Simple Justice (9 page)

I knew, when I first kissed Jim Lee, that if I were to remember nothing else about him, I would never forget his lips.

They were large, soft, wonderfully succulent.

Freed by whiskey and desire, he used them with a boldness and confidence I hadn’t anticipated, smothering my mouth until I wanted to do nothing but give in to him.

“I’ve known some great kissers, including a few women,” I told him later, “but you’re in a class by yourself.”

We lay naked at perpendicular angles on my big bed, his head cushioned on my hairy stomach.

He smiled a little at my remark and took another slow drag on his cigarette. He was the kind of man who made smoking look almost elegant.

I shifted the pillows behind my head to get a better view of him, and felt myself getting hard again.

His body was long and slender, marked only by a tattooed dagger that decorated one skinny bicep. He was pale and largely smooth, with a few coils of wiry, dark hair sprouting around each nipple. A sparse path of softer hair descended from his navel, disappearing into the canyon below his belly, where the hair became thick and silken and his penis lay limp against a curve of milky thigh, free of the condom I’d removed before washing him clean.

I ran a finger over his chin whiskers, then traced a line up his hairless cheek. He turned his head away.

“What’s wrong? You don’t like that?”

“It not seem right, men touch like that.”

He took a long, uneasy pull on his cigarette.

“Jim, we just spent the last two hours all over each other. My mouth was on every inch of your body, and you tasted most of mine. Or have you already forgotten?”

“That sex. The way you touch now different. It not feel right.”

“It’s just affection. Physical attraction.”

“This new for me.” He stubbed out his cigarette in a saucer. “L.A. guys, they move pretty fast.”

“Where are you from?”

He hesitated, and when he finally said “Fresno,” it sounded like a lie. I didn’t believe his true name was Jim Lee, either.

“My family has business there,” he said. “I am in Los Angeles only a few months.”

“Practically a native.”

I desperately wanted to touch him again, to put my hands on every part of him. But I also knew it wouldn’t happen.

He’d consumed most of a fifth of Crown Royal, on top of the earlier beer, before finding the courage for our initial embrace. Once started, he’d been wild in bed, half-crazy as he put me on my back and took charge. But now, almost sober again, he was the Jim Lee I’d first met playing pool at The Out Crowd. Reserved, suspicious, afraid of something.

“For someone with so little experience at making love,” I said, “you certainly seem to know what you’re doing.”

“I not say I have no experience making love. Only with the man.”

Someone tapped on my door. Jim sat up abruptly.

“Who that?”

“Probably one of the landlords.”

I worked my way out from under him.

“They know about you?”

I slipped into sweatpants.

“They’re both gay, and they’ve been together forty years.” He looked at me incredulously. “Yes, they know about me.”

As I approached the door, I heard footsteps on the stairs outside, going down. I opened the door and found a note from Maurice tucked under an edge of the doormat; Templeton wanted me to call.

I slipped on shoes, told Jim Lee that I’d be gone only a minute or two, then trotted down to the house and tapped on the back door. One of the cats rubbed against my legs, darting in the moment Maurice opened up.

The air inside was heavy with the musky smell of incense. I heard an aria from
La Bohème
playing in the living room, which meant that Fred was probably locked in another room down the hall, watching a boxing match.

Maurice showed me to the phone in the kitchen and withdrew discreetly.

“You asked me to check some facts,” Templeton said curtly, when we connected on the phone.

“First, the police won’t discuss the matter of powder burns on the suspect’s hands, but I’m trying to get some information through department sources.

“Second, Gonzalo Albundo refused to name the gang he belongs to. I have a call out to a priest who works with gangs in the Echo Park area to see if he knows anything, and a couple sources with the LAPD’s gang task force unit.

“Third, Albundo has no criminal record of any kind, not even jaywalking. He’s totally clean. I also called his school. No truancy. Excellent grades, until they began slipping about a year ago.”

“Nice work, Templeton.”

“You expected less?”

“Not for a moment.”

