“Hello, Sandy,” I
said.
He glanced at me
with annoyance. The bartender looked relieved and slipped away.
“Hi,” he said. “Enjoying
yourself?”
“The party’s fine
but I’ve got to go. I wondered if you’d say goodbye to Miss Gentry for me.”
“Yeah, I saw you
talking with her,” he said. “You two know each other?”
“Not before
tonight.”
He picked up a tall
glass from the bar and drank. When he set it down he wiped his mouth with the
back of his hand. “What did you talk about?”
“This and that,” I
replied, disliking him.
“Yeah,” he said. “You’re
gay, right?”
“I don’t make a
secret about it.”
“Just making sure,”
he said. “Tom’s the jealous kind.” Having seen Zane in action earlier with
another woman, I doubted this, but said, “He has nothing to worry about from
me.”
“So,” Sandy said,
lowering his voice, “what are you doing later?”
I smiled. “I’ve got
a date.”
“And after that?”
“Just say goodbye
to Rennie for me,” I said.
“Sure,” he replied,
already losing interest. His glance drifted back to the bartender. “Hey, Nick,
another drink.”
On my way out I
stopped at the men’s room. As I stood at the urinal I heard the door open. When
I went to wash my hands I found Tom Zane stooped over the marble counter that
held the wash basins. He lifted his eyes to the mirror and saw me.
“It’s the
ambassador,” he said. He inhaled a line of coke, straightened up, tilted his
head back and sniffled. “Want some?” “No thanks.” I turned on the tap and ran
my hands beneath the water. He did another line.
“Is that safe to do
here?” I asked.
“Are you gonna
tell?”
“No.”
“Good.” He did a
third line and stood up, putting his arm around my shoulder. “As long as you’re
not one of Sandy’s spies.”
“I’m not.”
“He says you’re
gay. Is that right?”
“Yeah,” I replied.
Zane dropped his
arm to just above my waist and we looked at each other in the mirror. In the
dim light he looked almost as he had in the last scene of the play: heroic,
dissipated, and beautiful.
“We should get
together sometime,” he said.
Before I could
think of an answer to this, the door opened again. He dropped his arm to his
side and stepped away. I dried my hands. Sandy Blenheim came in, looked at us
and scowled.
“Listen, T. Z.,
there’s some important people out there wanting to meet you.”
“Don’t I get to
take a leak?”
“What’s he do,”
Blenheim said, pointing at me, “hold your dick?”
I said, “Looks to
me like that’s your job, Sandy.”
“That’s telling
him, Ambassador.”
“Come on, T. Z.,
you’re wasting time.” Blenheim grabbed Zane’s arm and dragged him out.
I watched them go,
then finished drying my hands. I looked at myself in the mirror. Zane’s
proposition hadn’t meant anything more than Tony Good’s or Sandy Blenheim’s
had. They were empty gestures, the kind it was beginning to seem that these
people were full of. As I adjusted the knot in my tie, I tried to imagine Tom
Zane as me, and burst out laughing.
The front room was
a long, narrow rectangle with the bar running the length of it. Opposite the
bar, stacks of beer boxes were pushed up against the wall. The room was packed
and there was only a small aisle between the 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.
“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.”