The Burning Plain (43 page)

“Drinking is a sickness. It has nothing to do with self-control. If anything, I imagine getting drunk gives you what little control you have over your thoughts. I saw pictures of what Asuras did to Alex Amerian. That’s not something I’d want to see every time I closed my eyes.”

“Don’t be too sad for that little whore.”

“I know he tried to blackmail Asuras,” I replied. “He still didn’t deserve that kind of death. The other victims deserved it even less.”

He sprawled on the couch. “I didn’t kill anyone.”

I sat down across from him. “I believe you.”

“That’s a comfort,” he said, taking a slug from his drink.

“But you did help Asuras with the cover-up,” I said. “That makes you an accomplice with the same liability as his. Now’s the time to make a deal with the cops, Nick.”

He laughed. “The cops. The fucking cops were in on it, Henry. What’s his name? Gaitan. How do you think he got to Bob?”

“What do you mean?”

He put his glass down with a drunk’s precision. “The cop and I planned it,” he said. “There would be enough evidence to put Bob on trial, but not enough to convict him. Things would disappear, witnesses would change their stories.” He grinned. “You would give an excellent summation.”

“How did you talk Bob into that?”

“I told him he could move in with me when it was all over.”

“If Bob agreed, why was he killed?”

“The fucking cop did that,” he said. “Duke’s orders.”

“Gaitan killed Bob Travis? Why?”

“When Bob realized he was actually going to be arrested and go to jail, he panicked. Duke was afraid he’d crack, so he told Gaitan to take care of him. I didn’t know, I swear.”

I remembered how distraught he’d been the night Travis died. “Asuras didn’t tell you because he was afraid you’d object.”

He nodded. “Bob didn’t have to die. I could’ve handled him.”

“Was that the only time Asuras double-crossed you?”

“I didn’t know about Schilling either,” he said.

“He’s a megalomaniac.”

“Duke? That’s like saying the sky is blue. Everyone at Duke’s level is a megalomaniac. Duke’s crossed the line.”

“What line?”

“The M’Naughten line,” he said, referring to the legal standard for insanity in criminal cases. “But since this is Hollywood, no one’s noticed. The Industry rewards ruthlessness and cruelty, and if you’re powerful enough, you can rob, cheat and steal and people look the other way. Not just people in the Industry, the police, prosecutors, judges. I was relieved when we were arrested. I thought it would finally be over, but even I underestimated Duke.”

“I need to know what your part was in the murders.”

“Why?”

“To figure out what kind of deal I can make for you.”

“You said it yourself, Henry, I’m as guilty as he is.”

“That depends. What happened, Nick?”

“I helped with … disposal.”

“Were you coerced?”

The drunken eyes focused. “Is that what you would tell a jury? I was afraid for my life so I followed orders because I wasn’t man enough to stand up for myself?”

“All I want to know is what happened.”

“I was a fifth-year associate at an entertainment firm, and I was going nowhere when I met Duke. He hired me to run the legal department at the studio because he said he saw the warrior in me. I was going to help him conquer Hollywood.”

“He knew you were gay,” I said.

“That’s why my career had stalled at the firm. The partners thought I was a little too light in the loafers for their celebrity clients. They didn’t think I’d be tough enough. They found out how tough I am when I negotiated with them for Parnassus.”

“Asuras didn’t care that you were gay, obviously.”

“Obviously? Duke doesn’t think he’s gay, if that’s what you mean.”

“Neither did John Wayne Gacy,” I replied. “But he couldn’t escape who he was, either, and when you start running from yourself, you end up in some pretty dark places.”

“Are you saying if Duke had come out, those men would still be alive? I don’t think so, Henry. I know Duke. The one thing he’s not is repressed.”

“If you knew that, why did you help him?”

“I was gradually sucked in,” he said. “I knew Amerian was trying to blackmail Duke, so I arranged the meeting and had Bob bring Amerian to Duke’s house. Using the cab was Duke’s idea. At the time, I wrote it off to paranoia. Later I realized he had planned all along to kill Alex and to incriminate Bob and me in the murder. But when he called me at three in the morning in a panic, I didn’t consider the possibility he was acting, especially after I got to his house. Amerian’s body was floating in the hot tub. Duke said he and Alex were doing an S&M scene that went too far. I told him to call the police.”

