Free Justice at Risk by John Morgan Wilson Page A

a big guy, a couple of inches over six feet, with a husky body that had probably never had much muscle on it. He wore his brown hair long, tied back in a ponytail, a throwback to his younger, more adventurous days, even though everybody knew he’d sold out to management years ago, become a numbers cruncher and a yes man on his way up the corporate ladder, scared shitless of those above him, and taking it out on those below. That said, I’d given several years of my life to the Los Angeles Times , and you can’t get any more establishment than the good, gray L.A. Times . Maybe that was why I resented Lawson so much; maybe I saw a piece of myself in him that I didn’t like.
    I waited wordlessly until he lumbered off, his shirttail flopping out of his pants, which hung loosely around his sloppy gut. He was the kind of guy who tried hard to walk and talk tough, but every time I saw him, I saw the kind of big, soft high school kid who’d always been third string on the football team, and spent the rest of his life trying to make up for it.
    “You and Roger Lawson getting chummy?”
    Harry looked up from poring over a stack of budget statements. He smiled grimly, and motioned me silently to take a chair, which in Harry’s world translated roughly as take a chair and shut up until I’m ready to talk.
    I did, and used the time to study him. I didn’t like what I saw: He was haggard, his skin pallid and bloodless. The empty cigarette packs in the waste can told me he was probably smoking more than ever, and I thought I detected a tremor in his hand as he jotted notes in the margin of the document under his scrutiny. He was a shade past sixty but looked older. A hell of a lot older, with too many hard years behind him, some of which I’d given him.
    He finally shoved the printouts aside in frustration, pushed his bifocals higher on his nose, placed his elbows on his desk, and ran his hands through his hair, which had gone nearly white sometime in the past year without my realizing it. When he looked up, his eyes were rheumy and red with fatigue.
    “How the hell am I supposed to let another dozen reporters go and still put out a paper?”
    “That bad, huh?”
    “Worse. I talked that bastard Lawson down to a dozen.” His eyes made a quick survey of the small room: plaques and awards on one wall, favorite front pages framed and laminated on another. A lifetime of achievement, which guaranteed you nothing when you were sixty years old in a business that was downsizing everywhere you looked, trying to survive the onslaught of the electronic media. “Christ, there’s nothing sadder than watching an old daily go down in flames.”
    He reached instinctively to his breast pocket for a cigarette, an old habit from the days when smokers were allowed to light up inside. He sighed wearily, stared at his desk.
    “Take it easy, Harry. Things’ll turn around. They always have.”
    “Look who’s handing out optimism. You get a job or something?”
    I nodded.
    “Not publicity, I hope.”
    “Television.”
    He made a small hrummph .
    “Just as bad.”
    “Maybe not. It’s a documentary series for PBS.”
    “Mating rituals of South American butterflies?”
    “I’m glad to see you’ve still got your sense of humor.”
    “So what brings you down to the Sun , Benjamin? To watch it permanently set?”
    “Park rangers found a d.b. this morning, up in the Angeles National Forest. Mutilation job. I was hoping you might have a reporter on it.”
    “You knew the victim?”
    “Friend of a friend.”
    “Irish guy? Early fifties?”
    “Thomas Callahan, yeah.”
    “I saw the story come across the wire. We’re running a short item in the morning edition. Southland briefs, page two.”
    “That’s it?”
    “A dead body in the Angeles forest isn’t big news, Ben. Those mountains have been used as a dumping ground for inconvenient corpses longer than you’ve been alive.”
    I stood.
    “Templeton didn’t want to help me,