SUNSET BOULEVARD WAS littered with palm branches torn from the trees by the Santa Ana winds, and signals were out from Vermont to Highland. The restaurant was near the intersection where Hugh Grant bought a blow job from Divine Jones, one of the many women who worked this part of the boulevard. Tonight they huddled in doorways to keep the dusty wind from ruining their hair and makeup and ran to the curb like giggling schoolgirls when there was a rush of traffic. I pulled into the parking lot, narrowly missing a trash can that went rolling into the street. Inside, the cheesy cheerfulness of the orange vinyl booths and bright yellow walls contrasted bleakly with the handful of customers, working girls stopping in for a burger between tricks, a couple of tattooed twentysomething malcontents, a foursome of old people tucking into the senior specials. Odell was at a back booth, his face reflected in a darkened window, hunched over a dinner of pancakes, eggs and bacon, like a figure in an Edward Hopper painting.
“Odell,” I said, sliding into the booth.
He looked up, wiping syrup from his chin. “Mr. Rios. You hungry? My treat.”
I glanced at the greasy food on his plate. “Thanks, I’ll pass.”
“Suit yourself,” he said.
“I was surprised you were still at the station,” I said, while he smeared pancake into egg yolk. “You really don’t go home, do you?”
“No point,” he said, chewing. “My wife divorced me ten years ago, both my kids are grown.” He signaled the waitress for coffee and when she came, said, “And he’ll have a cup, too, darling.”
“I’m not your darling, mister,” she said, filling our cups.
He watched her go. “It doesn’t take much to piss people off these days, does it, Mr. Rios?” He dumped three packs of sweetener into his coffee. “You wanted to talk to me.”
“Gaitan’s trying to frame Bob Travis for the West Hollywood murders.”
“You mean the ‘Invisible Man Murders’,” he said, pronouncing the phrase with disdain. “Invisible Man, Night Stalker. Who thinks up that shit?” He sipped the coffee. “Tell me about Gaitan.”
“You know better than I do what kind of cop he is,” I replied. “I think he planted the evidence he found in the cab.”
“Why do you think that?” he asked, meeting my eyes.
“I’m going to level with you.”
“Good idea.”
“Before the studio turned the cab over to Gaitan, someone there conducted his own search and didn’t find anything to connect it to the murders. Gaitan gets possession of the car and suddenly there’s fibers, there’s bloodstains, paint transfers.”
He frowned. “It’s a felony offense to interfere with a police investigation.”
“I’m not defending the studio,” I said. “Travis is my client. Don’t you think it’s pretty fishy that Gaitan discovers evidence where there was none?”
He took a couple of quick bites of food, washed it down with coffee. “You want to know what I think, Mr. Rios? I think you should get off this case.”
“Why is that, Odell?”
“You had your crack at Gaitan. You didn’t take it. Let it go.”
“This isn’t about what happened to me out in the desert.”
“Sure it is,” he said. “You were humiliated. You want to get even. Avenging insults is part of the code for you Mexican guys.”
“That’s a fairly primitive analysis of what’s going on here.”
He smiled a yolk-stained smile. “We’re primitive creatures, Counsel.” He belched softly. “What if I told you I think your client’s dirty?”
“I’d have to question your judgment. Bob Travis is a mouse.”
“I watched him today. He’s hiding something.”
“He spent the first twenty-five years of his life in the closet,” I said. “That leaves a mark. A kind of furtiveness. The smell of mothballs. That’s all you’re picking up.”
He shook his head. “My daughter’s gay,” he reminded me. “Some of my deputies. People I work with in the community. I know the difference between nervous and guilty.”
“I know a little bit about gay people, too,” I said. “The man who committed those murders is a violent, twisted closet case who is also extremely intelligent and methodical. Travis is a set designer who lives in an antique-filled apartment, pines for a boyfriend and can’t pay his bills. He’s no more the killer than I am. Except to Gaitan who equates gay with criminal. That’s why he went after me, that’s why he’s going after Travis.”
“You must be really good in front of a jury,” Odell said.
“Hear me out,” I said, and explained how I thought Gaitan might have planted evidence in the cab.
“You’ve got this all figured out,” he said.
“You have to admit, with the right motivation, it could be done.”
“Sure,” he said. “It’s no trick to get evidence out of booking, especially in a case like this where there’s lots of people bringing in little pieces of this and that and things are going back and forth from forensics. It could have happened the way you say.”
“I need to get my hands on the police and lab reports,” I said. “They’ll show chain of custody.”
He grinned. “If Gaitan’s smart enough to plant evidence, he’s smart enough to cover it up.”
“Still, I need those reports.”
“And that’s where I come in?”
“I can’t get discovery unless Travis is charged,” I said. “In the meantime Gaitan may be manufacturing other evidence.”
