The Burning Plain

by Michael Nava

  “You think Walsh only knows her little piece?”

  “Yes, but helping to suborn perjury in a murder case is a pretty crucial little piece. And if she has any smarts, she’s drawn some inferences from Schilling’s murder. Once we tell her about the others, that might push her over the edge.”

  “Henry, there’s no proof Bob Travis was murdered.”

  “Asuras implied it.”

  She rolled her eyes. “You said the man’s a megalomaniac.”

  “Even without proof, we can still scare Walsh with it.”

  “We?” Serena mumbled.

  “After what happened to me tonight, do you still have any doubt about Asuras?”

  “If Walsh doesn’t break, and this backfires, I could be in real trouble,” she said. “Abusing the authority of my office.”

  “I need you because you have that authority.”

  She nodded. “All right, but it’s all or nothing. You understand? If this doesn’t work, you have to count me out.”

  I slept on Serena’s couch, with the cat at my feet, and the next day she drove me home on her way to her office. There was a message from Phil Wise on my machine. I called him back.

  “Any word on Rod’s whereabouts?” I asked.

  “No, I’ve been calling up and down the chain of command at the Foster Institute, but they won’t say if he’s there or not. I’m going to go ahead and file the dependency petition in the superior court down there in the valley.”

  “Rod’s not in the state,” I pointed out. “How does the court have jurisdiction?”

  “He was taken from the state against his will. A de facto abduction.”

  “Phil, he was taken by his father,” I said. “Can a parent abduct his own child?”

  “It happens all the time in custody cases,” he replied, an edge to his voice.

  “But this isn’t—”

  “I know,” he exploded. “I’m trying to figure out a way to get him back. You’re not helping.”

  “I’m asking you the same questions the judge will be asking you. You need a better answer than getting mad.”

  After a long pause, he said, “I lose a lot of these kids. It works my nerves.”

  “What can I do to help?”

  “Keep asking the tough questions, Professor Kingsfield,” he said. “I’ll go back and work on my answers.”

  When Serena picked me up that evening to visit Josey Walsh, she was considerably more optimistic than she’d been the night before.

  “Remember I told you I’d sic’d the LAPD on Walsh?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I checked in with one of them this morning. They talked to Walsh about Schilling. She was sticking to her story, but he said she was very nervous.”

  “She wasn’t nervous when she talked to you?”

  “She was like ice. She’s either finding it hard to keep her lies straight or she’s getting worried about her own safety.” She grinned. “Scaring her just might work.” After a couple of minutes, she added, “If she does want to make a statement, I’ll have to take over. I mean, you don’t have any official position, Henry.”

  “I’ve been ready to turn this over to you from the beginning,” I replied, miffed. “Once you overcame your doubts. If you want the credit, take it.”

  “That’s not the point,” she said.

  “Whatever. After tonight it’s your show, Serena. I do have my work to do. I’m perfectly happy to let you do yours.”

  We drove the rest of the way in silence.

  Josey Walsh lived in a condominium not far from where Travis had lived, on another tree-lined West Hollywood street just off Santa Monica Boulevard. Serena pulled up to the curb and we got out and went to the door. She found Walsh’s name on the directory and reached for the security phone. I stopped her.

  “We have to surprise her,” I said.

  “How are we going to get in?”

  “We’ll wait until someone comes out.”

  A moment later, a muscular man holding the leash on a golden Labrador retriever came out of the building. While I patted the dog, and flirted with his owner, Serena wedged her foot in the door. The building was a rectangle built around a courtyard and swimming pool. Walsh lived on the top floor in unit 302. I rang the bell, and a moment later, the door opened a crack and I saw a sliver of a woman’s face.

  “Yes?”

  “Miss Walsh?”

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Rios, Miss Walsh. I’m a lawyer. This is Serena Dance, from the DA’s office. I think you’ve talked to her.”

  “I don’t have anything to say to you,” she said, closing the door.

