The Burning Plain

by Michael Nava

  “Nice,” I said. “What’s their relevance?”

  “These pictures were taken in the men’s bathroom at the sheriff’s department headquarters in Monterey Park,” he said. “I think they pretty much sum up the sheriff’s attitude toward gays.”

  “I’m no fan of the cops,” I said, “particularly at the moment, but if this is supposed to prove that deputies in West Hollywood are collaborating with gay bashers, it doesn’t. It only proves that some cops are bigots, which is, believe me, no surprise to anyone who has to deal with them.”

  He threw his hands up theatrically. “Well, I give up, Henry. You asked me if I knew who killed Alex, but you don’t believe me, even after I’ve connected all the dots.”

  “It isn’t that I don’t believe you,” I said. “It’s a plausible theory, but it’s just a theory.”

  “I have to tell you, Henry,” he said. “If you were a reporter, you wouldn’t last here very long.”

  “I’m just glad I’m not your libel lawyer.”

  From Richie’s office, I drove to Century City for a meeting with Inez Montoya. I turned Richie’s theory over in my head, trying to come up with a precedent for it. I remembered a case from Texas a couple of years earlier in which a gay man had been abducted from a public park in Houston and taken out into the country and shot. The prosecutor had successfully argued that transporting the victim showed premeditation, and a jury sent the man’s murderers to death row. Why couldn’t something similar have happened in Alex’s case? Maybe after his last appointment, as he was returning home, he’d been abducted by the same men who’d attacked him and blown up his car. Maybe this murder was exactly what it appeared to be: a hate crime. Yet part of me still dismissed this scenario as Richie’s paranoia. This was partly a survival mechanism, because if I actually believed that hit squads were murdering gay men, I might become so consumed by rage or fear I’d be immobilized. But there was another reason, too. As I’d explained to Reynolds, people who inspire such homicidal hatred in others can come to believe they deserve it, subliminally if not consciously. Richie had nailed me on that. I realized it was easier for me to believe one of Alex’s closeted gay clients had hacked him to death than that he’d been murdered by a bigot, because even I struggled against this hatred of gays. And if it was true of me, how much easier would it be for the cops who were convinced they’d found the murderer. Me.

  Inez was in a rumpled white linen suit behind a cluttered desk in her twenty-eighth-floor office in the south tower of the two Century City towers that dominated the skyscape of the westside of the city. Her windows looked south and west, and on clear days, she boasted, she could make out the bluish outline of Catalina Island on the horizon. The walls of her spacious office were bare and her personal belongings stacked in boxes that bore such labels as “Awards and Mementos.” With the mayoral primary coming up in less than a year, it was clear that she planned to do her unpacking downtown in City Hall.

  She was on a call when I entered her office. She gestured me to a chair and masticated a piece of gum while she listened to her caller, interrupting with an occasional “Uh-huh,” or “No way.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she said, ending the conversation. “I’ll talk to you later. I’ve got a client.” She hung up and spit her gum into a tissue. “The cops still following you?”

  “Mostly they park outside my house. I guess they’re waiting for another victim to arrive so they can nab me in the act of beheading him.”

  “Good to know you haven’t lost your sense of humor,” she remarked sarcastically. “I have the preliminary report from the search.”

  “And?”

  “No surprises,” she said. “They found the victim’s prints in your house and your car. They matched the blood on the doorknob and the rag to his blood type, but DNA testing will take weeks, so for now that’s inconclusive. …”

  “I admitted it was his blood,” I reminded her. “Are they going to arrest me?”

  “Not on this evidence,” she said. “Except for the prints, your car was clean, and there were no other bloodstains anywhere in your house except where you said they’d be. They can’t arrest you until they can explain how you carved the guy up and transported him in your car without leaving a trace.”

  “The body was bloated, like it had been submerged in water.”

  She nodded. “That’s why Gaitan was so interested in your bathtub. There was water in the lungs, chlorinated water, as it turned out.”

  “A swimming pool?”

