The Burning Plain

by Michael Nava

  “I assume that means you didn’t get it in writing from Alex,” I said.

  He sipped his drink, the taut lines around his mouth relaxing. “He was an imbecile,” he said scornfully. “Street trash who could barely spell his own name. I didn’t think I had to protect myself against him.”

  No, I thought, I bet you didn’t. “Eleanor Wyatt thought there was a book in Alex’s experiences as a hustler. Did you?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said.

  “So you believed his stories?”

  “Of course I didn’t believe him,” Janeway said. “I asked him lots of questions. Names, dates, places, who was there, what was said, I made him write down all that stuff, plus I made him bring me pictures, receipts, notes, matchbook covers, anything that could prove his stories, then I did my own research.” The lines of bitterness reappeared around his mouth. “I forced him to document the book and then he turned around and took it to someone else.”

  “What happened?”

  “I made files from everything he brought me. He stole them.”

  “What happened?”

  “He came over one night, we had some drinks, ended up in bed,” he said. “I was too drunk to remember he was a whore. The next morning, he was gone, with the files.”

  “Do you know where he went?”

  He smirked. “A couple of weeks after Alex ripped me off, I got a letter from L.A. Mode offering me five hundred dollars for my work if I signed a release giving up the rights to Alex’s story.”

  “What did you do?”

  “The rent had to be paid,” he said. “Cocktails purchased. I took the money.”

  “Who did the letter come from at the magazine?”

  “The queen bee herself. Richie Florentino”

  Chapter 17

  THE TEN-MINUTE DRIVE between Janeway’s tenement and Richie’s gilded apartment cut straight through Hollywood, past Richie’s sacred sites, the Chinese Theater, the Walk of Fame, the Roosevelt. I covered the distance in a fury. I wasn’t certain of all the details, but clearly Richie had lied to me from the very beginning about Alex Amerian. I pulled up in front of his building and persuaded the sleepy-eyed doorman to buzz me in unannounced. I wanted to surprise the truth out of him. The white-and-gold lobby was empty, the courtyard deserted in the midday heat. He was in the solarium, a small, plant-filled room off the living room, enclosed on three sides by windows that looked out on the still pool. Sitting in a cane-backed rocking chair, a book in his lap, meditatively smoking, he emanated an aura of purposelessness. He wore white pants, a yellow sweater, a paisley ascot around his battered neck. Eyes closed, he raised the cigarette to his lips between two slender fingers, delicately inhaled, lowered the cigarette, exhaled question marks of smoke, sighed, fingered the book. I stopped at the door. He was so fragile. My anger melted away. Sensing me, he turned his head to where I was standing and croaked, “The door’s unlocked.”

  I stepped inside the room, brushing past an enormous dracaena. “We need to talk.”

  “Obviously,” he drawled. “Why else would you be here. Sit down, Henry. Do you want something to drink. Iced tea? A Coke?” He rocked forward and the book in his lap fell to the floor.

  “No, nothing,” I said, retrieving the book. “How We Die. Why are you reading this?”

  “I’m trying to improve my mind,” he replied, taking the book. “Don’t worry, it’s not a manual. It’s something I’ve been thinking about since I was fired, what happens after we die. What do you think?”

  I remembered my dream about Josh. “I think we create our afterlives in the same way we create our lives on earth, out of what we love and what we’re afraid of.”

  “You’ve just condemned me to eternity in a drag bar,” he said, putting out his cigarette in a butt-choked ashtray. “Sit down, Henry, you’re blocking my light. What do you want to talk about?”

  I sank into a red velvet armchair. “I read Alex Amerian’s memoir, Richie, and I know he came to you with it. I think he tried to blackmail Asuras. Is that why he was killed?”

  “He’s dead,” Richie said, dismissively. “Afterlife or not, it can’t matter to him who killed him. It shouldn’t matter to you.” He smiled, quoted, “‘It’s Chinatown, Jake.’”

  “You involved me in this. You owe me the truth.”

  “‘The truth? You want the truth? You can’t take the truth.’”

  “Your Jack Nicholson needs work, Richie.”

