I thanked them for the tea and toast, and Dr. Delgado for attending to me. I promised to eat more regularly, and even shook his hand.
*
Out on the street, a chill wind shivered the trees and thunderous clouds were massing overhead. I put the top up on the Mustang against the possibility of rain, and saw Martin Delgado doing the same with his Jag as I pulled away in a V-turn that pointed me back toward Sunset Boulevard.
I didn’t know how much of what the Delgados had told me was the truth, or how much of what they hadn’t told me might be. My little escapade hadn’t really taught me a whole lot, except what a tasteful interior decorator they had, and what a pretty daughter. I pulled into the driveway on Norma Place and shut off the ignition, I wondered if maybe I was speculating and imagining too much, putting too many sinister motives into too many heads. Maybe I was even wrong about how Charlotte Preston had died. Maybe she was just a neurotic, heartbroken young woman who’d finally grown tired of smiling through her tears and stuck the mean spike in her arm.
I trudged up the stairs dispirited, and faced a door I’d forgotten to close on my way out. The outer screen was slightly ajar. I called out for Mei-Ling, but she didn’t come. Distant thunder rumbled as I searched the yards, then the house, waking Maurice and Fred on the outside chance they’d seen her and taken her in. They hadn’t.
I’d fucked up so many things in my life that I’d lost count. Now, on top of everything else, I’d lost Charlotte Preston’s little dog.
We searched for Mei-Ling all the next day, while a steady rain soaked lawns and gardens and sluiced noisily along the gutters.
Finding Charlotte Preston’s dog suddenly seemed as important as finding her murderer, if there was one. I printed up a handbill offering a thousand-dollar reward, no questions asked, made two hundred copies, and stapled most of them to telephone poles and stop signs around West Hollywood, drenched by the downpour but keeping at it. I carried the rest across Doheny and posted them along the tonier residential streets of Beverly Hills, although those were all taken down by the end of the day. Maurice and Fred put on their slickers and went knocking door to door, while I drove to every animal shelter within a ten-mile radius, peeking into cages filled with sad-looking canines and felines doing time on death row, even a few ducks and a hutch of fornicating rabbits. We took out ads in the Lost Pet classified sections of the local papers, and one for the weekend edition of the
LA. Times.
By Friday afternoon, as the rain let up, we’d turned up no sign of Charlotte Preston’s pooch, and I was left more wrung out and riddled with guilt than ever, along with a fever that was starting to spike again.
I stopped in at the bank and withdrew five thousand dollars from the bundle I’d deposited thirteen days before. I wanted cash on hand in case someone turned up with Mei-Ling looking for a reward, and also on the outside chance that I might hear back from Chucho Pernales, ready to talk for the right amount. We spent the evening searching for the dog again, and shortly before midnight, without finding her, I climbed back up to the apartment to take my pills and collapse into bed.
*
I woke late Saturday thinking about Harry Brofsky as if he were still around.
It spooked me for a few seconds until I realized I’d spent the night tossing and turning, trapped in a rewrite nightmare like the old days—one of those surreal dreamscapes in which I found myself revising a story Harry had assigned me that was overdue, endlessly deleting and adding and rearranging words and phrases, trying to get the copy just right. The material in my reporter’s-deadline nightmare was always the same wild pastiche of unrelated facts, nonsensical quotes, absurd statements, strangely spelled words, sometimes even headlines comprised of pure gibberish. Because nothing in the story ever made any sense, it always got worse the more I tried to fix it, always had me scrambling in my feverish sleep to find a solution before my imagined deadline passed.
When I woke this morning, thinking of Harry, it came back to me that the story I’d been rewriting through the night had been an overdue piece on Charlotte Preston’s death, and that I’d called out Harry’s name for help, but he hadn’t come. Now, lying there fully awake but exhausted, I realized Harry would never come again, no matter how many times I called for him, and there was no assignment due on Charlotte Preston, none that I’d be writing, anyway. I also knew in that troubling moment that I had to finish Charlotte’s story, assignment or no. She deserved that, and maybe I needed it just as badly, needed to make sense of it, make all the pieces fit, as much for myself as for her. Maybe that was how I’d spend the rest of my life, chasing stories I’d never write, feeding the facts I uncovered to Templeton, who would get them into print, where they belonged. Maybe that was my assignment now, my new beat, my penance, with only the memory of my wise old editor to guide me when I was feeling lost.
