Revision of Justice (17 page)

Within an hour of Roberta Brickman’s hasty departure, I was looking at a
USA Today
headline taped to Harry Brofsky’s office door.

G
ROUCHY
O
LD
P
EOPLE
L
IVE
L
ONGER

N
EW
M
EDICAL
S
TUDY
I
NDICATES

Harry was behind his desk, biting into an oozing jelly doughnut. It wasn’t a pretty sight.

“Still off the cancer sticks, Harry?”

“What’s it look like?”

“Severe oral deprivation.”

“Thanks for the psychoanalysis.”

“Templeton around?”

“Out on assignment—where she should be.”

He pushed a Winchell’s box toward me. I pushed it back.

“Thanks, I had breakfast.”

“So did I—twice.”

He crammed the rest of the doughnut into his mouth and sucked the sugar off his fingers, one by one. When his fingers were clean, he stared at the remaining doughnuts despairingly. He reached for one with white frosting and colored sprinkles, then withdrew his hand.

“I can’t keep doing this.”

“Maybe you should try stopping.”

His dull gray eyes peered at me over the rims of his low-slung bifocals.

“Look who’s giving pep talks on discipline.”

“Just hate to see you trade tarred lungs for clogged arteries, that’s all.”

“You here to chew the fat or do some work?”

“Why don’t you take me down to the library and get me into the files.”

“For the magazine piece?”

I nodded.

“Why don’t you give me a status report, since it’s looking like it might turn into something for the
Sun
.”

“How about talking while we walk?”

We left the newsroom and headed down a corridor of buckling linoleum that led in the direction of Data Central, as Harry liked to call the research library. We turned a corner and passed the glass-enclosed kitchen where the food editor had once tested recipes. There was no longer a food editor at the
Sun
, no recipe testing, no food section; budget cutbacks and reduced page counts had taken care of that years ago. I wondered how long the
Sun
would stay in business, and what Harry would do if it folded.

“So fill me in on this JaFari business.”

I flipped open my notebook and showed Harry a chart I’d drawn linking various names to Reza JaFari and each other. Lines connected JaFari to Dylan Winchester, Roberta Brickman, Leonardo Petrocelli, and Gordon Cantwell. The line between JaFari and Anne-Judith Kemmerman was broken and tagged with a question mark, along with the word “Jimmy’s.” Anne-Judith Kemmerman was linked to Bernard Kemmerman by a solid line, indicating their marriage before his death. The connection from Bernard Kemmerman to Reza JaFari consisted of a broken line with a question mark and the words “phone calls” above it. Other lines connected other players to each other where appropriate: Brickman to Petrocelli, Cantwell to Winchester (“softball”), and so on.

“One tangled web,” Harry said, looking at all the crisscrossing lines. “Now all you have to do is untangle it.”

“And see where it leads me.”

“You know the old axiom, Ben: When in doubt, follow the money.”

“Except for Danny Romero, these people all have one thing in common, Harry.”

“The movie business.”

“Right. And they’ve got to be in the game for something besides money. The effort’s too big, and the chances of being successful too small.”

“Power?”

“That’s part of it, sure.”

“Money equals power, Ben.”

“And what does power get you?”

“In this town? Whatever you want.”

“Most people want happiness, Harry.”

“And what the fuck is happiness?”

“I guess that depends on the individual.”

We stopped outside the door to Data Central.

“I met a screenwriter once,” Harry said. “Little guy, nearsighted, not much to look at. Insecure as hell. Worked his ass off learning how to write screenplays until he finally sold one. Had a couple of hits. Strictly hack stuff, car chase movies, but the sequels and TVspin-offs made him rich. I asked him what made him want to be a screenwriter so badly. You know what he told me? ‘So I could get some of that Hollywood pussy!’”

I laughed, loudly enough to turn the head of a librarian or two.

“I swear,” Harry said. “His exact words.”

We stepped into Data Central and took our places at the front counter. The shelves to our left held an assortment of directories, from the popular
Encyclopedia of Associations
,
Who’s Who in America
, and
Research Centers Directory
on down to the more esoteric
Celebrity Register
and
Directory of American Scholars
. Across to the right, racks were draped with several local newspapers and half a dozen major papers from across the country. In between were four round tables, where reporters scanned various periodicals or leafed through clipping files, making notes or carrying pages to nearby photocopy machines.

Two or three looked up from their work, studying me as if I were a museum exhibit.

“It’s Benjamin Justice,” Harry barked at them. “You got a problem with that?”

Their eyes went back to their work, while mine took in the
Sun
’s library. It occupied a space less than half the size of the research quarters at the
Los Angeles Times
and was operated by an even smaller staff. That had to trouble Harry. I know it bothered me seeing him there, where I’d put him.

Harry bellowed toward the rear stacks.

“Hey, Nakamura!”

Katie Nakamura came scurrying from the index drawers that rose at least a foot above her head. She was a tiny bundle of energy from Northwestern University, who had interned for Harry the previous summer and helped Templeton and me with research on the Billy Lusk story.

I noticed immediately that she’d let her hair grow out and lost much of the baby fat I’d seen a year ago, along with the moon-shaped face and oversized, horn-rimmed spectacles. She was changing from a chubby teenager into a pretty young woman, but hadn’t given up her relentless good cheer.

“Mr. Justice! Welcome back!”

“You too, Katie. I’m surprised to see you stuck back here. Shouldn’t you be out reporting?”

