The Burning Plain

by Michael Nava

  “What did he look like?”

  “He was a big guy, six something, beefy. Fat neck.”

  “You shoved him back and then he knocked you down?” I asked, consulting my notes.

  He nodded. “It was a reflex when I shoved back. I wasn’t trying to pick a fight with him because I knew he could beat the crap out of me, but then he laid into me and knocked me down …”

  “And called you a faggot. Do you have any idea why he called you that?”

  “I guess it was the worst thing he thought he could call another guy.”

  “So it was just a general insult, but because you’d been gay bashed, you didn’t hear it that way, right?”

  He nodded. “He was standing over me, calling me a faggot, and it was like a flashback to those punks with their baseball bats. I thought, any second now and he’ll start kicking me, so I pulled my gun …”

  “Where was the gun?”

  “In my waistband,” he said.

  “What happened then?”

  “I got the gun out but before I could point it at him, he stepped on my wrist and I dropped it. He kicked it away. Then he rolled me over and got me into handcuffs. He pulled me to my feet and locked me to the fence until the cops came.”

  “You’re sure you didn’t point the gun at him.”

  “I didn’t have a chance.”

  “Tell me about when you were attacked. How serious were the injuries?”

  “Six broken ribs and a concussion, plus I was black and blue for weeks.”

  “And the psychological damage?”

  He frowned. “I’d like to find those punks and kill them.”

  “Richie said the police wouldn’t take a report. Is that right?”

  He nodded. “That’s right.”

  “So there’s no record of the attack.”

  He stared at me. “You don’t believe me?”

  “If I’m going to be arguing to the DA or a jury that you pulled the gun on the security guard because you were in fear of your life based on the previous attack, they’ll want evidence.”

  “Incredible,” he muttered. “This was a misunderstanding, that’s all.”

  “Misunderstandings that end up as felonies take on a life of their own.”

  He brooded into his beer. “What about the article about me in Richie’s magazine? Is that evidence?”

  I thought about it. “It depends on whether the reporter corroborated your story. Do you have a copy of the article?”

  “I have lots of copies,” he said. “I’ve been sending them all over the place. My congressman, the mayor, the sheriff. No one writes back.”

  “Where were you treated for your injuries?”

  “The emergency room at Cedar-Sinai.”

  “Then there are those records, too,” I said.

  “What’s going to happen to me, Mr. Rios? I don’t want to go to jail behind this. It’s not fair.”

  “The problem is the gun,” I said. “Where did you get it?”

  “It’s not hard to get a gun in LA.”

  “I assume the cops kept it.”

  “As far as I know,” he said.

  “Would you agree to its destruction?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If I can find a sympathetic DA, I might be able to work out a deal because, based on what you’ve told me, this isn’t the kind of case a prosecutor’s going to want to take to a jury. I can’t guarantee you no jail time, but it’s pretty unlikely unless you have a record. Do you?”

  “I’ve never been in trouble before,” he said, quickly.

  “Then that’s not a problem,” I replied. “You want to get me a copy of the magazine piece?”

  While he was gone, I went over my notes. Alex had provided a sympathetic and plausible account of the incident, one I could easily sell to a jury if it came to that. Was he telling the truth? Most of my clients lied to me, people in trouble usually do. Over the years I’d developed an intuition about how much was being concealed. My bullshit detector had twitched a couple of times with Alex, but no major alarms had gone off. I thought he might be lying to me about whether he had a rap sheet, but that was easy enough to check. One other thing bothered me, and when he returned, I asked him about it.

  “Did you carry this gun with you everywhere you went?”

  “Yes,” he said, passing me the article across the table.

  “But the attack was six months ago?”

  His eyes were cold. “Have you ever been gay bashed, Mr. Rios?”

  “No.”

  “I thought I was safe in West Hollywood,” he said, “but once I was attacked I knew I wasn’t safe anywhere. I had to protect myself.”

