Simple Justice (25 page)

By then, I was standing beside him, with a hand around his upper arm and my mouth inches from his ear. The bicep under my fingers was small and hard, like a baseball. I could feel damp heat radiating from his armpit.

“We can go to the police with what we have,” I said.

He stood motionless, no doubt trying to maintain a calm exterior while frantically sorting things out inside.

“Sit down, Paul. Let’s work things out.”

He sat.

I moved back around the table and took my chair next to Templeton.

When he spoke again, his voice was light, almost friendly.

“It doesn’t look like you have anything, really.”

He used his napkin to blot perspiration from his face, then spread it in his lap.

“I’m a married man. I’ll be a father in a few weeks.” He laughed and threw up his hands. “Hey, guys, I’m heterosexual.”

“You certainly wouldn’t be the only married man who’s been sexually involved with other men,” Templeton said.

He turned toward her tape recorder and said emphatically, “I’m telling you, I never met Billy Lusk in my life.”

Templeton reached into her file folder, came up with a copy of the photograph I’d found in Billy Lusk’s collection, and passed it across to Masterman.

“Ben found it with a couple of hundred other photos,” she said. “Photos that Billy Lusk took of his lovers over the years, after having sex with them.”

“It was kind of a hobby of his,” I said. “You were asleep and never knew he shot it. He was probably holding it back to use as ammunition if you resisted his demands for money. Or for down the road when he wanted more.”

“Or maybe he told you about it,” Templeton said, “which finally drove you over the edge.”

The blood was gone from Masterman’s face, and his breathing was erratic.

“Obviously, that’s me. But…but it doesn’t prove I knew Billy Lusk.”

Templeton handed across a blowup of the photo.

“If you look in the upper left hand corner, on the nightstand, you’ll see a framed photo of Billy with his best friend, Samantha Eliason. There were only two copies made.”

“Billy always kept his on his bedside table,” I said. “Samantha has the other one.”

“I’m afraid that puts you in Billy’s bed,” Templeton said.

“OK!” Masterman shouted.

A couple dining at the adjacent table looked over. He lowered his voice and leaned toward the middle of the table.

“OK. Maybe I slept with him once. But one foolish act, one moment of poor judgment, doesn’t make me a murderer.”

“It gives you a motive,” I said.

“Motive is insufficient when there’s an ironclad alibi.”

“You mean you have an alibi?” Templeton said, sounding surprised.

“If you check, you’ll find that when Billy Lusk was murdered, I was at a campaign appearance with my father. At a union hall several miles away.”

I threw a sheepish glance toward Templeton.

“That would make a difference,” I said.

His eyes went again to Templeton’s tape recorder.

“I’m not sure I should say anything else.”

“If you can explain things to our satisfaction,” Templeton said, “we won’t have much of a story.”

“But if all you can give us is a ‘no comment,’” I said, “we’ll have to go with what we’ve got.”

“You wouldn’t write about what I did with Billy Lusk,” Masterman said. “That’s invasion of privacy.”

“Not at all, Paul. If you’re not a public figure, your father certainly is. Considering his stand on gay rights issues, and your involvement in his campaign, I’m afraid your own sexual history is both pertinent and newsworthy.”

He shook the photograph. “You wouldn’t print this.”

“Unfortunately, the
Sun
isn’t known for its high standards,” Templeton said. “We’d do just about anything to attract readers from the
L.A. Times
.”

He stared at us, incredulous.

“God, you people.”

Templeton stretched her hand across the table and touched him reassuringly on the wrist.

“We just want your side of things, Paul. If you can convince us there was no problem between you and Billy, we’ll consider dropping the whole thing.”

His eyes roved our faces while his mind worked behind them. Then he placed his fork and steak knife in the middle of his plate, pushed it away, and folded his hands tightly in front of him on the table.

“We left Dad’s office shortly after eleven so he could make one last campaign stop that night. We got to the union hall around eleven thirty, and he started speaking a few minutes after that. I was there with him, along with several others. I can tell you exactly what he said.”

I glanced at my watch. It was a few minutes after nine.

“Why not sum it up for us, as succinctly as you can.”

He summarized his father’s speech, which focused on the financial impact of illegal immigration on state resources and his plans to tighten and enforce immigration laws.

“You see, I couldn’t possibly have been at that bar when William Lusk was murdered. Or I’d have no idea what my father told his audience that night.”

Templeton stopped scribbling in her notebook.

“The problem is, Paul, you just told us what your father planned to say, based on the text of his prepared speech. But a few minutes into that speech, he saw a large number of Hispanic faces in the auditorium and decided he’d better switch topics. The speech he actually delivered focused on his plans to create jobs and revive the economy.”

“But you wouldn’t know about that,” I said. “By that time, you were in your car driving to The Out Crowd.”

“A security guard in the parking lot recalls your driving away shortly before midnight,” Templeton said, “and returning thirty or forty minutes later. He’s signed an affidavit for us to that effect.”

“Your father’s notoriously long-winded at the podium,” I said. “He talked for almost an hour that night. Long enough for you to drive the four miles to The Out Crowd, take care of business, and drive back again.”

“You called Billy from the pay phone across the street,” Templeton said, “and asked him to meet you out back. You were waiting for him when he came out.”

“That’s when you shot him with your father’s thirty-eight,” I said. “We know he kept a thirty-eight because he mentioned it last year in a speech to the NRA.”

