Limits of Justice, The (5 page)

Templeton closed her notebook.

“You’ve told us quite a lot, Mr. Shapiro. We appreciate it.”

I saw headlights coming up the canyon. Moments later, an unmarked police car pulled over across the road. Two men in unpretentious suits got out, one taller than the other. They glanced at us as they crossed the road, then went directly into the house.

“I imagine you’ll have to repeat all this for the detectives, now that they’re here.”

Shapiro looked at me, almost startled.

“You don’t suppose the two people I saw had anything to do with Miss Preston’s death?”

“You never know.”

“My goodness, I should have been more vigilant. That’s what they teach us in Neighborhood Watch. Whatever was I thinking?”

“I’d say you did very well, Mr. Shapiro, everything considered.”

He smiled gratefully, though without much conviction, and pulled the afghan more snugly around him.

*

After a while, the detectives came out of the house and began to question witnesses. The shorter one talked to me while the taller one spoke to Shapiro. Mine was a no-nonsense dick who asked questions in a terse, cool manner, like a lot of L.A. cops tend to do. When I gave him my name I saw recognition register in his otherwise passive eyes. He asked me if I was the Benjamin Justice who’d once done some reporting for the
Los Angeles Times,
the one who’d had “that little problem” with the Pulitzer.

“That would be me, yes.”

He nodded knowingly, and I figured that my observations about the crime scene weren’t going to impress him all that much, so I didn’t bother to repeat them or anything else that struck me as odd about Charlotte Preston’s death. He wanted to know what I was doing at her place at such a late hour, and why I’d gone into the house uninvited. I filled him in on the business deal I’d made with Charlotte that morning, then the details she’d mentioned about her late father’s Montecito estate. I told him she’d seemed upset during our final conversation, that I’d been concerned about her well-being. He told me he might have more questions for me later, took my phone number and address, moved on to one of the neighbors.

When I was alone again with Templeton, she studied my face a moment, rubbing my shoulder sympathetically.

“I’m sorry the book project didn’t work out, Benjamin. At least you got some cash out of it. Quite a pile of cash, when you think about it.”

“Yeah, that’s something.”

Her dark, intelligent eyes searched out my elusive baby blues.

“So how are you, anyway? Other than having to deal with a dead body.”

“Getting by.”

“You don’t look so well, frankly.”

“I think you mentioned that already.”

“You’ve lost some weight, most of your color.”

“White guys always lose their color over the winter.”

She didn’t smile.

“Seriously, Benjamin.”

“How about you? Seeing anyone lately?”

“Trying to change the subject?”

“I already did.”

“I might be.”

“Why so coy?”

“No reason. Actually, we’re supposed to meet for lunch tomorrow, over in Leimert Park. Why don’t you join us?”

“And be the third wheel? Thanks, I’ll pass.”

“Good jazz in Leimert Park.”

“If I want good jazz, I’ve got my old tapes.”

“You need to get out. I’ll pick you up at eleven.”

“Really, Templeton, no.”

“You at least owe me lunch, Benjamin.”

“How do you figure? I just gave you a good news tip.”

“And I helped fatten your bank account by twenty-five large. The least I deserve is a nice lunch at the Elephant Walk.”

“They’re serving lunch now?”

“Experimenting with brunch on Sundays. You’re getting off cheap—I could demand dinner.”

“You get smarter and tougher the longer I know you, Templeton. There was a time when I could push you around pretty easily.”

“You never pushed me around.”

“Did so.”

She tapped me on the nose.

“Eleven o’clock. Try to look nice.”

She turned back to see what she could learn from the detectives, and I climbed into the Mustang and headed back down Nichols Canyon Road into Hollywood.

*

I slipped
Kind of Blue
into the tape deck and listened to Miles Davis as I cruised along Sunset Boulevard, which slowed with club traffic as I approached West Hollywood and the Strip. I didn’t need my watch to know it was close to 2 a.m.—bouncers were hollering at the paparazzi to keep their distance, druggies staggered from the clubs looking for their keys or for sex, young women tottered on high heels or threw up at the curb, drunks got into parking lot fistfights while distant sirens wailed. It was a far cry from the elegant days of Ciro’s, Mocambo, and Trocadero, when well-dressed gangsters had mingled over martinis with Hollywood’s elite, and the prostitutes had been as pretty as the starlets. Now, you couldn’t tell the tacky prostitutes from the club crawlers, and the term “gangster” had a whole new meaning. I wouldn’t have fit in on the Sunset Strip, then or now, but I didn’t fit into the gay scene a few blocks down the hill along Santa Monica Boulevard either. I didn’t know where I belonged anymore, and it occurred to me as I listened to Miles and followed the taillights in front of me that maybe I never did, except when Jacques had still been around, opening his world to me.

