The Burning Plain (23 page)

I tossed the pad on the table and went out on the deck for air. Except for the distant drone of traffic, it was completely still in the canyon. The dry, eviscerating desert wind had blown itself out and though the air still smelled of smoke and ash from the Sierra Madre fire, it was also damp and cool. Birds fluttered through the undergrowth, perched on the branches of stunted trees and sang. The big houses on the other side of the canyon were dark as tombs. I breathed in the wet, smoky air and remembered the moment in the desert when I had kneeled with a gun pressed to the back of my head and felt relief. Life is a kind of exile and we all long to go home. Who said that? What that the cause of my relief, that the bullet which would end my life would also send me home?

Behind me, in the house, the phone started to ring. Startled, I went in and picked it up, expecting, at that hour, a drunken wrong number, but it was the fax machine in my office and not the phone I’d heard. I went in to investigate. Two pages appeared, the first a cover sheet from Nick Donati’s office at Parnassus on which he’d written: “Attached declaration re my search of picture car. Use it at your discretion to help Bob.” The second page was a declaration by Donati signed under penalty of perjury admitting both that he had searched the car and had had it cleaned.

I picked up the phone and dialed his number.

He answered with a slurred, “Hello.”

“Nick, it’s Rios. I just got the declaration.”

“Why are you still up?” he asked, definitely under the influence.

“Working. Are you all right?”

“I’m drunk,” he announced.

“Big night?”

He laughed. “Yeah, big night. My declaration okay with you?”

“It’s fine. Unexpected.”

“To help Bob,” he muttered. “But try to keep me outta jail.”

“To help Bob? I thought you only cared about Parnassus. Why the change of heart?”

He breathed heavily into the phone, as if collecting his thoughts. “Let’s say I have a guilty conscience and let it go at that. Too much conscience, Henry. Lawyers shouldn’t have ’em. You Catholic?”

“I was raised Catholic,” I said.

“Me, too. Italian Catholic. I don’t believe in any of it anymore except—” he giggled—“I still believe in hell. Strange, huh? Hell made a big impression on me.”

I thought of my copy of Dante’s
Inferno
gathering dust on the bedside table. “From all accounts, the Catholic hell is a lot livelier than the Catholic heaven.”

“I always pictured the devil as this sexy older guy,” Donati said. “Big muscles, dark skin, like my grandpa. A ditchdigger. Old country
paisan.
Jesus? Forget about it. Goody Two-shoes, never told a lie. Or is that George Washington? I’m babbling here …”

“Maybe you should get some sleep.”

“You talk to Bob today?” he asked, suddenly alert.

“No,” I said.

“He has something to tell you,” he said, drifting off again. “About the case.” He yawned. “’Scuse me. He started to tell me, but I told him to save it for you.”

“I thought you weren’t talking to Bob at all,” I said.

“He’s here,” Donati said. “Upstairs. Asleep. Think I’ll join him.”

He hung up.

I meant to call Travis later in the morning, but just before dawn I woke up, grabbed a legal pad and began scribbling the revelation that had come to me while I was asleep.

“thanks for coming by on such short notice,” I said.

Odell grinned. “I wouldn’t miss it, Mr. Rios. You’re always full of surprises.”

“Why is Lucas here?” Serena asked, smiling at him to take the sting out of the question. “I mean, you’re not part of the investigation, not officially.”

The three of us were seated around my dining table.

“He’s here because I trust him,” I said. “Let’s start. I went over the investigative material you sent me, Serena. It proves Gaitan planted evidence in the cab.”

“I’m listening,” she said. “But I’m dubious.”

“All your evidence suggests that the killer—Mr. Invisible Man—is driving around West Hollywood in a fake cab picking his victims up at random. Right?”

She nodded. “Yeah, so?”

“You even have eyewitnesses who saw the second and third victims actually getting into the cab,” I continued. “But there’s a missing link. No one saw Alex Amerian get into the car.”

“The physical evidence puts him there,” she said.

“I’ll get to that in a minute,” I said. “My point is that no one ever identified the car Alex drove away in from this house the night he was killed. The only reason we assumed it was a cab was because he told me he’d called one, and that’s what I told the cops. This morning, I looked at my June phone bill. There were no calls made from my house after seven that night.”

