men lined up against the bar and those leaning against the beer boxes. The place smelled of spilt beer and cigarettes and was lit in red by spotlights above the bar. Dolly Parton was belting out a song from the overhead speakers and everywhere mouths moved, singing along with her. I wedged my way down the room looking for Josh Mandel.
There was a pool room behind the bar. A green-shaded light hung over the pool table. A thin boy with a bad complexion waited while his opponent, a lumbering bear of a man, calculated a shot. Josh Mandel was sitting on a bar stool beneath a chalkboard that listed the order of players. He wore jeans and an old white button-down shirt and his glasses dangled out of his pocket. A red sweater was spread across his knees. He was smoking a cigarette with one hand while the other grasped a bottle of beer. He looked too young to be either smoking or drinking. I came around the room until I was standing beside him.
“Josh?”
He jerked his face toward me. “Mr. Rios.”
“Henry,” I replied. “I’m sorry I’m late.”
“That’s okay.” He smiled at me. “You want a drink?”
“I don’t drink. Is there somewhere quiet we can talk?”
“There’s a patio out back,” he said, and hopped off the bar stool. “Come on.”
He led me out to a small fenced-in courtyard in the center of which was a big firepit. It was dark except for a couple of lights above the exit and the glow of the fire. We sat down on a bench beneath the feathery leaves of a jacaranda tree. Josh put on his glasses and the red sweater.
“I guess you figured out I’m gay,” he said.
“I assume that’s why you told me to meet you here.”
He nodded. “You knew when you saw me in court the first time.”
I remembered the odd jolt of recognition I’d felt that day when I had looked at him. I said, “I’m not sure. Maybe.”
He finished his beer. A waiter came by and Josh asked for a screwdriver. I asked for mineral water.
“Did Jim know about you?” I asked.
“No one does,” he*aid. “You probably think I should be more out.”
“That’s not my business.”
“I just mean, you’re out and everything.”
“I learned pretty early on that I’m not a good liar. That’s all there is to my being out.”
He lowered his eyes. “It’s not like I like lying,” he said, softly.
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“You don’t have to like me, Henry,” he said, suddenly. Our eyes met and I felt his sadness. Or maybe I felt my own. “You didn’t come to talk about me, anyway. You want to know about Jim.”
The waiter brought our drinks. I paid for them over Josh’s protests. “What about him?”
He churned his drink with a straw. “It’s something I found out after he tried to kill himself. I was hanging around the bar at the Yellowtail one night and the bartender asked me to dump the trash. He gave me the bar key to the back door. It was new.”
“New?” I echoed.
“Uh-huh. I asked him what happened to the old one and he said it had disappeared months ago. The next day I went through work orders and stuff and I found this.” He pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and extracted a piece of paper, handing it to me.
I examined it. It was a receipt from a locksmith for the making of a key. The receipt was dated less than a week after the night Brian Fox was murdered. I handed it back to Josh.
“You think the missing key has something to do with Brian’s death?”
He folded the paper. “You’d need it to get out,” he said.
I thought about this. “You think there was someone back there before Brian came in?”
He nodded.
“Kind of a strange coincidence,” I said.
“There’s a strongbox down in the manager’s office,” Josh said. “Someone could’ve cleaned it out and let himself out through the back door.”
“A burglary?” I was interested, suddenly, in the missing key. “And Brian just happened to be there. Had the strongbox been tampered with?”
Josh shook his head. “That doesn’t mean they didn’t try.” He shivered and pulled a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. The fire cast a flickering light on his face.
“The problem is that they found Jim with the knife,” I said. “There doesn’t seem to be any way around that.”
“Oh, that’s right,” he said too quickly and gulped his drink.
I looked at him. He hadn’t asked me here to tell me about the key. Then why? To let me know about himself?
“Still,” I said, “I’ll have my investigator look into it.”
“That skinny black guy?”
“Yes. Freeman Vidor. He talked to you, didn’t he?”
Josh frowned. “Yeah. I’m going to get another drink. You want one?”
“No.” He got up and started for the bar. “Josh,” I said, “are you trying to get drunk?”
He sat down again and looked at me. “I could’ve told you about the key on the phone,” he said, then added awkwardly, “I just really wanted to see you again.”
I looked at him. “Why?”
“I’ve seen you before,” he said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Two years ago you gave a speech at a rally at UCLA against the sodomy law. Remember?”
“I gave so many speeches that year,” I said apologetically. He smiled. “I remember. Afterwards I came up and shook your hand.” The smile faded and he looked at me gravely. “You gave me the courage to be who I am. But it didn’t last.”
“Few of us come out all at once,” I said, gently. “It’s not the easiest thing to do.”
He shook his head and frowned. “I never came out at all.” “We are at a gay bar,” I said.
“It’s easy to come out in a bar,” he said, “or in bed.” A shadow crossed his face.
“Are you all right?”
He stared down at his hands and said, “No.”
There was a lot of pain in the little word. He grabbed my hand, clutching it tightly.
“What is it, Josh?” I asked.
He drew a shaky breath. “My life’s a lie,” he said. “No one knows who I really am, not my friends or my folks. I can’t live this way anymore.”
Suddenly I thought of Jim Pears. “Don’t say that,” I said sharply.
He let go of my hand and looked away from me.
“I’m sorry,” he said in a voice at the edge of tears. “I admire you so much. I wanted you to like me.”
“I didn’t mean to snap at you. It’s just when you said you couldn’t live this way, it made me think of Jim.”
“If it wasn’t for me, he would be all right,” Josh said. “You’re taking the blame for a lot,” I replied.
“If I’d told him I was gay — “ he began.
“It wouldn’t have made any difference,” I said. “His denial was too deep.”
Josh tipped his head back against the fence. The light from the doorway of the bar shone on his face and cast a sort of halo around his hair.
“Is that true?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He inclined his face toward me. “But you still don’t like me.”
“You lied to me about where you were the night Brian was killed.”
Someone dropped a glass and it shattered near the firepit. “I wasn’t anywhere near the restaurant,” he said.
