Justice at Risk (23 page)

“Ben, please—”

“He’s a cowardly, career-climbing autocrat who spends his life kissing management’s ass and doing its dirty work while he keeps one eye on the next open rung.”

“Goddammit, Ben!”

I heard her pleading for her job as much as anything else, and it got to me a little, even if I didn’t respect it much. I let go of Lawson, backed off a few steps. He glared at me while he put some order to his necktie.

Templeton asked him what it was he needed from Harry.

“His password.”

“To his computer?”

“I need to get into his system, move some stories he’s been working on.”

“I know his password. He gave it to me when he was out last year with the flu, when I needed to retrieve a story for updates.”

Lawson suddenly looked very pleased. “I can get it from you then.”

“Like hell. That’s Harry’s password, nobody else’s.”

Lawson curled his mouth like a tough guy, but kept his distance.

“Nobody’s talking to you, Justice.”

“He’s right, though, Roger. Our passwords are confidential.”

When Lawson spoke again, he sounded genuinely flustered.

“Alexandra, try to see this from my side. I have to shoulder Harry’s responsibilities now. He’s got several hundred inches of copy in his system that are already edited and fact-checked, ready to be moved. We need that copy ASAP. Honest to God, I wouldn’t be here bothering him otherwise. Not at a time like this.”

Templeton glanced at me.

“It makes sense, Ben.”

It troubled me that she was even talking to Lawson in a civil tone.

“It’s your call, Templeton.”

“I think Harry would want those pieces published, Ben. If nothing else, to help get the paper out. That’s what always mattered most to Harry.”

My gaze became as chilly and disgusted as my voice.

“Like I said, Templeton, your call.”

She found a notebook and pen in her big purse, wrote down Harry’s password, ripped off the page, and handed it to Lawson.

“Anything else, Roger?”

Lawson turned his eyes on me.

“I’d suggest you be more selective about your friends.”

He hitched up his sagging pants and swaggered off, a big man who had spent a lifetime trying but failing to live up to his size, and taking out his frustration on anyone he could. We watched him stop at the elevator and impatiently punch the button.

“Congratulations, Justice. You certainly handled that in a mature manner.”

“I got rid of him, didn’t I? The last person I want Harry to see when he’s allowed visitors is Roger Lawson.”

The elevator doors opened, and Lawson stepped between them. They closed, and he was gone from our lives, at least for the moment.

I loathed Roger Lawson, or at least I loathed people like him. But I couldn’t deny the truth of what he’d said: I, more than Lawson or anyone else, was responsible for putting Harry where he was—at the lowly
Sun
, which was killing him.

I had to live with that, the way I had to live with a lot of things.

I spent most of Sunday afternoon at the house, leaving messages for Sergeant Montego at Parker Center and Cecile Chang at home and at her office, trying to work on my television script while I waited for them to get back to me. That wasn’t too productive, so I pulled out the list of names I’d jotted down the previous afternoon, and went over it, again and again and again. When that failed to render much that I hadn’t already figured out, I added the name of Roger Lawson, just for spite.

Shadows were deepening inside the house, and with them an unsettled mood that comes with the approach of nightfall when there’s something going on in your life that feels dangerous and out of control, that you don’t want to think about but can’t get out of your head. The thing that most troubled me at the moment was the last thing I could escape, which was my own body and what might be happening to it. As I sat in a corner of the darkening living room, on the floor where I couldn’t be seen through the windows, I had the irrational notion that I could sense the virus working inside me, riding my bloodstream to every part of my body, attacking tissue, attaching to the T4 cells that served as the building blocks of my immune system, moving voraciously, staking its claim on me.

When the phone finally rang, it made me jump. I got up and took the call in the kitchen. It was Montego.

“Sorry I didn’t call earlier, Justice. My family and I went to church, then out to the Santa Monica Pier so the kids could go on the rides. We like to do that on Sundays when the weather’s nice.”

“Spare me your sweet family portraits, Montego.”

“You don’t sound too happy.”

