Simple Justice Read online

  He removed the unlit cigarette from his lips and rolled it thoughtfully between his fingers before finally looking up.

  “Billy Lusk came from big bucks and breeding.”

  I smiled, but sadly.

  “Wealth, social status, and the right zip code. That makes all the difference.”

  “It does make a difference, Ben. Poor people dying violently has never been big news. Whether you like it or not.”

  “What I like or don’t like doesn’t matter much anymore, Harry.”

  He ignored that and rattled off details like a salesman trying to close a deal he feels slipping away.

  “The victim’s stepfather is Phil Devonshire, the retired golf pro. Serves on half a dozen corporate boards. Mother’s Margaret Devonshire. Comes from old Pasadena money, heavy into philanthropy. Country club people, up in Trousdale Estates.”

  I suddenly felt edgy, impatient. It was nearly five. I was getting closer and closer to needing a drink. But more than that, I didn’t like having Harry here, didn’t like playing the old game with him. It served no purpose; Harry Brofsky was part of the past.

  “Why are you telling me all this, Harry?”

  He slid off the chair, went to the window, and stared out across treetops and rooftops at the Pacific Design Center: a bold glass monolith in two sections, one cobalt blue, the other money green, jutting dramatically into a sky scoured clean by the Santa Anas.

  When he spoke again, all the combativeness was gone from his voice. It was the voice of a tired man, not tired from the day but from the years.

  “I want you to put together a short feature,” Harry said.

  Chapter Three

  It would have been less a jolt if Harry Brofsky had told me he was secretly a transvestite, or planned to join the priesthood.

  “I don’t think I heard you right,” I said.

  Outside, scrub jays and mockingbirds filled the warm air with a cacophony of chirping and screeching, as they often did during morning and early evening hours in this part of town. Mixed in was the chatter of an angry squirrel somewhere up an avocado tree, and a distant horn from down on the boulevard.

  Yet Harry and I seemed frozen in a moment of utter silence.

  Half a minute passed before he turned to face me. I hadn’t seen him look that vulnerable since his third wife left him eight years before, on the day he turned fifty; she’d tucked a note under the cake and taken the dogs.

  “All I want is a sidebar,” Harry said. “A short piece to go with Templeton’s story for Friday’s paper, covering the arraignment.”

  I realized then that he was serious.

  “How long have you been delusional, Harry? Taking your medication?”

  “I don’t need much, Ben. Fifteen inches would do it. A perspective piece on gay-bashing, anti-gay violence. Why it happens, what it means. That kind of thing.”

  “Let Templeton write it.”

  “Alex Templeton’s barely a year out of grad school,” Harry said. “A good reporter, but…”

  “Straight.”

  “Inexperienced.”

  “You’ve got plenty of seasoned reporters at the Sun who can handle that piece.”

  “Not the way you would,” Harry said. “Maybe you focus on the victim, humanize him. Maybe you try to get inside the head of the killer. You can work it any way you want.”

  “Forget it, Harry.”

  “It wouldn’t take you that much time. You could wrap up a piece like that in half a day. Less.”

  “I’m not talking about time, and you know it.”

  I slid off the bed, agitated, and angry that it showed.

  “Even if I wanted to write that piece, which I don’t, you’d never get it in the paper. Not even the Sun.”

  “We’ll run it deep inside. With the jump.”

  “You can’t put my name on an article and expect it to have any credibility. Besides…”

  “I’ve already cleared it with management. If it’s handled correctly, the guys upstairs think it’s actually got some good promotional value.”

  “Running an article by a reporter who won a Pulitzer for a series he fabricated? That’s good promotion?”

  “Handled right.” Harry smiled grimly. “Up against the goddamned Times, we need every edge we can get.”

  “Readers would scream, Harry.”

  “This is a town of new faces and short attention spans. Most of our readers won’t even remember.”

  “Enough will.”

  “Fuck ’em.”

  “That’s not good enough, and you know it.”

