The Burning Plain (10 page)

“He doesn’t work out of this station, does he?”

The jailer buzzed us in.

“The homicide unit’s downtown,” Odell said. “He’s here as a courtesy. Hey, Tim, Mr. Rios is going to be your guest for a little while, ’til his lawyer gets here.”

“I’ll take care of him,” the slight, fair-haired jailer said. He got up and went to the door that opened to the holding cells. When he asked, “You prefer the Presidential suite or the honeymoon suite?” I detected the camp cadences of a gay man.

“Which has better room service?” I asked.

The jailer grinned; a best-little-boy-in-the-world kind of grin. A brother for sure.

“I’ll leave you to it,” Odell said.

“Sergeant,” I said. “You know you can’t hold me much longer.”

“I can still arrest you for trespassing.”

“A misdemeanor? You’ll have to cite me out.”

He smiled. “Not necessarily, counsel. The way we work it here is, when you arrest someone you fill out a PCD form and ship it to a judge, who has forty hours to either sign off on it or we kick the suspect.”

“PCD? That’s a new one on me.”

“Probable cause determination,” he said. “I’ll let you know when your lawyer gets here.”

“So, Deputy Tim,” I said to the jailer. “Do these cells come with conjugal rights?”

He blushed.

Forty-five minutes later, Inez Montoya, wearing a blue power suit and sneakers and carrying a tattered briefcase, bustled into the jail, with Odell trailing behind her, and demanded of the jailer, “Release my client.”

“Let him out,” Odell said. “You can talk in the interrogation room.”

He took us back to the room where Gaitan had showed me the pictures of Alex and left us there. Inez yanked a chair from beneath the table and plopped herself down. Her heavy bangs fell across her round, cherubic face. She pushed them away impatiently and said, “What the fuck is going on, Henry? I was on my way to dinner with the Governor when my office forwarded your call.”

My friendship with Inez Montoya went back almost twenty years, to when we’d both been public defenders. I’d stayed in criminal law while she’d gone into politics, eventually serving on the Los Angeles city council and two terms in Congress. From the House, she’d gone to HUD, where she spent three years as the assistant secretary. A few months earlier, she’d resigned and returned to Los Angeles. Currently, she was cooling her heels as a partner in a politically powerful Westside law firm while she plotted her race for mayor a year hence. Inez was fierce in everything, including loyalty to old friends, even one like me whom she had long ago written off as a loser.

“I think I’m being held as a suspect in a murder,” I said.

“
Madre de Dios
,” she muttered. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s a long story,” I said, and explained.

She listened without expression until I finished, then crushed her cigarette on the floor and said, “That was too lame to be made up.”

“You think I would make up something that makes me look like such a schmuck?”

“You stalk this guy until he agrees to go out with you, then you find out he’s a whore but go to bed with him anyway, then you get pissed off because he was a whore, so you beat him up before sending him off his merry way to get murdered,” she said. “Jesus, Henry, I thought you gay guys were supposed to be different than straight guys.”

“I didn’t exactly stalk him,” I said, trying not to explode at her. “And I didn’t exactly beat him up, and I certainly didn’t know he was on his way to get killed.”

She leveled a warning look at me. “Watch your tone.”

“For Christ’s sake, Inez. I got no sleep last night, I spent the afternoon at Forest Lawn shopping for a grave for Josh, and then I come home to find out that someone murdered my date and now I’m sitting here suspected of the crime. How would you feel?”

She dug into her briefcase for her cigarettes.

“I don’t think you can smoke in here,” I said.

Ignoring me, she lit up and puffed furiously for a few minutes. “You’re going to have to tell the cops the truth,” she said.

I had reluctantly come to the same conclusion myself while I was waiting for her. “I know,” I said, “but it won’t exonerate me. Not in their eyes. I’ll still be a suspect.”

She ran an exasperated hand through her heavy hair. “
Pues
,” she said. “Who else have they got? But since you didn’t do it, they’ll eventually give up on you.”

“Not before my reputation is destroyed,” I said.

“That’s the least of your worries,” she said. “What’s the name of the cop from homicide?”

“Gaitan,” I said, “but bring the other one in, too. Odell.”

“Odell’s just the watch commander,” she said. “It’s Gaitan’s investigation.”

