The Burning Plain

by Michael Nava

  On the third floor was a TV room, a snack bar, a weight room and a pool table. I bought a Coke and wandered into the TV room, where a gay porno was running on a big-screen TV. The only other occupant of the room was holding a cigarette with one hand and idly masturbating with the other. I sat down, sipped my Coke, and wondered whether this wasn’t simply a joke Asuras was playing on me.

  “Are you Henry?” I turned around. A spectacularly handsome man, also attired in a towel, repeated, “Henry?”

  “Yeah, I’m Henry.”

  He gestured to the envelope. “Is that for Duke?”

  “Where’s the boy?”

  “You give me the envelope and wait here.”

  “I want to see the boy.”

  “The envelope first,” he said, menacingly.

  “No.”

  He got up and left. A few minutes later, he dropped into the seat beside me. “Here,” he said, slipping me a key.

  “What is it?”

  “It opens a room downstairs,” he said. He glanced at the watch he was incongruously wearing. “Duke said to wait ten minutes. The envelope. Please.”

  “How do I know … ?”

  “Look, give me the fucking envelope or you’ll get the kid back one piece at a time.”

  I handed him the envelope.

  “Great,” he said. “Pleasure doing business with you.”

  He got up and left. I waited ten minutes then went down to the second floor and found the cubicle that matched the key. I unlocked the door. Rod Morse sat up on the bed, huddled against the wall, naked, his arms around his knees.

  “Rod?”

  His eyes were dead.

  “Rod,” I said, shaking his shoulders. “Rod. It’s Henry. Are you all right?”

  “Henry,” he grunted. “I’m going to be sick.”

  Vomit sprayed from his mouth. When I helped him off the bed, I saw a fresh blood stain on the sheet where he’d been sitting.

  I called a friend, a doctor named Iris Wong, who directed me to the emergency room of a hospital in the Valley, where she met me. She took him into an examining room and emerged a few minutes later, pale and angry.

  “What the hell happened to that boy?”

  “He was abducted from the street yesterday,” I said. “He called me from the bathhouse.”

  “Who is he, Henry?”

  “His name is Rod. He’s a runaway. He was staying with me while I tried to straighten things out with his family.”

  “A minor?”

  “Sixteen. What’s wrong with him?”

  “He was injected with an opiate,” Iris said, “probably heroin, and penetrated.”

  “Penetrated?”

  “He was raped,” she said. “With some kind of foreign object, and whoever did it went out of his way to hurt the boy. I stitched him, up but it’s going to be very painful down there for a long time and there’s a danger of infection. You better get him to a specialist as soon as possible. Have you called the police?”

  “I’d like to get him home tonight,” I said. “He can talk to the cops tomorrow.”

  “You make sure he does,” she said. “The man who did this to him was a monster.”

  “I know,” I said.

  A couple of hours later, I was sitting beside the bed in the guest room when Rod woke up. With a dazed look, he said, “You said I would be safe.”

  “I’m sorry, Rod, but it’s over now.”

  “I want to go home,” he mumbled, then fell asleep again.

  Chapter 23

  “WHAT HAPPENED YESTERDAY?” I asked.

  Rod wrote his initials in the dust on the dining room table, the plate of food in front of him untouched. It was nearly four, but he had only been awake for a little while. He raised his shaggy head and said, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “He raped you,” I said. “You need to talk about it.”

  “Not with you.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Everything happened because of you,” he said, looking away. “You made me stay with Richie. I could’ve caught AIDS from him.”

  “You don’t get AIDS from breathing the same air as someone who has it,” I said. “You know that.”

  “He said he knows you.”

  “Who said that?”

  “The man … Duke.” He rubbed the dust from his fingers. “Don’t you ever clean your house? You have some nasty mold in the bathroom.”

  “What else did he tell you?”

  “He said you knew I was with him. He said you told him it was okay.”

  “You know that’s not true.”

  “He made me crawl on the floor and beg him not to hurt me,” he said. “But he hurt me, anyway.”

  “There’s a cop I want you to talk to,” I said, thinking of Odell.

  “No,” he said. “I’m not telling anyone what happened.”

  “This man needs to be in prison.”

  “For what?” Rod demanded. “Being gay?”

  “Duke Asuras is a sexual sadist,” I said. “That’s a different category altogether.”

  “How do you know him?”

  “He killed Alex Amerian,” I said. “And your sister.”

  “He’s Mr. King,” Rod said. “From the disc.”

  I nodded. “Alex was trying to blackmail him.”

  “Katie, too?”

  “I don’t know. She had the disc, so she knew something. Too much for her own good. That’s why Asuras killed her.”

  “Was he going to kill me, too?”

  “No, he kidnapped you to get something from me. A document. A confession from a man who helped him commit the murders.”

  He looked at me. “Did you give it to him?”

  “Yes.”

  “How are the police going to catch him?”

  “There is other evidence,” I said, “and if you talk to Odell, my cop friend—”

  He shook his head. “No, I just want to forget about it. I never had sex before yesterday.”

  “Rape isn’t exactly sex,” I said.

