Justice at Risk (7 page)

At sundown, I walked Fred’s golden retriever, Maggie, around the Norma Triangle, turning down her favorite streets where the smells were strongest. She shuffled along slowly, with a slight limp, and it took us a while. As I meandered along patiently beside her, I tried not to see Harry in her tired gait.

Back at the house, I brought in the day’s mail, fed the cats, then logged a three-mile hike up into the hills above Sunset Boulevard, which I finished off with a hundred sit-ups, fifty pushups, and a chicken-and-bean burrito from Taco Taco down on the corner. After a nap and a shower, I called Oree Joffrien, hoping to score a dinner date sometime in the next week. He was out, and I left a message on his voice mail, thanking him again for giving me such a valuable interview earlier in the day, and asking him to call, no matter how late.

Then I settled into the living room couch with the television on and the volume low, to make another pass through the research material for my show, making notes about the gaps I felt needed filling. It was sometime after ten when the chimes rang. I opened the door to find Peter Graff standing on the welcome mat, dressed in deck shoes, faded jeans, and a Minnesota Twins T-shirt, his hands pushed into his pants pockets.

“Peter. What a nice surprise. Come in.”

“It’s not too late?”

“Not at all.”

He stepped past me, and faced me in the middle of the living room.

“What’s on your mind?”

He shoved his hands deeper into his pockets so that his arms were fully extended, and the knobs of his shoulders raised a little. Then his eyes came up, slowly, until they found mine. His voice was quiet, sad.

“I just wondered if you’d learned anything more about Tommy.”

“I talked to a couple of friends at the
Sun
. They said they’d call if anything significant turned up.”

“A detective got in touch with me. From the sheriff’s department. Asked me some questions.”

“I imagine I’ll be hearing from him, too, since I was with you when we found Callahan’s motel room trashed.” The rims of his eyes were red. “How are you doing?”

His shoulders rose briefly, before sagging again.

“I’m OK.”

“Sit down. Let’s talk.”

We sat on the couch with a yard of upholstery between us. Maggie came over to get her head scratched, and Graff obliged. He ruffled the fur between her ears, then up under her chin the way she liked it, as she lifted her head and closed her eyes. Maggie had belonged to a young man named Danny Romero, someone close to Graff’s age, until Fred had inherited her the previous year as Danny was dying; he’d left me his pickup truck, which still sat unused in the garage, and a beautiful table he’d made by hand that I kept upstairs in the apartment, overlooking the yard.

Maggie seemed to take to Graff, and settled down on the floor by his feet, her big golden head on her paws. He rubbed her with the rubber toe of his shoe as he talked.

“This detective asked me a lot of questions about Tommy. What he was like, who his friends were. What kind of relationship we had.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That I’d met Tommy when Cecile hired him a few months ago. That he had a drinking problem he was trying to control, and this was like a second chance for him, late in his life. I told him Tommy seemed to be a loner, not much social life.”

Graff’s eyes shifted awkwardly. “I mentioned that Tommy was, you know, gay. I figured they’d find out sooner or later, anyway.”

“It’s not like he was burying bodies in the backyard, Peter. He just liked guys.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

“When did you first find out Callahan was queer?”

“Couple months ago. After we became friends.”

“Did it surprise you?”

“A little, I guess. Maybe I should have seen it coming, I don’t know.”

He stretched his arm across the back of the couch. His hand was strong and well veined, and his forearm heavily burnished with blond hairs that glowed in the lamplight like strands of fine silk.

“How close did you and Callahan get?”

His eyes were on the move again.

“Pretty good friends, like I told you before.”

“That covers a lot of ground.”

“His friendship was important to me. Losing him hurts.”

“I can see that.”

He didn’t say anything, just stared down at Maggie, who rolled on her side while Peter rubbed her chest.

“At what point in your friendship did he try to seduce you, Peter?”

His blue eyes flashed.

“What makes you think he did that?”

“It would take an awfully strong-willed gay man not to try to get your clothes off.”

“Are you saying that all gay men—”

“I’m saying that you’re a young man of extraordinary beauty, whether you realize it or not. If you happened to be female, instead of male, most straight men would be looking at you pretty much the same way. It’s a problem men tend to have, objectifying those we find desirable.”

His eyes steadied, landing on mine, staying there.

“Is that how you look at me?”

“My guess is you already know the answer to that one.”

When his eyes moved again, it was nervously, like blue neon flickering.

“You still haven’t told me if Callahan tried to get you into bed.”

“One night, in the editing bay, he said he wanted to kiss me. He asked me if it was OK.”

“And what did you say?”

“I asked him why. He said he really liked me. I told him I’d never done anything with a guy, no sex or anything, you know, except when I was a lot younger, fooling around, like most guys do.”

“And after that?”

“I said if he really wanted to, I didn’t mind. That I was open to new things, as long as he didn’t expect something more. He said that was all he wanted, just to kiss me, that he’d been thinking about it for a while. So we tried it.”

“How did it go?”

“We never really kissed. Somebody came in, one of the video library guys. He almost caught us. After he left, I told Tommy I was tired and wanted go home.”

“Alone?”

“To be with Cheryl. My girlfriend.”

“When was that?”

“Last Wednesday. It was the last time I saw Tommy.” He swallowed hard, looked away. “The last time I’ll ever see him.”

“Did you tell the cop about your relationship with Callahan?”

