SEVENTEEN

When I realized who Josh was talking to, my first thought was, He has a gun. I dried my hands on my trousers and stepped into the foyer where the two men were standing, Josh warily, the other with a slight, almost embarrassed smile.

“Hello, Henry.”

“Hello . . . what do I call you? Alfredo? Sumaya?”

“Freddy,” he replied. “That’s what everyone in my family calls me, so I used it when I went undercover, easier to remember that way. Saavedra’s my mom’s maiden name. Are you going to invite me in?”

“That depends on what you want.”

He smiled an easy smile. “I could use some legal advice, and you’re the only lawyer I trust.”

He was wearing jeans, sneakers, and a leather jacket over a black T-shirt; I looked for any gun bulges. As if he knew what I was thinking, he said, “I’m not armed, Henry.” With a flirty grin, he added, “Frisk me if you want.”

“Wait for me in the living room.”

After he left, I said to Josh, “Go to bed.”

He looked at me incredulously. “Are you crazy? I’m not leaving you alone with him.”

“I believe him when he says he isn’t armed.”

“That doesn’t mean he’s not dangerous,” Josh said in a fierce whisper.

“You heard what he wants. Legal advice. I’ll be fine. Plus, if I am talking to him as a lawyer, you can’t be there anyway. There’s no attorney-client privilege if another person is in the room.”

He shook his head. “I’ll be in the kitchen. If things get weird, shout.”

“Okay.” I gave him a quick kiss

Freddy was sprawled out on the couch, the leather jacket in a shiny heap beside him. I’d only seen Freddy in the flesh a couple of times; my image of him had been formed mostly by Theo’s descriptions of a pissed-off, muscle-bound, good-looking macho man but now I saw that image was incomplete. He was muscle-bound and he was good looking: slicked-back black hair, blunt black eyebrows, warm brown eyes. The shape of his face was an oval with high cheekbones, a strong chin, and perfectly symmetrical features, mole above the left side of his lips. His skin was the color of fresh walnuts. His smile was blinding. He moved with a feline grace surprising in such a hard-bodied man. He had old-school animal magnetism, the power to compel you to look at him.

“You got anything to drink?” he asked me.

“Not booze,” I said. “You want coffee or a Coke or something?”

He shrugged. “Nah. You don’t drink.”

“No.”

He smiled. “You sober? AA and all that shit?”

“That’s right.”

“Cool, cool,” he said approvingly. “I should probably look into that myself. Where’s Josh?”

I’d been standing. Now I took the armchair across from him. “He went to bed.”

“He doesn’t mind you being alone with me?” he asked, cocking his head to one side with a grin.

“I know you’re not gay, Freddy, so knock off the flirting.”

He slowly pulled his legs together, sat up. “Don’t tell me you weren’t checking me out.”

I sighed. “For weapons. You want legal advice, answer my question. Where have you been? No one’s seen you since the bombing.”

“I got reassigned to desk duty out in Devonshire division,” he said, laying a hand on the leather jacket. As he spoke, he stroked it as if it were a cat. “After Theo was arrested, they put me on administrative leave. I thought they’d put me back on active duty after he offed himself but then these lawsuits happened, and they hid me in a safe house out in Harbor division.”

That explained why the process servers hadn’t been able to locate him to serve him with wrongful death actions.

“Why would the department hide you?”

He stopped stroking his coat. “Not to protect me. To protect themselves from me telling someone what I know.”

“What do you know?”

He sank back into the couch and frowned. “First off, you need to know the bombs weren’t my idea.”

“You built them; you told Theo where to plant them.”

“Because those were my orders,” he replied emphatically.

“Orders from who?”

He hesitated and threw me a hard look.

“I’m not law enforcement and you came to me because you trust me, remember? If you’ve changed your mind, you’re free to go. I’m not going to tell anyone you were here.”

My bluntness seemed to satisfy him. “Will you be my lawyer then?”

“In the civil suits? Marc Unger in the city attorney’s office is your lawyer. Why aren’t you talking to him?”

