The Burning Plain

by Michael Nava

  “Darling,” he murmured, in the same whispery voice he’d used on the phone. “You’ve come to see your old Maman.” He shifted in his chair and his robe opened to reveal a thin, hairless leg. He sketched the sign of the cross in the air above my head. “Bless you.”

  “You don’t look well, Richie,” I said. “Is everything all right?”

  “Let’s see,” he replied, touching a long finger to his chin. “My lover left me, I was fired, I was sued and no one will return my calls. Yes, everything’s fine. Do you want black tea or green?”

  “I meant about your health,” I persisted.

  “I told you, I picked up a virus somewhere. I mean, other than HIV.”

  “Have you seen a doctor?”

  “Oh, darling, please, there will be time enough when we’re seventy to discuss our little aches and pains. Believe me, I’m fine.”

  He exhaled a plume of cigarette smoke, then choked, coughing until he was red-faced and sweating. I rose from my seat to help him, but he waved me away. Javier stood vigilantly at the doorway. The coughing subsided, and his face went from red to white as he gasped for air.

  “Water,” he said.

  Javier went into the kitchen, returning with a glass. “I should call the doctor,” he said sternly, as he handed it to Richie.

  “You should polish the silver and walk the dog,” he said. “Or walk the silver and polish the dog. Go away now. I want to talk to my friend alone.”

  “Javier’s right. You look seriously ill.”

  “If you both don’t shut up, I will be seriously ill,” he said in a fierce whisper. “Go, Javier.” After Javier left, he poured me a cup of tea with trembling hands and gave me a plate piled with sandwiches. “Mangia, Henry. You’re reed thin. I read about your serial killer. Drowned in the toilet? I always stay in the shallow end myself.”

  “He passed out from drugs and alcohol and choked on his own vomit,” I said, biting into horseradish and beef.

  “Charming picture.”

  I sipped the strong, sweet tea. “Do you remember the girl who lived with Alex? Katie Morse? They found her body in Griffith Park a few days ago.”

  “I saw that on TV,” he said, lighting another cigarette. He cautiously inhaled.

  “The cops think she disappeared shortly after Alex was killed.”

  “She was a speed freak,” he said. “She ran with rough trade.”

  “That’s what the cops think, too.”

  He exhaled, sipped his water. “You don’t?”

  I said, “By the time a case is over, it usually tells a pretty straightforward story but this one is all over the map. Travis was a completely unlikely suspect, the cops planted evidence, a witness turned up out of nowhere, Travis dies in this ridiculous accident, but then the police find evidence that definitely connects him to the first two murders. Just when it looks like all the loose ends are tied up, Katie Morse turns up murdered. You connect the dots. I can’t.”

  “Back up,” he rasped. “The police planted evidence?”

  I told him about the fibers in the trunk of the car. “The ironic thing is that it was completely unnecessary since they found the same fibers in and around his apartment.”

  “Maybe Gaitan planted those, too,” Richie said.

  “There was other evidence,” I said, explaining the bloodstained shoe, the fast-food wrapper.

  “You’re not suspicious enough,” he said, stubbing his cigarette out excitedly. “Maybe they planted all of the evidence.” He lit another cigarette. “You never did look into the gay-bashing angle I gave you.”

  “What do you mean, Richie?”

  “Alex was attacked twice before he was murdered and the police didn’t do anything about it.”

  “I don’t see the connection between that and planted evidence.”

  He frowned. “Think, Henry. Whoever framed Travis had access to the evidence.”

  “Obviously it was the cops.”

  “But why?” he asked. “What was their motive?”

  “They knew he was guilty and wanted to help things along.”

  “Or maybe,” he said, “they were diverting attention from themselves.”

  I let this sink in. “Are you suggesting that the cops killed Alex and the other two victims?”

  “Yes.”

  “But why, Richie?”

  “Because they hate us.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “They pistol-whipped you and you’re defending them?”

  “Eyewitnesses saw two of the victims get into the prop car,” I said.