I swung left at the Whisky a GoGo and a minute later was descending into the quieter haven of the Norma Triangle, then pulling into the gravel driveway on Norma Place. The house was dark, quiet; Maurice and Fred were surely asleep by now, snug under the covers, close beside each other the way they’d slept together for almost fifty years. I trudged up the wooden stairway alongside the garage and let myself into the apartment to a ringing telephone.

It was Templeton on her cell phone, cruising home along the freeway.

“When you called me just before midnight, you said something about a little dog.”

“Oh, Christ, the damn dog.”

I told Templeton I’d talk to her in the morning, hung up, and hurried back down to the car. When I unlocked the trunk, I saw the dog hunkered down on the old blanket, whimpering. I lifted it out and cradled it against my shoulder, stroking it while it licked my ear. It had been a while since I’d felt a tongue in my ear, but this wasn’t the tongue I would have chosen.

When I reached the backyard, I unlatched the gate and set the dog inside on the grass, where it squatted ladylike and took a long pee, revealing its gender. After that, with the dog following, I climbed back up the steps, which seemed twice as steep, my exhaustion was so deep. In the kitchen, I found an old Tupperware bowl whose lid had been lost to the ages, filled it with water, set it on the floor. While the dog lapped at it, I inspected three metal tags clustered in a jangle on her collar. One was a county registration tag. Another was stamped with Charlotte Preston’s address and phone number. The third, shaped like a heart, told me the dog’s name was Mei-Ling. It also bore these words:
For Charlotte, with love, Marty.

When the dog was finished drinking, I turned off the light and flopped down on the bed fully dressed. A moment later, she was up and sitting on my chest, fixing me with her dark, bulging eyes.

“Be a good girl, Mei-Ling, and go to sleep.”

She leaped forward and licked me on the mouth. Then she settled down beside me on the spread, curled up in a furry ball, and went to sleep.

As usual, I didn’t. I lay awake, waiting for the suicide tapes to start playing. I had no immediate plans to end my life, nothing so dramatic as that, but the tapes gave me a sense of calm and order in the midst of the chaos that constantly swirled and banged around inside my skull. If things went badly, horribly, as they had for so many of my friends, I figured I would always have one of the suicide scenarios to fall back on as a way out. Maybe the way Charlotte Preston had made her exit, if that’s what had actually happened.

Tonight, though, before the tapes began running, a stunning new thought struck me out of the early morning darkness. Once again, I’d turned one of those unexpected cerebral corners and found another monster lurking: Now that I was infected with the virus, I would never father a child. I was forty-one and had not seriously considered the desire to be a father, but now that it was an impossibility, now that the option had been taken from me, the finality of the loss caused a silent wail to reverberate inside me.

There was always something new about the disease that sprang out of nowhere and clutched at you, then ate away at you if you gave it half a chance. Dependence on medications, their side effects and insane cost, destitution, physical deterioration, hospitals, pain, helplessness. There was always something.

Tonight it was the irrefutable fact that I would never father a child, now that my semen was poisoned with HIV: That was what I thought about that night, hour after hour, while Charlotte Preston’s little dog slept beside me.

I drifted off to sleep just before dawn and was awakened a few hours later by a tiny pink tongue scrubbing my face.

As Mei-Ling lathered my stubble with canine saliva, I was reminded that Charlotte Preston was dead and that her dog was illegally in my possession. The troubling swirl of events from the day before came back all at once, including the image of Charlotte’s corpse on the bed with its frozen grimace and amber eyes stunned with the horror of her final moments. Seconds after that, the powerful urge to void my bowels sent me fleeing to the bathroom. It had become a habit upon waking, a sudden rumbling of the stomach and a flash of diarrhea as regular as a morning train pulling in.

Mei-Ling sat outside the open door, whining and watching me with plaintive, froggy eyes. After I’d flushed, she trotted beside me into the kitchen and started leaping with excitement when she saw my refrigerator. Apparently, to a dog, every refrigerator is similar and recognizable, no matter how old, battered, or rusted. She began to bark as I pulled open the door—short, sharp, unrelenting demands for food that made fingernails dragging across a blackboard seem like Beethoven by comparison. I told her to shut up. She barked louder, faster.

There was nothing in my fridge suitable for human consumption, let alone for a dog of Mei-Ling’s background and temperament. I went straightaway down to the house with Mei-Ling scampering after me, her nubby legs negotiating the wooden steps with a kind of accelerated waddle. While I knocked on the back door, she spread her hind legs on the grass and peed. The door opened and Maurice was there, freshly showered in a silk Japanese kimono, his long white hair drawn back into a ponytail and bound with a lavender plastic barrette. With an assortment of gemstone rings on his fingers, and a dozen bracelets of silver and gold on his slender wrists, Maurice was a wonderful mix of crafts and cultures, slim and artful by self-design. Behind him, reading the sports page at the kitchen table in his boxer shorts, Fred was just as beefy and sloppy through ambivalence and self-neglect. They were the classic married couple, strengths and weaknesses, contrasts and balances, yin and yang, and somewhere in the middle a long-term love and respect that had kept them together as steadfast companions.