“No,” Masterman said weakly.

“You then raced back to the union hall. You joined in the applause for the final few minutes of your father’s talk, when he delivered his usual closing, urging his audience to help get out the vote on election day. You each left in separate cars that night, and didn’t get a chance to talk. You had no way of knowing he’d changed speeches.”

Masterman gripped the edge of the table, trying to steady himself.

“That’s ridiculous.” He laughed again, but it couldn’t have sounded more false, more anxious. “How could I possibly know that William Lusk was going to be in a gay bar in Silver Lake?”

“Because you invited him to meet you there,” Templeton said.

She pulled a photocopied sheet from her file and handed it to him.

“A source at the phone company was able to get me a copy of all the phone calls made from your father’s office during the past week. You’ll notice that we’ve highlighted one call in particular. It’s to the home of Derek Brunheim, Monday night at three minutes past eleven. The call Billy got just before he went out.”

“You have no right to those phone records,” Masterman said.

“Apparently, you’ve forgotten about sunshine laws,” I said. “Public officials are required to file a record of all calls made at public expense with the city or county, which automatically become available to the press. If we don’t have a right to these records now, we would have gotten them eventually.”

“And the police can get them any time they want,” Templeton said. “As well as those of Derek Brunheim, which we suspect will show a number of calls made to you in the recent past, as Billy pressured you for money.”

The waitress stopped to ask if there was a problem with Masterman’s steak, since he hadn’t eaten a bite. He mumbled that it was fine. She warmed our coffees and went away.

“But if I murdered Billy Lusk, why would I want to shoot a TV spot there the very next day? It doesn’t make sense.”

“It does if you were obsessed with pleasing your father,” I said. “You suddenly had the opportunity to arrange the gay spot he wanted so badly, and you took it.”

“Besides,” Templeton said, “many murderers show a compulsion to return to the crime site, even with the police still on the scene.”

“When the police check,” I said, “we think they’ll either find your father’s thirty-eight is missing, or that ballistics match it to the murder weapon.”

Masterman stared numbly at the photo. In it, his face and body were leaner and more youthful by several years, and there was an aura of innocence about him as he slept.

“I only went with him once.”

His voice was barely audible. He looked first at Templeton, then at me, imploringly.

“I’m not gay. I was just experimenting, that’s all. It was one time.”

“You knew that if you paid Billy what he asked, it wouldn’t stop there,” I said. “To go to the police would have led to his arrest and made it a matter of public record, which meant the media could get hold of it. You figured the only way to stop him was to kill him.”

“All right, I killed him!”

Masterman raised his voice, fighting tears. He clenched his fists so tight the blood went out of them.

“He was scum. He didn’t care who he hurt. I have a chance to do so much good in the world. He didn’t care about anyone but himself.”

He spoke less hatefully than passionately, as if he really believed he might convince us to bury the story, forget what we knew, let him get on with his life.

“For God’s sake! I have a wife! A baby on the way!”

His voice became a whimper.

“Don’t do this to me.”

I was watching him closely, and when he grabbed the steak knife I was already reaching across the table. He had the blade aimed at his heart as I clasped my bigger hand around his. I squeezed tight, locking the handle of the knife deep inside his fist. The tip was poised an inch from his chest.

Without loosening my grip, I worked my way around the table to sit beside him. I told Templeton to call 911.

“Ask for the detective in charge of the Billy Lusk investigation. Tell him what we’ve got. Tell him we’ll cooperate only if they promise to sit on this and hold off booking their suspect until nine tomorrow morning.”

I wanted to be sure Harry got his scoop clean, with the story on the street ahead of the
L.A. Times
and the local morning news shows, which were notorious for combing the morning papers for news leads.

Templeton said, “I’m not sure I’m comfortable cozying up to the police.”

I glanced at the blade protruding from Masterman’s closed fist.

“Would you rather help this man commit suicide?”

She grabbed her notebook and left to make the call, leaving her tape recorder behind, still running.

The time was 9:17. I expected Templeton back within five minutes. If all went as planned, she’d be at the Sun fifteen or twenty minutes after that, putting her story together in time to make her no-fuss deadline. The police could talk to her after Harry locked it, with the presses rolling. The early edition would be in news racks and on doorsteps across the city as the sun came up, about the time Gonzalo Albundo was being processed out of Central Jail.

I used my other hand to work the knife free and flung it across the table to the floor. The couple next to us hadn’t stopped staring, and diners at other tables had joined them.

“Gonzalo Albundo must have seemed like a miracle to you,” I said.

Masterman opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

“A troubled boy out of nowhere,” I said, “willing for some crazy reason to take the rap. He must have seemed like a gift from God.”

But Masterman wasn’t concerned about Gonzalo Albundo.

“When did you know it was me?”

He sounded beaten, pitiful. Yet I also thought I heard a certain calculation.

“Something felt odd the first time I met you at The Out Crowd. When I saw the film permit. It struck me that the shoot had been put together rather fast.”

“That’s when you suspected me?”

“It was just a question mark. We started checking, and things started pointing your way.”

He stared at the Polaroid.

“And the photo clinched it?”

“It linked you directly with the victim and suggested motive. It made the pieces fit.”

We were so close I could see two or three tiny hairs on one cheek that he’d missed while shaving. His wife should have noticed, I thought; I would have.

He kept his eyes intently forward and his head slightly lowered, like a trapped animal waiting for a chance to escape.