The Burning Plain (25 page)

“Look at these,” she said, digging into her briefcase.

She slapped a stack of pink phone messages on the table. I glanced through them. They were all from either Mr. or Mrs. Jellicoe.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Tom Jellicoe’s parents. They live in Colorado Springs. Their priest told them Tom’s death was a blessing in disguise. After the newspaper ran the story of his murder, the Jellicoes got hate calls. Mrs. Jellicoe sent me Tom’s baby pictures, his high school yearbook. She told me she wanted me to know who he was, so I wouldn’t stop looking for his murderer just because he was gay.” She slipped the phone messages back into her briefcase. “I make it a policy not to come out to victims or witnesses, but I came out to her so that she would understand that I understood. Now she calls me two or three times a day because she doesn’t have anyone else to talk to. People in her town think this guy did her a favor by killing her faggot son. I hold the phone to my ear and listen to her cry. I promised her I would find the man who killed Tom.”

“My client didn’t kill anyone.”

“Then let’s finish the lineup,” she said. “If he wasn’t in the alley, she won’t ID him. If he was, Henry, I want him off the streets today.”

“You said she repeated the statement to you verbatim. That sounds like coaching to me.”

She was about to answer when there was a knock at the door and then Gaitan entered the room.

“The lady picked his client,” he thrust his chin at me. “She’s positive it was him.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“I told you to hold off on the lineup,” Serena said, angrily.

“I admonished her,” Gaitan said.

For a moment, Serena and I were both too stunned to speak.

“You conducted a lineup of my client without telling me?” I said. I grinned at Serena. “You can kiss that identification goodbye.”

She had turned beet red. “Goddamn you, Gaitan. Haven’t you ever heard of right to counsel?”

“Miranda only applies to questioning,” he replied.

“Not hardly,” I said. “You can fill Gaitan in on the law later. Right now my client and I are leaving.”

“I arrested him,” Gaitan said.

“Then unarrest him.”

“Cut him loose,” Serena said wearily.

Gaitan looked at her and said, “No.”

“The lineup was improper,” she said, speaking slowly. “The ID won’t hold up. Cut him loose.”

“Lady,” he said, “isn’t it time you remembered whose team you’re on?”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“What are you, a DA or a dyke?”

She pushed past him to the lineup room. I followed her, Gaitan behind me. She grabbed the nearest deputy and ordered him to bring Travis to the room. He arrived in handcuffs, so pale I thought he would pass out from shock. She ordered the cuffs removed.

“Take him,” she told me. “Go.”

“He ain’t going anywhere,” Gaitan said.

“I’ll escort you out,” she said, ignoring him.

Gaitan grabbed her arm. “Let’s knock this shit off.”

She spun around, shaking him off. “You touch me again, I’ll have you arrested for battery. I’m going to write you up as soon as I get back to my office. Why don’t you shut your fucking mouth before you make it worse for yourself.”

He looked as if he’d been slapped, then he recovered, grinned. “Hey, you’re the Man. You want to cut this guy loose, it’s all on you.”

Out in the parking lot, I sent Travis to the car and told her, “You did the right thing in there.”

“Don’t thank me,” she said, snapping on a pair of sunglasses. “Gaitan fucked up, not me. I can still use Schilling.”

“You’ll never get her ID in,” I said. “I’ll argue that any future identification was tainted by what happened this morning.”

“I’m talking about her statement,” she said. “I can still use that.”

Before I could ask her what she meant, she was striding across the lot. I got into my car, where Travis huddled in the passenger seat.

“Am I under arrest?” he asked, as I started up the car.

“No,” I said. “Gaitan produced a last-minute witness who claimed she saw you in the alley, driving the Lucky Taxi, the morning Amerian was killed.” When he didn’t respond, I glanced over at him. “Bob?”

“Pull over,” he gasped. I pulled the car to the curb. He opened the door and threw up into the gutter.

I was sitting in Travis’s antique-filled apartment waiting for him to come out of the bathroom, where he had been for the past fifteen minutes. I’d heard the tap run and then nothing. Finally, I called him. A moment later, he stumbled out. His eyes swam in and out of focus.

“What were you doing in there?”

He sprawled in a chair. “Relaxing.”