  “Yes,” he sighed, “I know. I should stick to the classics. Bette. Joan.” He tilted his head to one side tremulously. “Katharine Hepburn.”

  “Are you finished? This isn’t a movie.”

  He settled the crystal ashtray in his lap and lit another cigarette. “Now that’s where you’re wrong. This is a movie. A Parnassus release, called Letters. Have you seen it?”

  The video Asuras had inexplicably sent me. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I want you to tell me about Alex.”

  “You won’t like what I have to say,” he said. “Because you were part of it.”

  “Alex, Richie.”

  He sighed. “All right, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. The first time Alex showed up at my office, I listened to what he had to say about Duke and threw him out.”

  “You didn’t believe him?”

  “Oh, I believed him,” he replied, “but I didn’t care. I mean, it was interesting dish about Duke because there have always been rumors, but I wasn’t running a tabloid. Besides, Alex was … Well, let’s just say he was a whore, with all that that implies.”

  “Asuras raped him,” I said. “Or don’t you think whores can be raped?”

  His smile was mocking. “You really fell for him, didn’t you? I don’t blame you, Henry. He was pretty and he could laugh or cry on cue, almost like a real person, but the only thing he ever felt was greed. I mean, come on, Henry, the first instinct of most people who are raped is not to write a book about it. And anyway, he didn’t come and see me after the toilet episode, if that’s the rape you’re talking about. He came to me the moment he hooked up with Duke.”

  “Before he went to Rhodes Janeway?”

  He took a final draw on his cigarette and said through a mouthful of smoke, “Harvard, class of ’seventy-eight Rhodes Janeway? Yes. He came to me first, wanting to sell his dirty little story about how Duke liked to beat up boys and then fuck them.”

  Outside, the light began to fade, as that rarest of meteorological events in LA, a summer storm, gathered in the August sky. The wind came up, abruptly slamming a door shut in another room.

  “So when did you get interested in Asuras’s sex life?”

  “When I found out he was trying to sell Parnassus to the Antichrist,” Richie said. He put his cigarette out, shifted the ashtray from his lap to a side table. “Look at the rain.” The placid surface of the pool was hammered by fat drops of rain, shattering it. He watched meditatively for a minute before continuing. “I thought if Longstreet knew one of his potential partners was a sexual sadist, he might change his mind about buying into the company.”

  “If you wanted to screw up the deal, why didn’t you go after Longstreet and avoid pissing off Asuras?”

  “Because everything that can be said about him has been said,” Richie replied, “and either people don’t get that he’s a Nazi or they don’t care. That left Duke.”

  “So you got in touch with Alex.”

  He nodded. “By then, the other things had happened, l’affaire toilet. The beating, the car bombing, enough to ruin Duke. Even then, I hesitated.”

  “Attack of ethics?”

  “Ethics? From a lawyer. I’m surprised the word doesn’t burn your tongue. No, I wasn’t worried about ethics, I was just plain afraid.”

  “Of Asuras?”

  “I knew if I published this stuff and it didn’t bring him down, I could kiss my ass goodbye. Joel’s too, probably, because Hollywood’s a small town and what goes around comes around. So I fired a warning shot.”

&
nbsp; “The gay-bashing piece,” I guessed. “Even though you knew Asuras had had Alex beaten up, you made it sound like he’d been gay bashed.”

  “I wanted Duke to know that I knew about him and Alex.”

  “What happened?”

  “Your friend Donati called me,” he said. The rain slammed against the windows. “He asked, in so many words, what I wanted to keep my mouth shut. I told him I wanted Asuras to find another business partner. I reminded him that he was a fag, too. He hung up on me.”

  “That’s when you decided to go ahead with your exposé?”

  “Yeah, that’s also where you came in.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Duke gave Alex a car, and when Alex stopped letting Duke beat him up for fun and profit, the car was mysteriously blown up. In retaliation, Alex decided to kill Duke.”

  “What?”

  “I was surprised, too,” Richie said. “I didn’t think he had it in him, but he found a gun and went up to Duke’s house to shoot him. A security guard stopped him and called the cops. They arrested him and hauled him off to jail. He called me.”

