The Burning Plain

by Michael Nava

  Gaitan shrugged. “Someone could’ve leaked the information.” He glanced at Odell. “Maybe one of your gay deputies.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Odell growled.

  “Things get out,” Gaitan said. “People take care of their own. All in la familia, right, Rios?”

  I glanced at Serena. In a voice of controlled fury, she asked Gaitan, “Did you have Rios under surveillance when the second victim was killed?”

  “So?” Gaitan begrudged.

  “Therefore, he’s in the clear.”

  “Hey,” Gaitan complained. “The body’s still warm. No one’s in the clear. Besides, his lawyer’s wrong. We have other evidence that connects him to Amerian.”

  “What evidence?” Inez demanded.

  “I’ll let you know when I arrest him.”

  Serena said, “You’ll let all of us know now.”

  Gaitan stared at her. “I don’t take my orders from you, lady.”

  “Cut the crap, Mac,” Odell said. “We’re here to solve this thing.”

  “I don’t take orders from you, either.”

  “Don’t make me get my captain,” Odell said. “Don’t make get on the phone to yours. Again.”

  “I doubt if that would impress him,” I said. “Detective Gaitan has a long record of insubordination, reprimands and suspensions. Don’t you?”

  “What is this?” he hissed at me.

  “I’ve been doing some investigation of my own, Gaitan,” I said. “I have enough paper on you to put you on trial. Excessive force complaints going back to when you worked county jail and roughed up inmates in the queens’ tank. A three-day suspension for the time you called a black suspect a ‘nigger.’ Repeated accusations that you planted evidence when you worked Narcotics. A couple of times, a judge dismissed a case just because you were the investigating officer. You want to arrest me? Go right ahead. I’ll match my reputation against yours in front of a jury any time.”

  “Your reputation? As what, a drunk?” He looked at Inez. “You know Rios was suspended from the state bar for drinking? Up in San Francisco, your ex-colleagues tell me you were a blackout drinker. You was drinking the night Amerian was murdered. The waiter says you went through a bottle of wine, plus who knows how much more later. I think you killed him in a blackout. Is that how it happened?”

  “My last drink was eight years ago,” I said.

  “I’ve got the waiter from the restaurant.”

  “I’ve heard about your interview technique from my neighbors,” I said. “You tell them what you want them to say. You hear what you want to hear.”

  Odell cleared his throat. “That’s enough. This is degenerating into a pissing contest.”

  Gaitan got up. “Yeah, you’re right. I’ve had enough. I’m going back to work.” He looked at me on his way out and spat. “Desgraciado.”

  “What did he say?” Serena asked.

  “There’s no English equivalent,” I said. “It’s a kind of Mexican tribal curse.”

  “I want him off this investigation,” Inez told Odell.

  “I’m not his commander. Anyway, it sounds like he’s got something on your client that deserves a little more looking into.”

  “What, that I killed Alex in a blackout? That’s ludicrous.”

  “You’re a lawyer,” Odell said. “You know how it works. This is standard operating procedure.”

  “Let me tell you something that isn’t,” Inez said, gathering up her papers. “If my client isn’t cleared by Monday morning, we’ll call a press conference on Monday afternoon to talk about the sheriff’s record on hate crimes in this case and why you’re wasting time and money investigating an innocent man while there’s a murderer on the loose.”

  Flushed, Serena said, “You can’t make demands like that without allowing us to investigate …”

  “You should have investigated when Amerian was still alive.”

  “Inez, can I have a minute with you?” I said. We went out into the hallway. “Press conference? What are you talking about? I can’t admit I’m a suspect, even to deny it, because we both know what people will remember.”

  “Relax,” she said. “They’ll cave.”

  “Just in case they don’t,” I said, “you’ve got to give them more time. I have an argument on Tuesday in San Francisco in front of the state Supreme Court. I’d rather not show up as a suspected felon. Can we keep a lid on it until I get back?”

  “Fine,” she said. “We’ll give them a week. To next Friday.”

  “And what happens if they won’t clear me? We’re not going to go through with a press conference.”

  “We worry about it then.”

