“THESE NIGHTMARES,” I said. “They’re like something out of Bosch. I wake up shouting because I’ve dreamed that something is in the bed with me eating my flesh. Or I dream of the police pictures of Alex Amerian’s body. Or Josh at the end. Wasted to his skeleton.”
“You’ve had a series of traumas,” Reynolds said. “It’s not surprising they’ve invaded your dreams.”
His pudgy face wore its usual beneficent expression. His gray-and-beige office was quiet except for the ticking of a grandfather clock in the corner. Above his desk a discreetly framed degree testified to his doctorate in psychology. It had been a long time since I’d sought out Raymond Reynolds, but I hadn’t slept in the three days since Alex’s murder, because when I closed my eyes I was plagued by nightmares. My waking hours were not much better. When I looked out the windows, I saw a police surveillance car parked at the curb. Every time the phone rang, I thought it was Inez calling to tell me the cops were on their way to arrest me. I felt like I was choking in my own skin.
“It’s more than trauma. I feel implicated in Alex’s death.”
He shifted uneasily in his chair. “You don’t mean …”
“Calm down. I didn’t kill him.”
“Then what do you mean, Henry?”
“This guy killed Alex in a particularly intimate way. He used a knife, the classic sex-crime weapon, an instrument of penetration and rage. … You should’ve seen the pictures. And afterwards, he bathed the body carefully. All that touching of Alex’s naked body wasn’t inadvertent or incidental. The killer got off on it. You know what that means?”
The clock ticked. “No, what does it mean to you?”
“It means he’ll do it again,” I replied. “I sent Alex off to a serial killer.”
“And that’s why you feel implicated?” Reynolds asked. “Because you didn’t stop him?”
“No,” I said. “I feel implicated because I understand the mind of the man who killed him. He’s gay, Raymond, like you and me, but he can’t deal with it, so he works out his ambivalence on the bodies of other gay men. I’m almost positive Alex wasn’t his first victim.”
“Why do you understand about the way his mind works, Henry?”
“I understand that it takes so much energy to resist the hatred so many people feel toward us,” I replied. “It wears you down. You begin to wonder, if that many people are convinced you’re evil, maybe there’s something to it and that gives you license to behave as if you were.”
“To kill other gay men?”
“I admit that’s an extreme case,” I said, “but look at how gay men treat each other, look at the nastiness and bitchiness of so much gay life. Isn’t that a kind of acting out that most of us engage in?”
“There’s another side to it, Henry.”
“I knew you’d say that,” I replied. “That’s why I came here. What is the other side?”
“I think what frightens people about us isn’t that we’re different but that we’re free, in a way.”
“Free? Free to do what? Use each other?”
“I’m not talking about the freedom to do what you want, but to be who you are. To act on your deepest self-knowledge. Almost everyone feels trapped in their lives, but they’re afraid to change. They’re afraid to know themselves. We are forced to know ourselves.”
“We’re not a bunch of bodhisattvas, Raymond,” I said. “Take a drive down Santa Monica Boulevard and tell me those boys are free.”
“I said we’ve been forced to know ourselves, I didn’t say we liked it. For most of us, that self-knowledge stops when we come out of the closet and then we build other closets. The ghettos. Addictions. Codependent relationships. Places to hide from ourselves. But the thing is,” he continued, “once you begin to know yourself, it’s very hard to stop the process for good. Even your killer must know somewhere in some corner of his mind that no matter how many gay men he kills, he will never kill the gay man inside.”
“But how many others will have to die before he sees that?” I asked.
From Reynolds’s office in Beverly Hills, I headed east on Sunset to Hollywood to meet Richie for lunch. In the rearview mirror was another police surveillance car. I’d been followed more or less constantly since being questioned about Alex’s death. Approaching La Brea, traffic came to a dead stop, though the distant signal light was green, entombing me in my car. Sunlight smeared the windshield. Car horns began their pointless cacophony. A toothless man in rags, carrying a cardboard sign that said WILL WORK FOR BEER pressed his sunbaked face against my window. I looked away and he moved on, weaving between the cars like one of the damned. A fragment of a poem passed through my head, “I myself am hell; nobody’s here.” Where was that from?
