“WHAT HAPPENED YESTERDAY?” I asked.
Rod wrote his initials in the dust on the dining room table, the plate of food in front of him untouched. It was nearly four, but he had only been awake for a little while. He raised his shaggy head and said, “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“He raped you,” I said. “You need to talk about it.”
“Not with you.”
“What does that mean?”
“Everything happened because of you,” he said, looking away. “You made me stay with Richie. I could’ve caught AIDS from him.”
“You don’t get AIDS from breathing the same air as someone who has it,” I said. “You know that.”
“He said he knows you.”
“Who said that?”
“The man … Duke.” He rubbed the dust from his fingers. “Don’t you ever clean your house? You have some nasty mold in the bathroom.”
“What else did he tell you?”
“He said you knew I was with him. He said you told him it was okay.”
“You know that’s not true.”
“He made me crawl on the floor and beg him not to hurt me,” he said. “But he hurt me, anyway.”
“There’s a cop I want you to talk to,” I said, thinking of Odell.
“No,” he said. “I’m not telling anyone what happened.”
“This man needs to be in prison.”
“For what?” Rod demanded. “Being gay?”
“Duke Asuras is a sexual sadist,” I said. “That’s a different category altogether.”
“How do you know him?”
“He killed Alex Amerian,” I said. “And your sister.”
“He’s Mr. King,” Rod said. “From the disc.”
I nodded. “Alex was trying to blackmail him.”
“Katie, too?”
“I don’t know. She had the disc, so she knew something. Too much for her own good. That’s why Asuras killed her.”
“Was he going to kill me, too?”
“No, he kidnapped you to get something from me. A document. A confession from a man who helped him commit the murders.”
He looked at me. “Did you give it to him?”
“Yes.”
“How are the police going to catch him?”
“There is other evidence,” I said, “and if you talk to Odell, my cop friend—”
He shook his head. “No, I just want to forget about it. I never had sex before yesterday.”
“Rape isn’t exactly sex,” I said.
Not looking at me, he said, “It’s not sex when you come?”
“Orgasms are involuntary, physical reactions,” I said, conscious of how pedantic I sounded. “The fact that you have one doesn’t mean you consent to what’s being done to you.”
“He put things in my head,” Rod said.
“What things? Did he threaten you?”
He bit his lip. “No, sex things. Maybe they were always there.” He looked at me. “I don’t think I like being gay.”
“You’ve been traumatized, Rod. You need time, you need to talk to someone. I won’t make you talk to the cops, but I have a friend, a therapist who specializes in counseling rape victims. She can help you through this.”
“Yeah,” he muttered. “Maybe. Maybe so.”
“Phil gets here in about an hour,” I said, glancing at my watch. “Do you want to come to the airport with me?”
He shook his head.
“Are you going to be all right for the hearing tomorrow?”
“I’ll be fine,” he said.
On the drive to my house to the airport, I explained to Phil as concisely as I could what had happened. He was incredulous, then angry.
“We have to go to the cops.”
“He doesn’t want to do that right now,” I said. “He needs time.”
“No, not for him, Henry,” he said. “For you. What do you think his parents are going to be alleging if they find out about any of this?”
It took a moment for his implication to sink it. “That I hurt Rod? That’s crazy.”
“You have no idea how ugly cases like this can get,” he replied.
“Rod knows what happened.”
“They’ll say he’s lying to protect you or you threatened him.”
A wave of panic surged through me. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“Haven’t you heard?” he said, bitterly. “All gay men are child molesters.”
Rod, however, refused to talk to the police, even after Phil explained the necessity for it. When Phil continued to press him, he transformed himself into a sullen, taciturn adolescent. Phil finally gave up and I drove him to his hotel.
“I smell trouble,” he said, getting out of the car.
“He’s been through a lot,” I reminded him. “He’ll come through it all right.”
“I hope you’re right.”
Rod said very little to me the next morning as we drove downtown to the courthouse, but I sensed he was thinking and from his bedraggled look it seemed obvious he’d been up most of the night. Phil met us on the steps of the courthouse, beneath the frieze of justice and her minions. It was a hot, smoggy September morning. As we climbed the steps to the entrance, Phil coached Rod on what to say should he be called to the stand. Rod nodded, but his eyes were far away. We went into the courthouse and took the escalator to the fifth floor, where Judge Fuentes had his chambers. At the end of the polished hall were Rod’s parents and their lawyer.
