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“I didn’t think much of him at all. He was just a kid in my class. I guess he was smart. He wasn’t great at sports, so he wasn’t part of my gang. I suppose I thought he was a loser.”
“Did you think he was gay?”
He bristled. “It was different then. Yeah, we called some kids faggots. We called each other faggots. That doesn’t mean we thought anyone wasgay. That kind of thing happened somewhere else.”
A half an hour away in Los Angeles, half an hour in the other direction in Long Beach. These places had long gay histories. He was talking as though Downey was smack in the middle of Kansas. He would have known…
“So, before Anne there was no one specific?”
“I said he played the field, didn’t I?”
“You knew girls he had sex with?”
“I knew he had sex with girls, I didn’t know which ones.”
“You knew that because he’d disappear, and you wouldn’t know where he was?”
“He wouldn’t talk about the girls he was with. He was a gentleman. That’s what he was like.”
“You both played tennis.”
“Yeah. We played doubles together.”
“Why tennis? Why not baseball or football?”
“We played those, just not as well. I mean, Pete was the one who was really good at tennis. I was just okay. He could have had a scholarship to Loyola Marymount, but my parents don’t believe in that kind of thing.”
“College?”
“They don’t trust people who are too smart.”
“What about you?”
“I’m going to send my kids to college. Look, I really do need to go back inside.”
I was going to lose him in a moment, so I decided to play a hunch. “Your wife lied about being Pete’s fiancé, didn’t she? You just found out, that’s why you divorced her.”
His eyes got narrow and mean. He said, “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
But I was pretty sure I did.
Driving back to Long Beach I felt like I had more questions than answers. I understood why Anne had told the lie about being Pete’s fiancé in the first place—Larry had told her to. But why keep it up for twenty years? I mean, okay, she’d used the lie to snag herself a husband. So why did she suddenly tell him the truth? And if she had told him the truth, why didn’t she tell me the truth?
Did I really believe Pete’s parents didn’t want him to go to college? There are people in the world who are suspicious of intelligence. That would be why Adlai Stevenson never became president. Egghead is hardly a compliment. But Pete could have gone anyway, he was nineteen, twenty years old. It shouldn’t have mattered what his parents thought.
Paulie knew more about everything we talked about. I was sure of it. Clearly, he was close to his brother. So wouldn’t he have known, or at least suspected, that Pete was gay? I wasn’t sure I believed that he didn’t know Larry Wilkes was gay. It’s true that straight people can be oblivious, but high school kids, they see things like that and then use those things to destroy you. He would have known.
And if he knew Larry and Pete were spending time together, he could have guessed. But did heknow? Were Larry and Pete as discreet as Larry thought? Even if Paulie didn’t know then, he had to know now. So why not talk about it?
****
The news was full of the Unabomber who’d just been turned in by his brother, Strom Thurmond who’d announced he was going to run for senator again at 93, and Tammy Faye Messner who’d just had cancer surgery in full makeup. Those stories were on the radio as I drove up to Downey.
The courthouse was on Imperial Highway and looked like a four-story, concrete computer punch card. I got there at eight-twenty-five, which had meant I’d gotten up before seven. When I left, Ronnie woke up briefly, mumbled that he loved me, and rolled back over.
The clerk’s office was in the back of the first floor of the courthouse. The door was still locked. I waited ten minutes for them to open. That was the first stumbling block. The second was the request form.
I had to fill it out as though we’d already taken the case, putting down Lydia’s name as attorney. It asked for her bar membership number, which I did not know. It also wanted to know the date of Larry’s trial, which I only knew in the most general sense. It was sometime early in 1977. I didn’t know the case number nor the presiding judge. I put down a reason in the broadest of terms “INVESTIGATING THE POSSIBLE INNOCENCE OF DEFENDANT”
