Free Goldenboy by Michael Nava Page A

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