Phil wrapped an arm around Rod’s shoulders. “Are you ready?”
Rod shrugged him off. “I’m not doing it.”
Phil yelped, “What?”
“I want to go home with my parents.”
“Do you mean that, Rod?” I asked.
“You know they’ll commit you to the Foster Institute,” Phil warned.
“Maybe that’s where I belong,” Rod said. “I don’t want to be a homosexual. Can’t you understand that?”
“This is because of Asuras,” I said.
“No, it’s not,” Rod replied. “I don’t want to be like Richie. I don’t want be like you, either, Henry, some lonely, old man living in a dirty house.”
Phil said, “We’ve gone through a lot of trouble for you.”
“I changed my mind,” he replied, with adolescent finality. “You can’t make me go through with it.” He dashed down the corridor toward his parents.
“Let him go,” I said.
“That little shit,” Wise said. “That little shit.”
“It’s his life, Phil.”
“He can fucking have it,” Wise muttered, as we watched the Morses embrace their son. “I’m outta here.”
The Morses’ lawyer came toward us, with a delighted but confused expression.
“What’s going on?” he said.
“My client’s changed his mind about the petition,” Phil said formally. “He wants to go home. Is that acceptable to your God-fearing clients?”
“Yes, yes, I’m sure it is,” he replied.
“Great,” Phil said. “Let’s go inside and I’ll make a motion to dismiss.”
I watched Rod cling to his parents like a drowning man to a raft.
The motion was granted. Afterward, I drove Phil to the airport. I pulled up in front of the Southwestern terminal. He started to get out, stopped and looked at me.
“That case was a winner,” he sighed. “We could have made new law.”
“There will be other cases,” I said. “Some other parents trying to commit their kid for being gay or lesbian.”
“You got that right. Take care of yourself, Professor K.,” he said. “And for the record, I don’t think you’re a dirty old man, or whatever the hell the kid said. I think you’re pretty hot.”
“You comfort me in my old age,” I said.
“Give me a call next time you come up to the city,” he said.
I called Richie from the car phone to tell him the outcome of the hearing.
“It’s all my fault,” he said.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Richie. You didn’t rape the boy.”
“Now he’s going to spend the rest of his life either hating himself or hating other gays,” he said. “Or both. Asuras. I’m sorry Alex didn’t shoot that fuck when he had the chance. Maybe I should. I have nothing to lose.”
“I’ll take care of Asuras,” I said.
Odell gaped at me when I finished my story. We were in his office at the sheriff’s station, the door closed. He rubbed his temples.
“Where’s the affidavit?”
I handed him the sealed envelope I had retrieved from Kwan before coming over. “This is the copy Donati intended for the chief of police.”
He took a penknife from his desk, slit open the top of the envelope and removed the affidavit. He read it slowly, shaking his head. When he got to the last page, he looked up at me, puzzled.
“You said this was a copy.”
“Yeah?”
He held up the document. “This is his signature. This is an original.”
I studied Nick’s signature and the signature of the notary public. “He must have executed three originals.”
“Are you giving this to me?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m going down to pay a call on the sheriff,” he said, raising his bulk from behind his desk. “Good work, man.”
The phone company had sent someone to check my line for taps and he was waiting for me when I returned from the sheriff’s office.
“I didn’t find anything,” he said.
“You’re sure?”
“I’m not saying your line wasn’t tapped,” he explained. “I’m just saying it’s okay now. If you have any other trouble, you give me a call.”
I took his card and went in, picked up the phone and listened to the innocent buzz of the dial tone. When I put the receiver down, it started ringing. I jumped, then cautiously picked it up.
“Hello,” I said, half-expecting Asuras.
“Henry?” It was Serena, calling from Sacramento. “You’ve got to take the next plane up here.”
“The affidavit was an original, wasn’t it?”
“How did you know?”
“I gave the other copy to Odell. We opened it in his office.”
She hesitated. “I thought your phone …”
“The phone guy was just out here. He says it wasn’t tapped. Asuras isn’t as powerful as he likes people to think. That’s how bullies are.”
“We have a meeting with the Attorney General first thing tomorrow,” she said.
“Is he going to prosecute?”
“He took the affidavit with him. He’ll let us know in the morning.”
After a four-hour meeting the following morning, the Attorney General, a trim, telegenic man with reptilian eyes, said yes.