“Benjamin! How nice to see you up and about!”

“Good morning, Maurice.”

He wagged a finger at me.

“Frankly, we’ve been worried about you.”

“Stop worrying, I’m doing fine.”

That drew a more skeptical look.

“I do have a little problem, though.”

I glanced over my shoulder at Mei-Ling, who trotted across the patio, sniffed once at Maggie’s bowl of dry food, and just as quickly turned up her nose.

“My goodness, a darling Lhasa apso! I didn’t realize you were fond of small dogs.”

“I’m not. That’s the problem.”

Mei-Ling glanced up at Maurice in the doorway, then bounded past him into the house as if she owned it.

“Her name’s Mei-Ling, by the way.”

I explained the situation, mentioning Charlotte Preston’s death and how I happened to have Mei-Ling by accident.

“Not to worry, Benjamin. She can stay awhile, until she’s placed with one of Miss Preston’s friends or relatives. I’m sure Maggie will share the yard and house.”

“Two females?”

“Maggie’s in her elder years. She just wants company now.” Maurice winked. “Kind of like Fred and me, just two old maids fussing about. Though please don’t tell him I referred to him as an old maid. He still thinks he’s the gay version of Mickey Mantle.”

Maurice invited me in for breakfast, but I told him I had plans.

“You’re going out?”

“Templeton and I have a lunch date.”

He clapped his hands, causing his bracelets to jingle.

“Splendid, Benjamin!”

“It’s just this once. I owe Templeton a meal.”

Maurice pursed his lips primly.

“Of course—just this once.”

I reached into my pants pocket, pulled out the roll of hundred-dollar bills, peeled off five. “Here’s the rent for the month. It looks like I’ll be solvent for a while.”

“Not a problem, Benjamin. You know you always have a home here, whatever your circumstances.”

“You and Fred have been awfully indulgent with me.”

He pushed at my chest with a playful hand.

“Nonsense, you’re family, you know that.” His tone became more formal, his manner a tad proper. “Though we were relieved when all those tequila bottles stopped filling up the recycling bin.”

From inside the house, Mei-Ling’s sharp bark could be heard, then Fred’s gruff voice asking what the hell had gotten into the kitchen. I weeded out some smaller bills, change from my lunch the day before, and pressed them into Maurice’s hand.

“Here’s a little extra for dog food. Get a big bone for Maggie while you’re at it. And one for Fred to keep him happy.”

The sly wink again.

“Oh, he knows where to go for that when he wants it.”

Mei-Ling reappeared in the doorway. She sat on her haunches, looking up with pleading eyes, as if she were starving and on the verge of collapse. When she began whimpering, Maurice reached down and picked her up to quiet her.

“I expect I’ll be making a trip to the pet store. These little pedigrees are notoriously picky eaters, especially if they’ve been spoiled.”

“I have a feeling this one has.”

Frown lines formed on Maurice’s smooth old face.

“You say Mei-Ling’s mommy made her transition last night?”

“She may have had some help crossing the threshold.”

I filled him in on my odd, brief relationship with Charlotte Preston.

“Oh, my, not another murder. You seem to have a knack for sniffing them out, don’t you, Benjamin?”

“It’s a gift, I guess.”

*

After a shower and change of clothes, I called downtown to Parker Center and left a message for the detective who had questioned me the previous evening. I alerted him to the fact that I had Charlotte Preston’s dog by mistake, and asked him to send someone to pick her up as soon as it was convenient, though preferably sooner. After that I went out front to stand on the curb and wait for Templeton.

She zipped up a few minutes later in her new Cabriolet, with the top down and her sound system offering up a ballad delivered in a deep, elegant voice that could only belong to the late Joe Williams. The roiling clouds and gusty winds from the night before were gone, and we sped off into a bright, cloudless Sunday morning with a slight breeze tempering the air. The Porsche was engineered for high compression and fine-tuned like a good race car, and Templeton knew how to drive it, letting the engine wind up tight to get some torque before she shifted, keeping the pedal down and the car moving at a good clip. We hummed along in a southeasterly direction by way of San Vicente Boulevard until we reached Crenshaw Boulevard, where we hung a right and headed into the largely black Crenshaw district. Most of the residents seemed to be in church or home sleeping off the excesses of the night before, because the streets were largely clear of traffic.

Worried that Fred would soon tire of Mei-Ling, I spent the time trying to convince Templeton that she and the dog were perfect for each other.

“You can put her on the couch in your fancy condo like a new throw pillow. All you have to do is fluff her up and rearrange her once in a while.”

