The Burning Plain

by Michael Nava

  One night I was called to his house—he lives in Los Feliz in this old stone mansion that looks like a castle. It belonged to someone like Charlie Chaplin. There was already someone there, a big stud dressed from head to foot in a rubber suit. Him and King got me into the bathroom. The rubber guy pushed my head into the toilet while King pissed into the bowl. I thought I was going to drown. King pulled my head out and started beating me, really whaling on me, so hard the rubber guy tried to stop him. Even with all the drugs we were taking I could feel the pain. It turns out he broke a couple of my ribs. And my face—I couldn’t go out for a week.

  After that I stopping taking King’s calls because I thought he was going to kill me. I guess Mr. King was not used to rejection and he took his revenge. First, I got beat up one night when I was coming home from a bar. While I was down on the ground, I saw King’s car parked across the street. A few days later, he called me and asked me if I’d learned my lesson. I said, fuck you, if you don’t leave me alone, I’m going to the police. Of course, I wouldn’t go to the cops, like they’re going to believe me over him. The next thing that happened was the car he gave me was mysteriously bombed. That’s when I decided I had to do something. The cops were out, but I decided I was going to write this book to expose King and all the other freaks in Hollywood.

  They say Hollywood is a dream factory, but to me it’s more like a sewer. When I came here I was a young, struggling actor with big ideas but big ideas don’t pay the rent. I didn’t want to be a waiter-actor-whatever. The first time I got paid for sex I told myself why shouldn’t I get paid for doing something I was going to do anyway? But it’s not like that. It drags you down and you see people at there worse. That’s why I took more and more drugs and all my dreams became nightmares. Today I’m off drugs, and I’m cleaning up my act. Even though I’m still attracted to men, I also have a girlfriend, Katie, and we’re planning on getting married and having a family. This is the only happy ending I want.

  As soon as I’d finished, I e-mailed Rod to call me, collect. He phoned within the hour. From the background noise—canned music and passing voices—I knew he was at the diner.

  “I was going to call you,” he said. I could feel his anxiety like a blast of hot air across the line. “My parents are going to do something bad to me.”

  “What’s going on, Rod?”

  “I found a book in their room about some kind of hospital in Utah that says it can cure homosexuality.”

  “That’s unbelievable.”

  “They can’t do that to me, can they?”

  “I don’t know. Do you think this is going to happen soon?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll run away.”

  I thought of the army of runaway kids that roamed the mean streets of Hollywood. “Do you know for sure they’re planning on sending you to this place?”

  He hesitated. “No, I guess not.”

  “Then you don’t have to do anything right now,” I said. “If something does happen, you call me. I promise I’ll do what I can.”

  “Can you stop them?”

  “I’m not that kind of lawyer.”

  “There’s no one else.”

  “I promise I’ll help you, Rod.”

  “I guess you read Alex’s book,” he said.

  “Are you sure Alex wrote it?”

  “The disc had his name on it,” Rod said. “What did you think of it?”

  “It was pretty raw,” I replied.

  “When you called me and said you were a friend of Alex, I thought you might be one of the people he wrote about.”

  “No, I’m not into that kind of stuff.”

  “Me, either,” he said. “I mean, if I ever have sex it won’t be like that. I don’t even know why you’d want to do stuff like that, with whips and tying people up. Do you, Mr. Rios?”

  “It’s a fantasy for some people,” I said.

  “It’s sick,” he said. “Do you think Alex really did those things?”

  “I can’t verify all of it,” I said, “but some of it matches things I know about him.”

  “Does that have something to do with why Katie was killed?”

  “Alex must have given the disc to Katie for safekeeping in case something happened to him,” I said. “She sent it to you, so she must have been worried about her own safety. You said you didn’t tell the police about the disc. Why?”

  “I didn’t know Alex was dead,” he explained. “I wasn’t even sure it was real. I thought maybe he made it up, and it was like, a porn book. Should I tell the police now?”

  I thought about it. By itself, the disc explained nothing about Katie’s murder without an elaborate exegesis, something to which I doubted the police would be receptive. Moreover, although the information on the disc shed a different light on Alex’s murder, without further investigation and corroboration, it was all speculation.

  “Listen, Rod,” I said. “I’m going to ask you to trust me and not tell anyone about the disc until I can verify all of what’s on it. Then, maybe, there will be enough to go to the cops.”

  “I trust you,” the boy said. “I knew I could trust you from the first time you called me.”

  “You have my number,” I said. “Call me any time, collect, for any reason. If I don’t answer, leave me a message or e-mail me. Okay?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “You know, Rod, I also left home when I was a teenager. I went away to college and I never went back.”

  “My grades aren’t good enough for college,” he said. “I’m too busy trying not to get beat up to study very hard.”

  “All I mean is things will get better.”

  “They can’t get worse,” he said. Then, added hopefully, “Can I meet you someday?”

  “I promise,” I said. “You’re not alone anymore.”

