Simple Justice (4 page)

I eased the Mustang into a parking space in the southside warehouse district, fed two quarters into the meter, and approached the headquarters of the
Los Angeles Sun
.

The ornate building, one of the most photographed in the city, rose to four stories and covered half a block. It had been an architectural showplace during the Sun’s heyday in the 1930s and 1940s; its facade suggested the Romanesque, with an abundance of sculptured corbeling and heavy arched windows supported by twisted columns, and statues of Roman figures gracing the corners of each level.

In the late Fifties, when the
Sun
’s fortunes had begun to decline, so had the upkeep of the building. Now it was faded and shabby; the statues were encrusted with years of pigeon droppings, and its once-proud stonework was marred at street level with graffiti and splashes of urine.

Outside the main entrance, a dozen nicotine addicts huddled, getting their early afternoon fix: management, editorial, and labor, puffing furiously, united for a minute or two by their common craving.

Harry spotted me and emerged quickly from the pack, sucking down a lungful of smoke before flicking his butt toward the curb.

He took my elbow and hustled me into the marbled lobby, as if he was afraid I’d change my mind. I hadn’t been inside a newspaper building in half a dozen years, and as I pushed through the revolving doors, I felt a set of muscles tighten somewhere deep in my guts.

I signed in with the guard and rode the elevator up, standing rigidly beside Harry and staring at the tarnished copper doors. One or two passengers glanced curiously at my face, but no one showed any recognition. Maybe they were too polite. Or maybe it just didn’t matter anymore.

We got out at the third floor and turned in the direction of Harry’s office.

The four-story Sun building stood six stories below the highest level at Times Mirror Square, which housed the
Los Angeles Times
two miles north and occupied an entire square city block in the heart of Civic Center. The difference in the size and stature of the two buildings paralleled the difference between the newspapers themselves. The
Times
, with more than a million daily subscribers, was an institution in Southern California, a major force in its political, economic, and social affairs; whether it was a great newspaper was a matter of debate, but not its regional influence. The
Sun
, with fewer than 300,000 regular readers, had a good sports page.

For years, pundits had referred to Los Angeles as “a one-and-a-half-newspaper town,” where the
Sun
attracted only two kinds of journalists: young ones on their way up, and older ones on their way down.

“How are you doing?” Harry said.

“I’m all right.”

We passed along a corridor of buckling linoleum through the soft side of the paper, where the feature sections were put together, and into the hard-news area.

A couple of dozen reporters sat in their cubicles, separated from one another by sound-absorbent partitions, their ears pressed to telephones or plugged into tape transcription machines. They typed furiously on their keyboards as we went by, fixing their eyes resolutely on their computer screens; no one looked up.

“Fucking computer pods,” Harry grumbled, glancing at his isolated reporters. “Nobody talks to anybody anymore, nobody knows anybody anymore. We might as well be toll booth operators.”

I followed him into his office, where he picked up the phone and asked Alex Templeton to join us.

The morning edition of the
Sun
lay atop a stack of files on Harry’s desk. Templeton’s article on the Billy Lusk murder was the lead piece on the front page of part two, the City section. I’d read through it earlier that morning; it was a solid if predictable piece of news reporting, well organized and sharply written. It was also quite a few cuts above the flashy, sensationalist reporting the
Sun
had been known for in recent years, when it had been trying desperately to lure readers away from television and the more staid but substantial style of the Los Angeles Times.

Harry was right. Alex Templeton, though just out of graduate school, was a good reporter, with the potential to be very good.

“Benjamin Justice,” Harry said, as Templeton entered the office, “meet your new partner in crime.”

Alexandra Templeton looked me up and down slowly and critically before uttering a word.

She was a tall, sinewy woman, one or two inches shorter than my six feet, with an almost regal presence. Her beauty was startling: vaulting cheekbones; frank, almost fierce dark eyes; braids of black hair draped dramatically down a long, slender neck; flawless skin as dark and rich as deep obsidian, suggesting the force of volcanic fire beneath.

I put out my hand. She squeezed it perfunctorily, riveting her eyes to mine.

“I understand you’re going to work with me on the Billy Lusk story,” she said coolly.

“On an informal basis.”

“Informal or not, I hope you’ll get your facts straight.” She narrowed her eyes. “Because making things up isn’t my style.”

“Templeton, cut the crap,” Harry said. “We already talked this over.” He gathered up some papers from his messy desk. “I’ve got a meeting. Get along, OK?”

On his way out, he stuffed some cash into my shirt pocket. “And, you. Get a phone.”

When he was gone, Templeton slipped into the big chair behind his desk, leaving me to face her from the smaller visitor’s chair.

Behind her, the latest editions of the
Los Angeles Times
were draped over racks for Harry’s perusal, along with the
New York Times
, the
Washington Post
,
The Wall Street Journal
, the
Christian Science Monitor
,
USA Today
, the
Orange County Register
, and the
Los Angeles Daily News
, which was actually the newspaper of the city’s San Fernando Valley.

Templeton looked quite comfortable in a newspaper setting. Barring the obstacles typically faced by those of her race and gender, she could no doubt rise to Harry’s level and beyond, if she so desired, at one of the fifteen or twenty major newspapers around the country. That was assuming that printed newspapers survived long enough in the new age of video-shortened attention spans and electronic transmission. But Templeton was also exceptionally attractive, which probably meant she’d follow the dollars and the glory to television, reporting stories in a fraction of the time allowed by print, with a fraction of the depth and complexity, the way most of the world was already getting its information.