Two weeks later, at a packed press conference, with the LA County sheriff at his side, the Attorney General announced the indictment of Duke Asuras on six counts of first-degree murder and Montezuma Gaitan on two. He concluded with a swipe at the LA District Attorney, whom the AG accused of having been corrupted by Hollywood money. That night, Gaitan drove out into the Mojave and shot himself. His decomposing body was found ten days later. The day after the AG’s press conference, Johnnie Cochran was in court on Asuras’s behalf with motions to dismiss the indictment and postpone arraignment. The court continued arraignment for thirty days in order to study the motions to dismiss.
The media went crazy. Not since the Simpson trial had there been a murder indictment against so high profile a member of the entertainment industry. Asuras’s lawyers and Parnassus’s public-relations department immediately took the offensive. They claimed Donati was the actual murderer who had posthumously attempted to incriminate Asuras in his crime. The Industry’s “creative community” also rushed to Asuras’s defense. Full-page ads began to appear, first in the trade papers, then the Los Angeles and New York Times and the Wall Street Journal signed by some of Hollywood’s elite, in which phrases like “witch hunt” were bruited about. The Los Angeles DA also joined the fray, asserting that his office had found insufficient evidence to prosecute Asuras, and suggesting that the Attorney General’s indictment was pure politics. Even the President got in on the act, piously reminding his fellow citizens of the presumption of innocence when questioned about the case at a press conference. Later, after the evidence began to pile up against Asuras, his press secretary asserted that the President scarcely knew Asuras but then he was forced to admit Asuras had spent several nights in the Lincoln Bedroom, and Republicans in Congress demanded a special prosecutor. Asuras added a half-dozen of the country’s best lawyers to his defense, but, as often happens, new evidence emerged as witnesses stepped forward and the sheriff’s department pursued the investigation with all the vigor of a political campaign. The ads stopped running, Hollywood fell silent, and then it was announced that Asuras would be taking a leave from his position in order to defend himself. The Democratic National Committee returned his contribution.
The day before his arraignment, Duke Asuras borrowed the private jet of a movie-star friend and flew to Brazil, a country that, conveniently, had no extradition treaty with the United States. By week’s end, an arrest warrant had been issued for him. This was followed by a report that, between the time the indictment was announced and his departure, he had transferred most of his wealth outside the country. A state bar committee was convened to investigate whether his lawyers had knowledge of his plan to flee. The results were inconclusive. Equally inconclusive was the Attorney General’s attempt to indict the movie star for aiding Asuras’s flight. The movie star later made a substantial contribution to the AG’s gubernatorial campaign. From somewhere in Brazil, Asuras issued a press release in which he said that he was the victim of a homophobic, right-wing, religious zealot—the Attorney General—in a country “where gay people, such as myself, are routinely persecuted by the same legal system that is supposed to protect us. In the current climate of hatred and discrimination against gays, I have no confidence that my innocence, and I am completely innocent of these ridiculous charges, could be proven. Therefore, rather than risk conviction for a crime of which I am innocent, I have chosen to exile myself from my country until such time that I can be sure, as a gay man, of receiving a fair trial. God bless America.”
“Can you believe it?” Serena said to me. I was sitting in her living room, Hekate purring on my lap, having just watched Asuras’s statement being read on TV.
“He’s trying to turn his case into a discussion of homophobia the same way Simpson turned his case into a referendum on race. I guess it’s not surprising. They have the same lawyers.”
Serena switched the TV off. “Why not go the whole nine yards, then, and stick around for the trial?”
“Because, unlike Simpson, Duke couldn’t count on any sympathetic jurors. I mean, he is right about how hard it is for gay people to get a fair hearing from the cops and the courts. You know that better than anyone.”
She picked up her beer. “Yeah,” she said, “and I also happen to know that there are death squads in Brazil that routinely murder gay men. Quite an improvement over the old US of A.”
“He can’t be extradited,” I reminded her. “I think that was the attraction.”
“So we’re going to have to listen for the rest of our lives about how Duke Asuras, who murdered four gay men, was driven into exile by homophobia.”
“Chalk it up to life’s little ironies.”
Six months after he fled California, Asuras was appointed special assistant to the minister of culture in Brazil for the express purpose of encouraging movies to be filmed in that country. His old friend, the director Cheryl Cordet, immediately announced that she would make her next movie in São Paulo as a gesture of solidarity with Asuras.
Duke Asuras was beaten to death in a Rio de Janeiro hotel by a hustler whom he’d picked up at the beach. The hustler was ultimately convicted of Asuras’s murder but, owing to Brazil’s extremely lenient sentencing laws, served a total of eight months. In handing down the sentence, the judge observed that the deceased was a homosexual and therefore at least as culpable for his own death as his killer.
