Simple Justice (26 page)

“Yet you remained friendly,” he said. “Even after you became suspicious.”

I reached over with my free hand and shut off Templeton’s tape recorder. At that moment, I ceased being a reporter.

“Like I said, I wasn’t sure at first. It was just a notion. Then I wanted to look elsewhere for suspects. Hoping I was wrong, hoping I’d find a better one to replace you.”

“Why?”

“Probably because I liked you so much.”

He raised his head alertly, the movement so slight I almost missed it.

“Or maybe I was just buying time,” I said. “Giving myself a chance to spend some time with you while I could.”

He looked over at me, his eyes suddenly alive with hope.

“I like you, too, Ben. I always felt something special between us. A bond. A connection.”

“I thought maybe you did.”

He looked away, dropping his head pathetically. I slipped my hand inside his and intertwined our fingers.

“No matter how hard we try otherwise,” I said, “we end up being a lot like our fathers, don’t we?”

“He’s had some problems, but he’s not such a bad guy, Ben. There’s a whole side of him that no one knows.”

“There always is.”

“This will destroy his political career. You know how TV is. They’ll replay that gay spot forever on the news. Rub his nose in the gun control issue. Make him look like a fool.”

He turned his eyes plaintively to me again.

“Whatever you think of his politics, it’s not fair.”

“I suppose not.”

“And my mother.” Tears brimmed in his eyes. “This will kill my mother.”

Perhaps he thought there was some remote chance that I’d destroy the taped interview and convince Templeton to abandon the story; that I was that crazy for him. It was a wild notion, but he had nothing to lose, and his level of desperation at that moment must have bordered on madness.

“My wife. My daughter. Try to think about them.”

“Believe me, Paul, I have.”

He looked over at me, studying my face for weakness, praying for a way out.

“This will destroy our family, Ben.”

I wanted to tell him that the seeds of destruction had been sown in his family long before Templeton and I had found him out, long before he had murdered. That there are times when it’s better to chop off poisonous roots and start fresh, creating a new family, on different terms, with different values. That’s what Maurice and Fred had taught Jacques, and what Jacques had tried to show me. It had taken me a long time to understand that there’s more than one kind. That the only true family is the one that nurtures and protects. And that anything else is a lie.

There was a lot I would have liked to talk about with Paul Masterman, Jr., but it was too complicated now, and too late.

“Gonzalo Albundo has a family,” I said. “So did Billy Lusk.”

My words apparently found the decent part of him, the small part that had survived whatever had destroyed the rest. Hope dimmed in his eyes, and he sagged with remorse that no longer appeared calculated for effect.

I brushed the back of my hand gently across his face, the way my mother had always touched mine after my father had delivered a beating. I ran my fingers through his thick curls, then pulled his face toward mine and kissed him on the lips.

“The police are on their way, Paul. You should think about who you’re going to call from jail.”

He began to tremble uncontrollably, and looked at me with the most frightened eyes I’d ever seen.

It was the kind of hopelessness I’d seen in Jacques’s eyes, when his lungs had no longer worked and he’d struggled to get a breath like a man drowning in a sea of oxygen. When he’d sensed correctly that his life had come down to its final hours, and I’d packed him into the Mustang for our last ride to County Hospital.

I hadn’t been there to see his eyes at the end, but I could imagine them now, as he’d called out for me and I hadn’t come, because I’d lacked the courage to share with him life’s last and most intimate act, and in my cowardice, had let him die alone.

The waitress, looking uneasy, stopped at our table to ask if everything was all right. The host stood a short distance away, watching us closely, so there must have been complaints.

I asked the waitress if she was a regular reader of the
Los Angeles Sun
.

“To be honest,” she said, “I get most of my news from the TV.”

“You really should do more reading,” I said, and asked for the check.

The restaurant continued its silent rotation above the starry landscape. Masterman and I sat there passively, like two lost shuttle pilots back in the hands of ground control, coming slowly down to earth.

He bent his head over the table and wept. I continued to hold his hand, first stroking his arm, then running my finger along the soft ridges of his lovely veins.

For a few minutes more, until they came to take him from me, he was mine.

For my father and for Jon-Noell—two men whose gentleness and understanding have meant so much.

John Morgan Wilson is a veteran journalist, TV documentary writer, and fiction writer. He’s perhaps best known for his dark, hard-edged Benjamin Justice mystery series, which has won the prestigious Edgar Allan Poe Award (the “Edgar”) for best first novel from Mystery Writers of America and three Lambda Literary Awards for best gay men’s mystery from the Lambda Literary Foundation. The eighth Justice novel, Spider Season, will be published in December 2008 by St. Martin’s Minotaur. His short stories have appeared in
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
and
Blithe House Quarterly
. For more than twenty-five years, he has been an instructor with the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. He lives in West Hollywood, California.