Revision of Justice (26 page)

“Sounds like cyanide.”

“Then why can’t you smell it?”

“Only one in three people have the nose to pick up the scent. If that’s what it is, I guess you’re one of them. Thanks for letting me know.”

When I went back out, Mrs. Petrocelli was sitting on the couch sobbing. A black policewoman was sitting next to her, holding her hand. I noticed two patrol cars out front, and more uniformed cops down the hall. The Beverly Hills PD worked fast.

The sobbing diminished, becoming choked and intermittent. Then all I heard was soft weeping, no louder than a whisper.

“Mrs. Petrocelli?”

She looked up.

“I’m sorry. Just one more question.”

She nodded remotely.

“When you left for your walk this afternoon, did you leave two coffee cups and a spoon in the sink?”

“I did up all the dishes before I went out.”

“No coffee cups?”

“I keep a very tidy kitchen, Mr. Justice. Leo likes that.”

“I’m sorry about your husband. He seemed like a very fine man.”

“I have to call the children. That’s going to be the hardest part.”

I nodded, feeling clumsy and useless. I found a corner to myself and made some notes. The crew-cut detective came back out, and I told him about the missing files and scripts. I suggested he have Mrs. Petrocelli open the wall safe so he could take the remaining WGA file with him as possible evidence. I also suggested that Mrs. Petrocelli might be safer staying elsewhere, in case the intruder came back for the file he or she had missed.

As we finished talking, Lieutenant DeWinter arrived. He was chomping gum and carrying an unpressed jacket over one shoulder. The two detectives walked alone down the hall and stuck their heads in the door to look at the body.

When they came back the younger cop thanked me for my help, then went away again.

“I guess you got yourself a fan club,” DeWinter said.

“They appreciate raw genius when they see it.”

“Maybe you should have been a cop.”

“My old man was a cop. Until I was seventeen, I figured I’d be just like him.”

“What made you change your mind, hotshot?”

“I caught him raping my little sister. I pumped six loads into his chest from his thirty-eight Detective Special, then used it to turn his face to mush. It put a kink in my career plans.”

DeWinter swallowed hard, possibly his gum.

“What a load of bullshit.”

“Have it your way, Lieutenant.”

I started to leave him, with no particular destination, but he held my arm.

“You do time?”

“Justifiable homicide.”

“Sounds fair.”

“Not to my little sister.”

I’d said all I cared to on the subject, so I changed it. “What about the Grolsch bottle I gave you, Lieutenant? The one the old lady picked up in the canyon.”

“What about it?”

There was a new kind of uneasiness in his voice now.

“The lab results—are they back?”

“Not yet.”

He reached for a new stick of gum faster than usual.

“It’s taking a while, wouldn’t you say?”

He folded the gum up against his teeth a section at a time until he’d fed the whole stick into his mouth.

“The bottle’s been misplaced.”

“Say what?”

“Relax, Justice. We’ll find it.”

He said it without his usual bombast.

“Nice work, Lieutenant.”

I opened my notebook and started writing.

“You can’t wait to write this story, can you, Justice? Another Keystone Kops caper. Another broadside against the LAPD.”

“Maybe you should worry less about your image, Lieutenant, and more about how your department handles evidence.”

“Maybe I should worry about how you happen to be in the immediate vicinity of another stiff.”

“I dropped by about an hour ago. Found the front door ajar. Went around back, looked through a window. Saw Petrocelli face up on the carpet, where he is now.”

“You and Petrocelli buddies?”

“I had a few questions about his relationship with Reza JaFari.”

“I interviewed Petrocelli the night we found JaFari’s body. He told me he barely knew him.”

I slapped my notebook shut and gazed stupidly at him with a Howdy Doody smile.

“Gee, Lieutenant. I guess that’s all we need to know, then.”

I started past him but felt his big hand on my arm again. That didn’t surprise me, but the respect in his voice did.

“Maybe we should stop fighting each other, Justice.”

“Why should we do something as reasonable as that, Lieutenant?”

“Frankly, I could use your help on this.”

“No kidding.”

“Tell me what you know.”

“I gave you the Grolsch bottle, Lieutenant. Maybe you should go find it and make sure it gets to the lab.”

“Even if it does, that bottle could have come from anywhere. It’s got no proven connection to JaFari’s death. And if it does turn out to have some connection, let’s not forget that I found bottles of Grolsch in Daniel Romero’s refrigerator.”

“JaFari’s refrigerator, Lieutenant. Danny Romero was just staying there.”

