I had already phoned Homicide, so I headed for City Hall. I’d looked all over Jim’s house without finding even a trace of his manuscript. I knew much of what was in it, and I drove slowly toward downtown L.A., thinking about Jim, the book itself, and wondering if that book was why he’d been killed.
Years before I met him, Jim Brandon had been a reporter on one of the New York dailies and had wound up joining the party. He was intelligent, hardworking, and had a free-and-easy way with words, so he’d landed in a professional group with other newspapermen and writers, plus a couple of radio commentators. They studied the technique of artful lying, how to combine emphasis with omission to create an impression contrary to fact, how to turn black into gray and sometimes—all the liars working to
