“I think I owe Charlotte at least a little persistence.”
“Owe her in what way?”
“She paid me a generous advance to ghostwrite a book that might restore her father’s good name. She entrusted me to seek the truth.”
I put out my hand.
“Benjamin Justice.”
His grip was firm, his hand smooth.
“I wasn’t aware that Rod’s reputation needed restoring.”
“A biographer named Randall Capri recently took it down a notch or two.”
“Oh, yes, the book. Filth and lies, nothing more.”
“You’ve read
Sexual Predator
then.”
“I saw one or two reviews, read the profile of Capri in the
Times.
Trash like Capri doesn’t deserve even that much attention.”
“Still, there are some loose threads that need tending.”
“What kind of loose threads?”
“We could start with the way Charlotte died.”
“Charlotte took her life. That seems clear enough.”
“To the coroner, maybe.”
“Who would know better?”
“Someone who has more time, asks more questions.”
“If that’s you, Justice, perhaps you should take your questions to the police, along with anything else you feel might be relevant.”
“Before I do, I’d like to have some answers in place.”
“I’m sorry, Justice, we can’t help you.”
“How do you know if you haven’t heard my questions?”
He glanced at his Rolex, looking peevish.
“One or two, then, but make them quick.”
Regina’s bags rustled as she turned to face us both.
“We don’t have to listen to his damn questions. He’s nobody.”
“Shut up, Regina.”
“He’s just a two-bit, hack writer!”
“For God’s sake, put a lid on it.”
Delgado looked at me blankly, waiting.
“You must have seen Charlotte give hundreds of injections, Doctor.”
“Over the years, yes.”
“Did you ever see her give an injection holding the syringe in her right hand?”
His brown eyes shifted uneasily before settling again.
“Not that I recall. Is that significant?”
“The needle was found in her left arm. You didn’t know that?”
“Why would I know something like that?”
“I have a better question. Why would someone want to murder Charlotte?”
“I’m sure I wouldn’t know that, either.”
“Two people visited Charlotte just before she died, Doctor—an amorous couple she apparently knew and trusted enough to let into the house. There were signs that someone was with her when she died, that her house had been searched.”
“Charlotte was a lovely person. Who would want to take her life?”
I swung my eyes slowly around until they rested on the aging and calorie-starved face of Regina Delgado.
“I imagine an attractive young woman like Charlotte might be capable of stirring up jealousy in the right person.”
“You’re looking at
me
when you say that?”
“You’ve made a career of being looked at, Regina. It must be tough when your looks begin to fade. Tougher still if your husband’s eyes begin to wander.”
She raised one arm and rattled a Gucci bag in my face.
“There was no love lost between that little tramp and me, OK? You think I give a rat’s ass if you know that?”
“Regina, stop.”
“I’ve been married to my husband for fourteen years. We have three beautiful girls together. That whore with the Madonna smile tried to break up my family—and I’m supposed to like the little bitch?”
My eyes moved back to Dr. Delgado, who seemed on the point of squirming.
“So you
did
have an affair with Charlotte.”
He glanced around at the ladies seated in the lobby and lowered his voice.
“It’s true, Charlotte and I were involved briefly while I was separated from Regina.”
“How long is briefly, Doctor?”
“A matter of months, that’s all.”
“Would that be twelve months, twenty-four, thirty-six?”
“I didn’t keep count.”
“My guess is your affair lasted longer than you’re willing to admit, and that Charlotte was head over heels in love with you. I think she mortgaged everything, heart and soul. That’s why your photograph still sat prominently in her den the night she died. After leading her on, maybe even promising marriage, you decided that hearth and home and the little kiddies were what you really wanted, and Charlotte got foreclosed. Am I getting warm, Doctor?”
His nostrils flared as he sucked in air.
“I may have gotten over our relationship more easily than she did. I regret my actions. I take full responsibility.”
“In the brief time I knew Charlotte, she seemed like the persistent type. Focused, maybe even a little obsessive.”
