“Why was he cremated?” I asked, rising.
“That is not your business,” she said, “now get out.”
“Thank you for your time, Mrs. Paris.” She put the phone down and went back to her writing.
Sitting on my patio an hour later, I finished a gin-and-tonic, watched clouds move in from the ocean and counted up my leads. They amounted to about nothing. There were Hugh’s allegations against his grandfather and the coincidence of his death under odd circumstances. Gold knew more than he was saying, but either he could not say any more or really believed that our interests were sufficiently different for him not to confide in me. Katherine Paris was a dead end. I needed something tangible. It seemed to me that Hugh Paris moved through life like a nomad, using life up as he lived it, and leaving very little behind.
And then I remembered the letters. They were still in the pocket of the coat I had worn three days earlier. I finished my drink and went to the closet to retrieve them. Even as I spread them out on my desk a voice within begged me not to read them. I was afraid of what they might contain. I made myself another drink and circled my desk, vaguely, looking at them — thirteen in all, arranged from the earliest, in June, to the most recent, only a couple of weeks earlier. Finally, I sat down and started reading.
They were not exactly the rantings of a lunatic. On the other hand, there was little in them that could be called civilized discourse. Mostly, they were excruciatingly detailed invective of a psycho-sexual nature — literate but profoundly disturbed. I refolded the last letter and tucked it back into its envelope. It seemed impossible these could come from Hugh, but the details told. I said to myself that I was now his advocate, not his lover, and an advocate accepts revelations about his client that would send the lover running from the room. It’s part of the masochism of being a criminal defense lawyer to want to know the worst, in theory so the worst can be incorporated into the defense, but in actuality to confirm a blighted view of humanity. If I believed that people are basically good, I would have gone into plastics. People are basically screwed-up and often the best you can do for them is listen, hear the worst and then tell them it’s not so bad.
It wasn’t so bad, Hugh, I said, silently. I’ve seen worse. And the letters contained solid information. Hugh believed his grandfather was responsible for the deaths of his grandmother and his uncle, Jeremy. He also accused the judge of imprisoning his father, Nicholas, in an asylum. Finally, he accused the judge of depriving him of his lawful inheritance. There wasn’t much elaboration since, obviously, Hugh expected his grandfather to understand the allusions. It wasn’t evidence but it was something. A lead. A theory. Hugh’s death was part of a cover-up of earlier murders. All right, so it was melodramatic. Most crime is.
I collected my thoughts and called Terry Ormes. Her crisp, friendly voice was a relief after the dark muttering voice of the letters. I told her, briefly, editing out the lurid details, what the letters contained.
“That’s still not much,” she said.
“Well, it’s something. Apparently, Hugh’s grandmother and his uncle were killed up near Donner Pass on interstate 80 about twenty years ago. Can you contact the local police agency in the nearest town up there with a hospital?”
“Sure,” she said, “but if it happened on 80, it was probably a CHP case. What am I asking for?”
“Everything you can find out about the circumstances of their deaths. Any reports, death certificates, anything. And find out anything you can about Hugh’s life the last six months. Rap sheets, DMV records, any kind of paper.”
“Call me in two days,” she said. “What will you do?”
“I have one other card to play,” I said. “I’ll be in touch.”
The line went dead. I gathered up the letters and buried them beneath a pile of papers in the bottom drawer of my desk. I closed and locked it. For a long time I sat, nursing my drink, thinking about the hole where my heart had been.
5
The next morning I sat down to dial a number I’d not called in four years. The receptionist I reached announced the name of the law firm in the hushed tones appropriate to old money. I gave her the name I wanted and waited the couple of minutes it took to work through the various intermediaries until a deep unhurried male voice spoke.
“Grant Hancock here.”
“Grant, this is Henry Rios.”
There was the slightest pause before breeding won out and he said, “Henry, it’s been a long time.”
“Four years, at least.”
“Are you in the city?”
“No, I’m calling from my apartment. Grant, I need your advice.”
“Surely you don’t need the services of a tax lawyer on what you make with the public defender.”
“I’m not a P.D. anymore,” I replied, “and what I want to talk about is death, not taxes.”
“Anyone’s in particular?”
“Yes, Hugh Paris. I thought since you’re both — well, old San Francisco stock — that you might have known him.”
“Indeed I did,” Grant said slowly. “How well did you know him?”
“Well enough to think that he was murdered.” The line buzzed vacantly. “Grant? Are you still there?”
“Yes,” he said. “I don’t want to discuss this over the phone. Can you come up here tonight?”
“About nine?”
“Fine. I’m still at the same place. You know the way.” I agreed that I did.
“Henry, did Hugh mention me? Is that why you called?” His voice was, for Grant, agitated.
“No, he never said anything about you. It was my own idea to call. I know how thick the old families are with each other.”
“I knew him a long time ago,” Grant said in a far-off voice, and then stopped himself short. “I’ll talk to you tonight.” The line went dead.
Grant Hancock, along with Aaron Gold, had been one of my two closest friends at law school. His name was the amalgamation of two eminent San Francisco families and he grew up in a mansion in Pacific Heights. He was one of those San Francisco aristocrats who, for all their culture and worldliness, never move a psychological inch from the tops of their hills. Among those families that gave the city its reputation for insularity, “provincial” was a compliment.
In the normal course of existence, I would never have met someone like Grant since his world was far removed from mine and hardly visible to the untrained eye. Its tribesmen recognized each other by certain signs and signals meaningless to the outsider. However, Linden University was an extension of that world and the law school was a kind of finishing school from which he entered a law practice so leisurely and refined that it would have befitted one of Henry Fames’ languid heroes.
Grant cultivated a certain languor and part of it was real, growing out of a sense of belonging that was deep and unshakable. Part of it was an act, a way of masking real passion and a strong if confused decency. His decency was as simple as the desire to treat everyone fairly and civilly but it was undercut by his knowledge that, from his position of privilege, he could afford to act decently at no cost to himself. He wondered how he would treat others had he not been so privileged, and, I think, he assumed the worst about himself.
The fact that he was gay added to his confusion because acknowledging his homosexuality was an opportunity to take a moral risk and he passed it up. He rigidly separated his personal and professional lives and spent great amounts of energy policing the border between them. And for all that, I had once loved him and he had loved me. There had even been a time when it appeared that we might live together, openly, but that time came and passed, and he could not bring himself to do it. We drifted apart, he back to his hill and I back to real life.