The Burning Plain

by Michael Nava

  I pulled him into the shadows. “What are you doing here, Nick?”

  “I went to a screening this evening. When I got home, there was a hysterical message from Bob on my machine. I called him back and a policeman picked up the phone, so I came right down.”

  “Bob’s dead.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” he moaned. “How?”

  “This isn’t the place to talk about it,” I said, indicating the press. “Didn’t you tell me you live in Laurel Canyon?”

  Dazed, he said, “Yeah.”

  I walked him to my car, unlocked the passenger door. “Get in,” I said.

  “What about my car? I’m double-parked.”

  “Worry about that later,” I said, pushing him into the car.

  As I drove away, the paramedics came out with Bob Travis’s body on a stretcher.

  Chapter 14

  I BACKED OUT of the driveway and drove to Sunset, then headed east to Laurel Canyon, the snaking road that connected the city to the valley. From Laurel Canyon, tributary roads forked into dark and wooded hills, where rustic bungalows elbowed million-dollar chateaux, and everyone locked up their pets at night to keep them from being carried off by coyotes. I turned off Laurel Canyon at Kirkwood. Donati directed me across a web of narrow, twisting streets to a cul-de-sac where his two-story house occupied the last lot, which backed up against the grove of eucalyptus trees. I pulled into the driveway. The fragrant trees perfumed the cool air and it was so still I could hear the rustle of small animals moving through the woods.

  The ground floor of Donati’s pillbox-shaped house was a wall of un-painted concrete, pristine and stark, partly covered by a sheet of corrugated metal. The upper floor was a wall of greenish glass, brightly lit from within, but of such distorting thickness it was impossible to see in from the street. The front door was made of hammered copper and it bore a sign that warned the house was protected by an armed-guard service. The sign seemed extraneous; the house was obviously a bunker. It took Donati a good five minutes to shut off the security alarms and let us in. Of course, his hands were shaking.

  From a small foyer paneled in dark marble, metal stairs twisted up to the second floor. I glimpsed an office and a bedroom off the foyer as I ascended behind him. The upper floor was a single big room, anchored on one end by an open kitchen and on the other by a fireplace. The kitchen gleamed, as if it had never been used. Neutral area carpets were scattered across the concrete floor. The room was sparsely furnished with leather club chairs, a matching sofa, a scattering of occasional tables. The walls were a snowy shade of white, dominated by an enormous black-and-white abstract painting that looked very much like a Franz Kline. Over the fireplace were two Mapplethorpe photographs of flowers. Between them was a small engraving. The contrast between Donati’s house and Travis’s apartment could not have been greater. Travis’s antique-cluttered apartment was pure camp. This room was as sour and penitential as a monk’s cell.

  “I need a drink,” Donati said. He tossed his keys with a clatter on a lacquered dining table, the overhead light shimmering on its surface. “You?”

  “I’ll have a Coke,” I said.

  While he slammed through the kitchen, I took a closer look at the engraving on the mantel and recognized it as one of Gustave Doré’s original drawings for the Inferno.

  “The wood of the suicides,” Donati said, coming up behind me. “From the Inferno.”

  “I recognize it,” I said, accepting a glass.

  In the Inferno, the suicides were consigned, like the sodomites, to the circle of the violent, having committed violence against themselves. They spent eternity encased in trees under attack by the Harpies, scaly, foul-smelling birds with iron talons and women’s faces, who ripped bloody branches from the trees. The suicides could speak only as long as the blood ran from their amputated limbs.

  “Did Bob kill himself?”

  I remembered the scene in the bathroom. “Not according to the cops. Why do you ask?”

  He downed his drink, slipped into a chair and filled his glass from the bottle of Chivas he’d brought from the kitchen.

  “His message. It was crazy, desperate.”

  “Did you save it?”

  He hesitated a moment, then shook his head. “It was too disturbing.”

  I sat down. “What did he say?”

  “If he didn’t kill himself, what did happen?”

  “The police say they found him facedown in the toilet. They think he mixed pills and booze and passed out while he was vomiting, and drowned.”

