Free Goldenboy by Michael Nava

say
that he didn’t because you killed him. What’s your explanation?”
    “I didn’t kill him.”
    “Why didn’t he tell
your parents?”
    “I don’t know,” he
replied, his voice rising. “Ask him.” “He’s dead, Jim. Remember?”
    “Yeah, I remember.
Why aren’t you trying to find the guy that killed him?”
    “Why don’t you tell
me the truth?”
    “Fuck you,” he
replied.
    “This isn’t getting
us anywhere,” I observed in a quiet voice. “Are you sleeping better?”
    “They give me
pills,” he said, all the anger gone.
    I frowned. I had
had Jim examined by a doctor to see what could be done to relieve his anxiety.
Apparently the doctor chose a quick fix.
    “How often?”
    “Three times a day,”
he said.
    “I’d ease up on
them,” I cautioned.
    He shrugged.
    “You need anything?”
    He shook his head.
    “I’ll see you
tomorrow, then,” I said.
    His face showed
what he thought of the prospect.
     
    *****
     
    There was a knock
at the door. I got up from the desk and went downstairs. It was Freeman Vidor,
whom I had been expecting. I let him in, found him a beer, and led him up to
the study.
    “Nice place,” he
commented, sitting on the sofa and looking around the room. He glanced at the
piles of paper on the desk. “How’s it going?”
    “The good news is
that there won’t be any surprises from the prosecution at trial,” I replied. “The
bad news is that they don’t need any.”
    He lit a cigarette
and looked around for an ashtray. I gave him the cup I had been drinking coffee
from.
    “What about you?” I
asked. “Any surprises?”
    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