The Burning Plain (9 page)

“Maybe he told her where he was going last night after he left here.”

“She deals drugs, Henry. If she gets wind that Alex is dead and the cops are coming, she’ll split.”

“Then I’d better get to her first,” I said.

The moment I got into my car, I went into lawyer mode. I’d had sex and then scuffled with Alex Amerian hours before he was murdered. I knew exactly how those circumstances would look to a cop and what they would do with them. Once they focused on a suspect, the object of their investigation was to establish guilt. It was up to me to find exonerating evidence now, before I was incriminated. Meanwhile, I kept a lid on my feelings about Alex’s murder.

I parked across the street from Alex’s house where I’d so often kept nocturnal vigil the past few weeks. There were no signs of cops in the vicinity. I got out and walked to his front door. When no one responded to the bell, I tried the door. It was unlocked.

“Katie, are you … ?” The words died in my mouth. I saw why Richie had been getting a busy signal when he called. The phone had been yanked from the jack and left in the hall. I saw no other immediate sign of disturbance, but the air was charged. I proceeded down the hall, glanced into the kitchen. There were dirty dishes in the sink. I made my way to the bedrooms in the back of the house. I deduced from the contents of the closets which room was Alex’s and which was Katie’s. In his room was a king-sized bed, a TV and VCR and a dresser. On top of the dresser was some change, unopened bills, a stack of men’s fashion magazines,
Detour
,
GQ
. No sign of an appointment book.

She slept on a mattress on the floor and kept her clothes in cardboard boxes. She had fashioned a desk from two sawhorses and a piece of particle board. On the table were pay stubs from a temp agency. There was also a computer monitor, a keyboard and a printer but no computer. As I stared at the monitor, I realized there were no personal papers of any kind in either room, no letters, address books, Rolodexes. The rice-paper shade that covered her window stirred. I rolled it up. The window was open, the screen had been removed. The signs were subtle, but it looked like someone had entered the house and removed things. Her computer, Alex’s appointment book, other papers of a personal nature. Unless, of course, the computer was being repaired, and he had taken his book with him, and there were no personal papers.

I slipped one of the pay stubs into my pocket and went out in the hall. At the other end of it, the door was thrown open and two uniformed sheriffs burst into the living room with their guns drawn.

“Put your hands way up in the air,” one of them shouted at me.

I raised my hands. “I’m not armed,” I said.

“Stay put,” the first cop said, while the second one came toward me, gun still drawn, and patted me down.

“He’s clean,” he shouted to his partner. “You can put your hands down, but keep them where I can see them.”

“What’s going on here?” I asked.

A third man had entered the house. He was in plainclothes but unmistakably a cop. He had thinning silver hair, a big gut and a face like a mound of mashed potatoes. He was wearing mirrored sunglasses. As he approached me, he removed them revealing small, shrewd eyes that brought his soft, pale face into sharp relief, like a blurred movie image that comes suddenly into focus. I saw intelligence, caution, cynicism.

“I’m Sergeant Odell,” he said. “Is that your black Accord parked across the street?”

“Yes,” I said.

“And what’s your name, sir?”

“Rios. Henry Rios.”

“You want to step outside with me, Mr. Rios?”

“Why? What’s going on here?”

“Well as near I can tell, you’re trespassing.”

“I know the people who live here.”

Odell smiled. “It doesn’t look like there’s anyone here but us chickens.”

“The door was unlocked. I was concerned. I came in.”

“Why don’t we talk about it outside,” Odell said, taking me by the elbow. I shook him off. He stepped back and let me go ahead. The two uniformed deputies had holstered their revolvers but their postures warned me against sudden movement. I stepped out onto the porch, where another deputy was standing with a man in civilian clothes who looked remotely familiar to me.

“That’s him,” he said excitedly, pointing at me. “He’s been parking in front of my house two, three times a week in the middle of the night, just watching this place. I told him if he didn’t quit, I’d call the cops. Good thing I wrote down his license plate.”

Odell breathed heavily beside me. A fat man’s breath. “Good thing, huh,” he murmured.

“I know the man who lives here,” I told him. “His name is Alex Amerian.”

“Uh-huh,” Odell said. “Last night someone killed him, Mr. Rios. I’d like you to come down to the station and answer a few questions.”