  We returned to Odell’s office, where Inez gave him and Serena our ultimatum. As I walked Inez to her car, I asked, “What’s with you and Serena Dance?”

  “She’s a fanatic,” she replied, unlocking her door.

  “What do you mean?”

  “When I was in the House working on the federal hate-crime bill, she was part of a group of gay lobbyists who threatened to out any closeted legislator who refused to support putting gays and lesbians in the statute,” she said. “One of the people they threatened was a friend of mine. A married man with kids from a conservative district in the Midwest. They put him through hell.”

  “Was he gay?”

  She crushed her cigarette beneath a fire-engine red high heel. “That’s not always the point, Henry. Things can be a little more complex than that.”

  “Maybe,” I replied. “But I get tired of doing double duty for all those closet cases who want to have their cake and eat it, too. The ones who claim being gay is a bedroom issue, not a civil rights one. Maybe they’re the ones who need a lesson in complexity.”

  She shook her head. “You could lose a lot of friends with that attitude.”

  “I’ve already lost a lot of friends, Inez,” I told her, as she slipped into her car. “Like Josh. They’re not coming back. It’s hard for me to get excited about a few ruined political careers.”

  “Whatever happened to tolerance?”

  “Tolerance is a luxury.”

  “Watch what you say doesn’t come back to bite you.”

  By evening the media blackout on the second murder had apparently been lifted, because the local TV stations were running the story with lead-ins like “Serial Murder Stalks West Hollywood Gays.” I surfed the channels until I found the least offensive station. On the screen was a black-and-white photograph—obviously a mug shot—of the second victim, a twenty-six-year-old man named Jack Baldwin. The camera cut to footage of male hustlers on Santa Monica Boulevard while the voice-over narrator said, “Baldwin, a known male prostitute, who was last seen by friends getting into a taxicab two nights ago near the intersection of Santa Monica Boulevard and Formosa Avenue in West Hollywood. His nude body was found yesterday in a Dumpster behind this restaurant.” The screen showed a fast food Mexican restaurant that the reporter pointed out was only a block from the sheriff’s station. “According to the medical examiner, Baldwin was stabbed and beaten. Only a week ago, another man, twenty-nine-year old Alex Amerian, was also found in a Dumpster in the alley behind Santa Monica Boulevard with similar injuries. Police refuse to speculate on whether the murders were connected, but the young male residents of West Hollywood, who are predominantly homosexual, are convinced there is a serial killer on the loose.” The camera went to a tank-topped kid who expressed concern for his safety and his belief that the sheriff’s department did not do enough to protect him. “Furthermore,” the reporter continued, switching to another talking head, “according to Victor Frenza at the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center, these killings may be part of an upsurge in hate crimes against homosexuals, which increased by fifty-five percent last year in the county.” The camera recorded Victor Frenza’s thoughts on hate crimes, then returned to a helmet-haired reporter standing in front of the sheriff’s station. “West Hollywood doesn’t have its own police department. It co
ntracts with the sheriff’s department to provide police services. Relations between the department and the city’s gay residents have frequently been rocky in the past. In response to criticism from gays and lesbians, the department has started an aggressive campaign to recruit gays into its ranks. A year ago, a new captain, Walt Sturges, was brought in to command the West Hollywood station. Sturges has required mandatory sensitivity training for his deputies, brought in gay and lesbian deputies, and designated as his liaison to the gay community Sergeant Lucas Odell, a twenty-three-year veteran of the department, whose daughter, Layne, is one of only six openly lesbian officers in the LAPD. Sturges has received high marks from the gay community for these moves, but all that could be threatened if these murders continue. This is Linda Frye …”

  The phone rang. I picked it up and switched the TV off.

  Richie said, “I hear from inside the department the second victim had the words ‘Dies 4 Sins’ carved across his chest.”

  “Apparently. They didn’t show me crime-scene pictures this time.”

  “They can’t still suspect you,” he said. “It’s got to be a Christian hate group.”

  “Why Christian, Richie?”

  “Sin? That’s them all over.”

  “The detective in charge of the case still likes me,” I said. “But I don’t think he has much credibility with the deputies in West Hollywood and it’s their turf.”

