The Burning Plain
A Henry Rios Mystery
Michael Nava
TO
ROBERT DAWIDOFF AND IN MEMORY OF RICHARD ROUILARD
Enormous herds of naked souls I saw, lamenting till their eyes were burned of tears; they seemed condemned by an unequal law, for some were stretched supine upon the ground, some squatted with their arms about themselves and others without pause roamed round and round.
—
The Inferno
Crime is terribly revealing.
—
Agatha Christie
Chapter 1
I
WAS SITTING
by myself at a plastic table outside the coffee kiosk in the plaza between the county courthouse and the Hall of Records in downtown Los Angeles on a warm, polluted morning in late April. It was nine-forty-two. The office workers had reluctantly straggled off to their jobs, leaving empty cups, pastry crumbs, packets of sugar and lipstick-stained napkins on the surrounding tables. A homeless woman—a swirl of rags, a baked face—rooted through the litter. She carefully wrapped the remains of a bran muffin in a paper napkin, tucked it into a soiled pocket and approached me with an outstretched hand. Her eyes were like wounds. I gave her a dollar, to the frowning displeasure of the boy behind the counter at the kiosk. The sky was metallic, as if the city was enclosed by a dome, and nothing stirred among the dusty plants and trees in the plaza. The poisonous air made my eyes sting. I sipped lukewarm coffee and glanced at the paper. There was a picture of a heavyset man in a tuxedo, standing at a podium with an oversized Oscar behind him. The caption identified him as Duke Asuras, head of Parnassus Pictures, and quoted him as having said at the recent Academy Awards ceremony, “Filmmaking isn’t an industry, it’s warfare and the whole world is our battleground.” I glanced at my watch. It was time to go to court.
The county courthouse filled three blocks along First Street with concrete and polished granite, a severe and gargantuan building in a neighborhood of severe and gargantuan buildings: the Halls of Records and Administration, the Criminal Courts Building, the Chandler Pavilion, Times Mirror Square, City Hall. Civil matters were heard at the county courthouse, and as a criminal defense lawyer I hadn’t spent much time there. Still, I never failed to be impressed by the frieze high above the Hill Street entrance that depicted Justice balancing the scales on her head while on either side of her knelt a heroically muscled male figure, each with a stone tablet he displayed to the passersby.
Lux et Veritas
was carved on one tablet,
Lex
on the other. Light and truth. Law. That was the promise, but as I stepped into the courthouse on my way to the final hearing on the disposition of my lover’s corpse, the phrase that passed through my mind was “Hell is other people.”
Taped to the door of Department 22 was a schedule of the matters pending that day before Judge Goodman. Heading the list was a will contest: In
re the Estate of Joshua Scott Mandel.
The parties were me, Henry Rios as executor of the estate and the objectors, Josh’s parents, Sam and Selma Mandel. This wasn’t the usual fight over competing claims to property or money; Josh’s worldly possessions had filled a dozen paper sacks and a U-Haul van. At issue were his written instructions that upon his death his body be cremated and the ashes scattered by his friends and family.
Josh had died of complications from AIDS at the age of twenty-nine. For five years, we’d been lovers, until he left me for another man, who, like Josh, had AIDS. After Steven had died and Josh’s own health began to fail, I became his main caretaker. Even before the last series of infections and illnesses that carried him off, Josh had insisted on cremation rather than burial. He’d advanced a number of reasons, everything from the environmental (“There’s already a big landfill problem, Henry”) to the mystical (“The Hindus believe that fire releases your soul”); but reason aside, Josh was phobic about burial. Toward the end, he’d been plagued by nightmares of being buried alive and he made me promise, repeatedly, to honor the request for cremation he had included with his will.
I’d assumed he had spoken to his parents about his wish, but when I went about making the arrangements after he died, I learned I was wrong. Not only had Josh not told his parents he wanted to be cremated, they were horrified at the prospect.
“Jews,” his father told me in our last phone conversation, “are not cremated.”
“It’s what he wanted.”
As if I hadn’t spoken, Sam Mandel said, “My son will be buried beside his grandparents.”
“I’m sorry, Sam. I promised him.”
I knew Sam had viewed his son’s homosexuality as a calamity of Biblical proportions, so I tried not to take personally his scarcely concealed loathing for me; but when he dismissed me with a contemptuous, “You promised him? Who are you? I’m his father,” I blew up.
“Now,” I said. “Now that he’s dead and can’t embarrass you anymore. You weren’t so anxious to be his father while he was dying.”
“You evil man,” he said. “You killed him.”
“Josh is dead because you made him feel so ashamed of himself he thought he deserved to contract AIDS.”
“Liar! You gave it to him.”
“You know that’s not true.”
He hung up on me.
The next day, the Mandels filed a lawsuit to remove me as executor on the grounds of undue influence. They sought a temporary injunction to prevent me from proceeding with the cremation. Included in their request was Sam’s affidavit alleging that I had infected Josh with HIV, alienated him from his family and now proposed to dispose of his remains in a manner offensive to their religion. Selma Mandel, with whom I’d sat the last vigil at Josh’s deathbed, now claimed that I had prevented her from seeing Josh after I brought him home from the hospital. Their attorney, Howard Lev, implied in not so subtle terms that a decision against the Mandels was tantamount to an act of anti-Semitism. The court granted the preliminary injunction while it determined the merits of their action, and ordered me to release Josh’s body to the custody of the medical examiner, who removed it to the county morgue.
