Simple Justice (16 page)

“I suppose he offered details.”

“Some.”

“Are you going to put any of that in your paper?”

“Possibly.”

“My God.”

She rested her forehead on her hand, rubbing at the worry lines.

“Would you care to go on the record, Mrs. Devonshire? The more substantial the information I have from you, the less likely I’m going to need to rely on Derek Brunheim.”

“I don’t seem to have much choice, do I? Thanks to Derek Brunheim and his pathetic fantasies.”

I opened my notebook, jotting notes while she talked.

“When my first husband died he left Billy a modest trust fund. It was closed to Billy until his thirtieth birthday, as an incentive for him to make something of himself. About two years ago, we realized that Billy was using cocaine on a regular basis. That’s when Phillip stepped in. He was adamant that Billy enroll in a treatment program and submit to regular drug tests. Billy flatly refused, insisted he didn’t have a problem. So Phillip cut off his allowance. They had some terrible fights over that.”

“Was cocaine the only issue?”

“If you thought it was, I doubt you would have asked the question.”

I waited. The silence loomed larger until it forced her to say something.

“All right, you may as well know. We also demanded that Billy end his friendship with that awful man. Derek Brunheim.”

She closed her eyes for a moment in apparent revulsion.

“I doubt you’ve told me everything he said, Mr. Justice. I can imagine that most of it was lies.”

“That’s why I’m here, Mrs. Devonshire. To try to sort things out.”

“Trust me, he’s a sick man. He was the one who introduced Billy to drugs.”

“Do you have proof of that?”

“He wanted to make Billy dependent on him, to take him away from me. What better way?”

She wrung her hands together as if they were cold. Her chin trembled as she spoke again.

“He succeeded quite well, wouldn’t you say?”

“Did it bother you that your son was homosexual, Mrs. Devonshire?”

She regarded me critically for a long moment, as if deciding exactly how to respond.

“Billy was not homosexual, Mr. Justice. He was rebellious. And that’s where I take much of the blame.”

She stood and wandered to the edge of the patio, carrying the photo album with her. I followed, standing beside her as she looked out across the city.

“I think Billy always wanted to hurt me, for remarrying so soon. For sharing myself with another man, so to speak. Through the years, he acted out in certain ways. Moving in with that perverted man was one of them. But it had nothing to do with his sexuality. It was just a phase.”

She glanced over.

“I know that sounds naive and unenlightened in this day and age. But in Billy’s case, it happens to be the truth. A mother knows.”

“Billy died outside a gay bar, Mrs. Devonshire. He was a regular customer there.”

“I spend much of my time and a good deal of my money helping the disadvantaged, Mr. Justice. That doesn’t make me poor.”

The phone rang in the background. There was a click, and the answering machine picked up the call.

She opened the album to a photo of her son at about age two, all big blue eyes and golden curls, clutching a toy airplane in his tiny plump hand.

“Frankly, I wish that Billy had been homosexual,” she said, studying the photo. “It would make his death much easier to accept.”

“Because you would have loved him less?”

“Grandchildren, Mr. Justice. If there was anything I was looking forward to, it was Billy settling down and having children.”

“Did your husband share that sentiment?”

“Phillip wouldn’t have liked it much, I don’t suppose. It would have brought not only Billy back into our lives, but a wife and grandchild, and it would have disrupted our routine. But that was a sacrifice I’d happily make to hold a grandchild in my arms.”

She flipped to the next page and to more photographs of her only child.

“At least if I’d been certain Billy was homosexual, I wouldn’t have expected that and been so disappointed. Would I?”

It was a long way to get to the kind of logic Margaret Devonshire needed to make her pain tolerable. Viewed through her narrow prism, I supposed it made some kind of sense.

She turned the page again, to a shot of her son splashing in a backyard play pool, dated twenty-five years earlier.

“You probably think I’m a very selfish woman, don’t you, Mr. Justice?”

“You seem lonely, Mrs. Devonshire.”

She tried to laugh but it didn’t quite get out.

“Since his passing, I’ve probably talked more about Billy with you than with anyone else. Most of the time, it’s just myself and Francesca here. I haven’t welcomed visitors.”

“And Mr. Devonshire?”

She continued turning the pages, almost in rhythm with her speech, which had slowed considerably, as though her emotion was winding down.

“Naturally, he feels badly about what happened. But he was never close to Billy. He has grown children of his own from his first marriage, and several grandchildren. So it’s not the same for him.”

The laugh finally came, sharp with bitterness.

“The day Billy died, Phillip played eighteen holes. He shot par.”

I remembered from Templeton’s notes that the police had called in Margaret Devonshire to identify her son’s body early that afternoon. She’d probably gone alone, while her husband golfed.

She glanced at my notebook, realizing again just how much she’d been saying.

“Please, nothing in your story about Phillip, or the part about grandchildren.”

“I see no reason for it.”

I looked over her shoulder to a picture of Billy in a Cub Scout uniform, his cap tilted to one side.

“Your son was a beautiful child,” I said.

“Wasn’t he? Look at that darling little nose. That’s the one thing everyone always commented on. Today, people pay fortunes for a nose like that. Billy was born with his.”