  I nodded. “And if I run a rap sheet on you, I’m not going to come up with any surprises.”

  He was more wounded than angry. “No.”

  “I have to make sure. I don’t like surprises.”

  A dusty leaf drifted from the vine and settled in his hair. He was drenched in cologne. I recognized the fragrance—it was popular that year—but I couldn’t remember what it was called.

  “You looked pretty surprised when you first saw me,” he said. “What did Richie say about me? Did he tell you I was crazy?”

  “It wasn’t anything Richie said. You reminded me of someone.”

  “Someone you liked?” A note of flirtation crept into his voice.

  “My lover,” I said. “He died a few months ago. I still think I see him sometimes, walking down the street, sitting in front of me at the movies, but of course it isn’t him, just someone who looks like him a bit. I had one of those moments when I first saw you.” I sipped some water, warm now that the ice had melted. “I didn’t mean to stare.”

  The black eyes gazed at me. “What was his name?”

  “Josh,” I said. “Joshua.”

  “Joshua,” he repeated. “I like that name.”

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s a nice name.” I gathered up my papers. “I’ll see if I can’t straighten this out with the DA tomorrow.”

  He laid a hand on my sleeve. “I’m sorry about Josh, Mr. Rios.”

  Each time he said Josh’s name, I felt a pang in my gut, like hunger.

  “You will have a record after this,” I said, not looking at him. “You should be aware of that. It might affect your future employment.”

  “I’m an actor,” he said. “I don’t think it will matter.”

  “A working actor?”

  “If you’re worried if I can pay you …,” he said, frowning.

  “No,” I interrupted. “I’m doing this as a favor to Richie. I was just curious, but it’s none of my business.”

  “I support myself,” he said.

  He walked me to the front door. “Thank you,” he said.

  “I’ll be in touch.”

  I read the L.A. Mode article when I got home. Alex’s was one of four gay-bashing incidents discussed in the story. According to Alex, he’d been attacked on his way home from a bar called the Gold Coast at two in the morning on a side street off the boulevard. He managed to get to a phone and call 911. Half an hour later an ambulance and a sheriff’s patrol car arrived. As he was being loaded into the ambulance, he attempted to report the attack to a deputy sheriff. The deputy had refused either to take the report or to explain why. The writer claimed the reason was that by refusing to take hate-crime reports in West Hollywood, the sheriffs could then claim no such crimes occurred. A former deputy was quoted, anonymously, in support of this assertion. Asked for a comment, the captain of the West Hollywood station denied this was the sheriff’s policy and declared Alex’s allegation was “without merit.”

  Though there wasn’t much direct corroboration of Alex’s story in the piece, the claim that the sheriff’s office was deliberately refusing to take hate-crime reports was potentially incendiary in a city where police were increasingly regarded with suspicion and hostility. In a trial, it was the kind of information that could have what some local defense attorneys were now cal
ling “the Fuhrman effect,” after the LAPD cop who’d been used by the defense to turn the Simpson trial into a referendum about racism in the department. If I could find the right person in the District Attorney’s office to give this information, I might be able to leverage a plea in Alex’s case.

  The right person: a gay or lesbian deputy DA. There were a number of them in the DA’s office, something that still seemed remarkable to me because when I had begun practicing, most prosecutor’s offices were the preserve of people to whom homosexuals were, at best, a colorful part of the demimonde, like whores and junkies. I suppose it was progress that now some of us were deemed fit to put people in jail, and I wasn’t above appealing to gay solidarity if it helped me on a case.

  The next morning I made an appointment to see Serena Dance, the head of the DA office’s Hate Crimes Unit. I’d known Serena casually for a couple of years, since we’d been on a panel together at the state bar convention to discuss the impact of the then newly enacted hate-crime statutes. At the time, she’d been the director of the Gay and Lesbian Law Project, and she’d been instrumental in assuring that crimes against gays and lesbians were included in the hate crime legislation. When the DA set up the Hate Crimes Unit, he hired her to run it, to much fanfare, but then it and she had faded from public view.

