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

highest levels of Hollywood power. By midafternoon, I’d called all the numbers on the list, and learned that only two were still in service, one for a Dr. Stanley Miller, a name I also recognized, and the other for someone named Freddie Fuentes, which meant nothing to me.
    I knew of Dr. Miller because he had personally stuck a hypodermic in my behind sometime back in the early eighties, giving me a shot of penicillin for a case of the clap I’d picked up at a bathhouse in Silver Lake, something he’d done for literally thousands of homosexuals who came to him from throughout Southern California. At a time when sexually transmitted diseases were a mark of shame and stigma, particularly for closeted gay men, Miller had made quite a success of specializing in gay clients and STDs, handing out antibiotics like candy on Halloween. Eventually, he’d expanded to three private clinics in Hollywood, West Hollywood, and the San Fernando Valley. When AIDS began to spread like wildfire, Dr. Miller was ideally positioned to take advantage of the epidemic, advertising heavily in the gay press and quickly growing wealthy off the sick and dying. I called the phone number that followed his name on Randall Capri’s handwritten list and got Dr. Miller’s West Hollywood office. The receptionist picked up at the exact moment my bowels began to make funny noises, reminding me that I had a legitimate reason to schedule a doctor’s visit. I related my symptoms and was given an appointment for Thursday morning, and a chance to kill two birds with one stone.
    With that out of the way, I called information and got the number of Megamedia, Inc., the umbrella corporation for most of Edward T. Felton’s companies. I left my name and number with the voice mail of someone in corporate PR, explaining that I was writing a book that involved the late Rod Preston and needed to verify some facts regarding Mr. Felton. After that, I got the number of Mandeville Slayton’s personal flack from the Publicists Guild, which led me to another recorded message asking me to leave mine, which I did.
    I had more luck dialing the number listed for Freddie Fuentes, though not much. It was answered by an automated recording for the Los Angeles office of the federal Immigration and Naturalization Service, better known as INS, which offered me caller options, then more options, and still more. After following orders and punching the right numbers for a minute or two, I finally heard Fuentes at the other end of the line. He spoke in a thin, pinched voice that had the vestiges of a Mexican accent, one that seemed a generation or two removed, maybe more. I explained that I was a friend of Charlotte Preston’s, working on a book to clear her father’s name, and inquired about his relationship to the late movie star. He replied so fast he almost cut me off.
    “There must be some mistake. I never met Rod Preston. I’m just an INS agent, not a Hollywood guy.”
    “Randall Capri, then, the writer. You must know him—he put your name down on a list with several others.”
    “Never heard of him.”
    “The list was in the possession of Rod Preston when he died. His daughter passed it on to me, for research purposes.”
    Fuentes’s voice cued up anxiously, his words coming faster.
    “I told you, there’s some mistake. I know neither of those men.”
    “How about Edward T. Felton? Mandeville Slayton?”
    “Good-bye, sir.”
    Abruptly, the line went dead, and I stared at the receiver a moment before hanging it up. After that, I looked through the file until I found the photo of the dark-haired young boy I suspected was Randall Capri twenty-odd years ago. I studied the boy’s dark-eyed, flawless face, saw the author in it more than ever, and wondered what Rod Preston was doing with a portrait of Capri dated more than two decades before.
    I turned the photo over, mulled the stamped credit on the back: Horace Hyatt Studio. I’d seen that name as well, on illustrated books