The Burning Plain

by Michael Nava

  “We’re not a bunch of bodhisattvas, Raymond,” I said. “Take a drive down Santa Monica Boulevard and tell me those boys are free.”

  “I said we’ve been forced to know ourselves, I didn’t say we liked it. For most of us, that self-knowledge stops when we come out of the closet and then we build other closets. The ghettos. Addictions. Codependent relationships. Places to hide from ourselves. But the thing is,” he continued, “once you begin to know yourself, it’s very hard to stop the process for good. Even your killer must know somewhere in some corner of his mind that no matter how many gay men he kills, he will never kill the gay man inside.”

  “But how many others will have to die before he sees that?” I asked.

  From Reynolds’s office in Beverly Hills, I headed east on Sunset to Hollywood to meet Richie for lunch. In the rearview mirror was another police surveillance car. I’d been followed more or less constantly since being questioned about Alex’s death. Approaching La Brea, traffic came to a dead stop, though the distant signal light was green, entombing me in my car. Sunlight smeared the windshield. Car horns began their pointless cacophony. A toothless man in rags, carrying a cardboard sign that said WILL WORK FOR BEER pressed his sunbaked face against my window. I looked away and he moved on, weaving between the cars like one of the damned. A fragment of a poem passed through my head, “I myself am hell; nobody’s here.” Where was that from?

  A horn blasted behind me. The road had cleared while I was trying to remember the poet. Robert Lowell. Part of that generation of poets who went crazy or killed themselves or both. Plath, Berryman, I put the gear and moved forward, winging the intersection as the light changed from yellow to red, turning north on La Brea toward Hollywood Boulevard. Off on the curb I saw the cause of the delay. Two paramedics were lifting a gurney into an ambulance. On the gurney was a body, covered with a bloodied sheet.

  I pulled into a parking lot off Hollywood and walked to Richie’s office. A heat wave had descended on the city, causing an inversion. The smog hung in the motionless air, like the respiration of a great, unseen beast, a dirty veil that curtained the city and left its inhabitants to stew in their own filth. The sidewalk on Hollywood Boulevard glittered with some shiny mineral ground into the concrete to suggest the sparkle of Hollywood, but the bronze stars of the “Walk of Fame” embedded in it were like gravestones. Across the street from Richie’s office, in front of Mann’s Chinese Theater, tourists photographed each other standing in the footprints of dead stars. As I entered his building, I looked over my shoulder, but for now I’d eluded my police escort.

  Except for the framed magazine covers that lined the walls of the reception room, the offices of L.A. Mode, from the industrial gray carpet to the blonde faux Scandinavian furnishings, were as functional and unadorned as a dental office. The receptionist, a tousle-haired blond with capped teeth, apparently mistaking me for a movie agent, greeted me with a big smile.

  “Hi, can I help you?”

  “I’m having lunch with Mr. Florentino. My name is Rios.”

  “I’ll let him know you’re here.” He whispered into the phone for a minute, then said, “He said to go on back to his office.”

  I made my way down the gray carpeted hallway, past the utilitarian cubicles that housed editorial and production. The decor of Richie’s corner office was inspired by the Chinese Theater across the street. The walls were painted the color of coagulated blood, satiny gold drapes billowed across the windows, and a gold-and-crystal chandelier hung from the acoustical ceiling. Richie ran the magazine from behind a massive, inlaid, Biedermeier desk. A table and six chairs in the same ponderous style sat on a faded blue-and-white carpet of Chinese design. A large vase held a bouquet of huge wilted peonies giving off the scent of vegetable decay.

  He was sitting at the table reading a long fax, a MontBlanc fountain pen in one hand, a cigarette burning in the other, wearing an avocado-green shirt and a blue tie patterned with orange and yellow tulips. A linen blazer the color of cornflowers hung neatly from a hanger on the coat rack by the door. He looked up at me with red-rimmed eyes.

  “Asshole,” he said, with weary irritability. “The cops have been here for the last two days questioning me about the murder. I’ve got a magazine to run. Why did you give them my name?”