“’Cause he called me up and told me to hire my own lawyer. I asked him why, and he said the city had decided I wasn’t acting in the scope of my job. You know what that means?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Then maybe you can explain it to me because that pinche pendejo sure didn’t.”

“The city’s only obliged to defend you in a civil suit if the things you’re accused of doing happened while you were acting in your official capacity as a police officer and you didn’t exceed your authority. If you taser an unarmed suspect and he sues you for excessive force, the city has your back. If you kill a guy in an off-duty bar fight and get charged with homicide, you’re on your own.”

He took this in for a moment. “Unger’s saying I did the bombing on my own time?”

“Something like that,” I said. I considered the other ramifications of the city’s position. “It also means if the DA decides to charge you, there’s no guarantee of any kind of immunity defense.”

He muttered, “Fuck me.” He looked at me. “What kind of charges?”

“If you’re charged like Theo was, first-degree murder with special circumstances. A death penalty case.”

He sank his head between his hands and rubbed his temples.

“You started by saying you were only following orders,” I prodded.

Through outstretched fingers, he mumbled, “Yeah, that’s right.”

“Whose orders?”

Now he looked up again. “I don’t hate gay people.”

I offered a tentative, “Okay.”

“Seriously, I don’t,” he insisted, sitting up. “Hanging out with you guys in QUEER, I saw the shit you take, plus the whole AIDS thing getting blamed on you. That ain’t fair.”

“Okay, you’re not a homophobe. What does that have to do with anything?”

“I just want you to understand that what I did to Theo wasn’t personal. I liked the little speed freak.”

“You were only following orders,” I said, not bothering to keep the sarcasm out of my voice.

“Were you in the military, Henry?”

“No,” I said, confused by the abrupt change of subject. “I know you were. I’ve seen your service record.”

He nodded. “The first thing you learn in the army is you don’t think for yourself. They tell you your life and the lives of your friends depend on following orders. So, if they point to a bunch of people,” he pointed at a corner of the room, “and tell you, that’s the enemy, take them out. You don’t get to go, but, Sarge, some of them are good people.” His hand fell back in his lap. “You take them out. The department’s like the army.” He leaned forward, emphatically. “They send you into Watts and tell you, those Black people are the enemy and you forget about the Black kids you played basketball with during high school or how fucking great Hank Aaron was. The Blacks are the enemy, you treat them accordingly.” His voice had become sharp and angry. “They told me, ‘These fags, they’re the enemy. They’re spreading this disease, they’re molesting kids, they’re doing disgusting things with their bodies and they have to be stopped. You get in there, into this group that has the balls to shove the word queer in our face like it was something to be proud of and you fuck them up.’”

“By blowing up a church?”

He fell back onto the couch again and shook his head. “First, they told me, get them to take some swings at the cops at one of their demonstrations, but you know those QUEER guys.” He grinned. “They’re smart motherfuckers. They tried to provoke the cops to take swings at them. Make the department look bad. So I went back and said, ‘They ain’t biting.’ Then they told me, ‘okay, well, get the leaders to plan some kind of violent action,’ but they didn’t understand.” He clenched his fist in remembered frustration. “There’s no fucking president of QUEER to incite to violence. People do their own thing and that don’t include violence. So, then they say, ‘Okay, well if everyone does their own thing, find the weak link and turn him.’”

“Theo,” I said.

He nodded. “A fucked-up, submissive speed freak into guys who treated him like shit. He was perfect. Just the right combination of crazy, suggestible, and obsessed.”

“Who are these ‘they’ who were giving you orders?”

“Well, not so much ‘they,’ I guess, as ‘him.’ Chief Moore.”

“Raymond Moore,” I said. “The head of the anti-terrorism unit.”

“Now there’s a guy,” he replied with a smirk, “who really, really hates gays.”

“Was he the only one giving you orders? Were there others up or down the chain of command you reported to?”

“No, just Chief Moore. This was his special project. He even had a code name I was supposed to use when I wanted to talk to him. I’d call his office and ask for Eleazer. That’s how he knew it was me. I thought his secretary would hang up on me the first time I called, but she didn’t bat an eye. Just put me through.”