“Where should we begin?” she asked, with feigned politeness, folding her long, slender fingers across her lap.

“Why don’t you fill me in on the case?”

“There’s really not much of a case.” She turned each word crisply, with the perfect articulation of someone educated at high-class prep schools. “They have their suspect and a plausible motive. Witnesses have placed him at the crime scene. He’s confessed and intends to plead guilty. Open and shut, all the way around.”

“You believe that?”

“The police certainly do.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

She hesitated; her eyes flickered, suggesting a mind racing back through a notebook full of details.

Finally, she said, “I don’t see much reason to doubt that Gonzalo Albundo committed the murder.”

I wasn’t sure if the tone in her voice was smug or just supremely confident.

“Weapon?”

“They haven’t found one. He apparently disposed of it after fleeing the crime scene.”

“Previous record?”

Once again, she hesitated. Then: “I don’t believe so.”

“You don’t ‘believe’ so?”

She flinched.

“The police didn’t mention a criminal record,” she said tightly. “Perhaps it was automatically erased when he turned eighteen a few weeks ago. I’ll check.”

“What about the gang Albundo mentioned?”

“What about it?”

“That’s what I’m asking you.”

“I’ll check into that as well.”

She raised her eyebrows and smiled thinly; the expression bordered on insulting.

“Anything else, Mr. Justice?”

“Did the detectives check the boy’s hands for powder traces?”

The muscles tightened in her graceful neck, and her eyelids fluttered rapidly. She may have been a good reporter, well educated, smart, ambitious; but she was twenty-five, and she was still green.

“I’m referring to gunpowder,” I said.

“Yes, I know what you’re referring to.” Then: “I…I didn’t ask them that.”

“Well, it’s an easy question to overlook,” I said, as smoothly as I could. “Especially given the confession.”

She sat forward and placed her hands firmly on Harry’s big desk.

“Don’t patronize me, Mr. Justice. If I make a mistake, I’ll live with it.”

The remark might have had a double meaning, aimed right at me; or maybe not.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll be more careful. On one condition.”

“Which is?”

“That you promise not to call me Mr. Justice.”

She looked at me quizzically, as only someone so young would. “It makes me feel Harry’s age,” I explained. “And I’m not quite there yet.”

I expected at least a smile; she wouldn’t give me even that.

We agreed to address each other by our last names, then spent another twenty minutes discussing the murder of Billy Lusk, choosing our words and tone of voice carefully.

I conceded that Gonzalo Albundo clearly looked guilty, but reminded her that it never hurt to poke around with off-target questions, what Harry liked to call “fishing.”

“But if Gonzalo Albundo didn’t do it,” she asked, “why would he confess?”

“Why is always the most interesting question, isn’t it? And always the most difficult to answer.”

She considered that in silence for a moment; I could almost see the finely tuned machinery turning behind her lively, intelligent eyes.

Then she told me she was working on other assignments, including one that was just breaking, which meant at least one urgent deadline. She’d already asked Harry to give her an extra day or two before filing a follow-up story on the Billy Lusk murder.

“What about the arraignment tomorrow?”

“We’ll handle it as a news brief in Friday’s paper,” she said. “Then go deeper a day or two after that.”

We decided that I’d begin gathering background from various sources, so she could put together the perspective piece Harry wanted as soon as she cleared some time.

When it seemed there was nothing more to discuss, I stood up to go. She stood with me, but stayed behind Harry’s desk.

“If it were anyone but you,” she said, “I wouldn’t accept this arrangement.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

Her voice and manner, which had been merely cool, dropped toward the arctic zone.

“When I was a freshman in J-school seven years ago, we thought you were hot stuff, Justice. I’m not saying you were the only reporter we admired, or studied. But you got information other reporters just didn’t get. You wrote with such authority and commitment. Real passion. In a way, I felt I knew you.”

She paused, and for a moment I thought I saw in her eyes an emotion softer than resentment.

“I clipped every major piece you filed for the
L.A. Times
,” she said. “Including the AIDS series.”

The AIDS series. Sooner or later, it had to come up.

A chronicle of two men, lovers; one dying, the other caring for him in his final days. A saga not just of the disease and its impact on a particular generation of young men, but
A Story of Love and Loyalty and Loss
, as Harry had summarized it in the deck that he’d inserted just beneath the headline.

“It was the best writing you’d done,” Templeton said. “It took readers beyond the statistics, humanized the issues. I was only eighteen, but that series reminded me why I wanted to be a reporter. I clipped it and taped it above my desk in my dormitory room, it was that important to me.”

“And then,” I said, “it won the Pulitzer.”

I resisted the impulse to smile at the irony.

Templeton leaned forward on Harry’s desk, closing the distance between us a little.

“I was so happy for you. I celebrated with champagne, and I don’t even drink. I was happy for all of us who care about the truth.”

There was nothing for me to say, except that I was sorry. I preferred to keep quiet and take the punishment. In a perverse way, it felt good.

“And when I found out those two men didn’t exist,” she went on, her voice growing not just icy but tough, “that you made them up, made the whole story up, I felt betrayed. And I felt more contempt for you than I can ever express.”

“You’re doing a pretty good job.”

“When Harry first proposed this arrangement, I flatly refused. I didn’t care to be associated with the notorious Benjamin Justice, the reporter who had to give back the Pulitzer prize. But then I realized what I could get out of it.”