A horn blasted behind me. The road had cleared while I was trying to remember the poet. Robert Lowell. Part of that generation of poets who went crazy or killed themselves or both. Plath, Berryman, I put the gear and moved forward, winging the intersection as the light changed from yellow to red, turning north on La Brea toward Hollywood Boulevard. Off on the curb I saw the cause of the delay. Two paramedics were lifting a gurney into an ambulance. On the gurney was a body, covered with a bloodied sheet.
I pulled into a parking lot off Hollywood and walked to Richie’s office. A heat wave had descended on the city, causing an inversion. The smog hung in the motionless air, like the respiration of a great, unseen beast, a dirty veil that curtained the city and left its inhabitants to stew in their own filth. The sidewalk on Hollywood Boulevard glittered with some shiny mineral ground into the concrete to suggest the sparkle of Hollywood, but the bronze stars of the “Walk of Fame” embedded in it were like gravestones. Across the street from Richie’s office, in front of Mann’s Chinese Theater, tourists photographed each other standing in the footprints of dead stars. As I entered his building, I looked over my shoulder, but for now I’d eluded my police escort.
Except for the framed magazine covers that lined the walls of the reception room, the offices of L.A. Mode, from the industrial gray carpet to the blonde faux Scandinavian furnishings, were as functional and unadorned as a dental office. The receptionist, a tousle-haired blond with capped teeth, apparently mistaking me for a movie agent, greeted me with a big smile.
“Hi, can I help you?”
“I’m having lunch with Mr. Florentino. My name is Rios.”
“I’ll let him know you’re here.” He whispered into the phone for a minute, then said, “He said to go on back to his office.”
I made my way down the gray carpeted hallway, past the utilitarian cubicles that housed editorial and production. The decor of Richie’s corner office was inspired by the Chinese Theater across the street. The walls were painted the color of coagulated blood, satiny gold drapes billowed across the windows, and a gold-and-crystal chandelier hung from the acoustical ceiling. Richie ran the magazine from behind a massive, inlaid, Biedermeier desk. A table and six chairs in the same ponderous style sat on a faded blue-and-white carpet of Chinese design. A large vase held a bouquet of huge wilted peonies giving off the scent of vegetable decay.
He was sitting at the table reading a long fax, a MontBlanc fountain pen in one hand, a cigarette burning in the other, wearing an avocado-green shirt and a blue tie patterned with orange and yellow tulips. A linen blazer the color of cornflowers hung neatly from a hanger on the coat rack by the door. He looked up at me with red-rimmed eyes.
“Asshole,” he said, with weary irritability. “The cops have been here for the last two days questioning me about the murder. I’ve got a magazine to run. Why did you give them my name?”
I pulled out a chair. It was stacked with folders. When I moved them, a picture of Duke Asuras fluttered to the floor. I sat down. “Because I was about three inches from being arrested.”
He waved his hand dismissively. “That’s ridiculous.”
“Goddammit, Richie,” I shouted, tearing the fax from his hand. “I’ve got cops following me everywhere I go, waiting to catch me chopping up someone else. They tore my house and car apart and my own lawyer looks at me like I could’ve done it.”
He put his cigarette out in a crystal bowl. “What do you want me to do about it?”
“What did the cops ask you?”
“They wanted to know about your relationship with Alex.”
“What did you tell them?”
“I said as far as I knew you’d just gone out with him once.”
“As far as you knew?” I said. “Richie, you know I only went out with him one time, because you paid for it. Or did you forget to mention that to the cops?”
“I didn’t see that it was relevant.”
I looked at him. “This is not a game. Cops don’t believe in the presumption of innocence. You feed them weasel words like ‘as far as I know’ and they’re going to draw adverse conclusions.”
