Limits of Justice, The (17 page)

What troubled me most about the pictures was how much I liked them, how the desolate world and dark mood she’d captured appealed to something deep inside me. I’d always been drawn to places like that, vast and lonely landscapes where one could become lost and never found.

“So, tell me all about Saturday night.”

Templeton kept her mischievous brown eyes on me as she flipped chunks of sizzling chicken on the tabletop broiler at the Koreatown restaurant she’d chosen for lunch. We’d finished our dried persimmon soup with pine nuts and moved on to the main course.

“We’re here to discuss the Charlotte Preston case, Templeton, not my relationship with Oree.”

“I can always pry it out of Oree if I have to.”

“Fine, you do that.”

Her gorgeous face became smug, self-satisfied.

“He’ll be more open with me, anyway.”

“I wish to God you’d start dating again, Templeton, and find someone to take your mind off my romantic life.”

“Such as it is.”

We had a side booth near the back, where it was quiet, and away from the smoggy, noontime glare of Western Avenue. I’d wanted to meet at the Mandarin Deli downtown, a couple of blocks from the
L.A. Times,
where Harry and I had eaten so often in the old days. Templeton had ruled that out, telling me frankly that as a new hire at the
Times,
she couldn’t be seen lunching with a former reporter who was not just persona non grata at the newspaper, but the most infamous fraud in its 119-year history.

I passed her the little bowls of kimchi and marinated vegetables, and got the big bowl of steamed rice in return.

“Charlotte Preston, Templeton—that list of names. Can we get down to business?”

She sighed with exaggerated frustration, reached into her bag, pulled out a notebook, then a file filled with computer printouts, which she opened on the table.

“There were an even dozen names on the list you gave me, all men. Two of the names I was unable to run down through the usual methods, but I’ll keep trying if it’s important.”

“Let’s concentrate on the others for now.”

“Four of those are deceased, one a suicide, the others from natural causes, including two who died from AIDS-related conditions. Two of the others are in prison, both for sex crimes involving minors. All of the above were white males, fairly well educated and successful, generally born in the thirties and forties. Three of them were members of a group called BLAST—an anagram for Boy Loving Adults Sticking Together.”

“Clever.”

“BLAST claims several thousand members nationwide, but that’s not verifiable, because it’s so secretish. There are apparently a few women in the group, though it’s overwhelmingly male. The organization was formed to promote the idea that children are sexual creatures, just like adults. That loving them should not be criminalized but encouraged.”

She looked up from her notes.

“You aren’t that radical, are you, Justice?”

“I’ve got no argument with the part about loving them. I’ve just never understood why a grown man has to fondle a little boy’s penis to show how much he cares.”

Templeton’s face soured at the image. She transferred a few chunks of crackling chicken to my plate with chopsticks, before glancing at her notebook again.

“That leaves four more names, which you’re already familiar with: Mandeville Slayton, Edward T. Felton, Jr., Dr. Stanley Miller, and Freddie Fuentes.”

“All of whom were apparently connected to Rod Preston and Randall Capri in some way, since the list was in Capri’s handwriting and found among Preston’s effects.”

“Seems like a logical conclusion.”

“Dr. Miller I’ve already got a bead on, unless you’ve come up with something new.”

“Just what you already know from the last two decades—his success with the clinics, his charity work—though underprivileged kids aren’t among the publicized causes.”

“He likes to keep that quiet, I guess.”

She raised her eyebrows, popped a piece of chicken into her mouth, then talked again as she chewed.

“That brings us to Freddie Fuentes, the INS guy.”

“Any progress there?”

“Fuentes started out with the border patrol back in seventy-eight, rounding up illegal immigrants trying to come across from Mexico. He moved into administration here in L.A. about ten years ago, screening applications for green cards and citizenship, evaluating deportation cases, that kind of thing. He works downtown at INS headquarters, where the final decisions come down.”

“He’s got some power then.”

“He’s essentially a midlevel bureaucrat, but he controls the fates of thousands of people. Have you ever been down to the INS center?”

I nodded, thinking back a few years.

“There are dozens of undocumented aliens lined up down there every day, hoping to get a green card or some kind of waiver to stay in the country.”

“Dozens has grown to hundreds, Justice. With the immigration laws tightening up so much in recent years and the crackdown on illegals getting a big political push, it’s become pretty intense. Except for a refugee camp, I’ve never seen so much desperation in one place.”

“Which puts even more power into the hands of a guy like Fuentes.”

I glanced at her notebook.

“Who’s next?”

“Edward T. Felton, who’s pretty much a known entity—one of the most high-powered multimedia moguls in the entertainment business. Single, gay, likes to be seen on the arm of wealthy socialite women at public functions.”

“He’s come out?”

“A few years ago, after one of the gay magazines threatened to drag him from the closet kicking and screaming because of his lousy record supporting gay and lesbian film projects.”

“Closet cases can be that way. Personal life?”

Templeton put down her chopsticks, flipped a page in her notebook, scanned her reporter’s shorthand.

“Beyond escorting aging socialites, not much that’s known. He has a habit of hiring slender, boyish-looking men to fill corporate jobs. From what I’m told, you could enter his offices and think you’d walked into a modeling audition by mistake.”

“Hasn’t seemed to hurt his corporate profits.”

“Not at all—Felton’s a bonafide billionaire. He buys, sells, trades, and creates new corporations the way some people play Monopoly.”

“Except in Felton’s case, he never loses or goes to jail.”

Templeton’s eyebrows rose like the devil’s, with a smile to match.

“Don’t be so sure, Justice.”

