AT THE END of July came a series of breathtakingly beautiful days. Desert winds swept the air clean and the light had a purity and intensity reminiscent of an earlier time, when the city was still half orange grove and street cars shuttled back and forth between downtown and the ocean. The San Gabriel mountains, seldom visible between May and December, appeared so suddenly it was as though they were advancing on us like a herd of ancient behemoths. The shiny leaves of the ficus trees were an even glossier green, the throats of the cawing bird of paradise a deeper purple, and the white walls of the stuccoed city blazingly bright. At Forest Lawn in Hollywood Hills the light ricocheted off the marble surfaces of the Courts of Remembrance and the air smelled of cut grass, eucalyptus and roses. I sat in the Columbarium of Radiant Destiny, on the bench where Amiga Slade had shared her tea with me, and contemplated the brass marker that recorded Josh’s name and dates and beneath them the words BELOVED SON & BROTHER and, beneath that, LITTLE FRIEND. There were fresh flowers in the vase beside the marker, white carnations. They weren’t from me. I wondered who, among his friends, had come to visit. Who among them was still alive? After I had interred his ashes, I’d gone through his address book and sent out notes to let his friends know where he could be found. They were still coming back to me, marked “Deceased.” I’d written his parents, too, and half-expected them to return the letter unread. I was glad they hadn’t. Glad for Josh. I still hadn’t forgiven them. But sitting there in the shade, I remembered that Grant had told me heaven was nothing more than a world where everyone forgave everyone else, and my anger thawed, for a moment.
I got up to go. On my way to my car, I saw a fresh burial mound and wondered whether the police had ever released Alex’s body or those of the other victims of the killer the media had briefly christened the Invisible Man. Briefly, because since Tom Jellicoe’s murder almost a month earlier there had been no others and the story had faded from public attention. My involvement had ended with the sheriff’s statement that I was not nor had I ever been a suspect and apologizing for any misimpression. Privately, I agreed not to sue the department and accepted the settlement Inez had negotiated. Up to the last moment, I’d considered backing out of the agreement and going ahead with a lawsuit. Part of me still very much wanted vengeance, especially against Gaitan, but I knew Inez was right about my chances of prevailing in an action against the department, so I reluctantly let it drop. When I signed the release, Inez reminded me that the sheriff was conducting an investigation of my kidnapping, but I could’ve predicted the result and I was not surprised when a letter came from county counsel exonerating the department. Other than that, my last contact with anyone in the department had been with Odell, who told me off the record that the investigation had been cursory, as if I hadn’t already guessed that. I paused for a second at the mound of drying dirt that covered the new grave. Now that the murders had apparently stopped, the cops would have no incentive for solving them, and the case would be as dead as whoever lay here. And anyway what were three more unsolved murders in this city, where each year hundreds were killed? It was like a war out there, and in war you didn’t stop to count every casualty, much less determine the cause of every death. In war, the bottom line was who was winning. The cops knew it wasn’t them. Violence was escalating in the city, rising like the temperature in a kettle on a low flame, so gradually and inexorably that before we knew what was happening we’d all be boiled alive.
A couple of days later, the weather reverted to its usual summer pattern of smog and heat. I was working at my desk when the phone rang. When I picked it up a woman said, officiously, “Please hold for Mr. Nick Donati.” I didn’t know any Mr. Nick Donati, so I hung up.
A moment later, the phone rang again. This time when I picked it up a deep, authoritative male voice asked, “Mr. Rios? Did you just hang up on my secretary?”
“Are you Mr. Nick Donati?”
“That’s me,” he said.
“Then, yes, I did hang up on your secretary.”
“Why did you do that?” he asked, with apparently genuine curiosity.
“Because I’ve never heard of you.”
His chuckle, like his speaking voice, was too deep to be natural. “I’m sorry, Mr. Rios. In my business, you never pick up the phone and just call someone, because no one wants to deal with you if you actually have time for them.”
“What is your business, Mr. Donati?”
“Nick,” he said. “I’m the head of the legal department at Parnassus Studio. We have a problem here involving one of our people and I thought you could help us out with it.”
“A legal problem?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not an entertainment lawyer. I’m in criminal defense.”
“I know that,” he assured me.
“What happened? One of your actors get picked up for driving under the influence?”
“It’s a little more complicated than that,” he said. “You know about the Invisible Man murders in West Hollywood.” It wasn’t a question.
“What about them?”
“The police suspect one of our people of being the killer.”
