The Burning Plain (12 page)

I sipped my tea. “What does this have to do with Hollywood?”

He gulped his martini. “He wants to make movies.”

“Who? Longstreet? According to him, Hollywood’s on God’s hit list.”

“If you listen carefully,” Richie said, cutting into his steak, “beneath the fire and brimstone is the whining of a would-be player. Longstreet runs a billion-dollar media empire, including two cable networks. He’s cash rich and he’s looking to expand into Hollywood, and those fuckers at Parnassus are going to open the gates.”

“Asuras?”

Richie chewed and nodded vigorously. “I told you that Asuras and Allen Raskin, his boss at the Parnassus Company, have been feuding with their board of directors. Apparently, they decided the way to solve their problems was to find a white knight, either to buy out the major shareholder or to launch a takeover fight that would let them stack the board with their own people.”

“Longstreet is their white knight?”

“That’s what it looks like,” he said. “You can’t breathe a word of this to anyone, Henry.”

“Who would I tell?”

“I mean it. People could get hurt.”

“I’m not in your world, Richie. This isn’t important to me.”

He swallowed another chunk of meat. “You should care. If Longstreet pulls this off, he’ll get mainstream respectability. You know what that means for us?”

“You’re talking about making movies.”

“Where did your dreams come from when you were a kid, Henry?”

“My dreams came out of books,” I said.

“In another generation,” he said, “the only books are going in museums.”

“That’s a scary thing for a magazine editor to say.”

“It’s true, Henry. You know Asuras gave a speech at the Academy Awards and said Hollywood was taking over the world. He wasn’t joking. People don’t have to know how to read to go to movies.” He touched his napkin to his mouth. “Do you want Longstreet making the movies that people are going to watch in Bombay and Lagos? I don’t, and I’m going to stop him.”

“My problems are a little closer to home. You had something to tell me about Alex.”

“I think Alex was killed by an anti-gay hit squad.”

“What do you mean a hit squad?”

“Did you know his car was firebombed?”

“Yeah, he told me.”

“I think the same people who attacked him and blew up his car also killed him.”

“He also told me there were other car bombings in his neighborhood.”

“That’s right,” Richie said. “And in each case there was something on the car that identified its owner as gay, a bumper sticker or Pride flag decal.”

“That doesn’t prove the owners’ identities would’ve been known to the bombers,” I said. “The bombing of Alex’s car could’ve been a coincidence.”

“But it wasn’t,” Richie said. “It happened right after I ran the gay bashing piece. He was the only victim we interviewed who agreed to use his real name. He made himself a target by going public.”

“That’s all conjecture.”

“I heard from my source in the department that ‘kill fags’ was carved on his chest,” Richie said. “‘Kill fags.’”

“So?”

“Gee, Henry, if a black person was attacked by white racists and went to the media and then his car was blown up and then he was murdered by someone who carved ‘kill niggers’ on his body, wouldn’t it occur to you that there might possibly be a connection?”

“Touché.” I said, “But, Richie, gay bashings are random and impulsive. I saw the police pictures of Alex’s body. His murder was deliberate and methodical.”

“Since when are gay bashings impulsive?” Richie asked, disbelievingly. “These punks deliberately come into West Hollywood and stalk us. Is it so hard to believe they’d carry it a step further?”

“Did you mention any of this to the cops when they came to see you?”

“I told you, they were only interested in you,” he said. “Besides, I think the cops are in on it.”

“Now you’re in Oliver Stone territory.”

He drained his drink. “You think so? Come back to the office with me.”

Back at Richie’s office, he had his assistant dig out the file on the gay-bashing piece that had featured Alex Amerian. Among the drafts and notes was a series of photographs of toilet stalls. On the walls were graffiti. Close-ups revealed the messages “Kill all fags” and “AIDS=Anally Inserted Death Serum.”

“Nice,” I said. “What’s their relevance?”

“These pictures were taken in the men’s bathroom at the sheriff’s department headquarters in Monterey Park,” he said. “I think they pretty much sum up the sheriff’s attitude toward gays.”

“I’m no fan of the cops,” I said, “particularly at the moment, but if this is supposed to prove that deputies in West Hollywood are collaborating with gay bashers, it doesn’t. It only proves that some cops are bigots, which is, believe me, no surprise to anyone who has to deal with them.”

