The Burning Plain (30 page)

I called the temp agency named on the pay stub. A brisk woman answered the phone with a clipped, “Temporarily Yours. This is Judy. How can I help you?” When I explained that I was calling about Katie Morse, she said, “Well, it’s about time.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I called you last week, as soon as I saw the news.” She paused. “You are the police, aren’t you?”

I couldn’t remember whether impersonating an officer was a misdemeanor or a felony, so, leaving myself wiggle room, I said, “I’m working with Sergeant Lucas Odell at the West Hollywood sheriff’s station. Can you answer a couple of questions?”

“If you make it quick. I do have a business to run.”

“When did Katie last work for you?”

“That’s why I called you,” she said, with exasperation. “On the news they said no one knew when she disappeared. I checked her time sheets. We placed her with a law firm in Century City on a nine-week job in mid-April. She worked through May and the first week of June, then she didn’t show up and I couldn’t get ahold of her. The firm was very upset.”

“Was she a flake?”

“No, not at all,” the woman said. “That’s why I was worried, but when she didn’t return my phone messages, I pulled her card from my Rolodex. I mean, let’s face it, they don’t call this temp work for nothing. People come and go. But I was surprised that Katie just disappeared.”

“Could you fax me her time sheet?”

“Of course.”

“Did she fill out any kind of application with you?”

“Yes, our standard agreement.”

“Could you fax me that, too?”

“Give me your fax number and I’ll do it right now, before I get any busier.”

I gave her the number. “Did you know anything about her personal situation?”

“Honestly? No. She’d only been with us a couple of months and I really only saw her on Fridays when she picked up her paycheck. She was a nice girl, very pretty. I was sorry to hear about her.”

“Can I call you back if I have any other questions?”

“Sure,” she said. “Just ask for Judy. Who are you?”

“Detective Gaitan,” I said. “G-A-I-T-A-N.”

Five minutes later, I was looking over Katie Morse’s employment application. The most interesting thing on it was under the heading
PERSON TO BE NOTIFIED IN CASE OF EMERGENCY
, where she had scribbled, “Rod Morse.” Under
RELATIONSHIP TO APPLICANT
, she’d written “brother,” but instead of an address or phone number, all she had provided was an e-mail address. That night I went on-line and sent a message to [email protected]:

Dear Rod, I’m an attorney in Los Angeles who knew your sister and her roommate, Alex Amerian. I would be interested in talking to you about her disappearance and death because Alex was killed around the same time and I’m wondering if there was a connection. Please e-mail or call me at
213-555-4592
. Sincerely, Henry Rios.

I checked my e-mail every day for the next week, but there was no response from Rod Morse, nor did he call me. I didn’t think I could get away with another call to the temp agency, so I was reduced to checking the paper to see if the police had uncovered any new information about Katie, but she wasn’t mentioned again. Her disappearance was complete.

“henry, are you there?” The voice on my answering machine was whispery and hoarse, as if the air had been squeezed from it, but still recognizable.

I picked up the phone. “Richie?”

He sneezed. “There’s a special place in hell for queens who screen their calls.”

“Are you all right? When did you get back?”

“Summer cold,” he grumbled. “Just now.”

“Where were you?”

“Here and there,” he said, vaguely. “I got your message about Duke. Thanks, Henry. My lawyer is composing a groveling letter of apology.” He coughed. “I’m all by myself. Come and see me.”

“I was sorry to hear about you and Joel.”

“All good things come to an end,” he croaked. “Come for tea? Four-ish?”

Javier—Richie’s houseman—let me in. He was a man of indeterminate age, somewhere between thirty and sixty, whom Richie had helped escape from El Salvador where, as a homosexual, he had been reviled by both sides in that country’s endless civil war. There had been some trouble with INS, which refused to grant refugee status to immigrants who had been persecuted because of their homosexuality on the grounds that they were mere criminals. I represented him
pro bono
at the INS hearing, where he described how government soldiers had stuck bamboo splints into his urethra. When he was given his green card, he kissed my hand. I had never felt so humbled.

“Hello, Javier.”

He smiled formally. “Señor Henry.”

“Richie invited me to tea.”

“He’s in the living room.”

I found Richie in the sky-blue living room, seated before the tiled fireplace, where a fire was burning, though it was ninety outside. The room was refrigerated. I thought of Duke Asuras and wondered whether fires in the summer was simply the latest trend among the rich; no quarter to nature given there. Richie was dressed like a character from a novel by Somerset Maugham set on the Riviera in a thick blue-and-white striped terry-cloth robe with a lavender silk scarf elaborately wound around his neck. He wore monogrammed espadrilles. At his elbow a lacquered table held a tea service, including plates of crustless sandwiches and fruit tarts. He was smoking and wheezing. I eased into the chair opposite him. His skin was yellowish and he looked fevered and ill.

“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.”

“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.