Revision of Justice (36 page)

“Why would the murderer use cyanide? Why not a knife or a gun?”

“That’s the creepiest part, Gordon, the final, gothic touch.”

“I’m breathless with anticipation.”

“The murderer had used cyanide once before, forty-two years earlier.”

“That would be 1955, I believe.”

“When he poisoned his own mother while she was on a drinking binge—crying her eyes out for James Dean when she should have been paying more attention to her troubled little boy.”

This time, Cantwell said nothing. Pebbles of perspiration appeared on his forehead, just below his toupee, and his eyes grew more anxious.

“At dinner the other night, you described your dead mother to me in elaborate detail, Gordon. How she looked, the position she was in, what she was wearing, what was playing on the radio. But according to the housekeeper who found your mother’s body, she woke you and got you out of the house without your seeing so much as the hem of your mother’s nightgown.”

The drops of sweat had broken and started to run. Cantwell mopped his face with the back of his sleeve. He was breathing hard.

“You were a precocious, neglected, angry little boy, Gordon. You found your mother’s cyanide, the bottle she’d waved around during her histrionic suicide threats. You slipped some into her gin when she was too drunk to notice, and watched her die. Then you went up to your tower, climbed into bed with all your stuffed toys, and stayed there until the housekeeper found you the next morning, pretending to be asleep.

“Is that why your grandmother cracked up, Gordon? Why she never set foot in this house again? Did she suspect what her grandson had done? Did it make her crazy?”

“It’s your scenario, Justice. You come up with the conclusion.”

“I think she guessed what you’d done but couldn’t accept it, so she snapped. I think that’s part of the sin she wanted to burn away when she set fires all over this canyon the last couple of days. The sins of her promiscuous daughter, of her rapacious son-in-law, of their only child, born of Satan.”

Cantwell cocked his head, looking at me strangely.

“Grandmother started the fires?”

“The police arrested her a short time ago. She confessed.”

The color drained slowly from his face.

“This is the first I’ve heard of it.”

“Here’s another plot point, Gordon—the meddling reporter also found the WGA script registration slip you failed to find when you burglarized Reza JaFari’s apartment. It proves that JaFari registered the script before you did. It was registered under the title
Over the Wall
—Leonardo Petrocelli’s title.

“The copy of Petrocelli’s registration receipt—the one you also failed to get when you rifled his files—is safe with the Beverly Hills police, proving that he registered the script before either of you. If that’s not enough, there’s the pile of papers I pulled out of your fireplace a few minutes ago, linking you to both victims.

“You felt things closing in the last few days, and decided you’d better get out—even if it meant leaving behind your precious movie deal. That’s why you’ve got a passport and plane ticket waiting inside the house.”

“You must know that I have a good deal of money put aside, Justice.”

“You seem the type who plans well.”

“Enough money to make you very comfortable.”

“If I let you go.”

“Why not? What did I do that was truly so terrible? Reza JaFari was a lazy, untalented little snot. Petrocelli a sick old man whose career was long behind him.”

“Expendable.”

“We’re all expendable, Justice. A few are lucky enough to achieve enough success, grab enough power to rise above the rest. But in the end—”

“We all take the fall.”

“Look at you, Justice. You traded your integrity for a Pulitzer prize. Surely, of all people, you understand.”

“Maybe it wasn’t the prize I was after. Maybe I had other reasons.”

“You see? You’re justifying your actions. We all do, no matter how big or how small our crimes.”

“And your reasons, Gordon?”

His mouth twitched beneath his flickering eyes. The truth seemed to be gnawing at him from inside.

“Greed, I suppose.”

“I don’t think it was greed at all, Gordon.”

“Don’t you?”

“I think time was passing you by. You’d grown frantic. You saw one last chance for success and recognition, which meant everything to you. Even in the depths of your self-delusion, you realized you’d become something of a Hollywood joke—the man who taught others how to write screenplays but couldn’t make a living at it himself.”

“I have to be going, Justice.” His voice sounded hurt, constricted with humiliation. “Trust me, you’ll be amply rewarded.”

My hand was still on his chest.

“If you hurry, Gordon—”

He suddenly looked hopeful.

“Yes?”

“If you hurry, there’s still time to call the airport and cancel your reservation.”

His illusory hope vanished, replaced by the dangerous cruelty I’d seen before.

“Very clever story, Justice. Nicely thought out. You even came up with a punch line.”

“I hoped you’d like it.”

“Unfortunately, the story has one major flaw.”

“What would that be, Gordon?”

“You haven’t explained how I was able to murder Reza JaFari while I was playing center field in a celebrity softball game—halfway across town in front of packed bleachers. Not to mention in the company of several notable celebrities who know me on a first-name basis.”

“An ironclad alibi, Gordon?”

“Unless I’m mistaken, JaFari died between seven and eight in the evening. That would have been the third through the sixth innings, when I was either in the dugout, at bat, or in center field under some very bright lights. I’d been on that field, quite visibly, since warm-ups began at five p.m.”

He smiled, pleased with himself again.

“How you murdered JaFari,” I said, “is the best part of the story.”

