The Burning Plain

by Michael Nava

  The Burning Plain

  A Henry Rios Mystery

  Michael Nava

  TO

  ROBERT DAWIDOFF AND IN MEMORY OF RICHARD ROUILARD

  Enormous herds of naked souls I saw, lamenting till their eyes were burned of tears; they seemed condemned by an unequal law, for some were stretched supine upon the ground, some squatted with their arms about themselves and others without pause roamed round and round.

  —The Inferno

  Crime is terribly revealing.

  —Agatha Christie

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Acknowledgements

  Preview: Rag and Bone

  Chapter 1

  I WAS SITTING by myself at a plastic table outside the coffee kiosk in the plaza between the county courthouse and the Hall of Records in downtown Los Angeles on a warm, polluted morning in late April. It was nine-forty-two. The office workers had reluctantly straggled off to their jobs, leaving empty cups, pastry crumbs, packets of sugar and lipstick-stained napkins on the surrounding tables. A homeless woman—a swirl of rags, a baked face—rooted through the litter. She carefully wrapped the remains of a bran muffin in a paper napkin, tucked it into a soiled pocket and approached me with an outstretched hand. Her eyes were like wounds. I gave her a dollar, to the frowning displeasure of the boy behind the counter at the kiosk. The sky was metallic, as if the city was enclosed by a dome, and nothing stirred among the dusty plants and trees in the plaza. The poisonous air made my eyes sting. I sipped lukewarm coffee and glanced at the paper. There was a picture of a heavyset man in a tuxedo, standing at a podium with an oversized Oscar behind him. The caption identified him as Duke Asuras, head of Parnassus Pictures, and quoted him as having said at the recent Academy Awards ceremony, “Filmmaking isn’t an industry, it’s warfare and the whole world is our battleground.” I glanced at my watch. It was time to go to court.

  The county courthouse filled three blocks along First Street with concrete and polished granite, a severe and gargantuan building in a neighborhood of severe and gargantuan buildings: the Halls of Records and Administration, the Criminal Courts Building, the Chandler Pavilion, Times Mirror Square, City Hall. Civil matters were heard at the county courthouse, and as a criminal defense lawyer I hadn’t spent much time there. Still, I never failed to be impressed by the frieze high above the Hill Street entrance that depicted Justice balancing the scales on her head while on either side of her knelt a heroically muscled male figure, each with a stone tablet he displayed to the passersby. Lux et Veritas was carved on one tablet, Lex on the other. Light and truth. Law. That was the promise, but as I stepped into the courthouse on my way to the final hearing on the disposition of my lover’s corpse, the phrase that passed through my mind was “Hell is other people.”

  Taped to the door of Department 22 was a schedule of the matters pending that day before Judge Goodman. Heading the list was a will contest: In re the Estate of Joshua Scott Mandel. The parties were me, Henry Rios as executor of the estate and the objectors, Josh’s parents, Sam and Selma Mandel. This wasn’t the usual fight over competing claims to property or money; Josh’s worldly possessions had filled a dozen paper sacks and a U-Haul van. At issue were his written instructions that upon his death his body be cremated and the ashes scattered by his friends and family.

  Josh had died of complications from AIDS at the age of twenty-nine. For five years, we’d been lovers, until he left me for another man, who, like Josh, had AIDS. After Steven had died and Josh’s own health began to fail, I became his main caretaker. Even before the last series of infections and illnesses that carried him off, Josh had insisted on cremation rather than burial. He’d advanced a number of reasons, everything from the environmental (“There’s already a big landfill problem, Henry”) to the mystical (“The Hindus believe that fire releases your soul”); but reason aside, Josh was phobic about burial. Toward the end, he’d been plagued by nightmares of being buried alive and he made me promise, repeatedly, to honor the request for cremation he had included with his will.

