Harlan's Race

had made the dean suspect him as well. In a second round of muffled homophobia, Denny was removed from the team. He dropped out of school, did a hitch in Nam, got himself into police work. Now he was a California SWAT man, with a rep as a sniper. He’d been married, divorced, treated for on-the-job stress. And he’d been in and out of New York a couple of times when I was being harassed. Spookiest of all, Russell learned that Denny knew the Joshua Force leader.
    Other files contained all the abortive efforts to connect Mech with other old grudges from my past.
    Breakfast over, Russell put away the files. We strolled outside and played with the terriers on the lawn, where we couldn’t be overheard. I had my unhappy Jess on a leash.
    “What do you think about the files, Harlan?” Russell asked.
    “Joshua Force,” I said with a shiver.
    ‘Yeah,” said Russell. “We’re going to see more and more like them. That kind of guy doesn’t like free love, uppity liberated women, or fags. America is what the Bible says, to them. What about your ex-wife?”
    “She hates me, all right,” I admitted. “Especially because of Michael. And she’s rich enough to afford a hit man. But Chino has this theory that LEV. likes me. Mary Ellen doesn’t like me. She’d dust me in a minute.”
    “The way she talked to John Sive, she’d torture you first.” “Maybe.”
    “Denny?”
    “I think he’s the strongest candidate. Denny’s a loco and a plotter ... always was. Wonder if he’s connected to Joshua Force.”
    “I’m checking it out,” said Russell.
    Strolling across the meadow, we came to an old tree stump. Chino used it as a conference table, spreading out a Los Angeles Parks Department map of Griffith Park.
    “Jeez, the park is big,” I said. “Bigger than Central Park.”
    “Almost sixty square miles,” said Chino. “Bounded by the 5 freeway on the east here. Forest Lawn Cemetery and the L.A. Zoo on the north. To the west is the 101, and Los Feliz Boulevard on the south here. Griffith is a real maze of green for our shooter to lose himself in.”
    A winding loop was marked through the park, in red ink.
    ‘The course?” I asked.
    “It starts here, at the ranger station near Los Feliz. It ends near the start.” Chino’s brown finger moved expertly over the map. “Here... and here... a few places that I remember, overlooking the course. Good hides. When we get back to LA., I’ll sneak and peek.”
    “Let’s hope Vince’s health holds up,” Russell said.
    I looked at Russell.
    “You’ve spent a helluva lot of money and time doing this. Why?”
    Russell’s pale blue eyes went briefly dark. Clearly his personal motive had little to do with an hour in a hotel room long ago. I realized he had been in the stands in Montreal that day. He’d passed up watching his horse go in the grand prix, so he could watch a boy that he secretly admired go in the 5000-meter.
    New Year’s 1980-1981
    Chino and I took Interstate 80 west. Nights in motels were consumed with fierce therapy. We thought we’d try to see Betsy and Marla and Falcon. But to our surprise, when we called them from Reno, their number was disconnected. The Ricelands College switchboard told us Betsy was no longer with the school. This was a disturbing development. I was starting to feel like a father pursuing an ex-wife across state lines in a child-custody fight.
    ‘What’ll you bet,” I said, “that Betsy and Marla read the Advocate piece too? Maybe they got scared.”
    Wanting to find out more, we stopped at the campus in Marysville, pretending to be friends passing through. In the personnel office, we were aghast when a woman took us aside and said quietly that Marla had been killed in a car accident right after Thanksgiving. Marla’s family, who knew she was a lesbian, swooped in to take the body, and barred Betsy from the funeral.
    Briefly, our two minds saw the work of LEV. here. But the woman kept talking. The accident had happened on Business 80 in Sacramento, in one of those dense fogs that blanket the Valley in winter. Five cars were involved, and three other people were killed. Betsy had been devastated, the woman said. It seemed like she had vanished overnight. She had left no forwarding address.
    I wrote a sorrowful note to Betsy and left it to be forwarded, in case she was in touch.
    As Chino and I drove on, we were choked into silence. We detoured onto Business 80, and saw where the guardrail had been crumpled everywhere