THE NEXT MORNING I was standing outside my office window with Jim Kwan. In his capacity as our neighborhood watch captain, he was inspecting the hole that had been cut out in the corner of the window from which, presumably, the intruder had reached in and unlatched the lock.
“Yeah,” Kwan said. “Looks like a professional. You didn’t hear him come in?”
“No,” I said. “I was asleep. If the phone hadn’t rung—” I decided against pursuing that line of speculation. “I wonder if you could canvass the neighbors, see if anyone saw anything.”
“Sure,” he said. He looked at me, his round, open face clouded. “Listen, Henry, there’s something I got to tell you.”
“About what?”
“I was talking to old Mrs. Byrne down the street,” he said, referring to the terror of the neighborhood, a bigoted old woman who spent her days reading a Bible and casting a censorious eye on the rest of us. “She said she saw a meter man hanging around your house a couple of days ago. Said he walked around from one side and came out the other.”
“The meter is in the back.”
He nodded. “I know, but Mrs. Byrne said everyone’s meters were read last week. She also told me this guy didn’t go anywhere but to your house. I should’ve said something to you, but half the time she makes things up to have a reason to talk to me.”
“Sounds like someone was casing my house.”
“I’m going to tell the security service to pay special attention to your place,” he said. “You should take care of this window as soon as you can. Did they take anything?”
“No,” I said.
“You were lucky then.”
“Yeah, lucky.”
On Saturday morning I drove to the outlet mall at the edge of the central valley town where Phil Wise and I were meeting with Rod Morse. I took Highway 99 through a landscape of field, farmland and long horizons, familiar to me from my own childhood in the valley. A dusty haze hung in the cloudless September sky. A new subdivision appeared like a weird mirage in the midst of tomato fields. A banner outside a junior high school proclaimed, YOU ARE ENTERING A DRUG-FREE AND GUN-FREE ZONE. The mall resembled a collection of barns, a tribute to the valley’s agrarian culture that was being rapidly displaced by things like subdivisions and outlet malls. Soon, all of California would be a suburb either of San Francisco or Los Angeles. Small towns like this would disappear, and while there was something to be mourned by their loss, at least urban culture might moderate the rancid local bigotries that had driven me out of my hometown and which would probably drive Rod out of his. I pulled into the parking lot in front of the Mikasa outlet store and made it to the McDonald’s, with five minutes to spare. A thin, goateed man in an electric-blue vintage suit waved me to his table.
“Henry? Phil Wise. Rod’s not here yet.”
I slipped into the booth across from him, the remains of an Egg McMuffin between us. I estimated Phil’s age at twenty-eight or twenty-nine. The suit was from the sixties and he carried it off with Gen-X panache. He had long fingers but his nails were bitten to bloody stubs.
“Nice to finally meet you face to face,” I said.
“You, too,” he replied. “I really admire you, Henry. Not many boomer lawyers are still fighting the good fight.”
Ouch, I thought, but said, “How did you get interested in this work?”
“Pentecostal parents,” he replied, smiling. He had smoker’s teeth.
“I thought things were better for your generation.”
“In the big cities, maybe,” he said. “Not in places like this or where I was raised.”
“Which was?”
“Colorado Springs,” he said. “I’d like to go over a couple of points with you before Rod gets here.”
“Sure, but I want to make clear, this is your show. I’m just here for moral support.”
We became so intent on our conversation, we didn’t notice that the crowded restaurant had grown very quiet as a phalanx of deputy sheriffs surrounded our table. Then Phil looked up and nudged me. I looked around at the beefy, glowering uniformed men.
“Is there a problem?” I asked the nearest one, a black man whose name tag identified him as Deputy Collins.
A middle-aged woman suddenly burst through the circle of cops pointing at us. “That’s them,” she shouted. “Those are the child molesters who’ve come for my boy.”
Collins said, “Philip Wise, Henry Rios. Get up.”
“What the hell is this?” Wise demanded.
“I said, get up,” Collins replied, jerking him to his feet by his shirt collar. “You’re under arrest for conspiring to commit kidnapping.”
“I want them in handcuffs,” the woman, who I now realized was Rod’s mother, screamed.
Collins complied.
Four hours later, we were sitting in a conference room at the DA’s office with a pudgy, bespectacled assistant DA named George Holly, who was trying to talk Phil out of suing the county for false arrest and false imprisonment.