  I wedged my foot in the door. “Miss Walsh, your life is in danger.”

  Her face again appeared in the crack. “Who writes your dialogue?”

  “You know who killed Joanne Schilling,” I said. “She wasn’t their first victim. She won’t be their last.”

  She didn’t move for a moment, then she opened the door and sighed, “Come inside.”

  I got my first good look at her. In her early thirties, thin, pretty, she should have looked relaxed in her jeans and Gap tee shirt, but instead she radiated tension. Behind her, the curtains were drawn against the dusk and her carefully furnished living room was dark.

  She turned a lamp on, sat down, stared at us. “What do you mean my life is danger?”

  Uninvited, we sat down. “You’re helping Donati cover up a series of murders committed by Duke Asuras,” I said. “The last three people Donati recruited were themselves murdered. You’re next on the list.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Three men were murdered in West Hollywood this summer,” I began. “One of them was trying to blackmail Asuras. We know Asuras killed him, then killed the other two to hide his tracks and make it look like there was a serial killer on the loose. The police arrested a man named Bob Travis for the murders. Travis worked at Parnassus, he was Donati’s ex-boyfriend. The police didn’t have much of a case against him until Joanne Schilling turned up with a positive identification of Travis at one of the crime scenes. I think Donati made a deal with Travis. Travis agreed to take the fall—to allow himself to be arrested and maybe even tried for the murders—and Donati promised to control the evidence to make sure there wouldn’t be enough to convict. Donati double-crossed him by producing Schilling. When Travis threatened to expose the deal, he was murdered. You know what happened to Joanne Schilling. She turned up in a shallow grave in Griffith Park but she wasn’t the first. There was a third victim, a young girl named Katie Morse who knew about the blackmail scheme against Asuras. She was also murdered.”

  “You understand what’s going on here, Josey,” Serena said. “Everyone Asuras uses to protect himself ends up dead.”

  Josey Walsh said, “Nick is gay? That asshole.”

  “He didn’t exactly propose,” Josey Walsh was saying, sometime later. We were sitting at her kitchen table. She was knocking back bourbon while Serena and I drank Tab, the industrial-strength diet drink. The kitchen had an unused cleanliness to it that reminded me of Donati’s kitchen. She had opened the windows. It was now dark outside and the scent of honeysuckle drifted on the warm air.

  “He led you on?” Serena asked.

  “He talked about the future in a way that included me. You know, what a great power couple we’d make. He’d leave Parnassus and we’d start our own production company, that kind of thing.”

  “Was this while you were still working for him as a paralegal?” Serena asked.

  She nodded. “I was a lousy paralegal, but it was a way into the studio.” She belted back bourbon. “I couldn’t get into a decent film school and I wanted to make movies.”

  “Did Nick know that?” I asked.

  “Yes, I was very up-front about it,” she replied. “Not that Nick noticed me at first. He supervises ten lawyers and eight other paralegals. I knew I had to get his attention.”

  “How?” I asked.


  Her smile was a slash across her pretty face. “Feminine wiles, Mr. Rios.” She glanced at Serena. “I know it’s not politically correct, but Hollywood is still a boy’s club. I was ready to do what I had to do.”

  “Did Nick respond?”

  “Yes and no. Or maybe I mean, yes to a point. He seemed flattered and he would flirt back sometimes at the office, but it never went past mild innuendo. I thought he was afraid I’d scream sexual harassment if he actually asked me out. I guess that wasn’t his worry.”

  “He was completely closeted at work?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Completely. He’d show up at office parties with dates, different girl, same tits, but he was a big studio exec and you expect them to be pigs.” She shrugged. “Plus, the story around the office was he’d been married once and had a bad divorce that soured him on relationships.”

  Serena asked incredulously, “This was your idea of a good catch?”

  “No, he was my idea of an E-ticket.”

  “A what?” I asked.

  “An E-ticket,” she said. “They used to sell them at Disneyland. They were good for every ride.”

