Justice at Risk (11 page)

“As you can see, he was on the heavy side, like me, though not as big, but that didn’t bother him. He saw beyond that, beneath the surface. He said I was beautiful. He saw what was inside, Ben! How many men do you find like that?”

“Too few, I’m sure.”

“We were going to be married, have children. I’m thirty-nine. I’ll probably never have a child now. Byron’s been murdered, and my life’s been torn apart, and they aren’t doing anything about it! I loved him, Ben! I loved Byron!”

Her voice had risen to a shrill pitch, and Harold suddenly rose behind his crescent-shaped desk. His lisp, always lively, got livelier.

“Thank God, you’re back, Mr. Justice! I tried to console this poor woman—I even offered her one of my Valiums. But she only wanted to talk with you.”

“Don’t worry, Harold. Things are under control.”

I convinced Melissa Zeigler to sit, and took a chair beside her. All I could think to do was to make her a promise.

“I’ll look into it for you, Melissa. I’ll try to light a fire under this Sergeant Montego.”

“If you could, it would mean so much.”

“I’ll see what I can do. On one condition.”

“What’s that?”

“That you promise to go home and get some rest. Will you do that?”

She nodded, and her shoulders slumped as some of the anger ebbed out of her. After a while, she stood, clutching her purse, and we borrowed pen and paper from Harold to exchange phone numbers. I put an arm around her and steered her toward the door.

“I’ll call you as soon as I know anything.”

She nodded again, whispered the words
thank you
, and stepped out into the lunchtime heat.

*

I spent three hours in front of a video screen, writing down time codes and making notes on the last of Tommy Callahan’s interviews, while Peter Graff was in and out of the office with seemingly a hundred tasks, patiently answering my questions each time I had one. There were times, when our bodies were particularly close, that I had trouble concentrating on his answers. Finally, he went out for a late lunch, and I started to get some real work done.

The most interesting of Callahan’s interviews was with a black guy named Charlie Gitt, who, according to the tape, owned a private sex club in east Hollywood called the Reptile Den, which catered exclusively to men who rode bareback. Gitt was no more or less articulate than any of the others Callahan had interviewed on the issue of bareback sex, which included an impassioned spokesman for an activist group called Sex Panic! that had formed to combat what it called Gay Neoconservatism, lumping anyone into that group who remotely challenged sexual promiscuity as unhealthy.

What made Charlie Gitt so fascinating was his ferocious defense of his right to use his genitals any way he pleased with a consenting adult, condoms and other health measures be damned, and regardless of the HIV status of any of the partners involved. His club had been closed down several times, he said, but he had a smart lawyer who knew the constitutional issues inside and out, and Gitt boasted proudly that he was currently back in business as a private social club, and would continue to operate “until the puritan oppressors shut me down or lynch me.” He was a fierce-looking man about my age with a rock-hard gym body, dark, angry eyes, and piercings of various kinds in his nipples, lips, and nose. As an African American gay man, he told the camera, riding bareback was the ultimate expression of racial and sexual freedom, “a testament to the selfhood of a faggot nigger,” especially when he was fucking a white man. It was a startling, disturbing piece of footage, and I marked it on my logging sheet for special attention.

As I slipped another tape into the machine, the phone rang. It was Melissa Zeigler, apologizing for her agitated behavior earlier that day and thanking me again for doing whatever I could do to give her some peace of mind. When I hung up, I knew that trying to concentrate on more of the tapes was useless. I left Peter a note suggesting he take the rest of the day off, as I intended to do.

*

Half an hour later, I was in the lobby of a Century City high-rise that served as the headquarters for Jacob Kosterman Enterprises, Inc. I told the receptionist I was there to see Mr. Kosterman, but had no appointment.

The receptionist was a young black woman with impeccable hair, clothes, teeth, and diction.

“I’m afraid that’s impossible then.”

“Tell him I’m here to discuss the death of Tommy Callahan. See if that gets his attention.”

“Your name, sir?”

“Benjamin Justice.”