  Donati’s delicate fingers tightened around his glass until his knuckles went white. “He drowned in his toilet?”

  “That’s the theory. I won’t know for sure until I see the autopsy.”

  “On the message, I could hear in his voice he was drunk,” Donati said.

  “When did he leave the message?”

  “A little after nine.”

  “I spoke to him an hour earlier. He sounded sober.”

  Donati smiled grimly. “After around seven, Bob was never completely sober.”

  “Did he have a problem with drugs, too?”

  Donati nodded. “Bob didn’t like reality very much.”

  “What did he say on his message?”

  Donati took a quick drink, looked past me. “I guess it can’t hurt him now. He incriminated himself in the murders. That’s why I erased the message. That’s why I went to his apartment, to talk to him, to persuade him to talk to you.”

  “What exactly did he say?”

  “He said he was afraid to go to jail for killing those men.” He rolled his glass between his hands. “He said the police were about to arrest him. Is that true?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “They came with arrest and search warrants.”

  He swallowed more scotch, grimaced, and said, “I still can’t believe he killed those men.”

  “You knew him better than anyone.”

  He looked at me wearily. “Not really.”

  “Wasn’t he in love with you?”

  “Oh, please,” he said. “Men can’t love each other that way.”

  “Which way?”

  “The way men love women,” he said. “The way women love men. Romantic love is for making babies. We’re a different kind of biology.”

  “Bob didn’t agree?”

  Donati sprang to his feet and paced to the window. “He wanted us to live together, play house. I told him I wasn’t interested. That was the first time he tried to kill himself. It was pathetic and disgusting. He was. You see why I don’t advertise I’m gay.”

  “No, not exactly, Nick.”

  “Because I don’t want to be confused with people like Bob.” He tossed back his drink. “Drag queens, leather queens, all those sick fucks who parade around and make it impossible for the rest of us to have normal lives. You must understand that, Henry. You’re a man, like me.”

  “The bigots don’t make those distinctions,” I said. “We’re all the same to them.”

  “Why should we care what the fly-overs think?”

  “The what?”

  He went back to the table and poured himself another drink. “Everyone who lives between the coasts. The fly-overs.”

  “Does that include Reverend Longstreet?”

  He narrowed his eyes. “What are you talking about?”

  “Richie Florentino sent me a copy of next month’s issue of L.A. Mode with his exposé of your boss.”

  “That issue will never see the light of day,” he said, dismissively. “You shouldn’t have talked to him.”

  “He quoted me without my knowledge or approval.”

  He nodded. “That pretty much sums up his ethics.”

  “But he has a point,” I said. “Why give Longstreet another forum to express his hatred of us?”

  “I’m not part of that ‘us,’” Donati said, his eyes beginning to blur with drink. “That’s what Bob never understood. I don’t want to be part of any ‘us.’”

  “You w
ere ready to face obstruction of justice charges to protect him,” I reminded him. “When I called the other night, he was here.”

  “That was before I knew he was a murderer,” he said.

  “You must have felt something for him.”

  He swirled the scotch in the heavy glass. “My father committed suicide when I was thirteen. My older brother killed himself when I was twenty. Bob had already tried once. I was afraid he would try it again. I couldn’t have another suicide on my conscience.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Why would it be on your conscience? People kill themselves of their own free will.”

  “Suicide is a message,” he said. “A message to the people who survive.”

  “What message?”

  He downed the rest of his drink. “You failed me.”

  I heard the scamper of small feet on the stairway and then two small dogs bounded into the room. They stopped when they saw me, tensed, sniffed the air.

  “Pablo, Paloma,” Donati called. “Come.” The dogs jumped into his chair and licked his hands and face.

  “It’s late,” I said, getting up. “I should get going.”

  “I want to know what happened to Bob,” he said, as the dogs settled on either side of him.

  I stopped, turned. “You care, but you don’t care. What is that?”

  “I’m not like Duke,” he replied. “I believe in consequences. By the way,” he continued, rubbing his temples, “tell Richie Longstreet doesn’t hate gays. It’s all an act, a marketing device.”