“That just means he arranged it earlier.”

“That’s what’s impossible, Serena,” I replied. “He couldn’t have called Lucky Taxi Service, because it doesn’t exist. The only way you can put him in that car from here is if you believe the killer was cruising the neighborhood and happened to spot Alex standing outside waiting for the cab he’d called.”

The point clearly worried her, but she said, “Why not? We don’t know the killer’s patterns.”

“I was here,” I reminded her. “I saw what happened. Alex waited in the living room until he heard the car pull up and the driver blew his horn.”

Odell, who has been listening intently, now said, “You know there’s another way he could have left here in that car.”

“I know,” I said, nodding. “He could have arranged for that particular car to pick him up, but that means he knew the driver. The murderer. Travis says he never met Alex.” I tapped the stack of papers at Serena’s elbow. “There’s nothing in any of these witness interviews to contradict him. Besides, if Alex knew the driver, that contradicts your theory that the killings were random.”

Serena shrugged. “It’s obvious what happened. Amerian left here by whatever means, went wherever he was going, left there and then ended up in the Lucky cab.”

“The evidence won’t support that,” I said. “He left here at midnight. The medical examiner says he was killed sometime between one and six in the morning. A five-hour window. The manner in which he was killed, the events that preceded his murder and the way his body was disposed of would’ve taken at least that long.”

“There’s no evidence of what happened before he was killed,” she said.

“No direct evidence,” I corrected her. “But between circumstantial evidence and my own recollections, I can infer the sequence of events.”

“And what was that?” Odell asked.

“According to the medical examiner, Alex was drunk when he was killed, but he was sober when he left here. When Gaitan showed me pictures of his body, I noticed superficial marks and welts that I didn’t see earlier that night and were clearly not part of the beating that killed him later.”

“S&M?” Odell guessed.

I nodded. “He told me some of his clients were into that,” I said. “Obviously, he left here, went to a client, had some drinks, had sex with him, and only after that was he murdered. That all took time. Plus, after he was killed, ‘Kill Fags’ was carved into his chest and then his body was carefully cleaned to erase any evidence. Not just wiped off. Bathed, bundled up and transported. There’s no time in this scenario for Alex to be running all over LA in the middle of the night. Wherever he went from here was his last stop. The question is how he got there. The answer is not by Lucky Taxi Service.”

Serena tossed her head back and looked at me. “I thought you told me you weren’t a percipient witness.”

“I didn’t think I was until I reviewed your evidence.”

“Well, you can’t have it both ways, Henry. You can’t represent Bob Travis and also expect to call yourself to the witness stand and testify, ‘I know the victim didn’t have these marks on his body because I slept with him a few hours before he was murdered.’”

“If it comes to that,” I replied, “I’ll withdraw as Bob’s counsel. I asked you here to stop this thing before we end up in a courtroom.”

“I’m not convinced,” she said. “It’s still your conjecture versus my physical evidence.”

“Evidence that was planted.”

“That’s not even conjecture,” she said.

“What if I can prove the car was cleaned inside and out before Gaitan impounded it and the evidence was discovered?”

“What if,” she said, dismissively.

“Take a look at this,” I said, slipping Donati’s declaration across the table to her.

Odell put on reading glasses and peered over her shoulder. Her mouth constricted into a thin, angry line.

“This is unbelievable,” she said, rattling the paper. “Obstruction of justice, evidence tampering, and he’s a goddamned lawyer …”

“I’m not defending him,” I said. “You can go after him for all of that, if you want. But the point is, the car was clean when Gaitan got it.”

“We’re talking about things like fibers, practically microscopic …”

I flipped through the forensics reports, found the fiber analysis and quoted, “‘Between half an inch and an inch in length. Light blue in color.’ Hardly microscopic, Serena.” She opened her mouth to retort, but I cut her off. “Just listen to me.” I explained shedding patterns and the disparity between the location and amount of fibers combed from Alex’s body and those found in the trunk.

When I finished, she said, “The point is the fibers match.”

“The question isn’t whether they match, but how they got into the trunk.”

“There was other evidence beside the fibers,” she said, leafing through the crime-lab reports.