“And where’s he staying now?”

He’d worked me nicely into a corner. I decided to gamble on the truth.

“The infectious diseases ward at Cedars-Sinai.”

“Since when?”

“Couple hours ago.”

“And before that?”

“Palm Springs, with me.”

“What were you doing at the Springs?”

“Getting some sun.”

“Why do I have this feeling you’re blowing smoke up my ass?”

“Do you really want to pull Romero out of the hospital, Lieutenant? Based on the evidence you have against him?”

“I want to talk to him again. Clear up a few things.”

“The last thing Danny needs right now is you leaning on him. He’s not going anywhere, believe me.”

“That’s what you said the last time.”

“He’s sick, he can barely walk.” I did my best to find the centers of his eyes. “A few more days, that’s all.”

“I can’t spend much more time on this case, Justice. Not after the coroner wrote it off to natural causes, even if that’s bogus. As it is, I’m squeezing this one in between other assignments.”

“Why?”

“If I told you, you’d laugh.”

“Try me.”

“Because I want the same thing you do.”

“The truth.”

“Yes—if only to give Hosain JaFari some peace. If I ever lost a kid of mine under similar circumstances, I’d want somebody to do the same for me.”

I believed him, even though I still didn’t like him much.

“How’s Mr. JaFari holding up?”

“Better than before.”

“Maybe he’ll talk to me now about his son.”

DeWinter slid the jacket off his shoulder and reached into a pocket. He handed me a business card.

“That’s the family restaurant. A few blocks from here, on Wilshire. Be nice to him. I hear otherwise, and I stop doing favors for your friend in the hospital.”

I glanced at the card, slipped it into my shirt pocket.

“Was Reza JaFari cremated?”

“Muslims don’t cremate.”

“They planted him, then?” DeWinter nodded his big head. “Did you keep tissue and blood samples? Or did you lose those, too?”

“We got ’em.”

“Find the Grolsch bottle, Lieutenant. Have the contents checked for cyanide. Then decide if maybe you should order the blood and tissue samples tested.”

“And if nothing turns up?”

“I’ll buy you a decent tie.”

I got as far as the front door when I heard my name.

“Justice—”

“Yeah, Lieutenant.”

“My old man was a cop, too. A good cop.”

“A perfect father, too, I’ll bet.”

“Damn close.”

“That’s nice, Lieutenant. We’ll have to get together some time and swap family memories.”

Then I was out the door and heading down the winding walkway between the pretty yellow roses, while a coroner’s van pulled up out front with a body bag for Leonardo Petrocelli.

Hosain JaFari’s restaurant occupied a corner of Wilshire Boulevard in the golden triangle district of Beverly Hills, a few blocks west of the fabled shops on Rodeo Drive.

A sign overhead told me the restaurant, like the family, was Persian. Another in the window bore one word:
CLOSED
.

I walked around back just the same. There was a black Cadillac parked in the alley and the delivery door was propped open behind a locked outer door with security bars and a screen. Through the screen I could see a narrow concrete corridor stacked with cartons and crates, lit by a dim yellow bulb. I rang the bell.

A few seconds later I saw Hosain JaFari coming toward me, clutching a meat cleaver in his right hand. He wore a fresh white apron, stained with blood and sauces, over gray slacks and a white dress shirt. The sleeves were rolled up, showing his thick, hairy forearms.

“We ordered no delivery today.”

“It’s Benjamin Justice, Mr. JaFari.”

He came closer to the sunlight and I could see the toll that grief had taken. The passion in his dark eyes had dimmed; his face, even his stocky body, seemed softened by sadness if that, in fact, was the burden he was carrying.

“We met last week at your son’s apartment.”

“Yes, I remember. What do you want with me, Mr. Justice?”

“To talk about Reza, if you’re up to it.”

“Please, leave us alone.”

“I may be writing about your son, Mr. JaFari. I hoped you might tell me more about him.”

“You plan to write about Reza? Why?”

“He seems to be in the middle of an interesting story.”

“He was of my flesh and my blood. Not a piece of information for your article. I ask you to leave him in peace. Can you not do that?”

“I’m afraid I can’t.”

His eyes searched my face.

“You seem very determined about this.”

“I am.”

“The one great thing about this country, Mr. Justice, is the freedom. The exchange of information, ideas.”

He reached for the screen door, unlatched it.

“I am not happy about this story you plan to write. But if you must do it, then let us talk.”