“Did Moore specifically order the bombing?”

He slowly nodded. “He asked me to come to his house one night. When I got there, he introduced me to this old dude, Metzger. They sat me down and explained that getting that quarantine thing passed was a matter of life and death. They talked about the innocent people who would die if the homosexuals were allowed to spread their lifestyle and their disease. The old guy began quoting the Bible about how even God was disgusted by what homosexuals did, and that back in the day they were stoned to death, it was that much of a sin.”

I interrupted him. “Are you religious?”

He shrugged. “Catholic. I haven’t been to church in a long time, but I know the pope don’t like homosexuals any more than Metzger does.”

“So then what?”

“They told me it was time for something big to happen to bring people’s attention to how much of a threat the homosexuals were. That’s when they said I should get someone in QUEER to bomb the church and help them do it.” His eyes widened. “I thought they were joking.”

“Why?”

“I know what bombs can do. You don’t play with that shit. And a church?” He blew out a breath, shook his head. “That’s hard-core. But Metzger told me it was his church, and that his church was ready to make the sacrifice if it would get the law passed. They told me damage would be minimal and no one would get hurt, but I had to make sure it looked like gays had done it.”

“Moore told you no one would get hurt.”

“Metzger said Thursday was the one night nothing goes on at the church and that’s when I’d plant the bombs.”

“And you said, sure, I’ll blow up your church?” I asked, disbelievingly.

“Following orders, Henry.”

“Moore and some civilian hatch a plot to bomb a church to swing an election,” I said. “Didn’t that have the smell of being off the books?”

“No one let me read the book.”

I was, by now, pretty skeptical of his claim to have been nothing more than an automaton, blindly carrying out the orders of his superior officers. The department wasn’t the army— its officers were entrusted with the power to make their own judgments in critical situations— and Freddy wasn’t stupid. He had to have known something this outrageous was both criminal and morally wrong.

“How did you persuade Theo to help you?”

“Theo was into me, way into me. I pretended to be a pissed-off queer radical who wanted to get back at the people who wanted to lock us up in concentration camps. That’s all I talked to him about and, you know, like I said, he was suggestible, plus he was HIV positive, so he was already angry. I’d seen the way he’d scream at people at QUEER meetings, not making a lot of sense, just venting. Plus, he was usually speeding, and that shit makes you paranoid. I’d get him all worked up and then I’d fuck him and while I fucked him, I kept at him. Told him we’d be soldiers. It’d be us against the world. Made it sound kind of romantic. I led him to it, step by step, and by the time he knew where I was taking him, he was in too deep to back out.”

“You didn’t think twice about involving a screwed-up, HIV-positive emotionally troubled drug addict in a major felony that would destroy his life?”

“Hey, I’m sorry about Theo, but the way he was going, it was only a matter of time before speed got him or AIDS did.”

“You said you liked him, but you were willing to use him without any feelings about it.”

In a hard voice, he replied, “Civilians have feelings, not soldiers, not cops.” Then, “Are you going to help me or not?”

“What kind of help do you want, exactly?”

“Get me out of the lawsuits and make sure I don’t get charged with anything.”

“You don’t think you have any responsibility here?”

“Not for doing my job. Not for following orders,” he insisted. “Scold me all you want, but that’s the way it was.”

He was shrewd. If the city was trying to cut him loose by arguing he had exceeded the scope of his duty, his only defense was to claim he had followed the orders of a superior in a good faith belief they were legitimate orders reflecting official policy. Then, it wouldn’t matter if the orders were invalid or even illegal— that was on his superiors, not him.

Of course, there was the problem of persuading a judge or a jury that any reasonable cop who was directed to blow up a church would have believed that activity fell within the scope of police work. But the defense might at least cancel out Freddy’s personal, civil liability for the bombings. As for criminal charges— well, Theo had died with all the original capital charges pending against him. Though he hadn’t been found guilty, he hadn’t been acquitted either. The cops and the DA could argue he was the perpetrator and, letting political dogs lie, decline to reopen the case based on allegations in a civil suit where there was a lesser burden of proof.

