Who? Jim?”
He nodded.
“You never met him.”
“I know,” he said and looked past me to the window with its still view of the lake. “It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? A sick man’s fantasy. I dreamed of bringing him here to live with me. I thought we could heal each other. How absurd.”
“No,” I said. “It isn’t.”
As if he hadn’t heard, he said, “Does God give us life to want such things? It seems cruel.”
“To love someone?”
“To fall in love with a picture in the newspaper,” he said, “and to lie in bed at night like a schoolboy, unable to sleep because of it. To ask you to put your reputation on the line in the hope that you could work a miracle.”
“But you were right,” I said, fiercely. “Jim didn’t do it.’’
“You don’t understand, Henry,” Larry said. “I wanted him to have done it, and I wanted the world to understand why.”
“Meanwhile someone’s dead,” I answered.
“And how many of us have died at the hands of people like Brian Fox?” he demanded.
I glanced at the bills on his desk, from the newspaper, the utility companies, his gardener. Across the top of each of them he had written, “Discontinue service.” I remembered he had told me that he was willing to trade his life for Jim’s. At the time it had merely seemed like impassioned rhetoric. Now I knew he had meant it.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’d like to agree but it goes against everything inside of me.”
Larry smiled. “It’s all right,” he said. “I know you, Henry. You believe in the law the way other people believe in God. Not me. I’m dying. I only believe in balancing the accounts.”
I went into the kitchen to call Freeman Vidor. He wasn’t at his office. A moment after I hung up, the phone rang. It was Freeman.
“I’m at Tony Good’s apartment with the L.A.P.D.,” he said. “You better get over here.”
“What happened?”
“He’s been murdered,” Freeman said. “Someone took a knife and rammed it up his guts.”
“Up his-” I began to say, then I understood. “My God.”
Over Tony Good’s bed was a framed poster that showed James Dean walking down a New York street in the rain. On the bed were sky-blue sheets soaked with blood.
“He bled to death,” a small man in wire-rimmed glasses was telling me. I wasn’t sure who he was, the medical examiner maybe. There was a faint chemical smell in the air. Tony had been using poppers. My stomach heaved.
“Someone stuck him,” I said, to say something.
“A twelve-inch blade,” the little man said, “inserted into the anus.”
I turned and hurried from the room into the kitchen where
Freeman was sitting at the table with Phillip Cresly, the L.A.P.D. detective assigned to the case. Cresly glanced at me without much interest as I pulled up a chair.
“You satisfied?” Cresly asked. He was a tall man with light brown hair, eyes that had been chiseled from a glacier and a twitchy little mouth. I thought I had seen his face before and then I remembered the picture in Freeman’s office of the three young cops. A long time ago Cresly had been one of them.
“The bed was soaked with blood,” I replied. “How can you say he didn’t struggle?”
“Position of the body,” Cresly replied as if reading from a list. “Nothing disturbed in the bedroom. Neighbors didn’t hear anything.”
“You really think he took a knife up his rectum without fighting?”
The ice-cube eyes considered me. “Vidor says the guy told you he was going to meet a client after he left the bar.”
It took a moment for me to understand what he was implying. “You think that this is something gay men do?” I asked, unable to keep the astonishment out of my voice.
“I used to work vice,” he said. “I seen movies where guys took fists up their ass. Jesus, I mean, right up to the elbow.” He made a sour face. “A little knife is nothing.”
I glanced at Freeman. A warning formed on his face. I ignored it.
“A little knife is nothing,” I repeated. “You learn that at the academy?”
“I’m paid to do my job, Rios,” he said, the mouth twitching. “But I don’t have to like it.”
I stood up. “What about Blenheim?”
“He’s gone,” Cresly said.
“You looking for him?”
“We’ll find him,” he said, smugly. “You have anything else to tell me?”
Freeman stood up, quickly, and pulled at my arm. “Come on, Henry,” he said. I let him lead me from the room
“That jerk,” I sputtered as soon as we were outside in front of Good’s apartment building.
Freeman lit a cigarette. “The man’s set in his ways,” he said, mildly, “but he’s a good cop, Henry. He don’t like open files.”
Two young men came down the sidewalk carrying an immense Christmas tree. They passed us with shy, domestic smiles.
“No struggle,” I said, more to myself than to Freeman.
“Look,” Freeman said, “the guy was drunk when we saw him. And he was probably dusted, too.”
“PCP?” I said. “How do you figure?”
“I smelled ether in the bedroom,” he said. He blew smoke out of the side of his mouth. “They use it to cover the smell.”
“I know,” I replied. “But that wasn’t ether. It was amyl nitrite.”