I think we had all expected the case to be determined swiftly, but this was the year of three strikes. Every criminal defendant in the county of Los Angeles faced with a possible third felony conviction and twenty-five to life was demanding a trial, and even probate judges had been pressed into service. Our case was tried in bits and pieces over a period of six months. My dreams were straight out of Edgar Allan Poe; worm-eaten flesh, ravenous ghosts. I only had to look at the Mandels to know they were having the same dreams.
“Counsel,” Judge Goodman had said to Lev and me the last time we were before her, “surely, some compromise is possible.”
“The Mandels cannot compromise their religious principles,” Lev replied.
“Mr. Rios?”
“I’m sorry, Judge, but I’d be derelict in my duties as Josh’s executor if I didn’t follow through with his last request.”
She sighed. “All right. Come back in April for final judgment. My clerk will give you a date.”
Afterward, in the hallway outside of Judge Goodman’s courtroom, Lev said, “What have you got against these people, Henry? All they want is their son back.”
“Back from where?”
“They had relatives who died in the camps,” he chided me. “Their bodies were burned in Hitler’s crematoria. Doesn’t that move you at all?”
“Of course,” I said, “but I don’t see that what their family suffered gives them the right to shove Josh back into the closet.”
“They only want to bury him.”
“What they want is to return him to the family fold and erase all evidence he was gay. I’ve seen it happen over and over, but Josh wouldn’t have let it happen to him, and I won’t, either.”
“He belongs to them,” Lev said angrily. “They’re his family. You’re the stranger here, trying to make some political statement out of their loss.”
“The hard lesson of Josh’s life was that he belonged to himself.”
“Ah, well. Fine. I’ll see you back in court.”
“Please rise,” the bailiff said. “Department 22 is now in session, the Honorable Judith Goodman presiding.”
Judge Goodman took the bench and shuffled some papers in front of her. She was probably thirty-four, thirty-five, a decade younger than me, an attractive woman with cascading blond hair, who had presided over the case with a pained, trapped expression. Sometimes, while someone was testifying, I watched the furrows deepen in her brow and I could almost hear her thinking, God,
I hate this case.
Looking at her now, I watched the mask that descends over the features of judges about to render an unpopular decision descend over hers, and I knew I had won. I did not feel victorious. I was only aware of how cold it was in the courtroom, so cold that the reporter who sat beneath the bench with her fingers poised over her reporting machine was wearing thin leather gloves. As the judge began to speak, I glanced at the Mandels. Sam stared fixedly at the Great Seal of California on the wall above the judge’s head. Selma stole a look at me; her heart-shaped face was tired, cried-out. When I caught her eye, she quickly turned away. I could tell by the slump in Howard Lev’s shoulders that he had read in Judge Goodman’s face the same result as me.
“We are here today in
In re Estate of Mandel
,” Judge Goodman was saying. “The objectors, the decedent’s parents, are attempting to remove the executor of decedent’s estate on grounds of undue influence. I have considered the following evidence,” she continued, and listed it slowly for the benefit of the court reporter. “On a personal level, this is a troubling case, because it pits the decedent’s family against his dearest friend and companion. As a legal question, however, the result is clear to me. For purposes of this proceeding, undue influence has been defined in
Estate of Dale
as conduct which subjugates the will of the testator to the will of another. To prevail in this action, the Mandels were required to prove that Mr. Rios overcame Joshua’s free will with respect to the funerary arrangements specified by Josh in the codicil to his will dated last September sixteenth.” She paused, took a breath and said, “I find that the Mandels have not satisfied their burden of showing undue influence …”
From the other side of the courtroom, I heard Selma gasp, “Oh, oh …”
When she finished reading her judgment, Judge Goodman said to Lev, “Mr. Lev, I’m prepared to issue an order to Mr. Rios today that would allow him to take possession of the body from the county medical examiner, but I’ll refrain from making that order if the Mandels intend to appeal the judgment.”
Lev shambled to his feet. “I’ve discussed it with my clients. They can’t afford to pursue the case to the appellate level. The only appeal they can afford to make is to Mr. Rios’s sense of decency.”
“The time for argument is over,” the judge murmured. “Mr. Rios, I’m signing the order.”
“Thank you, Your Honor.”
The next morning, armed with the order, I stood in a cold room in the county morgue while a deputy medical examiner wheeled in a gurney with a body on it, covered by a sheet. He pulled the sheet back.
“This him?”
Six months of refrigeration had so drained the last vestiges of life from the blue-skinned, emaciated body that for a long minute I wasn’t sure it was Josh. His body looked like the kind of thing that was dropped from the rafters of the haunted house at an amusement park to make kids scream. There was no trace in those forlorn features of the cranky, funny intelligence that had been Josh Mandel. It was just a thing, a husk, from which Josh was long gone. And yet it was the body I had held next to mine, had reached for in lust, pushed aside in anger, comforted, loved, missed. All that struggle, all that feeling gone down the black hole, leaving nothing but this effigy.