The screen of my computer went momentarily blank and then tropical fish drifted across it. “An employee?”
“Yes,” he said. “His name is Bob Travis. He works on a TV show called Nights in Blue.”
“Nights in Blue,” I said. “The cop show?”
“Yeah, the studio coproduces and it’s filmed on the lot. We get a lot of cooperation from LAPD and the sheriff’s department. That’s what’s so ironic about this situation.”
“Why do the police suspect Mr. Travis?”
“I didn’t call you at random,” he said. “I know the police questioned you about the murders and I watched your press conference. Your lawyer, Ms. Montoya, claimed the police were going after you because they were biased against gays. Bob Travis is gay and I believe something similar may be happening here.”
“What makes you think that?”
“I’d really prefer to discuss this face to face.”
“Customarily, Nick,” I said, “it’s the suspect who calls the lawyer.”
“There’s potential studio involvement,” he said.
“So who’s the client here?”
“The studio wants to hire you to represent Bob. You’ve already dealt with these people once, on your own behalf. We’d like you to deal with them on his. And ours.”
“These people?”
“The sheriffs,” he said. “Detective Gaitan.”
I let this sink in. “Gaitan’s still on the case?”
“He seems to be in charge of it,” Donati said. “He’s kind of a tough customer, but you probably know that.”
“When do you and Mr. Travis want to meet?”
“This afternoon? Around four? I’m sure you know where we are. Just come to the front gate and give the guard your name.”
“I’ll be there.”
Parnassus studio was not only Hollywood’s oldest studio, it was the only one actually located there, occupying four square blocks on La Brea between Beverly and Melrose. Like a medieval fortress, it was enclosed by a high wall. Nothing was visible from the street but a water tower emblazoned with the studio’s logo, a mountain crowned with a laurel wreath representing Mount Parnassus, which, in Greek mythology, was the abode of the Muses. This was the studio that Duke Asuras headed and which Richie claimed was in danger of being sold to Reverend Longstreet, the anti-gay crusader. As I pulled up to the famous front gate, a replica of Hadrian’s Arch—which was Roman, not Greek, but this was Hollywood—and gave my name to the female guard who consulted a list, handed me a map and waved me through, I wasn’t thinking about Asuras or Longstreet. All I was thinking was that fate had handed me another chance to tangle with Gaitan. I pulled into a parking lot and got out expecting to see extras parading around in costume, but the only other people around were two Japanese businessmen hunched over a map, conversing in Japanese.
The parking lot was enclosed by two- or three-story stucco buildings painted beige with brown trim. Looming in the distance were enormous barnlike structures. I consulted my map and found the administration building where Donati’s office was located. My path led me across a perfectly trimmed patch of grass where perfect flowers grew in identically proportioned flower beds reminiscent of the grounds at Forest Lawn. The surrounding buildings were in an architectural style that combined the sleek lines of Art Deco with the baroque ornamentation of Spanish Colonial. I stopped to examine an exhibit case that held shelves of Academy Awards. Some went back to the early thirties, for best movie or best actor or director. All of them bore the inscription on their base: DUPLICATE FOR STUDIO USE. I walked on, unnoticed by the men and women in suits who came in and out of the buildings, briskly purposeful, their eyes hidden behind Oliver Peoples sunglasses. The administration building was newer than its neighbors. Inside was a vast lobby, the walls of which were faced in brown marble and bare except for a dozen framed movie posters. The stainless steel walls of the elevator I took to Donati’s office on the fourth floor made me think of an autopsy table.
Nick Donati sat at a big desk in a double-breasted charcoal suit that, upon closer inspection, sported the subtlest of pinstripes. I hadn’t spent all that time around Richie without picking up a thing or two about fashion, so I was pretty sure the suit was Armani and had cost at least a grand. I felt pretty dowdy by comparison in my old olive drab Brooks Brothers sack suit. Donati’s dark hair was crisply barbered and threaded with gray and his light blue eyes were searching and intelligent in a bony, handsome face. I judged him to be about my age. As his secretary ushered me into his office, he flashed a flawlessly white smile and came around his desk, hand extended. Then the shock. He was child-sized, no more than five foot three, even in his discreetly lifted loafers. On the slender column of his neck, his big head was like an unwieldy monument. He stopped about a foot and half away from me, grasped my large hand in his delicate one and squeezed firmly. Later it occurred to me that the reason he’d stopped short was because, had he come any closer, instead of discreetly tilting his head forward to meet my eyes, he would’ve had to look up at me. It also occurred to me that he was not aware of doing this, that it was second nature to him.