“What are you on, Bob?”

“Quaalude,” he said. “For my nerves.”

“How many?”

His eyelids fluttered. “Enough.”

“How many?”

“One, two,” he said. “I’m tired. I want to rest.”

“Don’t fall apart on me.”

“I’ll be all right,” he said, closing his eyes.

I sat with him, watching for signs of an overdose, but after awhile it became clear he was merely asleep. I shook him into consciousness long enough to get him to bed, then I went into his bathroom and searched it for other drugs. I found small dosages of everything from crystal meth to Percocet; party drugs, recreational drugs. I flushed them down the toilet and called Nick Donati. I caught him as he was leaving for a meeting, but there was more than impatience in his cold, “What do you want, Henry?”

“Something wrong, Nick?”

He was silent. “Say what you have to say.”

“All right,” I said. “Detective Gaitan has produced an eyewitness who said she saw Bob coming out of the alley where the first victim was dumped,” I said, and recounted the morning’s events.

“That’s ridiculous,” he said. “His witness has to be a fake.”

“That’s my working assumption, too,” I replied, “at least until I interview her.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“The DA in charge of the case is operating under a different assumption. She talked to the woman, and she believes her. I’m pretty sure she’s going to use the witness’s statement to obtain either a search warrant or an arrest warrant. I wanted you to know this is about to escalate.”

“Media?”

“If there’s an arrest, I don’t see how it can be avoided.”

“Shit,” he muttered.

“Meanwhile, Bob seems to be falling apart. I just flushed his pharmaceuticals down the toilet, but at the moment he’s passed out on Quaaludes. I think someone should be here to keep an eye on him.”

“Can’t you stay?”

I glanced at my watch. It was nearly noon. “I’ve got a suppression motion in Torrance at one-thirty,” I said. “If I don’t show up, I’ll be held in contempt.”

“All right, I’ll take care of Bob,” he said. “I’ll call you tonight. Meanwhile, don’t talk to anyone in the media again.”

“Again?”

“You heard me,” he said, and hung up.

Puzzled by his peremptory tone, I put the phone down, checked on Travis, and left.

When I got home that evening, I found a FedEx envelope at my door from Richie Florentino. I called Travis, but his line was busy, so I returned some other calls that had come in while I was in court. As I talked on the phone, I opened the package and out slipped the September issue of
L.A. Mode
with a note from Richie on a pink Post-It stuck to the cover. On the cover were pictures of Duke Asuras and Reverend Longstreet at their most predatory, under the headline:
THE SECOND COMING: JESUS IN TINSELTOWN
. The note read:
Couldn’t wait
to
hear from you. R.
I shook my head and put the magazine aside while I finished my calls. I ordered some food from the chicken place down the street, and when it arrived I went out on the deck to eat and read Richie’s big story.

It was essentially the one Richie’d told me weeks earlier, about the battle between Parnassus Studio and its corporate parent, Parnassus Company, over the direction of the studio and the distribution of credit and profit. Continually thwarted by the Company’s board of directors, Asuras and his boss, Raskin, had conducted secret negotiations with Reverend Longstreet to buy a majority interest in the Company and stack the board with directors favorable to Raskin and Asuras.

There was nothing libelous in the first few pages of the article, which outlined the byzantine machinations of the parties. Although the studio had become wildly profitable under Asuras, the company’s stock value had never completely reflected this profitability. A majority of the board of directors, led by its chairman, an investment banker named Adler, blamed this on Wall Street’s continuing doubts about Asuras’s personal honesty and integrity because of his record as a convicted embezzler. Adler and his allies had tried to force Raskin, who had final authority in personnel matters, to fire Asuras. Raskin refused, igniting a corporate civil war. Raskin himself could not be fired by the board, even had Adler had the votes, because there were two years remaining on his five-year contract. The article detailed acrimonious board meetings, venomous memos, leaks and counter-leaks, all of which were slowly eroding the studio’s standing as Hollywood’s “creative community” awaited the outcome of the power struggle. Projects that would have been offered to Parnassus were now shopped elsewhere first while other studios openly poached projects already in development there.