Freddy said, “What do you think?”

“I think you’re a liar. You knew damn well when Moore and Metzger brought you in on the scheme to blow up the church, it was a private vendetta, not official police business. You went along with it anyway. Why? I don’t know for sure, but the fact you’d wreck Theo Latour’s life without a second thought and try to implicate QUEER tells me you’re not as okay with gay people as you claim. I don’t know if you’re a bigot or a psychopath, but I’m damn sure you’re not an innocent victim of circumstances.”

He threw me a long, hard stare and then he shrugged. “Whatever, dude. Can I get away with it?”

“There’s a decent chance,” I said, “with the right lawyer. I’m not that person.”

He stood up, grabbed his coat. “Too bad. I wanted to see that asshole Unger’s face when I walked into court with Theo’s lawyer. Thanks for the chat, Henry. Now you can go cornhole Josh or whatever it is you guys do.” He smiled. “I really don’t hate gays. I didn’t even mind the sex. No bitch ever gave me head as good as Theo, and his asshole was tighter than a pussy. I guess that proves I’m not a bigot.”

As the front door closed behind him, I thought, Which leaves psychopath.

••••

In the weeks that followed, the wrongful death actions moved at the glacial pace of most civil suits and got even more complicated when Alfredo Sumaya filed a separate suit against the city and the police department. In it he sought a ruling from the court that the city was required to defend him because all his actions had been at the direction of the department. We filed a massive discovery request. The defendants responded with the first round of motions to dismiss, called demurrers. And then, except when something required my immediate attention, the action slipped into the back of my mind, buried beneath the daily demands of my practice and the happy challenge of merging my life with Josh’s.

One morning, I sat down to breakfast and unfolded the Times. There, beneath the fold, next to a photograph of Alfredo Sumaya was a headline:

 

FORMER LAPD OFFICER SOUGHT IN CHURCH BOMBING

 

Police have issued an arrest warrant for Alfredo Sumaya, 34, a former member of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Anti-Terrorism Unit, in connection with the bombing of Ekklesia church last spring. Daniel Herron, the church pastor, was killed in the bombing. Police sources state that Sumaya conspired with Theo Latour to commit the bombing. Latour was charged with first-degree murder, but committed suicide in his jail cell before he could be brought to trial. A wrongful death action filed by Herron’s widow and his son allege that Sumaya was operating as an undercover officer at the time of the bombing under the direction of his supervisors at the police department. The complaint alleges that the purpose of the bombing was to discredit a gay activist organization that Sumaya had infiltrated and that Latour belonged to. The city has denied those allegations on behalf of the department. Sumaya had filed his own lawsuit alleging all his actions were within the scope of his duties and was seeking a declaration of immunity from any liability, civil or criminal. Both lawsuits are currently pending, and it is unclear whether this latest development is related to them . . .

 

Maybe the Times was unclear about the connection between the civil suits and this bombshell, but I had my suspicions.

••••

Marc chose another restaurant-bar for our meeting, this one not far from his office on Main Street, but with the same noirish, torch song feel as the New York Company. Apparently when he was drinking Marc liked to imagine himself as a character in a Raymond Chandler novel. This place was called The Twilight Club. Outside, it was a squat, windowless square that could have been a warehouse. Inside, twinkle lights cast a faux-romantic glow over booths padded with red leather, and cocktail waitresses in evening gowns delivered drinks and bar food to equally well-padded men in suits. Although it wasn’t a gay bar, its clientele was almost exclusively male. Marc was comfortably settled in a booth with a martini in front of him. A candle burned in a squat orange candle holder on the table, the light flickering across his face.

“Henry, baby,” he said when I slid in across from him. So, not his first drink. “You’re looking good.”

“Thanks, Marc.”

The cocktail waitress laid a little napkin in front of me and asked for my order. I said mineral water.

Marc rolled his eyes and told her, “Bring me another one of these, darling. So,” he continued as she disappeared into the gloom, “what’s on your mind?”

