Limits of Justice, The (8 page)

I knew of Dr. Miller because he had personally stuck a hypodermic in my behind sometime back in the early eighties, giving me a shot of penicillin for a case of the clap I’d picked up at a bathhouse in Silver Lake, something he’d done for literally thousands of homosexuals who came to him from throughout Southern California. At a time when sexually transmitted diseases were a mark of shame and stigma, particularly for closeted gay men, Miller had made quite a success of specializing in gay clients and STDs, handing out antibiotics like candy on Halloween. Eventually, he’d expanded to three private clinics in Hollywood, West Hollywood, and the San Fernando Valley. When AIDS began to spread like wildfire, Dr. Miller was ideally positioned to take advantage of the epidemic, advertising heavily in the gay press and quickly growing wealthy off the sick and dying. I called the phone number that followed his name on Randall Capri’s handwritten list and got Dr. Miller’s West Hollywood office. The receptionist picked up at the exact moment my bowels began to make funny noises, reminding me that I had a legitimate reason to schedule a doctor’s visit. I related my symptoms and was given an appointment for Thursday morning, and a chance to kill two birds with one stone.

With that out of the way, I called information and got the number of Megamedia, Inc., the umbrella corporation for most of Edward T. Felton’s companies. I left my name and number with the voice mail of someone in corporate PR, explaining that I was writing a book that involved the late Rod Preston and needed to verify some facts regarding Mr. Felton. After that, I got the number of Mandeville Slayton’s personal flack from the Publicists Guild, which led me to another recorded message asking me to leave mine, which I did.

I had more luck dialing the number listed for Freddie Fuentes, though not much. It was answered by an automated recording for the Los Angeles office of the federal Immigration and Naturalization Service, better known as INS, which offered me caller options, then more options, and still more. After following orders and punching the right numbers for a minute or two, I finally heard Fuentes at the other end of the line. He spoke in a thin, pinched voice that had the vestiges of a Mexican accent, one that seemed a generation or two removed, maybe more. I explained that I was a friend of Charlotte Preston’s, working on a book to clear her father’s name, and inquired about his relationship to the late movie star. He replied so fast he almost cut me off.

“There must be some mistake. I never met Rod Preston. I’m just an INS agent, not a Hollywood guy.”

“Randall Capri, then, the writer. You must know him—he put your name down on a list with several others.”

“Never heard of him.”

“The list was in the possession of Rod Preston when he died. His daughter passed it on to me, for research purposes.”

Fuentes’s voice cued up anxiously, his words coming faster.

“I told you, there’s some mistake. I know neither of those men.”

“How about Edward T. Felton? Mandeville Slayton?”

“Good-bye, sir.”

Abruptly, the line went dead, and I stared at the receiver a moment before hanging it up. After that, I looked through the file until I found the photo of the dark-haired young boy I suspected was Randall Capri twenty-odd years ago. I studied the boy’s dark-eyed, flawless face, saw the author in it more than ever, and wondered what Rod Preston was doing with a portrait of Capri dated more than two decades before.

I turned the photo over, mulled the stamped credit on the back: Horace Hyatt Studio. I’d seen that name as well, on illustrated books displayed at A Different Light, a few blocks down the boulevard. I opened a fresh reporter’s notebook and started a list of my own, with Randall Capri, Freddie Fuentes, and Horace Hyatt at the top. After that, I added the name of George Krytanos, the caretaker up in Montecito who’d given Charlotte some trouble, and followed it with Vivian Grant Preston, Charlotte’s mother.

Always start with names, if you can get some.

That’s what Harry Brofsky had advised me, when I’d started working for him as a police reporter seventeen years ago before moving up to bigger and better assignments, and, finally, to the Pulitzer prize I had to give back.

Make a list of names, and put a phone number next to each one. Then get to work, asking the right questions. Don’t give up until you have all the answers.

That’s what Harry had advised me, back when I still had my reputation and my credibility, when everything was so different.

Following precise instructions, I arrived thirty minutes prior to my scheduled appointment at the West Hollywood offices of Dr. Stanley Miller.

The clinic was located on the top floor of a modern low-rise not far from the Beverly Hills border in a neighborhood heavily populated by interior decorators and high-end antique dealers. An elevator rose from the cool underground garage on well-oiled machinery, without so much as a squeak or a lurch. As it made its silent climb toward a bright skylight, I faced the rear glass wall, studying a four-story atrium that was filled with lush conservatory plants, including colorful orchids whose speckled blossoms were just opening in the generous light from above. Hidden hoses misted the leaves, and here and there colorful ceramic birds perched among the branches. Atop a ladder, a nimble, elderly Asian man worked amid the foliage, picking off the dead or dying leaves.

