Revision of Justice (9 page)

My legs felt weak, my stomach in turmoil. I wanted to throw up, to scream, to run.

“He has his ups and downs.”

“Is he on his feet today?”

I nodded again.

His smile was serene, his voice as comforting as a lullaby.

“Then it’s a good day, isn’t it?”

“I guess it is.”

Maybe it was the simplicity with which he was doing his job. Maybe it was his calm in the midst of horror. Maybe it was the incredible goodness I saw in his warm Filipino eyes.

Whatever it was, it helped me make my decision.

“If I could, I’d like to take his dinner up to him.”

He handed me the box, which was warm in my hands.

“Tell him Aurelio says hello.” His smile widened, his teeth white against his brown skin. “And be sure to give him a hug for me. I always give him a hug.”

“Sure.”

I watched Aurelio drive off, steering with one hand and clutching his list of deliveries with the other, an angel of mercy whose simple kindness shamed me.

Then I turned to the stairs.

Memories, images, feelings washed over me like a dark wave rolling up from a cold sea filled with corpses that all had the same face. Memories of Jacques. Images of him getting sick, scared, dying. Feelings I’d tried to keep buried for years and years and years.

As I climbed, I felt myself wading into that cold, dark sea, which I’d fled with such fierce resolution. I dreaded every step, but made my legs keep moving.

At the top, I rang the bell and waited.

Danny opened the door rubbing his sleepy eyes. His face and neck glistened with sweat from the early evening heat.

“Your dinner’s here.”

He looked at the box in my hands. I stepped back and he pushed the screen door open.

I went in and we faced each other in the small living room.

“How long have you been sick?”

“A few years.”

“You don’t look so bad.”

“Looks can be deceiving.”

He turned away, facing an unwashed window.

“Aurelio says hello.” I set the boxed meal on a side table. “He asked me to give you a hug.”

“Aurelio’s a sweet guy.”

A long moment passed without either of us speaking. Danny pushed the hair back off his face with both hands; the fading light caught the sheen of perspiration on his forearms, where the fine, dark hairs had lain down like wet grass after a storm.

I wanted him very, very badly but was frightened of him just as much, frightened by the poison he carried in his blood and semen, and by his mortality.

Finally, he said, “I didn’t have anything to do with Reza’s death.”

“I believe you.”

I said it knowing it meant nothing, except momentary relief for him; the most believable people in the world are often simply the best liars. I’d met my share and then some.

Danny turned to face me. His eyes showed a special fear some people would never understand; he appeared close to tears that I suspected were never very far away, but rarely spilled.

“I can’t go to jail. Not now. Not sick like I am.”

I moved to him and took him in my arms. I held him the way I should have held Jacques in the final months of his life, the way I should have held him all the time we were together, all the years, if I hadn’t been so selfish and afraid.

Danny responded passively at first, letting me pull him in as if he didn’t care, as if I’d forced him to surrender. In the end, though, I felt his arms wrap around me, holding on as tightly as I held him.

We had become fused in the sudden, perplexing way that the outlaw nature of homosexuality can thrust strangers together, welded tighter by the terrifying dimensions of a disease that either draws people closer or propels them forever apart.

I’d made my choice not to turn and run. What remained now was for me to find the courage to honor the unspoken promise.

Whatever Danny Romero was—murderer, saint, something in between—I felt bound to him until the end.

I took a small table on the sidewalk outside Tribal Grounds, with a pen in one hand, a tall cup of the house blend in the other, and my notebook open to a fresh page.

It was a few minutes past eight. Santa Monica Boulevard was sluggish with Monday morning traffic, cars and buses filled with men and women on their way to another numbing day of work. I looked for smiles, faces of contentment. I didn’t see many.

It felt odd, sitting here again in the mode of a working journalist—freelance yet—with decent money figuring in the deal. As much as a part of me resisted, it didn’t feel half bad. If nothing else, at least for now, I’d managed to avoid the sad parade of lemmings, marching dutifully forward to the tick of the time clock.

I sipped some coffee, bent over my notebook, and printed a list of names.

Dylan Winchester

Roberta Brickman

Leonardo Petrocelli

Bernard Kemmerman

Anne-Judith Kemmerman

Gordon Cantwell

Christine Kapono

Daniel Romero

Lawrence Teal

Hosain JaFari

Each had known Reza JaFari. With the exception of Danny Romero and Hosain JaFari, each had been at the party or left messages for him in the days and weeks before his death.

Excluding Teal, I wanted to talk to each of them when I had the right questions in place. If I never saw Teal again, it would be soon enough.