“Did it ever occur to you that he found the evidence in the car just like he said he did?”
“I told you, someone else looked before he did.”
“Maybe he didn’t know what to look for,” Odell said. “When you talk about things like fibers, you’re talking small.”
“Do you know that for a fact in this case?”
“No,” he conceded.
“Me, either,” I replied. “I won’t know until I get the analysis from hair and fiber.”
Odell grunted a noncommittal, “Uh-huh,” and returned to his meal.
“I don’t understand, Odell, a couple of weeks ago you came to my house and wanted me to bring a lawsuit against the department to stop Gaitan and his friends. Have you had a change of heart?”
“That was a different situation,” he said, slugging down the last of his coffee. “You could’ve forced some real change in the department.”
“That’s your job, not mine. My job is to defend my client.”
“Is that what you’re doing? Or are you going after Gaitan?” He shook his head. “Mac might be a bigot, but even a bigot can be right sometimes.”
“You won’t help me.”
“You don’t need me,” he said. “If you want to talk about the evidence against your client, call Serena Dance. She’s running the task force on the murders.”
“Since when?”
“Since the sheriff had to apologize to you,” he said, pulling his wallet out of his pants pocket. “He needed cover with the gay community, so he agreed to let her run the show from the DA’s office.” He laid some bills on the table. “Of course, that don’t mean Gaitan is telling her everything he’s doing, but she knows more about the evidence than I do.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that before?”
“I wanted to warn you.”
“About what? Staying on the case?”
“You’ve made up your mind about that,” he said. “Just don’t let your prejudice against cops blind you to the obvious. And watch your back.”
Earlier, I’d left a message for Donati to call me. There was a return message from him on my machine when I got home from my meeting with Odell. I phoned him, reached an answering machine and started to leave a message, but then he picked up.
“I was working,” he explained.
“It’s almost eleven.”
“A typical day for me starts at six and ends at midnight,” he said, “but you didn’t call to hear about the sad life of a studio lawyer. What happened with the police?”
“You haven’t talked to Bob?”
“He’s your client, now,” he said. “I don’t want to interfere in your relationship.”
I hesitated, then asked, “Am I interfering in yours?”
“I’m not sure I understand, Henry,” he replied, cooling.
“There’s a picture at Bob’s house of the two of you on a beach. You know which one I’m talking about?” When he didn’t immediately answer, I said, “I’m not asking out of idle curiosity, Nick. The nature of your relationship to him is relevant to why you searched the car before you turned it over to the police.”
“What do you mean?” he asked in a tight, angry voice.
“Maybe you were trying to protect him.”
He made a contemptuous sound. “I did it to protect the studio, not Bob. I didn’t even know the police were going to question him again. All I knew is that they wanted the car.”
“But after you searched it, you told him it was clean.”
“No, I didn’t,” he said firmly. “I never told him that.”
“He says you did.”
“He’s wrong,” he said, anger creeping back into his voice. “Whatever he told you, he’s wrong.”
“Were you involved with him?”
“It was a while ago,” he said, “and it was a mistake. Bob’s one of those gay boys with a little job, a little apartment, a little circle of swishy friends. Living for the weekend, looking for Mr. Right in the bars. I hated the smallness of his life. It was suffocating.”
“Unlike the closet?”
“I don’t live in the closet,” he said. “I live in the real world. In the real world, people don’t advertise who they fuck, and who they fuck is no one’s business.”
“You’re going to a lot of trouble for someone for whom you feel such contempt.”
“I told you, my only concern is the studio.”
“Married to your work?”
“Is this really why you called?”
“The cops found a bloodstain from the second victim in the trunk of the car, along with fibers that matched fibers taken from the first victim’s body,” I said. “They also found prints they’ve matched to Bob and paint from the car on the wall of the alley where one of the bodies was dumped. You searched the car. Any of this sound familiar?”
“Well, obviously I couldn’t have seen fingerprints,” he said, “but I know for a fact the interior and exterior of the car were clean.”
“You’re sure of that?”
He hesitated. “It’s complicated,” he began. I’d begun to realize when he used that word, it meant trouble. “There’s something I didn’t tell you yesterday.”
“What?”
“I didn’t find anything when I searched the car,” he said. “But afterwards, I drove it off the lot to a car wash and had it washed and vacuumed from top to bottom.”
“You what?”
“I swear, I didn’t see anything in the trunk or anywhere else.”
“Then why did you have it cleaned? In case you missed something?”
“I accept full responsibility,” he said, stiffly.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
A dog barked in the background. He shushed it. “Isn’t the important thing that the police found evidence where clearly there couldn’t have been any?”
“Are you prepared to testify to that and expose yourself to prosecution for tampering with evidence?”