“Make a list of names,” Harry had advised me, when I’d been young and eager to learn. “Ask the right questions. Don’t quit until you get the right answers.”
I’d made my list of names, even added a name or two since, and I went to the kitchen table to look at it now, trying to get back my focus. The list reminded me how little progress I’d made, how slack I’d been on the job, how Harry would have chided me if he’d been there, peering over my shoulder with a lukewarm cup of coffee in one hand, an Eagle Number Two pencil in the other, and an unlit cigarette dangling from his lips.
Just as Randall Capri’s flack had done, the publicists for Mandeville Slayton and Edward T. Felton were ignoring my calls. Harry had never let a two-faced flack stand in the way of a story that deserved to be told.
“Fuck ’em,” Harry would always say. “Find a way around the bastards. Find a way to get your questions answered. Don’t quit until you do.”
*
By noon, I was sitting in the Mustang along a shoulder of the Pacific Coast highway in Malibu.
From my vantage point, I could see tennis being played on the enclosed courts situated on the southeast corner of the Felton estate, near the access road. There appeared to be several men and at least two women involved in mixed doubles, running about and whacking the ball with varied levels of skill, but taking it very seriously.
I drove off the highway and down to the kiosk, where a guard was stepping out before I even rolled to a stop. I told him I was there to play some tennis, and when he went to check my name on a list I told him I was lying about the tennis but wanted to see Edward T. Felton, Jr., anyway. The guard said that wouldn’t be possible, his instructions were never to allow anyone in who was not personally cleared by Mr. Felton himself. It was a long-standing rule, one that had never been broken.
“Maybe you can call Mr. Felton and put him on the phone with me.”
“I’m sorry, sir, that’s not the way it’s done.”
“Maybe we can make an exception just this once.”
He was well trained, and knew how to smile in situations like this.
“I’m really very sorry.”
“You will be really very sorry if I leave and come back here with a couple of vice cops who have a few questions about the young boys who regularly visit Camp Felton for overnights.”
The training manual probably didn’t have a section on pedophilia and its possible ramifications for security guards who looked the other way. His smile didn’t last.
“I wouldn’t know anything about that, sir.”
I shifted the Mustang into reverse, letting him hear it.
“You can tell that to the vice dicks. Maybe they’ll believe you. Maybe they won’t book you as an accessory to lewd conduct with minors.”
I looked over my shoulder to back out, but he had his hand on the door.
“Maybe I could call Mr. Felton like you suggested.”
“Why don’t you do that.”
A minute later, I was on the phone with Edward T. Felton, Jr., who wasn’t at all pleased that his tennis match had been interrupted. I told him who I was, and that I wanted to talk to him about Charlotte Preston’s death, along with some other related matters. He knew my name, which didn’t surprise me, and told me he had no interest in speaking with me on any subject, now or ever.
“It’s in your best interest, Mr. Felton.”
“Get lost, Justice.”
“Is that what you told the boys who were here Tuesday night, after you and your friends were finished using them for sex?”
I heard Felton breathing hard, but nothing more.
“I’m not going away, Felton. Which means the only choice you have is to let me in and talk to me, or I’ll call the Malibu sheriff’s substation and have them handle it. Shall we call in the sheriff, Mr. Felton?”
Felton sounded grim.
“Put the guard back on.”
I handed the phone over.
“I think I just got on the invitation list.”
I climbed back into the Mustang, the guard raised the arm, and I drove through. I followed the road as it switched back, reaching the big gates at the end just as they were swinging open.
Felton was standing in the motor court near the garages, dressed in a spanking-white tennis outfit that showed off his stubby, muscular legs. I parked and got out, and when I joined him, he spoke two words.
“Not here.”