  “Well, that makes it all right,” I said.

  The medical examiner’s report arrived two days later, listing the cause of Bob’s death as asphyxiation. There were high, though not fatal, levels of benzodiazepines and alcohol in his system. When he had passed out in the toilet, he managed to aspirate vomit and choke to death. Death by misadventure was the official verdict. The media, however, continued to report it as a suicide in a flurry of stories in which, no longer fettered by libel laws, he was anointed a serial murderer, or, as one headline had it: THE INVISIBLE MAN DISAPPEARS.

  The day after I got the Medical Examiner’s report, while I was the Criminal Courts Building on another case, I ran into Serena Dance in the grim little coffeeshop on the first floor. It was noon. She was sitting alone with a stack of files and a Styrofoam plate piled high with a salad of wilted greens and wrinkled vegetables. I sat down at her table. She looked up, flicked a stray hair from her face.

  “I was going to call you,” she said. “I got back some preliminary results from the search of Bob Travis’s apartment.”

  “I’m surprised you bothered,” I said, tucking into a greasy enchilada. “He’s already been convicted in the press.”

  “This time they were right.”

  I paused, mid-bite. “What did you find?”

  “There were blue fibers on his closet floor that match the fibers in the car,” she said. “They were also found in the garbage chute and the Dumpster.” She looked at me. “I think it’s pretty unlikely Gaitan crawled down the garbage chute to plant them.”

  “A garbage chute is pretty much the man’s natural habitat.”

  “There was a fast-food wrapper stuck to the bottom of one of Travis’s shoes by a quarter-sized bloodstain,” she continued. “The wrapper came from the Mexican restaurant where the second body was dumped. The blood stain is O positive, Jack Baldwin’s type. I’ve sent it out for DNA testing, but I’m pretty sure it’ll come back his.” She ate a forkful of salad. “Ms. Schilling picked your client out of a photo lineup.”

  “You were thorough.”

  “I wanted to tell Mrs. Jellicoe we got the right man,” she said.

  “Did you ever doubt it?”

  She pushed her plate aside. “God, this food is terrible. Yes, I did wonder. When you weren’t impugning my integrity, you actually had me believing that Gaitan had planted evidence against Travis.”

  “I apologize if I impugned your integrity.”

  “You thought I was gutless because I wouldn’t take Gaitan on, but my job was to find the killer. I wasn’t interested in stroking your wounded male ego.”

  “Hey, it wasn’t my ego his pals beat the shit out of out there in the desert.”

  She frowned. “You could’ve brought charges. You decided not to.”

  “I decided I was in no position to take on the entire sheriff’s department,” I replied. “But then I’m not the one who’s working from inside the system.”

  “Don’t lay that on me,” she said. “I didn’t come to work for the DA to sell out my principles, I did it to implement them. There are thousands of hate crimes in this city every year. The only reason that any of them get prosecuted is because of me. I need the cops. I can’t be screaming police misconduct every time one of them pisses me off.”

  “Gaitan has more than just an attitude problem,” I said. “He’s a vigilante with a badge.”

  “Whatever Gaitan did or didn’t do, your client was guilty. End of story.”

  That night, I stopped at the Mayfair on Hyperion to pick up something for dinner and saw a stack of the September issue of L.A. Mode beside the manager’s counter at the front of the store. They were still in their shrink wrap. I had misplaced the copy Richie had sent me, so I went over to grab one from the pile.

  As I tried to tear through the plastic, I heard someone say, “Excuse me, sir, you can’t do that.” It was the manager, an open-faced man who, even as he admonished me, smiled pleasantly. “I’m sorry, but those aren’t for sale.”

  “Isn’t this the new issue?”

  “Yes,” he said, “but we’ve been told we’re not supposed to sell them.”

  “Why? They spoil?”

  “It’s on the advice of our legal department,” he said. “I guess the magazine’s been sued for libel.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “I couldn’t tell you,” he said politely. “But I have to ship these back to the distributor in the morning.”

  “You can’t spare even one copy?”