“I met Charlie Gitt. It didn’t go well.”

“I warned you to stay away from him.”

“Somebody’s been talking to him, getting him riled up about me. I’d like to know who it is.”

“Sorry, I can’t help you there.”

“Because you don’t know, or because you don’t want to tell me more than I already know?”

“You OK, Justice? You sound seriously on edge.”

“Tell me more about Gitt—like how he came to be the way he is.”

“I don’t usually do psychological profiles on ex-cops.”

“Take a stab at it.”

“Why, Justice?”

“Because I asked.”

“I don’t know that much about his childhood, if that’s what you’re after.”

“Start twenty years ago, then, when he was a young cop.”

“You taping this?”

“No.”

“If you are, I disallow myself to be taped, which makes anything I say illegally obtained and unquotable.”

“Fine. Just talk.”

I heard a child’s insistent voice in the background, then a woman saying, “Shhhh—Daddy’s on the phone, sweetie.” Montego told me he was going to switch to a phone in another room. A half minute later, he picked up, and hollered to his wife that she could hang up the other line. I heard a door being shut, a click on the line, and then Montego’s voice again.

“Gitt was recruited during a period when the department was under pressure to add more minority officers. It wasn’t any secret that the LAPD was heavily white, and that Gates wasn’t in a big hurry to dramatically change that. I joined around the same time, when they needed more Hispanic faces.”

“When did you meet Gitt?”

“At the Academy. He signed up right out of college, where he’d played football. I was already married, had my degree, was thinking about going to law school. Then my first child arrived and being a lawyer was just another dream. I applied with the department, passed the tests, and started training at the Academy, along with Gitt and a few other minority guys.”

“How did Gitt get past the psychological evaluation?”

“He was a straight arrow back then, like I told you before. Clean-cut, intelligent, polite, took orders and kept his mouth shut. The way you had to be if you were black and wanted to be in the department in those days. There were two standards, one for white officers, another for black and Latino officers. If you were white and had a mouth, you were considered outspoken, maybe even brash. If you were a minority, especially black, you were considered arrogant, a troublemaker. Charlie was polite to a fault in the beginning, all smiles and yes sir and no sir. He wanted very badly to be a cop.”

“But something happened.”

“Being a black cop under Daryl Gates took its toll on a lot of officers. You could see what was going on, the way blacks were treated on the street and in jail. You could feel it in the station house, the locker room, everywhere. Some of it was subtle, but a lot of it was overt. You heard the word
nigger
almost as often as you heard the word
black
. It wasn’t much different for those of us who were Hispanic. You had to learn to keep a lot inside if you wanted to keep your job, have a decent future in the department. It could eat at you if you let it.”

“Apparently, it bothered Gitt more than it did you.”

“I had a growing family. My priorities were different. The job meant something else to me—a living, college for my kids someday. For Gitt, I think it was all he had.”

“When did he start to change?”

“In the early eighties, a few years out of the Academy. I could see it, the tension building in him. Sometimes I felt like the guy was boiling with rage, a real time bomb. Some of the black cops coped better than others. Some of them seemed to be able to ignore what was going on. Charlie was like that in the beginning, but then he changed.”

“Plus, he was gay, in the closet.”

“That had to be making the guy crazy. In those days, Gates said publicly he wouldn’t tolerate any gays or lesbians on the force. Charlie was leading a double life two times over. I think it twisted him all up inside.”

“He kept it hidden?”

“Not really. He developed a reputation for being too aggressive, taking it out on prisoners, suspects. The brutality complaints started mounting. After the Rodney King incident, he was put on the list of forty-four, which ended his work in the field.”

“The list of forty-four?”

“Where have you been the last few years, Justice?”

“Not working as a reporter, that’s for sure.”

“I guess not.”

“So explain.”

“After the King incident, the Christopher Commission ordered an investigation into citizen complaints against the department, going back quite a few years. Forty-four officers were found to be too violent to be trusted in the field. They were given the chance to take administrative or instructor assignments, or to resign. Gitt lived to be where the action was, out on the street. So he quit.”

