by Michael Nava
“I stopped growing.” He sipped some coffee. “To answer your original question, Bob did go out on location to touch things up, give them the right look. You know, add graffiti, toss some garbage around, change street signs, bring in snow, whatever it takes for downtown LA to resemble downtown Detroit.”
“Would he have driven the cab?”
“Absolutely not,” Donati said, emphatically. “The union’s very touchy about that. No, Bob didn’t drive the cab on the set, but he did remove it from the lot for his own personal use and without anyone’s permission.”
“Why?”
“Earlier this summer, his car had major mechanical problems that he couldn’t pay for. While he got together the money for the repairs, he borrowed some of the picture cars, including the cab.”
“He drove off the lot in a fake cab and no one stopped him? What about the guard at the gate.”
“The guards’ job is to keep people from getting onto the lot. They don’t pay much attention to people leaving. You just smile and wave and they open the gate.”
“Wouldn’t a cab be conspicuous?”
“To the contrary, people are always arriving here by cab from the airport for a meeting or something. The guards didn’t know the cab was a picture car. That’s one reason Bob took it.”
“There’s no paperwork when you take a car off the lot?”
“Only if you do it legitimately,” Donati said. “Bob didn’t. He waited until shooting was over for the day, then took the keys from the pegboard and drove off. He was careful to return the car before the next day’s shooting began.”
“All right,” I said, “so Travis borrowed the car. That’s a long way to making him a murder suspect.”
“When the police searched the car, they found evidence.”
“What kind of evidence?”
“They’re not saying until they can talk to Bob again.”
“What do you think they found?”
“I don’t think they found anything,” Donati said, meeting my eyes. “I searched that car, Henry. It was clean.”
“You’re suggesting the cops are bluffing?”
“I think they planted evidence.”
“That’s a very serious charge.”
“I spent a couple of hours with Detective Gaitan,” he said, “and while I’m no criminal-defense lawyer, even I could tell the man has a bad smell to him.”
“Anything specific?”
“I gathered he was under a lot of pressure to close this case,” Donati said. “It didn’t seem to me he cared all that much how he did it.”
“So you’re basing your suspicion on the fact that he found evidence where you didn’t after he’d indicated he was in a hurry to close the case.”
“That, and the fact that of all the people he interviewed, Bob’s the one he suspects.”
“Why is that significant?”
“Because,” Donati said, “as I told you over the phone, Bob’s gay. In fact, he was the only gay person of the twenty-two Gaitan interviewed. I think you know how Gaitan feels about gay people.”
“This isn’t about me, now,” I said. “It’s about Bob Travis.”
“No,” Donati said. “It’s about Detective Gaitan.” At that moment, his phone buzzed discreetly. He picked it up. “Yeah, okay. Send him in.” He put it down and said, “See for yourself. Bob Travis is here.”
Had there been a homosexual Everyman for white, urban gay males, he would’ve looked very much like the person who now entered Donati’s office. Bob Travis had the average dimensions of an ordinary man in his early thirties, but he was skillfully renovated so as to appear somehow taller, thinner and better-looking than he was. He wore black rayon pants, a thin black alligator belt, a white linen shirt buttoned to the neck and a red, gold and black striped silk vest. The slight orangish tint to his skin suggested his tan was the result of lying in a machine rather than sitting in the sun. His clothes were tight around his chest, arms and thighs where his body was pumped from the gym, but the muscles conveyed effort rather than physical strength and contrasted oddly with his soft, slightly flabby face. His mouth was a long, thin line and his small, perfect nose was too obviously the result of rhinoplasty. Beneath sparse eyebrows his eyes were his best feature, china blue, quick and bright. His pale hair was buzzed to trendy stubble to disguise incipient baldness. I could smell his cologne from across the room—Eternity. From a distance, he was handsome, but as he approached, a worried smile bending the nearly lipless mouth, I was conscious of how much work had gone into the package, the painful effort to raise himself a notch or two on the scale of male pulchritude.