  I’d assumed he had spoken to his parents about his wish, but when I went about making the arrangements after he died, I learned I was wrong. Not only had Josh not told his parents he wanted to be cremated, they were horrified at the prospect.

  “Jews,” his father told me in our last phone conversation, “are not cremated.”

  “It’s what he wanted.”

  As if I hadn’t spoken, Sam Mandel said, “My son will be buried beside his grandparents.”

  “I’m sorry, Sam. I promised him.”

  I knew Sam had viewed his son’s homosexuality as a calamity of Biblical proportions, so I tried not to take personally his scarcely concealed loathing for me; but when he dismissed me with a contemptuous, “You promised him? Who are you? I’m his father,” I blew up.

  “Now,” I said. “Now that he’s dead and can’t embarrass you anymore. You weren’t so anxious to be his father while he was dying.”

  “You evil man,” he said. “You killed him.”

  “Josh is dead because you made him feel so ashamed of himself he thought he deserved to contract AIDS.”

  “Liar! You gave it to him.”

  “You know that’s not true.”

  He hung up on me.

  The next day, the Mandels filed a lawsuit to remove me as executor on the grounds of undue influence. They sought a temporary injunction to prevent me from proceeding with the cremation. Included in their request was Sam’s affidavit alleging that I had infected Josh with HIV, alienated him from his family and now proposed to dispose of his remains in a manner offensive to their religion. Selma Mandel, with whom I’d sat the last vigil at Josh’s deathbed, now claimed that I had prevented her from seeing Josh after I brought him home from the hospital. Their attorney, Howard Lev, implied in not so subtle terms that a decision against the Mandels was tantamount to an act of anti-Semitism. The court granted the preliminary injunction while it determined the merits of their action, and ordered me to release Josh’s body to the custody of the medical examiner, who removed it to the county morgue.

  I think we had all expected the case to be determined swiftly, but this was the year of three strikes. Every criminal defendant in the county of Los Angeles faced with a possible third felony conviction and twenty-five to life was demanding a trial, and even probate judges had been pressed into service. Our case was tried in bits and pieces over a period of six months. My dreams were straight out of Edgar Allan Poe; worm-eaten flesh, ravenous ghosts. I only had to look at the Mandels to know they were having the same dreams.

  “Counsel,” Judge Goodman had said to Lev and me the last time we were before her, “surely, some compromise is possible.”

  “The Mandels cannot compromise their religious principles,” Lev replied.

  “Mr. Rios?”

  “I’m sorry, Judge, but I’d be derelict in my duties as Josh’s executor if I didn’t follow through with his last request.”

  She sighed. “All right. Come back in April for final judgment. My clerk will give you a date.”

  Afterward, in the hallway outside of Judge Goodman’s courtroom, Lev said, “W
hat have you got against these people, Henry? All they want is their son back.”

  “Back from where?”

  “They had relatives who died in the camps,” he chided me. “Their bodies were burned in Hitler’s crematoria. Doesn’t that move you at all?”

  “Of course,” I said, “but I don’t see that what their family suffered gives them the right to shove Josh back into the closet.”

  “They only want to bury him.”

  “What they want is to return him to the family fold and erase all evidence he was gay. I’ve seen it happen over and over, but Josh wouldn’t have let it happen to him, and I won’t, either.”

  “He belongs to them,” Lev said angrily. “They’re his family. You’re the stranger here, trying to make some political statement out of their loss.”

  “The hard lesson of Josh’s life was that he belonged to himself.”

  “Ah, well. Fine. I’ll see you back in court.”

  “Please rise,” the bailiff said. “Department 22 is now in session, the Honorable Judith Goodman presiding.”

