“That was great, Ben.”
I turned my attention to his earnest face.
“You’re not just saying that to make me feel better?”
“Trust me, you handled it like a pro.”
Joffrien stood as the sound man unclipped his mike.
“He’s right, Ben. It went very smoothly.” He stepped over to us, extending his hand. “Congratulations.”
We shook hands as Graff turned away to answer a call on his cell phone. I suddenly realized I was no longer a virgin in my new field, that I had my first interview under my belt. It wasn’t as exciting as the first time I’d seen my byline on a newspaper article two decades earlier, at the age of twenty, but it would do.
Joffrien and I talked about the taping for a minute, until I was able to nudge the conversation toward the subject of dinner. I was about to ask him if I could buy him a good meal as a way of showing my appreciation, when we heard Graff cry out nearby.
“Oh God, no!”
I turned to see Graff holding his phone at his side, his shoulders slumping, eyes downcast.
“What is it, Peter?”
His eyes teared up as he looked over.
“They found Tommy. He’s dead.”
“Tommy Callahan?”
Graff nodded, and he looked away. I took the phone from him, and found Cecile Chang still on the line. She told me that she’d just been contacted by a homicide detective from the sheriff’s department. He’d informed her that Callahan’s body had been discovered that morning in a shallow grave in the Angeles National Forest, just north of the city, which fell under the sheriff’s jurisdiction. Callahan hadn’t just been murdered, she said; he’d been tortured, and had died a slow death. I asked her if she’d told Graff all that. She said she had, as delicately as possible.
I glanced at him as he stared at the ground, fighting his tears. He no longer looked the part of the commanding associate producer. He looked more like a lost little boy.
“I think Peter needs a shoulder at the moment.”
I told Chang I’d be in touch, and heard her click off. I didn’t know how to shut off a cell phone—I’d never used one—so I handed it to Joffrien and asked him to take care of it. Then I turned back to Graff, who looked up at me.
“Tommy was always really nice to me. He was the first real friend I made out here.”
“I know, Peter. It’s tough.”
“I’ve never lost anyone I’ve been close to, not even my grandparents. I’ve never even been to a funeral.”
“You’ll get through it, Peter.”
“You’ve lost friends?”
“Most of them, actually.”
I stepped closer, and opened my arms. He fell slowly against my chest, and I wrapped my arms around him, telling him it was all right to let out whatever he was feeling. It wasn’t necessary: he was already weeping quietly against my shoulder, digging his fingers into my back as he clutched me tighter, while I tried to ignore how indescribably good it felt having his body so close to mine, and how much shame that caused me, given the circumstances.
“Where’s Harry?”
I stood looking over Templeton’s shoulder as she pecked away at her keyboard in her reporter’s pod at the
Los Angeles Sun
. She kept punching keys, barely glancing up.
“How’d you get in?”
“I’m dating the security guard.”
“Dominick? Give me a break.”
“You think I’m too old for him, now that I’ve hit forty?”
“He’s not gay.”
“How do you know?”
“He’s got a wife, six kids, two girlfriends.”
“Probably overcompensating.”
“So how
did
you get in, Justice?”
“Dominick wasn’t at his station. I waltzed right by. Came up in the elevator.”
“Not good.”
“Sneaking in?”
“Lack of security. It means they’re stretching everybody as thin as they can. Another sign the
Sun
is on the financial skids.”
“It’s been on the skids as long as I can remember.”
“This time it’s serious.”
“So where’s Harry?”
“In a closed-door meeting with Roger Lawson, trying to figure a way to save the paper.”
“Roger Lawson—the weasel management brought in last year to trim fat?”
“He prefers the term managing editor.”
“From what I hear, he’s management’s hatchet man.”
“He’s been behaving that way, putting the screws to Harry.”
“This sounds serious, Templeton.”
She glanced up, rolled her eyes.
“I just said that, Justice.”
“So what are you working on?”
