The Burning Plain (14 page)

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.

“‘… evidence connecting
RIOS
to the first victim the night of the murder was discovered in a search of his home,’” I read into the phone. “‘After the body of the second victim, twenty-six-year-old Jack Baldwin, was found under circumstances similar to the first victim, Rios was again questioned by sheriff’s deputies. The detective in charge of the investigation, Montezuma Gaitan, declined to either confirm or deny that Rios is a suspect in the murders and would only say that the investigation is continuing.’”

There was an explosive, “That asshole,” from Inez.

“Gaitan?”

“Who else?” she said. “His way of retaliating. What time do you get in?”

I glanced at my watch. “Around one.”

“Come straight to my office.”

It seemed to me that everyone on the plane was reading the
Times
, and even though the piece didn’t carry my picture, inwardly I cringed. I knew only too well that the mere mention of someone’s name in the media in connection with a crime was all the proof of guilt that most people needed. Remembering the tabloid coverage of the second murder by local TV news, I could only imagine what they would do with this new development. The media was like the Red Queen in
Alice in Wonderland
: first the execution, then the trial. I had images of TV vans lining the street outside my house, and my befuddled neighbors cornered by lacquered-haired reporters demanding, “What kind of man is he?” And it wouldn’t take much research to discover that much of my practice consisted of cases on which I was appointed by the appellate courts on behalf of indigent criminal defendants. I could guess how that would play: public money pays murder suspect to defend other criminals. In fact, it wouldn’t take much research to get a pretty full picture of my life, to discover I was gay or had been treated for alcoholism, exactly the kind of information that could be spun to create a media monster, another Andrew Cunanan. By the time the plane touched down in Los Angeles, I saw my life collapsing around me.

“A
LL I KNOW
,” Inez explained in her unpacked office, the lights on her phone blinking urgently, “is that in politics, when your opponent goes negative you hit back hard and fast. Same thing here.”

“I’m not running for anything,” I replied.

“You’re running for your reputation,” she said. Her phone buzzed. “Let me get this.”

I went to the windows. A bronze cast to the late-afternoon light gave the city a solemn, funereal look. The smog was so deep it reminded me of the fog I’d watched roll in over Twin Peaks the previous afternoon at Grant’s house. Out over the ocean, the sun inflamed the wispy clouds. The little stucco houses were lined up in neat rows as far as the eye could see, like modest grave markers. An eastbound jet crossed my field of vision and I was filled with the urge to run.

“That was the sheriff’s PR guy,” Inez said. “They questioned Gaitan. He denies being the leak.”

I turned back to her. “Duh.”

“They tried the reporter. She climbed on her First Amendment high horse.” Inez lit a cigarette, using a wooden kitchen match from a box on her desk.

“I assume that means no retraction.”

She flicked the match into an ashtray. “The sheriff backs up Gaitan; the paper stands by its story.”

“The sheriff backs up Gaitan? Gaitan’s a cowboy at best. At worst, he’s dirty.”

“From your perspective,” she said, blowing smoke out of the corner of her mouth. “To the sheriff, he might just be a very zealous cop.”

“Who hates blacks and gays and plants evidence in drug cases.”

“All unproven allegations,” she reminded me. When I didn’t answer, she continued, “I know you don’t want to turn this into a media circus, but now that they have your name, they’re going to hound you until you respond. Let’s do it in our way and on our turf.” She smiled. “Trust me, Henry. I know what I’m doing.”

I looked at her. Years earlier, when we were both young public defenders, she told me the only part of trial she really enjoyed was the summation, when she knew the jurors were transfixed by her every move, hanging on her every word. We were deep in our cups—I was still drinking—and I remember she leaned against me, her heavy, scented hair falling against my cheek, and giggled, “I love it when they watch me. It’s better than sex.”

“You should consider what effect this might have when you run for mayor,” I said now.

“I’m only defending an old friend’s reputation from police excess.”