The Burning Plain (31 page)

The phone rang at midnight. I rolled over in the darkness and saw that the call was coming in on the office line. I picked up the phone.

“Will you accept a call to anyone from Rod?” a male operator asked.

“Yes,” I said, turning on the light. I sat up and grabbed the legal pad and pen I kept on the bedstand to jot down ideas that came to me about my cases as I was drifting off to sleep.

“Hello, Mr. Rios?” It was a boy’s voice, just this side of puberty.

“Rod? Rod Morse?”

“Uh-huh,” he said.

“How old are you?”

“Sixteen,” he said, a little defiantly. “I turned sixteen in June.”

I heard restaurant noises behind him, the clatter of plates, shouted orders. “Where are you calling from?”

“All-night diner by the highway,” he said. “I come here sometimes.”

“Do your parents know?”

Silence. “I sneak out of the house. How come you’re asking me all these questions? I thought you wanted to know about Katie.”

“I expected you to be older,” I said. “Why did you ask me if I was queer?”

“I figured if you knew Alex, you might be,” he said.

“Did you know Alex?”

“I knew he was gay,” he said. “Katie told me. All of Katie’s friends were gay.” He hesitated. “I guess that’s how she figured out I am, too.”

As soon as he said that, I understood the coded messages, this call.

“Your parents don’t know.”

“No one knew but Katie,” he said. “Well, people on chat lines, but they don’t count. She promised to get me out of here.”

“What do you mean?”

“She told me I could come and live with her, that she would send me money to get down to LA.”

“When was this supposed to happen?”

“Right after my birthday,” he said. “When I didn’t hear from her, I started to get worried.”

“I understand you tried to file a missing person’s report with the LA police department in July. What happened?”

“The policeman wouldn’t do anything unless I let him talk to my parents,” he replied. “My dad told him Katie was on drugs somewhere and not to waste his time looking for her.”

“Why were you so sure she was missing?”

“Because she wouldn’t blow me off. She knows what my folks are like. She knew I had to get out of here.”

“When is your birthday, Rod?”

“June fifteenth.”

“The police say you got a card from her. Do you remember when it arrived?”

“Yeah, it came the day after. Katie messed up and left off the zip code, that’s why it took so long.”

“Did you keep the envelope it came in?”

“Yeah, why?”

“I want you to look at the postmark and let me know when it was mailed from Los Angeles.”

“Okay,” he said. “What happened to Alex?”

“He was murdered the first weekend of June,” I said. “I think Katie may have disappeared around the same time and I was wondering if there was a connection.”

“Do you know who killed him?”

“The police had a suspect, but he died before they arrested him. I was his lawyer.”

“I thought you were Alex’s friend,” he said, suspiciously.

“I was,” I said.

“And you were the lawyer for the man who killed him?”

“The man who was accused of killing him,” I said. “It wasn’t proven. There’s a long story behind this that I’ll tell you another time. Right now I’m interested in when Katie disappeared.”

“How did you know Alex?”

“What do you mean?”

“Were you, um, his boyfriend?”

“I went out with him once, but I wouldn’t say I was his boyfriend.”

Silence. “Did you pay him to go out with him?”

“No. How did you know that Alex was a hustler?”

“The disc,” he said.

“What disc?”

“I have to go now,” he said. “I’ll e-mail you. You figure out my code?”

“Yeah, I think so. Rod, what disc?”

“Check your e-mail tomorrow night. Late.”

The following evening, after midnight, I got Rod’s e-mail. I decoded it and printed it out.

Katie moved up to San Francisco as soon as she graduated high school. I was
13
. She knew I was gay before I did because she had a lot of gay friends up there and I guess she recognized the symptoms: Like I don’t play sports and I don’t have a girlfriend and I like nice clothes and whatever. She told me I was queer when I was
14
and everything kind of fell into place. Since then all I want is to get OUT OF HERE. My parents are born-agains. They told Katie she was going to hell because she liked to party, so you can guess how they’d react if they knew about me. I’m pretty sure they know, because they are always asking me weird questions like what do I think about when I’m alone. Plus I have to go to church three times a week … It sucks. There’s no place for gays here but a couple of bars and a park downtown. I can’t get into the bars and the park’s gross. I used to spend a lot of time in gay chat rooms, talking to other queer kids, but then someone at the church told my dad that there’s child molesters on the Internet, so they installed this thing called a Cybersitter on my PC that tells them what sites I’ve been to so I had to stop going to the gay sites. I still e-mail some of the people I met, but I have to delete the messages and I made up this code. I don’t know how much longer I can take this, now that Katie’s gone … R.