“She could be that way.”
“I’ll bet she didn’t just disappear and bury her face in her tearstained pillow, did she, Doc? I’ll bet she put up a fight for what she wanted.”
“As I said, Charlotte had more difficulty with the breakup than I did.”
“I imagine it can be rather annoying, a spurned woman who refuses to go quietly away.”
My eyes roved the Delgado Center for Enhanced Beauty and Well Being. All the ladies of a certain age had their eyes wide open and their ears cocked.
“Especially for someone whose reputation resides so solidly on peace and inner calm.”
Regina took a step closer.
“The cunt phoned here five times a day if she called once.”
“Regina, please.”
She shook off her husband’s hand.
“Month after fucking month, for more than a year. Sometimes, she even called my husband at home. If I happened to answer, I’d get the click.”
“Which really must have pissed you off.”
She settled back a little, pulling in her anger, looking like maybe she regretted having said so much.
“I wasn’t too happy about it, no.”
Dr. Delgado raised his wrist to look at his watch again.
“I’m afraid I must get going. As I said, I have a surgery at four.”
“Just one more question—an easy one. Where were you and Regina the night Charlotte died?”
Regina moved in again, breathing fire.
“I’ll tell you where we were. The children were with their grandmother that night. My husband and I were at home, fucking our brains out.”
“A romantic interlude, just the two of you.”
“Just the two of us.”
“No witnesses, no alibis. How convenient for you both.”
“And a couple of major-league orgasms, sweetheart.”
Regina transferred the bags in her right hand to her left, and slipped her right arm through her husband’s.
“He’s a fantastic lover, and he’s wild about Regina. Put that in your book and set it in italics.”
I stepped past them on my way out, then stopped. Nearby, on the sofas, the ladies were sitting on the edge of their cushions, still listening keenly.
“Tell me, Doctor, how many facial surgeries did you perform on George Krytanos over the years, turning him into a Randall Capri clone?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Is that how you repaid Rod Preston for all the celebrity clients he sent your way, transforming Krytanos into Randall Capri’s twin?”
He glanced uneasily at the listening ladies.
“That’s absurd.”
“You’re telling me you never had George Krytanos under the knife? It wouldn’t be so hard to check, would it? There must be medical records.”
“Patient records are confidential.”
“Especially castrations, I imagine.”
Delgado balled his fists and puffed up his chest. He seemed ready to come at me until he remembered the ladies who were watching, storing up enough gossip to get them through half a dozen lunches at Spago down the street.
“I’m warning you, Justice—go away and don’t bother us again.”
“Or what, Doctor—you’ll take matters into your own hands?”
“I might.”
“Using a shot of curare?”
Regina came at me with her sharp, painted nails aimed at my face. Her husband grabbed her by the arm, nearly yanking her off her tapered heels.
I turned away to the sound of her high-pitched profanity screeching at my back, and made my exit past the sign asking for tranquility.
*
I was almost to the Mustang when I heard Dr. Delgado call my name. I waited for him in the dimness of the parking structure, listening to the hum and lurch of traffic on nearby Wilshire Boulevard.
When he reached me, his eyes were unsettled, his voice troubled.
“I really did love Charlotte, Justice. I want you to know that.”
“Why, Doctor?”
“So that you’ll understand that I could never hurt her.”
“You did hurt her, when you went back to your wife.”
He shoved his hands into his pants pockets, jingling change.
“Near the end of my separation from Regina, my mother became critically ill. She knew Charlotte and I were involved. On her deathbed, my mother made me promise to go back to Regina, to honor my wedding vows.”
“And you agreed?”
“I told her I’d do as she requested, but I chose my words carefully. Essentially, I promised to stay with Regina as long as my mother was alive. Secretly, in my heart, I vowed to leave Regina once my mother was gone. You can see what Regina’s like—you can imagine what living with her is like.”
“Yet you’re still with her.”
Delgado smiled ironically.