  “All the studios hire off-duty police for security,” he said. “It’s a kind of payoff. Who’s to say an off-duty cop didn’t borrow the car?”

  “An anti-gay death squad in the sheriff’s department? Someone would’ve noticed.”

  “No one takes me seriously,” Richie complained. “Everyone assumes I’m some kind of flake.”

  “The problem isn’t with your conclusions, it’s with your research,” I said.

  “Don’t you start.”

  “You quoted me in that piece of Asuras without permission,” I reminded him.

  “I warned you I would,” he replied.

  “That’s not exactly true,” I said.

  He bent his head over the tea table as he poured himself a cup of tea. The scarf around his neck parted slightly to reveal a patch of severely bruised skin.

  “What happened to your neck?”

  His hand went to where the scarf had come apart. He adjusted it so that the skin was again covered, sipped his tea and said, “Would you like a scone? They’re from the La Brea Bakery. Lemon and ginger. To die for.”

  “Richie, your neck.”

  “I had an accident.”

  “What kind of accident?”

  He put his teacup down. “I accidentally tried to hang myself.”

  Chapter 16

  “I HAVE TO be Someone,” Richie said, delicately setting his cup on its saucer.

  “You are someone, Richie,” I said.

  “No, Henry, I mean Someone, with a capital S. A star.” He tapped ash from his cigarette. “That’s the only way it means anything.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Everything I suffered,” he said, quietly. “The four years in that hospital, HIV, Joel. Being born a fag. It has to add up to something because if it doesn’t, then the fundies are right, and God is a crazy bitter old queen who creates us just so he can torture us.” He took a quick puff from his cigarette. “Think about it, Henry. If this God creates people in his image, that’s got to include John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer, and what does that say about his personality? Hide the knives, that’s what it says. Watch your back.”

  “Why didn’t you call me before you tried to kill yourself?”

  He patted my knee. “You’ve never needed to be a star. You don’t understand what I would do to be one. Which is just as well, because you wouldn’t like me very much if you did.”

  “What happened?”

  “As I was hanging there, in the bedroom, from the lighting fixture, I heard a voice in my head that sounded a lot like Vivien Leigh say, ‘There’s always tomorrow. Tomorrow is another day.’ Then I passed out. When I came to, I was on the floor covered with plaster. I’d pulled the fixture out of the ceiling.”

  “Is any of that true?”

  “All of it,” he said, crossing his heart. “I swear. Scarlett O’Hara saved my life.”

  The suicide attempt had injured his larynx, but according to his doctor, the damage would be temporary. For a while, however, he had barely been able to speak, so he had concocted the story that he was out of the country. No one knew of the attempt except Javier and now me. He swore me to secrecy. In return, I made him promise not to commit suicide. He agreed, on the condition that I go shopping with him for new suits at Barney’s when he felt better, “because if I have to keep seeing you in those Brooks Brothers muu-muus you wear, I will kill myself.” On my way out, I slipped Javier
my number and asked him to call me should Richie’s depression worsen. Inscrutable as always, he took the number. Only on the drive home did I allow myself to feel the weight of what Richie had confided to me and I pulled into my driveway, blinded by tears.

  That night, I checked my e-mail, and to my surprise, there was a message from Rod Morse, but when I called it up it was incomprehensible, a single line, all in caps: RUKWERE? I printed it out. After checking various dictionaries without finding a word that remotely resembled it, I was about to write if off as an error in transmission when it occurred to me that the first two letters, R, U, formed the question alluded to by the question mark. Are you KWERE? I sounded it out several times before I got it. ARE YOU QUEER? It was impossible to discern the intent behind the question, but the fact he had encoded it was circumstantial evidence that it was not hostile, since such hostility is seldom veiled. On the other hand, the word queer was ambiguous; for decades it had been an epithet, but many younger gays and lesbians had co-opted the word and proudly described themselves as queer, in the same spirit that long-hair college students in the sixties used to call themselves freaks. But I knew nothing about Rod Morse, not his age, his sexual orientation or level of political sophistication. Still, he was my only hope for getting information about Katie, so, after mulling it over, I wrote back, YES. The following evening, I got a message in return in the same odd code. WILKAL. Will call.