  “It must’ve worked,” I said. “Don’t you have some kind of producing deal with the studio?”

  “They gave me an office, a phone and a half-time secretary,” she said, bitterly. “Oh, and $10,000 a month for two years to develop projects. I report to some twenty-three-year-old VP, who reports to some twenty-five-year-old VP, who gets maybe ten minutes a month with Duke. I was closer to him when I was working for Nick.”

  “What did you give them in exchange?” Serena asked.

  “After weeks of flirting back and forth, Nick asked me to dinner. We ended up at his place.” She looked at me. “Yes, we had sex. All right, so it wasn’t very good sex, but he seemed to enjoy it. God knows what he was thinking about while we were doing it. No, wait, I know what he was thinking about, the busboy at the restaurant. I thought I saw Nick give him the eye.” She drained her glass. “Anyway, for the next month it was dinners and parties and premieres. The Hollywood high life. I was dazzled. That was when Nick started dropping hints about the future and then one night he invited me to Duke’s house for dinner, just the three of us. The first words out of Duke’s mouth were, ‘So, Nick tells me you want to produce.’ After that I would’ve agreed to anything.”

  “What exactly did you agree to?” I asked.

  “It was this very odd thing,” she said. “I was supposed to make it look like I was sharing this place with this Joanne Schilling woman. They wanted me to put her name on the mailbox and the answering machine and take messages for her and relay them through Nick.”

  “You ask why?” Serena asked.

  “No,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “There was something in the way Duke asked me that was … ,” she searched for a word, “… menacing. It was like, this conversation never happened. I can’t explain why, but I knew I wasn’t supposed to ask for an explanation.”

  “Is that why you agreed to it?” I asked. “Because you felt threatened?”

  “No,” she said. “I agreed because he offered me a production deal.” She looked back and forth between us. “Or would I be better off if I said I felt threatened?”

  “Then what happened?” Serena asked.

  Walsh directed her answer to me. “I did what I was told. I put her name on the mailbox, on my machine.”

  “Did you ever meet her?”

  “No,” she said, splashing bourbon into her glass. “I had no idea who she was. For a long time, nothing happened, but then I began to get messages from the police and from her.” She indicated Serena. “That worried me, but Nick told me it would all be over soon.”

  “You and Nick still going out?” I asked.

  “Once I signed the deal memo, he dumped me,” she said. “It wasn’t crude, but the invitations stopped coming, the calls were all business. I got the hint. I can’t say I cared much, because I got what I wanted from him, and despite his talk about the future, I knew he wasn’t exactly lovestruck.” She sipped, scowled. “Maybe if I’d had a dick.”

  “I thought you didn’t care,” I said.

  “Maybe I did, a little.” She stared at her glass, then said, fiercely, “You know he never could get it up for me. I thought it was because he was usually pretty drunk by the time we got to that part of the evening. We always ended up with him going down on me. He was good at oral sex. I guess he’d had a lot of practice.”

  “When did you start figuring this out?” I asked her.

  “I had a lot of time on my hands, sitting in my producer’s office in my little power suits, waiting for anyone to return my calls. I hadn’t paid much attention to those killings around here this summer. I mean, I was busy, and from what I heard, the victims were all gay men. I felt safe, for once. But when everyone started asking me about Joanne Schilling, I got curious about her, too. Her name was familiar, but I couldn’t think why, so one day I ran a search on the Internet and I came up with about thirty hits. Most of them were from twenty years ago. That’s how I found out she was an actress. The last one was from July, in an article about the murders. It said she was a witness who saw the killer driving out the alley where one of the bodies was found. I did some more research and figured out that the alley was about two blocks from here.”

  “You put two and two together and realized that Asuras and Donati had hired her to pose as a witness living in this neighborhood?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “That’s too byzantine for me. All I figured out was for some reason they wanted me to say she lived here, and by a bizarre coincidence, she was a witness in this local murder. All I wondered is what she was doing in the neighborhood.”

  “When did you realize it was more than a coincidence?”