  “Or hot tub,” she said. “The killer soaked the body. It was as clean as a whistle.”

  “All the cops have got to do is find his pool-cleaning service. They must know it’s not me.”

  “Detective Gaitan has a hard-on for you and I don’t mean that in a good way.”

  “That’s good because he’s not my type,” I said. “Reminds me of my father, and I don’t mean that in a good way, either. Maybe the words malicious prosecution would help him overcome his animosity.”

  “His investigation hasn’t crossed that line yet,” she said. “We’re just going to have to hang on for a few more days until Gaitan admits you’re a dead end.”

  “What if we offered the cops an alternative to me?”

  “Who are you thinking of, Henry? They executed Gacy.”

  “Just listen.” I laid out Richie’s theory.

  “Do the cops know any of this?” she asked angrily, when I finished. “Because if they did and they didn’t tell us, I will sue their asses for malicious prosecution.”

  “You think it’s a plausible theory?”

  “Plausible? Henry, I was one of the authors of the federal hate-crime law. You wouldn’t believe the things we heard at the hearings. Gay bashing is practically a Saturday-night pastime in some places. And the cops, Jesus, the gays have as much to fear from them as their attackers.” She dug a cigarette out of her purse. “It’s the same place we were at with rape twenty years ago. When the victims go to the authorities, they get victimized all over again.”

  “You may want to take a look at these,” I said, slipping her the pictures of the toilet-stall graffiti. “Richie loaned them to me. He says they come from the deputy’s bathroom at sheriff’s headquarters.”

  “Un-fucking-believable,” she said, flipping through them. She stuck her cigarette in the corner of her mouth and reached for her phone. “I’m going to get Gaitan’s ass down here now.”

  I restrained her hand. “Wait, Inez. I have a better idea.”

  She put the phone down. “Such as?”

  “If Gaitan is the asshole he appears to be, I doubt whether he’s going to be impressed by anything we have to tell him. But the watch commander, Odell? He might be, especially since all this activity was going on in West Hollywood. And there’s one other person we should bring into this: Serena Dance.”

  “Serena Dance,” she said, frowning.

  “You know her?”

  “Oh yes,” she said. “The hate-crimes unit. But you’re right. If we can convince her, she’ll call off Gaitan. I’ll set up a meeting at the West Hollywood station as soon as possible.”

  “You have something against Serena?”

  “That’s not important,” she said. Her phone buzzed. “I have to take this call. I’ll be in touch.”

  It was dark when I returned home. My neighbor Jim Kwan came out of his house and across my yard, with a worried look on his round, good-natured face. Kwan was the head of neighborhood watch for our street, an easygoing, low-key guy, so I knew immediately something serious was up.

  “Hey, Henry,” he said. “Got a minute?”

  “Sure, Jim. What’s wrong?”

  “I thought you should know a detective came over to my house earlier tonight and wanted to ask me and Sharon some questions about you.”

  My heart sank. “What kind of questions?”

  Kwan looked at his shoes. “You know, Henry, what you do in the privacy of your house is no one’s business.”

 
“Jim, what did he ask you?”

  “It wasn’t so much what he asked,” Kwan said, “as what he told us. He said you were a suspect in a murder case and the victim was a male prostitute. He showed us pictures …” His voice trailed off. “He wanted to know if we saw or heard anything last Friday night. Jesus, Henry, what’s going on?”

  “The detective’s name was Gaitan, wasn’t it?”

  He reached into his shirt pocket and removed a business card. “Yeah, Montezuma Gaitan,” he said, reading the card.

  “I did have company on Friday,” I said. “He was a prostitute. And he was murdered. The rest is a fabrication. Did Gaitan talk to anyone else in the neighborhood?”

  “Just the Cohens,” he said, referring to the neighbors on the other side of my house. “Fred came over after Gaitan left and told me he was sure it was all a mistake.” He clamped my shoulder. “I’m glad to hear it is.”

  “I’m worried about my reputation on the block.”