“She sounds adorable, Benjamin. But she’s just been through a terrible trauma. She needs lots of attention. I’m putting in sixty hours a week with the new job. It wouldn’t be fair to neglect her like that.”

“Maybe your new boyfriend can take her.”

We’d reached a red light at Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, and Templeton glanced over with a look I didn’t like.

“I suppose I should have told you before.”

“Told me what?”

“The man we’re meeting for lunch isn’t exactly my boyfriend.”

“What exactly is he?”

“Promise you won’t get mad.”

“Only with my fingers crossed.”

“We’re meeting Oree.”

The name was like ice water thrown in my face.

“Oree Joffrien?”

Templeton nodded and looked quickly away as the light turned green, then pulled the Porsche out. I waited to speak until she’d shifted into third so she could hear me over the whine of the gear box.

“You tricked me, Templeton. You lied.”

“I did nothing of the sort.”

“You told me we were having lunch with someone you’ve been seeing.”

“I have been seeing Oree. We’re just not dating, in the usual sense.”

Oree Joffrien was a UCLA anthropology professor Templeton had introduced me to the previous year when my life had been more intact and promising. It had been Oree who’d helped me get a job writing my first TV documentary, an hour episode on the bareback sex issue that PBS had deemed too controversial to air. We’d shared a chaste but flirtatious relationship before I’d tested positive for the virus and turned from Oree to Jose Cuervo for solace. Oree had offered to be there for me when I’d needed him most, and I owed him an apology at the very least. But I also felt I had the right to choose when and how that was taken care of, without Templeton manipulating events, as she was prone to do where my messy life was concerned.

“Suppose I ask you to turn the car around and take me home.”

She slowed for another red light, looking over at me.

“Suppose you stop acting like a brat and realize what a great favor I’m doing you.”

“Did I ask you for any favors?”

“You certainly cashed that check from Charlotte Preston quickly enough.”

“So now I owe you my life?”

In the crosswalk, a large black woman carrying a Bible herded several small black children in their Sunday best through the intersection. Each little girl was in braided pigtails bound with powder-blue bows, each little boy in a yellow bow tie, and all of them were wearing patent leather shoes so shiny they seemed to sparkle.

“Oree’s a great person, Ben.”

“Yes, I know.”

“And he cares about you, in case you didn’t notice.”

“He could do much better, Templeton. He’s in a whole other league. He doesn’t need me dragging him down.”

“Why don’t you let him decide what he needs?”

“The way you do me?”

She set her dark eyes furiously forward, waiting for the light to change.

“You can be so fucking obstinate and ungrateful, if you’ll pardon my Sunday-morning French.”

The green light came on and she shot through the intersection so fast my head jerked back. Nothing was said during the next minute. As Leimert Park came into view, Templeton slowed and glanced over, her voice more conciliatory.

“OK, maybe I stretched the truth just a teensie-weensie, but it was for your own good. Oree Joffrien is the best thing that ever happened to you.”

She swung left onto Forty-third Place in front of a little pocket park that was bordered by four streets and shaped like a lopsided rectangle, all spruced up with a new fountain and greenery. We pulled up at a parking meter in front of Fifth Street Dick’s, a venerable coffeehouse in need of a paint job where straight-ahead jazz drifted from speakers out to the sidewalk tables. A middle-aged couple in church clothes sat at one of them, tapping their toes and sharing coffee and pastry in the pleasant sunlight. Both the man and the woman glanced up when we pulled in, first at the flashy foreign car, then at Templeton, then at me; their eyes returned quickly to their pastries but the man’s eyes came back up and stayed on me awhile. I was the minority person here, the outsider, which was not the way it had always been in the Leimert Park district. This one-square-mile section of central Los Angeles had been created in 1927 as an affluent bedroom community that excluded anyone of color, with whites-only golf courses and whites-only social clubs. With the changing times and antidiscrimination laws of later decades, more and more African Americans had moved in; by the seventies, the district’s quaint commercial center, known as Leimert Park Village, had become a focal point of African American culture. Saturday nights were traditionally festive and charged with energy, Sundays more tame, like this one.

Templeton switched off the ignition and looked over.

“Here’s the deal, Justice. I haven’t been dating for a while, as a matter of choice. I got lonely. Oree and I have been getting together more often, having dinner, going to museums, plays.”

“You got tired of musical beds?”

“I’m almost thirty. There’s a point when certain women realize that most of the men we’ve dated are interested in only one or two areas of our anatomy, and it’s not the region between our ears. Yes, I got tired of revolving boyfriends. I wanted good, intelligent companionship for a change, and if that meant hanging out exclusively with a gay man, so be it. You haven’t been too available, and Oree fit the bill quite nicely.”

She dropped her voice, and her eyes settled frankly on mine.

“For what it’s worth, he asked about you the other night.”