I asked her to have a librarian at the
Sun
run the name Jefferson Bellworthy through the database research system to see if it turned up in any news stories in recent years. I suggested she connect it with football as a subject to narrow the search.

“Anything else, Justice?” Her voice suddenly shifted from businesslike to playful. “Because if there isn’t, I have someone waiting in bed.”

“So do I,” I said.

I heard the receiver click sharply at her end.

When I got back up to the apartment, Jim was dressed. His shirt was again perfectly tucked, his necktie knotted, his black hair slicked neatly down.

I went up behind him and kissed him lightly on the neck, careful not to put my hands on him. As I looked over his shoulder, I saw that he was holding the framed photograph of Jacques.

He glanced back at me without quite meeting my eyes.

“Your lover?”

“He was.”

“How long…”

“A few years, off and on.”

“And where he now?”

“He died, six years ago this Sunday.”

I anticipated the questions I was certain he was too discreet to ask.

“Yes, it was AIDS. Yes, I’ve been tested. No, I’m not infected.”

“I sorry, I no have right to ask about him. Or even look at his picture.”

He placed it back on the shelf, arranging it exactly as he’d found it.

“You have every right to ask, if only to protect yourself. Although you should never believe the answers. Some people lie, even when they know their lies can kill.”

He glanced my way just enough to acknowledge me, without our eyes connecting. It seemed to be a habit of his.

He said, “You not trust people much, I guess.”

“Do you?”

He slipped away from me and into his jacket.

“He was Spanish?”

“His father was Caucasian. His mother was Chicana, born and raised here. They were both American.”

He glanced back at the photo: the eyes, wide and bright, the mouth shaped by a laugh. I remembered the day Jacques had returned from the clinic, where he’d gone for his test results. “It looks like I’ve got that Rock Hudson flu that’s going around,” he’d said, and laughed just before the tears.

“He look like he was nice person,” Jim said.

“He was.”

Jim went into the bathroom and checked his clothes in the mirror. Then he faced me and shook my hand.

“I go now.”

“I’ll give you a lift home.”

“I take taxi, thank you.”

“Where do you live?”

Again, the hesitation. “Koreatown.”

“It’s late. I’ll drive you.”

“I be fine, thank you.”

I slipped the Crown Royal bottle back into its wrinkled bag and held it out.

“Don’t forget your whiskey.”

“You keep it, please.”

I pushed the bag into his hands.

“If you leave it, I’ll drink it. And that wouldn’t be good.”

We stepped out onto the landing.

The blue-gray leaves of a nearby eucalyptus tree trembled in the warm breeze and gave off their heavy camphor smell. From the house, we could hear the sound of an old Percy Faith LP, complete with needle scratches. I recognized it as “The Theme from
A Summer Place
,” a favorite of Fred’s from the early Sixties.

“Can I call you?”

“I sorry,” Jim said. “No phone.”

He was looking at me again in his peculiar way, with his eyes just off my line of vision.

“How about at work?”

“They no allow personal call.”

“Maybe I’ll catch you at The Out Crowd,” I said, getting the message.

Below, on the candlelit patio, Maurice and Fred danced cheek-to-cheek to the lilting strings of the Percy Faith Orchestra. Jim stared at them a moment, transfixed.

Then he moved down the stairs, holding his head high and his eyes resolutely ahead, as if he found the notion of two men moving so intimately together to be a troubling aberration.

The music suddenly swelled. Sensing motion, I looked away to the patio.

Fred swept Maurice up in his beery trucker’s arms, whirling him around and around in the flickering light. Maurice threw his head back in blissful surrender, his long white hair falling free, a look of pure rapture on his candlelit face.

When I glanced back at the stairway, the man who called himself Jim Lee had crossed the last step and disappeared into the shadows beyond.

The winds stopped sometime during the night, and the heat broke before dawn.

I slept fitfully for a few hours, twisting in the single sheet that half-covered me, gripped in a feverish dream filled with flying horses that crashed screaming to earth, desperately flapping wings that no longer worked.