“Mr. Travis,” I said, shaking his hand after Donati made formal introductions.
“Hi,” he said, his eyes flicking up and down my body in the reflexive ten-second sexual appraisal men give anything that moves. “I’m very happy to meet you.”
“Henry has a couple of questions for you,” Donati said.
I leaned toward him, forcing him to meet my eyes. “Did you kill those three men?”
He licked the corner of his mouth with a pointed tongue, but his eyes stayed on mine. “I didn’t kill anyone, Mr. Rios,” he said.
“Why do you think the police suspect you?”
“It was the car,” he said. “The cab. I took it off the lot when my car was in the shop, but it wasn’t that hard, Mr. Rios. Anyone could’ve taken it.”
His eagerness to please, to be helpful, bordered on self-abnegation, and for a moment I saw the good little boy he must have been.
“You must make a decent living,” I said. “Why didn’t you rent a car while yours was being repaired?”
He glanced anxiously at Donati. “I have some debts.”
“Tell him everything, Bob,” Donati said.
“Okay, financially I’m way over my head. Maxed out on all my credit cards. I didn’t have the money to fix my car when it broke down and I couldn’t afford to rent one, so I took cars off the lot.”
“Why the cab?” I asked him. “Why that particular car?”
“Because it was easy to get it off the lot,” he said. “I put on my sunglasses and a baseball cap, slouched down and the guards actually thought I was a cab driver. They let me in and out without questioning me. And it was kind of a kick to cruise around in a cab. People flagged me down for rides.”
“Did you pick any of them up?”
“No,” he said, the good boy again. “I’m not licensed to drive a cab. I didn’t want to get into trouble.”
“Did you know Alex Amerian?”
“No.”
“Jack Baldwin?”
He licked his mouth again, shook his head.
“Tom Jellicoe?”
“I didn’t know any of them, Mr. Rios. Look,” he said, “I’m gay. I live in West Hollywood. I was as scared as anyone else when I started hearing about those murders.”
“Where in West Hollywood do you live?”
“On Flores Street, just below Fountain,” he said.
“That’s within a couple of miles of where all the bodies were discovered.”
“Tell me about it,” he said. “I stopped going out after eleven.”
That he lived in the neighborhood where the bodies were found was an additional circumstance supporting Gaitan’s decision to go with him as a suspect. One Donati hadn’t mentioned.
“When did you use the cab?”
He frowned. “The police asked me that, too. My car was broken down most of June, but I only took cars off the lot on weekends or if I needed to get around to do errands. I guess I took the cab maybe three or four times until I finally borrowed the cash to fix my car.”
“I’m interested in dates,” I said.
“I don’t remember dates,” he said, snippily.
“Try.”
“I’ll have to look at a calendar,” he said.
“The cops told Nick they found evidence in the cab linking it to the murders,” I said. “You drove it. What did you see?”
“Do you know how often it was cleaned?”
“It all depends on the look the director’s going for,” he said. “Sometimes you want it to look grubby.”
“When you borrowed it, did you clean it before returning it?”
“No, I snuck it back on the lot in the same condition I took it out. I would’ve been in big trouble if anyone knew I’d borrowed it.”
“You’re in pretty big trouble now,” I observed.
“Tell me about it,” he said. Beads of sweat were forming on his upper lip despite the air-conditioned chill in the air.
“What happened when you talked to Detective Gaitan?”
At the mention of Gaitan’s name, the crease between his eyes deepened. “At first he was sort of friendly, but when I told him I lived in West Hollywood, he asked me if I was a homosexual. That’s the word he used. I said, ‘Well, I’m gay, if that’s what you mean,’ and after that his entire attitude changed. He started calling me Bobby, but it was sarcastic, not friendly.”
“What kind of questions did he ask you?”
