The Burning Plain

by Michael Nava

  “Karma?” I asked.

  “And cause and effect,” he continued, ignoring me, “are themselves illusions.”

  “So what does that leave?” I asked.

  He grinned. “Perfect freedom of action. And once you understand that,” he droned on, “you can go out into the world as a warrior. Free to risk everything, to lose everything, because nothing matters but the act.”

  Nick Donati discreetly stifled a yawn. I imagined such theological ruminations must become tiresome after a couple of thousand times, and it seemed from their obvious ease around each other that they’d had a long and intimate association.

  “That’s very interesting,” I said, politely. “Nick’s secretary said you wanted a word with me.”

  Asuras put his cup down. “Is the man guilty?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Was I unclear?” he asked. “I want to know if we have a murderer on the lot.”

  I turned to Donati. “Do you want to explain attorney-client privilege, or should I?”

  “No one needs to explain anything to me,” Asuras said. “I have a law degree from Yale University. Let me explain something to you. The studio’s paying your fee and that makes you a studio employee.”

  Donati broke in. “Henry, you have to understand. This isn’t just a legal situation, its a public-relations problem. As soon as the press gets wind of this story, they’ll be camped out at the studio gates.”

  “Presumably you have people who know how to give non-answers to the press,” I said.

  “It would help if they knew which non-answers to give,” Donati said.

  “You took the same oath I did, Nick, to uphold the laws and represent your clients to the best of your ability. That precludes telling their secrets to third parties.”

  “Mr. Rios,” Asuras said, in a soft rumble. His voice, I noticed, was even lower than Donati’s. Together they were like a duet in testosterone. “I run a billion-dollar-a-year business. Thousands of people depend on the studio for their livelihoods. I need to know when something is going to have an adverse effect on them.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “An hour ago Donati was telling me he thought Bob was being framed, and now you’re asking me if he did it.”

  “I do think he’s being framed,” Donati said. “All we want is your professional assessment.”

  “After all,” Asuras said offhandedly, “the man is a homosexual.”

  “And that means he’s more likely to have done it?” I asked.

  “It means he’s feminine,” Asuras said. “Ergo, weak.”

  “By that reasoning,” I replied, “it’s virtually certain he’s innocent, since women don’t go in for serial killing. It’s mostly a male sport.”

  “So you don’t think he did it,” Asuras said. “You would know, being a homosexual yourself. What homosexuals are capable of, I mean.”

  I got up. “What this homosexual is capable of is walking out of this ridiculous and offensive meeting. The studio can keep its fucking money. I’ll work something out with my client.”

  On my way out, I kicked the gong.

  Donati caught me just as the elevator door slid open. “Henry,” he said. “Wait.” He got into the elevator with me and pushed the button to the mezzanine. “Duke asked me to apologize.”

  “Was he too busy meditating to come himself?”

  Nick glanced at his watch. “Can you squeeze in a tour? I want to show you the lot.”

  “I’ll take a rain check.”

  We were outside on the steps of the administration building. He put on a pair of sunglasses and said, “It’ll help explain what happened up there. Come on. Not many people get my personal tour.”

  Grudgingly, I followed him down a narrow street toward the hulking buildings at the back of the lot. I noticed a couple of two-story wood-framed buildings with covered porches behind a row of tamarisk trees. Casually dressed people popped in and out of them. Those who recognized Donati were respectful rather than friendly.

  “Those buildings look familiar,” I said.

  “They’re where the studio used to quarantine the writers,” he said. He stopped, pointed to a louvered door. “William Faulkner’s office. Two doors down was Scott Fitzgerald. There was a movie about a screenwriter in the forties a couple of years back. It was filmed here, that’s probably why you recognize the buildings.”

  “They filmed here? Aren’t those working offices?”

  He smiled. “They’ve filmed in my office. In Duke’s. There’s a parking lot over there,” he said, pointing toward the water tower, “that was flooded and used as the Red Sea in a TV movie about Moses. Parnassus is the smallest studio in town, every inch does double duty, at least.”