“The sheriffs had a good faith belief there was probable cause to arrest you based on what Mrs. Morse told them,” Holly said defensively.
“Good faith!” Wise screamed. “Two faggots are coming to town to abduct our son? That’s your idea of probable cause? Where did you go to law school, you Nazi?”
“You were planning to remove Rod from his family,” Holly replied, his plump, pale face going apple red.
“I’m the kid’s lawyer,” Wise shouted. “Not a goddamned child molester. What I want to do and what I plan to do is get him away from those fundamentalist crazoids. By court order.”
“His lawyer? Counsel,” Holly huffed, “it’s first-semester contracts law that a minor has no capacity to make a contract for personal services, yours or anyone else’s.”
“Actually, George,” I said mildly, “you’re only half-right. A contract with a minor is voidable, not void per se, but let’s not split hairs. Phil, you sue the county if you want to, but I’d like to talk to Rod. The Morses do realize they can’t prevent Rod from talking to us, don’t they, George?”
He licked his lips, a bad sign. “That’s kind of a moot point.”
“What do you mean?”
“I want you to understand I’m not the enemy here,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. “Understood. Why can’t we talk to Rod?”
“Mrs. Morse says Rod and his Dad flew to Utah last night.”
Completely deflated, Phil uttered a low, “Shit.” He looked at me. “How did they find out?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe they pressured it out of him.”
“No,” Holly said. “Mrs. Morse said she got a anonymous call yesterday. That’s how she knew.”
Phil scowled at me. “I didn’t tell anyone I was coming here.”
“I didn’t, either,” I said, and then remembered the second hang-up when I’d spoke to Rod about coming down. “I think I know what happened. Someone listened in on my conversation with Rod.”
“Who?” Wise asked.
I shook my head. “I’ll worry about that,” I said. “You try to find him.”
I had left home before eight in the morning. Twelve hours later, I turned the corner to my street and saw a large black car parked in front of my house. An old Rolls-Royce. I pulled into my driveway and got out. At the same time, the driver emerged from the black car. He was in a kind of uniform, black suit, white shirt, black tie. He was tall and muscular, and when he was near enough for me to see his face, I recognized his eyes; a saint’s eyes. My stomach dropped. Adrenaline pounded through my veins the primal message, fight or fly, but before I could make a conscious choice he was standing in front of me, blocking my path.
“Mr. Asuras would like to talk to you,” he said, in the voice I remembered from the desert instructing me to get on my knees.
“You work for him,” I said, “not Gaitan.”
“He’s waiting in the car.”
“Your partner, too? Which one of you killed Joanne Schilling?”
He turned away, walked back to the limo, and opened the back door. I followed him and stood outside the car, looking in. A flood of frigid air drifted from the vehicle into the end-of-summer evening.
“Henry,” I heard Asuras say from within. “Are you free for dinner?”
“With you?” I asked, peering in. “I’d rather dine with John Wayne Gacy.”
From out of the darkness, he laughed. “I’m better company,” he said. “Come on, Henry. You have questions, I have answers. I promise you safe passage.”
“You promise, huh? That’s a great comfort.”
“The Asian man who lives next door to you came outside a half-hour ago and very conspicuously wrote down the license-plate number. Your security service questioned my driver. What else do you want, my fingerprints? A blood sample? Either get in or close the door.”
I got in.
“You’re very paranoid, Henry,” he said.
“Can’t imagine why,” I replied.
The car soundlessly negotiated the curving streets of my hillside neighborhood and descended into Hollywood. A thick glass partition divided the front compartment from the back. The seats, upholstered in soft, burgundy calfskin, smelled like old money. Asuras was dressed in tweeds and leather. The car was freezing.
“A drink?” Asuras asked, indicating the small bar built into the seat between us.
“No, I don’t drink.”
“AA?”
“I don’t drink.”
“A man who doesn’t drink is a man who doesn’t trust himself,” Asuras said, filling his glass from a decanter marked SCOTCH. “Ergo, not trustworthy.” He raised his glass to me. “Skoal.”
“Nick Donati must have your complete confidence,” I replied.
He shrugged. “Nick’s not untrustworthy, he’s just weak. There are things he can’t face without a little help.”
“Which he pours out of a bottle.” When Asuras didn’t reply, I asked, “Have you been parked outside of my house all day?”
He set his drink down. “You left the valley at five-thirty,” he said. “With traffic, I thought eight was a safe bet. How did your business go up there? Find the boy?”