“The same ones you asked,” he said, “about the cab, and my financial situation but it wasn’t like he was asking questions because he was interested in my answers. It was like he already knew the answers and was testing me.”
“He was trying to catch him in a lie,” Donati said.
“You were there?”
“I sat in on Bob’s interviews,” he said. “The tone he took with Bob was different than with anyone else. Total contempt. I finally intervened.”
“What did you say?”
“I told him that some of his questions seemed inappropriate,” Donati said. “The guy was asking Bob about his sex life.”
“What did Gaitan say?”
“He said he would decide what questions were appropriate and told me to get lost, basically,” Donati replied. “So I threw him off the lot.”
I smiled. “You did what?”
“I reminded him that I was the studio’s lawyer, that he was at the studio as a courtesy and then I told him he’d worn out his welcome. I asked him to leave.”
“And did he?”
Now Donati smiled. “Oh, yes. He left. And later that day I had my boss call the sheriff and complain.”
“Your boss is …”
“Duke Asuras,” he said. “The head of the studio.”
I nodded, turned my attention to Travis. “Gaitan wants to question you again?”
“Tomorrow. He called me and said if I didn’t show up, he’d arrest me.”
“I assume that’s bullshit,” Donati said to me. “I don’t remember much criminal law, but if the police have probable cause to arrest, they don’t usually invite you to come and discuss it with them, do they?”
“No, they don’t,” I said. “I’d like to talk to Bob alone for a few minutes.”
He glanced at his watch, nodded. “Sure, I have a meeting with my boss so you can stay here and talk. If I’m not back when you’re done, I wonder if you’d wait for me, Henry.”
“All right.”
Travis’s anxiety level soared after Donati left the room.
“You seem very anxious, Bob.”
“I’m terrified,” he blurted out.
“I can see that,” I said. He’d gone white beneath his salon tan, and sweat stained the armpits of his expensive shirt.
“Nick told me about you,” he said. “He said you were a suspect for a while. He told me you’re gay, too.”
“That’s all true,” I replied.
“Then you know about Gaitan. I moved here to get away from people like him. People that stare at you like you’re something they stepped in. He made me so nervous I would have confessed just to get away from him.”
He would’ve made a bad interview, I thought, dripping in his own sweat, alternatingly eager to please and frightened.
“I know better than you what kind of cop Gaitan is,” I said. “He’s a thug, but he’s not stupid, and the fact is that you are a legitimate suspect based on what you’ve told me today, even without knowing what the evidence is he claimed to find in the car.”
“I didn’t …”
“Two of the three victims were last seen getting into an off-duty cab,” I said. “Someone has obviously identified the cab as the same one you were driving around the time the murders were committed last month. Plus, Bob, you live in the neighborhood where the bodies were found. Based on that alone, I’d suspect you, too.”
“Other people could’ve taken the car,” he said.
“Someone obviously did. Who else could it have been?”
“I don’t know,” he said, “but it wasn’t me.”
“Tell me about yourself,” I said.
“What?” he looked confused, suspicious.
“Let’s just talk.”
In the next hour I learned that Bob Travis was thirty-four but admitted to thirty-one and lived beyond his means in a two-bedroom apartment furnished with antiques and a closet full of designer clothes. He hit the bars on weekends, used drugs recreationally, mostly pot and occasionally Ecstasy, had never had a steady boyfriend and had gone into therapy to discover why. Travis was quietly but deeply dissatisfied with his life, and sometimes wondered if being gay was not the cause of his unhappiness, but felt guilty about this because he thought he was supposed to be proud of being out. He gave money to AIDS and gay organizations when he could and had volunteered at Project Angel Food, delivering meals to people with AIDS, but quit because it got too depressing. He enjoyed his work, but worried about advancing, got along better with his women coworkers than the men, but didn’t see any of them socially. His small circle of friends was all other gay men, and while his family back in Maryland was “okay” with his homosexuality, he rarely saw or spoke to them. What he wanted most in life was a nice house, a stable career and a boyfriend.