“Gaitan’s a macho prick,” I said, and told her how he had attempted to question me after I’d requested a lawyer. “Odell stopped him.”

“All right,” she said. “But remember, Henry, you tell them everything, no matter how embarrassing it is for you.”

“You’re not enjoying this, are you, Inez?”

“Not really,” she said. “It’s kind of disgusting. You deserve to be convicted of poor judgment, if nothing else.”

I made my statement into a tape recorder that kept malfunctioning, so that every few minutes I’d have to repeat a sentence.

“I said, the reason I parked across the street from his house was because I was working up my courage to ask him out on a date.”

A look of comic disbelief flashed across Gaitan’s face. “You wanted to date him? Are you a homosexual?”

“Yes, Detective, that’s what I’m saying. I’m gay.”

The disbelief shaded into disgust. “But you’re Mexican, man.”

“Let’s move on,” Inez said.

I felt Gaitan’s silent contempt, as I described my date with Alex and then going back to my house to have sex.

“Sorry,” Odell said. “The machine. Can you repeat that.”

I looked at my hands. “We went to my house and had sex.”

Across the table, Gaitan muttered something.

“What’s that, Mac?” Odell asked. “You want to put something on the tape?”

He shook his head slowly in a gesture of disgust.

“Afterwards,” I continued, “as he was leaving, we got into a scuffle. I knocked him down. Gave him a bloody nose, I think. There was a cab waiting for him outside. He left, to another appointment, he said. That was the last time I saw him.”

“Why did you beat him up?” Gaitan asked.

“He said something disrespectful to me,” I said, hoping it was enough.

“What?” Gaitan persisted. “How could he dis you, Rios?”

“Inez,” I said.

“It’s not important,” she said. “The important thing is when the man left my client’s house he was still alive.”

“If Rios is telling the truth,” Gaitan said, “how come you were at the vic’s house this afternoon?”

“The man who introduced me to Alex called me and told me he’d heard Alex had been murdered. I went to his house to talk to his roommate to see what she knew.”

“Name of the man who introduced you?” Odell asked.

“Richard Florentino. He lives on La Cuesta Way, here in West Hollywood.”

“And how did he know about Amerian?” Gaitan asked.

“He said he’d heard it from one of your deputies,” I said, looking at Odell.

“He say which one?” Odell asked.

“No.”

“Who is this roommate you’re talking about?” Gaitan said.

“Her name is Katie Morse.”

“What did you think she was going to tell you, Rios?”

“I thought she might know where Alex was going after he left my house.”

“Why?”

“Because of this,” I said. “I knew as soon as you guys found out that I’d been with him last night you’d be all over me. I wanted to be prepared.”

“You don’t trust us to do our job?” Gaitan asked.

“I know you guys go in for the obvious answers.”

“That’s because most of the time they’re the right answers,” Odell said.

“Not this time,” I replied. “If you want to know who killed him, find out where he went after he left my house.”

Gaitan tipped his chair back, looked at me with undisguised distaste, and said, “You know what I think, Rios? I think you two had a lover’s spat and you killed him.”

“I’ve cooperated with you completely,” I said. “The only way you’re going to keep me here is to arrest me, and not on some bullshit trespassing charge.”

Odell said, “Will you consent to a search of your house and your car, Mr. Rios?”

“Now? Tonight?”

“If you didn’t do it, you shouldn’t have anything to hide,” he said.

“That’s right, Rios. You want to clear yourself, don’t you?”

“I want a minute with my lawyer.”

The two deputies left the room. “Listen to me, Henry,” Inez said, “I’m the lawyer here. We do this my way.”

“What are you talking about?”

“That macho crap, daring Gaitan to arrest you.”

“We all know there’s no probable cause.”

“He’d do it just to harass you,” she said. “Good thing that other cop is here.”

“Do you think they could obtain a search warrant?”

“In a heartbeat. You have something to hide?”

“I told you, I bloodied his nose. They’ll find traces of his blood at my house and his fingerprints all over my car.”

“You explained all that,” she said. She narrowed her eyes. “You’re not holding out on me, are you, Henry?”

“You don’t think I did it, do you?”

“Some judge somewhere will sign a search warrant,” she said. “I think you should cooperate. Let them have their search.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

She had to think about it. “Of course not,” she said, after a moment.

