Free The Little Death by Michael Nava Page A

out of seeing
Hugh. And that night he was killed.”
    “I
swear I had nothing to do with that,” he said.
    “But
your client — the judge did.”
    “I
don’t think it’s that simple,” Aaron said. “I’ve been doing some research.
Something’s going on that goes back a long time and involves a lot of people.”
    “You’re
talking in riddles.”
    “I
can’t speak more clearly — yet.” He looked at me. “I’m going to stay here,”
his gesture encompassed the entire firm, “until I find out. But I don’t want to
see you. It’s not safe for either of us.”
    “This
is no time to split up,” I said.
    “They’re
watching you, Henry. But they’re not worried about my loyalties. You’re my
diversion.”
    “Why
are you doing this, Aaron?”
    “I
won’t be an instrument of crime,” he said. “I either have to clear my client of
this murder or urge him to turn himself in. That’s my obligation.”
    “Then
our interests are different,” I said, “because I want justice for my friend.”
    He
nodded. “I’ll be in touch, Henry. Wait for my call.”
    “You
have to give me something, Aaron. Something to go on.”
    “All
right,” he said. “Robert Paris inherited his wife’s estate after she was killed
in a car accident. She had a will but she died intestate.”
    “That
doesn’t make sense.”
    “If
you can make sense of it,” he said, “you’ll know who killed Hugh Paris.”
    I
heard the tremor in his voice and I was frightened for both of us.
     
    *
* * * *
     
    I
was sitting on the patio of the student union at the university having left
Gold’s office an hour earlier. I had come to find Katherine Paris. I stared out
across the empty expanse of grass
    and
pavement. Misty light hung from the branches of the trees. A white-jacketed
busboy cleared away my breakfast dishes.
    School
had not yet started for the undergraduates so there was none of their noise and
traffic to shatter the stillness. I was thinking about Hugh. The same money
that raised this school was responsible for his death. The money was everything
and nothing, something that overwhelmed him and which, perhaps, could only be
contained by the institution. It had not done Hugh any good, but was merely the
background noise against which he played out his unhappiness.
    I
got up and walked across the plaza to the bookstore. It was a two-story beige
box with a red tile roof, a far cry from the excesses of the Old Quad. But
then, as the campus moved away from the Old Quad the architecture became purely
utilitarian as conspicuous displays of wealth, whether personal or institutional,
went out of style. I entered the store and stopped one of the blue-frocked
salesclerks, asking where the poetry books were shelved. I was directed to the
back wall of the second floor. The poetry books covered a dozen long shelves
and it took me a minute to figure out that they were arranged alphabetically.
    There
had been a brief time in college when I wrote poetry. It was, like most
sophomore verse, conceived in the loins rather than the mind. It was a notch
better than most such verse, perhaps, but it was no loss to literature when I
stopped writing. My brush with poetry, however, left me with a permanent
respect for those who wrote it well. Seeing familiar names again, Auden, Frost,
Richard Wilbur, took me back to sunny autumn afternoons when I sat in my dorm
room writing lame couplets.
    Katherine
Paris had published a half-dozen slender volumes over the past twenty years and
one thick book of collected poems. Each book was adorned with the same
photograph I had seen at Hugh’s house and beneath it was the same paragraph of
biographical information. She was born in Boston, graduated from Radcliffe,
took a master’s degree from Columbia and currently divided her time between
Boston and San Francisco. Her work had won the National Book Award and been
nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She had been translated into twelve languages
— they were listed