“A paint transfer from the car to a fence in the alley,” I replied. “That’s easy to explain. Gaitan had seventeen hours to drive the car to the dump site and scrape it against the wall before the crime lab folks examined it.”

“They can tell a fresh scrape from an old one,” Odell observed quietly.

“I bet no one asked them to,” I said. “I bet the materials analyst was told there’s paint on the fence in the alley that’s the same color as the car. Match them if you can. End of story.”

“The department’s crime lab is one of the best in the country,” Odell said, in the same thoughtful voice.

“I’m not accusing any of them. The planted evidence was already in the car when they searched it.”

“But if you’re right, Mac got fiber samples from the lab because that’s where they would’ve been booked.”

“You said it yourself the other night, Sergeant. It’s a complicated case. Little bits of evidence coming and going all the time.”

“You believe this, Lucas?” Serena asked.

“Tell her about Antelope Valley,” I said.

Odell shrugged. “Gaitan’s been accused of planting evidence in the past. Never proved.”

“Come on, Odell. You told me he was involved.”

He looked at me. “You’re the lawyer, Mr. Rios. You know prior bad acts can’t be used to prove present misconduct.”

“No one doubts Gaitan’s an asshole,” Serena said impatiently, “but I’m not convinced he planted evidence.”

“What about you, Sergeant?” I asked Odell.

“You’ve given me a lot to think about,” he said.

“You may not be convinced,” I told Serena, “but reasonable doubt is still the gold standard. As it stands, you don’t have sufficient evidence even to arrest my client, but if at some point you think you do, you should consider how a police-misconduct defense will play in front of a downtown jury.”

“What are you looking for, Henry?”

“Gaitan off the case. My client exonerated.”

She shrugged, “I don’t have any control over who the sheriff assigns to a case.”

“Even with this information?”

“You’re crazy if you think I’d go to the sheriff with all this conjecture.”

“Not conjecture, inference.” “Whatever,” she said. She chewed her lip. “I can’t do anything about Gaitan.”

“I thought you ran this investigation.”

“Shouldn’t you be more worried about your client than about Gaitan?”

“I said I wanted my client exonerated.”

“The deal is he comes downtown for a lineup,” Serena said.

“You know your eyewitnesses can’t ID him,” I said. “Their descriptions are vague and contradictory.”

“If they can’t ID him,” she said, “then as far as I’m concerned, that eliminates him as a suspect.”

“And Gaitan goes scot free.”

“Jesus Christ, Henry,” she said. “Will you back off? This is a murder investigation, not an internal-affairs probe. If you want to bring misconduct charges against Gaitan, go to the appropriate forum.” She got up. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get back to work.”

“When do you want to do the lineup?”

“Day after tomorrow. Friday. Ten o’clock. Bauchet Street.”

After she left, Odell said, “You pushed her buttons.”

“What do you mean?”

He grinned. “She’s a figurehead. Mac’s still calling his own shots.”

“Why is that, Odell?” I asked, putting the reports into order. “Why, after the press conference and what happened to me in the desert, is Gaitan even on the case?”

“Remember Willie Williams?” he asked. Williams was the black cop who’d replaced Daryl Gates as chief of LAPD after the King riots, but was then himself replaced after a single term.

“What about him?”

“The public loved him,” Odell said. “The L.A. Times loved him. They all thought he was doing a great job, but when it came time to renew his contract, the city council gave him the boot. You know why, Mr. Rios?”

“I listen and learn.”

“His own people in the department did him in. The union, the career brass, the lifers. Sheriff Ramsay’s like you. He listens and learns, too. Every chief’s got two constituencies, the public and his own people. Williams paid attention to the wrong one. Chuck won’t make that mistake. Keeping Gaitan on the case was the sheriff’s way of showing his people where his loyalties lie. But he’s no Daryl Gates,” Odell continued. “He knows he can’t ignore it if someone calls his department homophobic or racist. That’s why he agreed to let Serena run the task force.” He smiled. “I’m sure he had a meeting with her and promised her his full cooperation. I’m also sure she’s getting squat.”

“You’re sounding a little bitter, Odell,” I said. “I thought you and the sheriff were tight.”