Simple Justice (18 page)

“A name would help.”

“You already know it.” He molded butter on his roll. “Samantha.”

“Samantha Eliason?”

I’d nearly forgotten about the famous tennis player. Given how close she’d been to Billy Lusk, it was a serious oversight.

“Billy’s best friend until last year.” The insinuation in Brunheim’s voice was impossible to miss. “Then she suddenly wasn’t around anymore.”

“Do you know why?”

He shook his head and crammed half the roll into his mouth, leaving his lips greasy with butter.

“But in the last few weeks, I heard Billy on the phone with her a few times. Not enough to make out what they were saying, but enough to know it was ugly.”

“Interesting,” I said.

“Isn’t it?”

He raised his joined eyebrows.

“I also know that she was giving him money.”

“How much money?”

“Large amounts,” he said. “Thousands. In cash.”

Then he popped the rest of the roll into his mouth, looking quite content, as if he’d just told me everything I needed to know.

I used the pay phone outside Boy Meets Grill to call Queenie Cochran’s PR agency.

On the fourth ring, I caught Kevin as he was leaving to meet his boyfriend at the Nuart Theater for a James Dean retrospective.

The Nuart was out by UCLA, for most people only a few minutes from Queenie’s Century City office. But Kevin needed extra time to get his wheelchair in and out of his van, and he didn’t want to miss a frame of the first movie.

“Better make it quick, Ben.”

The agency had just signed a new contract with Samantha Eliason for continuing representation, so her file was current, but when I asked for her unlisted phone number, Kevin refused.

“Anyway, she’s out of town for the weekend. Check back Monday, and maybe we can help you.”

“Where out of town?”

“You know I can’t tell you that, Ben.”

“It’s important, Kevin.”

“So’s my job. What’s this about, anyway?”

“Kev, how would you like a framed, unfolded one-sheet from
East of Eden
?”

“I’ve got one at home. They’re not that hard to find.”

“Autographed by James Dean?”

This time, there was a pause. A long pause.

“You do not,” Kevin said.

“It’s yours if you tell me where I can find Samantha.”

“This is really dirty, Ben.”

“It’s in mint condition, Kev. His handwriting is almost, how do I put it…childlike, vulnerable.”

“Really rotten.”

“Yet with a strong masculinity struggling to get out. Or maybe it’s the other way around. I can’t be sure.”

“Not funny, Benjamin.”

“It’s yours if you want it, Kev. But it’s now or never.”

He lowered his voice and said quickly, “She’s at a private hotel in Laguna Beach.” He followed with the address and phone number. “You didn’t hear this from me. If Queenie finds out, she’ll string me up by the you-know-whats and turn me into a castrato.”

“You’re a peach, Kevin.”

My next call was to Katie Nakamura at the Sun. Not surprisingly, the well-disciplined intern was working late, even on a Friday.

I asked her about the media survey she’d undertaken for me related to Billy Lusk’s murder.

“I finished it this morning. Mr. Brofsky told me to put a hard copy in your box.”

“What box?”

“You have a box now with your name on it, for mail and messages. Mr. Brofsky’s talking like you’re going to be on staff. Congratulations, Mr. Justice!”

I cursed under my breath, asked her to fax Templeton a copy at home, and thanked her for her fast work.

Then I went home to take James Dean off the wall, and to go through the photographs Billy Lusk had taken of every man he’d seduced in the past several years.

Back on Norma Place, Maurice and Fred sat on their front porch, sipping cocktails and chatting with a young straight couple pushing a baby stroller.

Maurice informed me that a visitor was waiting by my apartment door, and that he appeared to be rather drunk.

I headed up the driveway, clutching the carton of photographs.

Jim Lee sat on the landing, leaning against the wall with his eyes closed and a cigarette that was all ash dangling from his lips. An empty pint of Crown Royal was beside him, and the alcohol had turned his sharp Asian features soft and puffy. Even so, he was a handsome man, ripe with the promise of sex, and I was hard before I reached the top step.

His sleepy eyes fluttered open at the sound of my footsteps. He lurched to his feet, and I caught him just before he fell.

He was drunk enough that he let me kiss him right there, where someone might see. Then he pulled me inside, flopped on the bed, and ordered me to take off my clothes.

When I was naked, he stared at me with the look drunks get that’s equal parts dopiness and fearless candor.