  “And you called me,” I said. “But, wait, Alex wasn’t arrested at Asuras’s house. He was arrested at that director’s place. What’s her name …”

  “Cheryl Cordet,” Richie said. “No, not exactly.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She lives in Malibu. When she comes into town, she stays in a guest house on Duke’s property.”

  “Is there anything you didn’t lie to me about?”

  “Well, sweetie, the truth was a little complicated.” He finished his cigarette. “The sound of rain always reminds me of hospitals.”

  “You really played me, Richie,” I said, angrily. “You embellished the story with that line about Alex carrying a gun because he’d been gay bashed. You wanted me to feel sorry for him, to be angry on his behalf.”

  “I wanted you to be motivated to help him,” he said.

  “Is that why you hired him to go out with me? For future legal emergencies?”

  He raised his hands as if to shield himself from my outrage. “I hadn’t counted on your becoming obsessed with him. You thought he was Josh, but he was a creep, a user. Someone had to burst your bubble. I knew if you spent time with him, you’d see through him.”

  “Instead I was nearly arrested for his murder.”

  “But you weren’t, Blanche,” he murmured as Bette Davis. “You weren’t.”

  Outside, the rain had abated as quickly as it had come. The room was again flooded with light.

  “Who killed him, Richie?”

  “Asuras sent word he wanted to settle things with Alex after Alex tried to shoot him. A payoff.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “The girl called me. Katie? She didn’t trust Asuras, and she was afraid for Alex. Naturally, I was annoyed that the little shit planned to double-cross me after I’d paid him ten thousand dollars for his life story, such as it was. He agreed he wouldn’t meet with Asuras until after we talked.”

  “Did you?”

  “He was supposed to call me on the Saturday after your date.”

  “The meeting he was going to from my house, that was with Asuras?”

  “No one will ever be able to prove it.”

  “Then who was Bob Travis? What was his part?”

  He shrugged. “A bit player.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That makes sense.” Things started to fall into place. “The line from Travis to Asuras runs through Nick Donati.”

  “There are no straight lines in Hollywood,” Richie said. “And not many straight men.”

  “The last time I talked to you, you tried to convince me it was the cops who killed Alex.”

  “I wanted to protect you from Hollywood.”

  “That’s a little melodramatic even for you, Richie.”

  “You don’t know what you’re up against,” he said. “Think, Henry. If Asuras killed Alex, who killed the other two men? And why?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Letters,” Richie replied.

  “What letters?”

  “The film,” he said. “You should go see it.”

  “I have it,” I replied. “Asuras sent it to me after Travis died.”

  “That’s so perverse, even for Duke.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Go home and watch it,” he said, rising slowly from his chair. “You’ll understand. I’m all worn out, Henry. Excuse me, won’t you?”

  “What happened at the magazine?” I asked, also getting up. “You must’ve known you were going to get into trouble with some of the allegations you made against Asuras.”

  “Alex had files, the ones Rhodes Janeway put together. They were my corroboration. They disappeared from his apartment after he was murdered.”

  “Along with Katie,” I said. “What about the stuff from Thailand? That didn’t come from Alex.”

  “I sent a reporter over there, but Asuras’s lawyers presented affidavits from the dead boys’ families, claiming that my reporter made the story up. A pathologist submitted an affidavit that the bones found outside of Duke’s property were a woman’s and had been there for at least thirty years. Duke threatened to bankrupt L.A. Mode’s publisher if she distributed the magazine.”

  “She pulled the magazine and fired you.”

  “Afterwards, my reporter heard from a stringer he’d used in Bangkok. He said he talked to the mother of one of the boys. She told him Duke’s Thai lawyer threatened to throw her into prison if she didn’t retract her statements about her son’s disappearance.”

  “What about the pathologist’s affidavit?”

  “How much do you think that cost Duke? Five hundred, a thousand? I know he killed those boys. I know he killed Alex.”

  “The perfect crime?”

  As he walked me to the door, he said, “Unless Duke is as crazy as he seems to be.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The only reason Duke was discovered stealing money from his clients and his partners back in the seventies and eighties was because he started forging their names on checks.”

  “Are you saying he wanted to get caught?”