There was the faintest trace of a sneer on the big, Roman emperor face.
“You know I didn’t.”
“For obvious reasons, I prefer not to be seen with you too publicly,” he replied. “I reserved a table at a quiet place in Brentwood. Italian. That all right with you?”
“As long as it’s not Mezzaluna.”
At the restaurant, the host greeted Asuras with murmured obsequiousness and led us unobtrusively through the main dining room to a private one where a waiter, the wine steward and a busboy were lined up at soldierly attention. The room, like the rest of the place, was paneled in dark wood, dimly lit, hushed; as much a bubble of luxury and privilege as Asuras’s car. And just as cold.
After we were seated, the waiter approached. “Mr. Asuras, may I suggest …”
“No,” Asuras said, “you may not suggest. This is what I want. A salad of hearts of romaine, the inner leaves only and they must be torn, not cut, into bite-sized pieces, with a vinaigrette of extra-virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar, which you will bring to the table so I can dress the salad myself. After that, a veal chop, seared on the outside, pink on the inside, no more than a half-inch in thickness. If it’s a millimeter thicker, I will throw it in your face. I also want you to bring me a plate of sautéed spinach and a plate of roasted red potatoes. When we are finished with our meals, you may offer dessert and coffee only after the tablecloth, our napkins and our settings have been completely replaced. I hope you got that, because I do not repeat myself.”
The waiter’s hands were trembling. “Yes, sir,” he said, “and for the other gentleman?”
Asuras turned his most charming smile on me. “What will the other gentleman have?”
“I don’t care,” I said. “A green salad and whatever your special is tonight.”
“Sir,” the waiter said, gulping, “we have several specials.” He rattled them off.
“The first one,” I said, “the seafood pasta. Thanks.”
Asuras was consulting with the wine steward. “Yes, a half-bottle of this.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but we don’t have half-bottles of this particular wine.”
Asuras said to me, “It’s too bad you don’t drink, Henry. This wine is spectacularly good.”
The wine steward said, softly, “Sir …”
Asuras gazed at him. “You’re still here?”
“The wine, sir. Do you want the full bottle or …”
“You appalling asshole,” Asuras said quietly. “Did I not say I would have a half-bottle? Didn’t you hear me?”
The wine steward bristled and opened his mouth to speak.
“Don’t you dare,” Asuras said. “Not if you want to keep your job. Now go bring the wine and a decanter and I’ll teach you how to pour a half-bottle from a full one.”
“Yes, sir,” the steward said, turned on his heel and marched, stiffly, out of the room.
“Do you make movies the same way you order dinner?” I asked when we were alone.
“With the same attention to detail? Yes?”
“No, I meant, are you as abusive to the people who work for you?”
“Abusive?” he repeated. “Am I abusive?” He smiled. “No, I’ll admit to impatience from time to time, but I’m not abusive, because abusiveness is cruelty that serves no purpose but to degrade another person. I don’t do that, ever.”
“Your cruelty always serves a purpose?”
“We’re not in court, Henry,” he said. “Don’t cross-examine me.”
The wine steward returned with the wine and a decanter. Asuras excused himself and they went to a sideboard where the wine was opened and poured. Their backs were to me, and I couldn’t hear what they were saying, until Asuras threw his arm around the man’s shoulders, massaged his neck and murmured, “Relax, you’re doing fine. Really great.” The steward visibly relaxed. They returned to the table. The steward poured the wine.
“Don’t forget to taste it,” Asuras said.
“No, sir, I won’t,” the steward said. “Thank you, Mr. Asuras.”
“What were you talking about?” Asuras asked, when we were alone. “Oh, yes, abuse.”
“What do you want from me?”
He sipped his wine. “Astonishing,” he said approvingly. “Just a sip, Henry? No, I suppose that would ruin your program, wouldn’t it? You’d have to go into one of your AA meetings and raise your hand as a newcomer again just because you had a sip of the finest wine on earth. What a terrifying little life you lead, Henry.” His smile was openly mocking. “‘I’ll have the special. No, you don’t need to tell me what it is. All food tastes the same to me.’ Tell me something, Henry, are you even alive?”
“I’m more alive than Alex Amerian is.”
His dark eyes gleamed. “The question isn’t what I want from you, it’s what do you want from me. How have I injured you, Henry? What have I done to you to explain your harassment of my associates and the terrible things you’re telling people about me?”