It was four in the morning before the sheriffs concluded their search of my house. They had impounded my car for a later search, so Inez drove me home and remained with me until the last deputy left. I showed them where I had shoved Alex against the wall, pointed out the bloodstains, retrieved the bloody rag from the washer. Gaitan seemed particularly interested in my bathtub.

“You have a hot tub?” he asked me, emerging from the guest bathroom.

“No,” I said.

One of his deputies broke a glass in the kitchen. Gaitan wandered around the living room, stopped, looked at the urn on the mantel.

“What’s that?”

“It contains my lover’s ashes,” I said.

“Open it.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said.

He picked it up, shook it. “You could hide a knife in here.”

“I won’t open it.”

By now, attracted by our rising voices, Inez had come over. I explained the conflict.

“I could come back with a search warrant,” Gaitan said.

“Forensics can take it and x-ray it,” Inez said. “But you can’t open it.”

“I won’t agree to that,” I said.

“We’re cooperating here, Henry,” she said. “Remember?”

Odell had joined us.

“I want it back tomorrow,” I said.

“I’ll see to it,” Odell said.

“Well, that’s over,” I said to Inez, after the cops had left. “For now.”

She lit the last of her cigarettes. “I’m going home, Henry.”

“Thanks for coming to my rescue,” I said.

She waved it off. “Don’t thank me yet. You’re not in the clear.”

“I’m sorry you missed dinner with the Governor.”

Anger and pity flashed through her eyes. “When we were starting out, you were the one with all the promise. What happened, Henry?”

“I don’t know what you mean, Inez. I’m still here, sober, working, alive.”

“You were supposed to do a lot more.”

“We don’t live in the same world anymore, and in my world, where a lot of guys are dead or drunk, those are major achievements.”

“Well, then, do me a favor and hang on to them. Stay out of trouble.”

I opened the door. “Trouble finds me.”

“Only because you advertise,” she replied, and drove away.

The next day, a deputy returned Josh’s ashes to me. The seal on the urn had been broken.

“T
HESE NIGHTMARES
,” I said. “They’re like something out of Bosch. I wake up shouting because I’ve dreamed that something is in the bed with me eating my flesh. Or I dream of the police pictures of Alex Amerian’s body. Or Josh at the end. Wasted to his skeleton.”

“You’ve had a series of traumas,” Reynolds said. “It’s not surprising they’ve invaded your dreams.”

His pudgy face wore its usual beneficent expression. His gray-and-beige office was quiet except for the ticking of a grandfather clock in the corner. Above his desk a discreetly framed degree testified to his doctorate in psychology. It had been a long time since I’d sought out Raymond Reynolds, but I hadn’t slept in the three days since Alex’s murder, because when I closed my eyes I was plagued by nightmares. My waking hours were not much better. When I looked out the windows, I saw a police surveillance car parked at the curb. Every time the phone rang, I thought it was Inez calling to tell me the cops were on their way to arrest me. I felt like I was choking in my own skin.

“It’s more than trauma. I feel implicated in Alex’s death.”

He shifted uneasily in his chair. “You don’t mean …”

“Calm down. I didn’t kill him.”

“Then what do you mean, Henry?”

“This guy killed Alex in a particularly intimate way. He used a knife, the classic sex-crime weapon, an instrument of penetration and rage. … You should’ve seen the pictures. And afterwards, he bathed the body carefully. All that touching of Alex’s naked body wasn’t inadvertent or incidental. The killer got off on it. You know what that means?”

The clock ticked. “No, what does it mean to you?”

“It means he’ll do it again,” I replied. “I sent Alex off to a serial killer.”

“And that’s why you feel implicated?” Reynolds asked. “Because you didn’t stop him?”

“No,” I said. “I feel implicated because I understand the mind of the man who killed him. He’s gay, Raymond, like you and me, but he can’t deal with it, so he works out his ambivalence on the bodies of other gay men. I’m almost positive Alex wasn’t his first victim.”

“Why do you understand about the way his mind works, Henry?”

“I understand that it takes so much energy to resist the hatred so many people feel toward us,” I replied. “It wears you down. You begin to wonder, if that many people are convinced you’re evil, maybe there’s something to it and that gives you license to behave as if you were.”