“Poppers?” Freeman shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“What does it matter,” I said. “He was obviously on something, but I can’t believe it was enough to knock him out.”
We got to Freeman’s battered Accord. The license plate read, PRIVT I.
“It had to be Blenheim,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s what I figure. How do you think he found out that Good talked to us?” He leaned against the car, dropped his cigarette and crushed it.
“Maybe Good told him,” I said. “Maybe he was Good’s client last night, only the appointment wasn’t for sex but a little more blackmail.”
“Kinda stupid,” Freeman observed.
“I doubt that Tony Good ever got any prizes for brains,” I replied.
“What a way to go,” Freeman said.
“Yeah. I think I better go pay a call on the Zanes.”
“You think Blenheim will be going after them next?”
I nodded. “I bet Tom Zane knows everything.”
“Poppers,” Freeman said softly, tossing his cigarette to the ground. “Is it true that they make sex better?”
I shrugged. “All I ever got from them was a headache.”
Freeman snickered. “Figures,” he said. “You ain’t exactly one for the wild side, are you Henry?”
“Not exactly,” I agreed.
The Zanes were at home. Rennie, in a gray silk robe, arranged herself in a chair near the fire. The maid brought her tea. Tom was having his morning pick-me-up, a tall Bloody Mary that he mixed himself. He brought his drink into the living room and sat in the chair beside his wife. The two of them, blond, handsome, could have been brother and sister. They watched me with still, blue eyes. A fire crackled in the fireplace, releasing the scent of pine into the air. A Christmas tree had appeared in the corner, near the Diego Rivera, with expensively wrapped gifts piled beneath it.
I told them about Tony Good and Sandy Blenheim’s disappearance. They said nothing though Rennie blanched-when I described the manner of Tony’s death.
I looked at Tom. “You knew Sandy killed Brian Fox,” I said. “How do you figure?” he asked, a lazy smile curling the edges of his lips.
“You produced the play,” I said. “Blenheim couldn’t have given Tony the part of Gaveston unless he cleared it with you. Isn’t that right?”
He took a swallow of his drink. “You’re a smart man,” he said. “You knew,” I repeated.
He set the drink down and said, “Yeah, I knew all about Sandy’s troubles.”
“Why didn’t you turn him in?” I asked. “The man’s a murderer.”
Rennie set her tea down with a clatter. “Don’t say anything, Tom,” she said. “Not without a lawyer.”
“Henry is a lawyer,” Tom replied. To me he said, “So it’s like talking to a priest. Right?”
“If you tell me you’ve committed a crime, then I’d advise you to turn yourself in, but I wouldn’t do it on my own.”
“See, Rennie,” Tom said, smiling. “These lawyers got all the angles covered.” Tom looked at me. “I told you I did time in the joint, well, I was there more than once. It was a bad scene. I would kill myself before I went back there again.”
I remembered he had told me the same thing that afternoon at Malibu a few days earlier. “Go on,” I said.
“They picked me up for burglary,” he said. “I managed to make bail.” He picked up his drink and drank from it. “I split.”
“Where was this?”
“A little town in Oklahoma,” he said. “Shitsville. I did some hard years there, Henry. That’s not important. The important thing is, I jumped bail.” He finished his drink. “Sandy knew.”
“He blackmailed you,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s about the size of it,” Zane said, rising. He walked over to the bar and poured himself vodka and lime. Rennie lit a cigarette.
“But you’re on tv,” I said. “Aren’t you afraid of being recognized?’’
“It was fifteen years ago,” Tom said, walking to the window that faced the terrace. “Hell, I could walk down the streets of that town and my mama wouldn’t know me.” For the first time I heard a twang in his voice.
“How old were you?” I asked.
He turned from the window. “Twenty-two.” He smiled, bitterly. “I already done two years by then at a state pen. Got raped every night for the first six weeks till I married me some protection — a guy with a forty-inch chest and biceps I could swing from. That’s how I stayed alive.”
I glanced over at Rennie. Her cigarette had burned down to the filter and a chunk of ash dropped to the floor. She stared at the wall, her face without expression.
“You could use some protection now,” I said. “You’re Sandy’s last hope. He’ll be back looking for you.”
“We can’t very well go to the police,” Rennie said, suddenly. She dropped the remnant of her cigarette into an ashtray.
“I understand that,” I said, “but-”
“But nothing,” Tom said. “I’ll take care of Sandy if he comes back. In the meantime, Henry, you just don’t worry about us. We’ll be all right.”
He stepped behind the chair where Rennie sat and rested his hands on her shoulders.
I stood up to leave. “You weren’t Tom Zane, then,” I said.
“No. I used to be Charlie Fry,” he replied. “Poor little Charlie. He never had a chance.”