“Did you kill him, Henry?” he demanded, fishing for another cigarette.
“You know I didn’t.”
“Then what the fuck are you worried about?”
“I’d like to be spared the humiliation of being arrested for murder and the trouble of having to clear myself,” I replied. “The only way I can do that is by offering up the cops another suspect. I think Alex was killed by one of his clients. You told me he kept an appointment book. When I went to his house after you called me Saturday, I didn’t see an appointment book, but it did look like someone had broken in and removed some things.”
“What things?”
“A computer, papers. Maybe the book. And what about the roommate?” I said. “Katie Morse. As far as I know, she’s still missing. You knew Alex. You must have some ideas about who killed him.”
He shook his head. “Boys like Alex have been coming to Hollywood by the busload for eighty years because someone back in East Jesus told them they ought to be in the pictures. In Alex’s case, it was some agent he blew for his card. The straight ones get married, go to work for the phone company and move to the Valley. The gay ones end up strung out on crystal or peddling their asses on Santa Monica. Alex got a break. Someone important liked him and passed him around to his friends.”
“And one of them killed him.”
“Oh, please, Henry,” he said. “We’re talking about rich and powerful men.”
“Who are also closeted.”
“You think they paid Alex with personal checks or posed for pictures with him? These guys could teach the Mafia something about omertà. Besides not even the tabloids are interested in stories about gays in Hollywood. Their readers don’t care about cocksuckers. They want to know how Oprah keeps the weight off.”
“Some of his clients were into S&M,” I persisted. “Could this have been a scene that went too far?”
“You want to know who killed Alex. I’ll tell you,” he exhaled a plume of smoke. “Over lunch.”
We crossed the street to the Hotel Roosevelt, where Richie had a standing lunch reservation at Theodore’s, the hotel restaurant. In exchange for his patronage, he was allowed, discreetly and illegally, to smoke at his table. The Roosevelt, as Richie rarely failed to remind me, was the site of the first presentation of the Academy Awards. After years of neglect, it had been refurbished as part of the city’s bid to revitalize Hollywood. The face-lift had succeeded, and the Roosevelt of the 1920s was recreated down to every last potted palm in the cathedral-ceilinged lobby, but the rest of Hollywood continued to resist the efforts of the city planners. As a result, the elegant old hotel was surrounded by tee-shirt shops, falafel stands and wig shops that served the needs of Hollywood’s legion of transvestite prostitutes.
Theodore’s was a calm, beige space separated from the lobby by a large plate of etched glass. Pale light suffused the room from tall, narrow, heavily draped windows. It was like walking into an earlier time, and I never entered there without expecting to find it filled with the shades of deceased movie stars raising ghostly cocktails to their pale lips. Instead, it was virtually empty and as quiet as a mausoleum, because Hollywood had long since decamped from Hollywood, leaving it to the drag queens and the tourists.
Richie inspected the purple napkins at the table, and frowned. “Whose idea was this?” he demanded of the waitress, a slight, dark girl whose name plate identified her as Isabel from Mexico, DF.
“Pardon,” she said, so flustered by him that she gave the word its Spanish pronunciation.
“Purple napkins? What is this, a Puerto Rican wedding? Bring me a martini. And an ashtray.”
“You have a theory about Alex’s murder,” I prompted.
Richie was contemplating the empty room. He inspected the flatware and disdainfully removed the little vase with its two wilted carnations from the table.
“I don’t know why I give a fuck about Hollywood. It certainly doesn’t give a fuck about itself.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m working on the biggest story of my career,” he said. Isabel brought his martini and his ashtray. He tasted the drink and smacked his lips. “At least the bartender can still pour a decent martini.”
After she took our orders and left, I asked him, “I came to talk about Alex.”
“I’m talking about the death of Hollywood,” he said, with a regal wave of his hand. “The murder of Hollywood. It’s a damn sight more tragic than the murder of Alex Amerian.”