“Five people are dead,” I answered, “You’re responsible.”
“Six people, actually,” he replied. “Since you’re keeping score.”
“Bob Travis.”
We were interrupted by the arrival of our food. Asuras was as solicitous of the waiter now as he had been peremptory before. I remembered Alex’s description of Mr. King, the initial charm followed by belligerence, and Serena’s story about the boy Asuras had made into his assistant, then raped. Was Asuras simply a man to whom people had said yes for such a long time, he could no longer conceive of any other answer? Or was he something else, darker and more frightening? In our last conversation, he’d asked me if I believed in evil and taunted me with, “You think it’s all the result of bad parenting?” when I denied that evil was the result of innate depravity. I watched our waiter plump himself up on Asuras’s praise, almost against his will. “Since you’re keeping score …” I was ready to reconsider my position. Asuras emanated cruelty and seduction, but they were so twisted together it was hard to say which attracted and which repelled. It was like looking down into a cavern and seeing something glitter at the bottom that could either be precious or lethal.
“I’m a warrior, Henry,” he said, when the waiter departed. “I do what needs to be done, but I take nothing personally. Nothing. Vendettas are not my style, they interfere with business. Don’t you agree?”
“I’m not in the rape and pillage business,” I said.
“When you try a case,” he said, ignoring me, “you don’t hate the lawyer on the other side, or the judge who rules against you, or the jury that convicts your client. No, you submit to the system and fight like hell within it, but if you lose, you shake it off and walk away.”
“Alex was blackmailing you. You had to stop him.”
“As I was saying, Henry, we submit ourselves to a system from the minute we take our first breath. In this system, there are various ways to get what you want. Say you want someone sexually. How do you go about it? You can try to charm them into bed, or you can buy the use of their bodies, or you can take what you want from them by force. As far as getting what you want, any of those methods works. Are you following me?”
“Rape and seduction are not the same thing.”
“I didn’t say they were,” he replied, impatiently. “The means are not the same, but the end is. That’s all I’m saying. There are means people and there are ends people. The means people create distinctions among means and call it morality. The ends people understand that in this world, in this system we’re born into, anything that gets you what you want is a good thing.”
“Is that the Buddhist perspective?”
“The Buddha taught there is no right and wrong, only action and consequence. There are certain esoteric teachings that go one step farther and prove that karma itself is an illusion. Once you understand that, you can do anything without fear or guilt.”
He cut into his veal, the juice ran red and pooled in the white plate.
“You personally killed Amerian, didn’t you? You raped him and butchered him and then you raped and butchered those other two men.”
Through a mouthful of meat, he asked, “What do you want? And don’t tell me money. I’m not Nick Donati. You can’t take me in with childish threats of blackmail.”
“You don’t have anything I want.”
“But you have some things you’d like to keep. Your reputation, for instance. Your friends. I can take them away from you, the same way I took that boy away from you this morning.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Your friend Richie is wrong when he says the studio system is dead,” Asuras replied. “It’s true we don’t have actors and technicians on staff the way they did in the thirties and forties, but I have access to incredible talent. Actors, detonation experts, wiretap experts, computer hacks. The bigger and more complicated the movies, the more sophisticated the talent, and all of them need me if they want to work. It’s amazing what people in this town will do to stay on my good side. There’s really nothing I can’t do, Henry.”
I got up. “The more people you bring into this, the likelier it is one of them will talk. All I have to do is find that person.”
“Please, Henry, what can you offer them? The rosy glow of self-righteousness?” he said. “Sit down. Finish your meal. We’ll talk afterwards. I’m promoting Nick to head of the TV division. We’re launching a Parnassus channel. You want his job?”
“You’re crazy.”
“You disappoint me,” he said, frowning. “But all right, have it your way. My driver will take you home.”
“No, thanks. The last time he took me for a ride, I barely survived it.”
“Then next time,” he said, and resumed eating.
I called Serena from a pay phone on Sunset and asked her to come pick me up. Twenty minutes later, she pulled up in front of the 7-Eleven where I was waiting for her. I had told her a little about the day’s events on the phone, but when I explained them in detail, she abruptly made a U-turn on Sunset and drove in the opposite direction of my house.
“Where are you going?”
“Home,” she said. “You’re sleeping on my couch tonight.”
“I don’t think that’s necessary.”