  We were on a narrow street. A woman in dark glasses steered a black compact BMW carefully between trucks and trailers, while a young man whizzed by on a ten-speed and a sweatshirted technician shouldered a coil of heavy electrical cable. A suit came by in a golf cart. I asked Donati about a row of unlocked bikes.

  “They’re the quickest way to get around the lot,” he explained. “Execs go by golf carts. You can see there’s not much room for cars.”

  “What are all the trailers?”

  “The little ones are makeup, the bigger ones for the actors. You wouldn’t believe the negotiations over the size of a star’s trailer,” he said. “Or what we have to put inside of it.”

  The noise of saws and hammers blasted from the open door of one of the massive buildings that Donati identified as a soundstage. From the outside it was shaped like a barn or airplane hangar with a rounded roof. Inside, a construction crew was building the interior of a three-story Victorian mansion for a movie about vampires in San Francisco. The set didn’t begin to fill the vast space. We stood and watched for a few minutes, then resumed the tour. Against the studio’s back wall was a row of Quonset huts that housed graphics, carpentry, fiberglass fabrication and other shops.

  “It’s total chaos,” I said, watching the swarm of workers darting in and out of the workshops.

  “It would be if everyone didn’t know their jobs,” he said. “But everyone does, Henry. These people are incredibly disciplined and hard-working and competent.”

  “I can believe that,” I replied. “What does it have to do with Asuras?”

  Donati said, “Duke’s no bigot, Henry. Especially not toward gays and lesbians. Parnassus was one of the first studios to offer domestic-partnership benefits. Duke’s personally given a couple of hundred thousand to AIDS organizations over the years …”

  “Then what was that all about?”

  “You wouldn’t believe the pressures he’s under,” Donati said, a fragile hand sweeping through the air. “He’s responsible for everything that goes on here and he takes that very seriously. These people are more than his employees, they’re family. It frustrates him that he’s not entirely the master of his own house.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “We’re not a freestanding business here. The studio’s owned by Parnassus Company in New York. The president of the company is Duke’s boss and both of them answer to a board of directors. I can tell you that’s not an easy relationship. It’s especially tense now.”

  “Why particularly now?” I asked innocently.

  “I can’t go into details, but things are coming to a head between Duke and the company. Any adverse publicity for the studio would weaken his hand. This trouble with Bob is a potential disaster.”

  “You said Bob didn’t do it.”

  “Anyway you look at it, it’s a PR disaster,” he said. “Duke has enough keeping him awake at night without one more thing to worry about. Look, Henry, the man drives himself to the limits and sometimes he crosses them and says or does something he regrets. That’s all that happened.”

  “So you’re saying he doesn’t hate gays and women.”

  “Two of his key executives are women,” Donati said. “His closest advisor is a gay man.”

 
We’d been walking back toward the administration building. I paused and said, “And that would be you?”

  “I’m not advertising my private life,” Donati said. “I just want you to understand that we’re not the enemy here.”

  The guard waved me through the gate without so much as a second look and I reentered the real world, where a flashing sign on a savings and loan reported a temperature of 89 degrees, and left the land of make-believe, where Duke Asuras sat beside a New England fire costumed as a country squire and Nick Donati cultivated a voice at least six inches taller than he was. Then I remembered the hive of purposeful activity that went on at the studio outside the executive suites, and thought I was probably being unfair to most of the men and women who worked at the studio. I doubted whether the carpenters or set designers confused the illusions they helped create with the reality of their own lives. Possibly I was being unfair even to Asuras, about whom I had formed my opinion based on Richie’s catty stories. Donati’s explanation of the pressure his boss was under was plausible enough. After all, Asuras was trying to sell the company behind the backs of its present owners to the kind of man whose cultural politics must be repulsive to him. Dancing with the devil was bound to produce a certain amount of anxiety and stress. The last thing Asuras needed was the cops accusing one of his employees of using studio property to commit a series of gruesome homosexual murders. Who was I to blame him for an off-the-cuff politically incorrect remark? He was standing beside Travis after all.

