Michael Nava - The Little Death

It was dusk and the shadows were at their deepest. Aaron’s brown BMW was parked, a little crookedly, in the driveway. There were lights on behind the drawn curtains but the house was still. I heard a noise, a movement on the side of the house in the narrow strip of yard between the building and the fence that bounded the property.

Abruptly I stopped, turned and sped toward the side yard, moving as quietly as I could. When I reached the edge of the building I stopped and listened. Another noise, fainter. Breathing? I slowed my own breath. Someone had been coming up the side yard when he heard me open the gate. Now he was standing still, wondering, as I had wondered, at the source of the noise. I crouched, walked to the very edge of the building, and then sprang.

For an instant no longer than a heartbeat we saw each other through the evening shadows. He raised his arm to his chest, holding something in his hand. I balled my hand into a fist and brought it down on his wrist as hard as I could. Startled, he dropped what I now saw was a gun. He gasped, turned, and started running. I stooped down, retrieved the gun and ran after him. He was scrambling over the redwood fence when I got to the back yard.

“Stop,” I shouted, training the gun at his back. I squeezed the trigger and then released it. It seemed suddenly darker as a burst of adrenalin rushed to my head. He was wearing — what? — dark pants, a dark shirt, taking the wall like an athlete. I knew that in another second it would be too late to stop him. I had to stop him. But shoot him? I was going to shoot a man? This wasn’t even remotely a situation of self-defense. I held on to the gun and ran for the fence. He was nearly over the top. With my free hand, I reached up and grabbed his ankle. He kicked free. In another second I heard him drop to the ground on the other side. I clambered up the fence, trying to get footholds on the rough wood. Reaching the top, I looked down at the alley, which ran the length of the street. He was gone. He had run to the end of the block or else had gone into someone’s back yard. I let myself drop back. Try to remember his face, I thought, as I made my way back to the house. The back door was ajar.

I entered the house through the kitchen.

“Aaron,” I said in a whisper.

There was no answer. I groped for a light switch, found it and turned it on. The fluorescent light blinked on, filling the room with a white electric glare. From the doorway of the kitchen I could see into the dining room and to the arched entrance that led into the living room. There was a light on in there. I stepped into the dining room and repeated Aaron’s name. There was no answer.

I crossed the room to the archway, holding the gun loosely at my side. Aaron Gold slumped forward in a brown leather armchair, his chest on his knees, his fingertips scraping the floor. Blood dripped steadily from his lap to a bright circle beneath him. On the table beside the chair was an empty bottle of Johnny Walker Red, a glass, and a small pitcher of water. The strongest smell in the room was of alcohol.

He’d probably been too drunk to know what was happening.

I took no comfort from this.

I started toward him. There was a loud noise out on the porch, the sound of footsteps and voices. Someone was pounding on the door.

“This is the police. Mr. Gold. Open up. This is the police.”

Numbly I went to the door and pulled it open. A young officer was flanked by three other cops. I opened my mouth to speak, but before I could utter a word, one of them said, “He’s got a gun.”

As soon as the sentence was out, there were four guns on me.

“Drop it,” the first officer said. I let the gun slip from my hand to the floor. “Now step outside nice and easy.”

“All right,” I said, regaining my composure, “but my friend is hurt in there.”

“We’ll take care of him in a minute.” One of the other officers directed me to turn, put my hands up against the wall and spread my legs. The felony position. I did as I was told. Another of the officers stepped into the house and I heard him mutter, “Jesus Christ.” To the officers outside he said, “Get the paramedics.”

I was searched, handcuffed and ordered to remain standing against the wall.

“This is a mistake,” I said to the officer watching me.

“It sure is,” he replied.

Now I heard the shriek of sirens as the paramedics’ unit shattered the stillness of the night. I had often heard that noise and wondered to what tragedy they were being summoned. This time I knew.

The officer who had first come to the door approached me, pen and pad in hand.

“What’s your name?” “Henry Rios,” I said.

He looked me over. Perhaps out of deference to the fact that I was still wearing most of my suit from the funeral, he called me mister.

“I’m going to read you your constitutional rights. Listen up.” He began to read from the Miranda card in the dull drone that I had heard so many times before when I was a public defender. I had about fifteen seconds in which to make up my mind whether to talk to him or not.

“Do you understand these rights?” he was asking.

“Yes,” I replied.

“Do you want a lawyer?”

“I am a lawyer,” I said.

The answer startled him and then he searched my face carefully. “I’ve seen you before,” he said.

“I was a public defender.”

He whistled low beneath his breath. “Then you know the script,” he said. “Do you want a lawyer?”

“Yes. Sonny Patterson at the D.A.’s office. I’ll talk to him.”

He nodded. “We’re going to take you down to county,” he said. “I’ll radio ahead and have them rouse Patterson.”

“Thank you.”

He turned to one of his fellow-officers. “Take him.”

“What charge?” the other asked.

“One eighty-seven,” the first officer replied. Penal Code section 187 — murder.

Out in the street the paramedics had arrived.

It took Sonny Patterson two hours and seven phone calls to get me out of jail. Most of the time I sat on one of the three bunks in a holding cell watching soundless reruns of Fantasy Island while he wheedled on the phone in the booking office for my release.

The last time I’d been at county was as a public defender the morning I met Hugh Paris. Nothing at the jail had changed, including the inmate population. Several trusties who recognized me from back then drifted past the cell, not saying anything but just to stare. I smiled and said hello and they moved on.

The sheriffs let me keep my own clothes but they did not spare me any other part of the booking process. I was strip- searched, photographed, finger-printed and locked up, all the while thinking, this is unreal. The worst part was the strip search. Until then it had never occurred to me to make the distinction between nudity and nakedness. Now I knew. Nudity was undressing to shower, or sleep, or make love. When you stripped in a hot closet-sized cell that smelled of the previous fifty men and under the indifferent stare of four cops, then you were naked. I still felt that nakedness. It was like a rash; I couldn’t stop rubbing my body.

I made my mind into a blank screen across which flickered the images of the day from Robert Paris’s casket to Aaron Gold’s fingertips dipped in a dark pool of his own blood. These pictures passed through me like a shudder, but it was better than trying to suppress them.

This entire affair began with the murder of one man, Hugh Paris. Now it was assuming the dimensions of a massacre. No one connected with the Paris family seemed safe, including, perhaps, Robert Paris himself. Had the judge’s death been purely coincidental to the fact that I’d begun to develop evidence that implicated him with three murders? Was there a gray eminence in the shadows directing events, or did the dead hand of Robert Paris still control the lethal machinery? Until that afternoon I had believed the investigation into Hugh’s death was closed. The killing of Aaron Gold changed all that. I was back at the starting line, but with this difference: I was exhausted.