He threw his hands up theatrically. “Well, I give up, Henry. You asked me if I knew who killed Alex, but you don’t believe me, even after I’ve connected all the dots.”

“It isn’t that I don’t believe you,” I said. “It’s a plausible theory, but it’s just a theory.”

“I have to tell you, Henry,” he said. “If you were a reporter, you wouldn’t last here very long.”

“I’m just glad I’m not your libel lawyer.”

From Richie’s office, I drove to Century City for a meeting with Inez Montoya. I turned Richie’s theory over in my head, trying to come up with a precedent for it. I remembered a case from Texas a couple of years earlier in which a gay man had been abducted from a public park in Houston and taken out into the country and shot. The prosecutor had successfully argued that transporting the victim showed premeditation, and a jury sent the man’s murderers to death row. Why couldn’t something similar have happened in Alex’s case? Maybe after his last appointment, as he was returning home, he’d been abducted by the same men who’d attacked him and blown up his car. Maybe this murder was exactly what it appeared to be: a hate crime. Yet part of me still dismissed this scenario as Richie’s paranoia. This was partly a survival mechanism, because if I actually believed that hit squads were murdering gay men, I might become so consumed by rage or fear I’d be immobilized. But there was another reason, too. As I’d explained to Reynolds, people who inspire such homicidal hatred in others can come to believe they deserve it, subliminally if not consciously. Richie had nailed me on that. I realized it was easier for me to believe one of Alex’s closeted gay clients had hacked him to death than that he’d been murdered by a bigot, because even I struggled against this hatred of gays. And if it was true of me, how much easier would it be for the cops who were convinced they’d found the murderer. Me.

Inez was in a rumpled white linen suit behind a cluttered desk in her twenty-eighth-floor office in the south tower of the two Century City towers that dominated the skyscape of the westside of the city. Her windows looked south and west, and on clear days, she boasted, she could make out the bluish outline of Catalina Island on the horizon. The walls of her spacious office were bare and her personal belongings stacked in boxes that bore such labels as “Awards and Mementos.” With the mayoral primary coming up in less than a year, it was clear that she planned to do her unpacking downtown in City Hall.

She was on a call when I entered her office. She gestured me to a chair and masticated a piece of gum while she listened to her caller, interrupting with an occasional “Uh-huh,” or “No way.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said, ending the conversation. “I’ll talk to you later. I’ve got a client.” She hung up and spit her gum into a tissue. “The cops still following you?”

“Mostly they park outside my house. I guess they’re waiting for another victim to arrive so they can nab me in the act of beheading him.”

“Good to know you haven’t lost your sense of humor,” she remarked sarcastically. “I have the preliminary report from the search.”

“And?”

“No surprises,” she said. “They found the victim’s prints in your house and your car. They matched the blood on the doorknob and the rag to his blood type, but DNA testing will take weeks, so for now that’s inconclusive. …”

“I admitted it was his blood,” I reminded her. “Are they going to arrest me?”

“Not on this evidence,” she said. “Except for the prints, your car was clean, and there were no other bloodstains anywhere in your house except where you said they’d be. They can’t arrest you until they can explain how you carved the guy up and transported him in your car without leaving a trace.”

“The body was bloated, like it had been submerged in water.”

She nodded. “That’s why Gaitan was so interested in your bathtub. There was water in the lungs, chlorinated water, as it turned out.”

“A swimming pool?”

“Or hot tub,” she said. “The killer soaked the body. It was as clean as a whistle.”

“All the cops have got to do is find his pool-cleaning service. They must know it’s not me.”

“Detective Gaitan has a hard-on for you and I don’t mean that in a good way.”

“That’s good because he’s not my type,” I said. “Reminds me of my father, and I don’t mean that in a good way, either. Maybe the words malicious prosecution would help him overcome his animosity.”

“His investigation hasn’t crossed that line yet,” she said. “We’re just going to have to hang on for a few more days until Gaitan admits you’re a dead end.”

“What if we offered the cops an alternative to me?”

“Who are you thinking of, Henry? They executed Gacy.”

“Just listen.” I laid out Richie’s theory.