By the time I’d finished questioning him, I had concluded that if he was the killer, he was an incredibly brilliant actor or completely psychotic to be able to fake such ordinariness. He didn’t appear to be either.
As if he’d read my mind, he asked, “Did I pass?”
“The studio wants to hire me to represent you. Is that what you want?”
“Yes,” he said, gratefully.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll call Gaitan and set up a meeting. In the meantime, you are not to talk to anyone about this case, especially the police. Here’s my card. Refer any questions to me.”
“What about Nick?”
“Nick represents the studio,” I said. “I represent you.”
Travis frowned. “But the studio’s paying you.”
“That doesn’t mean I work for them,” I said, “but of course I’ll keep Nick informed so long as there’s no conflict of interest.”
“I really need to get back to work,” Travis said apologetically.
“Go,” I said. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”
I gathered my things and prepared to leave, then remembered that Donati had asked me to wait for him. At that moment, his secretary came in and said, “Mr. Rios? Mr. Donati asked me to bring you to Mr. Asuras’s office. They’d like to have a word with you.”
Chapter 10
ASURAS’S SUITE OCCUPIED the top floor of the administration building. After a five-minute wait in an austere anteroom that featured as its sole decoration a gigantic bronze temple gong, his male secretary led me in to the inner sanctum. The room was arctic, so cold I shivered. It was also very large, and decorated in a style that was supposed to evoke the paneled library of an English country house, but the books which filled the bookshelves seemed chosen for size and color rather than content, and instead of hunting prints there was a series of odd, brilliantly colored framed wall hangings filled with floating Buddhas and fanged Asian monster gods. New Agey music seeped quietly into the cold air and I detected the smell of sandalwood. At the far end of the room was a massiv
e and unoccupied desk. Off in a corner a hard round pillow lay on the floor in front of a kind of altar that held candles, a small Buddha, bells, a framed photograph of the Dalai Lama, a vase of flowers. Through a bank of tinted windows I saw shirtless construction workers swigging sodas from a roach coach. On the other side of the room, Duke Asuras and Nick Donati were seated in front of a blazing fire in an ornate fireplace, having tea. Asuras was as physically imposing as I remembered him, while the diminutive Donati seemed like—I thought of his greyhounds—the big man’s lapdog.
“Over here, Henry,” Nick said.
I walked across the room, conscious of Asuras’s assessing gaze. He wore a brown tweed jacket over a brown leather vest buttoned to his neck, a banded-collar shirt, gray wool pants, highly polished boots. Not exactly summer in LA wear. Above the fireplace was the largest of the wall hangings. It depicted a circle in the maw of a black demon. The circle was divided into six segments, showing animals, humans, wraiths, demons, gods and warriors. In the center a smaller circle showed a rooster devouring a snake that was devouring a pig. I recognized it from visits with Josh to the New Age book store the Bodhi Tree as the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Each of the six segments represented a realm into which a soul could be reincarnated. The three animals in the center represented ignorance, desire and malice. The black demon was Yama, the god of death. Josh, who went to the Bodhi Tree in search of spiritual sustenance, often stared at their poster of the Wheel and speculated into which realm he might be reincarnated. The goal, however, was not to come back at all.
“Sit down, Mr. Rios,” Asuras said. “Have some tea.”
I sank into a red leather armchair with brass studs. “No, thank you.”
“Something else?” he asked solicitously. “Coffee? It’s early, but if you’d like a drink.”
“Nothing,” I said. “This is quite a place. Are you a Buddhist or just a collector?”
“Both,” he said. “You know about Buddhism?”
“It’s the religion du jour, isn’t it?”
Asuras frowned, formidably. “I’m sincere about my practice.”
“I didn’t mean to suggest you weren’t.”
“The hour I sit at my altar meditating is crucial,” he said. “The liberating thing about Buddhism is that it teaches there is no right and wrong, just cause and effect.”
