Chapter 7

July 25, 1996

Thursday morning

In the morning, Ronnie, John and I drove up to the Silver Lake area. The storage facility had turned out to be the one on Beverly Boulevard near Virgil in my old stomping ground. General Storage was housed in an Art Deco building about fifteen stories tall and made of beige stone that was ornately carved on the first floor. The entrance was just off Virgil. I parked in their lot, and we went inside.

A grumpy young man, practically a teenager, sat at the reception desk staring at us.

"Yeah?"

"We're going up to lockers 1018, 19 and 20."

"Take the elevator to the tenth floor. Shocking, I know."

He was annoying, so I said, "Have a nice day."

I'm not sure I meant it. All right, I know I didn't mean it. We walked over to the elevator and hit the button. Ronnie rolled his eyes at me.

In the elevator, John asked, "What exactly are we looking for?"

"Personal papers, diaries, photo albums, photographs, bills, taxes… Anything that might give us more information on who Patrick Gill was and who he was involved with: friends, lovers, associates. Particularly in the nineteen forties and early fifties."

"Personally, I don't have a lot of those things—mementos, I mean. I have friends and…" John said. "I do have a photo album and a box of important papers, but that's about it. I don't keep bills or taxes…"

"You're supposed to keep your tax records for seven years," Ronnie said. "In case you get audited."

"I use the EZ form. There's not a lot to audit."

I knew almost nothing about my taxes. Ronnie did them. When the elevator opened, we found ourselves in a long bland hallway. Following the numbers, we found 1018, 19 and 20. From a pocket, I took out a keychain that was labeled SHEILA K STABLES and held three keys. The locks were the kind of lock you bought for your gym bag if you weren't good at remembering numbers. Not very secure, but then simply being ten floors up was pretty secure, so it probably didn't matter.

One by one, I opened the lockups. John rolled up the doors. Once they were all open, I stood back and looked at them for a moment. Each lockup was full to the brim. I could see the ends of sofas, mattresses, dressers, some really ugly lamps, easy chairs, a dining table, a bunch of end tables, framed art, pillows, rugs, bookcases, a console television—and boxes, lots and lots of boxes. Each lockup seemed to have a path that went through to the back.

"We should each take one," I suggested. "Preferences?"

"I want the center one," Ronnie said.

"I'll take 1018," John said. It was the one to the left.

"Okay, let's get going," I said as I headed for 1020.

They'd left me the lockup with the most boxes. Which was good because what was in them was probably what I wanted. But also bad because it meant I had to lift them.

Years ago, twelve years ago, I got shot. The bullet went through my chest messing up a rib, nicking a lung, and doing a number on my right shoulder blade. That had resulted in one surgery. The doctors had such a good time with that, they wanted to do it again six months later. But by that time I was gone, and seeing a doctor was not exactly a priority.

And it's really not that bad. I have trouble getting things off the top shelf—and when you're six-foot-three people ask you to get things off the top shelf all the time. I'm a continual disappointment. I also have trouble with things like push-ups and pull-ups and lifting weights. Bodybuilding was out of the question. And I have a problem with heavy boxes—well, heavy anything.

In lockup 1020, there were fifteen boxes lined up, five deep, three tall, right next to the door. The only way I was going to be able to open them was to move them out to the hallway. I grabbed the first one; it was just below chest height. Not too bad. But then I had to put it down. I squatted and then a pain shot through my shoulder. I got the box close to the floor and dropped it.

The box had been taped closed. I pulled out my keys and used the key to my Jeep to open the box. Inside, I found six thick, red lawbooks. I didn't bother looking at the titles, they weren't what I wanted. I pulled the next box out, the one below the first. Same thing. Law books. Different color. I decided to leave the bottom row of boxes where they were. I opened that box. More legal books.

Then I began shifting the boxes from one stack to another, so I didn't have to move them far. I worked my way through all fifteen boxes. Nothing but legal books. It had taken a half an hour for me to look in the fifteen boxes. This was going to take a while.

I asked myself why Edwin or his brother hadn't taken the books. But then I realized they were probably outdated. Patrick was eighty. He likely stopped practicing ten, fifteen years ago. The books were out-of-date. Useless.

Why did they keep them at all, then? I couldn't imagine the Karpinskis loading up a moving van themselves. They must have hired movers and then not paid a lot of attention. I left the two boxes I'd put into the hallway out there and moved on.

Next to the boxes was an absurdly large, mahogany desk with a couple of straight-backed chairs sitting on top of the leather inlaid surface. I moved the chairs, sat down in one of them, and began opening the drawers. The drawer in the center contained things you'd expect: pencils, pens, erasers, stamps, business cards, a stapler, a staple-remover, matchbooks, paperclips, clamps and a cigarette lighter.

The top drawer on the left side contained stationary, both letter-sized and note-sized. The drawer directly below was full of boxed envelopes. Several sizes. And below that, manila envelopes 9x12.

On the right side, there were only two large drawers. The top drawer held an old black, rotary desk phone. The kind the telephone company used to rent. It was always the cheapest one when phones began to come in colors.

But all that was a long time ago. Patrick must have bought the phone at some point. I wondered if it still worked. The bottom drawer was filled up with cassettes. They were numbered P1, P2, P3… or at least I assumed that. They weren't in order. What I was seeing was P12, P8, P2. I suppose there were around fifteen tapes. I had no idea what they were. I'd have to look around for a tape deck somewhere.