  Judge Goodman took the bench and shuffled some papers in front of her. She was probably thirty-four, thirty-five, a decade younger than me, an attractive woman with cascading blond hair, who had presided over the case with a pained, trapped expression. Sometimes, while someone was testifying, I watched the furrows deepen in her brow and I could almost hear her thinking, God, I hate this case. Looking at her now, I watched the mask that descends over the features of judges about to render an unpopular decision descend over hers, and I knew I had won. I did not feel victorious. I was only aware of how cold it was in the courtroom, so cold that the reporter who sat beneath the bench with her fingers poised over her reporting machine was wearing thin leather gloves. As the judge began to speak, I glanced at the Mandels. Sam stared fixedly at the Great Seal of California on the wall above the judge’s head. Selma stole a look at me; her heart-shaped face was tired, cried-out. When I caught her eye, she quickly turned away. I could tell by the slump in Howard Lev’s shoulders that he had read in Judge Goodman’s face the same result as me.

  “We are here today in In re Estate of Mandel,” Judge Goodman was saying. “The objectors, the decedent’s parents, are attempting to remove the executor of decedent’s estate on grounds of undue influence. I have considered the following evidence,” she continued, and listed it slowly for the benefit of the court reporter. “On a personal level, this is a troubling case, because it pits the decedent’s family against his dearest friend and companion. As a legal question, however, the result is clear to me. For purposes of this proceeding, undue influence has been defined in Estate of Dale as conduct which subjugates the will of the testator to the will of another. To prevail in this action, the Mandels were required to prove that Mr. Rios overcame Joshua’s free will with respect to the funerary arrangements specified by Josh in the codicil to his will dated last September sixteenth.” She paused, took a breath and said, “I find that the Mandels have not satisfied their burden of showing undue influence …”

  From the other side of the courtroom, I heard Selma gasp, “Oh, oh …”

  When she finished reading her judgment, Judge Goodman said to Lev, “Mr. Lev, I’m prepared to issue an order to Mr. Rios today that would allow him to take possession of the body from the county medical examiner, but I’ll refrain from making that order if the Mandels intend to appeal the judgment.”

  Lev shambled to his feet. “I’ve discussed it with my clients. They can’t afford to pursue the case to the appellate level. The only appeal they can afford to make is to Mr. Rios’s sense of decency.”

  “The time for argument is over,” the judge murmured. “Mr. Rios, I’m signing the order.”

  “Thank you, Your Honor.”

  The next morning, armed with the order, I stood in a cold room in the county morgue while a deputy medical examiner wheeled in a gurney with a body on it, covered by a sheet. He pulled the sheet back.

  “This him?”

  Six months of refrigeration had so drained the last vestiges of life from the blue-skinned, emaciated body that for a long minute I wasn’t sure it was Josh. His body looked like the kind of thing that was dropped from the rafters of the haunted house at an amusement park to make kids scream. There was no trace in those forlorn features of the cranky, funny intelligence that had been Josh Mandel. It was just a thing, a husk, from which Josh was long gone. And yet it was the body I had held next to mine, had reached for in lust, pushed aside in anger, comforted, loved, missed. All that struggle, all that feeling gone down the black hole, leaving nothing but this effigy.

  “Excuse me,” the M.E. said impatiently. “Is this him?”

  “Yes, it is,” I said. “It’s him.”

  Two days later, his ashes were delivered to me in a bronze urn via UPS. Josh’s will specified that his family participate in the scattering of the ashes. As unlikely as it was the Mandels would agree, I felt duty-bound to remind them of his request before disposing of the ashes, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it just yet. I put the urn on the mantel above the fireplace, off to the side, and went back to work in the room I’d fitted out as my office.

