The Burning Plain (38 page)

“Of course, I did,” Serena snapped. “Walsh said she didn’t know anything about that. All she knew was the hard-luck story Schilling told her.”

“Did she know Schilling was a witness in the Travis case?”

“She says not,” Serena replied.

“What about the coincidence of Donati hiring me to represent Travis?”

“She said she hadn’t worked for Donati for several months and didn’t know anything about it.”

“With that kind of memory, she ought to go into politics.”

“She may start remembering when the police come around.”

“What do you mean?”

“I notified the LAPD homicide detectives investigating Schilling’s murder that they might want to talk to her dear, intimate friend, Josephine Walsh.”

“Why would she be more forthcoming to them?”

“I could tell she wasn’t taking me very seriously because I’m a woman. I get that more often than I care to admit. From other women, I mean. I assume men don’t take me seriously,” she said, throwing me a sharp look. “She’ll pay attention if it’s a man asking the questions.”

“Did you tell LAPD about the connection to the Morse murder?”

“What connection, Henry?” she said, wearily.

Having just had this argument with Odell, I let it go. “What about the car bombing investigation? You heard anything from Odell?”

“He promised to get back to me by the end of the week if he had anything.” She tried the coffee again. “God, I’m beat. I’ve got a backlog of a hundred cases with new ones coming in every week. I’ve got swastikas at synagogues in Fairfax, arson threats at black churches in South Central, and some asshole going around Union-Pico, pretending to be the INS and extorting illegals. Plus Donna’s threatening me with couples’ counseling and Jesse cries whenever I leave the house.” She belched softly. “And heartburn.”

I listened quietly to her speech. “Are you flaking on me, too?”

“No.”

“Odell thinks I’m turning into a conspiracy junkie, seeing Asuras beneath every bed. You, too?”

“We talked,” she admitted. “He told me you think Asuras hired Gaitan to kill Joanne Schilling—”

“Odell was the one who said she was killed with a service revolver.”

“So naturally it’s Gaitan,” she said. “That’s the problem, right there. You’re still gunning for him.”

“Fine,” I said, “I’d be happy to get out of the business of doing the cops’ job for them if you persuaded the sheriff to reopen the investigation.”

“The sheriff’s not interested in reopening the investigation,” she said brusquely.

“How do you know? Did you ask him?”

“I wrote a memo suggesting there were some loose ends that needed looking into. Whether Katie Morse’s murder was related to Amerian’s, the murder of a key witness. The answer came back through channels this morning. Travis was the killer, the case is closed. These other two murders are completely unrelated.”

“How can they know that before they investigate?”

“Think about it, Henry,” she said. “The department’s got its hands full investigating open cases, plus those killings in West Hollywood were a political hot potato for the sheriff, thanks to you. You made him look bad. Do you really think he’s going to admit the killer is still out there somewhere? And not just any killer, Henry, but the head of a major studio. He might as well arrest the mayor.”

“But we know Asuras did it.”

“We don’t know that,” she said. “All we know is he’s connected to one of the victims and to Schilling. The rest is conjecture.”

I looked at her. “I’m not letting up.”

“I’ve got to go,” she said, scooting out of the booth. “Don’t do anything crazy, Henry.”

“What, like murder a bunch of people?”

“Henry,” Donati greeted me in his deepest register. “I’ve been meaning to call you, but, you know, there are a lot of demands on my time.”

Thus put in my place, I replied, “I can only imagine.”

“So what can I do for you?”

“You were going to get back to me about Alex’s manuscript.”

“Oh, that,” he said. “I don’t think we have anything else to talk about.”

“Asuras doesn’t care if I go to the cops?”

“I told you when you first asked for a payoff that we weren’t interested in doing business with you,” he said. “That hasn’t changed.”

“No, what you said was—” I stopped. Something in his tone alerted me that he was speaking on the record. “Are you taping this call?”

“As a matter of fact, I am, Henry. I wanted it on tape that you’re trying to blackmail Duke Asuras.”

“If you actually practiced law,” I said, “you’d know secretly taped phone calls are inadmissible in court.”

“But not at a disbarment proceeding,” he reminded me. “Different rules of evidence.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t incriminate me.