She made a phone call, spoke softly, nodded, and hung up.

“Please take a seat, Mr. Justice. Someone will be right with you.”

For a minute or two, I had the opportunity to sink luxuriously into the lobby’s plush furniture, studying the lovely arrangements of fresh cut flowers, and admiring the huge art pieces on the walls, which looked fashionable and fashionably expensive. Without a doubt, in his quest for truth Jacob Kosterman had come a long way from his antiestablishment days in the more idealistic 1960s.

Across the polished terrazzo floor, two men in matching green blazers stepped out of an elevator. One was black, one was white, and both had big chests and shoulders, carried on frames exceeding six feet. They glanced first at me, then at the receptionist, who nodded. Then they were both standing over me. The one who was white, the taller of the two, did the talking.

“Mr. Justice?”

“That’s me.”

“Stand up, please.”

I stood.

“Are you parked in the building?”

I nodded.

“May I please have your parking ticket?”

I found it in a pocket, handed it to him. He handed it to the black man, who handed it to the receptionist, who placed validation stamps on it. Then it was passed back through the same hands, into mine again.

“It was nice of you to visit us, Mr. Justice.”

“I guess Mr. Kosterman is having a busy day.”

“Mr. Kosterman’s days are always busy.”

“I’m sure he could find a minute or two for me.”

“You should have called first.”

“He wouldn’t have returned my call.”

“Goodbye, Mr. Justice.”

“He knows I’m here to talk about Tommy Callahan?”

They did a two-step in their well-shined wingtips and took places on either side of me, close enough that I could see specks of dandruff on the white guy’s big shoulders, which were even with my eyes. He lowered his voice, firmly accentuating each syllable.

“Goodbye, Mr. Justice.”

*

I drove home with the top down and Nina Simone crooning “I Got My Man” on the radio, basking in temperatures that hovered near eighty degrees, even this late in the day.

In the trunk of the Mustang was one of the three boxes of videotapes, which I fully intended to finish viewing before the end of the night. My plan was to plop down with my notebook in front of the VCR the moment I got inside the house, push the Callahan and Mittelman murders into a mental compartment far, far away, and catch up on my work.

That was the plan, at least, until I pulled into the driveway and saw Peter Graff in the backyard. He was mowing the lawn, wearing nothing more than a pair of silky running shorts that left only a few square inches of him to the imagination.

He looked up when he heard the car door being shut.

“Ben! I got your note and took your advice. Beautiful day, huh?”

“A feast for the eyes. Need a hand?”

“Sure.”

“Let me get out of these clothes.”

I disappeared into the house and came back with two cans of cold soda, stripped down to my boxers. Peter had put the lawn mower aside and was raking the cut grass into a pile at the center of the yard. I drank half the contents of one can, put it down, and handed him the other one. He tilted the can and guzzled, and I watched the muscles of his throat work as the soda went down.

“You’re sweating, Peter.”

I ran my hand up the middle of his chest, through the moist golden hairs, collecting his perspiration on the edge of my finger.

“It’s hot.”

“Isn’t it, though.”

His eyes could not have been bluer, clearer, more steady. Our bare chests were nearly touching. The early March breeze swayed the trees, but the heat was unyielding.

“If memory serves, you’ve never kissed a man, have you?”

He shook his head slowly.

I took his face in my hands and looked into his eyes. We were so close now I could feel his breath on my mouth. Beneath my hands, his closely shaved beard felt like fine sandpaper. I could smell him faintly, along with the fresh cut grass.

“There’s nothing to it, really. It’s just like kissing a woman.”

Wednesday morning, I drove downtown to visit Katie Nakamura at the
Sun
, with my head still spinning from the feel of Peter Graff’s naked body. I’d explored all of him during the slow, sultry night, the contours and textures, all the secret places. It had lasted like a long, feverish hallucination, full of laughs and kisses, grunts and glorious ejaculations, through the sleepy dawn and into our soapy morning shower. The subject of my visit to the
Sun
, however, brought me quickly back to earth.

