The Burning Plain (21 page)

For a long moment, Gaitan stared and said nothing.

“Fibers in the trunk of the cab match fibers from Amerian’s body,” Odell said, amiably. “Also I think there was a paint transfer on the fence in the alley that forensics connected to the car. That right, Mac?”

Gaitan turned his head slowly to Odell, furious. “You’re interfering in a homicide investigation.”

“I’m moving it along,” Odell said.

“That’s it?” I asked. “That’s your evidence?”

“We have eyewitnesses that saw your client driving the cab when the Baldwin kid and Jellicoe got into it,” Gaitan said. “Plus a bloodstain in the trunk that matches Baldwin’s blood-type and your client’s prints all over the place.”

I felt the icicle of Travis’s silent terror.

“Is that all?” I asked.

I thought I heard Odell suppress a chuckle.

“What do you mean ‘is that all’?” Gaitan said.

“At best, your so-called evidence connects the car to the murders, but that’s a given. None of it incriminates my client. Of course his prints were in the car. He admits using it.”

“Maybe you didn’t hear me right,” Gaitan replied. “We have witnesses who put Baldwin and Jellicoe in the cab with your client driving.”

“Then arrest him,” I said.

Travis gasped.

Odell whistled, “Wooee.”

“If your witnesses can really put him in the car with the victims, that gives you probable cause to arrest. So arrest him.”

“What kind of lawyer are you?” Gaitan sneered.

“The kind who’s familiar with your interviewing tactics,” I said. “Do you remember telling me in this room that you had a witness who told you he saw me drinking the night Alex Amerian was murdered? A waiter from the restaurant.”

“What about it?”

“I talked to him last night,” I said. “He didn’t tell you he saw me drinking. In fact, he told you he didn’t see me drinking, but you badgered him until he admitted he wasn’t watching the table every second. Apparently, your idea of an eyewitness is someone who doesn’t see something.”

“Get out of here,” he said.

“That’s what I thought. Come on, Bob.”

Passing Odell, I shrugged, but he was deep in thought and didn’t respond.

Travis and I didn’t speak on the short drive from the station to his apartment, but when I pulled up in front of the building and he started to get out, I said, “Wait, Bob.”

He settled back into his seat. “What were you doing in there telling that prick to arrest me?”

I looked at him. He was still white. “After I heard his evidence, I knew he didn’t have enough on you, but you were really terrified, weren’t you?”

“Of course I was,” he said. “My own lawyer is saying arrest him.”

“Is that really what scared you?” I asked. “Or was it what they found in the car?”

“There wasn’t anything in the car,” he blurted.

“What did you say?”

He took a steadying breath. “Nick told me he looked.”

I nodded. “When did he tell you that?”

“After Gaitan questioned me the first time,” he said, but his eyes didn’t match his words.

“Not before?”

“No,” he said.

“All right, Bob,” I said. “Let’s keep in touch the next few days. Gaitan will be deciding what to do. If he tries anything with you, call me immediately.”

He opened the car door. “Mr. Rios,” he said. “I don’t know what you’re thinking, but I didn’t kill anyone.”

He said it with such conviction that I had to believe him.

Later, as I sat on the terrace watching the sky darken, I thought about Gaitan’s evidence. Fibers, paint transfer, a bloodstain. All evidence that could easily be faked: a few fibers combed from Alex’s body scattered in the car; a surreptitious drive to the alley in the cab once it had been impounded to scrape it against the fence; a drop of blood preserved from Baldwin’s autopsy smeared in the trunk. It was only a little more sophisticated than dropping a gun in a suspect’s car to justify a search, or planting drugs on him to justify an arrest, activities that Gaitan and his gang in Antelope Valley were known to have engaged in. As for Gaitan’s eyewitnesses, if what they had seen didn’t amount to probable cause to arrest Bob Travis for murder, it wouldn’t convict him of it, either. But what exactly had they seen? And what were the circumstances under which Gaitan’s investigation had turned up the physical evidence? I got up, went to the phone and dialed the West Hollywood station.

“Is Sergeant Odell still there?” I asked the deputy who answered the phone.

“I’ll check,” she said. “Who’s calling?”

“Henry Rios.”

A couple of minutes later, Odell said, “Mr. Rios. You wanted to talk to me?”

