The Burning Plain

by Michael Nava

“They might feel the same way about you.”

  “I want my old parents back,” he said. “I don’t want to have to choose between being gay and my family.”

  “It seems to me your parents have made that choice for you.”

  “Maybe,” he said, distantly, and then, remembering his manners. “Thank you, Henry.”

  “Keep in touch,” I said.

  “I have to go now,” he replied. “Thanks.”

  After a couple of days, I sent him an e-mail, but a week passed and he didn’t respond. I called Phil, who hadn’t heard from him either, but who counseled patience, reminding me that we’d basically told the kid his only chance was a court order out of his family.

  “What I don’t understand is how he could feel any loyalty to his parents when they’re trying to do this to him.”

  “He’s a child, Henry,” Wise said. “Children need to believe in their parents.”

  “Too bad parents don’t always reciprocate.”

  Chapter 19

  A FEW DAYS after our meeting, Serena Dance phoned about Asuras. It was a quarter after eight in the evening and from the sounds in the background—a TV, a child—I knew she was calling from home rather than her office.

  “Bringing work home?”

  “I’m working on this case on my own time,” she said.

  “Are you being scrupulous or paranoid?”

  She paused before answering. “A little bit of both. The DA warned me off Asuras. If he knew I was investigating him in a murder case that’s been officially solved, I’d be out of a job.”

  “Would that be so bad?” I asked. “He only keeps you around for political window-dressing.”

  “I prosecuted over fifty cases last year,” she said, seething. “My conviction rate was ninety-two percent. That’s better than the office average.”

  “I didn’t mean you don’t do your job,” I said. “But you have to admit, you don’t get much help.”

  “Joanne Schilling has disappeared,” she said abruptly.

  “What? Did you talk to Josey Walsh?”

  “Yes, of course. She gave me the same story she gave you. Schilling lived with her, moved out and she doesn’t know where she’s gone.”

  “She’s lying.”

  “Thanks, Henry, I couldn’t have figured that out for myself. Of course, she’s lying. I called her building manager. Walsh lives alone, has always lived alone. I called her back and she claimed she didn’t tell the manager because having a roommate violated her lease. Then she changed her story and said they weren’t exactly roommates. Schilling was a friend who needed a place to stay for a couple of weeks.”

  “You think if they were that close, she’d know where Schilling was.”

  “You’d think,” Serena said. “I tracked down an address for Schilling through the Screen Actors Guild. According to the manager of that building, Schilling’s lived there for the last four years. I decided to pay her a visit.”

  “You didn’t find her in.”

  “Her mail hadn’t been collected for at least a week,” Serena said. “I bluffed the manager into letting me into her apartment. The closets were filled with clothes, there was food rotting in the refrigerator. No sign of her.”

  “Did you go back to Walsh?”

  “Out of town until Monday, according to her answering machine,” Serena replied. “She was pretty huffy the last time we talked, and I had to back off because I didn’t have any leverage. Now I’ve got a missing person, thank God. Something to justify all this snooping.”

  “What about the investigation into the car bombing?”

  “There’s a problem. The detective who was on the case retired, so reopening it means pulling someone off an active investigation. I don’t have that kind of pull with the sheriff, at least not without explaining why I’m so interested, and you can imagine how that would go over.”

  “It’s time for a meeting with Odell.”

  “What makes you think he’ll help us? He told me he thought Travis was guilty, even with the planted evidence.”

  “Because maybe he’s wrong about Gaitan’s motives in planting the evidence,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Gaitan found Schilling, right? How did he find her?”

  She was silent. “Good question. I assumed she just came forward because of all the publicity about the murders.”

  “We can’t assume anything in this case except that what looks like a coincidence probably isn’t. How about lunch with Odell later on this week?”

  “Away from downtown,” she stipulated.

  “Can I call you at your office?”

  “Fine,” she said, “but if I’m not there, don’t leave a voice mail. Just call back later.”

  “You really are paranoid.”

  “Better safe than sorry. You might remember that.”

