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 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?”