  “No, I’m saying he wanted to show off. That’s why he sent you the video.”

  “Is Longstreet still poised to take over Parnassus Company?”

  “The board of directors bought him off. Greenmail.”

  “That must put Asuras in a difficult position.”

  “Au contraire,” Richie replied. “Once Duke and his boss, Raskin, proved they had the muscle to sell the company right out from underneath the board, the directors suddenly got very, very cooperative. Duke’s been given a brand-new long-term contract with a big raise, a lot more power, and millions of dollars’ worth of stock options.” He smiled grimly. “A happy Hollywood ending. Enjoy the movie.”

  When I got home, I found the video and slid it into the VCR. I fast-forwarded through the part I had already watched and forced myself to sit through the rest of it. When it was over, I understood the message, the warning it contained. Buried beneath the slaughter and the fancy camera work, a jumble of images interspersed with snippets of portentous but empty dialogue, were the musty bones of Christie’s book, The A.B.C. Murders. There were things I had missed on a first viewing, but I couldn’t bring myself to watch the film again, so I drove to the nearest Barnes & Noble and bought the book.

  The premise was simple: a series of murders occurred that had in common the alphabetical progression of the victims’ names and the locations of the murders: Mrs. Alice Ascher was killed in Andover, Miss Betty Barnard in Bexhill, Sir Carmichael Clarke in Churston. While the police puzzled over the murderer’s bizarre obsession with the alphabet, Poirot noticed inconsistencies between the first two killings and the last one, all the while issuing obiter dicta to the bemused English investigators. “Crime is terribly revealing,” he announced at one point, and at another, “At the time o
f the murder people select what they think is important. But quite frequently they think wrong!”

  His solution was that there had only been one intended victim, the last one, Clarke, whose fortune, upon his death, would pass to his brother, Franklin. With so obvious a motive to kill his brother, Franklin looked for a way to disguise his purpose and hit upon the ABC scheme. There was another element of the book I had forgotten. As part of his plan of diverting attention from himself, Franklin framed another man for the killings, a man named, conveniently enough, Alexander Bonaparte Cust.

  I closed the book and pulled out my notes on the Travis case with Poirot’s phrase bubbling through my head: Crime is terribly revealing. Somewhere I had started a list—where was it?—of the differences among the three murders that Travis had been accused of. Here it was. Wright, the witness in the Baldwin murder, said he saw Baldwin entering a cab driven by a middle-aged man; Gray, the witness in the Jellicoe murder, also saw the driver of the cab, but he described him as being in his late twenties to mid-thirties. Alex had been beaten and then stabbed, while the other two victims had first been stabbed and then, post-mortem, beaten. Alex’s blood alcohol level was .20, twice the level of legal intoxication, but he had been sober when he left my house; no alcohol was found in the blood of either of the other two victims. Alex and Baldwin had marks on their bodies consistent with being whipped, but there were no such marks on Jellicoe’s body. Blue cashmere fibers were combed out of Alex’s body, but not from the other two.

  I had started this list intending to use these minor dissimilarities to argue there was reasonable doubt that the murders had been committed by the same person, notwithstanding the greater and more dramatic similarities that seemed to connect them. Now a different pattern emerged. In a typical murder investigation the cops begin with the victim and deduce the killer from what they learned about the victim’s life. Had Alex been the only victim, the investigation would have proceeded in that manner and the police would have focused more closely on things like his profession and Katie’s disappearance. Once there was a second and then a third victim, however, the focus of the investigation shifted from the victims to the killer. As soon as the police became convinced the killings were the work of a serial killer who’d made his motive obvious in the hate messages he carved on the corpses, they stopped looking for any other motive. Certain they were dealing with a psychotic, the cops discounted the minor dissimilarities in the murders, and while I’d been aware of them, I’d drawn the wrong conclusion—that they indicated there was more than one murderer. What they actually revealed was that the first murder, Alex’s murder, was different from the other two, because the latter murders were a horrific cover-up, an attempt to disguise the motive in the first killing. As long as it appeared there was a rampaging serial killer on the loose, the police would never figure out that Alex was murdered to prevent him from blackmailing Asuras.