by Michael Nava
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.
“But you didn’t tell me the truth.”
He rose from the bench and stood irresolutely. “I told you,” he said, looking toward the bar. “My life’s a lie.”
He made a move to go.
“Wait,” I said.
His look was disbelieving. “You want me to stay?”
“You asked me here to come out to me,” I said. “That couldn’t have been easy. I did a lot of harm to Jim by not listening to him. I don’t want to make the same mistake with you.” He sat down.
“So,” I continued, “you want to talk?”
He shook his head. “No, I want you to come home with me.”
I smiled. “You need a friend, Josh, not another trick.”
“It doesn’t have to mean anything to you to mean something to me.”
“That’s not the point.”
He touched my hand. “Are we really going to sit here and talk about this?
I looked up at him, saw my face reflected in his glasses and saw past my reflection into his eyes. A waiter came up and asked us if we wanted another drink.
“No,” I said. “We’re leaving.”
Josh lived in Hollywood on a decayed street lined alternately with boxy apartment buildings and little stucco houses whose front yards doubled as driveways. The squalor was softened by the big elm trees that lined the road and the wild rose bushes still putting forth their flowers four weeks before Christmas. I lowered my window as I followed his car down the street. Mariachi music blared from one of the houses where four men squatted on the front lawn guzzling beer. Lights were on in every house, though it was now near two in the morning.
Josh flicked his signal and turned into the carport of a twostory apartment building. I pulled up along the curb and got out of my car. He met me at the sidewalk. It was cold. Behind us, in the Hollywood Hills, the lights flickered like distant stars. The big emptiness of the night was like a stage as we stood in the grainy light of a streetlamp looking at each other. In the darkness, I smelled jasmine.
“This is it,” he said, nervously.
I put my arm around his shoulders, and felt the tension in his neck seep out as he leaned into me.
“You’re cold,” I observed, touching his face wit
h the back of my hand.
“Let’s go upstairs.”
He led me around to a tall gate, through it, and up a concrete staircase to the second floor landing. “The place is kind of a mess,” he said, unlocking the door.
He held the door open for me. The room I found myself in was, in fact, quite tidy. There was a fake Oriental rug on a fake parquet floor. A shabby couch flanked by two sling armchairs, and a glass-topped coffee table furnished the place. One wall was taken up by wooden bookshelves crammed with books. A stereo and a small tv were set on a couple of orange crates filled with records.
Josh stood beside me. “Can I get you something to drink?” “No, thank you.”
“Excuse me, then,” he said, and went into a small kitchen.
The far wall was curtained. I went over and lifted the curtains, revealing a small patio behind a sliding glass door. I sat down on the couch. There was a fish bowl filled with change on the coffee table and next to it a photograph in a heavy bronze frame. The photograph showed a handsome middle-aged couple, two pretty girls, and a smiling Josh. He came back into the room holding a glass of milk.
“Your family?”
He nodded and sat down beside me. “My dad’s a CPA,” he said.
“Where do they live?”
“Sherman Oaks.” He set the glass down on the table. “Are you comfortable?”
I loosened my tie.
Smiling faintly, Josh asked, “Is that as relaxed as you get?” “It’s been a long time.”
“For me, too,” he said. “I don’t want you to think I spend all my time at bars or anything.”
“I know.”
“This feels like the first time for me,” he said, then smiled nervously. “That’s the wrong thing to say, isn’t it?”
I held him. “No,” I said. “My first time was almost twenty years ago. We thought we had invented love.”
He kissed me. His mouth tasted of milk and his skin beneath my fingers was smooth and firm. He drew back and unknotted my tie, sliding it from my collar, and unbuttoned my shirt. I removed my jacket and tossed it aside. Sinking into the couch, I pulled him against me.
“What happened to him?” Josh asked.
“To whom?”
“Your first time.”
“She got married.”
He lifted his head and looked at me. “It was a girl?”
“Yes,” I replied.
“Were you gay?”
“I’ve always been gay, Josh. I just happened to be in love with a girl.” I kicked off my shoes and smiled at him. “You can’t always specialize.”
His dark eyes were unhappy. “Do you still go out with them?”
“Women? No,” I said. “She was the only one.”
He smiled. “That cuts down the competition.”
“Don’t worry about that. It’s a buyer’s market.”
“We’ll see,” he said with a lewd flicker in his eyes.
Sometime later we lay on the couch, facing each other, our clothes discarded, bodies touching.
I watched my face form in Josh’s eyes. “You called me the night Jim tried to kill himself,” I said.
He was surprised. “How did you know it was me?”
“Just a feeling. I wish you hadn’t hung up.”
“I lost my nerve,” he replied and smiled. “Are you tired?”
I pressed him against me. “In a minute.”
It was cold. I opened my eyes and found that Josh had rolled himself into the blankets and now slept contentedly at the edge of the narrow bed. A light shone from beneath the bathroom door. He had carefully arranged my suit on a chair, leaving his own clothes in a little pile beside it. I gently unwound the blankets from him and lay against his back, putting my arm across his chest. He smelled of sweat and soap and semen. I lowered my hand to his firm belly, cupped his genitals and laid my hand, finally, between his thighs. He moved his head a fraction and I knew he was awake. He pressed his rump against my groin. I raised my hand along his torso to his nipples and grazed them with my palm. He sighed and pushed harder.