  “I don’t understand,” Richie said. “Is he an outsider?”

  “Yeah, in the sheriff’s department the homicide bureau is centralized, and detectives are rolled out as needed. Gaitan’s an old school cop who wears his contempt on his sleeve. Clearly not a fan of gay people. He’s creating problems for the West Hollywood command.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Inez Montoya gave the department until next Friday to clear me before she goes to the media and accuses the sheriff of harassing an upstanding, innocent member of the bar instead of investigating the hate-inspired attacks on Alex that preceded his murder.”

  “Tell her not to forget to give the magazine credit for breaking the story.”

  “I hope it doesn’t come to that,” I said. “I don’t need that kind of publicity.”

  “Any publicity is good for business.”

  “It’s never good for business for a lawyer to be named as a murder suspect.”

  “I know this must be making you crazy,” he said. “Is there anything I can do? If you’d like to get out of town, you can use the condo in Montecito. It’s right on the beach.”

  “Thanks for the offer, but I have business in San Francisco on Tuesday, so I’m flying up tomorrow and making a long weekend out of it.”

  “San Francisco? Take plenty of latex.”

  “Jesus Christ, Richie, you’re still living in nineteen seventy-eight.”

  “And you’re still living in eighteen seventy-eight,” he replied, and hung up.

  The next morning, I boarded a flight for San Francisco, and as soon as the plane was in the air, I felt tension in my shoulders ebb. By the time I caught sight of the city’s skyline, fifty minutes later, I had almost forgotten I was a murder suspect in my excitement to be there. San Francisco and I went back a long way. When I was a boy growing up in a dusty town in the Central Valley, it was the golden city of my imagination. Much later, as a law student at Stanford, it was also the city of eros. AIDS changed all that. There was a time when walking through the Castro, the gay neighborhood, was like walking through a graveyard. But even that had changed, and the last time I’d visited, Castro Street was thronged and for the first time in a decade, the living again seemed to outnumber the dead.

  I was met at the gate by the friend with whom I was staying, Grant Hancock. We’d been classmates at law school and boyfriends, briefly. After law school, he’d married and fathered a son. “Dynastic pressures,” he explained later, a reference to the old and distinguished San Francisco family he’d been born into. Now he lived with his lover, Hugo Luna, in a working-class neighborhood of the city not even visible from the Pacific Heights mansion where he’d been raised.

  “Welcome home,” Grant said, greeting me with a bear hug.

  His blond hair had faded to dusty gray. He was still broad shouldered, but he had acquired a patriarchal belly and the tailored suits from Wilkes Bashford he’d worn as an associate at the law firm his great-grandfather had founded had long since been exchanged for blue jeans, flannel shirts and work at a public interest law firm that provided legal services to the people with AIDS. He and Hugo both had the disease.

  “You look great,” I said.

  “And you look exhausted,” he said. He grabbed my garment bag. “Is this it, or do you have other luggage?”

  “Just this.”

  “Great, let’s go.”

  It was a blue and beautiful day as we drove north on the 101.

  “How’s Hugo?” I asked.

  He frowned into the rearview mirror. “Hugo’s in Arizona.”

  “The custody case?”

  Grant nodded.

  Hugo, like Grant, had a son from an earlier marriage, but unlike Grant and his ex-wife, Marcia, who amicably shared custody of Charley, Hugo’s wife had taken their son back to the small desert town in Arizona where she’d been raised and obtained sole custody of the boy on the grounds that Hugo’s homosexuality rendered him an unfit parent. For the past two years, the case had been up and down the state court system.

  “Still? I thought he won on appeal.”

  “The trial court judge is an old friend of the wife’s family,” he said. “So he just ignored the appellate decision. Hugo’s lawyer went up on a writ. Oral argument’s on Monday.”

  “Why didn’t you go with him?”

  Grant shrugged. “Hugo’s worried that if his male lover shows up in court with him, he’ll lose. I told him that’s not the way the law works, that he deserves to win on the merits of his case.” He smiled. “He reminded me that the law didn’t prevent the trial judge from taking his son away from him.”