She placed a finger on the line she was looking for, sipped some green tea, then began reciting facts.

“Thirty-two years ago, when Felton was a network wunderkind on a fast rise to the top, he made a business trip to a small Tennessee town. One of his miniseries was shooting on location there, over budget and behind schedule. While he was there, the gendarmes arrested him at a motel, in bed with a local boy. Charged him with corrupting the morals of a minor.”

“How young?”

“Fifteen, son of a local Baptist preacher. Felton was never prosecuted.”

“Charges dropped?”

Templeton pushed her notebook aside, working from memory.

“Charges dropped, police report conveniently lost, new church built for the father, college trust fund set up for the boy, generous cash payments to various officers and local officials.”

“Felton’s network picked up the tab?”

“I couldn’t trace the money. I had enough trouble prying the basics out of a retired cop who spoke off the record.”

“What’s his motive?”

“Hates Hollywood big shots and wishes he’d asked for a bigger cut.”

“Nice work.”

Templeton smiled.

“You and Harry taught me well.”

“Anything else?”

“My source in Tennessee told me the fifteen-year-old looked awfully young for his age.”

“Did he happen to say where the kid is today?”

“Planted in the cemetery behind his father’s old church.”

“What’s the story?”

“He began using drugs, dropped out of high school, started hustling in Nashville. He overdosed a few years after that, when his looks were gone and he couldn’t turn tricks anymore.”

“You’d think the father would want to blow the story wide open, even the score with Felton.”

“The preacher man’s got a lucrative televangelism career these days, out of Memphis. Owning up to his culpability in covering up a sex crime involving his own son could hurt all those fire-and-brimstone appeals for viewer contributions. Besides, the statute of limitations is up and the police records were destroyed long ago.”

“Daddy can always blame the kid’s death on the devil.”

“Amen, brother.”

“Which brings us to Mandeville Slayton, our chart-topping soul singer who has a thing for blue-eyed blondes before their voices change.”

“That’s the name that troubles me the most, Justice. Women are crazy for that man. They don’t call him the Tower of Love for nothing.”

“Which probably means his publicists work extra hard keeping the truth about his private life under wraps.”

While Templeton took notes, I filled her in on what I’d learned about Mandeville Slayton from Mike on Saturday night. When I was done, she glanced up.

“Here’s another interesting tidbit. Two years ago, on Oscar night, Slayton’s limo crashed in Beverly Hills. According to the police report, in the backseat with Slayton was a fourteen-year-old boy who was slightly injured. It might have gotten more attention, but you know what Oscar night is like in this town. Unless you’ve just won a couple of Academy Awards, you’d have to drop a bomb on Steven Spielberg to make the news cut.”

“Where was the boy treated?”

“Privately.”

“Who you gonna call?”

Templeton smiled like the Cheshire Cat.

“Dr. Stanley Miller?”

Templeton raised the pink palm of her slender black hand and we slapped five above the cooling broiler. Then her smile faded, and she grew serious again.

“I still can’t believe Mandeville Slayton has candlelight dinners with little boys instead of all the ladies he sings about. The man’s a marvel in concert. With that deep, silky voice of his, he knows just how to make a girl quiver and swoon.”

I shrugged.

“So did Liberace.”

Templeton widened her eyes in contemplation.

“Slayton’s booked at the Universal Amphitheater tomorrow night.”

“Tuesday seems an odd booking for someone like the Tower of Love.”

“Spring break, school’s out—at Universal City, that’s as good as a weekend.”

“Maybe an enterprising reporter I know could use her newspaper connections to get us a couple of tickets.”

Templeton smiled proudly as she delivered the payoff.

“Maybe she already has, along with two VIP passes to a backstage party before the show.”

I shook my head with genuine admiration. “You just get better and better, Templeton.”

She glanced at me sideways, slyly.

“Don’t I, though.”

*

Before Templeton and I parted ways, I borrowed her cell phone to check for messages on my machine at home. There was just one: Horace Hyatt, the photographer, sounding troubled and asking me to drop by his studio.

As I left the restaurant, I passed the kitchen, where three or four Latinos prepared food and washed dishes, something you’d see in just about any restaurant in Southern California. On my way back to West Hollywood, the streets teemed with more Hispanic emigrés, working odd jobs at construction sites, selling bags of oranges at intersections, hanging out in groups on street corners, alert for a potential employer beckoning from a passing vehicle. You saw thousands of these men and boys around the city—
jornaleros,
day laborers, hoping for
jale,
work. It was as if a Hispanic invasion had gradually taken place over the decades, dark-skinned immigrants returning to the land that had once belonged to their forefathers, when Californians had been
los californianos.
If you were politically sensitive, you weren’t supposed to use the word “invasion,” but it felt that way just the same. Whether it felt OK or not depended on your politics, your attitude about race, and how broadly your sense of humanity and generosity stretched. One thing was less debatable: If the INS were somehow able to round up and deport every undocumented worker as the law mandated, including those from all the fields where the crops were picked, the California economy would collapse overnight.

I stopped at a red light and a boy on the divider offered me a bunch of fresh-cut flowers from a bucket for three dollars, half the going supermarket price. He was a slim, pretty kid, with smooth skin the color of dark molasses and long, curling lashes over clear brown eyes that looked as if they belonged to a big puppy dog. There were thousands of kids just like him on the street, tens of thousands, surviving one way or another. You had to wonder what you could talk a kid like that into doing for twenty bucks, especially if he had an old man back home with a broken back, a mother with tuberculosis, brothers and sisters to feed. You had to wonder, especially if you had a group like BLAST or men like Rod Preston on your mind.