Read Online Limits of Justice, The by John Morgan Wilson - Free Book Online

skin and knows where to get the right haircut. He might have been Italian, maybe Greek, certainly Mediterranean; his parents must have been a very attractive couple, and he surely had been a most adorable little boy.
    A few minutes later, he was looking up and stretching his smile for me.
    “If you would, sign it ‘To Alexandra, with best wishes.’”
    “I’d be happy to.”
    He bent over the book with his Sharpie, scrawling what I asked, finishing it off with his name, exactly as he’d done on two or three dozen books before me. I turned away, replaced by the next person in the line, which was comprised mostly of men who struck me as inordinately chatty and probably gay, along with needy-looking women in various shapes and sizes who smiled excessively as I passed. I studied their faces as I made my way out of the store; most of Randall Capri’s fans impressed me as starstruck and vacuous, as if they needed a life a whole lot more than they needed another biography of a dead celeb, although when it came to needing a life, I was hardly in a position to point my finger.
     
    *
     
    In fact, I had nothing to do for the rest of the evening except get through the night without taking a drink.
    I picked up some chicken chow mein on the way home and opened Sexual Predator when I got there, leaving Mei-Ling down at the house, where she’d get more attention. Capri’s writing was competent if mediocre, given to hyperbolic statements, florid language, and a breathless style that the customers for this kind of book apparently appreciated; I hadn’t seen so many exclamation points since reading Andre Gide’s The Counterfeiters for a college lit class. Yet there was also a wealth of fascinating detail and a personal passion in Capri’s writing that surprised me; I’d expected a routine clip job, with information culled from old newspaper and magazine pieces, spiced up with seamy innuendo and purported revelations that Rod Preston could never deny from the grave. As an author, Capri still qualified as a Hollywood bottom feeder—he clearly traded on sordid gossip—yet there was a disturbing ring of truth to much of what he wrote.
    From the early pages to the end of the book, covering Rod Preston’s life from his early thirties to his death at age seventy, Capri portrayed the actor as a compulsive chickenhawk who secretly and endlessly preyed on young boys, preferring them in the age range of ten to twelve. According to Capri, during stretches of Preston’s life, he needed several boys a week to satisfy his compulsions. By Capri’s account, Preston didn’t care whether they were white, Asian, or Hispanic, as long as they were slim, dark-haired, and reasonably fair-skinned. The book claimed that Preston’s marriage to the starlet Vivian Grant had been nothing but a sham arranged by their studio to protect Preston’s career, although Capri gave Preston credit for being a doting father once his only child, Charlotte, had been born.
    The book ended with an indelible scene of Rod Preston’s last alleged sexual encounter that would be stomach-churning for many: According to Capri, only weeks before Preston had died, the one-time movie idol had an eleven-year-old boy brought to his bedside and his oxygen mask removed so he could fellate the child with what would be his final, natural breaths before the machines took over. The stunning anecdote, along with many of the other narrative elements, would certainly be talked about and would no doubt sell many books. How much, if any of it, was actually true remained open to question—there was virtually no documentation for the most scurrilous claims, and the only sources and supporting characters who were named had died years ago, unable now to prove or disprove so much as a single point. If Capri had made up most of it, Charlotte Preston was right—he was possessed of a vivid imagination, the most lurid fantasies.
    Aside from the startling claims, two things about the book struck