The Burning Plain (36 page)

“I thought the APA removed homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses twenty years ago.”

“That’s right,” he said. “Places like the Foster Institute hospitalize kids under a diagnosis of GID, Gender Identity Disorder, an approved diagnosis in the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. You know about the DSM?”

“You bet,” I said. Every criminal lawyer knew about the DSM, the handbook used by medical health professionals to diagnose psychiatric disorders. “What the hell is Gender Identity Disorder?”

“It relates to gender confusion,” he said, “the desire of a male to be a female and vice versa. Adult transsexuals have to be diagnosed with GID to qualify for hormone treatment and sex change surgery. That’s the legitimate use of GID.”

“Rod hasn’t expressed any desire to be a girl to me.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Kids who don’t conform to gender stereotypes get diagnosed with GID and off they go into places like Foster where they’re treated with heavy psychiatric drugs like Thorazine and lithium. They’re also subjected to behavior modification and in some cases shock treatment. Since gay and lesbian kids are the kids who are most likely to reject gender stereotyping, they’re the ones who fill these places. On their parents’ dime, of course. These places are raking it in.”

“What do you mean by rejecting gender stereotypes? Little boys playing with their sisters’ Barbies? Little girls who hate dresses?”

“Let me read you something out of the DSM,” he said. “One possible symptom of GID for boys is ‘aversion to rough-and-tumble play and rejection of male stereotypical toys, games and activity.’”

“These hospitals claim they can cure homosexuality by making kids conform to gender stereotypes, as if teaching your son to play baseball will prevent him from growing up gay?”

“Right, right,” he laughed. “And wearing lipstick and a dress means your daughter won’t be lesbian.”

“This is a joke.”

“I wish it was,” he said. “Gay kids get packed off to these hospitals by the thousands, and by the time they come out most of them are so fucked up that a lot of them end up killing themselves.”

“Can we stop Rod’s parents from committing him?”

Wise was silent for a moment. “It’s tough, Henry,” he said. “Rod’s a minor. His parents can pretty much submit him to any legitimate medical treatment they believe is in his best interests.”

“The kind of treatment you’re describing is medieval. How can it possibly be in his best interests?”

“Obviously, it isn’t,” Wise said. “I think it’s a form of child abuse to send a kid to one of these hospitals. The problem is persuading a court.”

“Here’s your chance,” I said. “Richie Florentino told me if you’ll take the case, he’ll finance it.”

“The problem is no court anywhere has ever declared that treating a child for homosexuality is child abuse,” Wise said. “Certainly not in Utah.”

“That’s all the more reason to act while Rod’s still in California.”

“Okay, let’s talk to the kid. Can you arrange a conference call?”

“Phil, he calls me in the middle of night after his parents have gone to sleep.”

“All right,” he said. “You explain the situation and give him my number. Tell him to call me day or night, but soon. If we’re going to save him, we need to get started now.”

“what do you mean, go to court?” Rod asked when he called at two in the morning.

“Before your parents try to send you to Utah, Phil will file a petition in juvenile court to have you declared a ward of the court and remove you from your parents into foster care, while the court decides whether they have the right to try to cure your homosexuality.”

“A foster home?” he asked, scared.

“Yes, temporarily.”

“How long?”

“Until the court makes its decision.”

“What if the court says my parents can send me to Utah?”

“Phil’s ready to appeal all the way to the California Supreme Court,” I said. “At the very least, he can tie your parents up in court until you’re eighteen. That’s the worst-case scenario, Rod.”

“I’ll be in foster care the whole time?”

“Yes,” I said, because there was no point in lying to him. “Phil asked me to give you his phone number. He needs to hear from you now.”

He didn’t answer for a long time. “Okay,” he said. “Give it to me.”

I gave him the address. “Rod, what’s bothering you? Foster care?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I don’t want to live with strangers.”

“Your parents are trying to commit you to a mental hospital. Don’t you think you’d be better off somewhere else?”

“They’re still my parents,” he said. “I still love them. I know they love me.”

“Weren’t you ready to run away to Katie?”

“Katie was family,” he replied, testily.