“But that’s the part you haven’t worked out. So, you see, you’ve really got no story at all.”

He started to step around me. I moved to the side, staying in front of him.

“I’ve not only worked it out, Gordon, I’ve written it all down and delivered it to Lieutenant DeWinter. He’s on his way up here right now to take you into custody.”

“You’re bluffing, Justice. It only works in bad movies.”

At that moment, we heard the
wa-wa
of a police siren cutting through the more distant wails of the fire vehicles.

Cantwell glanced past the house down Ridgecrest Drive, where DeWinter’s unmarked car sped up the hill, followed by a black-and-white with its lights and siren going.

Cantwell tensed, looking more desperate than before, if that was possible. Then he turned his back on me to look out across the canyon.

The flames on Mount Lee had moved on, leaving the ground charred but the Hollywood Sign intact, standing like a mocking symbol of Cantwell’s collapsing dreams.

The wind had shifted yet again, driving the flames in the ravine up the steep slope toward Cantwell’s property. The sirens grew louder above the crackle and roar.

Cantwell whirled and drove his fist at my face. I slowed the punch with my forearm but he caught me on the side of the head and I went down.

I grabbed his ankle as he ran for the house and pulled him back. We wrestled and kicked, flailed at each other with our fists, clawed at each other’s eyes, rolling across the lawn toward the lower edge of the yard.

Ordinarily, a man of Cantwell’s size and condition wouldn’t have been much of a problem; a few wrestling moves, reasonably well executed, usually prove an excellent equalizer. But Cantwell was fighting for his life and it was all I could do just to keep him from killing me.

As we tumbled to the edge of the yard, he landed a kick to my face and broke free. By the time I was on my feet, he had a rock in his hand. It was a solid hunk of granite about the size of a football that I knew would crush my skull if it found its target.

As he raised the rock overhead, I kicked him square in the chest, ducking away as the rock came down.

He tottered on the edge a moment, flapping his arms awkwardly like a baby bird, then fell backward.

He hit the wet slope hard and tumbled into a patch of cactus, screaming as the needles pierced his flesh, tearing at him as he tried to pull away. He settled back, whimpering, imprisoned in the bed of thorns planted by his mother half a century ago.

“Justice!”

I turned to see Claude DeWinter moving toward me from the house, followed by Templeton and several uniformed cops.

Then Templeton was beside me, reaching for me.

“You OK?”

I nodded.

We turned to look down at Cantwell as he made one final, agonizing effort to free himself.

He braced with both arms, moaning long and low as more needles turned his hands into pincushions. Then he pushed, crying out as he struggled to his feet, leaving his toupee behind, stuck to the thorns of a fishhook cactus.

He looked up at DeWinter a moment, then at the other cops waiting to take him away.

He turned his back on us, facing the Hollywood Sign and the flaming chasm in between. Then he was moving down the slope, stepping through the cactus as if it weren’t there, ignoring its barbs and spikes, straight into the heart of the fire.

He fell as he reached the deepest part of the ravine but got to his feet, aflame from head to toe, flailing his arms like a human torch.

Somehow, he began to move again, struggling up the other side as if trying to reach the sacred ground where the Hollywood Sign beckoned like a false god.

Halfway up, Cantwell fell to his knees, raising his flaming arms skyward. A moment later, I heard an anguished cry before he collapsed and tumbled backward, into the consuming fire.

“You still haven’t explained how he did it.”

The top was down and Danny was gazing up at a sky filled with more stars than I could ever remember seeing.

“You really want to know?”

“I just want to hear the sound of your voice, that’s all.”

It was sometime between midnight and dawn. I’d forgotten my watch, and the clock in the Mustang hadn’t worked for years. Time didn’t really mean a whole lot now, anyway.

We sped north along Highway 395, the jagged peaks of the southern Sierra to our left, the barren White Mountains of Nevada ahead to our right, running parallel to the infamous Los Angeles aqueduct, which sucked the precious water from the Owens Valley in a scandalous engineering feat whose dark origins went back almost to the turn of the century.

Somewhere along this route, in a town called Independence, Charles Manson had first been jailed after directing the slaughter of actress Sharon Tate and several others in 1969. Somewhere in the landscape of sagebrush and rattlesnakes and mounds of porous volcanic rock were the ghostly remains of Manzanar, the camp where thousands of innocent Americans of Japanese ancestry had been imprisoned during World War II. There was a hot springs out there too, once sacred to the local Indians, now littered with beer cans and condoms. A lake where a group of escaped convicts had been hunted down and hanged back in 1871. A gas station, long abandoned, with the improbable name Green Acres on a swinging sign blistered by the unforgiving desert sun.

It was a haunted, lonely land that Danny and I were crossing in the predawn hours, miles of unrelieved desolation, yet oddly beautiful and calming.

“So tell me,” Danny said. “How did Cantwell murder Reza?”

He slouched in the passenger seat as I drove, propped against a pillow. He’d said good-bye to Maggie back at the house, insisting she stay behind, worried that she wouldn’t leave him when the time came.

“You remember that Saturday night, two weeks ago?”

He smiled sleepily.

