The Hidden Law Read Online Free

Monica Motel in West Hollywood. It was a perfunctory, two-floor stucco building wedged on a small lot just off” the boulevard within walking distance of the gay bars; the kind of place where the vacancy sign was perennially lit.
    “Is this it?” Freeman asked.
    “Yeah, his last known address.”
    We got out of the car and went into the dimly lit office. An Asian woman stood behind the desk watching us apprehensively.
    “Yes,” she said.
    Freeman produced a mug shot of Deeds and his private investigator’s license. “We’re looking for this kid.”
    “Police?” she inquired, holding up his license to the light.
    “I’m a private cop,” he said. “This is Mr. Rios, the kid’s lawyer.”
    She took stock of me in my sincere blue suit, trying to puzzle it out.
    “We’re not here to make any trouble,” I told her. “The boy calls himself Deeds. He has to be in court tomorrow morning.”
    We all stood there for a moment while she weighed her options. An air conditioner hummed loudly. Although glossy brochures advertised Gray Line tours and fun at Disneyland from a metal rack on a table in the corner, I doubted whether this place attracted that kind of trade.
    “Twenty-three,” she said, wearily. “Don’t kick in the door.”
    Deeds’s room was upstairs. I knocked a couple of times, then called him. I tried the door. Locked.
    “We’ll have to ask her to let us in,” I said.
    “Go admire the view,” Freeman said.
    I walked over to the railing and watched the traffic stream up and down the boulevard. A blond in a Jeep cruised by slowly, his cassette player blaring a disco tune from the seventies. Ah, the hunt, I thought, remembering the nights I had stood in San Francisco bars listening to that same song while I ingested a little liquid courage. Or, rather, a lot of liquid courage. Most nights I would stagger out alone and take the train back to school. Once in a while someone would pick me up, or I would pick him up, and I would toil in a stranger’s bed for a few hours, trying to get out of my skin by going through his. I imagined that I was having fun, and sometimes I was, but not nearly often enough.
    By the time I had graduated from law school, I was doing my drinking at home. That went on for a decade or so, drinking and working. By the time I sobered up, I was casting a pretty thin shadow, there being not much more to me than a vague alcoholic melancholy and the ability to work sixteen-hour days. I didn’t work that hard anymore, and when I was unhappy, there was usually a reason. I was unhappy now, watching the blond cruise by, wondering with whom Josh was having an affair. The thought had been in the back of my mind for months but only now, as I stood in the sexy airs of Boystown, did it all fall into place: the element of evasion in his behavior which had never been there before, the vagueness about where he was going, and when he would be coming back. I hadn’t lost track of him; he was hiding from me.
    “Henry.”
    I glanced back at Freeman. He was holding the door open.
    We stepped inside to a darkened room. “Deeds,” I called. A sliver of light seeped out from beneath a door at the other end of the room. I went over and knocked. “Jimmy, are you in there?”
    When there was no answer, I turned the knob and shoved the door open.
    “Oh, shit,” Freeman muttered.
    Naked, Jimmy Dee sat sloppily on the toilet, his head tilted back at an angle that would have been really painful had he been alive. A needle was still jammed into his arm. His mouth was open and he stared up at a water stain on the ceiling in the shape of Africa.
    I closed the door and said to Freeman, “Go downstairs and call 911.”
    After he left, I switched on the light and looked around the room. Deeds’s clothes were in a pile at the foot of the unmade bed. There was a twenty on the nightstand, wages for his last trick, no doubt. On the dresser was a little pile of papers. I examined them and found my card, some