  Her office was on the eighteenth floor of the Criminal Courts Building, the same floor where the DA had his suite. I gave my name to the black marshal who sat at a desk in the dim corridor and waited while she tracked Serena down. A few minutes later, she emerged from a side door. In one of the many profiles that had appeared after her appointment by the DA, I’d read that Serena had played on the women’s pro-tennis circuit after college, and she still looked the part. Rangy and tall, she had the short, no-nonsense hair and sunburned face of a jock, and retained a kind of the stub-nosed collegiate cuteness. When she moved, it was with an athlete’s self-confidence and economy.

  She fixed me in her bright blue gaze, extended a muscular hand and said, “Henry Rios in the DA’s office. I’m surprised you didn’t turn into a pillar of salt when you stepped off the elevator.”

  “You used to be a radical lesbian lawyer,” I said. “What happened? Have you gone native up here, surrounded by all these career prosecutors?”

  “Come on back.”

  I followed her through the door to a corridor lined with cardboard boxes, file cabinets and discarded pieces of furniture, past a warren of small windowless offices, until we reached her office. It was a ten-by-twelve cubicle with metal walls, a dirty brown carpet and steel furniture finished in faux-wood grain, but it did have windows and a view of the roof of the building across the street. The city was, as usual, wreathed in smog.

  “Nice view,” I said, going to the window. “That’s the roof of the old Hall of Justice, isn’t it?”

  She came up beside me. She was wearing scent. Something herbal; rosemary or lavender. “Yeah, there was a jail on the top floor and the roof was the inmate’s recreation yard. Now it belongs to the pigeons.”

  “The sky is filthy.”

  “Like the scum around a toilet bowl,” she said, going to her desk. “Have a sit.”

  I moved a stack of Supreme Court advance sheets from one of the two chairs in front of her desk and sat down. A boom box on a bookshelf was tuned to the same big-band station I listened to when I was working. Billie Holiday crooned a junkie version of “Lover Man” in a voice like velvet over barbed wire. On Serena’s desk was a half-eaten egg-salad sandwich, a crumpled bag of Fritos, piles of case files, a laptop and a framed photograph of Serena, her lover, Donna, a therapist, and their five-year-old son, Jesse.

  “How’s business?”

  “Close the door,” she said.

  I tipped the chair back, reached behind and pulled the door shut. “So, what’s up? People stopped hating each other?”

  “Nope, there’s still a big market in hate in this town, but the DA’s priorities have changed. Hate crimes are out, three strikes is in.”

  “What does that mean to you?”

  “When I started, I had four deputies and a secretary. Now it’s just me and a secretary I share with three other assistants. I may not survive the next budget.”

  “The DA can’t get rid of you. There’d be a big ruckus.”

  She tossed a stack of papers across the desk. “The latest hate-crime statistics,” she said. “Crimes against persons and crimes against property are both on the rise, especially against Jews, blacks and gays, with Latinos running a close fourth. Where’s the public outcry? The Times will bury this report on the inside pages of the Metro section. The broadcast media can’t be bothered.” She slouched in her chair. “We’re becoming habituated to hate. Maybe we’re even becoming addicted to it. There’s nothing like it for that adrenaline rush.”

  “That’s a pretty grim prognosis.”

  “What does it say about a society that needs hate laws in the first place?” she replied. “You didn’t drop by to hear this. What can I do for you?”

  “I wanted to talk to you about a case.”

  She straightened up, all business. “What case?”

  “It’s a little complicated,” I began, and launched into my spiel.

  When I finished, I gave her a copy of the L.A. Mode piece. She flipped through it, frowning. “Yeah, I read this when it came out,” she said. “Anonymous sources, uncorroborated claims and no one bothered to talk to me. Not stellar journalism.”

  “The attack on Alex was real enough,” I said. “Cedars verified he was treated in the emergency room last November. I’ve subpoenaed his records.”

