Justice at Risk (15 page)

“Tell me about Tommy Callahan.”

“Callahan was a very good videotape editor with a promising future.” Kosterman smiled sourly. “Unfortunately, he was also a drunk and a thief.”

“When he stole that tape, it must have been very upsetting.”

“I certainly wasn’t happy about it, but there wasn’t much I could do. Callahan had the tape, and he was difficult to find.”

“Did you report the tape stolen?”

“No.”

“Of course not. But you wanted it back, nonetheless. Especially as
On Patrol
became such a success—the foundation of your entire production empire. If that tape got into the wrong hands, and became a
cause célèbre
, your vaunted reputation as the Man Who Put Truth Back In TV would become something of a joke, wouldn’t it?”

He pursed his thin lips dismissively.

“If that’s the spin you wish to put on it, Justice.”

“You might even have encountered some legal problems for aiding and abetting a criminal cover-up.”

“I seriously doubt that.”

“When was the last time you heard from Callahan?”

“Fourteen years ago, when I fired him.”

“Byron Mittelman?”

“He’s worked on various shows of mine through the years. A good camera operator, a nice man. I sent flowers to the service and notes to his family and fiancée.”

“Melissa Zeigler believes the two murders are connected, and have something to do with the stolen videotape.”

“Yes, that’s what Sergeant Montego told me when he first contacted me.”

Kosterman poured another saki, drained the cup, and patted his lips with his napkin.

“I understand you’re working for Cecile Chang now.”

“That couldn’t have been in the
GQ
piece, which means you’ve done some checking up on me.”

“It’s quite an opportunity, considering what’s happened to your career in recent years.”

“Yes, it is.”

“You might actually climb back to a level of respectability again, Justice, with a little luck along the way. On the other hand, it may be the first and last job you ever have in television. Funny how things often work out that way, isn’t it?”

I knew where he was going, felt myself instantly weakening, hated myself for it. I poured and sipped some tea, wishing against my will that it were warm saki instead, with an alcoholic kick to bolster my slipping courage.

“You’re probably aware that as president and CEO of a successful cable channel that specializes in documentary programming, I’m in a position to give someone with your background and skills just about all the work you would ever want. Considering the forcefulness of your personality, I have no doubt you’re producer material. Who knows? Perhaps you even have the stuff to be an executive producer.”

“That’s where the money is, from what I hear.”

“Quite a lot of it, when a series does well. More, I’m sure, than you’ve ever dreamed of making, even back in your halcyon days at the
L.A. Times
, when you were on top of the world. From what I understand, even at the top, most newspaper reporters remain stuck hopelessly in the middle class.”

“Is that something to be ashamed of, Kosterman?”

“Not at all. But it doesn’t buy much sushi, does it?”

“So what is it you’re trying to say?”

“Getting a foothold in the TV business is all about contacts and relationships, Justice.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“I could do a lot for you.” He leaned forward, his eyes as self-assured as they were cool. “I could change your life. Do you realize that?”

I said nothing, just sipped my tea to moisten my drying throat. He sat back, relaxing, his voice and manner becoming almost nonchalant.

“There may even be a place for you in the company itself, near the top. We’re growing, expanding internationally as new markets open up around the world. I can always use a man who’s decisive, strong-willed, smart.”

He pushed his chair back.

“Think about it, Justice. Opportunities like this don’t come along too often. For most people, never at all.” He glanced at his watch. “You’ll have to excuse me. I have an appointment at Universal. Let’s be in touch.
Ciao
.”

“
Ciao
.”

The waiter appeared as I was finishing the last piece of sashimi on my plate. He asked me if I cared for anything else.

“Has Mr. Kosterman taken care of the check?”

“Oh yes, sir. It’s all on his account.”

I smiled, feeling full but not content.

“In that case, I think I’ll see the dessert tray.”

“I worked hard to land this interview, Justice. I want you to know that.”

“You always work hard, Templeton. It goes without saying.”

“This time, I had to wheedle and beg. Rose Fairchild hasn’t granted a press chat since her husband was killed back in sixty-five. And that was a pre-fab statement released through her family lawyer.”

“She’s reclusive, then.”

“In the extreme.”

We were traveling east on the Pasadena Freeway in Templeton’s air-conditioned Infiniti, leaving downtown Los Angeles miles behind. Templeton had reached me at my office when I returned from my lunch of sushi and coercion with Jacob Kosterman, and asked me if I wanted to ride along to her interview with the matriarch of the Fairchild clan. It was not quite 3 p.m., and already the stream of cars on the oldest and narrowest section of the Southern California freeway system was slowing to a jogger’s pace. Discussing what Templeton and Katie Nakamura had dug up on the Fairchild family helped pass the time.

“Did Katie fill you in on Captain Fairchild’s death?”

“He took a ricochet from a detective’s forty-five during a robbery stakeout. Strictly accidental.”

“Not the robbery.”

“No. They threw the book at the two robbery suspects.”

“What was the adjudication?”