  “Nick had told me the calls for her would stop, and he was very upset when I told him the two of you had called. Very upset. Unhinged, almost. When I found out Schilling had been murdered, I started to think there was something very bad going on here.”

  “When was the last time you spoke to Nick?” I asked.

  “Two days ago,” she said, “after the police came and interviewed me about Schilling. I could tell they weren’t buying my act. I called Nick in a panic and asked him what I should do. He told me not to do anything, that it would all blow over soon. But he sounded kind of panicked himself, so I wasn’t reassured.” She paused. “I haven’t been to work since. I’m afraid to go back there.”

  “Have you been threatened?” Serena asked.

  “No, but I could see the writing on the wall. Joanne was hired to play a witness, I was hired to play her roommate and she ended up dead. Nick, who never breaks a sweat, is frantic. I don’t know how this movie ends, but I’m not liking where my character’s going.”

  “It might be a good idea for you to stay somewhere else for a while,” Serena said.

  Walsh got up and opened a drawer, removing an envelope. “Airplane tickets,” she said. “I’m flying up to Seattle tonight to spend some time with family.”

  “I’ll need a statement from you before you leave,” Serena said.

  Walsh hesitated, “I don’t know about that.”

  “If you want to be able to come back someday,” Serena said, “you’re going to have to help us out here.”

  Walsh looked at me. “Is that true?”

  “I’m afraid so, Josey.”

  “All right, but I want something in exchange.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “When this is all over, exclusive movie rights to your stories.”

  Serena dropped me at the bottom of the hill to my house, then she and Josey Walsh continued downtown to Parker Center, where she had arranged for Walsh to make a statement to the detectives investigating Schilling’s murder before she flew to Seattle. Walsh had given us the first solid evidence that connected Asuras to any crime, albeit suborning perjury rather than murder. If the cops did their job, the charges co
uld be ratcheted up. While we waited for Walsh to pack, Serena told me she thought she would try to use Walsh’s statement to persuade the sheriff to reopen the investigation into Alex Amerian’s murder. She was, in fact, full of plans.

  “What about your boss, the DA? Won’t he be pissed when he gets wind that you’re going after his friend, Asuras?”

  “I’m not going to tell him,” she said. “And hopefully, he won’t find out until it’s time to indict the asshole, in which case Jack will get some very nice headlines out of it.”

  “You’ll get some nice headlines out of it, too.”

  “Oh, screw you, Henry. You’ve patronized me from the very beginning. You really don’t think much of me as a lawyer, do you?”

  “I’m sure you’re a perfectly competent lawyer, Serena.”

  “Then what’s your problem?”

  “You let yourself be used before in this case by the DA and the sheriff,” I said. “I’m not sure it won’t happen again.”

  “Watch me,” she said.

  “Don’t worry,” I replied. “I will.”

  I came down the steps from the street to my front door. I hadn’t left the porch light on and it was very dark. I wanted to change clothes, eat something and vegetate in front of CNN for a while before calling it a night. As I fumbled with my house keys, I heard rapidly approaching footsteps behind me. I jerked around and saw a man emerging from the shrubbery, holding something in one of his hands. I swung wildly, connected with his chest and knocked him to the ground.

  “Who the hell are you?” I said to the figure sprawled beneath me.

  “Henry?” he panted. “Mr. Rios? It’s me, Rod. Rod Morse.”

  Chapter 21

  “ROD? I’M REALLY sorry.”

  The boy slowly got to his feet. He was tall, an even six-footer at least, but hunched his shoulders slightly, making him seem shorter. The object he’d been carrying was a backpack. He picked it up with one hand, and with the other tamped down a mass of greasy, black hair. There was a stubborn patch of acne on his chin and a faint trace of beard on his cheeks. His clothes—slacks, a white shirt, a blue blazer—were dusty and soiled. The sweaty, sour smell of fear issued from his thin body. Only his eyes were beautiful—large, dark, clear: his sister’s eyes.