  I’d been a lawyer for twenty-one years, having graduated third in my class from Stanford in the mid-seventies. Back then, the words “idealist” and “lawyer” could still be spoken in the same sentence without a sneer, and no one questioned why I would take my prestigious degree and join the local public defender’s office rather than hang my shingle with a big-city firm. Criminal defense was the only kind of law I had ever wanted to practice. I was inspired in equal parts by a childhood veneration of Abraham Lincoln, the TV series Perry Mason, my father’s brutality and my awareness, from the time I was sixteen, that I was gay. The last two were related. My Mexican immigrant father was a hard man who had survived a hard life, and he despised the softness he detected in his only son and was determined to beat it out of me. All his beatings had accomplished was to incite in me a hatred of authority and injustice. Not until I fell in love with my best friend in high school did I begin to understand that what had driven my father’s violence was every father’s ultimate nightmare: a homosexual son. A maricón. Had I been able to change, I would have done it without hesitation, but in the deepest part of me I knew change was not possible, only deception, and that would have inevitably implicated other people in my lie. I was too much an altar boy for that. I compromised: if I could not not be gay, I would compensate for it with good works. My compromise led me, at twenty-four, into a courtroom to defend my first client, a man not unlike my father, accused of murdering another man in a brawl in a cantina in the San Jose barrio.

  I hung the jury, eight to four for acquittal, with a mistaken identity defense, and the charges were dropped. It was the fast track after that, big cases, big wins, a reputation for thoroughness and eloquence I still lived off of; all those years of committing Lincoln’s speeches to heart had paid off. I was too busy for a private life, too busy to be gay, so busy that I didn’t notice the water closing over my head until I was drowning in loneliness and booze. I lost my job. I sobered up. I got drunk again. I sobered up again. I met Josh. We moved to Los Angeles. I established a successful practice. Josh left me for Steven. I closed my practice to find myself and discovered I was a lawyer. Steven died and Josh got sick. I went back to work handling criminal appeals out of my house so I could take care of Josh. Josh died. And that’s how I’d spent the last decade.

  Back in my office, tropical fish danced across the screen of my desktop. Piles of transcripts were stacked on the floor, spilling out of file cabinets, representing the fifty-odd cases on appeal I was handling. On makeshift bookshelves lining the walls were my law books, reporters, treatises, digests. Somewhere in the room was my degree from Stanford and a yellowing copy of my student law review note: “Recent Developments in Fourth Amendment Jurisprudence.” On my desk was a picture of Josh I’d taken on a weekend trip to San Francisco shortly after we’d met. He wa
s twenty-two, a little, beautifully made man with olive skin, a wild frizz of black hair, and eyes like wounds. He had only recently told me he was HIV positive. He was still afraid I would abandon him. In time, he’d learned to trust me and the wounded eyes healed. And then they’d closed for good. I took the picture from its frame, turned it over and scribbled on the back his name and dates and a line from Emily Dickinson that had been running through my head for months: “Parting is all we know of heaven and all we need of hell.”

  I don’t know how long I sat there looking at his picture before I was roused to the front door by the doorbell. I peered through the peephole at my friend Richie Florentino, his fist poised to bang on the door. I opened it.

  Tall and thin, his long face was framed by a luxuriance of thick, wavy dark hair and he had the square-jawed glamour of a forties movie star, a look he carefully cultivated. Always draped in the latest fashions, he was wearing a burnt-orange sports coat over a linen shirt of paler orange, a silk tie the color of new grass and cream-colored linen trousers. On his large feet were lime-green suede loafers with brass buckles forming by the letters GV, Gianni Versace, his favorite designer. Richie lived in an apartment in West Hollywood that had once belonged to Jean Harlow and edited a magazine called L.A. Mode that catalogued the antics of the rich and famous. His lover of twenty years, Joel Miller, was a studio executive. Richie claimed descent from the de Medicis and a family fortune going back five hundred years. His friends knew never to question his veracity, but simply assumed that, out of any ten statements, Richie had made up nine of them.

  “Good, you’re home,” Richie said, sweeping past me in a flood of Guerlain’s Derby. “Oh, honey, it’s so hot in here. Turn on the air-conditioning.”

  “You’ve been here before,” I said. “You know my house isn’t air-conditioned.”

  “But I keep hoping.” He flung himself into an armchair and lit a Marlboro Light. “You don’t mind, do you?”

  “Would it matter if I did?”