The doors rolled soundlessly open behind me and I turned and stepped into a carpeted reception area that was quiet except for the unexpected sound of Glenn Miller’s “String of Pearls” playing faintly in the background. Roughly half the seats I could see were filled—exclusively with men, most of whom looked quite healthy. A few glanced up from their magazines as I stepped across the foyer to a reception counter, but they lost interest just as quickly when they saw a pale man in his forties, looking sickly and going bald.

Behind the open window was a large, big-breasted black woman with bright red lips and a grand smile, who turned from a computer screen to tell me her name was Ruby and greet me as if I were family. Lipstick smudged her gleaming ivories, which she worked at with her tongue, and bracelets of braided gold decorated each of her chubby wrists. I told her my name and appointment time, and she handed me a medical history form to fill out, along with a questionnaire about some of my personal habits. When that was accomplished, I killed some time studying the gallery of medical staff photos framed on a wall near the reception window, and the captioned names beneath each face.

Dr. Miller’s physicians appeared uniformly well groomed, pleasant looking, and on the younger side; the great majority were white, and there wasn’t a single physician, other than Dr. Miller himself, who didn’t appear gym fit. The notable exception, Dr. Miller, was a pasty-looking, sixtyish man in horn-rimmed glasses and bow tie, with a prominent Adam’s apple protruding from his skinny neck. Except for his well-combed, medium-length hair, which had gone to gray, he was much as I remembered him from nearly two decades ago, when his offices had occupied much smaller quarters in a low-rent district in East Hollywood. His head shot was positioned in the center of the gallery, with the other smiling faces grouped around it like those of a big, happy family. A full-length shot of Dr. Miller graced the covers of some color brochures sitting on a side table, and I could see that his fashion tastes hadn’t changed over the years. Besides the trademark bow tie, he wore a jacket with wide lapels, slacks that were pleated and cuffed, and classic wingtips in brown and white, giving him a retro look right out of the late forties, what my flag-waving Republican father used to call “the goddamned Truman years.” It was an old-fashioned, Norman Rockwell image, by way of Mr. Peepers, complete with a fatherly smile.

“Mr. Justice?”

I returned to reception, where Ruby handed me a file. She told me I’d be seeing Dr. Watanabe, and directed me toward the hallway to my distant left, where I was to wait for a personal escort.

“Dr. Miller’s not available?”

“Oh, honey, Dr. Miller hardly sees patients anymore. He’s so busy running the clinics, sitting on advisory boards, and doing all his charity work. Don’t you worry, darlin’, Dr. Watanabe’s gonna take real good care of you.”

My escort was a slim young man in snug designer jeans and a form-fitting polo shirt, who waltzed ahead of me with his behind held high and tight enough to clench a new dime. We reached a scale, which I climbed on while he slid the weight until the needle balanced. I saw that I’d dropped close to fifteen pounds during the past year without even trying, which left a little more than a hundred sixty pounds on my six-foot frame. I was almost down to my college wrestling weight, but without the training or the muscle, and I stepped off the scale feeling like a man being slowly devoured by something he couldn’t see. The young man led me through a confusing maze of corridors, passing the occasional patient or staff person, until he found the door he was looking for.

He smiled like a mannequin, showing me in.

“Have a seat—a nurse will be with you in a few minutes.”

The nurse appeared sooner than that, checked my temperature, pulse, and blood pressure, and marked them down in my file before leaving me alone again. I used the time to study the brochure on the Miller clinics that I’d picked up near the reception desk. In addition to their medical services, the clinics offered HIV testing, referrals for psychological counseling, estate planning through affiliated lawyers, even an association with Farthing Mortuaries, which was described as a “gay-friendly” funeral chain willing to deal with the remains of those who had passed from AIDS complications, something many funeral homes had refused to do, particularly in the epidemic’s early years. I could see why Dr. Miller had built such a booming business since the mid-eighties; he’d created one-stop shopping for those afflicted with HIV and AIDS, of which there were more than enough in Southern California to keep his doctors busy and his examination rooms well occupied.

I’d put the brochure away and picked up an issue of
Poz
when Dr. Watanabe appeared, dressed in a standard white medical coat with the looped tube of a stethoscope dangling from one of the pockets. He was a lean, neatly clipped man of average height, whose handsomeness was made more striking by the natural bronze of his skin and a dark trace of heavy beard at odds with his boyish Asian face. When he introduced himself, I learned that his first name was Kendall. After glancing at my file, he noted aloud that I’d been suffering from diarrhea and fatigue, accompanied by a low-grade fever.

“How long has this been going on?”

I told him, and his face briefly showed concern. He asked me if I knew my HIV status. I told him I did.

“I was infected roughly a year ago, late March.”

“That was when you were tested?”

“That was when I was exposed to the virus.”

He cocked his head, looking curious.

“You know the date of your infection?”

“Down to the exact minute.”

“That’s pretty unusual.”

“I guess I lead an unusual life.”

His smile was small but reassuring.

“Let’s have a look at you, see if we find anything unusual there.”