“They copped to armed robbery and voluntary manslaughter, got twenty years apiece, and were shipped off to San Quentin. Within a month, one turned up stabbed to death in the shower room. The other was found suffocated in the laundry, with his head shoved into a barrel of powdered detergent.”

“At least they died cleanly.”

“That’s more than can be said about the investigation that followed.”

“Smelly?”

“Both killings went unsolved, written off as routine prison violence.”

“How convenient.”

“Wasn’t it?”

“I don’t imagine the Fairchilds shed too many tears over what happened up at Quentin.”

“Nor the members of the police fraternity who arranged to have those two guys rubbed out.”

“Why, Templeton, I do believe you’re becoming cynical.”

She kept her eyes straight ahead as she drove, but smiled a little.

“Even the press left it alone. This was sixty-five, almost a decade before Watergate. You know how the press handled things like that back then.”

“Nothing in the
L.A. Times
?”

“Rose Fairchild came from a prominent family of wealthy landowners. Very cozy with the Chandlers, who owned the
Times
—another prominent family of wealthy landowners, which had also made its fortune in real estate and land development. Not without the taint of scandal and conflict of interest along the way.”

“You’ve been reading your history books, Templeton.”

“I try to keep up.”

“What about the
Sun
? The
Herald-Examiner
, the
Daily News
? They didn’t chase the story?”

“All politically conservative papers, Justice. Very pro-police, cooperative to a fault. Surely you’re aware what it was like back then, in the days before Woodward and Bernstein. You’ve read the history books too.”

“Just testing you, Templeton.”

“How am I doing?”

“Headed for an accident if you don’t watch the road.”

She turned her attention back to the traffic and hit her horn as a Porsche cut rudely in front of her.

“So how did you score an interview with the reclusive Rose Fairchild?”

“I reached her through her attorney, convinced her that to draw a more complete portrait of her son as a police chief candidate, I should interview his mother. See where Taylor Fairchild grew up, get a sense of what he was like as a child.”

“I guess she took the bait.”

“Reluctantly. She kept reminding me that she’s an extremely private person. In the end, I guess I wore her down. She conceded that a short interview would be worthwhile if it helped the public get a better picture of her son. She feels he’s the top candidate among the bunch, that he’ll be good for the city.”

“No surprise there.”

“She also feels he’s destined for even greater things.”

“She said that?”

“Oh, yes. She’s very much the proud mother, and I played to that. She’s giving me one hour, from four to five p.m.”

“You’re getting trickier and trickier, Templeton.”

“I’ve studied with the master.”

We exchanged smiles of mutual appreciation that were greased with bullshit.

“What am I supposed to do while you’re chatting up Mrs. Fairchild?”

“I thought you might check out the neighborhood, take some notes. After all, Taylor Fairchild grew up there.”

“His mother never moved?”

“Rose Fairchild was born in the house she still lives in seventy years later. It was a wedding gift from her parents, the Maplewoods, who moved to a smaller place nearby. Today, both homes are certified as official historical landmarks, architectural treasures. There’s a lot of that out here.”

“Old Pasadena money, I think they call it.”

“The Maplewood side of the family pretty much defines the term—bottomless wealth, going way back. Along with a tradition of political conservatism, calculated philanthropy, and high social standing. And, of course, lily white, like some of the private golf clubs out this way.”

“What else can you tell me about Mrs. Fairchild?”

“There’s a file in my handbag, if you want to have a look.”

I found it, and started reading. In snippets from books on California history and the social pages of the
Sun
and the
Los Angeles Times
, a profile emerged of Rose Fairchild as a formidable matriarch, in the tradition of another Rose on another coast, with the last name of Kennedy. Photos of Rose Fairchild, most snapped at charity events years ago, showed a slim, graying woman of considerable beauty who appeared patrician but not stiff, with a smile that was wide and warm and a penchant for black gowns and white pearls. When I commented on that, Templeton corrected me.

“Actually, she wears black almost exclusively in the evening, and rarely anything but red during the day. It’s rumored that she only wears a piece of clothing once.”

“The black widow or the lady in red? Peculiar, either way.”

“With her money, Rose Fairchild can afford to be peculiar.”

“How wealthy is she?”

“Pretty much off the charts. According to
Forbes
, she’s worth so much they can only guess, but it’s well into the hundreds of millions. They routinely rank her among the country’s fifty richest people, but she manages to keep the exact figure a mystery.”