I decided I ought to check on Ronnie and John. But as I walked out of the lockup, I took in what else was there. Beyond the desk were a couple of shovels, a stack of four tires with a toolbox sitting on top of them, rakes, gardening tools. This was starting to make some sense. These were the contents of the garage. The boxes and the desk had been in a study. There was a brown leather sofa, tufted and long. That too would have been in the study. And there were two wing-backed chairs in a brown-and-black plaid.

Stepping out, I walked the few steps over to 1019. There was no hint of Ronnie. I stepped in, noticing a large, simple sofa in a ghastly gold velvet fabric. There were more boxes against the wall, which Ronnie hadn't opened yet. That annoyed me.

"Ronnie?"

"Back here."

He was at the very back of the lockup, on the far side. He'd pushed some furniture away and was staring at two green chairs. They were trimmed in carefully carved wood—the arms, the legs, and around the back cushion. French provincial? I wasn't sure. They certainly looked like they belonged at some castle somewhere a few centuries back.

"Look at these," Ronnie said. "Aren't they fabulous?"

"If you like green." Actually, green was fine as long as it didn't look like pea soup or mint candies. These chairs were definitely pea soup.

"I'd have them reupholstered. I know a place. Do you think they'll sell them to you?"

"I have no idea. That's not why they gave me keys. What else did you find?"

"There are a lot of old albums."

"Photo albums?" I asked, getting excited.

"No, record albums. Doris Day. Frank Sinatra. Ella Fitzgerald. That kind of album. And a record player. The kind that's on legs. You slide the lid back when you're not listening to it. It's totally cool."

"My mother had one like that in the sixties."

"And I adore this sofa," he stepped past me to the simple gold sofa.

"Did you find anything that might be useful, to me?"

"Not really."

"This is the living room furniture, right?"

"On this side. That's bedroom furniture over there."

"Is that a grand piano?"

"It is."

"Don't people put photographs on top of those?"

"You want me to find the photographs?"

"I do."

"Okay. I will."

"Can you open these boxes?"

"Fine."

I'd ruined his fun. I was a terrible person. I left him and went next door to ruin whatever fun John was having. 1018 had some furniture at the front: a floral loveseat, some end tables, crazy lamps. But as you went back, boxes, and then some old typewriters and office items.

"Hey," I said. "What are you finding?"

"Dinnerware, pots and pans, utensils. But look at this…" He led me over to the typewriters, two of them: one looked like it was from the fifties, a Royal, and the other looked even older, a Remington. John moved them so we could look at what was underneath. It was basically a white table with an IBM Selectric sunk into one end and a box holding two cassette decks at the other.

"What is that?" I asked.

"I think it's some kind of word processor from the seventies. These are the tapes it uses," he said, showing me a box on the floor. "The manual is underneath."

"So, you think the tapes are like floppy disks?"

"Yeah. I think so. I mean, they can't hold much."

"I found some of those in Patrick's desk."

From where I stood, I could see that these cassettes were labeled differently: 75-106, 75-223, 75-004. Obviously, the year and then a number for the document or documents. Legal documents. I mean, that made sense, right? But what were the cassettes in Patrick's desk?

"Have you seen any bags or empty boxes?"

"Um, yeah. It's not big," he said, reaching under one of the typewriters and pulling out a yellowing Fred Segal bag.

"Thanks. Matchbooks. Business cards. Anything personal."

"Got it."

I started to walk away, and he said, "Hey, thanks for this. It's fascinating in a creepy way."

"I should be thanking you, I appreciate the help."

I walked out of 1018. On the way back to 1020, I looked into 1019 and saw that Ronnie was opening the boxes like I'd asked. "What are you finding?"

"Books."

"Law books?"

"No. Fiction."

I stood behind him and looked into the boxes. Herman Wouk, Ira Levin, Gore Vidal, John Updike, Christopher Isherwood, Philip Roth. A who's who of American letters. The male edition. There were women who wrote in the sixties and seventies, but it didn't look like Patrick read them.

I went back into 1020. After scooping up the matchbooks and business cards and putting them into the Fred Segal bag, I looked the room over and thought this through. There had to be tax information. Bills. Patrick's library or den or home office seemed to end up in this lockup. His paperwork had to be here. The thing is, I couldn't find anything remotely like a filing cabinet. There should be nice ones, wooden ones, ones that would have matched his desk. But I didn't see anything like that.

A few minutes later, I did find another box behind the leather sofa. When I opened it up, I found five accordion files that held Patrick Giles bills from 1990-1994. Success, of a sort.

Right away, I saw that something was wrong. They were neat and organized and recent. The man I'd met the other day would not have been able to keep his records like this just two years ago. What I should have been seeing is decline. I could believe he'd be able to put together a file like this in 1990. But the files would have, should have declined with him. They should have become increasing messy and disorganized. But they weren't.

I stepped out of the lockup. Ronnie was still looking through boxes of books.

"Hey John, come here a minute."

I waited for John to come out. When he was standing with Ronnie and me, I said, "You know how when a gay guy dies, his friends go into this apartment or house before his family so they can take out all the porn and sex toys and anything else that might upset his family?"

"Been there, done that," John said.

"Do you think that's what we're looking at here? Someone's gone through Patrick's stuff and taken out anything that would tell you he's gay."

"Makes sense."