  The phone rang at midnight. I rolled over in the darkness and saw that the call was coming in on the office line. I picked up the phone.

  “Will you accept a call to anyone from Rod?” a male operator asked.

  “Yes,” I said, turning on the light. I sat up and grabbed the legal pad and pen I kept on the bedstand to jot down ideas that came to me about my cases as I was drifting off to sleep.

  “Hello, Mr. Rios?” It was a boy’s voice, just this side of puberty.

  “Rod? Rod Morse?”

  “Uh-huh,” he said.

  “How old are you?”

  “Sixteen,” he said, a little defiantly. “I turned sixteen in June.”

  I heard restaurant noises behind him, the clatter of plates, shouted orders. “Where are you calling from?”

  “All-night diner by the highway,” he said. “I come here sometimes.”

  “Do your parents know?”

  Silence. “I sneak out of the house. How come you’re asking me all these questions? I thought you wanted to know about Katie.”

  “I expected you to be older,” I said. “Why did you ask me if I was queer?”

  “I figured if you knew Alex, you might be,” he said.

  “Did you know Alex?”

  “I knew he was gay,” he said. “Katie told me. All of Katie’s friends were gay.” He hesitated. “I guess that’s how she figured out I am, too.”

  As soon as he said that, I understood the coded messages, this call.

  “Your parents don’t know.”

  “No one knew but Katie,” he said. “Well, people on chat lines, but they don’t count. She promised to get me out of here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She told me I could come and live with her, that she would send me money to get down to LA.”

  “When was this supposed to happen?”

  “Right after my birthday,” he said. “When I didn’t hear from her, I started to get worried.”

  “I understand you tried to file a missing person’s report with the LA police department in July. What happened?”

  “The policeman wouldn’t do anything unless I let him talk to my parents,” he replied. “My dad told him Katie was on drugs somewhere and not to waste his time looking for her.”

  “Why were you so sure she was missing?”

  “Because she wouldn’t blow me off. She knows what my folks are like. She knew I had to get out of here.”

  “When is your birthday, Rod?”

  “June fifteenth.”

  “The police say you got a card from her. Do you remember when it arrived?”

  “Yeah, it came the day after. Katie messed up and left off the zip code, that’s why it took so long.”

  “Did you keep the envelope it came in?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “I want you to look at the postmark and let me know when it was mailed from Los Angeles.”

  “Okay,” he said. “What happened to Alex?”

  “He was murdered the first weekend of June,” I said. “I think Katie may have disappeared around the same time and I was wondering if there was a connection.”

  “Do you know who killed him?”

  “The police had a suspect, but he died before they arrested him. I was his lawyer.”

  “I thought you were Alex’s friend,” he said, suspiciously.

  “I was,” I said.

  “And you were the lawyer for the man who killed him?”

  “The man who was accused of killing him,” I said. “It wasn’t proven. There’s a long story behind this that I’ll tell you another time. Right now I’m interested in when Katie disappeared.”

  “How did you know Alex?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Were you, um, his boyfriend?”

  “I went out with him once, but I wouldn’t say I was his boyfriend.”

  Silence. “Did you pay him to go out with him?”

  “No. How did you know that Alex was a hustler?”

  “The disc,” he said.

  “What disc?”

  “I have to go now,” he said. “I’ll e-mail you. You figure out my code?”

  “Yeah, I think so. Rod, what disc?”

  “Check your e-mail tomorrow night. Late.”

  The following evening, after midnight, I got Rod’s e-mail. I decoded it and printed it out.