  He hesitated. “I’m really sorry, but if I don’t return the exact number I was sent, I could get in big trouble.” He smiled again. “We have a lot of other magazines.”

  “Thank you,” I said and went off to buy my Lean Cuisine.

  As soon as I got home, I called Richie. Javier answered.

  “Javier, hi, it’s Henry Rios. Is Richie there?”

  Javier was the master of silences, capable of imbuing them with many different kinds of meaning. This one was anxious.

  “You haven’t heard, sir?” he asked, finally.

  “Heard what?”

  “Mr. Richie was fired,” he said. “He’s not talking to anyone.”

  “Fired? When?”

  Another silence. Doubt, reluctance.

  “Yesterday,” he said. “They changed the locks on his office. He had only one hour to pack and they watched him the entire time.”

  “Please, Javier, would you ask him if he’ll talk to me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  A few minutes later, I heard a low, broken, “Henry.”

  “Richie?”

  “Those fuckers,” he raved in a tear-stained voice. “They hired a fucking armed security guard to keep me out of my office. Everyone stood there and watched, even the goddamned little fag receptionist knew. I gave that little prick the job.” He started crying. “They took it all away.”

  “Richie, I’m sorry.”

  He breathed roughly into the phone. “When I started that piece of shit, they had forty thousand subscribers, Henry. Forty. Now there’s two hundred thousand. I put them on the fucking map. I did. I could kill that cunt …”

  “Who are you talking about?”

  “The publisher,” he said. “Alyssia Moran. Bitch. I even taught her how to dress. You should’ve seen the crap she used to wear before I got her into Armani.” He sniffled. “And her makeup. What a disaster. She made Tammy Faye Bakker look like fucking Martha Stewart.”r />
  I couldn’t help but laugh. After a brief, wounded silence, he laughed, too.

  “What happened, Richie?”

  I heard him strike a match and light a cigarette. “Asuras sued,” he mumbled as he drew on the cigarette. “The day the magazine was going out, his lawyers served Alyssia with a TRO to keep us from distributing the issue until the case was heard.”

  “Wow,” I said, “That’s prior restraint. Asuras must have some really good lawyers.”

  “She had to pull every fucking issue,” he said. “When I came in yesterday, she fired me.”

  “What did he allege was the libel?”

  “He said I accused him of committing a crime.”

  “Embezzlement,” I said, remembering the brief passage about my visit to the studio.

  “Embezzlement?” Richie said. “He was convicted of that.”

  “Then what does he say you accused him of?”

  “Murder,” Richie said.

  “Murder? I don’t remember anything like that in the article.”

  “Well, his lawyers caught it,” he said. I heard the doorbell ring. “Listen, honey, that’s my shrink. I talked her into making a housecall. I’ll call you back.”

  “All right. Let me buy you dinner.”

  “Sure, sweetie. Kiss, kiss.” He hung up.

  I waited two days for Richie to call, and when he didn’t, I called him. His answering machine repeated this message: “This is Mr. Richie Florentino. I’ve left the country because I’m rich and I can. So fuck you.”

  Worried, I called Joel Miller at Universal. After being put on hold by three different, but equally snippy, assistants, I reached him.

  “Joel, it’s Henry Rios. How are you?”

  After a brief, petulant silence he said, “As if you cared. You want to know about Richie.”

  “I guess that’s true. Sorry, Joel. I talked to him Monday, now his answering machine says he’s left the country. I didn’t know who else to call except you.”

  “I don’t know where Richie is,” he said, “and I don’t really care. I moved out of the apartment three weeks ago.”

  “Three weeks? He didn’t mention that.”

  “He didn’t notice,” Joel said bitterly. “You’re like all his other friends. You don’t know what he’s really like. Richie’s a failure. He was a nobody when we came to LA. I’m the one who got him his contacts, and then he turns around and treats me like shit. I only put up with it because I knew it was just a matter of time before he sabotaged himself. He’s fucked up everything he’s ever tried to do. He has to. He thrives on the drama. I put up with it for twenty years, but I’m through with him. And his goddamned friends.”