“I don’t know what to tell you, Rod. You wanted my help, this is the help I’m offering.”

“Can’t you just talk to them for me?”

“I will if you really think they’d listen to me. From what you’ve told me about them, they’ll probably think I’m a child molester.”

Silence. “You’re right. If they knew I was talking to you, they’d put me on a plane tomorrow. We used to be a good family, when I was little. My mom and dad were great. Now it’s different. It’s like aliens took over their bodies.”

“They might feel the same way about you.”

“I want my old parents back,” he said. “I don’t want to have to choose between being gay and my family.”

“It seems to me your parents have made that choice for you.”

“Maybe,” he said, distantly, and then, remembering his manners. “Thank you, Henry.”

“Keep in touch,” I said.

“I have to go now,” he replied. “Thanks.”

After a couple of days, I sent him an e-mail, but a week passed and he didn’t respond. I called Phil, who hadn’t heard from him either, but who counseled patience, reminding me that we’d basically told the kid his only chance was a court order out of his family.

“What I don’t understand is how he could feel any loyalty to his parents when they’re trying to do this to him.”

“He’s a child, Henry,” Wise said. “Children need to believe in their parents.”

“Too bad parents don’t always reciprocate.”

A
FEW DAYS
after our meeting, Serena Dance phoned about Asuras. It was a quarter after eight in the evening and from the sounds in the background—a TV, a child—I knew she was calling from home rather than her office.

“Bringing work home?”

“I’m working on this case on my own time,” she said.

“Are you being scrupulous or paranoid?”

She paused before answering. “A little bit of both. The DA warned me off Asuras. If he knew I was investigating him in a murder case that’s been officially solved, I’d be out of a job.”

“Would that be so bad?” I asked. “He only keeps you around for political window-dressing.”

“I prosecuted over fifty cases last year,” she said, seething. “My conviction rate was ninety-two percent. That’s better than the office average.”

“I didn’t mean you don’t do your job,” I said. “But you have to admit, you don’t get much help.”

“Joanne Schilling has disappeared,” she said abruptly.

“What? Did you talk to Josey Walsh?”

“Yes, of course. She gave me the same story she gave you. Schilling lived with her, moved out and she doesn’t know where she’s gone.”

“She’s lying.”

“Thanks, Henry, I couldn’t have figured that out for myself. Of course, she’s lying. I called her building manager. Walsh lives alone, has always lived alone. I called her back and she claimed she didn’t tell the manager because having a roommate violated her lease. Then she changed her story and said they weren’t exactly roommates. Schilling was a friend who needed a place to stay for a couple of weeks.”

“You think if they were that close, she’d know where Schilling was.”

“You’d think,” Serena said. “I tracked down an address for Schilling through the Screen Actors Guild. According to the manager of that building, Schilling’s lived there for the last four years. I decided to pay her a visit.”

“You didn’t find her in.”

“Her mail hadn’t been collected for at least a week,” Serena said. “I bluffed the manager into letting me into her apartment. The closets were filled with clothes, there was food rotting in the refrigerator. No sign of her.”

“Did you go back to Walsh?”

“Out of town until Monday, according to her answering machine,” Serena replied. “She was pretty huffy the last time we talked, and I had to back off because I didn’t have any leverage. Now I’ve got a missing person, thank God. Something to justify all this snooping.”

“What about the investigation into the car bombing?”

“There’s a problem. The detective who was on the case retired, so reopening it means pulling someone off an active investigation. I don’t have that kind of pull with the sheriff, at least not without explaining why I’m so interested, and you can imagine how that would go over.”

“It’s time for a meeting with Odell.”

“What makes you think he’ll help us? He told me he thought Travis was guilty, even with the planted evidence.”

“Because maybe he’s wrong about Gaitan’s motives in planting the evidence,” I said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Gaitan found Schilling, right? How did he find her?”

She was silent. “Good question. I assumed she just came forward because of all the publicity about the murders.”

“We can’t assume anything in this case except that what looks like a coincidence probably isn’t. How about lunch with Odell later on this week?”

“Away from downtown,” she stipulated.