  “Leave that to me,” Kwan said. “Listen, you eaten dinner yet? We’re just about to sit down. There’s plenty.”

  In the seven years we’d been neighbors, I’d never been invited to his house for a meal.

  “Thanks, Jim. I need to get some work done. Can I take a rain check?”

  “Anytime, Henry,” he said. “I’ll let you know if Gaitan shows up again.”

  “I’ll take care of that,” I said.

  Customarily, one of the first things a defense lawyer seeks to discover from the prosecution in a criminal case is whether the officers involved in the investigation have had any citizen complaints lodged against them for excessive force or other misconduct. There was even a name for the procedure, a Pitchess motion, after the state appellate case that authorized the disclosure of such records. I went into my office, pulled out my Rolodex and started calling every criminal-defense lawyer I could reach at home. The next day I called the offices of those I’d missed, asking all of them the same questions, “Have you run a Pitchess motion on a sheriff’s homicide detective named Montezuma Gaitan? If so, can I have your file on him?” It was a distinctive name, and more than one of my colleagues remembered it quite well. My fax worked overtime.

  Chapter 7

  I WOKE UP on Friday morning, a week after Alex’s murder, feeling as irritable and fatigued as if I’d had no sleep at all. The sky was overcast in the window, coastal fog that would clear up before noon to reveal another flaming day in mid-June. I got out of bed, wrapped myself in an old flannel robe that was at once too hot, and stepped on a tack as I made my way into the kitchen, leaving drops of blood on the carpet. At the sink, I poured water into the coffeepot and looked out the window at the unmarked police car parked across the street in front of the Hercus’s house. Inez had arranged the meeting with Odell and company for later that morning, so I was hopeful this would be the last day I would be watched by the police, though the curious stares of my neighbors might continue for a long time to come. While the coffee brewed, I got the paper from the porch. Scanning the headlines, I saw the usual collection of calamities and scandals. My horoscope spoke of confusion and secrets.

  I poured a cup of coffee and went out to the deck. My house was perched on the side of a small canyon and my property declined steeply into a brambly wilderness that was home to raccoons, skunks and the occasional deer. There was a road at the bottom of the canyon and, on the other side, far grander houses. When I’d bought the house, I had imagined the canyon was an escape from the city, a green and rustic place, but the city was inescapable. The green was as flat as painted scenery and the air was stale and exhausted. One night recently, I’d heard shots, and the next day word filtered up that a family of three had been murdered during a robbery two blocks down the hill. There was now a movement afoot to gate our neighborhood and, in effect, secede from the city, as if that would make any difference.

  I rinsed my cup at the sink, watching the police car. I could make out a man at the wheel. Gaitan? Probably not. This was drudge work. And then, suddenly, the car sped off without so much as a backward glance at me.

  On my way into West Hollywood for the meeting, I stopped at a book store and found a copy of the Inferno. I parked my car on Larabee Street and went to the coffeehouse to wait for Inez before proceeding to the sheriff’s station across the street. I reread Dante’s account of meeting his beloved teacher, Ser Brunetto, among the sodomites on the burning plain and my glance fell upon this passage:

  “… a troop of souls ran up beside the dike peering at us, each one, the way at dusk men eye one another under a new moon …”

  I remembered that Dante’s description of the burning plain reminded Richie of a gay resort in Palm Springs. A desert setting; tanned, fit men forever circling each other, peering into one another’s faces. What were we looking for? I closed the book. The morning mist had cleared and now the air was still like steel wool. The pair of ficus trees in front of the coffeehouse were wilted and dusty. I saw Inez turn the corner, remove her sunglasses and push open the door to the coffeehouse. She came over to my table, an odd, questioning expression on her face, as if she didn’t completely recognize me.

  “Inez? Are you all right?”

  “There’s been another killing,” she said, and for a split second I read the question in her eyes.

  “Sit down,” I said. “Tell me about it.”

