Simple Justice (12 page)

“That’s nice, Katie,” I said. “Katie, here’s what I’d like you to do.”

She raised the notepad and poised her pen for dictation.

“I want you to contact every TV and radio station in Southern California.”

“Now hold on a minute,” Harry said.

I stepped in front of him, blocking his way, and talked fast.

“The library can provide you with a media directory, if you don’t already have one. Find out which stations covered the Billy Lusk murder. And if they did, exactly when they identified The Out Crowd as a gay bar and when they first aired the story. Exact times are very important. Got it?”

She nodded confidently but tried to look past me for a sign from Harry.

“Go!” I shouted.

She turned and dashed out.

I could hear Harry hyperventilating behind me.

When I turned to face him, he said, with forced calm, “I know there’s a good reason for all this, Ben. I just don’t know what it is, do I?”

“Templeton can tell you. This is her story, not mine.”

Templeton looked at me questioningly.

“I’m just doing some support work,” I added. “She’s in charge.”

“All right,” Harry said, turning toward her. “Why all the research, Templeton?”

She searched my eyes. I nodded, just enough to tell her she already knew the answer.

Then she smiled a little, and her face relaxed. I even thought I saw respect in it.

She laid a hand on Harry’s shoulder.

“It’s like you always told me, Harry. The story’s in the details.”

Perhaps Harry was pleased to see Templeton and me finally working as a team. Or maybe he was just tired from a long day’s labor that wasn’t over. Whatever the reason, he decided not to probe any deeper, at least not yet.

He said to Templeton, “I think you have a news brief to file.”

She grabbed her handbag and tape recorder, and winked at me on her way out.

Harry found a cigarette and wet the filter with his lips. Then he narrowed his eyes at me and poked my chest with a stubby finger.

“Watch yourself,” he said, and went out for a smoke.

Templeton’s car was in the shop, so we rode together in the Mustang across the city’s central district to Little Tokyo.

Harry was still checking galley proofs and planned to meet us there later.

As I dodged potholes and intersections paralyzed by rush-hour gridlock, I tried to untangle the curious facts and conflicting statements surrounding Billy Lusk’s murder and arrange them in my mind so I could see some kind of order, some kind of pattern.

I was fairly sure, from what Mrs. Ashburn had told me, that Derek Brunheim was lying about his relationship with Billy Lusk and what had happened the last night they’d been together. Jefferson Bellworthy had conveniently failed to mention that he was friendly with Brunheim, leaving me to wonder how their relationship figured in all this. Jim Lee was another mysterious element; he’d been uneasy when I’d questioned him about where he was the night of the murder, and admitted that he’d at least been acquainted with the victim.

Then there was Luis Albundo, the suspect’s older brother, who obviously had a violent hatred of homosexuals. Was it possible that he’d committed the murder and Gonzalo was willing to take the rap, hoping his youth and clean record would get him a light sentence? Did family ties run that deep in the Albundo family?

“Anything’s possible,” I said.

Templeton glanced over.

“Were you talking to me?”

“To myself.”

“Do you do that often?”

“Frequently.”

I slowed for a homeless woman rattling across the street with a shopping cart full of deposit bottles.

“It comes with living alone,” I said.

“I live alone,” Templeton said. “I don’t talk to myself.”

“Maybe you do, and you just don’t know it.”

She shook her head, bemused, and looked out her open window.

The high-pitched sound of
ranchera
music blared from a store along Broadway, where vendors hawked fresh fruit ices to swarms of brown-skinned shoppers. Marquees on what had once been the city’s grandest movie theaters advertised church services and swap meets, and there seemed to be a bridal shop on every other corner. Across the street, pedestrians parted as a young man fled through the crowd, while two others chased him, screaming in Spanish.

We soon became trapped behind a line of gaseous buses, pinned in by renegade taxis whose battered fenders testified to the speed with which their drivers raced to pick up fares. I swung right onto Seventh Street, heading east into a section known as The Pit, where a ragged collection of street people slept and vomited and scrounged for drugs and ranted wild-eyed outside firetrap hotels. Each time we passed an alley entrance, we were hit by the stench of stale urine.