“You can question me here,” I said.

“I’m not the man you need to talk to,” he said. “That would be Detective Gaitan from Homicide and he’s at the station.” When I didn’t immediately respond, he added quietly. “I could arrest you for trespassing and take you down in handcuffs. It’s up to you.”

“You don’t have to do that,” I said. “Let’s go.”

I was assisted into the back of a patrol car. Odell got in beside me and we were driven down Santa Monica Boulevard the dozen or so blocks to the West Hollywood sheriff’s station at San Vicente. It was Saturday afternoon and the carnival that the city became on weekend nights had already begun. The windows of Twenty-Four Hour Fitness, the block-long gym just west of La Cienega, were filled with young men diligently racking their muscles on chrome-and-steel machines. The boutiques and coffeehouses were filled with weekend gays who gave away their tourist status with clothes and haircuts that were six months behind the times. Skinny twentysomethings paraded around shirtless, revealing elaborate tattoos and piercings. An old-fashioned queen in a white caftan and painted eyebrows walked a brace of poodles, swaying slightly right to left as if acknowledging applause only he could hear. A teenage Latino boy in the passenger seat of the car in front of us stuck his head out of the window and screamed, “Motherfuckin’ faggots!” at two suburban-looking men holding hands in front of a hamburger stand.

“Pull that kid over,” Odell said to the deputy driving the car. He turned on the siren and flashed his lights at the car, a beaten-up low rider. It pulled to the curb across the street from the low brown-brick building that housed the sheriff. We came to a stop behind it.

“Now what, Sarge?” the deputy asked.

“Bring him back here.”

The deputy got out, approached the car, talked to the driver. A moment later, the kid who had yelled the epithet got out of the car and was sullenly escorted to the patrol car. He was a skinny kid in a plaid shirt and jeans that were a half-dozen sizes too big for him hanging off his hips. A gang-banger. Odell rolled down his window and gestured to the deputy to bring the kid to him.

“I’m Sergeant Odell,” he said. “What’s your name, son?”

“I didn’t do nothing,” the kid replied.

“We’ll get to that,” Odell replied. “I asked you your name.”

“Jimmy,” he said sullenly. “Jimmy Saldana.”

“Where you headed, Jimmy?”

“Venice.”

“Where you coming from?”

“Boyle Heights.”

“West Hollywood’s a little out of your way, Jimmy,” Odell said. “What are you doing here?”

The kid shrugged, stared at his feet.

“Come to look at the fags, huh?” Odell said.

Jimmy lifted his head and apparently thinking Odell was an ally, smiled. “Yeah, the freaks.”

“Well, let me tell you something, Jimmy,” Odell said, in a voice filled with quiet menace. “This is my town and these are my people. I keep a list of punks that come in here and now your name’s on it. If I catch you again, I’ll haul your sorry
cholo
ass to jail, where you’ll get to meet the real freaks. Now get out of here and tell your partner to take the
10
next time he wants to go to Venice.”

Furious but frightened, the boy shuffled off with as much dignity as his sagging pants allowed.

“That was an illegal detention,” I said.

Odell looked at me. “You a lawyer?”

“Yes.”

He smiled. “Interesting.”

We pulled into the parking lot behind the station where the patrol cars were parked and came in through the back entrance into a corridor. Behind a glass wall were a set of holding cells and an office where the jailer sat. The station was bright and clean and looked relatively new. The deputies in their khaki shirts and tan pants looked more like forest rangers than cops. But Odell’s detention of the kid had reminded me that among the defense bar the sheriff’s department had a worse reputation than LAPD for violating suspects’ rights, because sheriff’s deputies began their training at county jail, where they were vastly outnumbered by the inmates and developed a siege mentality they carried into the streets.

“You mind waiting here for a minute, Mr. Rios?” Odell said.

“I’d like to get this over with.”

“I’ll be right back,” he said.

The deputy who’d driven us to the station departed and I was left alone in the corridor. It would have been easy enough to slip out the back door, and for a minute I considered it. I was not in a good position here. Anything I said would sound incriminating, but refusing to say anything would be equally incriminating. There was no innocent explanation of how I knew Alex, and the story of how I came to spend the last evening of his life with him would have made me suspicious of myself.