His civility was encouraging, but my wariness remained. I re-membered the way he’d exploded at the end of a short fuse, attacking Danny Romero with his bare hands.

I stepped down and waited while he locked the door behind us. Then I followed him along the cool, dank passageway. A familiar smell pervaded the air, a pungent mix of meat juices, grease, garbage, and disinfectant. It reminded me of every restaurant I’d washed dishes in as a kid back in Buffalo, except spicier.

JaFari led me into the kitchen, where a rack of beef ribs lay on an expansive butcher block table. He raised his arm and brought it down with a whack, wielding the cleaver with power and precision.

“How did you know I was here, Mr. Justice?”

“I was passing by. I saw your car. Do you by any chance know Leonardo Petrocelli?”

“Petrocelli?” He pronounced it carefully, in his clipped accent. “I’m sorry. The name means nothing to me.”

“I was just at his house. He knew your son.”

“My son was acquainted with many people.” JaFari sighed deeply, painfully. “And I knew almost none of them.”

“Petrocelli died earlier today. Or perhaps he was killed.”

“He was a young man?”

“No.” Without being asked, JaFari said, “I was with my family all morning, Mr. Justice. We were at the
masjid
, the mosque, to worship. Then I took them home. Then I came here.”

His eyes roved the kitchen.

“I cook. My wife, she is good with the customers. My children with the service. Me, I cook. So I come here alone and I prepare food and I try not to think about what has happened to us.”

“What time did you arrive here, Mr. JaFari?”

“You talk like a policeman.”

“You seem uneasy with the question.”

He reached for another slab of meat, threw it down in front of him, and hacked it into pieces.

“I have been here for perhaps one hour. Maybe longer. I did not look at my watch.”

“Chopping meat?”

“Also preparing the vegetables, the sauces.”

“Your restaurant is closed.”

“My family will come here later. We will eat together, as a family should. Some close friends will join us, perhaps.”

“You said you were with your wife and daughters this morning, then came here about an hour ago.”

“Yes.”

“That leaves a gap in between, doesn’t it?”

“No, I do not think so.”

“What were you doing, say, between noon and one p.m.?”

I saw his fist tighten on the meat cleaver, his face set with anger.

“I was praying, Mr. Justice.”

“Alone?”

“Yes.”

“You told me you prayed this morning, at the mosque.”

“I said that I went to the
masjid
to worship, Mr. Justice.”

“You happened to be praying alone, then, in the early afternoon?”

“As a Muslim, I pray five times each day. Before sunrise. Noon. Afternoon. Sunset. Before bed. Always I have prayed, even before my son—”

The words stopped.

“Was murdered?”

“Is that what you feel happened, Mr. Justice?”

“I think it’s probable.”

“The official people believe it was this terrible disease, this thing called AIDS, that killed him.”

“Do you believe that, Mr. JaFari?”

“I no longer know what to believe, except that there is a better life after this one, and my son is now there. As I will one day be, if I live in this one as I should.”

He looked away from me, grabbed another rack of beef, turned it so the ribs were perpendicular to his waist.

“I bring my family here to make a better life, Mr. Justice. But now our dream is shattered. The paradise we hoped to find here does not exist. I was foolish to think it did.”

“What were you expecting, Mr. JaFari, when you left your homeland?”

“Not all this violence, this spiritual emptiness, this greed. I accept my part, my blame. Never should I have brought my family so close to this place called Hollywood, this terrible seducer that drew my son away from us, where he got this evil sickness they say killed him.”

He looked at me again, his eyes revealing his pain, yet hiding something as well.

“Yet I am not sure he even had this disease. How would he get it?”

“You knew him, Mr. JaFari, I didn’t.”

He shook his head slowly, resolutely.

“He was my son, but I did not know him. Now I do not know how to think about him. Who was this beautiful boy who became a man I did not know?”

“Perhaps if he hadn’t grown up having to lie about who he was, what he felt, deception wouldn’t have come so easily to him.”

He raised the cleaver and resumed hacking. Each time he brought it down, I sensed more fury in his movements.

“Do you wish to insult me, Mr. Justice? On top of all that has happened?”

I kept my eye on the heavy knife in his hand, knowing how thin a line I was walking.

“I understand that in your culture, homosexuality is considered a very great sin.”

“By Muslims? Of course. The
Qur’an
says very clearly that God created women to be the mates of men, that we must not abandon them to be with other males.”

“Yet between grown men and boys in the Middle East, it goes on all the time, hidden and not spoken about.”

“This kind of talk disgusts me, Mr. Justice. I see no reason for it.”