“This guy breaks into your house, listens in on your calls, has you followed and buys you dinner so he can threaten you,” she said. “Humor me. Stay at my place tonight.”
“Actually, he offered me a job,” I said. “Legal counsel to the studio.”
She glanced at me. “He really is psycho.”
“If he had wanted to hurt me, he would have done it already. I’ve provoked him enough. I think what he wants from me is an audience.”
“Why choose you?”
“Because I know what he’s done, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“That’s unfortunately true.”
Donna Wynn, Serena’s partner, was a tall, slender woman, her pleasant face framed by straight, fair hair. She listened dubiously to Serena’s heavily edited explanation of why I needed to crash on their couch.
“This is a first,” she said to me. “She’s never brought a man home before.”
“I promise I’ll remember to put the toilet seat down.”
“Honey,” she said to Serena, “Jesse wants you to tuck him in.”
“Make yourself at home,” Serena told me, as she ascended the stairs from the foyer where we were all standing.
They lived in a townhouse, a duplex. In the car, Serena had said they owned both units and rented out the other to two gay men. I followed Donna into the living room, where a fluffy white dog was asleep in front of the fireplace. The room was a controlled mess, the furniture comfortable but plain, a child’s toys strewn on the floor. I felt something beneath me when I sat down, a chewed-up tennis ball. I rolled it toward the dog, who perked up for a second, then buried its head in its paws. Meanwhile, a black cat about the size of a bowling ball appeared in the doorway and stared at me, its whiskers twitching.
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“Hekate,” Donna said.
The cat leapt heavily into my lap.
“What should I do?”
“Pet her,” Donna said. “You’re not much of an animal person are you?”
I tentatively patted the cat. She purred. “Animals make me nervous.”
“Well, she seems to like you.”
I stroked the black fur, looked into glittering green eyes. “She probably recognizes the scent of her master on me.”
After Donna went up to bed, Serena and I sat up talking strategy.
“I got an idea while Asuras was bragging about his omnipotence,” I said.
“I’m almost afraid to ask, but what is it?”
“He’s dragged a lot of people into this. We have to find a weak link,” I said.
“Donati won’t break. Our best hope is Josey Walsh.”
“She’s stonewalled us so far. Why should that change?”
“Because she doesn’t know the whole story,” I said. “All she knows is that Schilling was murdered. She doesn’t know about Katie Morse or Bob Travis. If we tell her about them, we may raise the level of her anxiety until she decides it’s in her best interests to talk.”
“How do you know what she knows?”
“I don’t, but Asuras is smart. He realizes the less you let your coconspirators know about the crime they’re participating in, the less they can incriminate you if they break.”
“You think Walsh only knows her little piece?”
“Yes, but helping to suborn perjury in a murder case is a pretty crucial little piece. And if she has any smarts, she’s drawn some inferences from Schilling’s murder. Once we tell her about the others, that might push her over the edge.”
“Henry, there’s no proof Bob Travis was murdered.”
“Asuras implied it.”
She rolled her eyes. “You said the man’s a megalomaniac.”
“Even without proof, we can still scare Walsh with it.”
“We?” Serena mumbled.
“After what happened to me tonight, do you still have any doubt about Asuras?”
“If Walsh doesn’t break, and this backfires, I could be in real trouble,” she said. “Abusing the authority of my office.”
“I need you because you have that authority.”
She nodded. “All right, but it’s all or nothing. You understand? If this doesn’t work, you have to count me out.”
I slept on Serena’s couch, with the cat at my feet, and the next day she drove me home on her way to her office. There was a message from Phil Wise on my machine. I called him back.
“Any word on Rod’s whereabouts?” I asked.
“No, I’ve been calling up and down the chain of command at the Foster Institute, but they won’t say if he’s there or not. I’m going to go ahead and file the dependency petition in the superior court down there in the valley.”
“Rod’s not in the state,” I pointed out. “How does the court have jurisdiction?”
“He was taken from the state against his will. A de facto abduction.”
“Phil, he was taken by his father,” I said. “Can a parent abduct his own child?”
“It happens all the time in custody cases,” he replied, an edge to his voice.
“But this isn’t—”
“I know,” he exploded. “I’m trying to figure out a way to get him back. You’re not helping.”
“I’m asking you the same questions the judge will be asking you. You need a better answer than getting mad.”
After a long pause, he said, “I lose a lot of these kids. It works my nerves.”
“What can I do to help?”