Ten minutes later, Odell beckoned me from the other end of the corridor. “Mr. Rios? This way please.”

The room was furnished with a table and four chairs. There was a video camera mounted on the wall in a corner and a wall phone next to the door. A burly Latino cop in a short-sleeved shirt, shiny trousers and a K-Mart tie was waiting in the room when Odell and I entered. The man’s shabby clothes did not disguise his authority. He was fairer-skinned than me, but as unmistakably Mexican: round face, thick salt-and-pepper hair, blunt eyebrows, black eyes. A hard alcoholic paunch. Strong hands, with fingers thick as
chorizo.
Late thirties, I guessed, but showing signs of heavy wear. He reminded me of my father. It was not a pleasant association.

“Mr. Rios,” he said. “I’m Detective Gaitan. Homicide. I want to ask you a few questions about Alex Amerian. You knew he was murdered last night.”

“Sergeant Odell told me,” I said.

“Sit down, Rios,” Gaitan said, pulling a chair out for himself. “Make yourself comfortable. We’re going to be here for a while.”

“That’s up to me,” I said. “I’m here voluntarily.”

Gaitan slowly lifted his eyes from the manila folder on the table in front of him and stared at me. It was the prison-yard stare with which inmates tried to terrorize each other when no other weapons were at hand. It darkened his eyes with hatred and menace, extinguishing the human light in them. One of my recidivist clients had called it the mirror of death. I knew better than to look away.

“Maybe Odell didn’t mention that I’m a criminal-defense lawyer,” I said. “I have clients on death row, Detective. You’re not going to intimidate me with a jailhouse stare.”

“Then take a look at these,” he said, and opened the folder, spreading its contents across the table. A half-dozen black-and-white photographs of Alex Amerian.

I sat down. Slowly, I picked up the first photograph and studied it as carefully as if it were a trial exhibit, to stave off the horror of what it showed: Alex’s naked body folded into a recycling bin shoved against a cinder-block wall spread with a bougainvillea vine. His head and shoulders, upper chest and legs were visible. The left side of his face had been smashed into pudding, the eye missing from its socket, a fragment of jawbone protruding below what remained of his ear. There were sharp lacerations in the broken flesh that looked like stab wounds. His head had been nearly hacked from the rest of his body. A bougainvillea blossom had fallen into his exposed esophagus. On his chest were what at first looked like deep scratch marks but, in a second photograph, a close-up, were revealed to be letters spelling out the words:
KILL FAGS
.

I flipped through the other pictures, close-ups, full-body shots, all taken at the scene, ticking off mental notes as if I were preparing a cross-examination. Besides the blows to his face and throat and the carving in his chest, there were other bruises and welts on his body, but they were nonlethal, even superficial. I remembered from the bruises across his back that he was in the business of being beaten up, at least sometimes. Had this begun as an S&M scene that had gotten out of hand? What had he told me? Most of his clients hated themselves for being gay and took it out on him. Something else about the body seemed odd; it was slightly bloated, as if it had been submerged in liquid. And there was something odder still.

“There’s no blood.”

From behind me, Odell said, “What say?”

“He was hacked to death, but there’s no blood in these pictures.” I looked at Gaitan. “He wasn’t killed in the alley.”

“Then where was he killed, Rios?” Gaitan asked. “You should know. You did it.”

I pushed the pictures back into the folder. “I want to call my lawyer.”

“Let’s talk and then you call your lawyer,” Gaitan said.

Before I could answer, Odell said, “You heard the man, Mac. He wants to call his lawyer.”

Without looking away from me, Gaitan said, “Why don’t you take it outside, Lucas? I’ll let you know if I need you.”

Odell slapped his palm against the table. Gaitan jerked his head toward him.

With the same soft menace with which he’d addressed the gang-banger, Odell said, “In my station when a suspect requests a lawyer, questioning stops.”

Suspect
?

After I made my call, Odell escorted me to the holding cells.

“I can’t tell whether you and Gaitan were playing good cop/bad cop back there or if he really pissed you off,” I said.

Odell tapped the sally port to get the jailer’s attention and said, “You have more important things to worry about, Mr. Rios.”