“What did he say?”

“He said he had a better idea.”

“Which was?”

“Make it look like Amerian had been murdered by gay-bashers.”

“Why didn’t you call the cops yourself?”

“I saw the knife wounds and I knew it wasn’t an accident. He had murdered the kid. If it was obvious to me, it would be obvious to the cops. Amerian was a blackmailing little whore. I didn’t owe him anything. That’s how I justified going along with Duke.”

“So what happened?”

“I got Bob back up to Duke’s house. Together we wrapped the body up, put it in the trunk of the car and drove down to West Hollywood, where we dumped it in the alley.”

“You helped dump the body?”

He nodded. “Afterwards, we went to a self-service car wash and cleaned the car from top to bottom.”

“Joanne Schilling was going to testify she saw Bob coming out of the alley by himself.”

“She wasn’t there,” he replied. “She was paid to say what we told her to say.”

“What about the second murder?”

“The same thing,” he said. “A call at two in the morning from Duke. I get to his house and find another body in the hot tub.”

“Jackie Baldwin,” I said. “Did Travis pick him up in the cab?”

He shook his head. “No, that was Duke free-lancing, but he used the cab to further incriminate Bob. We got rid of that body, too.”

“You didn’t say anything to Asuras? Like, stop.”

“Duke said he was afraid the police would suspect him in Alex’s murder unless another victim turned up to divert them. It made a certain amount of sense,” he said wearily, “but by then I was in so deep there wasn’t any way out. He said there would have to be a lot more victims before the police was convinced it was a serial killer. The best I could do was talk him down to one more.”

“Jellicoe,” I said. “Who picked him up?”

“Bob,” he said. “I told him it would be the last time.”

“Too bad for Bob it wasn’t,” I said. “Who killed Joanne Schilling?”

“Gaitan,” he said. “He seems to enjoy killing people almost as much as Duke.” He finished his drink, but when I looked into his eyes, I saw he was sober. “When I found out about her, I realized the killing would never stop.”

“If I were you, Nick, I’d be concerned about my safety.”

“You’re my insurance, Henry,” Donati said. He dug into his pants pocket and removed a key. “This key opens a locker in the international terminal at the airport. Inside you’ll find envelopes, addressed to the District Attorney, the police chief and you. Each of them contains my sworn affidavit laying out everything I told you tonight.”

“Why not just go to the police now, Nick?”

“There’s something I have to do,” he said. “The affidavits are my protection.”

“I know I could work out a deal for you with the DA in exchange for your testimony against Duke.”

“What kind of deal, Henry? Life in prison instead of death row? No, thanks.”

“This affidavit’s not going to be admissible if you disappear,” I said.

“I’ve taken care of its admissibility. The airport locker’s on a twenty-four-hour timer,” he said, glancing at his watch. “You have about an hour to get to them.”

“I’m coming back and we’re going to the cops.”

“You’re a rescuer, Henry, aren’t you? Fixer of broken lives.”

“Wait for me.”

He smiled. “I’ll be here.”

L
A CLENEGA WAS
bumper-to-bumper from Sunset to the Santa Monica freeway. The pale faces of other drivers drifted by like images in a dream, floating heads entombed in the machinery of their cars. The street flashed around me: bursts of neon alternated with darkness; knots of people waited outside the restaurants on Restaurant Row for valets to retrieve their cars; a homeless man was reflected in the window of a Jaguar dealership, pushing his shopping cart toward Beverly Hills. An enormous bronze sculpture of John Wayne presided over a desolate intersection of shuttered storefronts. Farther down, the freeway lurched above the street; a row of palm trees kept austere vigil over a neighborhood of the poor; in a vacant lot a sidewalk vendor displayed velvet paintings of Martin Luther King and Diana Ross. This was Duke Asuras’s city, a place of dark dreams and wastelands and the hovering presence of the angel of death. I kept my eye on the rearview mirror, spooked by the possibility I was being followed.

