Simple Justice by John Morgan Wilson Page B

days of gay lib.”
    “Bless you, darling.”
    He threw me a kiss and led me deeper into the apartment. Heavy curtains were drawn closed over the windows, and dim bulbs in ornate lamps cast the room in funeral parlor light.
    “In fact,” he said, “I was marching in the streets before I turned seventeen. Maybe it was the sight of those hunky cops in those sexy uniforms, as they pummeled us so passionately with their phallic batons.”
    He motioned me toward a floral print sofa that reminded me of the personal checks I’d glimpsed a moment ago. Hand-embroidered doilies covered both arms, and dainty satin pillows were laid out diagonally against the back like slices of buffet cheese.
    “Please, have a seat. Something to drink?”
    “Thanks, I’m fine.”
    He lowered his big body into a hand-carved teak chair that creaked beneath his weight, and placed the dog in a cushioned basket on the floor near his feet, where it stared at me with eyes like shiny black beads.
    Brunheim hooked one hairy leg primly over the other, then laid his two hands delicately, one under the other, atop the highest knee.
    “I’ve heard that many people go into a paroxysm of house-cleaning when they lose a loved one,” he said. “A defensive reaction against grief, something to keep them busy. I used to do that in the early days of AIDS, when friends began to drop like flies. But Tuesday morning, when they called me about Billy, I didn’t react that way at all.”
    Tears brimmed in his puffy eyes, and his voice quavered.
    “I went quietly into his room, sat on his bed, and looked at his things. I wanted to see them all one last time, before his mother came and took everything away.”
    “Margaret Devonshire.”
    “Yes, Margaret Devonshire.” He etched her name with acid. “She was here before noon, the same morning he died. Can you imagine? You learn that your only child is dead and all you think about is raiding the home of the person who put him up rent-free for three years and paid half his bills!”
    I’d hoped to look through Billy Lusk’s personal belongings; hearing that they were gone was a serious disappointment.
    “She took everything?”
    “All but a few photos,” he said, “and I had to fight for those. Every stitch of his clothes, the stuffed toys I gave him, his electric razor, which was actually mine. The sheets off his bed, come stains and all.”
    Then, seething: “She even got the picture of Billy and Sam.”
    “Sam?”
    “Samantha Eliason. Billy’s best friend. At least, until recently.”
    “Samantha Eliason, the tennis player?”
    “The closet queen of the courts.”
    Reporters are invariably better off revealing as little as possible about how much they already know, at least until the questioning gets deeper and tougher. I saw no need to tell Brunheim of my tenuous connection to Samantha Eliason through my freelance work at Queenie Cochran’s public relations agency.
    Instead, I lobbed Brunheim a softball.
    “How did Billy happen to be best friends with an internationally ranked tennis star like Samantha Eliason?”
    “They met almost ten years ago,” Brunheim said, “during the first of Billy’s several ill-fated enrollments as a Trojan. I’m referring to the university, not the condom, though, God knows, he’s gone through his share of those. Sam was a senior, captain of the women’s tennis team. Billy was an eager-beaver freshman, out to meet people and have a good time. I believe they met through a lesbian friend of hers, and I guess they just hit it off.
    “Over the years, they spent more and more time together. Billy could play it straight when he had to, and there are those times when a dyke in the public eye needs a male escort to keep the right people fooled. If it had become public knowledge that Sam was a muff diver, she would have lost millions in endorsements.”
    Brunheim rolled his eyes theatrically.
    “Look what happened to Martina! She made millions on the court, but where