Following this was a second message, transmitted a few minutes later:

Oops, I forgot. The disc. Katie sent me a computer disc with my birthday card and told me to keep it for her until she needed it. She said it was important. I’m attaching the file for you to download. I didn’t tell the police about it. You’ll see why when you read it. R. PS I looked at the envelope. The postmark says it was sent from LA on June 3rd. I told you she screwed up the zip code, right?

When I got the second message, I flipped my calendar back to June. The third was a Wednesday, two days before Alex was murdered. So Odell was wrong about when she’d sent the card. I downloaded the file Rod sent me, a long one taking nearly ten minutes, and saved it on Word. When I called it up, a title page flashed on my screen:
Scenes: Tales from the Hollywood S&M Sewer by A.
I printed out a seventy-page manuscript and read through it with growing astonishment and pity and disgust.

… J. came into the room wearing bondage apperral and tied me down to the bed with leather restraints. I was so out of it from the ’ludes I didn’t understand what was happening until he started whipping me with a cat o’ nine tails. I told him to stop but he kept breaking viles of amyl nitrate under my nose instead. After a while I figured, what the fuck and just went with it. He shoved a dildo in me and called me names. There was an opening in his leather chaps for his dick, but he couldn’t get hard, no matter what he did to me. It was all the drugs, I guess. His ’ludes were pharmaceutical quality, not the street shit. Plus we did a lot of coke. Finally, he managed to dribble a little something out his dick. He untied me and gave me $500 and invited me to clean up and go downstairs to his screening room and watch his new movie with him and his wife. She was their all the time we were upstairs! I sat between them and we watched the movie and ate popcorn. He played an FBI agent, he was pretty good but it was weird sitting there with them. That was my first time getting paid for S&M.

I consider myself bisexual but the truth is most people who are in to S&M are guys, so that was most of my clients. So I was surprised when I got a call from this woman who said she heard about me from T. She was a director who won an Oscar. I’ll call her Judy. She lived in Los Feliz in a big white home with black shutters. She was skinny and homely but there was that Oscar over her fireplace. Her scene was bestiality. She had these big Greyhounds that she liked to watch have sex with people, boys and girls. I don’t why she called me. I guess she figured if I’d do S&M I’d do anything.

Judy introduced me to my evillest client. He is a big studio executive. I’ll call him Mr. King, because he’s like a king of his little kingdom. He’s used to getting his way. When it comes to sex, he doesn’t have any limits. There was even rumors he killed some kid when he was living in another country. They say he just snuffed him and then recorded it to watch later. Like a lot of these S&M queens, Mr. King had a playroom, but it didn’t look like a dungeon, the way most of them do. It looked like a room in a hospital where you do operations. He had this steel table with gutters that he said they used for autopsies. When I first met him, he was totally friendly. Plus, he paid the best. He became my best client. Our first scenes were pretty tame, but little by little, they got more crazy and I figured out he was breaking me in, testing my limits. He was a total manipulator and mindfucker. But, like I said, he paid me well and he gave me presents, including a car.

One night I was called to his house—he lives in Los Feliz in this old stone mansion that looks like a castle. It belonged to someone like Charlie Chaplin. There was already someone there, a big stud dressed from head to foot in a rubber suit. Him and King got me into the bathroom. The rubber guy pushed my head into the toilet while King pissed into the bowl. I thought I was going to drown. King pulled my head out and started beating me, really whaling on me, so hard the rubber guy tried to stop him. Even with all the drugs we were taking I could feel the pain. It turns out he broke a couple of my ribs. And my face—I couldn’t go out for a week.