“Maybe to you,” I said.
“Absolutely to me,” he said. “I couldn’t have survived the crazy house without it.”
“Watching movies after lights out. I know. You’ve told me,” I said, impatient to get back to Alex’s murder.
He narrowed his eyes. “But you don’t know, Henry, because I never told you how they treated homosexuality back then at the Chase-Levinger Hospital in Battle Creek, Michigan. Have I?”
“No,” I sat back. Richie was on a tear. There was nothing to do but wait it out.
“They attached electrodes to my body and then showed me gay pornography and when I responded, they sent an electric current through me.” He took a long swallow of his drink. “They called this aversion therapy. I was fourteen years old. I’d never seen pornography before. My fantasy was to hold hands with the football captain between classes. They showed me pictures of men doing things I didn’t know were physically possible. Of course I responded. I couldn’t help myself. They kept increasing the voltage until I had to be treated for second-degree burns. This went on week after week for almost two years. It’s amazing I don’t have some weird sexual fetish involving cable jumpers.” He tried to smile, but it came out a twitch. “Sometimes I tried closing my eyes, so I wouldn’t see the pictures, but then they’d shock me harder. You see, they wanted me to look. They wanted it to hurt to be a fag. I could’ve told them it already did. I thought they were going to kill me. So I taught myself to dream with my eyes open, to look at those pictures and see other things.”
“What things?”
“Scenes from movies. They’d show me porn but I’d be seeing Bette Davis rooting around in her garden in Dark Victory, or Norma Shearer flashing her jungle-red fingernails in The Women. I stopped getting hard-ons. They decided the treatments were a success. But they kept me there until I was eighteen and they had to release me legally. Four years, Henry, that’s how long my family had me institutionalized. I spent the last two years giving blow jobs in the bathrooms to the orderlies. I learned my technique from watching their porn, so I guess the therapy was successful.”
“That’s gruesome.”
The waitress delivered our food. He ordered another martini.
“I don’t want your pity,” he said, after she left. “I told you that story so you’d understand what movies mean to me. My case was extreme, but there were a lot of other gay boys like me who survived their childhoods because Hollywood gave them something else to dream about. That’s why I’m going after Duke Asuras.”
“You lost me, Richie.”
“Do you know who James Longstreet is?”
“Of course,” I said. “Every gay person in America knows who he is. What about him?”
“Fundamentalist evangelical asshole,” Richie spat. “He was staying here at the hotel once and got caught in the middle of a gay rights demonstration. When he got back to Buttfuck, Virginia, he sent out a fundraising letter that claimed the fags were pounding at his door, like wild animals, ready to tear him limb from limb.” His face darkened to apoplectic purple. “I wish someone would kill the fat fuck. Don’t you?”
“I don’t wish anyone dead,” I said. “On the other hand, there are definitely people I wish would shut up and he’s one of them.”
“He’s a murderer,” Richie said. “Think of all those little gay boys and girls out there trapped in so-called Christian families, forced to listen to him week after week tell them how God hates fags and AIDS is their punishment. Every time one of those kids commits suicide, the blood’s on his hand.”
I sipped my tea. “What does this have to do with Hollywood?”
He gulped his martini. “He wants to make movies.”
“Who? Longstreet? According to him, Hollywood’s on God’s hit list.”
“If you listen carefully,” Richie said, cutting into his steak, “beneath the fire and brimstone is the whining of a would-be player. Longstreet runs a billion-dollar media empire, including two cable networks. He’s cash rich and he’s looking to expand into Hollywood, and those fuckers at Parnassus are going to open the gates.”
“Asuras?”
Richie chewed and nodded vigorously. “I told you that Asuras and Allen Raskin, his boss at the Parnassus Company, have been feuding with their board of directors. Apparently, they decided the way to solve their problems was to find a white knight, either to buy out the major shareholder or to launch a takeover fight that would let them stack the board with their own people.”
“Longstreet is their white knight?”