“Not about the kissing stuff. I told him we worked late that night. He asked me if I was gay. I told him no, that I had a girlfriend. That was about it.”

He asked me if he could use the bathroom. I pointed to the hallway and told him to take a left. While he was gone, I tried to absorb the extent of his innocence, which wasn’t easy. All around me, in the musty, kitsch-filled living room, walls were covered with framed photos of friends Maurice and Fred had lost over the years; most of the faces were male, on the shy side of fifty, men who had passed in the last two decades. Jacques’s face was among them, a man who had packed a lifetime of emotional and physical experience into his twenty-nine years, before the virus had claimed him. Graff seemed like someone from another planet.

When he came back, it looked as if he’d blown his nose and washed his face. I’d turned up the volume on the television set to hear the eleven o’clock news. One of the promos mentioned a mutilated body discovered that morning in a shallow grave in the Angeles National Forest.

“You may not want to see this, Peter.”

“No, I’m OK with it. I figure it’s going to get worse, anyway. As more information comes out.”

Toward the end of the show, after using the sensational torture angle as a teaser before two commercial breaks, the “news team,” as the Eyewitless News readers referred to themselves, covered Callahan’s murder in about twenty seconds. The only video they had was footage of a group of detectives and criminalists on a mountain roadside, clustered around a body covered by a coroner’s blanket—not enough to warrant even half a minute.

I glanced with sympathy in Peter’s direction.

“You’d think they could give the poor guy more than twenty seconds.”

“Without pictures, you don’t get on the air. That’s the way it works.”

The brief segment didn’t tell us any more than we already knew, and I did some channel surfing with the remote control to see if we could find more complete coverage elsewhere. We didn’t. As I clicked through the channels, we landed on a late-night syndicated show called
On Patrol
. Graff reached for my hand, holding it on the remote, stopping the clicker.

“Tommy worked on this show almost fifteen years ago.”

“That’s a coincidence, coming on right after the report of his death.”

“Not really.
On Patrol
is on five nights a week in reruns. It’s so popular, the station runs it twice, in the afternoon and again late at night. A new episode airs each week, on Sundays, opposite
60 Minutes
. It’s pretty hard to miss.”

“Somebody’s getting rich from it.”

“The executive producer. That’s the one who always cleans up when the show goes into reruns. No more production costs, just syndication fees rolling in from a couple of hundred stations around the country.”

I’d seen the show before. As Graff said, it was hard to miss. It was one of those so-called “reality” shows, with a camera operator riding along with the cops in their patrol cars and chasing after them as they ran down suspects. It looked like a lot of similar documentary-style shows glutting the airwaves, only maybe more exciting and better edited. I said as much to Graff.

“This was the original,” he said, “the show that started that whole reality trend. It was a breakthrough when it first went on the air. A really simple concept—a good camera guy following cops in action, and some sharp video editors to stitch it together. No actors or narrator to pay, no script, not much in the way of production costs. With almost fifteen years’ worth of shows, it’s got to be a gold mine in syndication.”

“You seem to know a lot about it.”

He shrugged it off.

“Everybody in the business knows about
On Patrol
. It’s a TV landmark.”

“And Callahan was one of the original editors?”

“That’s what he told me. Said he hooked up with them the first year, lasted into the second season.”

“Did he say why he left?”

“He didn’t talk about that.” Graff was standing. “I should get going. Thanks for letting me stop by. I guess you figured out I needed to talk to somebody.”

“What about Cheryl?”

“Yeah, she’s good about it. But, I don’t know, I just wanted to talk to you, I guess. You’ve been really good to me. The way Tommy was.”

“Time heals, Peter.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that.”

I found myself saying something to him I’d said to Oree Joffrien only a few evenings before. Even as I spoke the words, I felt foolish doing it.

“You have to go so soon?”

“I really should.”

“It’s Friday. No work tomorrow.”

His hands were back in his pants pockets, finding the bottoms.

“I’ve got to move in the morning. Cheryl’s going back to Minnesota, to a teaching job. I can’t afford to keep the apartment on my own, not with what I make.” He laughed, and moved toward the door. “L.A. prices, they’re insane.”

“You have a new place?”

“Not yet. I’ll probably take a cheap motel for a few days, till I find something I can afford.”

He opened the door. One of the cats darted in, heading for the kitchen. Maggie trotted out to pee on the front lawn. My mind was moving at lightning speed, in a furious tug-of-war with itself.

“Listen, Peter—”

He stopped on the front steps, bathed in the overhead porch light.

“There’s an empty apartment out back above the garage. My place, actually. I won’t be using it until Maurice and Fred get back from Europe in a few weeks. My landlords.”

“I couldn’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know, I—”

“Then it’s settled. The place is yours, at least for a week or two.”

“You sure?”

“It’ll give you some time to find a place, get some money together. It’ll be convenient while we’re working on the show.”

“They won’t mind, Maurice and Fred?”

I shook my head, and he glanced around the yard.

“I could help out around here. Cut the grass, pull some weeds, things like that.”

“You noticed I’ve been neglecting it.”

He flashed a smile. God, he was good to look at.

“OK, I’ll take you up on it. Just until I find another place.”

“You need help moving?”

He turned his eyes toward his vintage Volkswagen at the curb.

“Actually, I could use a little help. A bigger car. Can’t get too much into the bug.”

“There’s a pickup truck in the garage. Doesn’t get much use. What time?”