Revision of Justice by John Morgan Wilson Page A

on the south side of the central city that housed the Sun . My notebook was in one hand and the box of doughnuts in the other.
    When I entered his third-floor office, Harry Brofsky looked up from behind his desk, where he was scanning copy for the next day’s edition.
    “Don’t get up,” I said, knowing Harry had never risen for anyone in his life, not even attractive women.
    “Well, well. If it isn’t the stranger in a strange land.”
    “Hello, Harry.”
    I set the box of doughnuts on his desk. He looked at it above his bifocals.
    “You heard.”
    “I heard.”
    Templeton had warned me that Harry was off cigarettes, stuffing himself with doughnuts as a substitute. I could see a good twenty extra pounds on him just from the waist up. When you’re on the stubby side like Harry, there’s not a lot of places to hide twenty extra pounds.
    I opened the box.
    “I hope you like glazed chocolate, Harry.”
    “What I’d really like is for you to take over the damn story Templeton got herself into so she can get back to what she gets paid to do here at the Sun .”
    Templeton’s voice floated into the small office.
    “Which is what, Harry?”
    She leaned against the doorway, a tall, graceful package of dark beauty and keen intelligence, looking like she’d put her shattered romance well behind her.
    Harry smiled with all the sincerity of a mob lawyer, and spoke in his most syrupy Sweet ’N Low voice.
    “What you get paid to do, Alex, is to be my best crime reporter.”
    “He showers me constantly with praise,” Templeton said, waltzing in with a file folder in one hand.
    “Calm down, Harry—I’ve agreed to work with Templeton on the story. Have a doughnut.”
    He reached for the box, looking slightly embarrassed.
    “I guess I could try one.”
    Templeton and I took chairs on opposite sides of the office, which put about five feet between us.
    “How did your meeting with Daniel Romero go?”
    “Dramatically.”
    I filled her in on Danny’s violent encounter with Hosain JaFari, and the temporary leverage it gave me with Lieutenant DeWinter. I left out any mention of Danny’s medical condition, figuring it was no one’s business but his at this point.
    Templeton opened the file folder, plucked out a legal-sized envelope, and tossed it in my lap. It was stuffed with fifty-dollar bills, twenty of them, the advance I’d requested. In the cushy old days at the Velvet Coffin—as we called the L.A. Times back then—it would have been a week’s pay, after deductions. Now it felt like a small fortune in my hands.
    “I didn’t know if you still had a bank account, so I brought cash.”
    “You want a receipt?”
    “I trust you completely, Justice.”
    She handed across the file folder, which was fat with notes, computer printouts, and photocopied press clippings.
    “I’ve organized and written up all my notes. Interviews with several leading screenwriters and an official with the Writer’s Guild of America West. That’s the union out here for film and TV writers. You’ll also find lots of lists.”
    I glanced through a few. There were detailed compendia of how-to books, audiocassettes, software programs, and magazines devoted to the craft of screenwriting; universities that taught cinema; stores and mail order houses that sold nothing but old screenplays; computer programs that transferred text into proper screenplay format; and countless unaccredited courses and workshops on how to write, pitch, and sell film and television scripts.
    “Teaching screenwriting seems to be an industry in itself.”
    “Everybody’s writing a fucking script in this town.” Harry pulled a doughnut apart and stuffed a ragged section into his mouth, glazing the tips of his gray mustache with chocolate. “Half my goddamn reporters want to be the next Jake Novitz.”
    “A name that means nothing to me,” I said. “Along with a few others I heard in passing at Gordon Cantwell’s bash the other night.”
    “We have to keep