“That’s what it looks like,” he said. “You can’t breathe a word of this to anyone, Henry.”
“Who would I tell?”
“I mean it. People could get hurt.”
“I’m not in your world, Richie. This isn’t important to me.”
He swallowed another chunk of meat. “You should care. If Longstreet pulls this off, he’ll get mainstream respectability. You know what that means for us?”
“You’re talking about making movies.”
“Where did your dreams come from when you were a kid, Henry?”
“My dreams came out of books,” I said.
“In another generation,” he said, “the only books are going in museums.”
“That’s a scary thing for a magazine editor to say.”
“It’s true, Henry. You know Asuras gave a speech at the Academy Awards and said Hollywood was taking over the world. He wasn’t joking. People don’t have to know how to read to go to movies.” He touched his napkin to his mouth. “Do you want Longstreet making the movies that people are going to watch in Bombay and Lagos? I don’t, and I’m going to stop him.”
“My problems are a little closer to home. You had something to tell me about Alex.”
“I think Alex was killed by an anti-gay hit squad.”
“What do you mean a hit squad?”
“Did you know his car was firebombed?”
“Yeah, he told me.”
“I think the same people who attacked him and blew up his car also killed him.”
“He also told me there were other car bombings in his neighborhood.”
“That’s right,” Richie said. “And in each case there was something on the car that identified its owner as gay, a bumper sticker or Pride flag decal.”
“That doesn’t prove the owners’ identities would’ve been known to the bombers,” I said. “The bombing of Alex’s car could’ve been a coincidence.”
“But it wasn’t,” Richie said. “It happened right after I ran the gay bashing piece. He was the only victim we interviewed who agreed to use his real name. He made himself a target by going public.”
“That’s all conjecture.”
“I heard from my source in the department that ‘kill fags’ was carved on his chest,” Richie said. “‘Kill fags.’”
“So?”
“Gee, Henry, if a black person was attacked by white racists and went to the media and then his car was blown up and then he was murdered by someone who carved ‘kill niggers’ on his body, wouldn’t it occur to you that there might possibly be a connection?”
“Touché.” I said, “But, Richie, gay bashings are random and impulsive. I saw the police pictures of Alex’s body. His murder was deliberate and methodical.”
“Since when are gay bashings impulsive?” Richie asked, disbelievingly. “These punks deliberately come into West Hollywood and stalk us. Is it so hard to believe they’d carry it a step further?”
“Did you mention any of this to the cops when they came to see you?”
“I told you, they were only interested in you,” he said. “Besides, I think the cops are in on it.”
“Now you’re in Oliver Stone territory.”
He drained his drink. “You think so? Come back to the office with me.”
Back at Richie’s office, he had his assistant dig out the file on the gay-bashing piece that had featured Alex Amerian. Among the drafts and notes was a series of photographs of toilet stalls. On the walls were graffiti. Close-ups revealed the messages “Kill all fags” and “AIDS=Anally Inserted Death Serum.”
“Nice,” I said. “What’s their relevance?”
“These pictures were taken in the men’s bathroom at the sheriff’s department headquarters in Monterey Park,” he said. “I think they pretty much sum up the sheriff’s attitude toward gays.”
“I’m no fan of the cops,” I said, “particularly at the moment, but if this is supposed to prove that deputies in West Hollywood are collaborating with gay bashers, it doesn’t. It only proves that some cops are bigots, which is, believe me, no surprise to anyone who has to deal with them.”
He threw his hands up theatrically. “Well, I give up, Henry. You asked me if I knew who killed Alex, but you don’t believe me, even after I’ve connected all the dots.”
“It isn’t that I don’t believe you,” I said. “It’s a plausible theory, but it’s just a theory.”
“I have to tell you, Henry,” he said. “If you were a reporter, you wouldn’t last here very long.”
“I’m just glad I’m not your libel lawyer.”