Katie and I had planned to meet in the small upstairs cafeteria, over coffee, but we ended up in Harry’s office instead, with Templeton present and the door closed.

“What’s going on, Harry?”

“Why don’t you have a seat? Let Katie tell us about it. She’s the one who dug it up.”

Katie sat on the edge of her chair with her skirted knees close together, and a file open across her lap. It was hard to believe she had earned her college degree and had a year of police reporting behind her; she still looked young enough to be in high school, writing nice features about spelling bees and cheerleading tryouts.

“I was able to find a copy of the police report from fifteen years ago, Mr. Justice. The one you asked for. I got it through a contact at the Hall of Records. At least I think it’s the one you want. The date, location, and description of the incident all match up.”

There were two typed and stapled pages, fairly typical for a standard, uncomplicated police report in the years before the LAPD became fully computerized. She lifted the first page, scanned the second, relaying information as she went.

“The victim was a Chinese American man, Winston Tsao-Ping. He didn’t want to talk to the police or press charges, but the ER doctors at County Hospital insisted on bringing in the cops.”

“Because he was beaten so badly?”

She nodded, and indicated the report.

“There’s an inventory of his injuries—a broken nose, broken arm, contusions covering most of his face and much of his body, with some internal bleeding that was considered serious enough to keep him in the hospital for observation.” She glanced up, wincing apologetically. “It also says he was kicked repeatedly in the groin area—his testicles were swollen to several times their normal size.”

“Sounds like one of the assailants had a sexual thing going on,” Templeton said, “maybe both of them.”

“Not untypical in gay bashings,” I said, “where the perps are usually sexually conflicted.”

Nakamura resumed reading.

“The victim was identified as a businessman, age twenty-four, married two years, with a Monterey Park address. He was wearing women’s clothes and makeup, along with a wig. One of the nurses called his wife at home. The wife spoke little English, so the victim’s mother came on the line—Pearl Tsao-Ping. It says here that she did most of the talking after she arrived at the hospital, doing her best to stay between the investigating officers and her injured son. She insisted he had no idea who his assailants were and did not wish to pursue the matter any further.” Nakamura glanced up at me. “That seems odd, doesn’t it?”

“Not if the guy was wearing women’s clothes and didn’t want to make the evening news.”

Harry was watching me with an unlit cigarette dangling from his lips, and a twitch over one eye that I hadn’t seen before.

“So why the big interest in this report, Ben? You writing a nostalgia piece about Hollywood cross-dressers in the eighties?”

“Suppose you answer a question first, Harry.”

“I’ll decide when I hear it.”

“Why are we meeting hush-hush like this? With Templeton giving up her precious reporting time to hang on every word. This document search was a simple request, between Katie and me.”

“Not anymore, it’s not.”

Templeton sat forward on her chair.

“Look who signed off on it.”

As Nakamura handed it across, Harry filled me in.

“You’ll find the name Taylor Fairchild at the bottom of page two.”

I took the report from Nakamura, but kept my eyes on Harry.

“The assistant chief?”

“Maybe the next
chief
.”

Templeton corrected him. “Almost certainly the next chief, Harry.”

“Taylor Fairchild must have signed off on hundreds of police reports over the years.”

Harry pushed his swivel chair away from his desk and clasped his hands behind his head. The tic over his eye kept on ticking.

“I was on the city desk at the
L.A. Times
fifteen years ago, Ben. You’d just come aboard as a cub reporter, still wet behind the ears. Taylor Fairchild was the newly appointed commander of the Rampart Division when he put his name on this report. I remember, because he was in his early thirties at the time, one of the youngest members of the department ever to make commander. The crime took place in the Hollywood Division—outside Fairchild’s jurisdiction. He also had the report stamped Internal and Confidential, which kept it out of circulation.”

“Out of the press room.”

“Out of general circulation, even within the department.”

“You think it smells a little.”

“Maybe you know something that suggests it smells a lot.”