  There were five of us cramped around Odell’s desk on folding chairs in his windowless office. From where I sat, I faced a framed photograph of Odell and a young woman in the uniform of LAPD. Glowering at me from the other side of the desk was Gaitan’s dark face as he popped antacids. Serena Dance sat between him and Odell, Inez next to me. The tension between the two women was almost as thick as it was between Gaitan and me, Inez’s cold, “Hello, Serena,” having elicited an equally frosty, “Inez.” Only Odell, with his snowman’s face and sharp eyes, seemed impervious to the currents of hostility that crossed the room. He saw me looking at the photo on his desk, smiled and said, “My daughter.”

  “Let’s get down to business,” Inez said. “There was another killing last night. Same MO. Young gay man beaten and stabbed, dumped in the alley with a hate message carved on his body. Since you’ve had my client under constant surveillance for the last week, you know he had nothing to do with it. Now maybe you’ll stop harassing him and find this guy before he kills again.”

  “Who told you about the second killing?” Gaitan demanded.

  “I did,” Odell replied calmly.

  Gaitan addressed him angrily. “So much for the blackout.”

  “The blackout applies only to the media,” Odell responded. “Ms. Montoya had a right to know, since it affects her client.”

  “This is my investigation,” Gaitan said. “I decide who needs to know what and when.”

  “These murders are happening in my town,” Odell responded. “I want them stopped.”

  “You could have prevented them,” Inez told him.

  Odell cocked his head back. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Our information is that Alex Amerian was the victim of two hate crimes before he was murdered, and neither the sheriff nor the DA either properly investigated or prosecuted those crimes. Then he was murdered under circumstances that suggest another hate crime. How much clearer does it have to be before you people get it?”

  “Get what, ma’am?” Odell asked, dangerously.

  “Alex Amerian wasn’t just murdered, he was assassinated by the same people who beat him up and torched his car, and when you had your chance to prevent it, you sat on your hands.” She laid out the details of our theory of Alex’s murder.

  “There was no corroboration that Amerian was gay bashed,” Dance said, when Inez finished. “Furthermore, the sheriff investigated his claim that a deputy had refused to take his report, and decided it was untrue.”

  “I know that’s the company line, but you thought there was enough truth in Amerian’s claim to cut him a deal on an ADW charge,” Inez reminded he
r. “You weren’t so sure then a jury would believe the sheriff. After looking at these pictures, I can’t blame you.” She threw the toilet-stall pictures across Odell’s desk. “These were taken at department headquarters in the deputies’ bathroom.”

  “What is this supposed to prove?” Serena asked.

  “That your faith in the sheriff may be a little misplaced,” Inez replied.

  Odell examined the pictures. “Anyone who put anything like this on the walls of my station would find himself out of a job before the ink dried.”

  “You still deny that one of your deputies refused to take a report from Alex Amerian when he was gay bashed last year?” I asked him.

  Odell shifted in his seat. “It was investigated.”

  “Did you also investigate the firebombings that occurred last winter?” I asked him.

  “Those are still open cases,” he replied.

  “Six months later and still no arrests,” I said.

  “And two murders,” Inez chimed in. “It should be clear by now that you’ve got some kind of hate group operating in this city, but instead of going after them, you harass my client.”

  “Harass?” Gaitan broke in. “Rios was the last person to see the victim, he admits he beat him up. That makes him a righteous suspect.”

  “You only have those facts because he cooperated with you,” Inez said. “Don’t forget that, and don’t forget you haven’t found a shred of independent evidence that connects him to Amerian’s murder and now you’ve got another body on your hands.”

  “A copycat,” Gaitan said dismissively.

  “No,” Inez said, “it’s not a copycat killing and you know it.”

  “How can you be so sure?” Serena asked.

  “Because when the sheriff’s department briefed the media on the first killing, it withheld the fact that there was a hate message carved on the victim’s chest. Isn’t that right, Sergeant Odell?”

  “Yep,” he said.

  “But the second victim also had a hate message carved on his chest,” she said. “What was it? ‘Dies 4 Sins.’”