  “Then we’ll deal with the issue directly, take advantage of it. We’ll write an editorial that recaps the whole Pulitzer mess and puts it in a new light.”

  “Let it lie, Harry.”

  His eyes followed me as I paced the room.

  “Everybody makes mistakes, Ben. These are the 1990s. We live in the era of Ollie North and Marion Barry. Michael Jackson, Tonya Harding. O.J., for Christ’s sake. If they’re entitled to another chance, so are you.”

  I whirled to face him, using my words like a whip.

  “Don’t you get it, Harry? I don’t want another chance.”

  I saw him wince, and had to look away.

  I ran a hand across my chin, feeling thick stubble. The last time I’d been at the market I’d come up short of cash, forced to choose between wine and razor blades; it hadn’t been a difficult decision. I couldn’t remember when I’d showered last, either, and wondered if I smelled as bad as I looked.

  “Listen,” I said, “I just want to be left alone.”

  Harry’s eyes scanned the unkempt room.

  “To do what? Rot in this dump?”

  If he meant to get under my skin, he succeeded.

  “Jacques lived in this dump for nine years,” I said, letting my anger out slowly, like dangerous radiator steam. “He wrote some of his best poetry in this dump.”

  Then, to make Harry squirm a little: “We made love a couple of hundred times in this dump. This was his home, Harry.”

  I didn’t expect him to apologize; it wasn’t Harry’s style. But beneath his emotional armor, Harry Brofsky was a decent man. When he spoke again, his tone was soft, almost comforting.

  “We’ll bring you back slowly, Ben. An occasional freelance assignment. No big investigative pieces, nothing heavy. Until readers get accustomed to your byline again.”

  “You’re not listening to me, Harry.”

  “Benjamin Justice.”

  He spoke my name forcefully, letting it hang there. The last time I’d heard my full name spoken aloud had been on TV and radio news reports, right after the scandal had broken.

  “Readers used to look for that byline, Ben. It meant something. It can mean something again.”

  I hadn’t seen Harry so worked up since the day the Pulitzer was first announced. Then, it had been jubilation. Now, it had the unsettling feeling of desperation about it.

  “I’m not a reporter anymore, Harry.”

  “You’ll always be a reporter, dammit.”

  “The fire’s gone.”

  “It’s never completely gone.”

  He sounded as if he was trying to convince himself as much as me.

  “Forget it, Harry. It’s not going to happen.”

  Our eyes met, longer than before. Then he sighed heavily and turned away, his shoulders slumping so that he became pear-shaped.

  I looked beyond him, out the window, and down at the house. Fred, a retired truck driver, was away on a fishing trip. Maurice, home from teaching classical dance, had decided to weed the front garden. After eating, the cats had wandered out to be near him, sitting in the shade like three overfed supervisors while Maurice toiled on his knees.

  He was somewhere in his sixties, slim and graceful, a beautiful old man. His long white hair was soft and silken, held back with a lavender bandanna. Bracelets and rings festooned his bony wrists and fingers like those of a gypsy. From time to time, he glanced appreciative
ly at younger men in shorts as they walked briskly by, heading down to the bars and gyms. It wasn’t yet evening, but warm weather drew men out of the neighborhood early and down to the boulevard in swarms, like June bugs. That’s when Maurice liked to do his gardening; he especially admired legs.

  “You must be doing some kind of writing,” Harry said quietly. “To pay the bills.”

  “Odd freelance jobs. Press releases, that kind of thing.”

  “Press releases. Jesus.”

  I wanted a drink badly now, and for Harry to be gone.

  “This isn’t just about the Billy Lusk murder, is it, Harry? Or about raising the level of reporting at the Sun?”

  He waited tensely, like a doomed man about to be executed with the truth.

  “You might make some changes at the Sun,” I said. “You might even turn it into a halfway decent newspaper, if the electronic superhighway doesn’t kill it first. But life can never be like it was, Harry. No matter how much you want to bring the old days back.”

  “You were the best reporter I ever had.”