  When Alex was murdered, my first thought was that one of his clients had done it. As I reread the manuscript, I kept coming back to the long section about “Mr. King.” The attack on Alex and the bombing of his car weren’t the work of gay bashers but a spurned client. Could the same man have killed him? Why? Who was Mr. King? Studio executive. Foreign exile. Murder allegation. A libel right off the pages of L.A. Mode. I went out into the garage and dug through a stack of newspapers awaiting recycling until I found the issue of L.A. Mode that had got Richie fired. I flipped through the magazine to the cover story. The first time through I’d been distracted by Richie’s having inserted me into the article without my permission and never finished reading it. Now I read it word for word. Toward the end, there was this:

  “Briefly married twenty years ago, Asuras has been seen with some of the most beautiful women in Hollywood, but the operative word here is ‘seen.’ His most frequent escort is the not-so-beautiful-by-any-standards Oscar-winning director Cheryl Cordet, a well-known fixture at a bar called The Palms in West Hollywood that is euphemistically referred to as a ‘women’s bar.’ As for Asuras, he’s been reportedly seen at clubs frequented by the black leather set of all persuasions. Says one habitué of these clubs who claims to have “done a scene” with the studio head, ‘S&M is the logical place for these guys to end up, the big execs and actors, the ones who spend their days pushing people around and getting paid for it. Needless to say, we’re talking S’s here, not M’s.’ Whatever his tastes, Asuras has managed to keep his private life private except for the incident that got him banned from Thailand (see sidebar). Still, you have to wonder what Reverend Longstreet would make of the Vulcan Club, one of the places where Asuras was allegedly seen, where guests are greeted by the sight of a nude young man in a sling available to anyone who wants to …”

  The boxed sidebar was captioned Duke’s Servant Problem. Three long paragraphs and a picture of Asuras standing outside his palatial residence in Bangkok. According to the piece, when a nineteen-year-old boy hired as a servant by Asuras had disappeared, his parents went to the police and accused Asuras of killing him. The police investigated the claim and clear
ed him. After Asuras left Thailand to run Parnassus, it was discovered that a second boy whom he had employed had also disappeared. Some months later, human remains were found buried in a park that abutted Asuras’s property. The remains were too decomposed to be conclusively identified, even as to gender.

  On these ambiguous facts, the writer implied that Asuras had murdered the two boys while having sex with them and had buried one of them in the park where the remains were found. I had to agree with Donati that the piece was slander per se, an accusation that the weakly circumstantial evidence could not begin to support. Even granting Richie’s lax standards of journalism, his audacity in publishing the story was breathtaking. It was almost as if he was inviting a lawsuit. Was he counting on some last-minute corroboration?

  For the next couple of days, I thought long and hard about Alex’s memoir and what, if anything, I should do. Even if Asuras was the spurned lover who had had Alex beaten and his car destroyed, this was not proof he’d killed Alex, much less Jack Baldwin and Tom Jellicoe. On the other hand, it seemed an improbable coincidence that the vehicle used in at least two of the murders was a prop car from Asuras’s studio. I began to reconsider the meaning of Asuras’s solicitousness toward Bob Travis. Was he really concerned about Travis or even the studio, or was he worried about his own safety as a co-conspirator? And where did Donati, Asuras’s trusted right hand, Travis’s erstwhile boyfriend, fit in all this? What motive would either of them have had to kill Alex Amerian?

  In retrospect, it was hard for me to believe I had actually puzzled over the question of motive when I had there in front of me Alex’s memoir. An idea began to form in my head, and I started to make some connections, but they were all tentative, unsubstantiated. I knew better than to make Richie’s mistake. I needed certainty before I was willing even to speak aloud the terrifying possibilities that had begun to emerge from my confusion.

  A few mornings after receiving Alex’s memoir, I poured myself a cup of coffee, sat down with the phone at the dining table, opened the yellow pages to literary agents, and started calling. I posed as the executor of Alex’s estate and told the dozen receptionists I talked to that I was trying to determine if Alex had secured representation for his book before his death. No one at the first seven agencies had ever heard of him. The receptionist at agency number seven had a record on her computer of receiving a manuscript from him which had been returned unread. At agency number eight, a junior agent had read the manuscript and passed on it. At agency ten, Eleanor Wyatt and Associates, I was put on hold for Miss Wyatt after I explained why I was calling. Five minutes later came a crisp, “This is Eleanor Wyatt.”

  I launched into my explanation of why I was calling.

  “Yes,” she said, cutting me off. “He came here. We talked. I told him I was interested but that it was obvious he was no writer. I suggested he find a ghost writer and I gave him the name of someone I thought would be appropriate.”

  “You read the manuscript?”

  “Uh-huh,” she said.

  “And you actually thought it was publishable?”

  She laughed. “Well, I wouldn’t want to read it, Mr. Rios, but the fact is a similar book by a group of prostitutes describing their adventures in the Industry called You’ll Never Make Love in This Town Again spent three months on the New York Times bestseller list. No one ever lost money overestimating the prurience of the American public.”

  “That’s appalling.”

  “You can’t be that appalled,” she said briskly. “You wouldn’t be interested if you didn’t think there was money in it for the estate. How did he die, by the way? AIDS?”

  “He was murdered,” I said.

  “Oh, really,” she salivated. “Murdered? What happened?”