“I believe he got it from you.”

“Thank you for noticing, Mr. Justice.”

“Mrs. Devonshire, I’m going to ask you a difficult question.”

She braced herself with another false smile.

“Can you think of anyone who might have had a reason to kill your son? Someone other than the boy who was arrested?”

“That’s not a difficult question at all. From the beginning, I assumed Derek Brunheim was involved.”

“Why would Brunheim kill your son, when he was so fond of him?”

“That’s just it. Billy was ending their friendship.”

“Are you sure?”

“He told us so himself, two days before he was taken from us. He was tired of the way he was living. We told him that if he changed his ways, we’d set him up in his own apartment and help him finish his education. He planned to go back to film school for the spring term.”

“And you believed he’d follow through?”

“Phillip warned Billy that this was absolutely his last chance. That if he failed to meet certain expectations, we’d cut him off completely, including any future inheritance. All he would have would be the trust fund, which wasn’t much. We worked it all out, and Billy promised to tell Derek the next day that he was moving out.”

Her face became strained, but I also thought I saw a glint of satisfaction in her eyes.

“I can only imagine that man’s reaction,” she said, “when he realized we’d finally beaten him.”

I reminded her of Gonzalo Albundo’s confession.

“I believe he comes from a poor background,” she said.

“Meaning Derek Brunheim may have hired him to commit murder?”

“Your words, Mr. Justice. Not mine.”

I asked to look through her son’s personal belongings, but she flatly refused. She did, however, agree to loan me a recent photo of him to accompany any article the
Sun
might run, and removed one from the album’s last page.

I asked to use the bathroom before leaving, and she led me inside. With the bathroom door locked behind me, I quickly surveyed the contents of the drawers and medicine cabinet. The latter held a pharmacopoeia of prescription drugs, including pills for nerves and chronic depression; most of them were prescribed to Margaret Devonshire and dated long before the death of her son.

On my way out, I glanced into her husband’s trophy room, where he’d mounted an impressive collection of handguns and rifles in a glass cabinet.

“For some reason, Phillip enjoys collecting them,” Margaret Devonshire said. “I suppose he thinks it’s a manly kind of thing. Personally, I never liked having them around.”

She opened the front door, exposing her gaunt face again to the unkind light.

“But Phillip’s like most men, I’m afraid. He likes to have his way.”

I hiked back down the hill with the patrol car following slowly behind until I was past the stone gates and out of Trousdale Estates.

In one hand, I carried the photo of Billy Lusk inside an envelope, on loan from his mother. I didn’t like the feeling of his dead face pressed between my fingers, but at first I wasn’t sure why.

Then I realized that meeting Margaret Devonshire had shaken me up a little.

There was a lot about her and her lofty world I didn’t care for, including her condescending attitude toward much of the human race. She’d raised a son who’d been spoiled, manipulative, and ridiculously vain. But for all there’d been to dislike about him, he’d been flesh and blood, and the most important person in her life. Her grief was real, and I knew what that felt like.

I left Beverly Hills and crossed back into West Hollywood, where I called Derek Brunheim from a pay phone on the Sunset Strip.

I made some small talk, then mentioned Billy Lusk’s personal photographs as casually as possible. Brunheim said he had them for me and agreed to meet me for an early dinner at a cafe in Boy’s Town. I had no idea what I might find, but I wanted a look.

As I hung up, a young woman was kneeling on the sidewalk outside the Viper Room. She placed a flower on the spot where River Phoenix had died a year or two before, thrashing with convulsions from a drug overdose. The campfire scene from
My Own Private Idaho
flashed in my mind, and I didn’t know if it signified glorious immortality, tragic waste, or maybe just plain stupidity—or if I was merely troubled by my meeting with a grieving mother.

I didn’t want to think about young men dying anymore, and tried not to as I headed back down to the apartment. But when I got there, I walked in to see the
East of Eden
poster hanging crooked on the wall, with James Dean’s message scrawled near the bottom:
To my buddy Maurice, a beautiful guy. Love always, Jimmy
. And then Jacques’s face smiling at me from the shelf, looking more alive in that one photograph than I’d felt in years.

I wanted a drink in the worst way.

Not wine but something hard, straight from the bottle, right now. When you want that and it’s barely past noon and you have four hundred dollars in your pocket, it might as well be 6 a.m. and the end of your life.

I did my laundry instead.

I concentrated on putting just the right amount of detergent in each washer and just the right amount of money in each dryer and meticulously sorting and folding my clothes afterward. When I got home, I even put everything in the proper drawers, something I hadn’t done since I’d moved in three months earlier.

As I was making up the bed, I saw the envelope.

It leaned against the vase that held the yellow rose, and bore the return address of the
Los Angeles Sun
. My last name was scrawled across the front in graceful handwriting that I immediately recognized as Templeton’s.

Inside was a newspaper clipping from the
Los Angeles Times
, dated Father’s Day the previous year. A note was paper-clipped to the corner:
Justice—I came across this in the files and thought it might interest you. Templeton
.