I glanced around the small office at their three expectant faces. It was Harry’s, so gray and drawn, so worn out and sad, that caused me to take the plunge I didn’t want to take. It occurred to me that maybe I could feed him a story that would make him feel some hope again, give him a reason to get up in the morning, to think about something besides cutting budgets and pink-slipping reporters. Something to help him get over that damned twitch.

“Here’s what I know, Harry, with some speculation thrown in to make sense of it. Fifteen years ago, two cops in an undercover car caught this transvestite in an alley near Hollywood Boulevard. That much I know for sure. Apparently, they started questioning him, maybe harassing him. The guy was a closeted cross-dresser, which back then was a big no-no. He tried to get away, maybe even resisted arrest. The two cops got pissed off, started pushing him around. They got carried away, as cops sometimes do, and basically beat the shit out of the guy. As we all know, that kind of thing gets covered up or goes unreported all the time—especially back then, before the Rodney King incident, when Daryl Gates ruled the roost and had the rubber stamp of the police commission. The problem for the cops was, the beating was captured on videotape.”

Harry unclasped his hands and rolled his chair forward, until his paunch was tucked under the edge of his desk.

“I don’t remember anything like that. I was on the city desk for Christ sake. That would have been front page. Hell, it would have made the evening news, coast to coast. TV loves nothing better than real violence caught on tape.”

“The videotape never saw the light of day, Harry. It was shot by a professional cameraman named Byron Mittelman, who was working for that cop show,
On Patrol
.”

“Doing ride-alongs,” Templeton guessed, “taping the action.”

“Right. But the tape of the beating incident never got on the air, because
On Patrol
doesn’t use footage that casts cops in a bad light. Never has, never will. If they did, no police department in the country would let them ride along with their cameras.”

“What’s your source for most of this?”

“A very distraught lady named Melissa Zeigler. Byron Mittelman’s fiancée.”

“You think she’s solid? Or maybe hysterical?”

“No reason to disbelieve her at this point that I can see.”

Harry’s elbows were up on the desk now, and he was leaning forward.

“So what happened to this footage?”

“It got locked away in a vault, with other outtakes. During the show’s second season, a videotape editor named Tommy Callahan got fired. Before he left, he stole the tape of the beating, for reasons yet to be determined.”

“Callahan’s the d.b. they found last week up in Angeles National Forest?”

I nodded.

“Callahan was tortured before he died. About the same time he was getting carved up, Mittelman, the camera guy, took a bullet to the head execution-style.”

“Together?”

I shook my head.

“They hadn’t been in contact for years. But just before he was killed, possibly as he was about to be abducted, Callahan called Mittelman to warn him that he was in danger, since he was the only witness to the beating fifteen years ago.”

“Except for the two cops involved.”

“There was a third cop, the one driving the patrol car Mittelman was riding in, who stopped the beating. That’s all I know, except that the investigating detective in the Mittelman murder, a Sergeant Montego, LAPD, seems to be keeping a lid on the investigation. Melissa Zeigler tells me he’s also handling the Callahan murder, and keeping just as quiet on that one.”

“Callahan was a sheriff’s find,” Templeton said.

“Yes, but he was abducted in Hollywood. My guess is Montego used that as a reason to take the investigation out of the hands of the sheriff’s department, which was probably happy to have its homicide caseload lightened, especially one involving a seeming deadbeat like Callahan. Gay, alcoholic, seedy Hollywood motel. On the surface, not a very sexy case.”

Nakamura had been quiet for a while. She finally spoke up.

“You did say Sergeant Montego, didn’t you?”

“Montego, right.”

“Felix Montego?”

“Correct.”

“You should look at the names of the investigating officers at the end of the report. Fifteen years ago, a Felix Montego was one of the two patrol officers who went to County Hospital to interview the beating victim.”

I turned to the second page and ran my finger down to the last few lines. Above the line where Lieutenant Taylor Fairchild had signed off on the report, the signatures of the two investigating officers appeared. Katie was right: Felix Montego, then an officer rather than a sergeant, had scrawled his name and followed it with the date. But it was the name of the other investigating officer that I found even more intriguing.

Charlie Gitt.