He led me into the house, through an enormous living room with bay windows that looked out on the ocean, and out onto the arcaded porch. We crossed to a set of stone steps that led us down to the yard and made a course around the pool to the right, far away from the tennis courts and the guests. We didn’t stop until we were standing on Felton’s manmade white sand beach looking out at the blue Pacific, where no one but the two of us could possibly hear our conversation above the crashing waves.
“I believe I saw you at the amphitheater party Tuesday night with Miss Templeton, the reporter from the
Times.
”
He glanced over my battered face, where the scrapes had scabbed over and the bruises darkened.
“It appears that since the party, you’ve had some rough-and-tumble.”
“You know the saying, Felton—time and tide wait for no man.”
“I wish I had more time for riddles, Justice, but my guests are waiting.”
“Then I’ll get right to the point. I went strolling along the shoreline Tuesday night—forgot to check my tide tables. That’s how I ended up looking like a club fighter after a bad loss.”
Felton nodded toward the darker sand beyond the fence.
“You were out there spying on me?”
“You and the munchkins.”
A coldness seeped into his smug voice and manner.
“I have underprivileged young people down to the house from time to time. They enjoy the pool, the tennis courts, that kind of thing.”
“Does that kind of thing include taking their pants down when you get them upstairs?”
“They come here because they enjoy it.”
“Cut the crap, Felton. I know exactly why they come here, and what you and your friends do with them. Mandeville Slayton, Dr. Stanley Miller, Freddie Fuentes, the others. I’m surprised Randall Capri wasn’t invited.”
The names opened a tiny crack in his arrogant facade.
“What is it you want, exactly? Money, a job? Since you’re no longer a member in good standing of the journalistic fraternity.”
“Number one on my wish list is solving Charlotte Preston’s murder.”
“I believe the coroner put that case to rest.”
“I guess I don’t rest as easily.”
“I can assure you, Justice, I wasn’t remotely connected to Miss Preston.”
“You were connected to her father, part of a network that shared the same boys. Stop me when I’m getting cold.”
Behind the hard face, the keen eyes, I could see Felton working frantically to patch up the widening crack.
“I don’t see what Rod Preston’s personal life has to do with his daughter’s death.”
“She died within hours of learning the truth about him—that Randall Capri’s book was more fact than fiction.”
“If what you’re saying is true, she may have been distraught. After all, there’s a terrible stigma against showing affection for boys of a certain age.”
“Especially when they’re just rented for the night.”
Felton set his square jaw, while his eyes became more active.
“Where were you the night Charlotte died, Felton?”
“You’d have to give me a date, I’m afraid.”
“Two weeks ago tonight. That close enough?”
He thought for a moment, or pretended to. He was so good at this kind of thing, in such command, I couldn’t tell the difference.
“I was here, all evening.”
He smiled, looking extremely pleased.
“Yes, I’m sure of it. Right here at the beach house.”
“Alone?”
His smile went south again.
“I had a visitor that evening.”
“Who would that be?”
“Dr. Miller dropped by.”
“He was here most of the night?”
“Not exactly.”
“Not much of an alibi then.”
Felton studied me with fierce concentration, then spoke with a reluctance even he was unable to conceal.
“Someone came with him, another friend who stayed for a while after Dr. Miller left.”
“Does this friend have a name?”
“That’s really none of your business.”
“What if it becomes police business? Then would you have a name?”
“I doubt the police would have much interest in anything you had to tell them, Justice.”
“Maybe they could talk to Jimmy, then. The boy who was here with Mandeville Slayton Tuesday night. I’m sure Jimmy could clear up everything in no time. Shall we go into the house, Felton, give the sheriff’s office a call? Or maybe one of your tennis partners has a cell phone we can borrow.”
Beneath his Malibu tan, Felton’s face and neck flushed with blood.
“I honestly don’t recall his name.”
“I’m going to take a wild guess and suggest your nameless friend hasn’t gone through puberty yet.”
Felton continued to redden, without replying.
“What time did he arrive?”
“Why is that important?”
“Charlotte Preston died sometime between seven and nine.”
“He got here around six thirty.”
“You seem rather sure of the time.”
“I remember because the sun was going down when Stanley dropped him off. We stood right here, having a drink, watching the sunset, while the boy set off some pinwheels I’d brought down from the house.”