From Richie’s office, I drove to Century City for a meeting with Inez Montoya. I turned Richie’s theory over in my head, trying to come up with a precedent for it. I remembered a case from Texas a couple of years earlier in which a gay man had been abducted from a public park in Houston and taken out into the country and shot. The prosecutor had successfully argued that transporting the victim showed premeditation, and a jury sent the man’s murderers to death row. Why couldn’t something similar have happened in Alex’s case? Maybe after his last appointment, as he was returning home, he’d been abducted by the same men who’d attacked him and blown up his car. Maybe this murder was exactly what it appeared to be: a hate crime. Yet part of me still dismissed this scenario as Richie’s paranoia. This was partly a survival mechanism, because if I actually believed that hit squads were murdering gay men, I might become so consumed by rage or fear I’d be immobilized. But there was another reason, too. As I’d explained to Reynolds, people who inspire such homicidal hatred in others can come to believe they deserve it, subliminally if not consciously. Richie had nailed me on that. I realized it was easier for me to believe one of Alex’s closeted gay clients had hacked him to death than that he’d been murdered by a bigot, because even I struggled against this hatred of gays. And if it was true of me, how much easier would it be for the cops who were convinced they’d found the murderer. Me.
Inez was in a rumpled white linen suit behind a cluttered desk in her twenty-eighth-floor office in the south tower of the two Century City towers that dominated the skyscape of the westside of the city. Her windows looked south and west, and on clear days, she boasted, she could make out the bluish outline of Catalina Island on the horizon. The walls of her spacious office were bare and her personal belongings stacked in boxes that bore such labels as “Awards and Mementos.” With the mayoral primary coming up in less than a year, it was clear that she planned to do her unpacking downtown in City Hall.
She was on a call when I entered her office. She gestured me to a chair and masticated a piece of gum while she listened to her caller, interrupting with an occasional “Uh-huh,” or “No way.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she said, ending the conversation. “I’ll talk to you later. I’ve got a client.” She hung up and spit her gum into a tissue. “The cops still following you?”
“Mostly they park outside my house. I guess they’re waiting for another victim to arrive so they can nab me in the act of beheading him.”
“Good to know you haven’t lost your sense of humor,” she remarked sarcastically. “I have the preliminary report from the search.”
“And?”
“No surprises,” she said. “They found the victim’s prints in your house and your car. They matched the blood on the doorknob and the rag to his blood type, but DNA testing will take weeks, so for now that’s inconclusive. …”
“I admitted it was his blood,” I reminded her. “Are they going to arrest me?”
“Not on this evidence,” she said. “Except for the prints, your car was clean, and there were no other bloodstains anywhere in your house except where you said they’d be. They can’t arrest you until they can explain how you carved the guy up and transported him in your car without leaving a trace.”
“The body was bloated, like it had been submerged in water.”
She nodded. “That’s why Gaitan was so interested in your bathtub. There was water in the lungs, chlorinated water, as it turned out.”
“A swimming pool?”
“Or hot tub,” she said. “The killer soaked the body. It was as clean as a whistle.”
“All the cops have got to do is find his pool-cleaning service. They must know it’s not me.”
“Detective Gaitan has a hard-on for you and I don’t mean that in a good way.”
“That’s good because he’s not my type,” I said. “Reminds me of my father, and I don’t mean that in a good way, either. Maybe the words malicious prosecution would help him overcome his animosity.”
“His investigation hasn’t crossed that line yet,” she said. “We’re just going to have to hang on for a few more days until Gaitan admits you’re a dead end.”
“What if we offered the cops an alternative to me?”
“Who are you thinking of, Henry? They executed Gacy.”
“Just listen.” I laid out Richie’s theory.
“Do the cops know any of this?” she asked angrily, when I finished. “Because if they did and they didn’t tell us, I will sue their asses for malicious prosecution.”
“You think it’s a plausible theory?”
