The Burning Plain (18 page)

“Henry,” he said, his deep voice as incongruous as his big head. “Thanks for coming. Have a seat. Can I get you something to drink?”

“Coffee,” I said, masking my surprise at his appearance. “Black.”

He settled into his chair and directed his secretary to bring in the coffee. I glanced around his office. On the wall behind him were ornately framed degrees from his undergraduate and law schools, Cornell and Columbia. On the credenza were a half-dozen framed photographs of Donati in black tie with similarly dressed people, including a movie star or two, of whom I recognized Tom Hanks and a Baldwin brother at what were clearly social functions. In each of them, he maintained his height-leveling distance. Off to the side, prominent in its isolation, a snapshot showed him standing in a park with two small sleek dogs on either side of him.

“Pablo and Paloma,” he said, following my glance.

“What are they?”

“Italian greyhounds,” he replied, his eyes lingering on the photograph. “Do you have pets, Henry?”

“I’ve never had time for pets.”

“You should make time,” he said, reluctantly looking away from the picture. “Studies prove that people who have pets are happier and live longer than people who don’t have them.”

“Why not just take vitamins?”

He grinned. “You’re really not a pet person.”

His secretary trundled in with the coffee, which had a rich, expensive smell.

“Where’s Mr. Travis?” I asked Donati after she left.

“He’ll be here,” Donati replied. “I wanted to talk to you privately first.”

I sipped the excellent coffee. “About what?”

“This is the most publicity-conscious business on the planet, Henry. Hollywood’s not a fishbowl, Henry, it’s a shark tank. I’m trying to keep the scent of blood out of the water.”

“People in your business have a pretty exaggerated sense of their own importance.”

With one of his small, delicate hands, he made a subtle gesture of disagreement. “No, it’s not really about vanity. Making movies isn’t like making widgets. Every movie is a huge financial gamble. Plus, the people who make the movies, like creative people everywhere, tend to be a little more unstable than your average factory worker. It’s a volatile mix where perception is reality and rumors have incredible power, so naturally we all tend to be a bit hypersensitive about appearances.”

“What does this have to do with me?”

“If you agree to represent Bob, I have to be able to count on your discretion,” he said. “I need for you to try to keep the studio out of this. There are things going on, high-level stuff, that would be seriously impacted by adverse publicity.”

I wondered if he meant the Longstreet deal. “Other than the fact that Travis works here, how could Parnassus possibly be involved?”

“The police think studio property was used in the murders.”

“Why don’t we start at the beginning,” I suggested.

Donati nodded. “A couple of weeks ago, Detective Gaitan showed up here, asking whether we had ever used a picture car …”

“A what?” I interrupted.

“A picture car,” he said. “A prop car. Gaitan was looking for a blue-and-white cab with the logo Lucky’s Taxi Service painted on the side. He said the car had been connected to one of the murders and a deputy of his thought he remembered seeing it when he was working location for
Nights in Blue.
I told Gaitan I’d have to check, but if I found it we’d cooperate any way we could.”

“Was it one of yours?”

“Yes. It was used on the
Nights in Blue
set.”

“And you turned it over to Gaitan and he found something?”

“Here’s the complication,” Donati said, gingerly. “Once I discovered the cab, I talked the situation over with my boss and we decided I should … ,” he paused and seemed to grope for the right word, “… look the car over before we gave it to the police.”

I lifted an eyebrow. “You searched the car before you turned it over to the police? That’s obstruction of justice, Nick.”

His eyes froze. “I wasn’t planning on destroying evidence. I just wanted to know if there was anything that could incriminate the studio.”

“What would you have done if the backseat was covered in blood?”

“It wasn’t,” he snapped. Smiled. “Fortunately.”

“What did you find?”

“Nothing,” Donati said. “We called the sheriffs and let them impound the car to conduct their own search. They also asked to talk to everyone who had had access to the car since the beginning of June. We gave them a list of twenty-two people, including Bob. I sat in on some of the interviews. Basically, the police wanted to know whether anyone had driven the car off the lot. Of course, a number of people had when the show went out on location shots …”

“You’ll have to explain that to me,” I said.

