The Hidden Law Read Online Free Page B

matter of fact. In a motel room in Boystown. He was dead.”
    “Murdered?” he asked, putting his drink down.
    “He OD’d.”
    “I’m sorry, Henry. I know how much you liked that kid.”
    I crunched into the bagel. “Not as much as I like you, Josh.”
    I watched him take a slug of juice, watched the muscles in his neck contract as he weighed a response. “What do you mean, Henry?”
    “Who is he, Josh? Who are you sleeping with?”
    “Steven,” he said, immediately.
    I thought back. Our house had become a kind of activists’ clubhouse and frequently I came home to find a meeting raging in the living room. Though Josh had introduced me to many of the men and women who attended these sessions, their faces blurred in my mind into a single youthful face flushed with excitement and anger.
    Steven?
    Then I saw him. A little taller than Josh, about my height, muscular, good-looking. Not one of the big talkers, but the others listened when he did speak. Josh had mentioned once that Steven was one of the oldest surviving PWAs in the group, having been diagnosed eight years earlier.
    Josh was speaking, “I kept meaning to tell you, but it seems like we never see each other anymore…”
    “Are you saying this happened because I’ve neglected you?”
    “No,” he said. “It happened because I’m in love with him.”
    “Are you sure it’s not because you’re in love with his diagnosis?”
    He stared at me in disbelief, and then fury.
    “I’m sorry, Josh, I didn’t mean that.”
    “You meant it all right,” he said, pushing his chair back from the table. He stalked out of the house. I heard his car start up. I didn’t think he would be coming back soon.

CHAPTER THREE
    I LEFT JOSH A LONG, apologetic note and set off to work. Driving in, I decided to stop at SafeHouse, to inform Edith Rosen, M.F.C.C., that Jimmy Dee would not be needing a bed there after all. I also thought I might say hello to Chuck Sweeny, the founder and director of the house, with whom I’d served on the local alcoholism council. After my term expired, he had urged me to keep in touch, but I had never followed up on my vague promises to drop in. Halfway there, it occurred to me that my true reason for going was that I felt like a creep for what I’d said to Josh and I was looking for a good deed to do by way of expiation.
    SafeHouse sat at the bottom of one of the canyons in old Hollywood on a busy street lined with towering palm trees. Up in the canyon itself, the one-time movie star residences had been torn down over the years by the new rich who preferred less ostentatious aeries, but down where Cahill Court flattened out the buildings retained their old magnificence: rambling Italian villas and Normandy chateaux set back from the road by walls and fences and sweeping swaths of grass.
    SafeHouse had been the mansion of a forties star who drank away his career. A few years before he died, he was led to sobriety by Chuck Sweeny, self-proclaimed recovering wino whom the actor had met when he stumbled into an AA meeting in skid row. In gratitude, the actor left Chuck his enormous residence which he stipulated in his will was to be used as an alcoholism recovery house.
    The neighbors were horrified, but Sweeny persisted, fighting zoning boards and obdurate bureaucrats until SafeHouse became a reality. The neighbors still complained. Fortunately for Chuck, the drugged-out sixties arrived. In a bold move, Chuck announced that he would also take drug addicts into the house. For this, he was condemned by old-line AA-types for whom alcohol and drugs were two entirely separate universes. But Chuck’s prescience paid off handsomely. As the decade progressed, the children of his affluent neighbors increasingly turned on, tuned in, and dropped out, and they found themselves in need of his services. His work with the rich and famous made SafeHouse chic long before Betty Ford took her last drink.
    Strictly speaking, SafeHouse was a halfway house rather