I removed my shirt and sat on the examination table, while he listened to my heart and lungs through his stethoscope. After that, he checked my ears, then had me open wide and say
ah
while he looked at my tongue and down my throat. Then he had me unbuckle and unzip my pants, and recline on the table while he put his hands on me. He probed my lymph nodes, palpated various sections of my belly, had me lower my shorts so he could prod my lower abdomen and check my testicles for any lumps that shouldn’t be there. A minute later, he had me up on my knees with my face and chest pressed to the table, while he pulled on latex gloves and opened a tube of K-Y. I felt his gloved finger slip into my rectum, then, half a minute later, heard him tell me to relax while he inserted a lighted proctoscope for a better look. In another time, I might have found all this rather titillating, even erotic, particularly with such a fine-looking man doing the prodding and probing. Since testing positive for HIV, however, the libidinous impulses that had once coursed through me so hotly had evaporated like steam into a frigid night. I felt no more sexual now than a cold lump of clay.

*

“I see a lot of scar tissue in your rectum, along with some fissures. There’s been some serious damage there.”

“I bleed once in a while.”

Dr. Watanabe regarded me with thoughtful, sensitive eyes. We’d both cleaned up, and were facing each other again as I pulled on my shirt.

“You have a history of rough sex?”

“Not really.”

His curiosity wrinkled into grooves across his forehead.

“You use lubrication?”

“I was raped, Doctor.”

The lines deepened into concern again.

“I see. When was that?”

“About a year ago.”

“That’s when you were infected?”

I nodded and began working at my shirt buttons.

“At least we know the exact point of infection. That’s helpful.”

“Yes, I count my blessings every day.”

He let that one sink in a moment but kept his eyes on me.

“Have you been feeling depressed?”

“Not for more than thirty years or so.”

He smiled, fleetingly.

“What about counseling?”

“I was in therapy with Jose Cuervo for about six months, seven nights a week.”

“You’re still drinking?”

I shook my head.

“That’s good. Eating well?”

“Not much appetite.”

He glanced at my file again. “According to your file, you’re not on any kind of medication for the HIV.”

“I just want to get this stomach problem taken care of.”

“This could be related to the virus. The earlier you get treatment—”

“I’ve only been infected for a year, Doc. It takes years before the virus starts breaking down the immune system.”

“For many patients, that’s true. But not for everyone. It depends a lot on your mental and emotional state, how well you take care of yourself.”

“Right now, I just want to take care of this diarrhea and fever.”

My tone was firm enough that it didn’t leave him much room.

“That’s what we’ll do then.”

He told me I needed to bring back three days’ worth of stool samples, wrote something on a slip of paper, asked me to hand it to the discharge person on my way out in exchange for the items and instructions I’d need.

“We’re a full-service clinic for the treatment of HIV, Ben.”

“I saw the brochure. Dr. Miller seems to have it covered.”

“He’s a leader in this field, one of the pioneers.”

“How well do you know him?”

“I see him from time to time, usually at meetings. He doesn’t socialize much with the staff. He’s a busy man.”

“I believe the actor, Rod Preston, was a friend of his. Maybe a patient.”

“I wouldn’t know about that.”

“Rod Preston was a pretty famous guy.”

“We’re very discreet about our clientele, particularly celebrities.”

Dr. Watanabe extended his hand, which I shook.

“Bring the stool samples in on Monday. We’ll see what they tell us. Meanwhile, drink plenty of liquids and get lots of rest. You think you can find your way out?”

I told him I thought I could; he smiled, and I was alone again. A moment later, I started back down the corridor the way I’d come, but before long I’d made a wrong turn that had me going in a different direction. Several turns later, as I tried to find my way back, I entered a long and unfamiliar hallway, facing the young man with the tight jeans and the store-window smile. He was carrying files, and we both stopped in front of a door he seemed about to open.

“This area is private and restricted. Dr. Miller does most of his charity work back here.”

“I’m afraid I got lost.”

He pointed over my shoulder.

“You need to turn around and go back to the first hallway, make a left, then follow the red line until you see the exit sign. They’ll take care of you on your way out.”

He opened the door and stepped in. Briefly, beyond him, I glimpsed several young boys who stood in their undershorts, waiting in line to be examined. Most of them appeared to be Hispanic, no more than twelve or thirteen, on the slim side. Sitting on a stool at the head of the line was Dr. Stanley Miller, instantly recognizable in his horn-rimmed glasses and familiar bow tie, as he pressed the diaphragm of his stethoscope to the chest of the boy in front of him. Standing behind him was a stocky Hispanic man with long sideburns and an unruly mustache, dressed in a drab suit and cheap tie.

When he saw me standing there, looking in, he whined at the assistant with the files, “Shut that door, for crying out loud.”

The door was quickly closed and I was heading back the way I’d come, looking for the exit sign and thinking how much the voice reminded me of my brief conversation on the phone with the INS official named Freddie Fuentes.