“I don’t know if I’ve offended you, or if you’re just nuts,” Donati said, “but this is going to stop. The other night at your house you tried to extort Duke with a phony document you obviously acquired from your friend Richie Florentino It was the same slanderous piece of crap he tried to use in his hatchet piece about Duke. You know you’re not going to the police with it, because if you do, I promise you, Henry, I’ll see to it you lose your license to practice law. I promise.”

He hung up.

I was awakened at one in the morning by a call coming in on my office phone. I reached for the phone.

“Mr. Rios? It’s Rod.”

“Rod,” I said, sleepily switching on the lamp. “What’s going on?”

“School starts next week,” he said. “Tonight my dad showed me the tickets for Utah. I made up my mind, I want to take them to court.”

“I know it wasn’t an easy decision,” I said.

“I talked to Mr. Wise. He’s coming down from San Francisco to meet me Saturday.” He paused. “Could you come, too?”

“I’ll be there,” I said. “I’ll call Phil in the morning and we’ll coordinate.”

Rod said, “I hope this is the right thing.”

“I don’t think they’ve left you any choice,” I said.

“Unless I change,” he said sadly. “I’ve got to go.”

He hung up and then, a second later, I heard the click of another receiver hanging up. At first I assumed one of his parents had been listening, but then I heard the distinct sound of footsteps at the other end of my house, in the office. I hopped out of bed, threw on some clothes, grabbed the baseball bat I kept beneath the bed and burst out into the living room.

“Who the fuck is out here!” I shouted, switching on the light.

The front door slammed. Footsteps echoed off the steps to the street. A car started just outside my house. I ran to the kitchen window as it sped past: a blue-and-white cab, the logo Lucky’s Taxi Service painted on the door.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
I was standing outside my office window with Jim Kwan. In his capacity as our neighborhood watch captain, he was inspecting the hole that had been cut out in the corner of the window from which, presumably, the intruder had reached in and unlatched the lock.

“Yeah,” Kwan said. “Looks like a professional. You didn’t hear him come in?”

“No,” I said. “I was asleep. If the phone hadn’t rung—” I decided against pursuing that line of speculation. “I wonder if you could canvass the neighbors, see if anyone saw anything.”

“Sure,” he said. He looked at me, his round, open face clouded. “Listen, Henry, there’s something I got to tell you.”

“About what?”

“I was talking to old Mrs. Byrne down the street,” he said, referring to the terror of the neighborhood, a bigoted old woman who spent her days reading a Bible and casting a censorious eye on the rest of us. “She said she saw a meter man hanging around your house a couple of days ago. Said he walked around from one side and came out the other.”

“The meter is in the back.”

He nodded. “I know, but Mrs. Byrne said everyone’s meters were read last week. She also told me this guy didn’t go anywhere but to your house. I should’ve said something to you, but half the time she makes things up to have a reason to talk to me.”

“Sounds like someone was casing my house.”

“I’m going to tell the security service to pay special attention to your place,” he said. “You should take care of this window as soon as you can. Did they take anything?”

“No,” I said.

“You were lucky then.”

“Yeah, lucky.”

On Saturday morning I drove to the outlet mall at the edge of the central valley town where Phil Wise and I were meeting with Rod Morse. I took Highway 99 through a landscape of field, farmland and long horizons, familiar to me from my own childhood in the valley. A dusty haze hung in the cloudless September sky. A new subdivision appeared like a weird mirage in the midst of tomato fields. A banner outside a junior high school proclaimed, YOU ARE ENTERING A DRUG-FREE AND GUN-FREE ZONE. The mall resembled a collection of barns, a tribute to the valley’s agrarian culture that was being rapidly displaced by things like subdivisions and outlet malls. Soon, all of California would be a suburb either of San Francisco or Los Angeles. Small towns like this would disappear, and while there was something to be mourned by their loss, at least urban culture might moderate the rancid local bigotries that had driven me out of my hometown and which would probably drive Rod out of his. I pulled into the parking lot in front of the Mikasa outlet store and made it to the McDonald’s, with five minutes to spare. A thin, goateed man in an electric-blue vintage suit waved me to his table.

“Henry? Phil Wise. Rod’s not here yet.”