  He turned to face me, raising his voice hopefully.

  “You always gave me more than I expected, Ben. You always surprised me. We shook the paper up. We shook readers up. It was a damn good time.”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “You’re thirty-seven, for Christ sake!”

  “Thirty-eight.”

  “Do you know how young that is?”

  “I can’t do it, Harry.”

  “I’m talking about a fucking sidebar.” Bitterness crept into his voice. “A thousand words. A few hours out of your life.”

  He looked away, reddening, and squeezed out his next words painfully.

  “A chance for us to be a team again.”

  I was reminded suddenly that the newspaper was all Harry had. No kids, no mate, no pets, not even a garden to tend. Then I realized I was probably the closest thing to a son he’d ever known, or ever would; I was surprised I’d never thought of it before.

  But there was something else, something Harry wasn’t telling.

  “What is it, Harry? Why do you want me back so badly? After what I’ve done to you.”

  He stepped out on the landing, fought off a coughing spasm, and lit a cigarette. He smoked awhile, looking north toward the hills that rose up beyond Sunset Boulevard.

  “I want you to work with Templeton. Pass on what you know. Leads, sources, document searches, interviewing, rewriting. The whole enchilada. I’ll pay you from my freelance budget. There’s not much, but there’s some.”

  “From what I’ve seen, Templeton’s doing fine without me.”

  “I thought you hadn’t been reading the paper,” Harry said.

  Score one for Harry. He turned to face me.

  “Alex Templeton has the chance to be as good a reporter as you were,” he said.

  “That’s your department, Harry. You did it for me. You can do it for Templeton.”

  “I don’t have that kind of time anymore. It’s not the velvet coffin we worked in at the Times.”

  “I’ve heard things aren’t so cushy at the Times anymore, either.”

  “I’m still working at a newspaper with a fraction of the budget, where everybody does twice the work.”

  “I operate solo, Harry. You know that.”

  “One more shot at the big prize. That’s all I want, Ben. A chance to get back on top before it’s all over. You can help give me that. But it means you have to crawl out of your hole and rejoin the world for a while.”

  I felt dread rising in me like nausea.

  “I’m sorry, Harry. I can’t.”

  I saw muscles tighten along the jawbone of his soft face, and his eyes turn to cold stones.

  Then he spoke the words that for nearly six years I’d hoped I’d never hear from Harry Brofsky.

  “You owe me, Benjamin.”

  Chapter Four

  When Harry was gone, I poured a glass of wine and drank it fast, standing right at the kitchen sink.

  I began to feel better, and poured a second glass as the six o’clock news was coming on.

  There was no hard liquor in the apartment; it was too dangerous to keep around. For self-medication, I relied on an economy jug of white wine kept cold in the refrigerator, with a reserve bottle in a nearby cupboard so that I was never without. It was a gutless drink, no soul or muscle, and I didn’t like the thin taste, all of which helped keep my consumption in check.

  The City of West Hollywood had cable television, but only if you paid. I adjusted the rabbit ears on Jacques’s old TV set and sat through a thirty-second commercial that reminded me we were at mid-summer in an election year. The spot was on behalf of U.S. Senator Paul Masterman, a former lawyer who managed to soften his notorious misogyny and homophobia each time the microphones and cameras were turned his way. I’d once interviewed Masterman about his well-documented record of flip-flopping on human rights issues, a meeting he’d abruptly terminated when my questions had turned toward his history of marital strife, specifically the charges of spousal abuse that his wife had suddenly dropped after he’d offered her an unusually generous divorce settlement.

  In the ensuing years, media scrutiny had done some damage to Masterman’s image, but he had still engineered two close reelections. He was the quintessential Nineties politician, a shrewd manipulator of public sentiment who used the medium of television especially well, which was pretty much all that mattered these days.

  “Senator Masterman,” I said, as his telegenic face appeared on screen. “And where will we find you exploiting misery today?”

