Justice at Risk by John Morgan Wilson Read Free Book Online

out to the parking lot as the door closed on the clicking of her high heels. By the time we reached the Mustang several blocks away, then found our way back to Ventura Boulevard, it was half past four, with traffic beginning to congeal. We headed east along the boulevard toward the Cahuenga Pass, staying off the freeway to avoid the crush. As we climbed a slight rise, parallel to the freeway, an orange sun flooded the suburban landscape behind us with sharp light, turning my rearview mirror into a flaming sphere. The fireball disappeared as we descended into the heart of Hollywood, slowing to a crawl along Highland Avenue, inching our way past the Hollywood Bowl, the Hollywood Museum, Hollywood Boulevard, the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
    By the time Hollywood High School came into view, alerting me to Sunset Boulevard, I had learned a great deal about Peter Graff, who answered all my questions openly and amiably, and seemed utterly without guile or pretense. He told me he was from a midsized town in Minnesota, the son of a hardware store owner and a mother who had never held a paying job, but had raised six children along with a passel of pets and the “best summer vegetable garden in the state.” I asked him what constituted “midsized” in Minnesota, and he put the number at fifteen thousand. He and his girlfriend, Cheryl, both twenty-four, had dated since their senior year in high school, and had begun living together two years ago, after college and against their parents’ wishes. Not quite a year ago, they had moved from Minneapolis to Los Angeles, where they had taken an apartment in Venice, right off the beach, hoping to find work making documentaries about “important subjects.” Only recently had they agreed to a trial separation, at Peter’s urging, to take some time apart and “and gain some real life experience,” before making up their minds about their future together.
    “I want to know everything about life,” Peter said. “The good along with the bad. All of it. So I really know who I am and what I want, before I finally settle down.”
    The light turned green, and I eased the Mustang into the middle of the intersection, waiting for a break in traffic.
    “Just be careful, Peter. Los Angeles has a way of giving some people more experience than they bargained for.”
    “I may be from a small town in Minnesota, Ben. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have a clue.” He said it matter-of-factly, without rancor, while staring out the windshield at the busy street. “It doesn’t mean I don’t know how to make conscious choices.”
    I glanced over at his sharp Nordic profile. The sun had disappeared behind the Art Deco buildings of Hollywood High, leaving a glowing halo in the western sky; the gentle light washed over him, highlighting the fine blond hairs along the slope of his neck. I had the notion that he was deliberately letting me study him, though I sensed no vanity in it. I still wasn’t sure he realized just how beautiful he was, and how much power that gave him with a certain kind of man.
    He turned his eyes on mine, blue on blue.
    “I can take care of myself, OK?”
    “OK, Peter.”
    Our eyes remained fixed as the light turned yellow, then red. The driver behind me blasted her horn. To clear the intersection, I made a fast left onto Sunset Boulevard, and drove a block or two until we reached the Sunset Tiki Motel, where Tommy Callahan had told Graff he was staying. A sign in garish neon advertised single rooms at $29.95 a night, a rate for Los Angeles that put the place squarely in hookerville. As I turned in, we could see a small squadron of both genders doing the stroll along the grubby sidewalk.
    I parked in front of the manager’s office, a small room that protruded from the corner of the motel’s main building in the shape of an island tiki hut, with a security window that looked out on the parking lot. Inside, a wizened, middle-aged Vietnamese man smoked a cigarette and read a