I returned to the jail day after day to talk to Jim Pears. We sat at the table in the room with the soiled walls beneath the glaring lights. As far as I knew, he had no other visitors. Jim showed no interest in preparing for the coming trial beyond repeating his stock claim of innocence. He answered my questions with the fewest words possible unless I asked him about the events leading up to the killing. Those he wouldn’t answer at all, maintaining loss of memory.
One late afternoon a week after our first interview, I said, “Tell me the last thing you remember about that night.”
His blue gaze drifted past my face. “I was at the bar.”
“Before Brian got there.”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember seeing him arrive?”
Jim shook his head. I drew a zero on my legal pad. A blue vein twitched at his temple. His eyes, the same throbbing blue, scanned his fingertips.
“Did Brian ever threaten you?”
He looked up, startled. “No.”
“Demand money?”
“No.”
“Did you tell him to meet you at the restaurant that night?”
His eyes were terrified. “No.”
“Did he tell you he was coming there?”
“No,” he replied, drawing a deep breath.
“But once he got there you assumed it was to see you, didn’t you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t know what?”
“What I thought.” He shifted in his seat.
I drew another zero on the pad. “Tell me about the guy who picked you up the night Brian saw you in the car. Had you ever seen him before?”
“No,” he replied.
“What did he look like?”
“That was a long time ago.”
“You must remember something,” I snapped.
He slumped in his chair. “He was old,” he said finally, and added, “Like you.”
Ignoring the gibe, I asked, “Was he tall or short?”
“Average, I guess.”
“I’m not interested in your guesses. What color was his hair?”
“Dark.”
“What about his eyes?”
He was quiet for a moment, then he said, in a voice that was different, almost yearning, “They were blue.”
“Like yours?” I asked.
“No, different,” he replied in the same voice. He was seeing those eyes.
“Tell me about his eyes,” I said, quietly.
“I told you,” he replied, the yearning gone. “They were blue.”
“How did you end up in his car?”
“He told me to meet him.”
“Where?”
“In the lot behind the restaurant.”
“Then what happened?”
He stared at me, color creeping up his neck.
“You got in the car and then what happened?”
“We talked.” It was almost a question.
“Is that what you were doing when Brian came up to the car, talking?”
He shook his head. “He was — sucking me.”
“That’s what Brian saw?”
“Yeah.”
“What did Brian do?”
“He opened the car door,” Jim said, talking quickly, “and yelled ‘faggots’. Then he ran back across the lot of the restaurant.”
“What did you do?”
“I got out of the car. The guy drove off. I went home.” “Did he tell you his name?”
“No.”
I looked at him. No, of course not. Names weren’t important.
“Brian threatened to tell your parents,” I said. “Did that worry you?”
“Sure,” he said, “but-” He stopped himself.
“But what?”
“He didn’t.”
“The D.A. will 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 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.”