“Henry,” he said, his deep voice as incongruous as his big head. “Thanks for coming. Have a seat. Can I get you something to drink?”
“Coffee,” I said, masking my surprise at his appearance. “Black.”
He settled into his chair and directed his secretary to bring in the coffee. I glanced around his office. On the wall behind him were ornately framed degrees from his undergraduate and law schools, Cornell and Columbia. On the credenza were a half-dozen framed photographs of Donati in black tie with similarly dressed people, including a movie star or two, of whom I recognized Tom Hanks and a Baldwin brother at what were clearly social functions. In each of them, he maintained his height-leveling distance. Off to the side, prominent in its isolation, a snapshot showed him standing in a park with two small sleek dogs on either side of him.
“Pablo and Paloma,” he said, following my glance.
“What are they?”
“Italian greyhounds,” he replied, his eyes lingering on the photograph. “Do you have pets, Henry?”
“I’ve never had time for pets.”
“You should make time,” he said, reluctantly looking away from the picture. “Studies prove that people who have pets are happier and live longer than people who don’t have them.”
“Why not just take vitamins?”
He grinned. “You’re really not a pet person.”
His secretary trundled in with the coffee, which had a rich, expensive smell.
“Where’s Mr. Travis?” I asked Donati after she left.
“He’ll be here,” Donati replied. “I wanted to talk to you privately first.”
I sipped the excellent coffee. “About what?”
“This is the most publicity-conscious business on the planet, Henry. Hollywood’s not a fishbowl, Henry, it’s a shark tank. I’m trying to keep the scent of blood out of the water.”
“People in your business have a pretty exaggerated sense of their own importance.”
With one of his small, delicate hands, he made a subtle gesture of disagreement. “No, it’s not really about vanity. Making movies isn’t like making widgets. Every movie is a huge financial gamble. Plus, the people who make the movies, like creative people everywhere, tend to be a little more unstable than your average factory worker. It’s a volatile mix where perception is reality and rumors have incredible power, so naturally we all tend to be a bit hypersensitive about appearances.”
“What does this have to do with me?”
“If you agree to represent Bob, I have to be able to count on your discretion,” he said. “I need for you to try to keep the studio out of this. There are things going on, high-level stuff, that would be seriously impacted by adverse publicity.”
I wondered if he meant the Longstreet deal. “Other than the fact that Travis works here, how could Parnassus possibly be involved?”
“The police think studio property was used in the murders.”
“Why don’t we start at the beginning,” I suggested.
Donati nodded. “A couple of weeks ago, Detective Gaitan showed up here, asking whether we had ever used a picture car …”
“A what?” I interrupted.
“A picture car,” he said. “A prop car. Gaitan was looking for a blue-and-white cab with the logo Lucky’s Taxi Service painted on the side. He said the car had been connected to one of the murders and a deputy of his thought he remembered seeing it when he was working location for Nights in Blue. I told Gaitan I’d have to check, but if I found it we’d cooperate any way we could.”
“Was it one of yours?”
“Yes. It was used on the Nights in Blue set.”
“And you turned it over to Gaitan and he found something?”
“Here’s the complication,” Donati said, gingerly. “Once I discovered the cab, I talked the situation over with my boss and we decided I should … ,” he paused and seemed to grope for the right word, “… look the car over before we gave it to the police.”
I lifted an eyebrow. “You searched the car before you turned it over to the police? That’s obstruction of justice, Nick.”
His eyes froze. “I wasn’t planning on destroying evidence. I just wanted to know if there was anything that could incriminate the studio.”
“What would you have done if the backseat was covered in blood?”
“It wasn’t,” he snapped. Smiled. “Fortunately.”
“What did you find?”
“Nothing,” Donati said. “We called the sheriffs and let them impound the car to conduct their own search. They also asked to talk to everyone who had had access to the car since the beginning of June. We gave them a list of twenty-two people, including Bob. I sat in on some of the interviews. Basically, the police wanted to know whether anyone had driven the car off the lot. Of course, a number of people had when the show went out on location shots …”
“You’ll have to explain that to me,” I said.
“Nights in Blue supposedly takes place in Detroit,” he said, “but except for the opening montage, it’s all filmed here in LA, mostly at the studio on the New York street set. Occasionally, the producer likes to go off the lot and shoot around the city. When he does that, he takes his picture cars with him, including the Lucky taxi.”