I slipped into the booth across from him, the remains of an Egg McMuffin between us. I estimated Phil’s age at twenty-eight or twenty-nine. The suit was from the sixties and he carried it off with Gen-X panache. He had long fingers but his nails were bitten to bloody stubs.

“Nice to finally meet you face to face,” I said.

“You, too,” he replied. “I really admire you, Henry. Not many boomer lawyers are still fighting the good fight.”

Ouch, I thought, but said, “How did you get interested in this work?”

“Pentecostal parents,” he replied, smiling. He had smoker’s teeth.

“I thought things were better for your generation.”

“In the big cities, maybe,” he said. “Not in places like this or where I was raised.”

“Which was?”

“Colorado Springs,” he said. “I’d like to go over a couple of points with you before Rod gets here.”

“Sure, but I want to make clear, this is your show. I’m just here for moral support.”

We became so intent on our conversation, we didn’t notice that the crowded restaurant had grown very quiet as a phalanx of deputy sheriffs surrounded our table. Then Phil looked up and nudged me. I looked around at the beefy, glowering uniformed men.

“Is there a problem?” I asked the nearest one, a black man whose name tag identified him as Deputy Collins.

A middle-aged woman suddenly burst through the circle of cops pointing at us. “That’s them,” she shouted. “Those are the child molesters who’ve come for my boy.”

Collins said, “Philip Wise, Henry Rios. Get up.”

“What the hell is this?” Wise demanded.

“I said, get up,” Collins replied, jerking him to his feet by his shirt collar. “You’re under arrest for conspiring to commit kidnapping.”

“I want them in handcuffs,” the woman, who I now realized was Rod’s mother, screamed.

Collins complied.

Four hours later, we were sitting in a conference room at the DA’s office with a pudgy, bespectacled assistant DA named George Holly, who was trying to talk Phil out of suing the county for false arrest and false imprisonment.

“The sheriffs had a good faith belief there was probable cause to arrest you based on what Mrs. Morse told them,” Holly said defensively.

“Good faith!” Wise screamed. “Two faggots are coming to town to abduct our son? That’s your idea of probable cause? Where did you go to law school, you Nazi?”

“You were planning to remove Rod from his family,” Holly replied, his plump, pale face going apple red.

“I’m the kid’s lawyer,” Wise shouted. “Not a goddamned child molester. What I want to do and what I plan to do is get him away from those fundamentalist crazoids. By court order.”

“His lawyer? Counsel,” Holly huffed, “it’s first-semester contracts law that a minor has no capacity to make a contract for personal services, yours or anyone else’s.”

“Actually, George,” I said mildly, “you’re only half-right. A contract with a minor is voidable, not void per se, but let’s not split hairs. Phil, you sue the county if you want to, but I’d like to talk to Rod. The Morses do realize they can’t prevent Rod from talking to us, don’t they, George?”

He licked his lips, a bad sign. “That’s kind of a moot point.”

“What do you mean?”

“I want you to understand I’m not the enemy here,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “Understood. Why can’t we talk to Rod?”

“Mrs. Morse says Rod and his Dad flew to Utah last night.”

Completely deflated, Phil uttered a low, “Shit.” He looked at me. “How did they find out?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe they pressured it out of him.”

“No,” Holly said. “Mrs. Morse said she got a anonymous call yesterday. That’s how she knew.”

Phil scowled at me. “I didn’t tell anyone I was coming here.”

“I didn’t, either,” I said, and then remembered the second hang-up when I’d spoke to Rod about coming down. “I think I know what happened. Someone listened in on my conversation with Rod.”

“Who?” Wise asked.

I shook my head. “I’ll worry about that,” I said. “You try to find him.”

I had left home before eight in the morning. Twelve hours later, I turned the corner to my street and saw a large black car parked in front of my house. An old Rolls-Royce. I pulled into my driveway and got out. At the same time, the driver emerged from the black car. He was in a kind of uniform, black suit, white shirt, black tie. He was tall and muscular, and when he was near enough for me to see his face, I recognized his eyes; a saint’s eyes. My stomach dropped. Adrenaline pounded through my veins the primal message,
fight or fly
, but before I could make a conscious choice he was standing in front of me, blocking my path.