Limits of Justice, The by John Morgan Wilson Read Free Book Online Page B

apology at the very least. But I also felt I had the right to choose when and how that was taken care of, without Templeton manipulating events, as she was prone to do where my messy life was concerned.
    “Suppose I ask you to turn the car around and take me home.”
    She slowed for another red light, looking over at me.
    “Suppose you stop acting like a brat and realize what a great favor I’m doing you.”
    “Did I ask you for any favors?”
    “You certainly cashed that check from Charlotte Preston quickly enough.”
    “So now I owe you my life?”
    In the crosswalk, a large black woman carrying a Bible herded several small black children in their Sunday best through the intersection. Each little girl was in braided pigtails bound with powder-blue bows, each little boy in a yellow bow tie, and all of them were wearing patent leather shoes so shiny they seemed to sparkle.
    “Oree’s a great person, Ben.”
    “Yes, I know.”
    “And he cares about you, in case you didn’t notice.”
    “He could do much better, Templeton. He’s in a whole other league. He doesn’t need me dragging him down.”
    “Why don’t you let him decide what he needs?”
    “The way you do me?”
    She set her dark eyes furiously forward, waiting for the light to change.
    “You can be so fucking obstinate and ungrateful, if you’ll pardon my Sunday-morning French.”
    The green light came on and she shot through the intersection so fast my head jerked back. Nothing was said during the next minute. As Leimert Park came into view, Templeton slowed and glanced over, her voice more conciliatory.
    “OK, maybe I stretched the truth just a teensie-weensie, but it was for your own good. Oree Joffrien is the best thing that ever happened to you.”
    She swung left onto Forty-third Place in front of a little pocket park that was bordered by four streets and shaped like a lopsided rectangle, all spruced up with a new fountain and greenery. We pulled up at a parking meter in front of Fifth Street Dick’s, a venerable coffeehouse in need of a paint job where straight-ahead jazz drifted from speakers out to the sidewalk tables. A middle-aged couple in church clothes sat at one of them, tapping their toes and sharing coffee and pastry in the pleasant sunlight. Both the man and the woman glanced up when we pulled in, first at the flashy foreign car, then at Templeton, then at me; their eyes returned quickly to their pastries but the man’s eyes came back up and stayed on me awhile. I was the minority person here, the outsider, which was not the way it had always been in the Leimert Park district. This one-square-mile section of central Los Angeles had been created in 1927 as an affluent bedroom community that excluded anyone of color, with whites-only golf courses and whites-only social clubs. With the changing times and antidiscrimination laws of later decades, more and more African Americans had moved in; by the seventies, the district’s quaint commercial center, known as Leimert Park Village, had become a focal point of African American culture. Saturday nights were traditionally festive and charged with energy, Sundays more tame, like this one.
    Templeton switched off the ignition and looked over.
    “Here’s the deal, Justice. I haven’t been dating for a while, as a matter of choice. I got lonely. Oree and I have been getting together more often, having dinner, going to museums, plays.”
    “You got tired of musical beds?”
    “I’m almost thirty. There’s a point when certain women realize that most of the men we’ve dated are interested in only one or two areas of our anatomy, and it’s not the region between our ears. Yes, I got tired of revolving boyfriends. I wanted good, intelligent companionship for a change, and if that meant hanging out exclusively with a gay man, so be it. You haven’t been too available, and Oree fit the bill quite nicely.”
    She dropped her voice, and her eyes settled frankly on mine.
    “For what it’s