“Keep asking the tough questions, Professor Kingsfield,” he said. “I’ll go back and work on my answers.”
When Serena picked me up that evening to visit Josey Walsh, she was considerably more optimistic than she’d been the night before.
“Remember I told you I’d sic’d the LAPD on Walsh?”
“Yeah?”
“I checked in with one of them this morning. They talked to Walsh about Schilling. She was sticking to her story, but he said she was very nervous.”
“She wasn’t nervous when she talked to you?”
“She was like ice. She’s either finding it hard to keep her lies straight or she’s getting worried about her own safety.” She grinned. “Scaring her just might work.” After a couple of minutes, she added, “If she does want to make a statement, I’ll have to take over. I mean, you don’t have any official position, Henry.”
“I’ve been ready to turn this over to you from the beginning,” I replied, miffed. “Once you overcame your doubts. If you want the credit, take it.”
“That’s not the point,” she said.
“Whatever. After tonight it’s your show, Serena. I do have my work to do. I’m perfectly happy to let you do yours.”
We drove the rest of the way in silence.
Josey Walsh lived in a condominium not far from where Travis had lived, on another tree-lined West Hollywood street just off Santa Monica Boulevard. Serena pulled up to the curb and we got out and went to the door. She found Walsh’s name on the directory and reached for the security phone. I stopped her.
“We have to surprise her,” I said.
“How are we going to get in?”
“We’ll wait until someone comes out.”
A moment later, a muscular man holding the leash on a golden Labrador retriever came out of the building. While I patted the dog, and flirted with his owner, Serena wedged her foot in the door. The building was a rectangle built around a courtyard and swimming pool. Walsh lived on the top floor in unit 302. I rang the bell, and a moment later, the door opened a crack and I saw a sliver of a woman’s face.
“Yes?”
“Miss Walsh?”
“Who are you?”
“My name is Rios, Miss Walsh. I’m a lawyer. This is Serena Dance, from the DA’s office. I think you’ve talked to her.”
“I don’t have anything to say to you,” she said, closing the door.
I wedged my foot in the door. “Miss Walsh, your life is in danger.”
Her face again appeared in the crack. “Who writes your dialogue?”
“You know who killed Joanne Schilling,” I said. “She wasn’t their first victim. She won’t be their last.”
She didn’t move for a moment, then she opened the door and sighed, “Come inside.”
I got my first good look at her. In her early thirties, thin, pretty, she should have looked relaxed in her jeans and Gap tee shirt, but instead she radiated tension. Behind her, the curtains were drawn against the dusk and her carefully furnished living room was dark.
She turned a lamp on, sat down, stared at us. “What do you mean my life is danger?”
Uninvited, we sat down. “You’re helping Donati cover up a series of murders committed by Duke Asuras,” I said. “The last three people Donati recruited were themselves murdered. You’re next on the list.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Three men were murdered in West Hollywood this summer,” I began. “One of them was trying to blackmail Asuras. We know Asuras killed him, then killed the other two to hide his tracks and make it look like there was a serial killer on the loose. The police arrested a man named Bob Travis for the murders. Travis worked at Parnassus, he was Donati’s ex-boyfriend. The police didn’t have much of a case against him until Joanne Schilling turned up with a positive identification of Travis at one of the crime scenes. I think Donati made a deal with Travis. Travis agreed to take the fall—to allow himself to be arrested and maybe even tried for the murders—and Donati promised to control the evidence to make sure there wouldn’t be enough to convict. Donati double-crossed him by producing Schilling. When Travis threatened to expose the deal, he was murdered. You know what happened to Joanne Schilling. She turned up in a shallow grave in Griffith Park but she wasn’t the first. There was a third victim, a young girl named Katie Morse who knew about the blackmail scheme against Asuras. She was also murdered.”
“You understand what’s going on here, Josey,” Serena said. “Everyone Asuras uses to protect himself ends up dead.”
Josey Walsh said, “Nick is gay? That asshole.”
“He didn’t exactly propose,” Josey Walsh was saying, sometime later. We were sitting at her kitchen table. She was knocking back bourbon while Serena and I drank Tab, the industrial-strength diet drink. The kitchen had an unused cleanliness to it that reminded me of Donati’s kitchen. She had opened the windows. It was now dark outside and the scent of honeysuckle drifted on the warm air.
“He led you on?” Serena asked.