  “Weren’t you concerned about libel when you read Alex’s book?”

  “Believe me, an army of lawyers would have gone through it with a fine-toothed comb before it ever saw the light of day.”

  “Did Alex tell you the identities of the clients he was writing about?”

  “He didn’t have to,” she said. “They were obvious. That was one of the problems with the manuscript.”

  “Mr. King, for example?”

  She hesitated. “I told him that section would have to be cut.”

  “Why? Did you doubt his veracity?”

  “I sell books to the studios,” she said. “I can’t afford to alienate someone like …”

  “Duke Asuras?”

  “That’s right,” she said. “I’m very busy.”

  “You remember the name of the ghostwriter you sent him to?”

  “Wait a sec.” I heard the faint rustling of papers. “Here it is. Rhodes Janeway.”

  “Do you know if Alex took your advice?”

  “Well, Rhodes called me to talk about the project. I assured him it had commercial possibilities and told him to keep me informed. That was the last I heard from either of them.”

  “When was this?”

  “I don’t remember, exactly. Late spring, early summer. If he finished a manuscript before he died,” she said, “I’m still very interested in representing him. Very interested.”

  John Rhodes Janeway had graduated from Harvard, a fact proclaimed by the framed diploma that hung above the toilet in the bathroom of his kitsch-filled Hollywood apartment. He lived a couple of blocks above Hollywood Boulevard on a street lined with junked cars, where guys with beepers dealt drugs from behind the banana trees in the yellowing yards of condemned houses. He was on the top floor of a three-story apartment dating from the twenties that looked from the outside like an Egyptian temple, complete with a bas-relief above the arched doorway depicting a winged sphinx. Inside, the resemblance was to catacombs; all murk and must and dusty silence. I rapped at the door numbered 333, heard the shuffle of footsteps, and felt myself being scrutinized through the peephole. Bolts slid, chains jingled, and the door was opened by a thin man of about forty wearing a stained silk bathrobe that emphasized his slightness over a dirty tee shirt and jeans. He had the wavy, tumbling yellow hair and the faded prettiness of a childhood sissy. Bitterness was cutting hard, deep lines around his Cupid’s bow of a mouth, and beneath the cocked, mocking eyebrows, his pale eyes were fearful.

  “I’m Henry Rios,” I said. “I called you earlier about Alex Amerian? I represent his estate.”

  “Come in, Counsel,” he said airily. “Before someone steals the suit off your back for crack.” I followed him into a cramped living room, every surface piled with newspapers and magazines or folders and manuscripts. “Excuse the deshabille.” He arranged himself in a chair. “Sit down. Just move whatever’s in your way.”

  I moved a pile of People magazines from a corner of the couch. Along the walls of the room were shelves filled with bric-a-brac, collections of salt and pepper shakers, commemorative plates, Barbie dolls, autographed photos of old movie stars, paper fans, martini shakers. The shade was drawn over the window and the room was suffused with a pinkish light from a half-dozen small lamps burning pink light bulbs. The smell of cedar incense mingled in the still air with marijuana and bourbon. A kitchen table was visible in the next room and on it was a computer monitor and keyboard and a scattering of books and papers.

  “I appreciate you seeing me, Mr. Janeway,” I said.

  “Rhodes,” he replied coquettishly. “May I call you Henry?”

  “Of course.”

  “I feel like I already know you,” he continued.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I guess someone like you doesn’t read the gay rags,” he said, his voice tipped with sarcasm. “Frontiers? Edge?”

  “No, not very often.”

  “The gay press is my bread and butter,” he said. “It keeps me in this luxurious lifestyle you see around you.” He smiled, but there was more grievance than good humor in the remark. “I know who you are, Henry,” he continued. “And I know you’re not anyone’s executor. You were the lawyer of the man who killed the three gay boys this
summer.” He smiled again, poisonously. “Why did you lie when you called me?”

  It was as if a friendly witness had suddenly turned against me in the middle of being examined, an unpredictable and dangerous situation.

  “If you knew I was lying,” I countered, “why did you agree to see me?”

  “Obviously because there’s a story here,” he said. “The one you tell me or the one I make up. The rags will publish it either way.”

  “There might be a story,” I allowed, “if you help me.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “I think I’m the one who should setting the conditions.”

  “Why is that, Rhodes?”

  “Because I could ruin you,” he said. “The rags didn’t devote much space to the murders because their biggest advertisers are bars and sex clubs and they were afraid if they paid too much attention to boys getting stabbed to death in the alleys of West Hollywood, it would be bad for business. But if there’s one thing the gay press really loves, even more than Madonna, it’s running vendettas against prominent fags. Now that the killing’s over, I think I could get them interested in why a gay lawyer was defending a gay serial killer.”

  “There’s no need to threaten me. I told you, there might be a story here if we help each other and it’s a lot bigger than any hatchet job you could do on me. If you’re interested, let’s talk. If not,” I continued, playing a hunch, “I can take it elsewhere, the same way Alex did with his manuscript.”

  The soft pink light could not entirely conceal the deepening of the pinched lines around Janeway’s mouth.

  “Any agreement between us, I want in writing,” he said.