“Why not use real cabs?”
Donati raised his eyebrows. “I’ll tell you about the teamsters sometime.”
“What about Travis? Did he work on location shoots?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Bob is the assistant production designer on the show.”
“Like a set designer in the theater?”
“More or less,” Donati said, then smiling, asked, “Were you in theater, Henry?”
“I was in my junior high school’s production of Arsenic and Old Lace,” I said. “I played the evil brother. Cast for my height, not my talent.”
“I wanted to be an actor when I was a kid,” he said.
“What happened?”
“I stopped growing.” He sipped some coffee. “To answer your original question, Bob did go out on location to touch things up, give them the right look. You know, add graffiti, toss some garbage around, change street signs, bring in snow, whatever it takes for downtown LA to resemble downtown Detroit.”
“Would he have driven the cab?”
“Absolutely not,” Donati said, emphatically. “The union’s very touchy about that. No, Bob didn’t drive the cab on the set, but he did remove it from the lot for his own personal use and without anyone’s permission.”
“Why?”
“Earlier this summer, his car had major mechanical problems that he couldn’t pay for. While he got together the money for the repairs, he borrowed some of the picture cars, including the cab.”
“He drove off the lot in a fake cab and no one stopped him? What about the guard at the gate.”
“The guards’ job is to keep people from getting onto the lot. They don’t pay much attention to people leaving. You just smile and wave and they open the gate.”
“Wouldn’t a cab be conspicuous?”
“To the contrary, people are always arriving here by cab from the airport for a meeting or something. The guards didn’t know the cab was a picture car. That’s one reason Bob took it.”
“There’s no paperwork when you take a car off the lot?”
“Only if you do it legitimately,” Donati said. “Bob didn’t. He waited until shooting was over for the day, then took the keys from the pegboard and drove off. He was careful to return the car before the next day’s shooting began.”
“All right,” I said, “so Travis borrowed the car. That’s a long way to making him a murder suspect.”
“When the police searched the car, they found evidence.”
“What kind of evidence?”
“They’re not saying until they can talk to Bob again.”
“What do you think they found?”
“I don’t think they found anything,” Donati said, meeting my eyes. “I searched that car, Henry. It was clean.”
“You’re suggesting the cops are bluffing?”
“I think they planted evidence.”
“That’s a very serious charge.”
“I spent a couple of hours with Detective Gaitan,” he said, “and while I’m no criminal-defense lawyer, even I could tell the man has a bad smell to him.”
“Anything specific?”
“I gathered he was under a lot of pressure to close this case,” Donati said. “It didn’t seem to me he cared all that much how he did it.”
“So you’re basing your suspicion on the fact that he found evidence where you didn’t after he’d indicated he was in a hurry to close the case.”
“That, and the fact that of all the people he interviewed, Bob’s the one he suspects.”
“Why is that significant?”
“Because,” Donati said, “as I told you over the phone, Bob’s gay. In fact, he was the only gay person of the twenty-two Gaitan interviewed. I think you know how Gaitan feels about gay people.”
“This isn’t about me, now,” I said. “It’s about Bob Travis.”
“No,” Donati said. “It’s about Detective Gaitan.” At that moment, his phone buzzed discreetly. He picked it up. “Yeah, okay. Send him in.” He put it down and said, “See for yourself. Bob Travis is here.”
Had there been a homosexual Everyman for white, urban gay males, he would’ve looked very much like the person who now entered Donati’s office. Bob Travis had the average dimensions of an ordinary man in his early thirties, but he was skillfully renovated so as to appear somehow taller, thinner and better-looking than he was. He wore black rayon pants, a thin black alligator belt, a white linen shirt buttoned to the neck and a red, gold and black striped silk vest. The slight orangish tint to his skin suggested his tan was the result of lying in a machine rather than sitting in the sun. His clothes were tight around his chest, arms and thighs where his body was pumped from the gym, but the muscles conveyed effort rather than physical strength and contrasted oddly with his soft, slightly flabby face. His mouth was a long, thin line and his small, perfect nose was too obviously the result of rhinoplasty. Beneath sparse eyebrows his eyes were his best feature, china blue, quick and bright. His pale hair was buzzed to trendy stubble to disguise incipient baldness. I could smell his cologne from across the room—Eternity. From a distance, he was handsome, but as he approached, a worried smile bending the nearly lipless mouth, I was conscious of how much work had gone into the package, the painful effort to raise himself a notch or two on the scale of male pulchritude.
