Free The Death of Friends by Michael Nava Page B

situation.
    “I’m sure,” I said.
    I finished my tea and went inside. Bay and Chris were married eight months later at a church in Pasadena. They wrote their own service and she asked me to help her find a poem to read. I gave her some lines from Whitman:
    I give you my love more precious than money,
    I give you myself before preaching or law;
    Will you give me yourself? Will you come travel with me?
    Shall we stick together as long as we live?

9
    T HE NEXT MORNING, BEFORE I left for Bay’s, I called Sam Bligh’s number. The man who answered was not Zack Bowen, but I recognized the voice, deep and mellifluous, as the same one condemning censorship as unAmerican on Asshole Buddies.
    “Hello,” he said.
    “Mr. Bligh?” I guessed.
    “That’s right. Can I help you?”
    “My name is Henry Rios. I need to talk to Zack Bowen.”
    A pause. “I’m afraid Zack’s not here.”
    “He was yesterday,” I said. “I spoke to him. He was supposed to meet me last night, but he didn’t show. Maybe you can tell me why.”
    “No,” he said, in his deep rumble, “I don’t think I can help you, Mr. Rios.”
    “Mr. Bligh, I’m a criminal defense lawyer. Zack is in a lot of trouble, but I assume he’s already told you that. The police have already been around to see me once, but I fended them off. I can’t continue to do that if he won’t talk to me.”
    “I see,” he said. “What did the police want with Zack?”
    “I think you know that, too. Let’s stop playing games.”
    “You’d better come around then,” he said.
    “I have another appointment this morning. I could come after that. Where are you?”
    He gave me an address. “Let’s say one-thirty,” he said.
    I agreed and hung up.
    As I drove to Bay’s, I wondered how much McBeth had told her about Chris’s arrest fifteen years earlier. I had only the vaguest recollection of the arrest report, but I remembered in great detail the night he’d called me from jail. It had happened five years after Chris and Bay were married. I was working in the Public Defender’s office in Palo Alto. I had only seen Chris and Bay a couple of times after their marriage, but Bay wrote once or twice a year. She always enclosed pictures of Joey, who’d been born a year after they’d married. She seemed unhappy, and I thought I discerned the effects of alcohol in her long, rambling letters. I scribbled postcards in return. From Chris I heard nothing until that night.
    It was a little after three in the morning. I picked up the phone and mumbled, “Hello.”
    Even before the caller spoke, I knew from the background noises—clanging metal, shouted commands—that I was being called from a jail.
    “Henry,” a man said. “It’s Chris Chandler. I’m in the San Francisco jail. Can you get me out?”
    His voice drove the fog from my head. “Chris? What happened?”
    “We can talk about that later,” he said brusquely.
    I sat up in bed. “I’m not asking out of idle curiosity,” I said. “It’s relevant to whether I can get you out.”
    “Lewd conduct,” he answered. “Are you coming?”
    “Don’t talk to anyone until I get there,” I said. “I’m going to make a few calls and see if I can’t get you out on your own recognizance. If they release you before I arrive, wait for me outside. Got that?”
    “Thanks,” he said, in the same short-tempered tone. “I’ll wait for you.”
    I called a D.A. acquaintance in the city. He roused a judge, who agreed to let Chris out O.R. As soon as I heard back from Mike, I got dressed and drove to the jail. Chris was waiting outside beneath a street lamp. I pulled up to the curb and opened the passenger door. He came toward me walking like a barefoot man across a bed of broken glass. He got into the car and slammed the door shut.
    “Are you okay?”
    He was disheveled and his eyes were bloodshot. He smelled of liquor.
    “Fuck,” he said, pounding his fist against the dashboard. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” Then he began