“Life takes funny turns. My mother survived, had a complete turnaround. Nothing short of a miracle cure. Today, she’s as healthy as a racehorse.”
“And your relationship with Regina, your passionate marriage—that’s just another illusion you’ve created, Doctor?”
He regarded me thoughtfully a moment, his dark eyes growing somber under his thick, graying brows.
“We all have our illusions, don’t we, Justice? Without our illusions, I’m not sure how we’d get through this life.”
Then he was gone, off to perform another surgery, to alter another face.
Over several days, I’d left three messages with Randall Capri’s publicist requesting an interview with him about
Sexual Predator.
By the time Monday evening rolled around, I’d still gotten no response.
Maybe the flack was ignoring me because I’d been vague about where the interview would appear, or perhaps she recognized my name and erased my message faster than she could say the words “disgraced journalist.” Or maybe it was because Capri was already booked on every TV talk show in the country willing to exploit the sleaze factor for higher ratings, which seemed to be most of them. Whatever the reason, I decided to toss out a few choice questions from the audience at the Hollywood Public Library, where he couldn’t dodge me so easily.
The library was located in the 1600 block of Ivar Avenue in a seedy neighborhood off Hollywood Boulevard, across the street from the city’s biggest gay bathhouse and next to one of its oldest straight porn and strip show theaters, which was boarded up at the moment. It seemed an appropriate setting for Capri to be holding court, dispensing pearls of wisdom about how one sifts through the garbage of dead celebrities for a living. I arrived at a quarter to eight, parked on the street, and left the top down on the Mustang because it was in such bad shape it wouldn’t have kept a serious thief out anyway.
Technically, Capri was scheduled to speak at the Francis Howard Goldwyn Regional Branch Library, named after a philanthropist and movie mogul’s wife, following an arson fire that gutted the original library in 1982. The new structure, designed by an architect famous for his high-tech sensibility, was stark and uninviting, and appeared to have been inspired as much by street crime as aesthetics. Great square sections of the white-stucco-and-glass building teetered atop others like children’s building blocks, and walls of sky-blue tile fronted lengthy sections along the sidewalk—chosen, perhaps, because glazed tile is more easily cleaned of urine and graffiti. A rolling gate of heavy steel bars rose nearly fifteen forbidding feet across the entrance, painted the same, innocuous powder blue but looking fit for a prison just the same. There was not a single tree or plant in sight around the building, meaning no planters with ledges that would have invited the neighborhood’s transients to lounge and linger.
The street people wandered into the library anyway, to read the newspapers and magazines, use the restrooms, and sometimes sleep at the reading tables until they were gently roused and asked politely to leave. I saw a few tonight, shuffling up the small circular staircase to the second-floor stacks, while I headed into the downstairs lobby, where a sign told me Capri would be speaking in a conference room to my right.
I entered to find several dozen people already seated, many of them clutching copies of
Sexual Predator
or earlier Capri titles for the author to sign. Most were alone like me, scattered widely in roughly a hundred folding chairs, as if sitting next to a stranger might invite unwanted conversation. I took a seat in the middle near the back, and Capri arrived a few minutes after that, carrying a plastic bottle of Calistoga water and a tote bag from the
Los Angeles Times
Festival of Books that looked largely empty. He chatted for a moment at the front of the room with a matronly woman in a flowered hat, then took a seat behind a folding table equipped with a microphone, where he beamed his charming smile to no one in particular, shifting his gaze every so often to cover different sections of the room. He was dressed in tight designer jeans that emphasized his slimness, and a sharp-looking sweater vest over a well-pressed pale blue shirt whose long sleeves were turned up just enough to reveal narrow forearms thick with dark hair and a gleaming gold bracelet on one wrist. He had shaved closely for the evening, and applied a light gel that gave his thick, dark curls a nice sheen while holding every strand in just the weave he desired, a triumphant amalgam of man and mirror that must have pleased him very much. After a few minutes, when he had nowhere new to direct his smile, he reached into the tote bag and brought out a Sharpie. He set the pen on the table like a holy tool for inscribing his cherished signature, then folded his hands in front of him and shaped his lips into his familiar, photogenic smile.
