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it was that important to me.”
    “And then,” I said, “it won the Pulitzer.”
    I resisted the impulse to smile at the irony.
    Templeton leaned forward on Harry’s desk, closing the distance between us a little.
    “I was so happy for you. I celebrated with champagne, and I don’t even drink. I was happy for all of us who care about the truth.”
    There was nothing for me to say, except that I was sorry. I preferred to keep quiet and take the punishment. In a perverse way, it felt good.
    “And when I found out those two men didn’t exist,” she went on, her voice growing not just icy but tough, “that you made them up, made the whole story up, I felt betrayed. And I felt more contempt for you than I can ever express.”
    “You’re doing a pretty good job.”
    “When Harry first proposed this arrangement, I flatly refused. I didn’t care to be associated with the notorious Benjamin Justice, the reporter who had to give back the Pulitzer prize. But then I realized what I could get out of it.”
    “And what’s that, Templeton?”
    “I’m going to learn everything I can from you. I figure you owe me at least that much.”
    “It seems I owe a lot of people.”
    “Yes, I think maybe you do.”
    I reached for my notebook and jacket. Templeton came around the desk with a big envelope stuffed with her photocopied notes on the Billy Lusk case.
    “There’s just one thing I’ve always wondered,” she said.
    “What’s that?”
    “Why did you do it?”
    She wasn’t the first person to ask that question. Harry had been the first, followed by countless journalists from around the country and as far away as Australia, whose phone calls I’d never returned.
    “Like I said, Templeton, that’s always the most interesting question, isn’t it?”
    “And the most difficult to answer,” she said, sounding very pleased with herself.
    “That’s right.”
    She handed me the envelope. Her eyes were riveted to mine again, and alive with challenge.
    “Maybe I’ll try,” she said.

Chapter Seven
     
    I grabbed a late lunch at Kosher Burrito downtown, paying with some of Harry’s cash.
    Then I caught a westbound section of the Hollywood Freeway, driving straight into the sun and jockeying for lane position in the afternoon rush.
    The Santa Anas were still blowing hot across the city and tearing at the Mustang’s battered top. I lowered it and let the air hit me full blast, like a furnace door opening.
    My destination was the crime scene at The Out Crowd bar, another mile or two down the freeway. But as I approached Echo Park Avenue, I impulsively swung the wheel toward the off-ramp, heading into the neighborhood where Templeton’s notes told me I’d find Gonzalo Albundo’s family home.
    At the bottom of the ramp, a squat, flat-nosed Guatemalan offered bags of oranges and unshelled peanuts to drivers trapped for a moment in the congestion of cars. I bought a bag of each, using two more of Harry’s dollars, and peeled an orange as I drove along the eastern perimeter of Echo Park. Around its steak-shaped lake, stately palm trees were rooted at attention like sunburned soldiers in the blistering heat, standing guard over brown-skinned families who lined the shores with picnic baskets and fishing poles, and ragged transients who slept during the day because it was safer to stay awake at night.
    I drifted right onto Laguna Avenue, then followed a network of narrower streets up into the hills. Modest older homes perched on the terraced land, which was supported by rows of low, thick concrete walls, many of them spray-painted with gang symbols or recently whitewashed to cover them over.
    The Albundo house was near the crest of West Covington Road. It sat at the center of a hilly triangle bordered by the Hollywood Freeway on the south, Sunset Boulevard on the north, and Echo Park Lake on the west, close enough to Dodger Stadium, I suspected, for the Albundos to hear the cheering crowds on nights when the Dodgers were