  Anyway, Asuras’s mental health was outside my bailiwick. I hadn’t told Donati how much I knew about Gaitan’s rogue past when he’d told me he thought the cops had planted evidence against Bob Travis because I might need his testimony and I couldn’t afford to taint him with my own prejudices. Also, I reminded myself, it was important for me to keep an open mind as to the possibility that the evidence was legitimate. But when Travis described Gaitan’s interrogation of him, I felt in my gut that Donati was right and Gaitan was up to his old tricks. What cinched it for me was Bob Travis. Between the lines of our interview, I read rejection by his family, loneliness and dissatisfaction with his life. I guessed he was someone for whom coming out had been so traumatic he expected to be rewarded for it, and was disappointed to discover that all he had won was the right to be ordinary. He was a victim who felt responsible for his victimhood, eager to please, fearful of disapproval and easily shamed. A perfect candidate for police bullying, the kind of suspect who could be confused, intimidated and coerced. Gaitan must’ve picked up on that right away. Embarrassed by his debacle with me, under pressure to close the case, faced with someone he could crumple with a stare, I could easily imagine he had decided to help things along.

  I felt an adrenaline rush when I imagined the expression on Gaitan’s face when I walked into his office with my client. No, not his office. I would make him meet us at the sheriff’s station in West Hollywood. Then I realized I’d lose the element of surprise if I talked to him directly, so when I got home I called Bob Travis and had him set it up. Afterward, I ran an errand I’d been meaning to get to for weeks.

  The following morning I pulled up to the apartment house on Flores Street where Bob Travis lived. The Santa Anas had returned and the tall trees that lined Flores swayed wildly as if they were trying to uproot themselves. Travis lived in an old courtyard building that had managed to escape the wrecker’s ball when the rest of the neighborhood went condo. A few such buildings still dotted West Hollywood, some of them once inhabited by movie stars. Travis’s was a typical specimen. A white stucco wall enclosed a U-shaped, two-story building. The roof was tiled with terra-cotta tiles. The center courtyard was filled with a wild tangle of shrubs and flowers that spilled into a reflecting pool. A lotus drifted in the turbid water, and here and there was the flash of silver at the bottom of the pool, coins tossed in with a wish. Scattered around the courtyard were broken-down bits of patio furniture, rusted iron tables and wicker chairs in need of recaning. The elephantine leaves of a banana trees fluttered in the dry wind. A ginger cat reclined in the sun.

  I entered a dark hallway, found the door with Travis’s name on a card taped to it and rang the doorbell.

  “Coming,” he shouted, and a moment later opened the door. “Mr. Rios, am I glad to see you.” His almost handsome face was panicked. He was in his underwear. “Come inside.”

  “What’s wrong Bob?” I said, stepping inside. “Why aren’t you dressed?”

  “I don’t know what to wear,” he said.

  Thinking I’d misheard him, I said, “What?”

  “It can’t be too faggy,” he said. “Maybe a suit? Dark colors? What?”

  “Bob, take a deep breath.”

  He inhaled, exhaled. “I’m so nervous I could shit my pants.”

  “Another breath, please.”

  After the fourth one, something like calm had returned to his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t get much sleep last night.”

  “Everything’s going to be fine,” I said. “Go get dressed. I’ll wait for you.”

  He disappeared through a door off the hallway. The living room was lighted by two large windows. Frosted glass kept the room light but cool. The room was crammed with a disorderly mix of antiques, Shaker chairs, Art Deco lamps, Chinese cabinets, an ornate Louis the something desk, all of it shoved around the room in no discernible pattern, like a warehouse. In all the clutter, there was nowhere to comfortably sit, so I wandered around pausing at the Louis desk. There was a pile of threatening notices from a half-dozen credit-card companies and collection agencies. Beneath the bills was a brown leather picture frame laid facedown. I dug through the bills and turned it over. It contained a photograph of Travis and Nick Donati on a beach. Travis lay on his back, his head in Donati’s lap. Donati frowned at the camera, plainly displeased at having his picture taken. I heard footsteps and put the picture back where I’d found it, just as Travis emerged from the hallway. He was wearing a navy blue suit, a white shirt and a silk tie with horizontal burgundy and gold stripes. He looked more like a lawyer than I did.