“The boy brothels of Thailand and the Philippines are filled with wealthy visitors from around the world, Mr. JaFari, along with the houses that offer young girls. Many of those visitors are married men from the Arab region. Sexual hypocrisy among certain sheiks from the oil countries is almost a way of life. It’s an old, old story.”

He stopped chopping, took a deep breath, then showed me the calm, dark centers of his eyes.

“There are more than one billion Muslims in the world, Mr. Justice. Most of them live outside the Middle East. Only a minority are Arab.”

“Yet Reza grew up there.”

“Until he was fourteen, yes.”

“In an atmosphere of sexual repression.”

“What is your point, Mr. Justice?”

“Perhaps if your son had felt more free to be himself, less need to lie, he would have turned out differently. Perhaps he’d even be alive.”

“If he was the way you suggest, homosexual”—he spoke the word as if it were poison on his tongue—“then it is perhaps better that he is dead.”

“And what about the part of him that was Jewish, Mr. JaFari? Do you feel the same way about that?”

He stared down at the bloody meat for a long moment before glancing my way.

“How do you know about this?”

“I’m a reporter, Mr. JaFari. I ask a lot of questions. Sometimes, if I’m lucky, they lead to interesting answers.”

He slammed the cleaver down into the wood, hard enough that it stuck. His eyes slid away from me as he spoke.

“You blame me for what has happened to my son?”

“I know that it’s usually the children who suffer the most from their parents’ lies. They lose trust. They lose faith. They learn to imitate.”

JaFari grabbed a pile of sliced ribs and tossed them one by one onto the hot grill. Tongues of flame appeared, licking the red meat.

“When I met my wife, I did not know she was a Jew. We fell very deeply in love.”

“It’s permissible for a Muslim to many a Jew?”

“We have our differences with the ways Jews and Christians have interpreted and modified the teachings of the ancient prophets. But a true Muslim accepts them as People of the Book, recognizing that Jesus and the biblical prophets were true prophets of God, divinely inspired.”

“And intermarriage?”

“If a Muslim woman marries a Jewish man, he must convert to her faith. But a Muslim man such as myself may marry a Jewish woman without her giving up her religion.”

“Your wife remained Jewish, then.”

“Secretly, for her safety. I wished my children to be raised as Muslims, so we never told them. It is one reason we came here, where my wife could feel safer, away from the political hatred in my country. In her heart, she is a Jew. But for me, for our marriage, she pretends otherwise.”

He grew silent and thoughtful before he spoke again.

“I suppose you are right, Mr. Justice. We should have told the children long ago. It is not something of which I am now proud.”

“Reza knew, Mr. JaFari.”

He stopped tossing meat on the grill to look curiously at me.

“Reza? That he was part Jewish?” He shook his head. “No, that’s not possible.”

“He had an accident, Mr. JaFari. Ten years ago, in Mexico. There were blood tests. He found out.”

He lay the last piece of meat on the grill, poking at it mechanically as he looked increasingly troubled.

“You are certain of this?”

“Completely.”

He spoke so quietly now I had trouble hearing him over the sizzle of the meat. “This I never knew.” He walked to a sink, washed his hands, filled a glass with water, drank it down.

“A Jew gave blood, Mr. Jafari—saved your son’s life.”

“This is also true?”

“Yes.”

JaFari stood facing the sink, his head hanging.

“All this time, Reza knew.”

“Along with the deception he’d grown up with back in his homeland, where older men, married men, had used him like a woman.”

He winced as if my words were a whip.

“And this you also know to be true?”

“He spoke about it to a friend of his named Lawrence Teal.”

JaFari looked over at me, imploringly.

“You will write about all this? Is it necessary? To hurt his family again, after they have suffered so much already? I say this not for me, Mr. Justice, but for my family, especially for my wife.”

“I’ll try to sort out the truth in this whole mess, Mr. JaFari. Then I’ll write what feels necessary to tell the story.”

JaFari returned to the grill, where he flipped the seared ribs with long tongs, causing the flames to jump and the meat to hiss. I sensed the anger rising in him again.

“When you write about my son, Mr. Justice, will you write about his life here—about the part we didn’t know? About this disease they say he had?”

“Possibly.”

JaFari stepped past me and opened the door of a massive refrigerator. On the top shelf, he reached for a plastic bucket filled with a brown sauce.

As he brought the bucket down, I glimpsed a six-pack of beer deep in the shadows of the cooler. Two bottles were missing.