  “I’d like to see you get them in,” she said. “They’re not exactly relevant to an ADW six months after the fact.”

  “No? What if a woman was raped and then found herself in a situation where she thought it was going to happen again and tried to protect herself? There isn’t a judge on the bench who would exclude evidence of the rape. It goes to the reasonableness of self-defense.”

  “Okay, decent analogy,” she conceded. “But what does that have to do with me?”

  “Doesn’t it bother you that the sheriff has a policy against taking hate-crime reports from victims of gay bashings? I think it would bother a jury.”

  Her face hardened. “One, it’s not true …”

  “Are you sure? I did a little research on the sheriff’s attitude toward gays. A couple of years back, he advised any gay or lesbian deputies to stay in the closet because he couldn’t guarantee their personal safety. What kind of message does that send to the troops?”

  “Unlike most politicians, the sheriff learns from his mistakes,” she said. “Look, I’m not going to defend the entire department, but I’ve personally trained deputies in West Hollywood and they know it’s their asses if they fail to investigate incidents of gay bashing. There is no contrary policy.”

  “Obviously at least one deputy didn’t get the message.”

  “What are you going to do, Henry, put the sheriff’s department on trial to deflect attention from your client?”

  “If I have to,” I said, “but this is not a case that needs to go to trial. My client was victimized, first by the guys who attacked him and then by the deputy who blew him off. Can you blame him if he goes in for a little self-help? He gets into a situation where he misreads the cues and overreacts. Is it right to throw him into jail for that?”

  “He should’ve come to me six months ago.”

  “Your mandate is to protect victims of hate crime. That doesn’t always mean prosecuting their assailants.”

  “What are you looking for?” she asked after a moment’s thought.

  “He pleads to misdemeanor assault and the gun charge. He agrees to the destruction of the gun, a fine and three years’ unsupervised probation.”

  “Does he have a record?”

  “I checked,” I replied. “He’s clean.”

  “He’ll have to agree to counseling as a condition of probation.”

 
; “I don’t have any problem with that.”

  “All right,” she said. “When’s the arraignment?”

  “Monday.”

  “I’ll make a note on the file,” she said.

  “Thanks.”

  She shrugged. “I might as well do someone some good while I still can.”

  A week later, I was standing at sidebar in a crowded master calendar court while a young assistant DA named Campion explained to an impatient judge the deal Serena and I had worked out on Alex Amerian’s case.

  “Your Honor,” Campion was saying, “we’ve agreed to a disposition on People versus Amerian.”

  “Am I supposed to guess?” the judge asked, rifling through a stack of files.

  “The People will dismiss the charge of assault with a deadly weapon and the defendant will plead to simple assault and possession of a concealed firearm.”

  “Sentencing recommendation?” she asked impatiently.

  “A thousand-dollar fine and thirty-six months’ summary probation, with counseling,” the DA said.

  “The gun bothers me,” the judge said. “Any prior record on this defendant?”

  “No, Your Honor,” I said. “As for the gun, Mr. Amerian was the victim of a vicious attack a couple of months before this incident, so he decided to arm himself. Not the smartest decision in the world, but understandable.”

  “Who attacked him?” she asked. “Is there a connection here?”

  “It was a gay bashing, Your Honor,” I replied. “It has nothing to do with this case.”

  “Is that right, Mr. Campion?”

  “Yes, Your Honor. The defendant’s agreed to the destruction of the gun. We’re satisfied that this was a one-time thing with him. He’s not a threat to public safety.”

  “You’d better be right,” she said caustically. “The court accepts the disposition. Let’s just take the plea.”

  At counsel table, Alex asked, anxiously, “Everything okay?”

  “Yeah, she accepted the deal. No jail time.”

  “In the case of People versus Amerian,” the judge said, “the defendant is present in court with his counsel, the People are also present. There has been a disposition. Mr. Campion.”