“Why is Alfredo Sumaya being charged now in the church bombing?”

He lifted his drink to his mouth and sipped. Light sparked from his gold cufflink. He set the drink down and said, “Why are you asking me? I’m not the DA.”

“Cut the crap. I know who’s pulling the strings in this case.”

The waitress returned and elaborately placed our drinks before us.

“You’re a smart guy, Henry. You must have a theory.”

“I do. You told Sumaya that the church bombing was beyond the scope of his duties and that the city wouldn’t defend him in the wrongful death actions. That left him dangling out there on his own without any protection from civil or criminal liability. He found himself a lawyer who sued the city to force the city to defend him. In order to destroy the credibility of his lawsuit, the DA charges him with murder and claims he acted alone— well, not alone, but with Theo who’s dead and can’t defend himself.” Marc was grinning like the Cheshire cat, so I knew I was on the right track. I plunged on. “If the criminal case gets to trial first, and Sumaya’s convicted, his civil lawsuit goes up in smoke. If he tries to rush through his civil lawsuit, you can argue it should be postponed until after the criminal prosecution because the criminal prosecution will be dispositive of whether he was acting in the scope of his duty.” I shook my head. “In other words, you’ve got his nuts a vise.”

“Excellent analysis, counsel,” he said. He sipped his drink, and the cufflink flashed again.

“Meanwhile, with everyone focused on Sumaya, Chief Moore and Bob Metzger, who masterminded the bombing, slip into the shadows.”

He smirked. “Objection. Assumes facts not in evidence. No proof of who masterminded anything.”

“Aren’t you worried Sumaya will go to the media and lay out the whole story of how an assistant chief in the police department and a leader of Ekklesia conspired to blow up the church and kill its pastor?”

“Do you think anyone will run that story and risk a slander suit on the word of an accused murderer?” I watched him light a cigarette and sip his cocktail, a self-satisfied expression on his face. “Anyway, he won’t talk. He’s charged with capital murder. His only hope for a reduced charge is to play ball.”

“Are you going to offer him manslaughter because he’s a cop?” I asked bitterly.

“He gets the same offer as Latour. Second-degree murder, fifteen to life. He’ll take it.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” I said, remembering my conversation with him. Freddy didn’t strike me as a guy who would take a fall. “And if he does, you’re okay with letting a high-ranking police officer who conspired to commit murder off the hook?”

He took a drag from his cigarette and exhaling said, “Chief Moore will be announcing his retirement at the end of the year.”

“And Metzger?”

Absently, he pushed the candle away from his side of the table, casting his face into shadow, and said, “Nothing I can do about him.”

“Nothing you— wait, is that what this is all about? You working backstage to get your idea of justice?”

“The cop responsible for the bombing goes to jail. The assistant chief who planned it retires. We’re preparing a very generous offer to settle the wrongful death actions. You should be happy. Why aren’t you?”

“Because it’s all bullshit, that’s why! You’re covering up the real story, that the department and the church joined forces to try to entrap a group of gay activists in a murder to swing an election that would have put a lot of gay men, including my lover, in quarantine camps. The power of the state was used to try to crush a group of its citizens who were peaceably resisting a horrifying plot against them. In America. Is sweeping all that under the carpet your idea of justice?”

“Proposition 54 lost,” he said. “It’s over, Henry. There’s no point in picking over the bones.”

“There may not be another initiative, but the bigots will think up something else. They’re in for the long haul. There will always be a next time, Marc. That’s why it matters that people know the truth about what happened this time.”

He finished his drink, dabbed his mouth with his cocktail napkin, and said, “That’s your fight. I have other responsibilities.” His eyes were sharp and focused despite the booze. “You may think I’m a sellout, but you’re a lawyer, too.” He slapped his hand on the table, shaking his glass. “You’re as much a part of the system as I am. I’m very good at my job, and sometimes part of my job, like part of yours, is choking back the puke and making the deal.” He picked up his cigarette. “I’m planning to sit here and drink myself into a coma. Unless you want to stay and watch, I suggest you go home to your cute little twink and fuck his brains out.”