Revision of Justice Read Free

bright as they were dark.
    “And you can call me Alex,” Templeton said. “Shorter and simpler.”
    “The name you use on your byline at the Sun .”
    “Right.”
    “Alex, then.”
    Christine Kapono wore her black hair cropped into an efficient ducktail; her skin was as smooth and brown as a hazelnut, suggesting island blood. She was trim but sturdily built—strong shoulders, wide hips, small breasts—and looked quite at home in her Gap T-shirt, snug jeans, and leather sandals. Bony protrusions showed atop the arches of her small feet, “surfer’s knobs” caused by years of kneeling and paddling on a surfboard, if my guess was right.
    “You must have been watching for us,” Templeton said.
    “You weren’t hard to spot. Gordon’s publicist described you as tall, black, and beautiful.” Kapono’s eyes lingered on Templeton as they shook hands. “He was right.”
    Templeton, accustomed to admiring looks from both women and men, glanced my way.
    “This is my friend Benjamin Justice.”
    “Welcome to the party.” Kapono’s grip was formal and firm, her eyes less interested. “Are you a screenwriter?”
    “I’m not much of anything these days.”
    “Sounds like an aspiring screenwriter to me.”
    That generated a small laugh all around. Kapono glanced at the diver’s watch on her wrist.
    “Gordon’s running a little late. Celebrity softball game for charity. He should be along any minute.”
    “I didn’t know Gordon Cantwell qualified as a celebrity,” Templeton said.
    “Only in his own mind.” Kapono followed the remark with a smile, but the edge in her voice had been unmistakable. “He’s filling in for someone who couldn’t make it. Center field, his favorite position. They called him day before yesterday. Needless to say, he was thrilled to be asked.”
    “I take it he likes the spotlight.”
    “You’ll meet him soon enough, Mr. Justice. I’ll let you judge for yourself.” She indicated my bottle. “You’d probably like to open that.”
    “More than you can imagine.”
    She led us through a maze of men and women toward the kitchen, turning it into a guided tour along the way.
    “The bedrooms are upstairs. Gordon uses the downstairs primarily for business and entertaining.”
    The lower level of the house was a collection of high-ceilinged rooms separated by arched entries, decorated with framed movie posters going back six decades and furnishings salvaged from the sets of famous movies and later sold at memorabilia auctions. A stone stairway with an ornate wrought-iron railing, worthy of a descending Norma Desmond, led to the second floor. Near the foot of the stairs was a gaping fireplace that reminded me of the one in Citizen Kane . Above the mantelpiece hung a framed one-sheet from Gone With the Wind , in mint condition, without so much as a fold or crease within its borders.
    Off the dining room, we could see a crowded patio lighted by candles and tiki torches. A few partygoers spilled out onto the lawn, but not far, because of the darkness extending to the edge of the canyon.
    “The pièce de résistance,” Kapono said.
    Across the brush-covered divide, on the upper slopes of Mount Lee, the white letters of the Hollywood Sign rose five stories high. From the flats not quite two miles below, the sign had looked modest and unprepossessing. Now, from a hundred yards straight across the canyon, even without lights, the huge letters looked monstrous, dwarfing the surrounding houses, riveting the eye.
    “Impressive, isn’t it?”
    “That’s one way of putting it.”
    “It looks positively indestructible,” Templeton said. “Wood?”
    “Sheet metal.”
    “On a steel frame,” I added, “set in concrete. Four hundred and fifty feet across. At one time, it was illuminated at night by five thousand high-powered bulbs, until the local residents complained.”
    Templeton threw me a curious look.
    “How do you know all that?”
    “I wrote a short feature on it once, when I was