  I met Serena and Odell for lunch at Langer’s, an old deli near McArthur Park, site of the famous and incomprehensible song. There was no cake to be seen, melting or otherwise, from the restaurant’s grime-streaked windows, only the brightly dressed throngs of Mexican and Central American immigrants who inhabited the neighborhood. Sixty years earlier, this had been an opulent shopping district, the Beverly Hills of its time, where movie stars shopped at Bullock’s Wilshire and I. Magnin, then lunched at the Brown Derby or Perino’s. Some of them lived in luxurious apartments in the grandiose Art Deco buildings that still dotted Wilshire Boulevard, like the Talmadge, named for the actress who had once owned it. The shells survived, but the apartments were more likely to house refugee families from Honduras than contract players from nearby Parnassus Studio. The Brown Derby had been razed, Perino’s was shuttered, as was I. Magnin’s, while Bullock’s Wilshire, undergoing perhaps the worst fate of all, was being converted to a law school.

  The neighborhood had still been vibrant the first time I came here, with Josh. After we’d moved to Los Angeles, we spent weekends driving around the city with a map and an architectural guide. One Sunday we stumbled into this district of sad, decaying wealth and cheerful, teeming poverty. We looked at five-hundred-dollar sweaters at Bullock’s, then ate fish tacos at a storefront taqueria down the street. Later, I thought, the city’s schizophrenic nature had never been clearer to me than in that afternoon of cashmere and salsa.

  Serena was waiting at a booth at the back of the restaurant when I came in, intent on the extensive menu, as venerable a dictionary of pastramis, corned beef and smoked fish as Langer’s itself, a throwback to the time when the neighborhood was Jewish.

  “Odell’s not here yet?” I asked, slipping into the booth.

  She glanced up. “No. This menu is more complicated than the bar exam.” She set it down, looked over my shoulder, and said, “There he is.”

  I felt a big hand squeeze my shoulder. “Counsel.”

  Odell pushed in beside Serena, his big stomach barely clearing the edge of the table. He was wearing his mirrored sunglasses. When he removed them, I was again struck by how much of his personality resided in his eyes.

  “This lunch a social thing?” he asked me.

  “Not exactly,” I replied.

  He smiled. “I didn’t think so,” he said. He looked from Serena to me. “This have something to do with—what did they call it—the Invisible Man killer?”

  “That description was more accurate than any of us knew,” I said.

  The Latina waitress came by the table and stood over us like an impatient recording angel as we pored over the vast menu.

  “We found the invisible man,” I said, after she left.

  “Beg pardon?” Odell said.

  “Travis didn’t commit those murders alone,” I said. “In fact, I doubt if he was much more than a pretty unimportant accomplice. The man who murdered those boys was—”

  “Mind you, this is just Henry’s theory,” Serena said.

  “Duke Asuras,” I said.

  “Parnassus Studio Asuras?” Odell asked, not missing a beat.
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  “That’s the one,” I said.

  Odell started laughing. “You really know how to pick ’em, Henry.”

  “I was right about Gaitan,” I reminded him.

  “I never said you weren’t one smart fella,” he replied.

  “Gaitan may be implicated in this part, too.”

  “I’m listening,” Odell said.

  I gave him my spiel over sandwiches and drinks, Serena occasionally interjecting a caution when she thought I was making too great a leap from fact to conclusion, but at the end she contributed her own bombshell.

  “Gaitan was the cop who found Joanne Schilling,” she said.

  “What do you mean ‘found her’?” Ode asked through a mouthful of pastrami.

  “I thought she’d volunteered her evidence. His report said he found her by canvassing her building.”

  “So what? That’s just good footwork.”

  “I went through my files on the case,” she said. “As far as I can tell, hers was the only building Gaitan personally canvassed, and he went there weeks after the murder, long after your deputies had already been through the neighborhood.”

  “When exactly did he find her?” I asked her.

  “Two days before the lineup,” she said. “And yes, he knew about the lineup. He brought in the other witnesses, remember?”

