The new telephone felt strange in the apartment, and not entirely welcome.
Yet within minutes of discovering the photos missing, I used it to call Templeton.
I reached her at home, and the conversation was brisk and businesslike.
I gave her Jin Jai-Sik’s name, birth date, and the only address I had for him. She promised to run them through criminal records before we met later that day to attend the memorial service for Billy Lusk.
I also gave her my new phone number, and before we hung up, she offered a quick rundown of her progress on the Masterman story.
She told me she was getting excellent access to the senator’s campaign staff, piecing together a detailed anatomy of one week’s well-organized effort to generate votes. Masterman’s schedule had included a late-night speech on Monday before the local machinists union, launched about the time Billy Lusk was ordering his whiskey sour at The Out Crowd.
Templeton expected to finish up her background research by early afternoon and conduct her core interviews Sunday or Monday. I suggested she assign a Sun photographer to get pictures of all the principals, and she told me she’d already taken care of that.
Neither of us mentioned the personal exchanges we’d shared the previous night.
My next call was to Paca Albundo. Her father picked up, speaking accented English in a tight, troubled voice.
When he left the phone to get his daughter, I could hear a woman wailing in the background. It didn’t stop when Paca came to the phone, so I assumed the hysterical woman was her mother.
“You seem to have good timing, Mr. Justice.”
She sounded numb, her emotions remote.
“What’s going on?”
“Gonzalo was raped last night. They called us from the jail hospital this morning. Our priest is here, mainly for my mother. We still haven’t told the old ones.”
“Can you tell me what happened?”
“A guard heard Gonzalo crying. They found him facedown on the floor of a dormitory cell. He’d been beaten, and his pants were soaked with blood. He refused medical treatment, tried to fight them off. It took several guards to get him to the hospital ward. They had to hold him down so the doctor could examine him. The doctor told my father Gonzalo was raped by several men.”
“Where is he now?”
“In a hospital bed, in restraints. On what they call a suicide watch.”
I thought about HIV, but kept it to myself. The Albundo family had enough to deal with for now.
When I tried to offer my sympathy, Paca cut me off, almost coldly.
“There’s something else, Mr. Justice. The doctor told us Gonzalo had two tattoos scratched on his right arm. They were very crude, and both were infected. The doctor said they were made in the last day or two.”
“Is Gonzalo right-or left-handed?”
“Left.”
“You think he made those tattoos himself,” I said.
“Yes.”
“But if he was in a gang, why didn’t they do it for him, cleanly?”
“They know how to do that, Mr. Justice, but Gonzalo doesn’t.”
“And if he’d had the protection of a gang, no one would have raped him.”
“It seems reasonable, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, it seems reasonable.”
The hardness suddenly went out of her voice.
“He’s safe for now, Mr. Justice. But for how long? Please, help us.”
I wanted to tell her I couldn’t help anyone; I didn’t even know how to help myself. I wanted to tell her I’d been running from involvement most of my life, letting people down when they needed me most.
“I remember the kind of stories you used to write…before you had your problems,” she said. “You were a good reporter. You know how to find things out.”
I could hear the tears she was holding back, and the next words she spoke stabbed at my heart.
“I’m begging you, Mr. Justice. For Gonzalo and for our family. Please find out who killed Mr. Lusk before Gonzalo dies in that horrible place.”