“How could I forget it? That’s when I met you.”

“It was Cantwell who made the appointment to meet Reza at the house at seven, well before the party started. He never intended to meet Reza, of course—that was the plan. He told Reza to tell no one, and to come alone—they had important business to discuss. He said to grab a bottle of beer from the fridge, go down to the terrace, and wait. When JaFari went to get his beer, he found a couple of six-packs of a cheaper domestic brand and a single bottle of Grolsch. Naturally, he chose the Grolsch.

“What he didn’t know was that Cantwell had opened the hinged cap, laced the beer with cyanide, and carefully recapped it. JaFari took his beer down to the terrace as instructed and waited for Cantwell. While he waited, he got thirsty.”

“It was warm that night,” Danny said. “Reza probably chugged it.”

“Even better, from Cantwell’s standpoint. Cyanide works fast. Depending on how strong a dose it was, JaFari probably died within an hour, possibly much sooner.”

I slowed as we approached the town of Lone Pine, in the shadow of Mount Whitney, which rose 14,495 feet like a jagged tooth to the west. We passed through a stoplight or two, and then the town was behind us, with nothing but miles of open highway ahead.

“By shutting off the automatic timer on the outdoor lights, Cantwell kept the yard dark until he arrived home from his baseball game. He figured that in the dark no one from the party would venture down the hillside to the terrace before he got there with Templeton. Dylan Winchester went down anyway. That’s the movie director.”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“Winchester found JaFari’s body, dropped his cigar without realizing it, and took off in a panic.”

“But what about the beer?” Danny sounded more sleepy now than interested. “If Cantwell and Alexandra were together when they found Reza’s body—”

“Cantwell came home carrying a grocery bag that contained the other five bottles of Grolsch, hidden under a bag of chips. He made a quick stop in the kitchen, where he slipped four of the bottles into the fridge. He concealed the other one in his baseball glove, which he tucked under his arm. Then he switched on the lights in the yard. He led Templeton down the steps to the terrace, where they discovered JaFari’s body together.

“Cantwell sent Templeton to call 911. While she was gone, he threw the poisoned bottle deep into the canyon. He then dumped out most of the beer in the fresh bottle to account for what JaFari drank, and left that bottle near the body. He made a mistake when he pressed the fingers of JaFari’s right hand around the new bottle to leave prints, not realizing JaFari was left-handed.

“Cantwell knew that cyanide is often overlooked in autopsies. It might have been a perfect murder, except for an eccentric old woman with a penchant for picking up bottles—Cantwell’s grandmother.”

I looked over at Danny. His eyes were closed, his breathing deep and steady.

I’d brought along a small box of tapes and searched around in it for just the right one. I passed over some Mingus, Wayne Shorter, and Billie Holiday before I found the one I wanted. It was an album recorded in Europe by Eric Dolphy, a saintly reed man who blew notes of incredible purity and who died young, not much older than Danny was now. I slipped it into the tape deck.

“Glad to Be Unhappy” came on, a tune both sad and sweet, with Dolphy playing a flute that soared and fluttered and wept.

I tried to find courage in the music, in the exquisite beauty of it that was also disturbing and made me tremble and want to cry. A line from Walter Mosley came into my mind:
I felt something deep down in me, something dark like jazz when it reminds you that death is waiting
.

The first light of dawn was coming up over the White Mountains, tinting the valley floor and everything in it a gentle pink. I could see the peaks of the Sierra more clearly now, magnificent and ageless, cradling the pretty lake where Danny had chosen to take his final sleep.

An unpaved road appeared ahead on the left. I slowed to read the sign, then turned, heading west toward the high country.

Billowing dust trailed behind us until the dirt road gave way to rough pavement.

Danny shifted and mumbled but didn’t wake.

I reached over to brush the hair off his forehead, to touch his peaceful face, to study him a moment, hoping I could remember him like that.

I never told him I’d done some checking on his background, unearthing more of his lies. There was no Native American tribe known as the Tokona. Nor was there a village in the Sangre de Cristo mountains called Milagro, not that I could find. I wasn’t even sure he had ever ventured into the High Sierra before, except in picture books.

Danny was like a lot of us who come to Los Angeles, seeking something better to replace what we were handed. We come to reinvent ourselves, to build a new identity from the outside in, to create and occupy a role that gives us hope. Sometimes it succeeds, usually not.

Danny, in the brief time he had, may have succeeded better than most. In the end, he had created something simple but worthy and lasting. He had given and accepted love, experienced the beauty and wonder of life, touched a heart or two.

Who Danny really was, where he came from, what had driven him to flee his past and write a new one—all that remained a mystery to me. It didn’t bother me to know he had lied. I understood.

*

Around us, the morning went from pink to golden. We kept moving higher into the mountains, into cooler air and the sweet smell of pine. Danny slept on and I listened to the jazz.

I wanted nothing more than to just keep driving with him like that. Up an empty road, with the sun behind us and the high peaks ahead and an Eric Dolphy tune floating away on the wind.

Just Danny and me. Together, forever.

But life doesn’t work like that, not even sometimes.

I guess that’s why they make movies.