“Can I call you at your office?”

“Fine,” she said, “but if I’m not there, don’t leave a voice mail. Just call back later.”

“You really are paranoid.”

“Better safe than sorry. You might remember that.”

I met Serena and Odell for lunch at Langer’s, an old deli near McArthur Park, site of the famous and incomprehensible song. There was no cake to be seen, melting or otherwise, from the restaurant’s grime-streaked windows, only the brightly dressed throngs of Mexican and Central American immigrants who inhabited the neighborhood. Sixty years earlier, this had been an opulent shopping district, the Beverly Hills of its time, where movie stars shopped at Bullock’s Wilshire and I. Magnin, then lunched at the Brown Derby or Perino’s. Some of them lived in luxurious apartments in the grandiose Art Deco buildings that still dotted Wilshire Boulevard, like the Talmadge, named for the actress who had once owned it. The shells survived, but the apartments were more likely to house refugee families from Honduras than contract players from nearby Parnassus Studio. The Brown Derby had been razed, Perino’s was shuttered, as was I. Magnin’s, while Bullock’s Wilshire, undergoing perhaps the worst fate of all, was being converted to a law school.

The neighborhood had still been vibrant the first time I came here, with Josh. After we’d moved to Los Angeles, we spent weekends driving around the city with a map and an architectural guide. One Sunday we stumbled into this district of sad, decaying wealth and cheerful, teeming poverty. We looked at five-hundred-dollar sweaters at Bullock’s, then ate fish tacos at a storefront taqueria down the street. Later, I thought, the city’s schizophrenic nature had never been clearer to me than in that afternoon of cashmere and salsa.

Serena was waiting at a booth at the back of the restaurant when I came in, intent on the extensive menu, as venerable a dictionary of pastramis, corned beef and smoked fish as Langer’s itself, a throwback to the time when the neighborhood was Jewish.

“Odell’s not here yet?” I asked, slipping into the booth.

She glanced up. “No. This menu is more complicated than the bar exam.” She set it down, looked over my shoulder, and said, “There he is.”

I felt a big hand squeeze my shoulder. “Counsel.”

Odell pushed in beside Serena, his big stomach barely clearing the edge of the table. He was wearing his mirrored sunglasses. When he removed them, I was again struck by how much of his personality resided in his eyes.

“This lunch a social thing?” he asked me.

“Not exactly,” I replied.

He smiled. “I didn’t think so,” he said. He looked from Serena to me. “This have something to do with—what did they call it—the Invisible Man killer?”

“That description was more accurate than any of us knew,” I said.

The Latina waitress came by the table and stood over us like an impatient recording angel as we pored over the vast menu.

“We found the invisible man,” I said, after she left.

“Beg pardon?” Odell said.

“Travis didn’t commit those murders alone,” I said. “In fact, I doubt if he was much more than a pretty unimportant accomplice. The man who murdered those boys was—”

“Mind you, this is just Henry’s theory,” Serena said.

“Duke Asuras,” I said.

“Parnassus Studio Asuras?” Odell asked, not missing a beat.

“That’s the one,” I said.

Odell started laughing. “You really know how to pick ’em, Henry.”

“I was right about Gaitan,” I reminded him.

“I never said you weren’t one smart fella,” he replied.

“Gaitan may be implicated in this part, too.”

“I’m listening,” Odell said.

I gave him my spiel over sandwiches and drinks, Serena occasionally interjecting a caution when she thought I was making too great a leap from fact to conclusion, but at the end she contributed her own bombshell.

“Gaitan was the cop who found Joanne Schilling,” she said.

“What do you mean ‘found her’?” Ode asked through a mouthful of pastrami.

“I thought she’d volunteered her evidence. His report said he found her by canvassing her building.”

“So what? That’s just good footwork.”

“I went through my files on the case,” she said. “As far as I can tell, hers was the only building Gaitan personally canvassed, and he went there weeks after the murder, long after your deputies had already been through the neighborhood.”

“When exactly did he find her?” I asked her.

“Two days before the lineup,” she said. “And yes, he knew about the lineup. He brought in the other witnesses, remember?”