Asuras and Raskin had devised a plan to invite a third-party investor to buy Adler out and replace him and two of his allies with directors who would give Asuras free rein. The third-party investor would make Adler an offer he couldn’t refuse: triple the value of his stock. If he did refuse, the investor would launch a public takeover of the company. To finance that kind of warfare, Asuras and Raskin needed deep pockets, a cash-rich investor with a burning desire to get into Hollywood. They found one in Reverend Longstreet, sole proprietor of a billion-dollar media empire anchored by his cable network FVTV or Family Values Television. FVTV alternated reruns of fifties and sixties sitcoms and self-produced religious epics with the most rancid hate-mongering on the public airwaves. In the margins of the story, Richie had quoted from Longstreet’s writings and set them off in bold, oversized type: “God does not hear the prayers of Jews”; “God has ordained the family for the propagation of life and it is not a voluntary association”; and “God hates homosexuality today as much as he did in Lot’s day.”

“You can imagine the Reverend’s movies,” the writer noted, “Walt Disney meets Leni Riefenstahl. They’d make
The Sound of Music
look like Last
Tango in Paris
.”

According to the piece, in a series of meetings between Longstreet and Asuras and Raskin conducted in secret at the home of Cheryl Cordet, a director Longstreet admired, the three men had plotted the takeover of the company, which was to be announced on September first. Longstreet was dispatched in a few paragraphs. The real venom was saved for Asuras. The section on him began: “
To call Duke Asuras soulless gives him too much credit. When someone asked him back in the seventies, during his earlier incarnation as a million-dollar-a-year agent (this was before he kited $20,000 worth of checks from a brain-addled, heroin-addicted client), what he wanted, Asuras summed himself up in a single word, ‘More.’
”

I skimmed the account of Asuras’s embezzlement conviction until my eye fell on the words “
Rios, a prominent criminal defense lawyer
.”

“Richie, you didn’t,” I sputtered through a mouthful of cornbread.

“
Adding to the studio’s troubles, there are rumors that Duke might be up to his old tricks. Henry Rios, a prominent criminal defense lawyer, recently had a secret meeting with Parnassus’s head lawyer, the incredibly shrinking Nicholas Donati. Rios would only say he’d been hired by the studio to represent an employee under investigation by the police for ‘a serious felony.’ Like embezzlement?
”

“Richie …” I muttered. An accusation of criminal activity was slander
per se
.

“
No one’s saying, but negotiations between the two sides suddenly stalled and then the criminal lawyer appeared on his mysterious errand.
”

I suddenly understood why Donati had been so sharp with me when we’d talked earlier. He had obviously seen the article and concluded that I’d given Richie an interview because we were friends. The phone in my office rang. I tossed the magazine aside and went to answer.

“Mr. Rios?” as unfamiliar woman’s voice asked.

“Yes, who is this?”

“I’m Kate Krishna from Eyewitness News on KVUE,” she said. “I wanted your comment on a breaking story that involves a man named Robert Travis …”

I cut her off. “What story? What are you talking about?”

“Our sources tell us that Mr. Travis was arrested for the Invisible Man killings in West Hollywood earlier today, but then he was released by the District Attorney handling the case even after a witness identified him as the murderer. As his lawyer, you …”

“How did you find out about this?”

“Is it true?”

“Was it Detective Gaitan from the sheriff’s department?”

“You were a suspect in this case yourself at one time, weren’t you?”

“Yeah, and he probably leaked that to you, too,” I said. “Doesn’t that give you some idea of his reliability?”

“So you’re saying your client’s innocent?”

“Are you admitting your source is Gaitan?”

After an equivocal silence, she said, “Will you talk to me if I tell you my source was someone in the sheriff’s office?”

“I’ll talk to you after I’ve talked to my client.”

“Okay,” she said, “but we’re running this on the ten o’clock broadcast.”

I glanced at my watch. It was a quarter after eight. “You can run my denial,” I said. “Oh, and remember Richard Jewell before you convict my guy on the air.”

“Richard Jewell? Who’s that?”

I hung up, called Travis and reached his answering machine. I was halfway through a message when he picked up, sounding groggy but sober.

“The press has got your story, Bob. I just got a call from a reporter from Channel Three.”

“She called me, too,” he said. “I didn’t know what to say, so I hung up on her.”