  I pulled out a chair. It was stacked with folders. When I moved them, a picture of Duke Asuras fluttered to the floor. I sat down. “Because I was about three inches from being arrested.”

  He waved his hand dismissively. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Goddammit, Richie,” I shouted, tearing the fax from his hand. “I’ve got cops following me everywhere I go, waiting to catch me chopping up someone else. They tore my house and car apart and my own lawyer looks at me like I could’ve done it.”

  He put his cigarette out in a crystal bowl. “What do you want me to do about it?”

  “What did the cops ask you?”

  “They wanted to know about your relationship with Alex.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “I said as far as I knew you’d just gone out with him once.”

  “As far as you knew?” I said. “Richie, you know I only went out with him one time, because you paid for it. Or did you forget to mention that to the cops?”

  “I didn’t see that it was relevant.”

  I looked at him. “This is not a game. Cops don’t believe in the presumption of innocence. You feed them weasel words like ‘as far as I know’ and they’re going to draw adverse conclusions.”

  “Did you kill him, Henry?” he demanded, fishing for another cigarette.

  “You know I didn’t.”

  “Then what the fuck are you worried about?”

  “I’d like to be spared the humiliation of being arrested for murder and the trouble of having to clear myself,” I replied. “The only way I can do that is by offering up the cops another suspect. I think Alex was killed by one of his clients. You told me he kept an appointment book. When I went to his house after you called me Saturday, I didn’t see an appointment book, but it did look like someone had broken in and removed some things.”

  “What things?”

  “A computer, papers. Maybe the book. And what about the roommate?” I said. “Katie Morse. As far as I know, she’s still missing. You knew Alex. You must have some ideas about who killed him.”

  He shook his head. “Boys like Alex have been coming to Hollywood by the busload for eighty years because someone back in East Jesus told them they ought to be in the pictures. In Alex’s case, it was some agent he blew for his card. The straight ones get married, go to work for the phone company and move to the Valley. The gay ones end up strung out on crystal or peddling their asses on Santa Monica. Alex got a break. Someone important liked him and passed him around to his friends.”

  “And one of them killed him.”

  “Oh, please, Henry,” he said. “We’re talking about rich and powerful men.”

  “Who are also closeted.”

  “You think they paid Alex with personal checks or posed for pictures with him? These guys could teach the Mafia something about omertà. Besides not even the tabloids are interested in stories about gays in Hollywood. Their readers don’t care about cocksuckers. They want to know how Oprah keeps the weight off.”

  “Some of his clients were into S&M,” I persisted. “Could this have been a scene that went too far?”

  “You want to know who killed Alex. I’ll tell you,” he exhaled a plume of smoke. “Over lunch.”

  We crossed the street to the Hotel Roosevelt, where Richie had a standing lunch reservation at Theodore’s, the hotel restaurant. In exchange for his patronage, he was allowed, discreetly and illegally, to smoke at his table. The Roosevelt, as Richie rarely failed to remind me, was the site of the first presentation of the Academy Awards. After years of neglect, it had been refurbished as part of the city’s bid to revitalize Hollywood. The face-lift had succeeded, and the Roosevelt of the 1920s was recreat
ed down to every last potted palm in the cathedral-ceilinged lobby, but the rest of Hollywood continued to resist the efforts of the city planners. As a result, the elegant old hotel was surrounded by tee-shirt shops, falafel stands and wig shops that served the needs of Hollywood’s legion of transvestite prostitutes.

  Theodore’s was a calm, beige space separated from the lobby by a large plate of etched glass. Pale light suffused the room from tall, narrow, heavily draped windows. It was like walking into an earlier time, and I never entered there without expecting to find it filled with the shades of deceased movie stars raising ghostly cocktails to their pale lips. Instead, it was virtually empty and as quiet as a mausoleum, because Hollywood had long since decamped from Hollywood, leaving it to the drag queens and the tourists.

  Richie inspected the purple napkins at the table, and frowned. “Whose idea was this?” he demanded of the waitress, a slight, dark girl whose name plate identified her as Isabel from Mexico, DF.