I glanced at the handbag resting in Templeton’s lap, within easy reach of anyone outside the car.

“It might be wise to roll up your window,” I said.

She rolled it up halfway, and asked me what I was thinking about.

“What we talked about before.”

“Masterman?”

“And the others.”

Back at the
Sun
, I’d given Templeton a thumbnail sketch of the various characters I’d come across in my research, and mentioned my encounter with Senator Masterman and his son at The Out Crowd the previous day. I’d suggested we look as deeply as possible into anyone with a link to Billy Lusk, if only to enrich her background material for the follow-up pieces Harry had promised her she could write. She’d agreed to wrangle a feature story on Masterman’s campaign, for purposes of snooping.

After our last meeting in Harry’s office, and the rapport Templeton and I had finally hammered out, she’d stopped resisting me. She seemed willing now to follow my lead, or at least to work with me side by side, which included a plan we’d discussed to get her closer to the Masterman camp.

I turned left onto Los Angeles Street, where cardboard boxes lined the sidewalk, serving as nighttime shelters for the homeless. Outside the rescue missions, a few hundred men and women queued up, hoping for a meal and a bed. As I looked them over, it occurred to me how closely I had been to becoming one of them, before Maurice and Fred pulled me back from the brink.

I also realized how radically my life had changed again in the two days since Harry’s visit. I was sitting beside one of the city’s more promising reporters, on my way to do more digging on a story loaded with possibilities. That it was a story others had written off as finished made it all the more intriguing, and I could feel the old exhilaration building.

Or maybe I was kidding myself.

Maybe I was just experiencing the giddiness and confusion of a puerile crush, as I took advantage of the opportunity I’d created to see Paul Masterman, Jr., one more time.

He stood on the curb outside a Japanese import store as we pulled up on First Street, consulting his clipboard while grips positioned decorative pagodas and hanging Japanese lanterns behind him. A Japanese-American family, presumably the one whose store had recently been burglarized, stood nearby, being prepped by the director.

Templeton and I made our way across between the bumpers of idling cars, catching the attention of the senator’s son as we approached.

“Ben,” he said, looking up with a gorgeous smile that made me wonder if he could possibly be that pleased to see me.

His eyes were clear and bright under tousled hair, radiating the kind of enthusiasm I’d felt when I’d started out as a cub reporter, the kind I could see in Templeton now, and in the intern, Katie Nakamura.

Maybe that was what drew me to Paul Masterman, Jr., so strongly: a chance to rub up against the idealism and hope that had died in me long ago, in what seemed another lifetime. Or maybe it was my sense that he had been involved in a dark struggle with his father, as I had once been with mine, and had somehow emerged with their relationship, and his own soul, intact, as mine could never be.

Or maybe it was the simple, overpowering pull of lust.

As Templeton and I approached, I looked him over from behind my dark glasses, hungry for the physical details of his body. His belt was buckled at his narrow waist on the third notch, snug against his flat stomach. His necktie was loosened in a preppy way, as it had been when I’d first met him, with the collar open just enough to expose the alluring tendrils of golden hair at his throat. His sleeves were turned up halfway to his elbows, revealing bluish veins that intersected at his wrists so boldly they looked like beautiful scars. I would have given up a week’s pay just to touch him, if I’d had a week’s pay, and thrown in the Mustang for good measure.

“Hello, Paul.”

I shook his hand and introduced him to Templeton, explaining that we were on our way to dinner and had just happened by.

His father came over, as a makeup woman scurried to stay beside him, dabbing at the senator’s face with a powder puff.

“Dad, this is Alex Templeton. From the
Sun
.”

The senator’s eyes devoured her quickly, the way mine were eating up his son, two predatory men with similar appetites but distinctly different tastes.

“Forgive my chauvinism,” he said. “But I always assumed from your byline that you were a man.”

He took Templeton’s hand.

“Obviously, you’re not a man.”