“
Trying
to work on, while you keep bothering me with meaningless chatter.” She flipped some pages in her notebook, found what she was looking for, deleted a few lines from the screen, resumed writing. “It’s a piece on the selection of the new police chief. Front page, Sunday edition.”
“You got the assignment you wanted.”
“Correct.”
“Congratulations.”
“Same to you. For the TV gig.”
“You heard.”
“Oree called. It’s nice to know somebody cares enough to let me know what’s going on in your life.”
“Sorry. I’ve had a full schedule. Learning a new trade and all.”
“So why aren’t you at home working on your script? Or out chasing people with a camera. That’s what Mike Wallace would be doing.”
“I have a favor to ask.”
“Bad time, Justice. This story’s industrial strength. I see it heating up as a black-white thing. Could be explosive.”
“Are you sure you can be objective?”
“Screw you, Justice! You’re telling me some lily-white reporter is going to be any more—”
She broke off, glanced up, saw my grin.
“Gotcha. Templeton.”
“Very cute.” She swiveled in her chair to face me. “Now that you’ve completely destroyed my concentration, what is it you want?”
“There’s this kid at the production company, Peter Graff. Not a kid exactly. Two years out of college. A friend of his turned up dead this morning. He’s pretty broken up about it. Wants to know more about what happened.”
“I thought you made a New Year’s resolution not to get involved in anyone else’s troubles until sometime well into the next century.”
“That’s why I’m here. I was hoping you’d take it off my hands.”
“Sorry. Not with my workload.”
“He’s drop dead gorgeous, Templeton. Smart, sensitive, hard-working.”
“Straight?”
I nodded.
“This might be the one.”
“Now look who’s playing Cupid.”
“Don’t tell me you’re not a little bit lonely out there in Santa Monica in that big condo of yours. Now that the Laker with the big hands is gone.”
“Let’s not go there, shall we?”
“Maybe you could just give Peter a call. Fax him a copy of the police report in a day or two, when the dicks have something down on paper.”
“Talk to Harry, Justice.” She spun in her chair, facing her computer screen again. “I really have to get this piece finished.”
I’d forgotten just how tough Templeton could be, now that she was a few years into the reporter’s trade. A lot of that toughening came from Harry, some from me. An occupational hazard. I forgave her.
“You told me Harry’s in a meeting.”
“I think it’s ending.”
She nodded at a computer message at the top of her screen:
I’m free if you need me. How’s the page one coming?
She erased his message, hit the command for a clean memo of her own, addressed it to
Brofsky H
, and typed in:
Making progress. Sending Justice your way. Please keep him out of my hair.
She punched the send button, and the message disappeared.
I did the same, heading for Harry Brofsky’s office, where Roger Lawson blocked the doorway, with his sizable butt filling most of it. Lawson was a big guy, a couple of inches over six feet, with a husky body that had probably never had much muscle on it. He wore his brown hair long, tied back in a ponytail, a throwback to his younger, more adventurous days, even though everybody knew he’d sold out to management years ago, become a numbers cruncher and a yes man on his way up the corporate ladder, scared shitless of those above him, and taking it out on those below. That said, I’d given several years of my life to the
Los Angeles Times
, and you can’t get any more establishment than the good, gray
L.A. Times
. Maybe that was why I resented Lawson so much; maybe I saw a piece of myself in him that I didn’t like.
I waited wordlessly until he lumbered off, his shirttail flopping out of his pants, which hung loosely around his sloppy gut. He was the kind of guy who tried hard to walk and talk tough, but every time I saw him, I saw the kind of big, soft high school kid who’d always been third string on the football team, and spent the rest of his life trying to make up for it.
“You and Roger Lawson getting chummy?”
Harry looked up from poring over a stack of budget statements. He smiled grimly, and motioned me silently to take a chair, which in Harry’s world translated roughly as
take a chair and shut up until I’m ready to talk.