“Plausible? Henry, I was one of the authors of the federal hate-crime law. You wouldn’t believe the things we heard at the hearings. Gay bashing is practically a Saturday-night pastime in some places. And the cops, Jesus, the gays have as much to fear from them as their attackers.” She dug a cigarette out of her purse. “It’s the same place we were at with rape twenty years ago. When the victims go to the authorities, they get victimized all over again.”
“You may want to take a look at these,” I said, slipping her the pictures of the toilet-stall graffiti. “Richie loaned them to me. He says they come from the deputy’s bathroom at sheriff’s headquarters.”
“Un-fucking-believable,” she said, flipping through them. She stuck her cigarette in the corner of her mouth and reached for her phone. “I’m going to get Gaitan’s ass down here now.”
I restrained her hand. “Wait, Inez. I have a better idea.”
She put the phone down. “Such as?”
“If Gaitan is the asshole he appears to be, I doubt whether he’s going to be impressed by anything we have to tell him. But the watch commander, Odell? He might be, especially since all this activity was going on in West Hollywood. And there’s one other person we should bring into this: Serena Dance.”
“Serena Dance,” she said, frowning.
“You know her?”
“Oh yes,” she said. “The hate-crimes unit. But you’re right. If we can convince her, she’ll call off Gaitan. I’ll set up a meeting at the West Hollywood station as soon as possible.”
“You have something against Serena?”
“That’s not important,” she said. Her phone buzzed. “I have to take this call. I’ll be in touch.”
It was dark when I returned home. My neighbor Jim Kwan came out of his house and across my yard, with a worried look on his round, good-natured face. Kwan was the head of neighborhood watch for our street, an easygoing, low-key guy, so I knew immediately something serious was up.
“Hey, Henry,” he said. “Got a minute?”
“Sure, Jim. What’s wrong?”
“I thought you should know a detective came over to my house earlier tonight and wanted to ask me and Sharon some questions about you.”
My heart sank. “What kind of questions?”
Kwan looked at his shoes. “You know, Henry, what you do in the privacy of your house is no one’s business.”
“Jim, what did he ask you?”
“It wasn’t so much what he asked,” Kwan said, “as what he told us. He said you were a suspect in a murder case and the victim was a male prostitute. He showed us pictures …” His voice trailed off. “He wanted to know if we saw or heard anything last Friday night. Jesus, Henry, what’s going on?”
“The detective’s name was Gaitan, wasn’t it?”
He reached into his shirt pocket and removed a business card. “Yeah, Montezuma Gaitan,” he said, reading the card.
“I did have company on Friday,” I said. “He was a prostitute. And he was murdered. The rest is a fabrication. Did Gaitan talk to anyone else in the neighborhood?”
“Just the Cohens,” he said, referring to the neighbors on the other side of my house. “Fred came over after Gaitan left and told me he was sure it was all a mistake.” He clamped my shoulder. “I’m glad to hear it is.”
“I’m worried about my reputation on the block.”
“Leave that to me,” Kwan said. “Listen, you eaten dinner yet? We’re just about to sit down. There’s plenty.”
In the seven years we’d been neighbors, I’d never been invited to his house for a meal.
“Thanks, Jim. I need to get some work done. Can I take a rain check?”
“Anytime, Henry,” he said. “I’ll let you know if Gaitan shows up again.”
“I’ll take care of that,” I said.
Customarily, one of the first things a defense lawyer seeks to discover from the prosecution in a criminal case is whether the officers involved in the investigation have had any citizen complaints lodged against them for excessive force or other misconduct. There was even a name for the procedure, a Pitchess motion, after the state appellate case that authorized the disclosure of such records. I went into my office, pulled out my Rolodex and started calling every criminal-defense lawyer I could reach at home. The next day I called the offices of those I’d missed, asking all of them the same questions, “Have you run a Pitchess motion on a sheriff’s homicide detective named Montezuma Gaitan? If so, can I have your file on him?” It was a distinctive name, and more than one of my colleagues remembered it quite well. My fax worked overtime.