I returned to her file and learned that Rose Fairchild’s father was Harrington Cahill Maplewood, son of Taylor Cahill Maplewood, a Union general in the Civil War who had later served in the cabinets of two presidents. Harrington Maplewood, an engineer, had moved west at the turn of the century and made his own fortune in mining and real estate. He and his wife named their daughter Rose, after Pasadena’s Festival of Roses, which had been organized in 1888 with horse carriages festooned with roses, and later became the extravaganza of motor-driven floats known as the Rose Parade. Rose and her husband, Rodney Fairchild, had married in 1951, and named their firstborn Taylor, after his great-grandfather on his mother’s side; their second son, Harrington, had died in childbirth, and there had been no other children. Rodney Fairchild, like his younger brother Matthew, had been a lawyer; unlike Matthew, he had considered law enforcement his true calling, and eventually left his legal practice to join the Los Angeles Police Department, against the wishes of his wife and her family. Rose Fairchild continued to oppose his police career until it became clear he was on his way to the high-profile chief’s position, which might serve as a springboard for higher public office. When Rodney Fairchild was killed in the line of duty in 1965, she transferred her ambitions for her husband to her twelve-year-old son, Taylor, grooming him to follow, and hopefully surpass, the accomplishments of his father.

It was a lot of family history to digest, and I went over it again, from the top down, before I closed the file.

“Taylor Fairchild may be a cop,” I said, “but he was definitely born with a silver spoon up his ass.”

Templeton laughed.

“Big bucks and breeding, as Harry likes to say.”

“How is Harry, by the way?”

“Not good.”

“How bad is not good?”

“Wrung out, losing weight, running a temp.”

“Is Roger Lawson still leaning on him, whittling away at his staff?”

“Harry had a major argument with Lawson just after lunch today. Harry called Lawson a bully, told him to get out of his office. Lawson tried to throw his weight around, literally. I think he’d belted down a few scotches with his double burger and fries.”

“Lawson’s a boozer?”

“Oh, yeah. Gets very boisterous and pushy when he’s loaded, especially with females.”

“And sixtyish editors on the sickly side, apparently.”

“Yeah, he seems to have it in for Harry. He bristles at anybody with an independent streak who speaks his own mind.” She glanced over, arching dark brows. “As long as they’re smaller than he is, of course.”

“If Roger Lawson ever lays a finger on Harry—”

Her eyes went back to the freeway, as she eased the car toward an off-ramp.

“Don’t go there, Justice. You promised me those days were behind you.”

“Somebody needs to plant his foot on Lawson’s fat ass.”

“You want to get angry, take a look at the file on Rose Fairchild’s father. He makes the Roger Lawsons of this world look like the petty errand boys they are.”

I found the file in her handbag. There wasn’t a lot in it—a few clippings from the
Washington Post
, and one or two from the old investigative magazines
Ramparts
and
Mother Jones
—but there was enough to indicate that Harrington Maplewood deserved to spend eternity in hell. After making tens of millions in California mining and real estate, in his later years he had sat on the boards of several multinational corporations while serving as the conduit between these companies and various dictators in countries where the right to do business was coveted by stockholders for whom being grossly wealthy was not enough. Taylor Fairchild’s grandfather had lived into his nineties, and his last accomplishment had been to work behind the scenes as the chief liaison for a number of American corporations with huge investments in Indonesia—corporations that had funneled tens of billions of dollars into the bank accounts of the ruthless dictator Suharto and his family members, while Suharto murdered and imprisoned his political opponents. It was a story I didn’t expect to see on the Documentary Channel.

I shut the file and slipped it back into Templeton’s handbag.

“The man was evil.”

“He was a businessman, Justice, without a soul or conscience.”

“That’s what I said.”

We were in Pasadena now, the civic focal point of the San Gabriel Valley, and you could practically smell the old money along the wide, clean, tree-lined residential streets, where the lawns were broad and countless Queen Anne cottages and other historical styles were well preserved. We left the western section of the city, passed through a long, lush parkway, and wound northward into the picturesque green hills of the city’s upper Arroyo Seco, one of the richest architectural districts in the country. Dozens of stunning homes dating back to the turn of the century sat proudly atop lush, gently rolling lawns, with Craftsman the dominant style.

Templeton slowed as she stared out, mouth agape.

“I feel like I’m driving through back issues of
Architectural Digest
.”

“I’m trying to picture Taylor Fairchild in these streets forty years ago, playing kickball and riding his bike.”

“I’ve never seen a neighborhood that looked so perfect, so beautiful, yet so unreal. It’s hard to imagine anything bad happening up here. I have yet to see a weed or a piece of litter, or hear a discordant voice.”

“All the more reason Fairchild must have been shocked by his father’s sudden death.”

“Good point, Justice.”

Down below, the enormous Rose Bowl football stadium came into view, and, in the distance, the less distinguished structures of downtown Pasadena, shrouded in noxious smog. We passed the elegant Gamble House, a two-story Arts and Crafts masterpiece designed meticulously in oak and teak, built in 1908 for the Procter and Gamble family, but now a house museum open to the public. Moments later, Templeton made a turn and drove uphill until she reached the crest, where she cruised slowly past a huge Mission-style mansion so massive and sprawling it might have passed for a great library or church, poised at the top of a sweeping drive. A neatly clipped lawn rolled down to the street in undulating, terraced symmetry, as smoothly as a well-laid carpet.

Templeton noted the street number outside the big gates, drove on for another block, and pulled to the curb.