The clipping was a first-person piece from the
Times
’s Life & Style section, accompanied by a three-column photograph of Senator Paul Masterman and his son; their arms were around each other’s shoulders as they beamed for the camera, two handsome, healthy men for whom life seemed to have fallen nicely into place.

Below the photo was a headline, A FATHER AND SON REUNION, followed by the deck: A S
ENATOR’S
S
ON
W
AGES A
D
ETERMINED
B
ATTLE
T
O
O
VERCOME
F
AMILY
T
ROUBLES
A
ND
W
IN
H
IS
D
AD’S
L
OVE.

Beneath the deck was the byline of Paul Masterman, Jr., and then his story.

Before this year, picking out a Father’s Day card was one of the most frustrating experiences of my life.

Most of the cards carried messages like “To the World’s Greatest Dad.” Or “To My Old Man, Who’s Always Been There for Me.” Or “I Love You, Dad, More Than I Can Ever Say.”

The problem was, I didn’t feel any of those things. Buying a card that expressed my love for my father, or acknowledged his love for me, would have been dishonest. When my father read it, its falseness would have embarrassed us both, underscoring how alienated we really were, and how little genuine affection had ever been expressed between us.

So I always ended up buying one of those joke cards that uses humor to avoid the awful truth so many sons face: The emotional distance that separates them from their fathers makes Father’s Day the most awkward and painful day of the year, when it should be one of the happiest.

The next several paragraphs recounted his parents’ bitter divorce, the years of infidelity and family turmoil that had preceded it, and the pain of seeing the details publicly aired in the press.

Then the piece jumped to an inside page, recounting Paul Jr.’s single-handed campaign to break through his father’s emotional armor.

First, I had to come to terms with my own anger and find the courage to express it fully and frankly, no easy task when your father is Senator Paul Masterman. I laid it all out in a letter, with nothing held back, and mailed it to him. Next, I sat down with Dad face to face, and forced him to deal with old issues between us, dredging up all the guilt and pain so that we might get past it. Finally, I accepted him as someone less than perfect, as we all are, and forgave him, knowing that he loves me, but that he just didn’t know how to express it until we sat down and learned how together.

It was the beginning of the healing process we both needed, and the building of a new relationship between us, based on communication and trust.

lt was a nicely written story, sappy but touching, with an ending that must have hit a nerve with many male readers.

This year, for the first time, I looked forward to picking out a Father’s Day card. The one I chose opened with these words: “I’m So Lucky to Have You for a Dad.”

Today, I’ll give my dad his card. The two of us will spend some time together. We’ll laugh, exchange hugs, share our thoughts and feelings. The way all fathers and sons were meant to do, every day of the year.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad. I love you.

I folded the clipping so that just the photograph showed, then folded it again so the senator was out of the picture. I smoothed it out and used the paper clip to hold it together, and propped it up against the bud vase, between the photos of Jacques and Elizabeth Jane.

Then I sat on the edge of the bed and thought about what was happening to me.

I was getting involved in other people’s lives. I knew that the more involved I got the more I would care. And if I cared, there would be inevitable disappointment and loss, inevitable pain.

Yet I also felt I deserved the pain, more than anyone.

Paul Masterman, Jr.

He’d found the courage to act decisively, to do the one thing that could set things straight, get his life on track. It occurred to me that if I could get Gonzalo Albundo out of jail, save him, it might straighten things out a little for me. It was the right thing to do. A matter of simple justice. I needed to do the right thing.

Paul Masterman, Jr.

I wanted to be able to put things right the way he was able to do, to summon up whatever was good inside me and do something with it, to carry on with strength and belief.

I wanted him to be my friend, my advisor, my lover. I wanted him to hold me, to save me before I lost whatever was left of myself, before I lost my mind.

Paul Masterman, Jr.

I’d never wanted anyone so much, this completely, this obsessively, this hopelessly. It was crazy, but it also felt as real as the bed I was sitting on.

I dozed off staring at his picture and slept stuporously in the afternoon heat, feverish and sweaty. I dreamed about the falling horses again, and then he was in the dream somehow, naked, and I was touching him, and the horses disappeared and I realized it was Jacques I was clutching, and I felt everything swell up aching below my belly and then hot semen pumping out of me, bringing me back, reminding me of who and where I was.

As I slowly woke, it was like coming out of a coma that I didn’t want to leave. Shadows slanted in, the way they often had in this room when Jacques and I had fallen asleep after making love. It was one of those moments when you feel like someone who is gone is back with you again. Then you gradually realize it’s only an illusion, slipping away as consciousness returns. Sadness engulfs you and then an overwhelming feeling of emptiness, like a bottomless dark hole you could fall into forever.

For a moment, I heard Jacques’s voice somewhere in my head, and the words he’d spoken as I drove him to County Hospital the final time.

I’m more worried about you than me.

Then he was gone, leaving me on a lumpy bed in a lonely room, haunted by what I needed most and knew I could never have.

I wanted something concrete to grab onto. I rolled over and found my watch. It was nearly five.

I crawled off the bed and shook off sleep with a shower and a shave.

Then I put on fresh clothes and headed down to the boulevard to meet Derek Brunheim.