A minute after that, with the last of the audience straggling in, the woman in the flowered hat took the microphone to say a few words about the Friends of the Library, then introduced Capri as a bestselling biographer in a way that made him sound like Justin Kaplan or A. Scott Berg. She gave the microphone back to Capri, and he talked loftily for a while about why he’d decided to write
Sexual Predator,
emphasizing the need for society to be vigilant against pedophiles, and how gratified he was that his book had brought so much attention to the issue. He read two long sections from the book, neither of them particularly graphic, then opened the discussion to questions. Some of the queries were intelligent and probing, pressing Capri about the lack of verifiable sources in his books and his habit of re-creating word-for-word conversations that he could not possibly have heard. The bulk of the questions, however, were typical starstruck claptrap—how many times did Capri think Preston and his wife had engaged in sex before their divorce, did he know if Preston had ever slept with such-and-such a movie star, had the actor relied on Viagra or other sex-enhancing drugs in his later years—questions that could only interest someone with an interior as empty as Capri’s showy tote bag.
Finally, I raised my hand and kept it there until Capri acknowledged me.
“I’ve read nearly all your books, Mr. Capri.”
“Thank you, thank you very much.”
“What I find interesting is that until
Sexual Predator,
they’ve all been clip jobs, superficial rehashings of books and articles written by others, spiced up with your own innuendo and alleged bedside confessions that can’t be verified.”
A collective nervous murmur rippled through the room, and I heard at least one audience member laugh uneasily. Capri pressed his fingertips together and smiled with patented tolerance.
“What’s your point, sir?”
“
Sexual Predator
is completely different from your other books—well researched, richly detailed, much more credible all around. It seems clear that you and Rod Preston shared an intimate relationship that gave you entrée into his private world.”
He surprised me with his unflappability.
“Different readers will have different interpretations, I suppose. You’re certainly entitled to yours.”
He swung around, pointing in the direction of another raised hand, but before that question could be asked, I blurted out my own.
“Are you saying for the record that you and Rod Preston did not have an intimate relationship?”
“I’m here to discuss my book, not my private life.”
He pointed for another question, but I stood, raising my voice.
“Randall, isn’t it a fact that you and Rod Preston were secretly lovers many years ago, when you were just a boy?”
This time, the collective murmur in the room became a single, horrified gasp. Capri stared at me for a moment that seemed to grow long, getting away from him. Then he came to his senses, leaning into the microphone and looking properly indignant.
“I don’t know who you are, sir, but I refuse to dignify that question with a reply.”
Applause broke out around the room. Still, every eye in the place was on me, while I continued to stand.
“Why are you so unwilling to face questions about yourself, Randall, when you pry so readily into the lives of others?”
“I prefer to keep my life separate from my work. I write books about public figures, who give up certain rights of privacy when they seek celebrity and fame.”
“But you
are
a public figure, Randall. You’ve hired a publicist, sought the spotlight, gone on dozens of talk shows, given countless print interviews. I have as much right to look into your private life as you have looking into the personal lives of your subjects.”
The microphone picked up Capri’s uneasy laugh.
“I don’t think anyone really wants to read a book about my life. I’m afraid it would be awfully dull.”
“Bad checks, illegal drug use, bathhouse sex, pimping for pedophiles—I imagine a tale like that might find an audience. At least Charlotte Preston thought so, before someone silenced her.”
For once, Capri was without a prepared response. He sat staring at me over the heads of his adoring audience, his pretty lips frozen in a smile that was no longer camera-ready.
“Charlotte commissioned me to look into your life, Randall, to examine every aspect of it, with the same exacting and unrelenting scrutiny you applied to her father’s.”
Capri had begun to pale, but he managed to speak, if weakly.