When I woke suddenly, bathed in perspiration, I reached for Jacques until I remembered once again that he was gone. As I settled back down, staring at the ceiling, I could still smell Jim Lee in the sheets and feel the dampness we’d made. But as the minutes passed, it was the image of Paul Masterman, Jr., that fixed itself in my mind.

I wondered if his lovely, well-veined arms were wrapped around his pregnant wife, as their bedroom filled with the same early morning light that was now insinuating itself into mine. I wondered if they made love frequently, and how. I envisioned his body, lean and hard, naked and straining, as he did with his formless, faceless wife what I wished I might do with him.

I finally rolled over on my belly, pressing myself against the mattress in longing that I knew was as foolish and futile as it was aching and intense.

I must have drifted back to sleep, because the next thing I heard was Maurice, tapping lightly outside, then his nimble footsteps on the stairs.

From the window, I saw him hurry down the end of the driveway, where Fred waited with the Jeep running. Then they drove off to their weekly stint as volunteers at the Chris Brownlie AIDS Hospice, where Maurice tended to the needs of the dying, and Fred to the leaky plumbing.

I opened the door to find a tray of coffee, bagels, cream cheese, and fruit, just the way Maurice had so often left one for Jacques after he’d gotten sick. There was even the same little packet of vitamins and a yellow rose, the flower of hope, rising on a thorny stem from a thrift store crystal vase.

I placed the rose between the photographs of Jacques and Elizabeth Jane, then ate, showered, and shaved.

It was almost ten when I drove to the nearest telephone company office, where I used most of Harry’s remaining cash to order a phone installed.

I also made two calls. One was to the home of Billy Lusk’s mother and stepfather, where I reached their answering machine and hung up without leaving a message. The other was to Derek Brunheim, Billy’s former roommate, who told me I was welcome to drop by that morning.

I spent the rest of Harry’s money to fill the Mustang’s tank, then drove southeast into the mid-Wilshire district, where Brunheim rented an apartment in an elegant older building near the museums.

At the entrance, I ran into a finely dressed, white-haired woman juggling groceries and a set of keys. I held the door open for her and she thanked me, smiling sweetly.

I told her I was there to visit Derek Brunheim, and wondered if she knew him.

“Oh, yes, he’s just two units down from me.”

She asked if Brunheim and I were friends. I told her I was from the
Sun
.

She frowned, shaking her head.

“It’s terrible, just terrible what happened to his friend. Mr. Brunheim was so devoted to that boy.”

I offered to carry her bags, and she continued talking as she transferred them to my outstretched arms.

“William liked to sun himself down by the pool—he was very careful about his tan, you know. Mr. Brunheim would bring magazines down, or a cold drink, without even being asked. Sometimes, he’d rub lotion all up and down William’s back and legs; he did it with such care.”

She pressed knobby, arthritic fingers lightly to my forearm.

“Not that I pry, mind you. It’s just that I can see the pool area from my kitchen window, and there are certain things one can’t help noticing.”

We crossed a flagstone courtyard shaded by towering bird of paradise trees and colorful climbing bougainvillea so thick you could no longer see the trellises. From around a corner came the reverberating hum of a diving board in motion, then the sharp splash of a body parting water. It was all very Southern California, very David Hockneyish, and not at all difficult to picture Billy Lusk lying poolside, sleek in bikini Speedos and languid with thoughts of his own beauty.

“William was under the weather now and then,” the old woman went on, as we entered an elevator. “Mr. Brunheim would put aside his work for days on end to tend to him. Nasal problems, for one thing, and not the normal kind.”

She lowered her voice to a whisper, even though we were alone.

“We think it was D-R-U-G-S. You know, cocaine. But, of course, you hear all kinds of things, so I simply pay no attention to any of it.”

We reached her apartment. She turned her key in the lock, opened the door, and took the bags.

“I’ve also heard that Mr. Brunheim has some health problems of his own, if you know what I mean. But please, not a word about it.”

I promised to keep it to myself.

She told me Brunheim’s apartment was two doors farther down, and asked me to pass along her sympathies.

“Mrs. Ashburn,” she said. “Unit 216.”