“Do the cops know any of this?” she asked angrily, when I finished. “Because if they did and they didn’t tell us, I will sue their asses for malicious prosecution.”

“You think it’s a plausible theory?”

“Plausible? Henry, I was one of the authors of the federal hate-crime law. You wouldn’t believe the things we heard at the hearings. Gay bashing is practically a Saturday-night pastime in some places. And the cops, Jesus, the gays have as much to fear from them as their attackers.” She dug a cigarette out of her purse. “It’s the same place we were at with rape twenty years ago. When the victims go to the authorities, they get victimized all over again.”

“You may want to take a look at these,” I said, slipping her the pictures of the toilet-stall graffiti. “Richie loaned them to me. He says they come from the deputy’s bathroom at sheriff’s headquarters.”

“Un-fucking-believable,” she said, flipping through them. She stuck her cigarette in the corner of her mouth and reached for her phone. “I’m going to get Gaitan’s ass down here now.”

I restrained her hand. “Wait, Inez. I have a better idea.”

She put the phone down. “Such as?”

“If Gaitan is the asshole he appears to be, I doubt whether he’s going to be impressed by anything we have to tell him. But the watch commander, Odell? He might be, especially since all this activity was going on in West Hollywood. And there’s one other person we should bring into this: Serena Dance.”

“Serena Dance,” she said, frowning.

“You know her?”

“Oh yes,” she said. “The hate-crimes unit. But you’re right. If we can convince her, she’ll call off Gaitan. I’ll set up a meeting at the West Hollywood station as soon as possible.”

“You have something against Serena?”

“That’s not important,” she said. Her phone buzzed. “I have to take this call. I’ll be in touch.”

It was dark when I returned home. My neighbor Jim Kwan came out of his house and across my yard, with a worried look on his round, good-natured face. Kwan was the head of neighborhood watch for our street, an easygoing, low-key guy, so I knew immediately something serious was up.

“Hey, Henry,” he said. “Got a minute?”

“Sure, Jim. What’s wrong?”

“I thought you should know a detective came over to my house earlier tonight and wanted to ask me and Sharon some questions about you.”

My heart sank. “What kind of questions?”

Kwan looked at his shoes. “You know, Henry, what you do in the privacy of your house is no one’s business.”

“Jim, what did he ask you?”

“It wasn’t so much what he asked,” Kwan said, “as what he told us. He said you were a suspect in a murder case and the victim was a male prostitute. He showed us pictures …” His voice trailed off. “He wanted to know if we saw or heard anything last Friday night. Jesus, Henry, what’s going on?”

“The detective’s name was Gaitan, wasn’t it?”

He reached into his shirt pocket and removed a business card. “Yeah, Montezuma Gaitan,” he said, reading the card.

“I did have company on Friday,” I said. “He was a prostitute. And he was murdered. The rest is a fabrication. Did Gaitan talk to anyone else in the neighborhood?”

“Just the Cohens,” he said, referring to the neighbors on the other side of my house. “Fred came over after Gaitan left and told me he was sure it was all a mistake.” He clamped my shoulder. “I’m glad to hear it is.”

“I’m worried about my reputation on the block.”

“Leave that to me,” Kwan said. “Listen, you eaten dinner yet? We’re just about to sit down. There’s plenty.”

In the seven years we’d been neighbors, I’d never been invited to his house for a meal.

“Thanks, Jim. I need to get some work done. Can I take a rain check?”

“Anytime, Henry,” he said. “I’ll let you know if Gaitan shows up again.”

“I’ll take care of that,” I said.

Customarily, one of the first things a defense lawyer seeks to discover from the prosecution in a criminal case is whether the officers involved in the investigation have had any citizen complaints lodged against them for excessive force or other misconduct. There was even a name for the procedure, a
Pitchess
motion, after the state appellate case that authorized the disclosure of such records. I went into my office, pulled out my Rolodex and started calling every criminal-defense lawyer I could reach at home. The next day I called the offices of those I’d missed, asking all of them the same questions, “Have you run a
Pitchess
motion on a sheriff’s homicide detective named Montezuma Gaitan? If so, can I have your file on him?” It was a distinctive name, and more than one of my colleagues remembered it quite well. My fax worked overtime.