I spent the next few minutes completing a list aimed at Dylan Winchester, then called him from the pay phone outside A Different Light, whose windows displayed an array of book titles of special interest to lesbians and gays. Included were unauthorized biographies of two popular actresses, Jodie Foster and Whitney Houston. There were also tell-alls on a number of late actors—Rock Hudson, Anthony Perkins, James Dean, Ramon Novarro, Montgomery Clift—who had spent their careers concealed in the Hollywood closet and tormented, each in his own way, by the need to lead a double life. Which brought me full circle back to Dylan Winchester.

I got his voice mail and left a message.

After that, I headed downtown to the
Los Angeles Sun
, stopping to put gas in the Mustang and buy a dozen doughnuts, which pretty much cashed me out. At half past ten, I was walking into the four-story building on the south side of the central city that housed the
Sun
. My notebook was in one hand and the box of doughnuts in the other.

When I entered his third-floor office, Harry Brofsky looked up from behind his desk, where he was scanning copy for the next day’s edition.

“Don’t get up,” I said, knowing Harry had never risen for anyone in his life, not even attractive women.

“Well, well. If it isn’t the stranger in a strange land.”

“Hello, Harry.”

I set the box of doughnuts on his desk. He looked at it above his bifocals.

“You heard.”

“I heard.”

Templeton had warned me that Harry was off cigarettes, stuffing himself with doughnuts as a substitute. I could see a good twenty extra pounds on him just from the waist up. When you’re on the stubby side like Harry, there’s not a lot of places to hide twenty extra pounds.

I opened the box.

“I hope you like glazed chocolate, Harry.”

“What I’d really like is for you to take over the damn story Templeton got herself into so she can get back to what she gets paid to do here at the
Sun
.”

Templeton’s voice floated into the small office.

“Which is what, Harry?”

She leaned against the doorway, a tall, graceful package of dark beauty and keen intelligence, looking like she’d put her shattered romance well behind her.

Harry smiled with all the sincerity of a mob lawyer, and spoke in his most syrupy Sweet ’N Low voice.

“What you get paid to do, Alex, is to be my best crime reporter.”

“He showers me constantly with praise,” Templeton said, waltzing in with a file folder in one hand.

“Calm down, Harry—I’ve agreed to work with Templeton on the story. Have a doughnut.”

He reached for the box, looking slightly embarrassed.

“I guess I could try one.”

Templeton and I took chairs on opposite sides of the office, which put about five feet between us.

“How did your meeting with Daniel Romero go?”

“Dramatically.”

I filled her in on Danny’s violent encounter with Hosain JaFari, and the temporary leverage it gave me with Lieutenant DeWinter. I left out any mention of Danny’s medical condition, figuring it was no one’s business but his at this point.

Templeton opened the file folder, plucked out a legal-sized envelope, and tossed it in my lap. It was stuffed with fifty-dollar bills, twenty of them, the advance I’d requested. In the cushy old days at the Velvet Coffin—as we called the
L.A. Times
back then—it would have been a week’s pay, after deductions. Now it felt like a small fortune in my hands.

“I didn’t know if you still had a bank account, so I brought cash.”

“You want a receipt?”

“I trust you completely, Justice.”

She handed across the file folder, which was fat with notes, computer printouts, and photocopied press clippings.

“I’ve organized and written up all my notes. Interviews with several leading screenwriters and an official with the Writer’s Guild of America West. That’s the union out here for film and TV writers. You’ll also find lots of lists.”

I glanced through a few. There were detailed compendia of how-to books, audiocassettes, software programs, and magazines devoted to the craft of screenwriting; universities that taught cinema; stores and mail order houses that sold nothing but old screenplays; computer programs that transferred text into proper screenplay format; and countless unaccredited courses and workshops on how to write, pitch, and sell film and television scripts.

“Teaching screenwriting seems to be an industry in itself.”

“Everybody’s writing a fucking script in this town.” Harry pulled a doughnut apart and stuffed a ragged section into his mouth, glazing the tips of his gray mustache with chocolate. “Half my goddamn reporters want to be the next Jake Novitz.”

“A name that means nothing to me,” I said. “Along with a few others I heard in passing at Gordon Cantwell’s bash the other night.”

“We have to keep in mind,” Templeton said, “that Justice has had his head buried in the sand for the better part of a decade.”

“Big-shot screenwriter,” Harry explained. “Gets millions of bucks to write crap like
Strip Show
.”

“No more than some of the big-book authors get,” Templeton said. “Grisham, Clancy, Crichton, King.”

Harry poked the last of the doughnut into his mouth, grumbling between bites.

“At least their stuff has to have some description in it.”

Templeton glanced over at me, enjoying herself.

“In Harry’s day, writing the great American novel was the mission of every young writer. Today, it’s knocking out a script that might strike box-office gold. Right, Harry?”

