Robert Mallory’s visit to Bret’s Mulholland home

Robert Mallory’s visit to Bret’s Mulholland home turns an evening of fear and suspicion into a charged confrontation in which neither character can make the other answer the question at hand. Bret challenges Robert about Chicago and the Trawler, while Robert asks whether Bret broke into his former house. Their exchange shifts abruptly into physical intimacy and then rejection: Robert calls Bret gay, leaves, and Bret is left alone with both the accusations and the desire that had complicated them.

Background and approach

The visit takes place after a day of mounting unease at Bret’s house. He has received a threatening call involving Steven Reinhardt and Liz Schaffer, worked out in an effort to blunt his distress, and checked the locks on the garage, doors, and windows. He turns down the telephone ringer rather than answer repeated calls, wary of being drawn into a game whose rules he cannot see. After taking a Quaalude and drifting in and out of sleep, he hears the doorbell and sees Robert outside, calling his name. The sequence makes Robert’s arrival difficult for Bret to place at first: he thinks he may still be dreaming, then recognizes that the encounter is real.

Bret’s immediate reaction is less terror than he expects. Robert is dressed in the same Buckley clothes he wore earlier, not in the ski mask and carrying the knife associated with Bret’s imagined home-invasion scenario. The contrast between the feared attacker and the familiar student lets Bret briefly experience him as safe. That perception is inseparable from attraction: Bret describes Robert as the idealized prep-school boy he has fantasized about, even as he suspects him of something far more dangerous.

The confrontation at the house

Robert asks Bret to open the door so they can talk, and Bret eventually unlocks the kitchen entrance. His first direct challenge concerns Chicago: he tells Robert that he knows what happened there and asks what Robert wants. Robert does not answer the accusation, instead insisting that the whole situation has to stop and that Bret needs to get a grip. The dialogue establishes a mismatch in their accounts. Bret is trying to name a larger pattern; Robert treats Bret’s conduct and suspicions as the problem.

The argument turns to the house in Benedict Canyon. Robert asks whether Bret broke in and went through his things, speaking with apparent sincerity and confusion. Bret denies knowing what Robert means. The question unsettles him because Robert refers to the property as his own house, while Bret is being asked to account for what he has discovered there. Robert’s uncertainty does not resolve the mystery; it makes the exchange more unstable, leaving Bret unsure whether Robert believes his denial.

When Robert asks who Bret thinks he is, Bret says he believes Robert is connected to the Trawler and responsible for the girls. Robert tells him to stop. The accusation is direct, but the scene supplies no confirmation from Robert and no resolution of Bret’s theory. Robert neither accepts the identity Bret assigns him nor gives an explanation that would clear him. The confrontation therefore leaves the central question open while making the dispute personal: Bret is not only accusing Robert of crimes but asking him to account for who he is.

Desire, reversal, and departure

Bret also brings up a tape he says Robert left, one involving Robert and Matt Kellner. He decides against playing it. The recording, he recognizes, implicates him more than anyone else, and showing it would mean retrieving it from a drawer containing Matt’s underwear. The evidence he claims to possess thus fails to become a weapon: Bret withholds it, and Robert denies leaving a tape. Their conversation reaches a deadlock, which the narration compares to speaking into a mirror.

The deadlock gives way when Robert reaches toward Bret. Bret reacts with surprise and initially resists the touch, but Robert calms him and strokes his hair and face. The gesture is followed by a kiss and a brief encounter on the bed. Bret responds with intense desire; Robert, by contrast, appears distant and uncertain even as he continues. The scene does not settle whether Robert’s actions express attraction, confusion, or some other impulse. Its decisive turn comes when Robert stops, sits apart, wipes his mouth, and calls Bret gay in a tone of disgust, adding that he knew it.

Robert then stands looking out through the bedroom window at the illuminated yard and pool before leaving without further explanation. Bret remains in the room and breaks down. His reaction is not simply the aftermath of rejection: the scene has fused his longing for Robert with his suspicion that Robert may be tied to the Trawler and to the deaths he has been investigating. Robert’s departure closes the encounter but not its questions.

Relationships and narrative significance

The visit draws on a pattern in which attraction and secrecy have already shaped Bret’s relations with other boys. Bret’s account of Ryan Vaughn describes a closeted athlete, the need for discretion, and a plan to leave Buckley and begin again elsewhere. Ryan had asked for subterfuge and later spent a weekend with Bret at the empty Mulholland house, which Bret remembers as a rare interval of uncomplicated desire. Robert’s visit offers no comparable mutual understanding: its physical closeness is brief, followed by a sharp rejection and an unresolved conflict over the Trawler.

Bret’s feelings for Thom Wright provide another contrast. He has loved Thom without disclosing it, and after Thom is overcome by grief at school Bret wants to comfort him but instead says they have to do something about Robert. That earlier moment shows how Bret’s feelings for Thom, his concern for his friends, and his fixation on Robert occupy the same emotional field. At the house, these strands meet in a scene where he attempts to confront a suspected threat but is also vulnerable to the very person he suspects.

The scene’s structure keeps the reader inside Bret’s uncertainty. Robert first arrives as a possible threat, becomes familiar enough to seem safe, then turns the confrontation into intimacy before withdrawing and leaving. Neither the tape nor the accusations produce a clear answer. The encounter’s significance lies in that refusal of resolution: Bret’s desire does not establish Robert’s innocence, and his suspicion does not explain Robert’s behavior. The visit leaves both the crime narrative and the relationship unsettled.