“I’d like to buy you a cup of coffee when you get off duty,” I said.

“That’s never,” he said, “but if you want to meet me in about a half hour I could give you a few minutes.”

“Where?”

“There’s a Denny’s on Sunset around Genesee, you know it?”

“I’ll find it,” I said. “Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me yet,” he said.

S
UNSET BOULEVARD WAS
littered with palm branches torn from the trees by the Santa Ana winds, and signals were out from Vermont to Highland. The restaurant was near the intersection where Hugh Grant bought a blow job from Divine Jones, one of the many women who worked this part of the boulevard. Tonight they huddled in doorways to keep the dusty wind from ruining their hair and makeup and ran to the curb like giggling schoolgirls when there was a rush of traffic. I pulled into the parking lot, narrowly missing a trash can that went rolling into the street. Inside, the cheesy cheerfulness of the orange vinyl booths and bright yellow walls contrasted bleakly with the handful of customers, working girls stopping in for a burger between tricks, a couple of tattooed twentysomething malcontents, a foursome of old people tucking into the senior specials. Odell was at a back booth, his face reflected in a darkened window, hunched over a dinner of pancakes, eggs and bacon, like a figure in an Edward Hopper painting.

“Odell,” I said, sliding into the booth.

He looked up, wiping syrup from his chin. “Mr. Rios. You hungry? My treat.”

I glanced at the greasy food on his plate. “Thanks, I’ll pass.”

“Suit yourself,” he said.

“I was surprised you were still at the station,” I said, while he smeared pancake into egg yolk. “You really don’t go home, do you?”

“No point,” he said, chewing. “My wife divorced me ten years ago, both my kids are grown.” He signaled the waitress for coffee and when she came, said, “And he’ll have a cup, too, darling.”

“I’m not your darling, mister,” she said, filling our cups.

He watched her go. “It doesn’t take much to piss people off these days, does it, Mr. Rios?” He dumped three packs of sweetener into his coffee. “You wanted to talk to me.”

“Gaitan’s trying to frame Bob Travis for the West Hollywood murders.”

“You mean the ‘Invisible Man Murders’,” he said, pronouncing the phrase with disdain. “Invisible Man, Night Stalker. Who thinks up that shit?” He sipped the coffee. “Tell me about Gaitan.”

“You know better than I do what kind of cop he is,” I replied. “I think he planted the evidence he found in the cab.”

“Why do you think that?” he asked, meeting my eyes.

“I’m going to level with you.”

“Good idea.”

“Before the studio turned the cab over to Gaitan, someone there conducted his own search and didn’t find anything to connect it to the murders. Gaitan gets possession of the car and suddenly there’s fibers, there’s bloodstains, paint transfers.”

He frowned. “It’s a felony offense to interfere with a police investigation.”

“I’m not defending the studio,” I said. “Travis is my client. Don’t you think it’s pretty fishy that Gaitan discovers evidence where there was none?”

He took a couple of quick bites of food, washed it down with coffee. “You want to know what I think, Mr. Rios? I think you should get off this case.”

“Why is that, Odell?”

“You had your crack at Gaitan. You didn’t take it. Let it go.”

“This isn’t about what happened to me out in the desert.”

“Sure it is,” he said. “You were humiliated. You want to get even. Avenging insults is part of the code for you Mexican guys.”

“That’s a fairly primitive analysis of what’s going on here.”

He smiled a yolk-stained smile. “We’re primitive creatures, Counsel.” He belched softly. “What if I told you I think your client’s dirty?”

“I’d have to question your judgment. Bob Travis is a mouse.”

“I watched him today. He’s hiding something.”

“He spent the first twenty-five years of his life in the closet,” I said. “That leaves a mark. A kind of furtiveness. The smell of mothballs. That’s all you’re picking up.”

He shook his head. “My daughter’s gay,” he reminded me. “Some of my deputies. People I work with in the community. I know the difference between nervous and guilty.”

“I know a little bit about gay people, too,” I said. “The man who committed those murders is a violent, twisted closet case who is also extremely intelligent and methodical. Travis is a set designer who lives in an antique-filled apartment, pines for a boyfriend and can’t pay his bills. He’s no more the killer than I am. Except to Gaitan who equates gay with criminal. That’s why he went after me, that’s why he’s going after Travis.”