“Obviously, you have to figure out a way to keep the case from coming to trial,” he said, adding airily, “Make a deal with someone.”
“You don’t seem to understand the gravity of the situation.”
The deep voice was peremptory. “This is what I understand, Counsel. I’ve given you hard proof that the police planted evidence against Bob. A first-year law student could take that to the bank.”
“With no way to prove it.”
“If you want off the case, just tell me,” he said.
“I’ll stay on the case,” I said, “but I’m warning you, Nick, I will put you on the stand if I have to, whatever the risk to you.”
“If you do your job right, it won’t come to that.”
“I can’t do my job if you keep withholding information.”
“I’ve told you everything,” he said. “I swear.”
I hung up, astonished by the conversation. If Donati was any indication, Hollywood was as lawless as Gaitan’s cohort in the sheriff’s department; but I understood police corruption. Nick Donati was something new.
Sometime during the night, a transient who’d been in and out of mental hospitals most of his life poured a gallon of gas over a patch of scrub in the hills above Sierra Madre and put a match to it. By dawn, the wind had blown the fire out of control. When I went downtown to the Criminal Courts Building to see Serena, soft gray flakes of ash were falling from the smoky sky and the acrid air burned my eyes. Office workers walked between the government buildings with handkerchiefs covering their mouths and noses. Looking northeast from Serena’s eighteenth-floor window I could see a funnel of smoke rising from the vicinity of Pasadena.
I hadn’t seen Serena since she’d turned up at the West Hollywood station where Gaitan was questioning me about the Baldwin murder. Her face was pale with fatigue. She twisted the gold band on the ring finger of her right hand as I began my pitch for access to the evidence reports. Two sentences into it, she stopped me.
“Henry, why are you doing this?”
“Doing what?”
“Taking on this case,” she said. “I mean, besides the potential conflict of interest, don’t you feel any moral qualms about representing someone who preys on gay men?”
“What conflict?”
“I could call you as a witness in the Amerian murder.”
“To testify to what? I wasn’t a percipient witness to anything.”
She frowned. “You were the last person to see him.”
“No,” I corrected her. “His killer was. My testimony wouldn’t be relevant to anything except possibly establishing the time of death, and the medical examiner can do that.”
She twisted the ring. “The relevance of your testimony is a matter for the court to decide. If you persist in representing Bob Travis, I’ll move to disqualify you.”
“Gaitan put you up to this, didn’t he?”
She glared at me. “No one put me up to anything, least of all Mac Gaitan.”
“If you charge my client, and if the case gets to trial and if you subpoena me, I’ll get the subpoena quashed on the grounds that any marginal value I might have as a witness is clearly outweighed by my client’s constitutional right to counsel.”
“The right to counsel,” she said, “is not a right to a particular counsel.”
“I can pretty convincingly demonstrate that he needs me to establish a defense of police misconduct.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Why is Gaitan still running this investigation?”
Her face reddened. “He isn’t running it,” she said. “I am. This case is a lot bigger than one deputy. There are homicide units from the sheriff” and LAPD working with me. Even the FBI’s assisting.”
“Gaitan’s still out there riding the range like a cowboy,” I said.
“I don’t understand your obsession with Gaitan.”
It occurred to me she hadn’t heard about the incident in the desert. I told her.
After I finished, she looked at me silently. “How can you be sure Gaitan was behind it?”
“I can’t, obviously,” I said, “but the circumstantial evidence is pretty compelling.”
She sank back in her chair with a complicated expression on her face. “What do you want, Henry?”
“I want to examine the evidence against my client.”
“Your client hasn’t been charged. If he is, you can file a discovery motion; Until then, he’s not entitled to anything.”
“The evidence is already tainted by Gaitan’s involvement in the case,” I said.
She sighed. “Can you be more specific?”
“I think he’s planted the evidence recovered from the Parnassus studio prop car.”
“I have an eyewitness who saw the second victim get into that car. The same with the third victim, Jellicoe. The actual search was conducted by forensics.”
“Who brought the cab in?”
“I don’t know,” she said, exasperated.
“According to the studio lawyer, it was Gaitan. How much time passed between when he brought the car in and forensics searched it?”
“Shouldn’t you be saving this for a jury?”
“I’m telling you Serena, I have information that will prove the evidence was planted.”
“What information?”
“I can’t disclose that without jeopardizing my defense.”
“You’ve just told me your defense.”
“Then believe that I can prove it,” I said. “Look, we can resolve this now before it goes any farther, or play it out in front of a jury and embarrass your office.”
“You’re that sure,” she said, wavering.
I decided to play my trump card. “I’m so sure that if you’ll agree to let me preview this evidence, I’ll submit my client to a lineup with your eyewitnesses.”
She cocked an eyebrow. “A lineup?”
“Do we have a deal?”