“He talked about the future in a way that included me. You know, what a great power couple we’d make. He’d leave Parnassus and we’d start our own production company, that kind of thing.”
“Was this while you were still working for him as a paralegal?” Serena asked.
She nodded. “I was a lousy paralegal, but it was a way into the studio.” She belted back bourbon. “I couldn’t get into a decent film school and I wanted to make movies.”
“Did Nick know that?” I asked.
“Yes, I was very up-front about it,” she replied. “Not that Nick noticed me at first. He supervises ten lawyers and eight other paralegals. I knew I had to get his attention.”
“How?” I asked.
Her smile was a slash across her pretty face. “Feminine wiles, Mr. Rios.” She glanced at Serena. “I know it’s not politically correct, but Hollywood is still a boy’s club. I was ready to do what I had to do.”
“Did Nick respond?”
“Yes and no. Or maybe I mean, yes to a point. He seemed flattered and he would flirt back sometimes at the office, but it never went past mild innuendo. I thought he was afraid I’d scream sexual harassment if he actually asked me out. I guess that wasn’t his worry.”
“He was completely closeted at work?” I asked.
She nodded. “Completely. He’d show up at office parties with dates, different girl, same tits, but he was a big studio exec and you expect them to be pigs.” She shrugged. “Plus, the story around the office was he’d been married once and had a bad divorce that soured him on relationships.”
Serena asked incredulously, “This was your idea of a good catch?”
“No, he was my idea of an E-ticket.”
“A what?” I asked.
“An E-ticket,” she said. “They used to sell them at Disneyland. They were good for every ride.”
“It must’ve worked,” I said. “Don’t you have some kind of producing deal with the studio?”
“They gave me an office, a phone and a half-time secretary,” she said, bitterly. “Oh, and $10,000 a month for two years to develop projects. I report to some twenty-three-year-old VP, who reports to some twenty-five-year-old VP, who gets maybe ten minutes a month with Duke. I was closer to him when I was working for Nick.”
“What did you give them in exchange?” Serena asked.
“After weeks of flirting back and forth, Nick asked me to dinner. We ended up at his place.” She looked at me. “Yes, we had sex. All right, so it wasn’t very good sex, but he seemed to enjoy it. God knows what he was thinking about while we were doing it. No, wait, I know what he was thinking about, the busboy at the restaurant. I thought I saw Nick give him the eye.” She drained her glass. “Anyway, for the next month it was dinners and parties and premieres. The Hollywood high life. I was dazzled. That was when Nick started dropping hints about the future and then one night he invited me to Duke’s house for dinner, just the three of us. The first words out of Duke’s mouth were, ‘So, Nick tells me you want to produce.’ After that I would’ve agreed to anything.”
“What exactly did you agree to?” I asked.
“It was this very odd thing,” she said. “I was supposed to make it look like I was sharing this place with this Joanne Schilling woman. They wanted me to put her name on the mailbox and the answering machine and take messages for her and relay them through Nick.”
“You ask why?” Serena asked.
“No,” she said.
“Why not?”
“There was something in the way Duke asked me that was … ,” she searched for a word, “… menacing. It was like, this conversation never happened. I can’t explain why, but I knew I wasn’t supposed to ask for an explanation.”
“Is that why you agreed to it?” I asked. “Because you felt threatened?”
“No,” she said. “I agreed because he offered me a production deal.” She looked back and forth between us. “Or would I be better off if I said I felt threatened?”
“Then what happened?” Serena asked.
Walsh directed her answer to me. “I did what I was told. I put her name on the mailbox, on my machine.”
“Did you ever meet her?”
“No,” she said, splashing bourbon into her glass. “I had no idea who she was. For a long time, nothing happened, but then I began to get messages from the police and from her.” She indicated Serena. “That worried me, but Nick told me it would all be over soon.”
“You and Nick still going out?” I asked.
“Once I signed the deal memo, he dumped me,” she said. “It wasn’t crude, but the invitations stopped coming, the calls were all business. I got the hint. I can’t say I cared much, because I got what I wanted from him, and despite his talk about the future, I knew he wasn’t exactly lovestruck.” She sipped, scowled. “Maybe if I’d had a dick.”
“I thought you didn’t care,” I said.
“Maybe I did, a little.” She stared at her glass, then said, fiercely, “You know he never could get it up for me. I thought it was because he was usually pretty drunk by the time we got to that part of the evening. We always ended up with him going down on me. He was good at oral sex. I guess he’d had a lot of practice.”