“
Nights in Blue
supposedly takes place in Detroit,” he said, “but except for the opening montage, it’s all filmed here in LA, mostly at the studio on the New York street set. Occasionally, the producer likes to go off the lot and shoot around the city. When he does that, he takes his picture cars with him, including the Lucky taxi.”

“Why not use real cabs?”

Donati raised his eyebrows. “I’ll tell you about the teamsters sometime.”

“What about Travis? Did he work on location shoots?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Bob is the assistant production designer on the show.”

“Like a set designer in the theater?”

“More or less,” Donati said, then smiling, asked, “Were you in theater, Henry?”

“I was in my junior high school’s production of
Arsenic and Old Lace
,” I said. “I played the evil brother. Cast for my height, not my talent.”

“I wanted to be an actor when I was a kid,” he said.

“What happened?”

“I stopped growing.” He sipped some coffee. “To answer your original question, Bob did go out on location to touch things up, give them the right look. You know, add graffiti, toss some garbage around, change street signs, bring in snow, whatever it takes for downtown LA to resemble downtown Detroit.”

“Would he have driven the cab?”

“Absolutely not,” Donati said, emphatically. “The union’s very touchy about that. No, Bob didn’t drive the cab on the set, but he did remove it from the lot for his own personal use and without anyone’s permission.”

“Why?”

“Earlier this summer, his car had major mechanical problems that he couldn’t pay for. While he got together the money for the repairs, he borrowed some of the picture cars, including the cab.”

“He drove off the lot in a fake cab and no one stopped him? What about the guard at the gate.”

“The guards’ job is to keep people from getting onto the lot. They don’t pay much attention to people leaving. You just smile and wave and they open the gate.”

“Wouldn’t a cab be conspicuous?”

“To the contrary, people are always arriving here by cab from the airport for a meeting or something. The guards didn’t know the cab was a picture car. That’s one reason Bob took it.”

“There’s no paperwork when you take a car off the lot?”

“Only if you do it legitimately,” Donati said. “Bob didn’t. He waited until shooting was over for the day, then took the keys from the pegboard and drove off. He was careful to return the car before the next day’s shooting began.”

“All right,” I said, “so Travis borrowed the car. That’s a long way to making him a murder suspect.”

“When the police searched the car, they found evidence.”

“What kind of evidence?”

“They’re not saying until they can talk to Bob again.”

“What do you think they found?”

“I don’t think they found anything,” Donati said, meeting my eyes. “I searched that car, Henry. It was clean.”

“You’re suggesting the cops are bluffing?”

“I think they planted evidence.”

“That’s a very serious charge.”

“I spent a couple of hours with Detective Gaitan,” he said, “and while I’m no criminal-defense lawyer, even I could tell the man has a bad smell to him.”

“Anything specific?”

“I gathered he was under a lot of pressure to close this case,” Donati said. “It didn’t seem to me he cared all that much how he did it.”

“So you’re basing your suspicion on the fact that he found evidence where you didn’t after he’d indicated he was in a hurry to close the case.”

“That, and the fact that of all the people he interviewed, Bob’s the one he suspects.”

“Why is that significant?”

“Because,” Donati said, “as I told you over the phone, Bob’s gay. In fact, he was the only gay person of the twenty-two Gaitan interviewed. I think you know how Gaitan feels about gay people.”

“This isn’t about me, now,” I said. “It’s about Bob Travis.”

“No,” Donati said. “It’s about Detective Gaitan.” At that moment, his phone buzzed discreetly. He picked it up. “Yeah, okay. Send him in.” He put it down and said, “See for yourself. Bob Travis is here.”

Had there been a homosexual Everyman for white, urban gay males, he would’ve looked very much like the person who now entered Donati’s office. Bob Travis had the average dimensions of an ordinary man in his early thirties, but he was skillfully renovated so as to appear somehow taller, thinner and better-looking than he was. He wore black rayon pants, a thin black alligator belt, a white linen shirt buttoned to the neck and a red, gold and black striped silk vest. The slight orangish tint to his skin suggested his tan was the result of lying in a machine rather than sitting in the sun. His clothes were tight around his chest, arms and thighs where his body was pumped from the gym, but the muscles conveyed effort rather than physical strength and contrasted oddly with his soft, slightly flabby face. His mouth was a long, thin line and his small, perfect nose was too obviously the result of rhinoplasty. Beneath sparse eyebrows his eyes were his best feature, china blue, quick and bright. His pale hair was buzzed to trendy stubble to disguise incipient baldness. I could smell his cologne from across the room—Eternity. From a distance, he was handsome, but as he approached, a worried smile bending the nearly lipless mouth, I was conscious of how much work had gone into the package, the painful effort to raise himself a notch or two on the scale of male pulchritude.