She thought about it. “All right. Deal. I’ll messenger you this afternoon.”
My car phone rang. It was Richie Florentino on the other end saying, “You’re holding out on me, Henry.”
I was stopped at a light on Sunset just outside of town. Ash rained down on my windshield. A plume of black smoke unfolded in the gray sky like a wing. The light went green and I lurched forward behind an exhaust-spewing, nearly empty bus.
“I’m very busy, Richie,” I said.
“I know you are,” he replied. “Working for Parnassus. My spies say you had a meeting with Nick Donati.”
“How could you possibly know that?”
“If I tell you, will you tell me what you talked about?”
“No,” I said. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw an enormous, filthy woman lift her voluminous skirts and squat in a weed-choked lot.
“I’ve got the dish on Donati,” he said.
On my right, a banner in a gay-porn store just outside Silver Lake advertised XXXXX-rated videos. “Richie, what do you think an XXXXX-rated gay video could possibly show?”
“Restraint?” he ventured. “Good taste?”
“That would be shocking,” I agreed. “I’m not interested in your dish on Donati.”
There was nothing like indifference to goad an inveterate gossip like Richie.
“He’s so far in the closet, you can’t see him for his suits,” Richie said.
“He told me he was gay,” I said, stretching the point.
“He did?” Richie was astonished. “What else did he tell you?”
“I went to see him on a professional matter,” I said. “I can’t say anything else.”
“A professional matter? You mean as in the police are after him?”
“No,” I said, adamantly. “The police are not after him.”
“Can I quote you on that?”
“Quote me? What are you talking about?”
“I have to say something in my piece on Parnassus about a big-time criminal-defense lawyer showing up for a secret meeting with the head of legal,” he said, adding a disingenuous, “don’t I?”
I pulled out of traffic and stopped in front of the Vista theater.
“This is extortion.”
“All I know,” he said, “is that I’m waiting for Asuras to try to close the Longstreet deal so I can run this story, and suddenly everything stops and I can’t find out why.”
A light went on. “Does Donati know about the Longstreet deal?”
“He’s Asuras’s shadow. Take away Asuras and Donati’s an empty suit with a two-hundred-dollar haircut.”
“How far would Donati go to protect Asuras’s interests?”
“As far as Asuras tells him. So I’m right,” he said triumphantly. “Your meeting with Donati had something to do with the delay in closing the Longstreet deal.” His mood changed to anger. “How could you double-cross me when you know how important this story is to me?”
“I’m not one of your spies, Richie,” I said. “I can’t violate attorney-client privilege to help you win the Pulitzer prize or whatever it is you’re running for.”
“This isn’t about any fucking prize,” he huffed. “It’s about protecting Hollywood from a homo-hating bigot. Whose side are you on?”
I waved away a tattered man who was trying to clean my windshield with a soiled rag. He muttered a stream of invectives and wandered off.
“I’m doing my job,” I said.
“That’s what the Nazis said at Nuremberg,” he shouted.
“Richie, calm down,” I said, thinking fast. I knew how destructive he could be when he was enraged. “Let’s make a deal.”
“I don’t make deals with collaborators,” he fumed, but he was listening.
“I can tell you this much,” I said. “Donati’s not the client. The client’s a low-level studio employee who’s suspected by the police of a serious felony. I personally don’t think this has anything to do with the Longstreet deal.”
“It has to,” Richie insisted. “Everything just stopped.”
“The police are at the point in their investigation where they either have to arrest him or let him go,” I said. “I expect a decision within a few days. Either way, I’ll call you and you can decide for yourself if it had anything to do with the deal.”
“So you’re saying it’s a routine case.”
“Exactly, it’s just a coincidence that it’s at Parnassus.”
“If it’s routine, why can’t you tell me about it now?”
“I’m at a very delicate place in my negotiations with the District Attorney,” I said. “If the story gets out prematurely, it could jeopardize them.”
There was a long silence. “I don’t know how much longer I can sit on this piece before Duke finds out about it.”
“What does that matter?”
“Are you kidding? He’s famous for killing books and stories about him,” Richie said. “Just last year he got an unauthorized biography literally pulled off the presses by his libel lawyers.”
“Haven’t your libel lawyers vetted your piece?”
“You let me worry about my lawyers,” he said. “I have a week to deadline for the September issue. If I don’t hear from you before then, I’m running with what I’ve got.”
“Richie, I’m speaking as a friend, here. If you make any statements implying I met with Donati because he’s the target of a police investigation you’re courting a libel suit.”
“I have a friendly warning, too,” Richie said. “Before you get too cozy with Donati, remember, everyone in Hollywood is either a flake or an asshole.”
“You don’t have to worry about me going native.”
“Just remember,” he intoned ominously. “A flake or an asshole.”