I did, and used the time to study him. I didn’t like what I saw: He was haggard, his skin pallid and bloodless. The empty cigarette packs in the waste can told me he was probably smoking more than ever, and I thought I detected a tremor in his hand as he jotted notes in the margin of the document under his scrutiny. He was a shade past sixty but looked older. A hell of a lot older, with too many hard years behind him, some of which I’d given him.
He finally shoved the printouts aside in frustration, pushed his bifocals higher on his nose, placed his elbows on his desk, and ran his hands through his hair, which had gone nearly white sometime in the past year without my realizing it. When he looked up, his eyes were rheumy and red with fatigue.
“How the hell am I supposed to let another dozen reporters go and still put out a paper?”
“That bad, huh?”
“Worse. I talked that bastard Lawson down to a dozen.” His eyes made a quick survey of the small room: plaques and awards on one wall, favorite front pages framed and laminated on another. A lifetime of achievement, which guaranteed you nothing when you were sixty years old in a business that was downsizing everywhere you looked, trying to survive the onslaught of the electronic media. “Christ, there’s nothing sadder than watching an old daily go down in flames.”
He reached instinctively to his breast pocket for a cigarette, an old habit from the days when smokers were allowed to light up inside. He sighed wearily, stared at his desk.
“Take it easy, Harry. Things’ll turn around. They always have.”
“Look who’s handing out optimism. You get a job or something?”
I nodded.
“Not publicity, I hope.”
“Television.”
He made a small
hrummph
.
“Just as bad.”
“Maybe not. It’s a documentary series for PBS.”
“Mating rituals of South American butterflies?”
“I’m glad to see you’ve still got your sense of humor.”
“So what brings you down to the
Sun
, Benjamin? To watch it permanently set?”
“Park rangers found a d.b. this morning, up in the Angeles National Forest. Mutilation job. I was hoping you might have a reporter on it.”
“You knew the victim?”
“Friend of a friend.”
“Irish guy? Early fifties?”
“Thomas Callahan, yeah.”
“I saw the story come across the wire. We’re running a short item in the morning edition. Southland briefs, page two.”
“That’s it?”
“A dead body in the Angeles forest isn’t big news, Ben. Those mountains have been used as a dumping ground for inconvenient corpses longer than you’ve been alive.”
I stood.
“Templeton didn’t want to help me, either.”
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t help you. Sit down.”
I sat.
“I said I don’t have anything on it besides what ran on the wire.” He looked at me sideways. “You think it’s worth looking into?”
“Callahan was a videotape editor with a drinking problem. He was writing and co-producing a segment for the PBS series that I inherited. His first writing-producing job. Disappeared mysteriously from a hot pillow joint in Hollywood. I think he was gay, maybe with a taste for sadomasochism. That’s about all I know.”
“I’ll have Templeton keep an eye on it.”
“She’s got her hands full.”
“With the cuts I’m about to make, her hands’ll be dragging down around her ankles. One more murder shouldn’t make all that much difference.” Harry tried to smile, didn’t quite get there. “She’s come along real well, Ben. Two or three more years, and I could have rounded her into shape. The way I did you, before you went and fucked everything up.”
His eyes twinkled a little through their puffiness, and the grin finally showed up on his sagging face. We’d both come a long way to get to this point, where we could smile about what I’d done to both our careers. Harry, in particular, had gone the extra distance. I was damned grateful for it. Someday, I’d have to tell him that.
“I’d offer to buy you dinner at the Mandarin Deli, Harry, but I have a feeling you’re going to be working late.”
He stood. I did the same.
“Yeah, I got more meetings.” He came around his desk, and surprised me by putting an arm around my shoulders as he walked me to the door. “This wasn’t the way I saw it all ending, Ben. Petering out with a whimper, instead of going out with a bang.”
“Is it that definite—the
Sun
folding?”
“The guys upstairs are trying to round up investors, find a buyer. Pull in another loan if they can, but that’s a real long shot.”
“Maybe something good’ll happen.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“Get some rest, Harry.”
“I’ll do that.” The smile was long gone. “Right after I call in twelve reporters and tell them they don’t have jobs anymore.”