“Mr. Travis,” I said, shaking his hand after Donati made formal introductions.

“Hi,” he said, his eyes flicking up and down my body in the reflexive ten-second sexual appraisal men give anything that moves. “I’m very happy to meet you.”

“Henry has a couple of questions for you,” Donati said.

I leaned toward him, forcing him to meet my eyes. “Did you kill those three men?”

He licked the corner of his mouth with a pointed tongue, but his eyes stayed on mine. “I didn’t kill anyone, Mr. Rios,” he said.

“Why do you think the police suspect you?”

“It was the car,” he said. “The cab. I took it off the lot when my car was in the shop, but it wasn’t that hard, Mr. Rios. Anyone could’ve taken it.”

His eagerness to please, to be helpful, bordered on self-abnegation, and for a moment I saw the good little boy he must have been.

“You must make a decent living,” I said. “Why didn’t you rent a car while yours was being repaired?”

He glanced anxiously at Donati. “I have some debts.”

“Tell him everything, Bob,” Donati said.

“Okay, financially I’m way over my head. Maxed out on all my credit cards. I didn’t have the money to fix my car when it broke down and I couldn’t afford to rent one, so I took cars off the lot.”

“Why the cab?” I asked him. “Why that particular car?”

“Because it was easy to get it off the lot,” he said. “I put on my sunglasses and a baseball cap, slouched down and the guards actually thought I was a cab driver. They let me in and out without questioning me. And it was kind of a kick to cruise around in a cab. People flagged me down for rides.”

“Did you pick any of them up?”

“No,” he said, the good boy again. “I’m not licensed to drive a cab. I didn’t want to get into trouble.”

“Did you know Alex Amerian?”

“No.”

“Jack Baldwin?”

He licked his mouth again, shook his head.

“Tom Jellicoe?”

“I didn’t know any of them, Mr. Rios. Look,” he said, “I’m gay. I live in West Hollywood. I was as scared as anyone else when I started hearing about those murders.”

“Where in West Hollywood do you live?”

“On Flores Street, just below Fountain,” he said.

“That’s within a couple of miles of where all the bodies were discovered.”

“Tell me about it,” he said. “I stopped going out after eleven.”

That he lived in the neighborhood where the bodies were found was an additional circumstance supporting Gaitan’s decision to go with him as a suspect. One Donati hadn’t mentioned.

“When did you use the cab?”

He frowned. “The police asked me that, too. My car was broken down most of June, but I only took cars off the lot on weekends or if I needed to get around to do errands. I guess I took the cab maybe three or four times until I finally borrowed the cash to fix my car.”

“I’m interested in dates,” I said.

“I don’t remember dates,” he said, snippily.

“Try.”

“I’ll have to look at a calendar,” he said.

“The cops told Nick they found evidence in the cab linking it to the murders,” I said. “You drove it. What did you see?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I can’t imagine what they’re talking about.”

“Do you know how often it was cleaned?”

“It all depends on the look the director’s going for,” he said. “Sometimes you want it to look grubby.”

“When you borrowed it, did you clean it before returning it?”

“No, I snuck it back on the lot in the same condition I took it out. I would’ve been in big trouble if anyone knew I’d borrowed it.”

“You’re in pretty big trouble now,” I observed.

“Tell me about it,” he said. Beads of sweat were forming on his upper lip despite the air-conditioned chill in the air.

“What happened when you talked to Detective Gaitan?”

At the mention of Gaitan’s name, the crease between his eyes deepened. “At first he was sort of friendly, but when I told him I lived in West Hollywood, he asked me if I was a homosexual. That’s the word he used. I said, ‘Well, I’m gay, if that’s what you mean,’ and after that his entire attitude changed. He started calling me Bobby, but it was sarcastic, not friendly.”