“Thank you for placing me in my proper historical context, Templeton.”

“Always a pleasure.”

I scanned her notes on recent prices paid for original screenplays.

“It’s obviously lucrative.”

According to Templeton’s figures, only one percent of the WGA’s four thousand members consistently made more than a million dollars a year. Half the active members made less than seventy-five thousand. Hundreds barely made a living at all. But if you scored the big one, it paid off: Prices for original screenplays generally ranged from a quarter of a million to the higher six figures.

“The jackpot can climb as high as several million,” Templeton explained, “if an agent is able to start a bidding war for a particular property.”

“Sounds like real estate.”

“A screenplay’s not a final version like a novel or a play. It’s more like a blueprint that’s turned over to others for interpretation and revision.”

“So it really never belongs to the writer.”

“Not once it’s sold.”

“Sounds like a whore’s profession.”

“It has that element. Which may be one reason screenwriters seem so preoccupied with money.”

“It’s crazy,” Harry said, licking his fingers and reaching for another doughnut. “A million bucks for a hundred pages of writing that doesn’t even have to be grammatically correct.”

Templeton shrugged.

“It depends on what the market will bear. There are actors making more than twenty million a picture now. Movies that cost a hundred million or more to produce, with budgets going up all the time. Why should the writer be left out?”

“The screenplay drives the market?”

“The script is where it all starts. Without the right script, the star doesn’t say yes and the movie doesn’t get made. At least that’s how it works at the studio level.”

Harry talked while he chewed.

“Sounds like you’ve got a lot of good material, Templeton.”

“Thank you, Harry.”

“So what’s the fucking problem?”

She leveled her eyes on his, like a bullfighter staring between the horns. “The ‘fucking’ problem, as I believe you know, has to do with my troubling case of writer’s block.”

“Thinking through a serious magazine piece,” I said, “can be a lot more challenging than knocking out a news story.”

“Thanks so much for the encouragement, Justice.”

Harry wiped his hands on a paper napkin, leaned back in his chair, and folded his fingers behind his head.

“So how would you write the story, Ben?”

“Yes, Ben,” Templeton said cutely. “How
would
you write the story?”

“I’d start and end the piece at Gordon Cantwell’s party.”

She cocked her head skeptically.

“Frame my entire story with the party?”

“Why not? It has all the elements we need in one setting—screenwriters, agents, producers, a self-important screenwriting teacher, lots of Hollywood wannabes. Even a director whose career seems to be falling apart.”

“Dylan Winchester,” she said, perking up a little.

“There was a kind of fever at that party, spiked by ambition and greed. Anchor your article at the party and you’ll have the focus you need to tell the bigger story.”

“Fleshed out with my other research and interviews.”

“Exactly.”

Templeton was nodding now, looking much happier.

“I like it, Justice. I like it a lot.”

Harry stood, as if his mission was accomplished.

“Sounds like a fairly simple magazine piece to me.”

“Maybe more than that.”

He peered down at me, narrowing his eyes.

“You’ve also got an unexplained death, Harry—a young screenwriter who died grabbing for the brass ring. And a number of people at the party who didn’t seem terribly distressed by it.”

“I thought some kid choked on his beer at that party. You’re making it sound sinister.”

“Justice suspects foul play, Harry.”

“It’s a possibility, that’s all.”

“How strong a possibility?”

“All I know is, there were at least three people at that party who were looking for Reza JaFari. A troubled director, an uptight agent, and a frail old screenwriter.”

“Winchester, Brickman, and Petrocelli,” Templeton said.

“I heard Winchester say he wanted to kill JaFari.”

Templeton shot me a questioning look.

“Dylan Winchester threatened Reza JaFari with violence?”

“Figuratively, anyway.”

“Why am I just hearing this now?”

“Because telling you sooner wouldn’t have done anybody any good. You’d be getting it secondhand, without concrete proof. And my word, to put it bluntly, isn’t worth shit anymore.”

Harry sat on the corner of his desk, looking more interested.

“What makes you think this kid might have been knocked off?”

“I watched the people gathered around JaFari’s body Saturday night. Not only did they not seem bothered by his death, one or two seemed almost pleased. The question is why.”

“That’s it?”

“I have a few other things to check out.”

“Why do I get the feeling you’re about to turn an uncomplicated magazine feature into a major journalistic crusade?”

“I just want to do a little digging, that’s all.”

He got to his feet again.

“I never discouraged a reporter from doing a little digging. Just don’t dig too long. Get the damn piece finished so I can have Templeton back full time.”

He glanced at his watch.

“Now, if you ladies will excuse me, I have a meeting.”

“Why don’t you take a doughnut with you, Harry? You look famished.”