  Katie moved up to San Francisco as soon as she graduated high school. I was 13. She knew I was gay before I did because she had a lot of gay friends up there and I guess she recognized the symptoms: Like I don’t play sports and I don’t have a girlfriend and I like nice clothes and whatever. She told me I was queer when I was 14 and everything kind of fell into place. Since then all I want is to get OUT OF HERE. My parents are born-agains. They told Katie she was going to hell because she liked to party, so you can guess how they’d react if they knew about me. I’m pretty sure they know, because they are always asking me weird questions like what do I think about when I’m alone. Plus I have to go to church three times a week … It sucks. There’s no place for gays here but a couple of bars and a park downtown. I can’t get into the bars and the park’s gross. I used to spend a lot of time in gay chat rooms, talking to other queer kids, but then someone at the church told my dad that there’s child molesters on the Internet, so they installed this thing called a Cybersitter on my PC that tells them what sites I’ve been to so I had to stop going to the gay sites. I still e-mail some of the people I met, but I have to delete the messages and I made up this code. I don’t know how much longer I can take this, now that Katie’s gone … R.

  Following this was a second message, transmitted a few minutes later:

  Oops, I forgot. The disc. Katie sent me a computer disc with my birthday card and told me to keep it for her until she needed it. She said it was important. I’m attaching the file for you to download. I didn’t tell the police about it. You’ll see why when you read it. R. PS I looked at the envelope. The postmark says it was sent from LA on June 3rd. I told you she screwed up the zip code, right?

  When I got the second message, I flipped my calendar back to June. The third was a Wednesday, two days before Alex was murdered. So Odell was wrong about when she’d sent the card. I downloaded the file Rod sent me, a long one taking nearly ten minutes, and saved it on Word. When I called it up, a title page flashed on my screen: Scenes: Tales from the Hollywood S&M Sewer by A. I printed out a seventy-page manuscript and read through it with growing astonishment and pity and disgust.

  … J. came into the room wearing bondage apperral and tied
me down to the bed with leather restraints. I was so out of it from the ’ludes I didn’t understand what was happening until he started whipping me with a cat o’ nine tails. I told him to stop but he kept breaking viles of amyl nitrate under my nose instead. After a while I figured, what the fuck and just went with it. He shoved a dildo in me and called me names. There was an opening in his leather chaps for his dick, but he couldn’t get hard, no matter what he did to me. It was all the drugs, I guess. His ’ludes were pharmaceutical quality, not the street shit. Plus we did a lot of coke. Finally, he managed to dribble a little something out his dick. He untied me and gave me $500 and invited me to clean up and go downstairs to his screening room and watch his new movie with him and his wife. She was their all the time we were upstairs! I sat between them and we watched the movie and ate popcorn. He played an FBI agent, he was pretty good but it was weird sitting there with them. That was my first time getting paid for S&M.

  I consider myself bisexual but the truth is most people who are in to S&M are guys, so that was most of my clients. So I was surprised when I got a call from this woman who said she heard about me from T. She was a director who won an Oscar. I’ll call her Judy. She lived in Los Feliz in a big white home with black shutters. She was skinny and homely but there was that Oscar over her fireplace. Her scene was bestiality. She had these big Greyhounds that she liked to watch have sex with people, boys and girls. I don’t why she called me. I guess she figured if I’d do S&M I’d do anything.

  Judy introduced me to my evillest client. He is a big studio executive. I’ll call him Mr. King, because he’s like a king of his little kingdom. He’s used to getting his way. When it comes to sex, he doesn’t have any limits. There was even rumors he killed some kid when he was living in another country. They say he just snuffed him and then recorded it to watch later. Like a lot of these S&M queens, Mr. King had a playroom, but it didn’t look like a dungeon, the way most of them do. It looked like a room in a hospital where you do operations. He had this steel table with gutters that he said they used for autopsies. When I first met him, he was totally friendly. Plus, he paid the best. He became my best client. Our first scenes were pretty tame, but little by little, they got more crazy and I figured out he was breaking me in, testing my limits. He was a total manipulator and mindfucker. But, like I said, he paid me well and he gave me presents, including a car.