“Do you want to?” he whispered.
I raised myself on my elbow and said, “Of course I do, but I haven’t carried rubbers with me since I was sixteen.”
“Just this once,” he said. “You could pull out before — you know.”
I squeezed his neck between my fingers. “No,” I said softly. “There’s AIDS, Josh. It’s not worth the risk.”
Abruptly he drew away to the edge of the bed and lay on his back, looking at the darkness.
“I didn’t mean that the way it sounded,” I said.
“I know what you meant,” he said in a flat voice. “You’re right. It’s not worth it.”
He drew himself rigidly apart from me as if daring me to make a move across the channel of darkness between us.
“That’s not what I meant at all,” I said, reaching for him.
He jerked away. “I said it didn’t have to mean anything to you, Henry.”
I lay back in the bed. “You’ve been awfully rough on yourself tonight, Josh. I’d like to know why.”
“Does it really matter to you?” he asked, more in pain than defiance.
But I had long ago stopped issuing blank checks on my emotions and I waited a moment too long to answer.
“That’s what I thought,” he said.
“What’s this about, Josh?”
Instead of answering, he turned away and quietly began to weep.
16
When he stopped crying, I asked, “Does this have anything to do with Jim?”
“Please hold me,” Josh said. I moved myself against him and took him in my arms, feeling the dull thud of his heart against my ribs. “I don’t want to talk now.”
I opened my mouth to speak but thought better of it. After a few minutes, Josh slipped into sleep. A long time later, I did, too.
When I woke Josh was standing beside me, dressed in jeans and a UCLA sweatshirt. He squinted at me through his glasses. It was plain that he was seeing a stranger.
“I’ll make you some breakfast,” he said, politely.
“Coffee will be fine.”
He nodded and left. I stretched my neck, shaking off the little aches that seemed to accumulate there as I got older, wiping the sleep from my eyes. The bathroom was steamy and smelled of Josh. A thin, suspicious face formed in the mirror. Deepening lines and graying hair foretold the coming of middle- age, what the French called — ironically, in my case — the age of discretion. I rinsed my mouth, showered, put on the clothes I had worn the night before, and followed the smell of coffee into the kitchen.
Josh stood at the stove scrambling eggs. He looked at me and said, “You should eat something.”
“Whatever you’re having.” I poured coffee into a mug from Disneyland and leaned against the counter, watching him.
“Do you ever stop thinking?” he asked.
“I did last night,” I replied. He stirred the eggs savagely.
“Lowered your standards, you mean.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“Don’t worry about it.” He shut off the flame beneath the skillet and faced me.
“What were you going to tell me last night?”
“Nothing.”
I set my cup on the counter. “We shouldn’t start out by lying to each other.”
He jammed his hands into his pockets. “Sometimes I don’t think there is any love, just a kind of envy.” He looked at me. “I want to be who you are. What do you want from me, to be twenty-two again?”
“I think I’d better be on my way,” I said.
He started to say something but then simply nodded. I let myself out. I told myself I didn’t want to buy into his troubles, but I felt heavier going down the steps than I had coming up.
There was a black Mercedes parked in front of Larry’s house. The plate read gldnboy. I pulled into the driveway and went into the house. Tom Zane, Irene Gentry, and Sandy Blenheim were sitting in th
e big front room with Larry. The coffee table was littered with papers, coffee cups, and empty glasses. A half- empty bottle of Old Bushmill’s sat near an ashtray filled with cigarette butts.
“Excuse me,” I said.
Larry gave me a look that made me acutely aware that I was in the same clothes I had worn the night before. “I think you know everyone,” he said.
“Looks like someone got lucky last night,” Zane said.
“I don’t mean to interrupt,” I said, and headed up the stairs without looking back. I changed clothes and called Freeman Vidor. He was surprised to hear from me.
“Read about you in the paper today,” he said. “D.A. dumped the Pears case.”
“Justice triumphs again,” I replied. Downstairs someone burst into loud laughter.
“You don’t sound like a happy man.”
From the window I watched shadows of clouds gather on the surface of Silver Lake. “It wasn’t exactly an acquittal.”
“He wasn’t exactly innocent.”
“There’s something I’d like you to look into.”
“We still talking about Pears?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t do pro bono,” he said.
“I’ll pay you the same rate we originally agreed on.”
“Go ahead.”
I told him about the missing bar key.
“That’s it?” His voice was incredulous. “You think someone broke in, slashed the Fox kid and left the knife in Pears’s hand?”
“I’m less interested in the bar key than I am in Josh Mandel,” I replied after a moment’s hesitation.
“What does that mean?”
“I think he’s concealing information about the case,” I replied. “I’d like you to find out what it is without approaching him.”
“I’m an investigator, Henry, not a psychic.”
There was more laughter from downstairs. “Then do what you have to do,” I replied.
“What do you think he knows?”
“I have no idea,” I said, irritably. “That’s what I’m hiring you to find out.”
“Uh-huh. You don’t want to talk to him because, why? You think he’ll run or… “ The sentence trailed off.
“I slept with him last night.”
Vidor said, “I’m glad I’m not your boyfriend.”
