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Show 162 had called the poor devil a chickenshit and Lorin had kept very quiet. He remembered a fundamentalist storekeeper in a Southern town who was goaded to violence when his daughter#was made pregnant by the leading man's son. He had seen that movie on a date with Carol Schooley in junior high and he remembered the pride with which he had reflected that Carol's father had nothing to fear from him. There was a scattering of other characters in other films who had tugged or pricked at his sympathies in different ways. There was a Jewish chief of detectives whose men were always on the edge of disrespect until the stakeout, during which he was killed covering one of them, after which they knew they had been wrong. There was a dapper but corrupt courtroom lawyer who was overruled from the bench during the climactic scene and whose humiliation was poignantly satisfying. There was a newspaper editor whose office had gotten smashed and whose head had been beaten bloody-Lorin still remembered the clots in his white hair-by a mob infuriated at the paper's call for restraint in the face of something or other. Lorin had not known these were all the same person-he had seen them at wide intervals over the years and they didn't look alike-and when much later he had learned that they were and that all of them were Simon's father, and that he had known them before he had known Simon, he had experienced an odd flash in which he was suddenly very old and was seeing Simon through a veil. He did meet the man once when Simon had brought a few friends home, and was reduced to shuffling wordlessness, but he did not recognize in the bony spectacled face any of the faces he remembered. Simon was, as it happened, on good terms with his family, a fact that Lorin envied. He was often invited home to spend an evening in the large stucco house that rose above the trees on a hillside north of Los Feliz Boulevard, from whose front window you could look out on narrow winding |