“In case you hadn’t noticed, he’s gotten worse.”

“He’s trouble, yeah. I guess you found that out.”

“What do you know about Roger Lawson?”

“Don’t know the man.”

“But you know who he is.”

“The big blowhard at the
Sun
?”

“That one, yeah.”

“I know who he is, sure.”

“What’s his connection to Fairchild?”

“My wife’s got dinner ready, Justice. Kids are waiting.”

“The conversation’s suddenly over?”

“I didn’t have to talk to you at all.”

“Why did you?”

“I told you before, I don’t like to see people get hurt. I hope that whatever went down between you and Gitt convinces you to keep your nose where it belongs from now on.”

“I don’t think it’s going to work that way.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Justice. I really am.”

“
Adios
, Sergeant. Enjoy your dinner.”

I hung up, feeling so anxious, so restless, I thought I might crawl right out of my skin. Beneath the restlessness was an anger I hadn’t felt before, growing inside me the way it must have grown in Charlie Gitt when he didn’t know what to do with it, and it helped make a monster of him. I intended to do something with mine, which included getting some information that was long overdue. If that meant losing my TV gig, my big chance, fuck it. I had more important matters to think about now.

I picked up the phone and called Cecile Chang again. When I got her answering machine, I slammed down the phone and stalked out of the house, heading in the direction of the Powder Room.

*

Tiger Palumbo was bent over the pool table when I entered the bar, sending a solid into a side pocket with a sharp, clean stroke.

“I need to talk to you, Tiger.”

She glanced at me as she moved around the table, chalking the tip of her stick. “More to the point, I need to talk to Cecile.”

“I’m busy at the moment.”

“You remember me, from the other day?”

She bent over the table again, lining up another shot from the far end.

“I remember. I mentioned to Cecile that you’d been in here asking questions. That didn’t make her very happy.”

“I’ve been trying to reach her. She seems to be avoiding me.”

“That’s her business.”

She sent the ball rocketing toward the corner closest to me. As the ball reached the lip of the pocket, I grabbed it. I finally had Palumbo’s complete attention.

“I’ve gotten into some deep shit, Tiger. Very deep shit. I need to talk with Cecile, and I’m running out of patience.”

“Put the ball back on the table, mister. Then turn around and haul your ass outta here.”

“Not until you help me find the little woman.”

Tiger turned and handed her cue stick to a tall, long-haired woman dressed incongruously in an evening dress and high heels, then came around the table in my direction, rolling up the sleeves of her denim shirt.

There were perhaps a dozen other women in the bar, and all eyes were on Palumbo, including mine. When she was in front of me, she shoved me in the chest with both hands, hard enough to back me up a step or two. By the time she did it again, then again, I was standing in the middle of the dance floor, with a pretty good idea why.

“I’m givin’ you one more chance to catch the bus, mister, and then I’m gonna put you on it myself.”

“I don’t want trouble, Tiger. I’m in enough trouble already. But I do need some answers, and I have a funny feeling Cecile’s the only one who can give them to me.”

“Two seconds from now you’re not gonna be feelin’ so funny.”

She counted to two, then whirled with a roundhouse kick, which had been her specialty during her ring days, when she’d been considerably quicker. I caught her boot at the ankle with my left hand as it came around and coldcocked her with a straight right to the chin, the cue ball still curled inside my fist. She went down like a sack of potatoes, and stayed there.

Every woman in the bar was on me in a heartbeat, punching, kicking, clawing at me as I tried to get to the door. The one with the cue stick did the most damage, bringing it down across my back and shoulders half a dozen times or more, even getting in a lick or two across my chops when the crowd turned me around to take target practice on my face. When the woman with the cue stick was right on top of me, I saw an Adam’s apple and suddenly realized that she was a he, probably a pre-op on the hormone regimen, since the facial hair was minimal and the breasts looked real enough.

Then I was out on the sidewalk, sprinting down Santa Monica Boulevard, thankful the guy with the cue stick was wearing high heels instead of Nikes.