  “Sorry, folks,” Odell said. “You’re going to have to connect the dots for me here.”

  “Two days before the lineup Gaitan goes to a single building in a neighborhood that’s already been canvassed and finds the only eyewitness who swears she saw Bob Travis in the alley the morning Alex’s body was dumped there,” I said to Odell. “Is a picture beginning to emerge?”

  Odell chewed thoughtfully, swallowed. “You’re saying she was a plant?”

  I nodded. “She had to be.”

  “Gaitan put her up to it?”

  “No,” I said, “that’s too risky, even for him. It’s one thing to drop drugs or a gun or plant fiber evidence, that’s your word against a defendant’s, but suborning perjury from a civilian witness is pretty damn unpredictable. If she breaks, it’s all over for him.”

  “Who planted her then?” Odell asked.

  “Asuras,” I said. “We already connected her to him through Josey Walsh.”

  “We connected her to Josey Walsh,” Serena said. “To be precise.”

  “Come on, Serena, the path to Asuras is obvious.”

  “Serena’s right,” Odell interjected. “You have to be careful the conclusions you jump to, Henry. I don’t know that I want to follow you except that the woman disappeared.”

  “That bothers me, too,” Serena said, “because it was obvious from the condition of her apartment that she wasn’t planning on being gone for long.”

  Odell sipped a tumbler of Diet Coke, belched softly. “They found that other girl in Griffith Park.”

  “Katie Morse?”

  He nodded. “Good place to bury your mistakes.”

  “Isn’t that the first place the cops would look?”

  “Only if they have a reason to look.” He pulled his notebook out of his shirt pocket and scribbled a note. “You want me to find out about the bombing, Serena?”

  She nodded. “Here’s the picture of the guy Henry thinks might have been involved,” she said, handing him an envelope. “Maybe your deputies could walk it around the neighborhood? I can’t get any cooperation.”

  He took the envelope. “I’ll take care of it.”

  “What does this mean Odell? You in?”

  He shrugged. “I’m curious, that’s all. This is strictly off the books.”

  Two days later, there was a message on my machine from Odell when I came home from court: “LAPD found Joanne Schilling in the park. Two shots through the back of the head from close range. From the state of decomposition, it looks like she was probably killed sometime in the last two weeks. They buried her fast. The grave wasn’t much more than a couple of shovels of dirt. I’m at the station.”

  I called him back.

  “Where was the body?” I asked him.

  “Down a ravine in the gay cruising part of the park.”

  “Wasn’t Katie Morse’s body found in that area?”

  “Yeah,” he replied. “Not far. Must be the perp’s favorite spot.”

  “Or a familiar one,” I said. “Any way to connect her killing with the other murders?”

  “She was shot with a service revolver,” he said.

  “What? A cop’s gun?”

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “One of ours.”

  “Is there any way to trace it?”

  “There’s eight thousand cops in the county.”

  “How about narrowing it down to the one named Gaitan?”

  “Is that how you figure it?” Odell asked.

  “Don’t you?”

  He was silent for a moment. “Tell you the truth, Henry, I don’t know what to think. But it sure complicates your theory that Asuras is our killer.”

  “Gaitan’s on the take from him, so he shot the woman. What’s hard about that?”

  “You don’t know what you’re saying,” he rumbled, as to an errant child.

  “What? Cops don’t kill people.”

  When he spoke again, I heard the unimaginable in his voice—doubt. “Not like this, Henry. This is first-degree murder. Say what you want about Mac, he thinks of himself as a cop, first and last. He’s never done anything for strictly private gain. Why would he start with murder? It don’t add up.”

  “Maybe Asuras made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.”

  “There you go jumping to conclusions again. You’re going to jump yourself off a cliff,” he said sharply.

  “Huh?”

  “You still can’t connect this woman to Asuras, much less that he ordered a hit on her, but you’re ready to take Gaitan to a jury.”

  “She is connected, through Walsh, through Donati,” I said, beginning my litany.