“When did you start figuring this out?” I asked her.
“I had a lot of time on my hands, sitting in my producer’s office in my little power suits, waiting for anyone to return my calls. I hadn’t paid much attention to those killings around here this summer. I mean, I was busy, and from what I heard, the victims were all gay men. I felt safe, for once. But when everyone started asking me about Joanne Schilling, I got curious about her, too. Her name was familiar, but I couldn’t think why, so one day I ran a search on the Internet and I came up with about thirty hits. Most of them were from twenty years ago. That’s how I found out she was an actress. The last one was from July, in an article about the murders. It said she was a witness who saw the killer driving out the alley where one of the bodies was found. I did some more research and figured out that the alley was about two blocks from here.”
“You put two and two together and realized that Asuras and Donati had hired her to pose as a witness living in this neighborhood?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “That’s too byzantine for me. All I figured out was for some reason they wanted me to say she lived here, and by a bizarre coincidence, she was a witness in this local murder. All I wondered is what she was doing in the neighborhood.”
“When did you realize it was more than a coincidence?”
“Nick had told me the calls for her would stop, and he was very upset when I told him the two of you had called. Very upset. Unhinged, almost. When I found out Schilling had been murdered, I started to think there was something very bad going on here.”
“When was the last time you spoke to Nick?” I asked.
“Two days ago,” she said, “after the police came and interviewed me about Schilling. I could tell they weren’t buying my act. I called Nick in a panic and asked him what I should do. He told me not to do anything, that it would all blow over soon. But he sounded kind of panicked himself, so I wasn’t reassured.” She paused. “I haven’t been to work since. I’m afraid to go back there.”
“Have you been threatened?” Serena asked.
“No, but I could see the writing on the wall. Joanne was hired to play a witness, I was hired to play her roommate and she ended up dead. Nick, who never breaks a sweat, is frantic. I don’t know how this movie ends, but I’m not liking where my character’s going.”
“It might be a good idea for you to stay somewhere else for a while,” Serena said.
Walsh got up and opened a drawer, removing an envelope. “Airplane tickets,” she said. “I’m flying up to Seattle tonight to spend some time with family.”
“I’ll need a statement from you before you leave,” Serena said.
Walsh hesitated, “I don’t know about that.”
“If you want to be able to come back someday,” Serena said, “you’re going to have to help us out here.”
Walsh looked at me. “Is that true?”
“I’m afraid so, Josey.”
“All right, but I want something in exchange.”
“What?” I asked.
“When this is all over, exclusive movie rights to your stories.”
Serena dropped me at the bottom of the hill to my house, then she and Josey Walsh continued downtown to Parker Center, where she had arranged for Walsh to make a statement to the detectives investigating Schilling’s murder before she flew to Seattle. Walsh had given us the first solid evidence that connected Asuras to any crime, albeit suborning perjury rather than murder. If the cops did their job, the charges could be ratcheted up. While we waited for Walsh to pack, Serena told me she thought she would try to use Walsh’s statement to persuade the sheriff to reopen the investigation into Alex Amerian’s murder. She was, in fact, full of plans.
“What about your boss, the DA? Won’t he be pissed when he gets wind that you’re going after his friend, Asuras?”
“I’m not going to tell him,” she said. “And hopefully, he won’t find out until it’s time to indict the asshole, in which case Jack will get some very nice headlines out of it.”
“You’ll get some nice headlines out of it, too.”
“Oh, screw you, Henry. You’ve patronized me from the very beginning. You really don’t think much of me as a lawyer, do you?”
“I’m sure you’re a perfectly competent lawyer, Serena.”
“Then what’s your problem?”
“You let yourself be used before in this case by the DA and the sheriff,” I said. “I’m not sure it won’t happen again.”
“Watch me,” she said.
“Don’t worry,” I replied. “I will.”
I came down the steps from the street to my front door. I hadn’t left the porch light on and it was very dark. I wanted to change clothes, eat something and vegetate in front of CNN for a while before calling it a night. As I fumbled with my house keys, I heard rapidly approaching footsteps behind me. I jerked around and saw a man emerging from the shrubbery, holding something in one of his hands. I swung wildly, connected with his chest and knocked him to the ground.
“Who the hell are you?” I said to the figure sprawled beneath me.
“Henry?” he panted. “Mr. Rios? It’s me, Rod. Rod Morse.”