“I want to learn data research from the ground up, Mr. Justice. I feel it will pay off in the long run.”

“Katie’s studied the entire local, state, and national archival system,” Harry said. “Visited half the specialty libraries in Southern California. She knows database systems like I know doughnuts.”

“Somehow, I’m not surprised.”

Her face turned cherry pink.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Brofsky?”

“Justice needs a few Hollywood clips.”

“You’re working for the
Sun
again?”

“Not exactly.”

“He’ll fill you in,” Harry said. “Excuse me—I got news pages to put together.”

When he was gone, I told Katie that I was helping Templeton with a freelance magazine piece.

“How exciting!”

“Harry’s letting me use the library, if I don’t abuse the privilege.”

“What can I get you?”

“For starters, anything you’ve got on a director named Dylan Winchester.”

“
Sun
clips? Or shall I search further?”

“Let’s start with the
Sun
.”

“I’ll see what we have.”

Katie came back with a file slugged
Winchester, Dylan (Film Director)
. I signed for it and took a seat at one of the circular tables, where a few pairs of eyes ventured again in my direction. I set the stack of old clippings in front of me, with the most current on top. When I’d gone through them, I’d narrowed it down to two clips that seemed worth photocopying.

The most recent, dated not quite a year ago, detailed Dylan Winchester’s production troubles on his latest film,
Thunder’s Fortune
, a mystical, sword-and-sorcery adventure that starred Mel Gibson. According to the article, the initial budget of $65 million had soared past $90 million, due in part to adverse weather conditions, elaborate stunts, and Winchester’s demanding standards. Executives at Monument Pictures, the studio backing
Thunder’s Fortune
, had been concerned with the runaway budget; one of them, Bernard Kemmerman, had personally visited the location in England trying to get the production back on track. He hadn’t stayed long; sickness had forced his return home.

On my chart, I drew a line between the names of Bernard Kemmerman and Dylan Winchester.

The second clip was dated nearly ten years earlier, datelined Mexico City. It covered an independent production, an action picture called
Full Contact
, which Winchester had directed early in his career. The project had given the Aussie wunderkind his first American-sized budget—a mere $22 million at the time. The article itself was a standard production puff piece, in which the reporter wrote a lot of favorable things about the movie and its cast, and probably had a swell time hanging out in cantinas and getting a suntan at the producer’s expense.

It was the name of the producer that caught my eye: Bernard Kemmerman. That, and a photo of the film’s male star kissing a buxom supporting actress named Anne-Judith Carlton.

The future Anne-Judith Kemmerman?

I drew a broken line on my chart connecting Anne-Judith Kemmerman to Dylan Winchester, and added a question mark above it.

Then I made copies of both articles and handed the file back to Katie Nakamura.

“Our clips on the movie industry aren’t too good,” she said. “I could do a search of the
L.A. Times
database, although I’m told their film coverage hasn’t been anything special since the eighties. If you want to do some serious research, you might try the Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.”

“The foundation that awards the Oscars?”

“Right. They’ve got some amazing stuff over there, going back decades. The library’s open to anyone doing serious research.”

She wrote down the address, phone number, and library hours in neat, block handwriting and handed me the slip of paper.

“I need another favor, Katie—a home address for a man named Bernard Kemmerman.”

I spelled it for her and she wrote it down.

“He was a studio honcho, Monument Pictures. Died a few weeks ago. I’ve already got the obit.”

“Have you called the studio’s publicity department?”

“Not cooperative.”

“There’s the
Celebrity Register.
”

“They probably wouldn’t have more than a publicist’s or lawyer’s name, anyway.”

“That’s true. I assume you’ve tried the phone book.” I gave her a look. “Sorry, Mr. Justice.”

“This is a long shot, but maybe you can check the
L.A. Times
database, real estate section. Does the
Times
still run that fluffy column about celebrity real estate deals?”

“Hot Property. Front page, left-hand column, on Sundays.”

“If I remember right, when the news gets thin, the writer sometimes includes entertainment execs. Cross-check the column with Kemmerman’s name and see if anything turns up. They usually list the realtor.”

“I’ll search back the last two years.”

“Make it three and I’ll buy you lunch.”

What turned up was the sale of an estate not quite three years earlier to Bernard and Anne-Judith Kemmerman of a home owned by a pop singer I’d never heard of named Michael Bolton. The home was located high in the hills of Bel-Air, and had sold for $2.8 million after originally being listed at nearly twice that much.

It didn’t matter that I’d never heard of the singer. The important thing was that he was apparently well known to people who cared about such things. If my luck held out, I’d find the house listed on one of the star maps sold by youngsters along Sunset Boulevard, which gave the locations of homes owned or once owned by Hollywood’s rich and famous. If that didn’t work, I’d contact the realtor named in the item and see if I could squeeze the address out of her.

I took Nakamura to lunch at the Mandarin Deli on Second Street in the shadow of the mighty
L.A. Times
. She ate a cold San Tong chicken salad and sipped hot green tea while asking me endless questions about the world of journalism, reminding me of the zeal that had possessed me when I’d been her age, and that I’d assumed would never run out.

She was still asking questions when I dropped her back at the
Sun
.

Just before I drove off, she reminded me about the research library operated by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. As I pointed the Mustang toward a northbound on-ramp of the Harbor Freeway, it seemed more and more like a good idea.