“Mr. Travis,” I said, shaking his hand after Donati made formal introductions.
“Hi,” he said, his eyes flicking up and down my body in the reflexive ten-second sexual appraisal men give anything that moves. “I’m very happy to meet you.”
“Henry has a couple of questions for you,” Donati said.
I leaned toward him, forcing him to meet my eyes. “Did you kill those three men?”
He licked the corner of his mouth with a pointed tongue, but his eyes stayed on mine. “I didn’t kill anyone, Mr. Rios,” he said.
“Why do you think the police suspect you?”
“It was the car,” he said. “The cab. I took it off the lot when my car was in the shop, but it wasn’t that hard, Mr. Rios. Anyone could’ve taken it.”
His eagerness to please, to be helpful, bordered on self-abnegation, and for a moment I saw the good little boy he must have been.
“You must make a decent living,” I said. “Why didn’t you rent a car while yours was being repaired?”
He glanced anxiously at Donati. “I have some debts.”
“Tell him everything, Bob,” Donati said.
“Okay, financially I’m way over my head. Maxed out on all my credit cards. I didn’t have the money to fix my car when it broke down and I couldn’t afford to rent one, so I took cars off the lot.”
“Why the cab?” I asked him. “Why that particular car?”
“Because it was easy to get it off the lot,” he said. “I put on my sunglasses and a baseball cap, slouched down and the guards actually thought I was a cab driver. They let me in and out without questioning me. And it was kind of a kick to cruise around in a cab. People flagged me down for rides.”
“Did you pick any of them up?”
“No,” he said, the good boy again. “I’m not licensed to drive a cab. I didn’t want to get into trouble.”
“Did you know Alex Amerian?”
“No.”
“Jack Baldwin?”
He licked his mouth again, shook his head.
“Tom Jellicoe?”
“I didn’t know any of them, Mr. Rios. Look,” he said, “I’m gay. I live in West Hollywood. I was as scared as anyone else when I started hearing about those murders.”
“Where in West Hollywood do you live?”
“On Flores Street, just below Fountain,” he said.
“That’s within a couple of miles of where all the bodies were discovered.”
“Tell me about it,” he said. “I stopped going out after eleven.”
That he lived in the neighborhood where the bodies were found was an additional circumstance supporting Gaitan’s decision to go with him as a suspect. One Donati hadn’t mentioned.
“When did you use the cab?”
He frowned. “The police asked me that, too. My car was broken down most of June, but I only took cars off the lot on weekends or if I needed to get around to do errands. I guess I took the cab maybe three or four times until I finally borrowed the cash to fix my car.”
“I’m interested in dates,” I said.
“I don’t remember dates,” he said, snippily.
“Try.”
“I’ll have to look at a calendar,” he said.
“The cops told Nick they found evidence in the cab linking it to the murders,” I said. “You drove it. What did you see?”
“Nothing,” he said. “I can’t imagine what they’re talking about.”
“Do you know how often it was cleaned?”
“It all depends on the look the director’s going for,” he said. “Sometimes you want it to look grubby.”
“When you borrowed it, did you clean it before returning it?”
“No, I snuck it back on the lot in the same condition I took it out. I would’ve been in big trouble if anyone knew I’d borrowed it.”
“You’re in pretty big trouble now,” I observed.
“Tell me about it,” he said. Beads of sweat were forming on his upper lip despite the air-conditioned chill in the air.
“What happened when you talked to Detective Gaitan?”
At the mention of Gaitan’s name, the crease between his eyes deepened. “At first he was sort of friendly, but when I told him I lived in West Hollywood, he asked me if I was a homosexual. That’s the word he used. I said, ‘Well, I’m gay, if that’s what you mean,’ and after that his entire attitude changed. He started calling me Bobby, but it was sarcastic, not friendly.”
“What kind of questions did he ask you?”
“The same ones you asked,” he said, “about the cab, and my financial situation but it wasn’t like he was asking questions because he was interested in my answers. It was like he already knew the answers and was testing me.”
“He was trying to catch him in a lie,” Donati said.
“You were there?”
“I sat in on Bob’s interviews,” he said. “The tone he took with Bob was different than with anyone else. Total contempt. I finally intervened.”
“What did you say?”
“I told him that some of his questions seemed inappropriate,” Donati said. “The guy was asking Bob about his sex life.”
“What did Gaitan say?”
“He said he would decide what questions were appropriate and told me to get lost, basically,” Donati replied. “So I threw him off the lot.”