  “Pardon,” she said, so flustered by him that she gave the word its Spanish pronunciation.

  “Purple napkins? What is this, a Puerto Rican wedding? Bring me a martini. And an ashtray.”

  “You have a theory about Alex’s murder,” I prompted.

  Richie was contemplating the empty room. He inspected the flatware and disdainfully removed the little vase with its two wilted carnations from the table.

  “I don’t know why I give a fuck about Hollywood. It certainly doesn’t give a fuck about itself.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m working on the biggest story of my career,” he said. Isabel brought his martini and his ashtray. He tasted the drink and smacked his lips. “At least the bartender can still pour a decent martini.”

  After she took our orders and left, I asked him, “I came to talk about Alex.”

  “I’m talking about the death of Hollywood,” he said, with a regal wave of his hand. “The murder of Hollywood. It’s a damn sight more tragic than the murder of Alex Amerian.”

  “Maybe to you,” I said.

  “Absolutely to me,” he said. “I couldn’t have survived the crazy house without it.”

  “Watching movies after lights out. I know. You’ve told me,” I said, impatient to get back to Alex’s murder.

  He narrowed his eyes. “But you don’t know, Henry, because I never told you how they treated homosexuality back then at the Chase-Levinger Hospital in Battle Creek, Michigan. Have I?”

  “No,” I sat back. Richie was on a tear. There was nothing to do but wait it out.

  “They attached electrodes to my body and then showed me gay pornography and when I responded, they sent an electric current through me.” He took a long swallow of his drink. “They called this aversion therapy. I was fourteen years old. I’d never seen pornography before. My fantasy was to hold hands with the football captain between classes. They showed me pictures of men doing things I didn’t know were physically possible. Of course I responded. I couldn’t help myself. They kept increasing the voltage until I had to be treated for second-degree burns. This went on week after week for almost two years. It’s amazing I don’t have some weird sexual fetish involving cable jumpers.” He tried to smile, but it came out a twitch. “Sometimes I tried closing my eyes, so I wouldn’t see the pictures, but then they’d shock me harder. You see, they wanted me to look. They wanted it to hurt to be a fag. I could’ve told them it already did. I thought they were going to kill me. So I taught myself to dream with my eyes open, to look at those pictures and see other things.”

  “What things?”

  “Scenes from movies. They’d show me porn but I’d be seeing Bette Davis rooting around in her garden in Dark Victory, or Norma Shearer flashing her jungle-red fingernails in The Women. I stopped getting hard-ons. They decided the treatments were a success. But they kept me there until I was eighteen and they had to release me legally. Four years, Henry, that’s how long my family had me institutionalized. I spent the last two years giving blow jobs in the bathrooms to the orderlies. I learned my technique from watching their porn, so I guess the therapy was successful.”

  “That’s gruesome.”

  The waitress delivered our food. He ordered another martini.

  “I don’t want your pity,” he said, after she left. “I told you that story so you’d understand what movies mean to me. My case was extreme, but there were a lot of other gay boys like me who survived their childhoods because Hollywood gave them something else to dream about. That’s why I’m going after Duke Asuras.”

  “You lost me, Richie.”

  “Do you know who James Longstreet is?”

  “Of course,” I said. “Every gay person in America knows who he is. What about him?”

  “Fundamentalist evangelical asshole,” Richie spat. “He was staying here at the hotel once and got caught in the middle of a gay rights demonstration. When he got back to Buttfuck, Virginia, he sent out a fundraising letter that claimed the fags were pounding at his door, like wild animals, ready to tear him limb from limb.” His face darkened to apoplectic purple. “I wish someone would kill the fat fuck. Don’t you?”

  “I don’t wish anyone dead,” I said. “On the other hand, there are definitely people I wish would shut up and he’s one of them.”

  “He’s a murderer,” Richie said. “Think of all those little gay boys and girls out there trapped in so-called Christian families, forced to listen to him week after week tell them how God hates fags and AIDS is their punishment. Every time one of those kids commits suicide, the blood’s on his hand.”

  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.”