I parked illegally outside the Tom Bradley International Terminal, a monument to the mayor under whom the city had erupted into civil war. I hurried through the bright corridors until I found Donati’s locker near the gates for Aerolineas Argentinas. There was no timer on the locker. Inside I found three sealed envelopes. Attached to the one addressed to me was a handwritten postcard that contained Donati’s suicide note:

Dear Henry,

You will find in this envelope an affidavit under penalty of perjury that incriminates Duke Asuras in the murders. It incriminates me, too, but I couldn’t face the fall. I guess that makes me a coward, but you already knew that about me, so no surprises there. Listen, I cracked the law books for the first time in twenty years and this affidavit should be admissible either as a statement against penal interest or a dying declaration. You’re smart—you’ll get it in. Just remember, Henry, don’t underestimate Duke.

Later, Nick.

“Shit,” I said. The Doré engraving. The wood of the suicides. He’d been studying it before I arrived. The ruse with the timer on the locker was to get me out of his house. I stuffed his letter into my pocket, grabbed the envelopes and made a dash to my car, arriving just as it was being hitched to a tow truck.

The airport cop who’d called the tow was unimpressed by my story about preventing a suicide, but the truck driver let me ride with him to the yard, where I bailed my car out. It was well after midnight before I reached Donati’s street. I didn’t get far. Two police cars and a paramedic unit blocked the road. Curious neighbors huddled a few feet away. I pulled over and got out of my car.

“What happened?” I asked a white-haired woman in a quilted bathrobe.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I was in bed reading and then all hell broke loose. Sirens, lights. I’ve been standing here for a half hour. So far the only thing that’s come out of the house are the dogs.”

“The dogs? Where are they?”

“There,” she said pointing. The delicate greyhounds lay lifelessly on the sidewalk. “I guess he killed them. Isn’t that strange? But I still don’t understand why …”

She stopped mid-sentence as a couple of burly paramedics emerged from Donati’s house and hoisted a stretcher into the ambulance, a sheet drawn over a small body.

I couldn’t go home. I couldn’t face my empty house. I kept seeing the frail corpses of Donati’s dogs laid out on the sidewalk. A bizarre, sad touch. Did he kill them to protect them from the pound or was he afraid, at the last minute, to meet the darkness alone? I drove around in circles for an hour before I found myself pulling up to Serena Dance’s darkened townhouse in Santa Monica. I walked to the door, carrying Donati’s affidavits. I hesitated, but then a dog yapped from within, startling me out of my uncertainty. I pressed the bell. The dog yapped even more frantically. Lights, footsteps. I felt a presence on the other side of the door peering at me from the peephole. Slowly, the door opened. Serena was wearing a pink chenille bathrobe over sky-blue flannel pajamas. She was stuffing a handgun into her pocket.

“Henry? What the hell are you doing here?”

“Donati confessed,” I said. “He left an affidavit describing the murders and implicating Asuras.”

“Left?” she repeated, groggily. “Did he run?”

“No,” I said. “He killed himself.”

“Get in here,” she said, yanking me across the threshold. She looked up and down the street, closed the door and dead-bolted it. “Come into the kitchen. I’ll make some coffee. When did Donati … ?”

“A couple of hours ago. He sent me off on a wild-goose chase to get these and while I was gone, he killed himself.”

She gave me a long, assessing look. “You’re not going to blame yourself for this,” she announced.

“I could’ve stopped him.”

She sat me down at the kitchen table and said, “Start at the beginning.”

After I related the events of the evening, we opened the envelope addressed to me and found the original of Donati’s affidavit. It contained a complete confession, filled with details he could only have known about by having been present when they occurred. The last page was signed under penalty of perjury, and notarized.

“This is powerful stuff,” she said.

“Enough to get the DA off his ass?”

She poured the last of the coffee into her cup. “Didn’t you remind me that the uncorroborated testimony of an accomplice to a felony isn’t admissible against the principal if that’s the only evidence?”

“Donati’s affidavit is a roadmap to corroborating evidence.”

“I’m not talking law now,” she said, “but politics. The DA’s been burned once before. He’s not going to jump back into the fire.”

“What more does he need? Asuras’s confession?”

“Works for me,” she said.

“Are you seriously telling me that, even with Donati’s confession, the DA won’t reopen the murder investigations?”

“Not without giving Asuras a chance to respond,” she said. “And you know what he’s going to say. He’ll lay it on Donati and Travis. Both conveniently dead.”

“That’s not plausible.”