  Not looking at me, he said, “It’s not sex when you come?”

  “Orgasms are involuntary, physical reactions,” I said, conscious of how pedantic I sounded. “The fact that you have one doesn’t mean you consent to what’s being done to you.”

  “He put things in my head,” Rod said.

  “What things? Did he threaten you?”

  He bit his lip. “No, sex things. Maybe they were always there.” He looked at me. “I don’t think I like being gay.”

  “You’ve been traumatized, Rod. You need time, you need to talk to someone. I won’t make you talk to the cops, but I have a friend, a therapist who specializes in counseling rape victims. She can help you through this.”

  “Yeah,” he muttered. “Maybe. Maybe so.”

  “Phil gets here in about an hour,” I said, glancing at my watch. “Do you want to come to the airport with me?”

  He shook his head.

  “Are you going to be all right for the hearing tomorrow?”

  “I’ll be fine,” he said.

  On the drive to my house to the airport, I explained to Phil as concisely as I could what had happened. He was incredulous, then angry.

  “We have to go to the cops.”

  “He doesn’t want to do that right now,” I said. “He needs time.”

  “No, not for him, Henry,” he said. “For you. What do you think his parents are going to be alleging if they find out about any of this?”

  It took a moment for his implication to sink it. “That I hurt Rod? That’s crazy.”

  “You have no idea how ugly cases like this can get,” he replied.

  “Rod knows what happened.”

  “They’ll say he’s lying to protect you or you threatened him.”

  A wave of panic surged through me. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  “Haven’t you heard?” he said, bitterly. “All gay men are child molesters.”

  Rod, however
, refused to talk to the police, even after Phil explained the necessity for it. When Phil continued to press him, he transformed himself into a sullen, taciturn adolescent. Phil finally gave up and I drove him to his hotel.

  “I smell trouble,” he said, getting out of the car.

  “He’s been through a lot,” I reminded him. “He’ll come through it all right.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  Rod said very little to me the next morning as we drove downtown to the courthouse, but I sensed he was thinking and from his bedraggled look it seemed obvious he’d been up most of the night. Phil met us on the steps of the courthouse, beneath the frieze of justice and her minions. It was a hot, smoggy September morning. As we climbed the steps to the entrance, Phil coached Rod on what to say should he be called to the stand. Rod nodded, but his eyes were far away. We went into the courthouse and took the escalator to the fifth floor, where Judge Fuentes had his chambers. At the end of the polished hall were Rod’s parents and their lawyer.

  Phil wrapped an arm around Rod’s shoulders. “Are you ready?”

  Rod shrugged him off. “I’m not doing it.”

  Phil yelped, “What?”

  “I want to go home with my parents.”

  “Do you mean that, Rod?” I asked.

  “You know they’ll commit you to the Foster Institute,” Phil warned.

  “Maybe that’s where I belong,” Rod said. “I don’t want to be a homosexual. Can’t you understand that?”

  “This is because of Asuras,” I said.

  “No, it’s not,” Rod replied. “I don’t want to be like Richie. I don’t want be like you, either, Henry, some lonely, old man living in a dirty house.”

  Phil said, “We’ve gone through a lot of trouble for you.”

  “I changed my mind,” he replied, with adolescent finality. “You can’t make me go through with it.” He dashed down the corridor toward his parents.

  “Let him go,” I said.

  “That little shit,” Wise said. “That little shit.”

  “It’s his life, Phil.”

  “He can fucking have it,” Wise muttered, as we watched the Morses embrace their son. “I’m outta here.”

  The Morses’ lawyer came toward us, with a delighted but confused expression.

  “What’s going on?” he said.

  “My client’s changed his mind about the petition,” Phil said formally. “He wants to go home. Is that acceptable to your God-fearing clients?”

  “Yes, yes, I’m sure it is,” he replied.

  “Great,” Phil said. “Let’s go inside and I’ll make a motion to dismiss.”

  I watched Rod cling to his parents like a drowning man to a raft.

  The motion was granted. Afterward, I drove Phil to the airport. I pulled up in front of the Southwestern terminal. He started to get out, stopped and looked at me.

  “That case was a winner,” he sighed. “We could have made new law.”

  “There will be other cases,” I said. “Some other parents trying to commit their kid for being gay or lesbian.”

  “You got that right. Take care of yourself, Professor K.,” he said. “And for the record, I don’t think you’re a dirty old man, or whatever the hell the kid said. I think you’re pretty hot.”

  “You comfort me in my old age,” I said.

  “Give me a call next time you come up to the city,” he said.

  I called Richie from the car phone to tell him the outcome of the hearing.

  “It’s all my fault,” he said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Richie. You didn’t rape the boy.”

  “Now he’s going to spend the rest of his life either hating himself or hating other gays,” he said. “Or both. Asuras. I’m sorry Alex didn’t shoot that fuck when he had the chance. Maybe I should. I have nothing to lose.”

  “I’ll take care of Asuras,” I said.

  Odell gaped at me when I finished my story. We were in his office at the sheriff’s station, the door closed. He rubbed his temples.