I smiled. “You did what?”
“I reminded him that I was the studio’s lawyer, that he was at the studio as a courtesy and then I told him he’d worn out his welcome. I asked him to leave.”
“And did he?”
Now Donati smiled. “Oh, yes. He left. And later that day I had my boss call the sheriff and complain.”
“Your boss is …”
“Duke Asuras,” he said. “The head of the studio.”
I nodded, turned my attention to Travis. “Gaitan wants to question you again?”
“Tomorrow. He called me and said if I didn’t show up, he’d arrest me.”
“I assume that’s bullshit,” Donati said to me. “I don’t remember much criminal law, but if the police have probable cause to arrest, they don’t usually invite you to come and discuss it with them, do they?”
“No, they don’t,” I said. “I’d like to talk to Bob alone for a few minutes.”
He glanced at his watch, nodded. “Sure, I have a meeting with my boss so you can stay here and talk. If I’m not back when you’re done, I wonder if you’d wait for me, Henry.”
“All right.”
Travis’s anxiety level soared after Donati left the room.
“You seem very anxious, Bob.”
“I’m terrified,” he blurted out.
“I can see that,” I said. He’d gone white beneath his salon tan, and sweat stained the armpits of his expensive shirt.
“Nick told me about you,” he said. “He said you were a suspect for a while. He told me you’re gay, too.”
“That’s all true,” I replied.
“Then you know about Gaitan. I moved here to get away from people like him. People that stare at you like you’re something they stepped in. He made me so nervous I would have confessed just to get away from him.”
He would’ve made a bad interview, I thought, dripping in his own sweat, alternatingly eager to please and frightened.
“I know better than you what kind of cop Gaitan is,” I said. “He’s a thug, but he’s not stupid, and the fact is that you are a legitimate suspect based on what you’ve told me today, even without knowing what the evidence is he claimed to find in the car.”
“I didn’t …”
“Two of the three victims were last seen getting into an off-duty cab,” I said. “Someone has obviously identified the cab as the same one you were driving around the time the murders were committed last month. Plus, Bob, you live in the neighborhood where the bodies were found. Based on that alone, I’d suspect you, too.”
“Other people could’ve taken the car,” he said.
“Someone obviously did. Who else could it have been?”
“I don’t know,” he said, “but it wasn’t me.”
“Tell me about yourself,” I said.
“What?” he looked confused, suspicious.
“Let’s just talk.”
In the next hour I learned that Bob Travis was thirty-four but admitted to thirty-one and lived beyond his means in a two-bedroom apartment furnished with antiques and a closet full of designer clothes. He hit the bars on weekends, used drugs recreationally, mostly pot and occasionally Ecstasy, had never had a steady boyfriend and had gone into therapy to discover why. Travis was quietly but deeply dissatisfied with his life, and sometimes wondered if being gay was not the cause of his unhappiness, but felt guilty about this because he thought he was supposed to be proud of being out. He gave money to AIDS and gay organizations when he could and had volunteered at Project Angel Food, delivering meals to people with AIDS, but quit because it got too depressing. He enjoyed his work, but worried about advancing, got along better with his women coworkers than the men, but didn’t see any of them socially. His small circle of friends was all other gay men, and while his family back in Maryland was “okay” with his homosexuality, he rarely saw or spoke to them. What he wanted most in life was a nice house, a stable career and a boyfriend.
By the time I’d finished questioning him, I had concluded that if he was the killer, he was an incredibly brilliant actor or completely psychotic to be able to fake such ordinariness. He didn’t appear to be either.
As if he’d read my mind, he asked, “Did I pass?”
“The studio wants to hire me to represent you. Is that what you want?”
“Yes,” he said, gratefully.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll call Gaitan and set up a meeting. In the meantime, you are not to talk to anyone about this case, especially the police. Here’s my card. Refer any questions to me.”
“What about Nick?”
“Nick represents the studio,” I said. “I represent you.”
Travis frowned. “But the studio’s paying you.”
“That doesn’t mean I work for them,” I said, “but of course I’ll keep Nick informed so long as there’s no conflict of interest.”
“I really need to get back to work,” Travis said apologetically.
“Go,” I said. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”
I gathered my things and prepared to leave, then remembered that Donati had asked me to wait for him. At that moment, his secretary came in and said, “Mr. Rios? Mr. Donati asked me to bring you to Mr. Asuras’s office. They’d like to have a word with you.”