  “Is this okay?”

  “You look fine, Bob,” I said, then, indicating the room, asked, “Do you deal in antiques?”

  “No,” he said, “I just buy. And buy, and buy. My sponsor says I’m the most compulsive shopper he’s ever met.”

  “Your sponsor? Are you in AA?”

  “DA,” he said, straightening a cuff. “Debtor’s Anonymous. But I’ve been to AA, too, and CA, NA, SCA and Al Anon.” He shrugged. “I guess shopping’s not the only thing I’m compulsive about.”

  “Do you have a problem with drugs or alcohol, Bob?”

  “No, like I said yesterday, I drink socially and I only do drugs when I go out to the clubs.” His face reddened. “The only reason I went to AA was because someone told me it was a good place to meet guys.”

  “Did you?”

  He walked to the desk and picked up the bills. “Oh, yes, I met someone. Went out with him for three months. I’m still paying for it.”

  “We should go,” I said.

  “YOU KNOW WHY my relationships never work out?” he said, as we left his apartment. “I’m always apologizing for things that aren’t my fault. Guys get tired of me saying I’m sorry.”

  When we entered the lobby of the sheriff’s station ten minutes later, Lucas Odell was standing behind the counter, talking to the deputy on duty. He stopped midsentence and raised his pale eyebrows.

  “Don’t you ever go home?” I asked him.

  “Think of what I’d miss if I did,” he said. “You here to see me?”

  “No, Mr. Travis and I are here to see Detective Gaitan,” I said. “Is he around?”

  A slow smile of comprehension spread across his face. “Yeah,” he said. “He’s back there drinking up my coffee. Let me bring you to him.”

  The deputy buzzed us through the door into the back of the station. We went down the bright, clean corridor, past Deputy Tim and his jail, to the intervie
w room. Odell stopped short and gestured for us to wait. He went to the doorway, rapped the wall and said, “Hey, Mac, got someone here to see you.” He looked at Travis. “What was your name, son?”

  “Bob Travis.”

  “Young man named Travis,” Odell spoke into the room. “And his lawyer.”

  From inside the room, Gaitan groaned, “His lawyer? Shit.” A chair skidded across the floor and then he stepped out into the hall and saw me. His eyes went dead. His face turned to stone. “Rios. What the fuck are you doing here?”

  I smiled. “I represent Mr. Travis.”

  I demanded a tape recorder, and for good measure insisted that Odell be present when Gaitan questioned Travis, so it took a few minutes before we were arranged around the metal table in the bare room. Gaitan was on one side, Travis and I on the other, Odell in the corner rocking on the back legs of his chair, hands folded on his big gut.

  “So, Rios,” Gaitan said, “is this a coincidence or what?”

  “If we’re getting started, turn on the tape.”

  He flicked on the recorder, gave the date, time and the names of those present.

  “To answer your question,” I said, “I’m here because after you questioned my client at Parnassus studio, he and the studio’s legal counsel figured you needed someone to keep you in line.”

  Gaitan started to speak, glanced at Odell, then said, formally, “We can connect your client to two of the Invisible Man killings.”

  “Everything’s connected in the great scheme of things. I assume you have something more specific.”

  Ignoring me, he said to Travis, “So, Bobby …”

  “Address my client as Mr. Travis, please.”

  Gaitan glared at me. “Okay, Mr. Travis, the last time we talked, you admitted taking a—what do you call it—a ‘picture car’ off the lot at Parnassus studio.” He shuffled some papers from a manila folder in front of him and withdrew three pictures, which he laid in front of us. They showed a medium-size, two-toned American car, blue and white, with a taxi light on the roof and the logo Lucky’s Taxi Service painted on the passenger doors. “Is this that car?”