He dug into the pocket of his suit and extracted a little notebook. He flipped through pages filled with big, loopy handwriting. “Maybe.”
“Fox?” I asked, setting a fresh notepad on the desk in front of me.
“Uh-huh,” he said, and sipped his beer. “There’s a private security patrol in the neighborhood where his folks live. Seems about a year ago they started getting complaints about a Peeping Tom. They kept a look-out and, lo and behold, they find Fox in someone’s back yard. There’s a girl lives there he went to school with. It was just about her bedtime.”
“What was his story?”
“He wanted to talk to her,” Freeman said, dropping his cigarette into the coffee cup and pouring a little beer over it. “Only they caught him with his pants down.”
“What?”
“Jerking off. He said he was just taking a piss.”
“Anyone press charges?”
“Not in that neighborhood,” he said. “Security took him home and told his parents.” He belched softly. “Excuse me. There was some other stuff, too,” he continued. “Seems like Brian was the neighborhood pervert.”
“I’m listening.”
Freeman shrugged. “Now these are just rumors,” he cautioned. “He spent a lot of time with kids who were younger than him — thirteen, fourteen.”
“Boys? Girls?”
“Both,” he replied, and finished off the beer. “‘Course, less time with little girls because their folks got kind of suspicious that a high school senior was hanging around them. So mostly he was with the little boys. They thought he was kind of a creep.”
“And why is that?”
“A couple of them came over to his house to go swimming when his folks were gone. He gave them some beer and tried to get them to go into the pool naked.”
“What happened?”
“They split,” he replied and thumbed through the notebook. “After that, they all pretty much avoided him.”
“Did they tell their parents?”
He shook his head.
An interesting picture was beginning to develop. I asked, “What about kids his own age? Did he have a girlfriend?”
“Nope,” he said. “Didn’t go out much with girls. He was kind of a loner except for his computer buddies.”
“The stories in the papers make him sound like the most popular kid in his class,” I observed.
Freeman lit another cigarette. “The kids didn’t write those stories, grown-ups did. They see a young guy, not bad looking, smart enough, killed by some — excuse the expression — faggot. What do you think they’re going to make of it?”
‘“Golden boy,” I said, quoting the description from one of the newspaper accounts.
“Yeah,” Freeman said, dourly, “Golden boy. Hell,” he added, “the only thing golden about that boy’s his old man’s money. There’s a lot of that.”
“Rich?”
“Real rich,” he replied.
“Then why was he working as a busboy?” I asked.
Freeman shrugged. “Not because he needed the money. His counselor at the school says he told Brian’s folks to put him to work. Teach him to fit in — no, what did she say?” He flipped through the notebook. “Learn ‘appropriate patterns of socialization,’“ he quoted. He grinned at me. “Some homework.”
“Did it work? What did they think of him at the restaurant?”
“That he was a lazy little shit,” Freeman replied. “They fired him once but his old man got him the job back.”
“Speaking of the restaurant, what did you find out about the keys to the service door?”
“There’s four copies,” he replied. “One for the manager and his two assistants and one they leave at the bar.”
“Were they all accounted for?”
“Everyone checks out, except for one. The day manager, a kid named Josh Mandel.”
“The prosecutor’s star witness,” I said.
“That’s him.”
“No alibi for that night?”
Freeman nodded, slowly. “He says he was out on a date.”
“You have trouble with that?”
“Let’s just say he don’t lie with much conviction.”
9
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
