Goldenboy (9 page)

The next day I called the Yellowtail
and learned that Josh Mandel was working the lunch shift. I headed out to
Encino at noon on the Hollywood Freeway. October brought cooler weather but no
respite from the smog that hung above the city like a soiled, tattered sheet.
Hollywood Boulevard looked more derelict than usual, as if the brown air above
it were its own gasps and wheezes. The movie money had migrated west, leaving
only this elegant carcass moldering in the steamy autumn sunlight.

The air was clearer
in the valley but there was decay here, too; but with none of the fallen-angel
glamour of Hollywood. Rather, it lay in the crumbling foundations of
jerry-built condominium complexes, condemned drive-ins and bowling alleys,
paint blistering from shops on the verge of bankruptcy. The detritus of the
good life. It was easy to feel the ghost town just beneath the facade of
affluence.

The Yellowtail
anchored a small, chic shopping center comprised of clothing boutiques and
specialty food stores, white stucco walls, covered walkways, tiled roofs,
murmuring fountains, and grass the color of new money. I pulled into the
parking lot beside the restaurant and walked around to the entrance. Heavy paneled
doors led into a sunlit anteroom. A blonde girl stood at a podium with a phone
pressed to her ear. She looked at me, smiled meaninglessly, and continued her
conversation.

I walked to the
edge of the anteroom. The restaurant was basically a big rectangular room with
two smaller rooms off the main floor. The first of these, nearest to where I
stood, was the bar. The other, only distantly visible, seemed to be a smaller
dining room. The entire place was painted in shades of pink and white and gray.
Behind the bar there was an aquarium in which exotic fish fluttered through
blue-green water like shards of an aquatic rainbow.

There were
carnations in crystal vases on each table. Moody abstracts hung from the walls.
Light streamed in from a bank of tall, narrow windows on the wall opposite the
bar. The windows faced an interior courtyard, flowerbeds, and a fountain in the
shape of a lion’s head. Above the din of expense-account conversation I heard a
bit of Vivaldi. The waiters were as handsome as the room they served. They
seemed college-age or slightly older, most of them blond, wearing khaki
trousers, blue button-down shirts, sleeves rolled to the elbows, red silk ties.
The busboys were similarly dressed but without ties. They swept across the
tiled floor like ambulatory mannequins.

“Excuse me, are you
waiting for someone?” It was the girl at the podium. I looked at her. She was
very nearly pretty but for the spoiled twist of her lips.

“I’d like to see
Josh Mandel.”

“Are you a
salesman?” she asked, already looking beyond me to a couple just leaving.

“No, I’m Jim Pears’s
lawyer.”

Her eyes focused on
me. Without a word, she picked up the phone and pressed two numbers. There was
a quick, sotto voce conversation and when she put the phone down she said, “He
asked for you to wait for him in the bar.”

“Fine. By the way,
is Andrea Lew working today?”

The girl said, “She
quit.”

“Do you know how I
can reach her?”

“No,” she said in a
tone she probably practiced on her boyfriend.

“Thanks for your
help,” I replied, and felt her eyes on my back as I made my way to the bar. I
found an empty bar stool and ordered a Calistoga water. Andrea Lew was right;
it was impossible for anyone to enter the restaurant without being seen from the
bar. Assuming, of course, that someone was watching.

I was about to ask
the bartender about Andrea when I heard someone say, “Mr. Rios?”

I looked up at the
dark-haired boy who had spoken. “You’re Josh,” I said, recognizing him from
court.

He nodded. In court
he had seemed older. Now I saw he was very young, two or three years out of his
teens, and trying to conceal the fact. The round horn-rimmed glasses didn’t
help. They only called attention to green-brown eyes that had the bright sheen
of true innocence. His hair was a mass of black curls restrained by a shiny
mousse. He had a delicate, bony face, a long nose, a wide strong mouth and the
smooth skin of a child. “Why don’t we go down to my office,” he said, and I was
suddenly aware that we had been staring at each other.

“You mind showing
me around the place first?” I asked, stepping down from the bar stool. I was
about an inch taller than he.

He frowned but
nodded. “You’ve already seen all this,” he said, jutting his chin at the dining
room. “I’ll show you the back.”

We made our way
across the big room and pushed through swinging double doors.

“This is the waiter’s
station,” he told me. We were in a narrow room. The kitchen was visible over a
counter through a rectangular window on which the cooks placed orders as they
were ready and clanged a bell to alert the waiters. In one comer was a metal
rack with four plastic tubs filled with dirty dishes. A busboy took the top tub
and carried it out through another door behind us. Pots of coffee bubbled on
the counter. Cupboards held coffee cups, glasses, napkins, and cutlery. One of
the blond waiters walked in, lit a cigarette and smoked furiously.

“Put it out, Timmy,”
Josh said as we passed through the door where the busboy had gone and stood at
the top of a corridor that terminated at the back door. Josh walked toward it.
I followed.

“Dishwasher,” he
said, stopping in front of a small room where a slender black man wearing a
hair net pushed a rack of dishes into an immense machine.

