LITMIR.BIZ

      TWO

      The vehicle blocking the driveway as I backed out of my garage was so conspicuously nondescript it could only be a plainclothes cop car. I rolled down the window, cut the engine, and waited. A short-haired woman in a pantsuit the same dull, dark gray as her car got out of the driver’s seat, followed a moment later by a buff young guy in a suit almost indistinguishable from hers. She approached my window. He stood a step behind her. The sunglasses hiding his eyes were a kid’s idea of intimidation.

      “Henry Rios,” she not quite questioned.

      “Who’s asking?”

      “Doris Whitcombe. Special agent, FBI. My partner, John Colby.”

      I glanced at him. “Trainee?” When neither responded, I asked, “What do you want?”

      “The man who owns this house, Larry Ross, was involved in drug smuggling. We have reason to believe there are still drugs on the premises. We’d like to look around.”

      Doris Whitcombe looked less like a cop than a high school science teacher— the sensible haircut; utilitarian clothes; plain, intelligent face; unthreatening voice. The feds didn’t go in for the stormtrooper bluster of LAPD, but behind their blankness was the same implied threat of menace.

      “Larry Ross died six months ago. The drugs he allegedly smuggled were over-the-counter medications from Mexico to relieve the suffering of men infected with HIV. That’s not a violation of any federal statute I’m aware of.”

      She replied, crisply. “Those drugs are not approved by the Federal Drug Administration for HIV.”

      “That’s a regulatory issue, not a criminal offense. Doctors routinely prescribe off-label uses for drugs. Are you going to bust them?”

      “These drugs were not prescribed by doctors.”

      “Because they’re nonprescription drugs.”

      “In Mexico, not here. You could be charged with conspiracy to distribute illegal drugs.”

      I’d had it. “Go to hell. You and your boy should be ashamed of working for a government that would rather let my friends die than have access to drugs that might save their lives. If you have probable cause I’ve broken any law, arrest me. As for searching my house without a warrant, fuck you. Now move your goddamn car. I have to get to court. Or didn’t you know I’m a criminal defense lawyer?”

      Her face had gone red, but she maintained her bureaucratic monotone and said, “We will be back, sir.”

      I wanted to shout at her something about it being 1986 and not 1984, but I figured the George Orwell allusion would be wasted on her. I started the car. She and her partner walked down the driveway to their own car, got in, and drove away.

      As soon as they were gone, I cut the engine again and pressed my forehead against the steering wheel. Grief and fury surged through my body like electrical shocks. It was moments like this that I most missed Larry Ross, my friend and AA sponsor.

      It was a clear, mild day in May. The sun warmed my face. Birds chirped in the trees. A vine of deep red bougainvillea crept up the wall that enclosed the back yard of Larry’s hillside house. Well, my house, technically. Without telling me Larry had put the place into joint tenancy with me. When six months earlier an aneurysm had burst in his brain in a hotel room in Mexico City, I became the owner of his fifteen-room, 1925 Spanish mission residence in a canyon above Franklin Avenue, at the edge of Griffith Park. Far too much house for me, and I couldn’t enter a room without expecting to find him there, but I couldn’t bear to leave it yet, either. It was my last physical connection to him.

      In his late forties, Larry’d been a hugely successful partner at the most successful entertainment law firm in LA. He was also an alcoholic, a coke addict, and a closeted gay man. Forced from the closet when a trick he’d picked up at a bathhouse tried to blackmail him, he’d come out to his law partners who had had no problem with his homosexuality but forced him into rehab. When he emerged, he had poured the same energy and tough-talking empathy that had made him a preeminent entertainment lawyer into helping other people get and stay sober. Two years earlier, he’d found me in a halfway house in San Francisco with three months of shaky sobriety, feeling hopeless and desperate, and had steered me back to sanity and a new life in Los Angeles where I was slowly rebuilding my criminal law practice.

      He invited me to stay at his house until I got on my feet, but even after I could have found my own place, I stayed on. We got along as roommates and, by then, Larry had been diagnosed as HIV positive. He’d suffered a bout of PCP, the virulent strand of pneumonia that was often the first of the opportunistic diseases that attacked the compromised immune systems of people with the virus. After that, there was no question of my moving out.

      The near-death experience of PCP changed his priorities. He had cashed out of his law practice and thrown himself into the battle against AIDS. He took as his motto Mother Jones’s axiom: “Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.” Not content to be a checkbook activist, he looked for a way to fight on the front lines. He heard about two drugs that, when used together, had bolstered the immune system of some people with HIV. The catch: the drugs weren’t authorized for HIV treatment in the United States, and the Federal Drug Administration had rejected requests to begin trial of them for that purpose. They were, however, available over the counter in Mexico.

      An underground already existed of people crossing the border, smuggling the drugs in bulk and distributing them at cost to anyone who wanted to try the regimen. But it wasn’t enough to keep up with demand. Larry bought a Cessna, hired a gay pilot, and began flying all over Mexico to scour pharmacies for the drugs. I had once helped him unload the boxes in the big storage facility where he stored the drugs but only that one time.

      “You need to keep your hands clean,” he said, rejecting my further offer to help with the operation. “Because if I’m arrested, I’ll need you to represent me.”

      So I knew little

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