  “Where’s the affidavit?”

  I handed him the sealed envelope I had retrieved from Kwan before coming over. “This is the copy Donati intended for the chief of police.”

  He took a penknife from his desk, slit open the top of the envelope and removed the affidavit. He read it slowly, shaking his head. When he got to the last page, he looked up at me, puzzled.

  “You said this was a copy.”

  “Yeah?”

  He held up the document. “This is his signature. This is an original.”

  I studied Nick’s signature and the signature of the notary public. “He must have executed three originals.”

  “Are you giving this to me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m going down to pay a call on the sheriff,” he said, raising his bulk from behind his desk. “Good work, man.”

  The phone company had sent someone to check my line for taps and he was waiting for me when I returned from the sheriff’s office.

  “I didn’t find anything,” he said.

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m not saying your line wasn’t tapped,” he explained. “I’m just saying it’s okay now. If you have any other trouble, you give me a call.”

  I took his card and went in, picked up the phone and listened to the innocent buzz of the dial tone. When I put the receiver down, it started ringing. I jumped, then cautiously picked it up.

  “Hello,” I said, half-expecting Asuras.

  “Henry?” It was Serena, calling from Sacramento. “You’ve got to take the next plane up here.”

  “The affidavit was an original, wasn’t it?”

  “How did you know?”

  “I gave the other copy to Odell. We opened it in his office.”

  She hesitated. “I thought your phone …”

  “The phone guy was just out here. He says it wasn’t tapped. Asuras isn’t as powerful as he likes people to think. That’s how bullies are.”

  “We have a meeting with the Attorney General first thing tomorrow,” she said.

  “Is he going to prosecute?”

  “He took the affidavit with him. He’ll let us know in the morning.”

  After a four-hour meeting the following morning, the Attorney General, a trim, telegenic man with reptilian eyes, said yes.

  Two weeks later, at a packed press conference, with the LA County sheriff at his side, the Attorney General announced the indictment of Duke Asuras on six counts of first-degree murder and Montezuma Gaitan on two. He concluded with a swipe at the LA District Attorney, whom the AG accused of having been corrupted by Hollywood money. That night, Gaitan drove out into the Mojave and shot himself. His decomposing body was found ten days later. The day after the AG’s press conference, Johnnie Cochran was in court on Asuras’s behalf with motions to dismiss the indictment and postpone arraignment. The court continued arraignment for thirty days in order to study the motions to dismiss.

  The media went crazy. Not since the Simpson trial had there been a murder indictment against so high profile a member of the entertainment industry. Asuras’s lawyers and Parnassus’s public-relations department immediately took the offensive. They claimed Donati was the actual murderer who had posthumously attempted to incriminate Asuras in his crime. The Industry’s “creative community” also rushed to Asuras’s defense. Full-page ads began to appear, first in the trade papers, then the Los Angeles and New York Times and the Wall Street Journal signed by some of Hollywood’s elite, in which phrases like “witch hunt” were bruited about. The Los Angeles DA also joined the fray, asserting that his office had found insufficient evidence to prosecute Asuras, and suggesting that the Attorney General’s indictment was pure politics. Even the President got in on the act, piously reminding his fellow citizens of the presumption of innocence when questioned about the case at a press conference. Later, after the evidence began to pile up against Asuras, his press secretary asserted that the President scarcely knew A
suras but then he was forced to admit Asuras had spent several nights in the Lincoln Bedroom, and Republicans in Congress demanded a special prosecutor. Asuras added a half-dozen of the country’s best lawyers to his defense, but, as often happens, new evidence emerged as witnesses stepped forward and the sheriff’s department pursued the investigation with all the vigor of a political campaign. The ads stopped running, Hollywood fell silent, and then it was announced that Asuras would be taking a leave from his position in order to defend himself. The Democratic National Committee returned his contribution.

  The day before his arraignment, Duke Asuras borrowed the private jet of a movie-star friend and flew to Brazil, a country that, conveniently, had no extradition treaty with the United States. By week’s end, an arrest warrant had been issued for him. This was followed by a report that, between the time the indictment was announced and his departure, he had transferred most of his wealth outside the country. A state bar committee was convened to investigate whether his lawyers had knowledge of his plan to flee. The results were inconclusive. Equally inconclusive was the Attorney General’s attempt to indict the movie star for aiding Asuras’s flight. The movie star later made a substantial contribution to the AG’s gubernatorial campaign. From somewhere in Brazil, Asuras issued a press release in which he said that he was the victim of a homophobic, right-wing, religious zealot—the Attorney General—in a country “where gay people, such as myself, are routinely persecuted by the same legal system that is supposed to protect us. In the current climate of hatred and discrimination against gays, I have no confidence that my innocence, and I am completely innocent of these ridiculous charges, could be proven. Therefore, rather than risk conviction for a crime of which I am innocent, I have chosen to exile myself from my country until such time that I can be sure, as a gay man, of receiving a fair trial. God bless America.”

  “Can you believe it?” Serena said to me. I was sitting in her living room, Hekate purring on my lap, having just watched Asuras’s statement being read on TV.