•

We walked back a
little farther. “Employees’ locker room,” Josh said. There were three rows of
lockers against a wall. Opposite the lockers were two doors, marked men and
women. A bench completed the decor. “This is where we change for work,” he
said.

We went back into
the corridor.

“Back door,” he
said, pointing.

I looked at the door
and realized, for the first time, that the lock which Andrea Lew had talked
about was an interior lock. Inspecting it further I saw that it could not be
unlocked from outside at all but only from within. I asked Josh about it.

“It’s for security,”
he replied. “It can’t be picked from outside.”

“You keep it
unlocked during the day?”

“Uh-huh, for
deliveries. Night manager locks it up when the kitchen closes at ten.”

“So if anyone was
back here after ten he’d need a key to get out?”

“Uh-huh,” he said.

“But there’s a key
at the bar.”

He looked at me and
blinked. “Yeah, for emergencies.”

“Show me the
cellar,” I said.

I followed him back
down the corridor and around the front of the walk-in refrigerator. We passed
briefly through the kitchen and then went down a rickety flight of stairs into
the cellar. We stood in a big, dark room that had a damp, fruity smell. Behind
locked wooden screens were hundreds of bottles of wine. The room was otherwise
bare. He showed me two smaller rooms adjacent to each other. The door to one of
them was open, revealing a cluttered desk. The door to the other was closed.

“That’s where they
found Jim,” he said. “You want to go in?” His voice indicated clearly that he
didn’t.

“Maybe later,” I
said, giving him a break.

We went into his
office. He sat in a battered swivel chair behind a desk made of a thick slab of
glass supported by metal sawhorses. There was a phone on the wall, its lights
flashing.

He closed a ledger
on the desk before him and offered me a cup of coffee. I declined.

“How’s Jim?” he
asked.

‘‘Surviving.’’

“I’m really sorry
about what happened,” he said, defensively. “They told me I had to testify.”

“Of course you did,”
I said soothingly. “You seem pretty young to be managing this place.”

“I’m twenty-two,”
he protested, and must have caught my smile. “I usually just manage the floor
but Mark — he’s the head guy — he’s out sick today.”

“Have you worked
here long?”

“Six years. I
started as a busboy.”

“You go to school?”

He picked up a
paper clip. “Two years at UCLA. I dropped out.”

“Why?”

He flattened out
the paper clip. “Is that important?”

“I won’t know until
you tell me.”

He set the paper
clip aside. “I didn’t know what I was doing there,” he said. “I never was much
for school.”

I accepted this,
for the moment. “What was Jim like to work with?”

He was visibly
relieved by the change of subject. “He was a hard worker,” Josh said. “Reliable.”

“You ever see him
outside of work?”

He shook his head
and picked up a pencil.

“Were you surprised
to find out he was gay?”

Our eyes caught. “What
do you mean?”

“Didn’t Brian tell
you Jim was gay?”

“Yes.”

“Did you believe
him?”

He put the pencil
down. “Yes.”

“Why?”

He looked at the
desk. “I don’t know. I just did.”

I let his answer hang
in the air. He picked up the paper clip again.

“And later you
heard Brian threaten to tell Jim’s parents.”

“It wasn’t exactly
like that,” he said, softly.

“No?”

“It was more — like
a joke,” he said, raising his head slowly. “Brian said something like, ‘You
want your mama to know you suck cock?’ like the way little kids insult each
other.”

“And Jim? Did he
know it was a joke?”

“I think so,” he
replied. “He kind of laughed and said, ‘I’ll kill you first.”‘

“Where did this
happen?”

“The locker room.
We were all changing for work.”

“This was the only
time you ever heard them say anything to each other like this?”

“Yes,” he said, and
bit his lower lip.

“You know, Josh,” I
said, “this sounds entirely different than it did when you testified at the
prelim.”

“I told the
prosecutor but he kept saying that Jim really meant it because, you know, he
did kill Brian. I guess he convinced me.”

“Do you think Jim
killed Brian?” I asked.

“That’s what they
say. All the evidence looks pretty bad for Jim.”

“Do you think he
did it?” I asked again.

Josh took off his
glasses and cleaned them with his handkerchief. “I don’t know,” he said,
finally.

“Can you think of
anyone else who would have a reason to kill Brian Fox?”

He shook his head
quickly.

“Where were you the
night he was killed?”

He looked shocked. “On
a date.”

I looked at him until
he looked away. He was lying. “Who with?”

Recovering himself
he said, “The D.A. said I don’t have to talk to you.”

“But you are going
to have to testify again,” I said.

“I’ll tell the
truth,” he replied, his face coloring. It was useless to push him.

“You won’t have any
choice, Josh,” I said. I wrote Larry’s number on a slip of paper. “If you want
to talk later you can reach me here.”

He looked at the
paper as if it were a bomb, but took it and slipped it into his pocket.

*****

Larry’s car was in
the driveway though it was only two-thirty. That worried me. Except for a
certain gauntness, Larry gave no sign of being gravely ill, but his condition
was never far from my mind. I knew it preoccupied Larry, too. Sometimes he
became very still and remote. It actually seemed as if some part of him were
gone. When I mentioned it, he smiled and said he was practicing levitation.
What he was actually doing, I think, was practicing dying.