He lifted her hand toward his lips. Before it got there, she gently withdrew it.

“Actually, I’m neither.” She spoke amiably, almost teasingly, with a smile that was exactly right. “I’m just a reporter, Senator Masterman.”

“Touché,” Paul, Jr., said.

“Touché, indeed,” said the senator.

His eyes roved Templeton’s face as he spoke, while sneaking forays to the shaplier territory below.

“Ordinarily, Miss Templeton, I don’t enjoy being put in my place. Somehow, you make it a pleasure.”

“Believe me, Senator, the pleasure’s all mine.”

She met his eyes with hers and kept them there.

I waved my hand toward the import store and the props being arranged in front of it.

“I see you’ve found fertile ground for another TV spot.”

Senator Masterman turned his eyes from Templeton to me as if I were a bug that needed swatting.

“As long as crime continues to strike all sectors of the community,” he said, “we’ll continue to talk about it.”

“Any niche voting groups you’ve missed?”

“I don’t see victims as members of target voting groups,” the senator said. “I see them as human beings, whose stories deserve to be told.”

“And who deserve more protection than they’re getting for their tax dollars?” Templeton asked.

“Exactly.”

The senator turned back to her, clearly pleased.

“It’s an imaginative campaign,” Templeton said. “You must be shooting a new spot each week.”

“That about right, Paul?”

“Close to that,” his son said. “With this one, we’ll have half a dozen in the can.”

She glanced around at the video equipment and crew members, who scurried about like worker bees.

“In the midst of a campaign, the logistics must be formidable.”

“Again, I defer to my son,” the senator said.

Paul, Jr., offered us his trademark shrug.

“It’s a matter of organization. Having a good crew on call. Then moving fast enough to get the proper clearances and permits from the city.”

“It might make an interesting feature,” Templeton said. “The anatomy of a unique TV campaign, framed by a single week. Gives us a nice hook.”

The senator and his son exchanged a glance, raising their eyebrows.

“What exactly did you have in mind?” the senator asked.

“A behind-the-scenes piece. Lots of color, human interest. Nothing too heavy.”

“The
Sun
isn’t known for doing anything too heavy,” the senator said, grinning. “Hell of a sports page, though.”

Everyone laughed but me, and Templeton most of all.

“Why don’t we set it up?” She demurely dropped her eyes. “I’ve never actually interviewed a U.S. senator.”

“Forget anything you may have heard,” the senator said. He slipped an arm around her shoulders. “I’m a pussycat.”

She glanced at his arm but allowed it to stay, as if her submission to his overpowering charms had finally begun.

“There’s just one condition,” the senator said.

He put his free arm around his son, joining the three of them together.

“I want to be sure you give Paul his due. He’s the one who makes all this happen.”

Crimson flooded his son’s face, and I felt the deep tug of envy again.

“We’ll make it a father-and-son story, then,” Templeton said. “A story with real heart.”

The senator beamed, and with good reason. After his nasty divorce a decade earlier, and a history of escapades with much younger women, his family-values image desperately needed enhancement. Who knew how many votes a story in the
Sun
might turn his way in a close election, particularly a puffjob written by a starstruck young reporter?

“I’ll have to run it by our campaign manager,” his son said. He and Templeton exchanged business cards. “But I’m sure it can be arranged. I’ll have a publicist get in touch with you. Now, if you’ll excuse us, we have a spot to shoot.”

Suddenly, everyone was shaking hands. My precious minutes with Paul Masterman, Jr., so carefully arranged and nervously anticipated, were gone.

“It was nice running into you again.” I clasped his hand as long as possible, savoring the contact. “I wish we’d had more time to chat.”

“Let’s be sure to make time.”

My eyes felt locked on his like radar. We must have stood like that longer than I realized, because I suddenly became aware of the silence, and of Templeton and the senator watching us.

I turned to Templeton quickly, trying not to sound flustered.

“By the way, Paul and his wife are expecting a baby soon.”

“How nice,” Templeton said, and everyone smiled uneasily.