  His current series of commercials was a brilliant demonstration of cynicism and ambition masquerading as public concern. Each spot found him in a new section of Southern California, delivering a potent anti-crime message targeted at a specific voting bloc, but cleverly fashioned to tap the fear of violent crime that preoccupied a broad cross-section of voters. So far, I’d seen commercials taped at a Jewish convalescent home, where a burglary and murder had recently occurred; at a family-owned Mexican restaurant in east Los Angeles, the site of an armed robbery; and at a barbecue in upscale Malibu, where money was being raised as a reward for the capture of a child molester who was preying on local children.

  In the ad airing that night, Senator Masterman stood on a street corner in South Central, the scene of a recent drive-by shooting, with his comforting arm around a weeping black mother whose young daughter had been killed in the cross fire. Like his other spots, this one had been shot quickly and cheaply, with a handheld camera, giving it the look and feel of a news report. It was another deft touch that had kept Masterman even in the polls with his opponent, in what was shaping up as his toughest fight yet to retain his Senate seat. If he repeated his previous pattern of campaigning, he would flood the airwaves during the final weeks with a series of negative ads filled with innuendo and half-truths about the other candidate, winning over as many ignorant or undecided voters as he could.

  At 5:59 p.m., Eyewitless News, as L.A. print journalists preferred to call it, blasted into my room with shameless electronic fanfare and a blitz of crass promotional teasers for the evening’s upcoming stories. Harry had made me promise to tune in. I figured I could give him that much.

  The producers led the show with the Billy Lusk murder, starting with old sports footage of Phil Devonshire, when he’d been a money leader twenty years earlier on the professional golf tour.

  Then the director cut to a photograph of Devonshire’s murdered stepson, zooming slowly in on Billy Lusk’s pretty face. It was a head shot, taken from a modeling portfolio, that showed a clean-cut young man with soft blue eyes, an upturned button nose, and a curly crown of hair tinted surfer blond. Completing the portrait was a practiced smile, about as fresh and natural as processed cheese.

  In short order, viewers were informed that the victim had died instantly from a single gunshot to the face from a .38 revolver; that it had happened a few minutes past midnig
ht in the parking lot of a gay bar called The Out Crowd; that a teenaged gang member named Gonzalo Albundo was in custody; that Albundo had signed a confession, and was being held on half a million dollars bail.

  A shot of The Out Crowd bar was followed by footage of the handcuffed suspect as he was transported from a patrol car into downtown Parker Center for booking. He wore baggy pants but no shirt, just as the detectives had found him at his parents’ Echo Park home, and he appeared younger than his eighteen years. He was of medium height but slightly built, his coal black hair cut short and a soft mustache just starting to show against his copper-colored skin. I thought I saw the potential for a handsome face, if he lived long enough for his boyish features to develop, which at that point seemed unlikely.

  Then I saw something that caused me to sit forward in the chair, and to feel my first spark of interest in Billy Lusk’s murder.

  As two detectives led Gonzalo Albundo into police headquarters, he wheeled around to flash angry eyes and shout defiantly at the camera, a brazen display of teenage machismo. But as I zeroed in on those dark eyes, I sensed that Gonzalo Albundo wasn’t feeling angry or defiant at all. He looked seriously scared, close to trembling. His outburst was an act, badly performed, and I wondered what that meant.

  There was also something else in that brief footage, something insisting to be noticed, that I couldn’t put my finger on. And when Albundo was gone from the screen, I found myself seeing the ghost of his image in my head, as I tried to figure out what I’d missed.

  Next came a taped interview with Billy Lusk’s roommate, conducted in the mid-Wilshire apartment they’d shared for three years.

  Physically, the two men couldn’t have been more different. Derek Brunheim was tall, husky, and dark-haired, with an oily, pockmarked face and a coarse beard that no razor could hope to even temporarily erase. The news report failed to note his age, and it was difficult to guess. He might have been forty, but Brunheim was one of those heavily bearded, prematurely balding men, not unlike myself, who often appear older than they are.