  We turned off the freeway at Army Street, recently renamed Cesar Chavez Boulevard. The signage lagged behind the sentiment. A few minutes later, we pulled into the driveway of the hillside house Grant and Hugo shared.

  “Oh,” he said, fumbling for his key, “Charley sends his love. He’s studying Spanish in Cuernavaca this summer. So it’s just you and me in the house.” He unlocked the door and was set upon by a small, yappy mutt. “And Good Boy, of course.”

  Grant improvised lunch from odds and ends in his refrigerator and we went out on the deck to eat. Good Boy lay poised at our feet, ready to spring at any dropped scrap of food. Tangos played over outdoor speakers mounted on the wall. Grant poured himself a glass of wine and dug into his cold burrito. The view from his deck embraced the entire city from the Golden Gate to the Bay Bridge.

  “I never get over this view,” I said.

  “I can see my family’s entire history,” he replied. “All six generations. When I was younger, it embarrassed me that I was such a small-town boy. …”

  “Some small town.”

  “But it is,” he replied. “Now I feel incredibly lucky that I never had to leave my home to live my life. Unlike Hugo, or you.”

  I ate a forkful of Thai noodles, gazed out at the crowded hills of the city and wondered how it felt to belong to a place. My homosexuality had exiled me from my own hometown, where the local prejudices would have kept me in the closet had I remained. When I was younger, I was relieved to have kicked its dust from my shoes; but with fifty only five years away, rootlessness was quickly losing its appeal. What would it be like to die in the same place where you were born, to grow old with people you knew as children, to be compared to your grandfather or grandmother by people who had actually known them?

  “Once you leave your hometown,” I said, “every other place feels temporary, no matter how long you live there.”

  “Every place is temporary,” Grant said. “Ultimately
.”

  I looked at him. He dabbed sour cream from his chin and smiled at me.

  “How’s your health, Grant?”

  “These protease inhibitors are miracle drugs,” he replied. “Hugo’s talking about going back to work.” He sipped some wine. “For me, the miracle may have come too late. We’re trying different combinations of drugs, but so far the effects are transient.”

  “The longer you can stay alive, the better your chances that something will work,” I said.

  “I know,” he said. He unbuttoned his shirt and pulled it open, exposing his pale skin. “Feel the sun, Henry. Isn’t it wonderful?”

  “Are you afraid to die?”

  He squinted at me. “I’m not in any hurry but five generations have gone before me, so I’ll have a lot of people waiting at the dock when I get there.”

  “There? You think we survive death?”

  He set his plate on the ground for Good Boy and said to the dog, “Don’t tell Daddy.” To me, he said. “Of course I believe in an afterlife. Don’t you?”

  “In heaven and hell? No.”

  He put his arm around me. “Heaven and hell? You’re just like Hugo. He can only imagine heaven if there’s a hell. Well, you’re both Catholic, after all. Me, Henry, I think it’s all heaven. Great food, good weather, hunky guys.”

  “You’re describing San Francisco,” I pointed out.

  “Why not? Why shouldn’t it be like this, but without the suffering?”

  “Even for those who inflict suffering?”

  “We all inflict suffering, honey,” he said. “And we all suffer. Why not a world where everyone forgives everyone else for good?”

  “Not everything can be forgiven,” I said.

  He shook his head. “That’s why you worry about hell.”

  I slept more soundly at Grant’s house than I had for months. On Tuesday, I took a cab downtown to the courtroom of the Supreme Court, where I was arguing a death-penalty appeal. The justices listened to my arguments like seven sphinxes, although one of them, a judge I’d known in LA, winked recognition at me when I first rose to speak. From the court, I took a cab to Grant’s, collected my belongings and went on to the airport. Waiting for my plane, I bought an LA Times. On the front page of the Metro section, just beneath the fold was the headline: “Police Question Suspect in W. Hollywood Slayings.” I began to read: “Police have been questioning a suspect in the recent murders of two West Hollywood men, the Times has learned. The suspect, 45-year-old attorney Henry Rios, was initially questioned after police discovered the body of the first victim, 29-year-old Alex Amerian, in an alley off of Santa Monica Boulevard …” I folded the paper, tucked it into my briefcase, and went to find a phone to call Inez.