Asuras’s body was eventually returned to Hollywood and interred at the Westwood cemetery, where his neighbors included Marilyn Monroe and Truman Capote. His memorial service was canceled when it became clear that no one of any prominence in the Industry intended to show up for it.
One morning a few days after New Year’s, my phone rang as I was working in my office. I picked it up.
“Hello, Henry?”
The voice was familiar, but it took me a moment to place it, because I had not expected to hear it again. “Rod?”
“Yeah, it’s me. Rod Morse.” He sounded older, almost adult.
“Where are you? How are you?”
“I’m fine,” he said. “Really good.” He paused. “I’m calling to Christian witness you, Henry.”
“To what?”
“I’m calling to tell you that homosexuality is not part of God’s plan and to beg you to turn from your sinful ways and receive Jesus in your life.”
“Is this a joke, Rod?”
“I’m deadly serious,” he replied. “You could be a good man if you would open your heart to Jesus.”
“What happened to you, Rod? Did your parents send you to the Foster Institute?”
“What happened to me is that I surrendered myself to Jesus,” he said. “You can, too. Henry, in I Corinthians 6, Paul tells us that no homosexual will possess the kingdom of God.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Rod. The word ‘homosexual’ didn’t even exist until the nineteenth century.”
“And in Leviticus,” he continued, gathering steam.
“Stop, Rod. I know all the passages, I know what they say, I know how they’re used and I’m not impressed. Did you hear Asuras was killed in Brazil?”
There was a pause. “I read about it,” he said, grudgingly, then added, “The wages of sin are death.”
“I’ll admit he did a lot of evil and there was a certain poetic justice to his death,” I said.
“You do believe in evil,” Rod said, triumphantly.
“Not the kind you’re thinking about,” I said. “Not Christian evil. That’s more of a political category than a moral one, but yes, after Duke Asuras, I definitely believe in evil.”
“Homosexuality is evil,” he said. “It’s an abomination condemned by God. He sent the plague of AIDS as a judgment on your lifestyle.”
In my appointment book was a plane ticket to San Francisco where, on Sunday, I would be attending a memorial service for Grant Hancock.
“Someday, when you realize what you’ve just said, you won’t be able to forgive yourself.”
“I meant it.”
“You can’t run away from yourself forever,” I said. “You can’t hide in someone’s Bible for the rest of your life.”
“It’s not someone’s Bible,” he corrected me. “It’s the word of God.”
“It’s a book written by human beings about a God they imagined and any God that any human can imagine is imperfect. Don’t look for God in the sky, Rod. Look at what’s inside of you.”
“I feel sorry for you, Henry, because you’re going to hell.”
“Hell’s not a place, Rod, it’s something people do to each other.”
“I’ll pray for you.”
“All right,” I said, “but hang on to my number because someday you may want to call me again. When you stop running.”
He hung up.
That afternoon, I made my weekly visit to Josh’s grave. I walked up the steps of the Court of Remembrance, past the tomb of Bette Davis to the Columbarium of Radiant Destiny. As I approached the grave, I saw a woman in late middle age, her back to me, running her fingers across the raised surface of the lettering on the marker.
“Selma?”
She turned. It was Josh’s mother.
“Hello, Henry,” she said. Her heart-shaped face was careworn and showed signs of recent tears, though it was dry now.
“Is this your first time here?”
“I’ve been coming since we got your letter telling us where to find Josh,” she said. “I thought we would probably run into each other.” She turned back to the plaque and read, “‘Little friend.’ What is that?”
“An endearment.”
“I see,” she said. “Did you have to put it here?”
“I’ll leave you,” I said. I gave her the rose I’d brought. “Will you put this in the vase?”
She took it, looked at me, seemed to thaw a little. “I don’t mean to run you off, Henry.”
“I’ll come back later,” I said. “I’m usually here on Tuesdays, around this time.”
She nodded. “I’ll try to remember.”
“Goodbye, Selma.”
But she had already turned away from me again and was replacing the wilted rose in the vase by Josh’s marker with the fresh one.
I got into the car and started down the long, winding drive out of the cemetery. A fleet of trailers and trucks turned into the front gate. I pulled over and let them pass, equipment trucks, caterers, performers’ trailers, a caravan that could mean only one thing: someone was making a movie.