“Why your dick so big,” he said, slurring his words so badly they ran together into one.

I unknotted and slipped off his tie, unbuttoned his shirt, then pushed him back on the bed and ran my tongue over every inch of his chest. I nibbled at his nipples until they became as hard as pebbles, rolling them between my teeth and biting deeper until he cursed me and yanked me away by my hair.

I pulled away the rest of his clothes and fell onto him. We thrashed around, feeling blind and feverish and crazy, finding the hardest and hairiest places on each other with our hands and mouths. There were moments when he was tender, brushing my body with his lips, and times when he pulled bunches of hair from my chest with his teeth, causing me to cry out before I forced his mouth back to mine, where I wanted it.

Then he suddenly rolled away from me, facedown, with his tattooed left arm thrown out to one side. He lay there passively, his posture an unmistakable invitation.

I ran a finger down the bony track of his spine, along the curve of his waist and hip, over smooth buttocks that were barely bigger than my hands. I delicately pried them apart to reveal a crevice sparsely lined with fine, dark hairs and so clean he must have prepared himself carefully for this moment.

He reached back and grabbed the hardest part of me, and pulled me to him; but the moment he felt the probing tip of my erection, he shoved me roughly away.

I massaged the insides of his thighs, reached up between them to caress his loose testicles, gently stroked his slender, rigid cock. He squirmed, buried his face in a pillow, moaned softly.

When I touched him again in the place where I most wanted to be, he reached back as he had before and pulled me toward him, as if he wanted me inside him just as much. But the moment I made contact, he shoved me off again, even more rudely than before.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll put on a condom.”

“Nobody fuck me,” he said, spitting the words at me.

“That’s not the signal I’m getting.”

I ran a hand over his backside again, but this time he rolled over and kicked me away.

“Anybody fuck me,” he said, “I get a knife and kill them.”

I grabbed his feet by the ankles and held them still.

“Then stop playing games with me, Jim.”

“Fuck you, too.”

He pulled his legs free, turned over on his belly, and covered his head with an arm. Within a minute, his breathing grew rhythmic and heavy.

I shook one of his shoulders gently and spoke his name, but he didn’t respond. His breathing grew deep and guttural, then gave way to snores.

I slipped quietly from the bed and picked his clothes up from the floor. As I draped his pants over the chair, his wallet fell from a rear pocket. Inside, I found some cash, a few credit cards, a picture of a pretty little girl with Korean features, and a California driver’s license with a Koreatown address. The photograph on the license was clearly that of Jim Lee, but the name was different: Jin Jai-Sik.

I wrote it down in my notebook, along with the license number, address, and his birth date, which told me he’d just turned thirty. Then I slipped the wallet back into his pants and laid them neatly across the chair with his other clothes.

Jin Jai-Sik snorted, and his snoring stopped, but he remained asleep.

I sat on the bed and opened the box of Billy Lusk’s photographs. Inside were two or three hundred Polaroid snapshots of naked men on his bed, most attempting to cover themselves, others laughing with their legs wide open, a few blissfully asleep and unaware of the prying camera.

Most of the subjects appeared to be in their twenties and thirties, but a few were older, and one or two may have been teenagers. If there had been a pattern to Billy Lusk’s sexual tastes, all I could discern was trim, male, and fair-skinned.

In many of the photos the nightstand beside his bed was visible, and on it a framed photo of Billy with his arm around the tanned and sturdy shoulders of Samantha Eliason. It was the photograph Derek Brunheim had mentioned the first time I’d spoken with him, the one Margaret Devonshire had taken with her the day her son was murdered.

After looking through several dozen snapshots that meant nothing to me, I grew distracted by the sleeping form of Jin Jai-Sik. I pushed the box of photos under the bed and stretched out beside him, propping my head on one hand to study him.

Half his face was buried in the pillow. Now and then it twitched in torment, and his jaw muscles tightened furiously as he ground his teeth, so hard it sounded like walnuts cracking.

The first time we’d spoken in The Out Crowd, he’d lied to me about his name and been evasive when I asked him where he’d been when Billy Lusk was murdered. Now I wondered if he’d done more with Billy Lusk than just play a game or two of pool.