After that I stopping taking King’s calls because I thought he was going to kill me. I guess Mr. King was not used to rejection and he took his revenge. First, I got beat up one night when I was coming home from a bar. While I was down on the ground, I saw King’s car parked across the street. A few days later, he called me and asked me if I’d learned my lesson. I said, fuck you, if you don’t leave me alone, I’m going to the police. Of course, I wouldn’t go to the cops, like they’re going to believe me over him. The next thing that happened was the car he gave me was mysteriously bombed. That’s when I decided I had to do something. The cops were out, but I decided I was going to write this book to expose King and all the other freaks in Hollywood.

They say Hollywood is a dream factory, but to me it’s more like a sewer. When I came here I was a young, struggling actor with big ideas but big ideas don’t pay the rent. I didn’t want to be a waiter-actor-whatever. The first time I got paid for sex I told myself why shouldn’t I get paid for doing something I was going to do anyway? But it’s not like that. It drags you down and you see people at there worse. That’s why I took more and more drugs and all my dreams became nightmares. Today I’m off drugs, and I’m cleaning up my act. Even though I’m still attracted to men, I also have a girlfriend, Katie, and we’re planning on getting married and having a family. This is the only happy ending I want.

As soon as I’d finished, I e-mailed Rod to call me, collect. He phoned within the hour. From the background noise—canned music and passing voices—I knew he was at the diner.

“I was going to call you,” he said. I could feel his anxiety like a blast of hot air across the line. “My parents are going to do something bad to me.”

“What’s going on, Rod?”

“I found a book in their room about some kind of hospital in Utah that says it can cure homosexuality.”

“That’s unbelievable.”

“They can’t do that to me, can they?”

“I don’t know. Do you think this is going to happen soon?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll run away.”

I thought of the army of runaway kids that roamed the mean streets of Hollywood. “Do you know for sure they’re planning on sending you to this place?”

He hesitated. “No, I guess not.”

“Then you don’t have to do anything right now,” I said. “If something does happen, you call me. I promise I’ll do what I can.”

“Can you stop them?”

“I’m not that kind of lawyer.”

“There’s no one else.”

“I promise I’ll help you, Rod.”

“I guess you read Alex’s book,” he said.

“Are you sure Alex wrote it?”

“The disc had his name on it,” Rod said. “What did you think of it?”

“It was pretty raw,” I replied.

“When you called me and said you were a friend of Alex, I thought you might be one of the people he wrote about.”

“No, I’m not into that kind of stuff.”

“Me, either,” he said. “I mean, if I ever have sex it won’t be like that. I don’t even know why you’d want to do stuff like that, with whips and tying people up. Do you, Mr. Rios?”

“It’s a fantasy for some people,” I said.

“It’s sick,” he said. “Do you think Alex really did those things?”

“I can’t verify all of it,” I said, “but some of it matches things I know about him.”

“Does that have something to do with why Katie was killed?”

“Alex must have given the disc to Katie for safekeeping in case something happened to him,” I said. “She sent it to you, so she must have been worried about her own safety. You said you didn’t tell the police about the disc. Why?”

“I didn’t know Alex was dead,” he explained. “I wasn’t even sure it was real. I thought maybe he made it up, and it was like, a porn book. Should I tell the police now?”

I thought about it. By itself, the disc explained nothing about Katie’s murder without an elaborate exegesis, something to which I doubted the police would be receptive. Moreover, although the information on the disc shed a different light on Alex’s murder, without further investigation and corroboration, it was all speculation.

“Listen, Rod,” I said. “I’m going to ask you to trust me and not tell anyone about the disc until I can verify all of what’s on it. Then, maybe, there will be enough to go to the cops.”

“I trust you,” the boy said. “I knew I could trust you from the first time you called me.”

“You have my number,” I said. “Call me any time, collect, for any reason. If I don’t answer, leave me a message or e-mail me. Okay?”

“Yes,” he said.

“You know, Rod, I also left home when I was a teenager. I went away to college and I never went back.”

“My grades aren’t good enough for college,” he said. “I’m too busy trying not to get beat up to study very hard.”