“You can’t write a book like that about me.”
“Of course I can, Randall—you’re a bonafide celebrity now. Your life story is fair game, starting with your love affair at Equus with Rod Preston, when you were only eleven or twelve. You were always his favorite boy, weren’t you, Randall, right to the end.”
Alarmed chatter spread about the room, across the empty seats; strangers were actually talking to one another. Capri stood, abandoning the microphone.
“What you’re saying is outrageous. It’s nothing less than slander. I hope you understand the legal implications of that.”
“After you became too old to interest Rod Preston sexually, you would have done just about anything to be near him, to keep his favor. Even if it meant finding younger boys to take your place—in effect, pimping for him.”
Capri stretched out his right arm, pointing at me, his dark eyes narrowing.
“I know who you are! I recognize you now!”
“That’s what all those canceled checks were for over the years, blank checks that Rod Preston gave you, ostensibly for public relations work.”
“You’re that reporter who used to be with the
Los Angeles Times!
The one who was fired, who had to give back the Pulitzer for making up a bunch of lies!”
Someone shouted out my name, causing Capri to grin happily and nod.
“Yes, Benjamin Justice! That’s who he is, still making things up!”
A few of Capri’s fans rose to their feet, yelling at me to get out.
“Why wasn’t George Krytanos in your new book, Randall? With all the research you did, how could you have missed the boy who replaced you at Equus, the castrato who served Rod Preston as your clone for so many years? Why wasn’t he in your book?”
Capri stared at me as if he were seeing an image of George Krytanos himself. Audience members were booing, hollering at me to shut up and sit down, or simply to leave. The woman in the flowered hat dashed from the room, probably to find a security guard. Capri just stared.
“Tell us how you happened to come by the most shocking anecdote in your new book, Randall, the one involving Rod Preston and an eleven-year-old boy at his bedside.”
“I have my sources, like any good biographer.”
“You cite no sources for that anecdote, Randall. Yet you describe the scene in remarkably vivid detail, as if you’d been right there in the room. Unless I’m mistaken, when Preston was dying, he asked to see you—his all-time favorite. That’s how you happened to be there to witness that sordid bedside scene that provided the highlight for your book. Unless, of course, you simply made it up. Which is it, Randall?”
“You think you’re pretty smart, don’t you?”
“More than some, less than others.”
“You’ll hear from my lawyer, then we’ll see how smart you are.”
“Maybe your lawyer has an alibi for you for the night Charlotte Preston was murdered.”
Capri’s dark eyes appeared to swell with shock, maybe rage, and the booing and catcalls grew louder. Capri grabbed his tote bag and rushed out, leaving behind his untouched bottle of water, his unused Sharpie, and a room filled with pandemonium.
I caught up with Capri just as he was fleeing the building.
“What really happened to Charlotte Preston, Randall? Who was with her the night she died?”
“Leave me alone!”
“You’re right in the middle of all this, aren’t you, Randall?”
“I wrote a book, that’s all. Now get away from me!”
He slowed on the stairway to step over a nodding transient, and I took the opportunity to shove my scribbled phone number into his tote bag and ask him to call me when he was ready to talk.
“I don’t want your phone number!”
He started running as he hit the sidewalk.
“I won’t stop asking questions until I get to the truth, Randall. Call me obsessive, but it’s a habit I just can’t seem to break.”
“You had no trouble distorting the truth when you wrote for the Times, did you?”
I was beside him, trying to keep up.
“I screwed up, Randall, that’s a fact. Just that once, but it was major league. So I’m a schmuck. So let’s you and me sit down and have a talk, schmuck to schmuck.”
“I have nothing to say to you!”
I pulled up, heaving for air, feeling ill. I took a final shot.
“It’s me or the cops, Randall.”
Capri raised his hands and covered his ears, fleeing toward the human flotsam and garish neon of Hollywood Boulevard, and the well-scrubbed stars in the sidewalk that always looked so sparkling and clean.