Perhaps he’d been one of Billy’s sexual conquests, I thought. Perhaps Billy had tried to force Jin Jai-Sik into submitting to anal sex, maybe even succeeded, and Jin had killed Billy out of anger and shame, just as he’d threatened to kill me.

I placed one hand on his shoulder, another on his hip, and gently turned him over on his back. He mumbled in his sleep and swatted weakly at me once or twice, but didn’t wake.

Of all the people I’d encountered who were connected to Billy Lusk, Jin Jai-Sik seemed the most cryptic. It made his sexual allure even darker and more compelling. But I wondered if, deep beneath, he and I were all that different. I knew what it was like to kill a man who had hurt and humiliated me. I remembered even now, twenty-one years later, how good total retribution could feel, along with the horror.

As I ran my hands over Jin Jai-Sik’s slender body, touching him wherever I pleased, I wondered if he shared a similar violent memory, a more recent one, in the nightmares he was having now.

I brushed the thick black hair from his forehead, then kissed his anguished face.

Until he woke, Jin Jai-Sik was mine.

I gradually came awake Saturday morning to an insistent thumping on the door.

I slept on my side, with my head on Jin Jai-Sik’s shoulder and one arm flung across his chest. His body gave off rancid vapors from last night’s whiskey, and his breath stank of cigarettes. He stirred but didn’t wake.

Outside, an unfamiliar voice called my name.

I rolled away from Jin and out of bed, cursing as I stepped on his shoes. I kicked them under the bed and hopped into sweatpants on my way to open the door.

Kevin’s boyfriend stood outside, looking sheepish. I recognized his round Chinese face from a chance meeting at the agency, where he programmed the computers.

“Sorry to wake you,” he said. “Kev couldn’t wait for the poster. You know how he is.”

Kevin sat in his Electric Wilshire at the bottom of the stairs, holding his hands up in a gesture of apology.

“I would have called first,” he said, “but you don’t have a phone. When are you going to get one?”

“This morning,” I said, and went inside to get the poster.

Jin was awake, covering himself with the sheet.

“The Chinese guy, he one of your lovers?”

“No, he’s not one of my lovers.”

I carried the poster, frame and all, to the door, where I handed it over to the boyfriend.

He glanced past me at Jin Jai-Sik, threw me a knowing smile, and went down the stairs, where Kevin grabbed the poster and looked it over.

“This is great!”

“I thought you might like it,” I said.

“Not a word to Queenie,” Kevin said.

“On my honor, Kev.”

He turned his wheelchair back down the driveway, passing a telephone installation man as he approached.

“Benjamin Justice?”

“That’s me.”

“Got your phone for you.”

I invited him up, showed him the phone jack, and left him to his work.

“What you do, bring him in here?” Jin whispered, drawing the sheet up higher around him.

“It’s West Hollywood. He understands.”

“You make me feel dirty.” He kept his voice low and a little tough. “Like you do last night.”

“We were equal partners last night.” I put an edge in my voice to let him know I didn’t feel intimidated. “In case you were too drunk to remember.”

He inched off the bed, wrapping himself in the sheet, and slipped into the bathroom, locking the door behind him. Moments later, I heard the water running.

By the time he finished showering, the telephone was installed and the service man was on his way out. I wrote my new number on a piece of paper and shoved it into Jin’s coat pocket.

He peeked from the bathroom to make sure we were alone, then emerged with a towel tucked around his waist. He brushed past me to the chair, where I’d placed his clothes the night before.

“I’m sorry if I was rude,” I said.

He kept his back to me and stepped into his shorts, pulling them up under the towel before he let it fall away. Droplets of water glistened on his back, which bore the marks of my frenzied passion from the night before.

I picked up the towel and patted away the moisture. The scratches were jagged and pink against his pale skin. As I gently touched each one, I felt blood pumping into my cock, raising it like a flag.

“You sure you don’t want to come back to bed for a while?”

“I sure.”

“I put my phone number in your jacket pocket.”

He slipped wordlessly into his shirt, still facing away from me. I decided to let him dress in privacy and went into the bathroom for a quick shower.

I was rinsing off when I remembered stepping on his shoes that morning as I rolled out of bed, and kicking them irritably from underfoot.

“Christ.”

I jumped from the shower and darted out dripping wet, scanning the room. Jin Jai-Sik was no longer there.

Then I fell to my knees and looked beneath the bed. The box of photos was gone.