“You must be really good in front of a jury,” Odell said.

“Hear me out,” I said, and explained how I thought Gaitan might have planted evidence in the cab.

“You’ve got this all figured out,” he said.

“You have to admit, with the right motivation, it could be done.”

“Sure,” he said. “It’s no trick to get evidence out of booking, especially in a case like this where there’s lots of people bringing in little pieces of this and that and things are going back and forth from forensics. It could have happened the way you say.”

“I need to get my hands on the police and lab reports,” I said. “They’ll show chain of custody.”

He grinned. “If Gaitan’s smart enough to plant evidence, he’s smart enough to cover it up.”

“Still, I need those reports.”

“And that’s where I come in?”

“I can’t get discovery unless Travis is charged,” I said. “In the meantime Gaitan may be manufacturing other evidence.”

“Did it ever occur to you that he found the evidence in the car just like he said he did?”

“I told you, someone else looked before he did.”

“Maybe he didn’t know what to look for,” Odell said. “When you talk about things like fibers, you’re talking small.”

“Do you know that for a fact in this case?”

“No,” he conceded.

“Me, either,” I replied. “I won’t know until I get the analysis from hair and fiber.”

Odell grunted a noncommittal, “Uh-huh,” and returned to his meal.

“I don’t understand, Odell, a couple of weeks ago you came to my house and wanted me to bring a lawsuit against the department to stop Gaitan and his friends. Have you had a change of heart?”

“That was a different situation,” he said, slugging down the last of his coffee. “You could’ve forced some real change in the department.”

“That’s your job, not mine. My job is to defend my client.”

“Is that what you’re doing? Or are you going after Gaitan?” He shook his head. “Mac might be a bigot, but even a bigot can be right sometimes.”

“You won’t help me.”

“You don’t need me,” he said. “If you want to talk about the evidence against your client, call Serena Dance. She’s running the task force on the murders.”

“Since when?”

“Since the sheriff had to apologize to you,” he said, pulling his wallet out of his pants pocket. “He needed cover with the gay community, so he agreed to let her run the show from the DA’s office.” He laid some bills on the table. “Of course, that don’t mean Gaitan is telling her everything he’s doing, but she knows more about the evidence than I do.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that before?”

“I wanted to warn you.”

“About what? Staying on the case?”

“You’ve made up your mind about that,” he said. “Just don’t let your prejudice against cops blind you to the obvious. And watch your back.”

Earlier, I’d left a message for Donati to call me. There was a return message from him on my machine when I got home from my meeting with Odell. I phoned him, reached an answering machine and started to leave a message, but then he picked up.

“I was working,” he explained.

“It’s almost eleven.”

“A typical day for me starts at six and ends at midnight,” he said, “but you didn’t call to hear about the sad life of a studio lawyer. What happened with the police?”

“You haven’t talked to Bob?”

“He’s your client, now,” he said. “I don’t want to interfere in your relationship.”

I hesitated, then asked, “Am I interfering in yours?”

“I’m not sure I understand, Henry,” he replied, cooling.

“There’s a picture at Bob’s house of the two of you on a beach. You know which one I’m talking about?” When he didn’t immediately answer, I said, “I’m not asking out of idle curiosity, Nick. The nature of your relationship to him is relevant to why you searched the car before you turned it over to the police.”

“What do you mean?” he asked in a tight, angry voice.

“Maybe you were trying to protect him.”

He made a contemptuous sound. “I did it to protect the studio, not Bob. I didn’t even know the police were going to question him again. All I knew is that they wanted the car.”

“But after you searched it, you told him it was clean.”

“No, I didn’t,” he said firmly. “I never told him that.”

“He says you did.”

“He’s wrong,” he said, anger creeping back into his voice. “Whatever he told you, he’s wrong.”

“Were you involved with him?”

“It was a while ago,” he said, “and it was a mistake. Bob’s one of those gay boys with a little job, a little apartment, a little circle of swishy friends. Living for the weekend, looking for Mr. Right in the bars. I hated the smallness of his life. It was suffocating.”

“Unlike the closet?”

“I don’t live in the closet,” he said. “I live in the real world. In the real world, people don’t advertise who they fuck, and who they fuck is no one’s business.”