  “I know the speech,” he said impatiently. “Save it. I want you to think about what you’re saying, son. According to you, Asuras is responsible for what, five murders? Suborning a veteran cop? Framing an innocent man? Unless you start backing this up, it’s crazy talk, that’s all.”

  “Do you believe me?”

  “I’m not the people you have to convince. As far as the department is concerned, Travis killed those men, he’s dead and the case is closed. The two women, they’re LAPD’s problem. You want the sheriff to reopen the investigation, you need more and better than what you’ve got.”

  After I got off the phone with Odell, I surveyed my situation and discovered, to my chagrin, that he was right. The threads connecting Asuras to the murders were fragile: a history of sexual violence, gossip, the threat of blackmail, a movie plot, a hearsay document, a contract signed by an underling. In desperation, I took a legal pad and made six columns, one for Asuras and the others for his putative victims, Amerian, Baldwin, Jellicoe, Morse, Schilling. Beneath each name, I wrote down everything I knew about that person. Then I combed my files to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. When I finished, I went over the columns carefully, searching for an overlooked connection, a fresh lead. The fourth time through, my eye fell upon the words ex-agent in the Asuras column and ’70s actress in Schilling’s column. Agent, actress. A match. I called the Screen Actors Guild.

  Joanne Schilling had last been represented by an agent named Carson Kahn. He listed his address as Beverly Hills, but his office, in a building on the southeast corner of San Vicente and Wilshire, fell several blocks short of its ambition. From the outside, the building was imposingly stark, but once inside the starkness revealed itself to be nothing more than cheap and hasty construction. Everything about the place screamed 8o’s tax shelter. The hallway carpeting was coming apart, wires dangled from the light fixtures, the walls were apparently made of cardboard and held together with staples. The offices were occupied by enterprises like Pounds Away, Inc. and Scott Alan, Ph.D., Aesthetician
and Electrolysist. There were, needless to say, many, many production companies and casting agencies. There were even more empty offices which, having never been inhabited, were not even haunted by the shades of former tenants, just lifelessly vacant.

  Carson Kahn shared a suite with a half-dozen other agents. Their receptionist’s perfectly rounded, gravity-defying breasts were a tribute to modern science. She smiled encouragingly as I leafed through six-month-old issues of People and Variety, while Kahn kept me waiting to impress me with how busy he was.

  “Is he on the phone?” I asked her, fifteen minutes into my wait.

  She glanced at her bank of blinking lights. “Gee, no. Sorry.”

  Thirty minutes later, I asked, “Is someone with him?”

  “Don’t think so,” she said, tilting her head pertly. “I guess he’s in there doing, whatever.”

  I skulked back to the couch, which was upholstered in a vaguely Southwestern plaid, to match the vaguely Southwestern lamps and carpet, and read another article about the travails of Sarah, Duchess of York. At two o’clock, exactly one hour after our appointment, he emerged from his office, a bony, middle-aged man with hair implants and bags beneath his brown, doggy eyes.

  “Mr. Rios?” he said, looking me over, as if mentally casting me for the role of lawyer. He extended a soft, damp hand. It was like shaking a wad of used Kleenex. “Come on back. Honey, hold my calls will ya?”

  “Yes, Mr. Kahn,” she squealed, with such patent campiness I gained sudden respect for her intelligence.

  Kahn’s office was furnished with blonde Nordic furniture that could either have been very expensive or purchased at Ikea. His walls were covered with the obligatory framed movie posters, presumably of movies his clients had appeared in. I didn’t recognize any of the titles. I sat down across the yellow expanse of his desk in a slightly elevated chair that gave me an unavoidable view of his hair plugs.

  “So, Rios? That’s Mexican, right? You’re a lawyer? What can I do for you?” he gusted.

  “Thanks for your time, Mr. Kahn. I’ll be brief. I have some questions about one of your clients, Joanne Schilling. You probably know she was murdered.”

  “Joanne,” he said. “I read her obit in the Times. A tragedy. But wha’cha gonna do? This city? Meshuganah. Am I right?”