Light Before Day

by Christopher Rice

  "I don't think so," he said in a low voice that he wanted to sound threatening.

  "Brian, Roger never called you back because he went missing a few months later," I said.

  "That's not the same as going on vacation. Missing means you leave all your belongings behind and you don't tell anyone where you're going. The police put your face on a flyer, and when nobody calls about you in a few months, they assume you're dead."

  This new information put a dent in his anger. I decided to add to it. "A friend of mine is also missing, Brian. That's why I need to talk to you." It was less than a quarter of an answer to his question.

  He looked at the clerk behind die counter as if she might come to rescue him. A terrorist attack couldn't have distracted her from her magazine.

  "Brian," I said softly, and his eyes went to mine. "I know what happened to you."

  "What happened to me?" he asked in a whisper.

  I had painted myself into a corner. For several seconds, I let the silence hang between us. He was waiting for my answer with rigid patience.

  "You were raped, Brian."

  He let out an irritated-sounding groan and turned to the rack. Then he shook his head as if he were an aspiring musician and I had just told him he had no talent. He had heard my claim before, and as usual, he was determined not to believe it.

  "I'm not a fucking girl," he muttered. "I knew what kind of party it was going to be. I knew what it was when I got there, and I didn't want to leave. I wanted to be there, okay. I was fifteen, but I wasn't stupid."

  Not only did it sound like he had rehearsed these lines, it sounded like they had been provided for him by someone else.” Who told you that what they did to you was okay?" I asked.

  "Not okay," he hissed. "It's just. . . life, all right?"

  "You passed out, right?" I asked. He looked at me, startled. "And you woke up in someone's bed with a bunch of guys ..." I put my hand out for him to finish the sentence, but he didn't.

  "That's rape, Brian. Who told you it wasn't? Joseph Spinotta?"

  At the sound of Spinotta's full name, the breath went out of him. He steadied himself against the rack and looked at me as if I had slapped him. I felt like a monster, but we had passed the point of no return, and I wasn't letting up on him now. I couldn't do my job if I got lost in every story I heard. If I did, I would lose sight of the fact that Brian Ferrin's buried anger and repressed pain were small elements of a larger intrigue that had pulled Corey Howard from visible life.

  "Take a coffee break, Brian. Talk to me."

  "I don't need a break," he said with wavering defiance.

  I nodded as if I thought his fortitude was impressive. "Did Roger know what happened to you at the party?"

  "Maybe," he said in a low voice, "I thought that might be why he didn't call. Because I made an ass of myself, you know?"

  "How much did you have to drink that night?"

  "Too much, obviously," he said. "I was really nervous on the way there. Roger had a flask with him and he let me take some sips from it. I guess I took too many, because I blacked out."

  Brian Ferrin had consumed more than alcohol that night, but despite what I had just said to him, he still clung to the conviction that he had brought that night's events upon himself.

  "When you woke up," I began carefully, "in bed—was Roger there?"

  He shook his head.

  "But Joseph Spinotta was?"

  He gave me a blazing look. Then he said, "And some other guys. Older. But no, Roger wasn't there. I woke up later and I was alone. Then Roger came in and told me he was worried out of his mind about me because he didn't know where I had gone. He said he had to take me home or else my mom was going to be pissed. I told him it didn't matter because she thought I was sleeping over at a friend's."

  "What did Roger say?"

  "He said the party was over." Brian's voice grew quavery. "On the drive home, he kept telling me about how I had to learn how to drink like the big boys if I wanted to party with the big boys.

  I didn't say anything, but I figured he knew what had happened and he was pissed at me for being a jerk and passing out."

  I could feel my pulse beating in my temples. I took out my wallet and showed him the pictures of Terrance Davidson and Ben Clamp. "Did you see these guys that night?"

  "I've seen them, but. . ."

  "But what?"

  He furrowed his brow. I realized he wasn't staving me off, just trying to place the two faces.

  "Online," he said. "The same chat room where I met Roger. They both sent me their photos."

  He pushed the pictures at me as if they were on fire. I took them back. "Roger sent you his picture, too?"

  "Yeah."

  "And Roger was the only one you responded to?"

  He chewed on his lower lip and tightened his arms against his chest.

  "You didn't come forward because you wanted Roger to call you back."

  His jaw quivered slightly before he stilled it. The fight was leaving him, but I wasn't sure that was a good thing. If I had not barged in on him, I wondered how much longer his fantasy of a relationship with Roger Vasquez could have protected him from the truth of what had been done to him.

  "What happened to you was a crime, Brian," I said. "You didn't deserve it because you had too much to drink. You didn't deserve it because you went to the wrong party. And you didn't deserve it because you were a fag who didn't have a date for the prom."

  For a second, I thought he might fall apart, but the moist sheen in his eyes grew to a hard polish.

  I took out one of my old cards from Glitz magazine. It had my cell phone number on it.

  "You don't have to talk to me again if you don't want to," I said. "I can find someone who might be able to help you."

  He snatched the card out of my hand and shoved it in his pants pocket. Then he moved ten deliberate steps away from me and went back to shelving CDs. I lingered for a few seconds, then started for the door. I glanced back before I left and saw that Brian Ferrin hadn't turned to shoot me a goodbye look.

  As I drove up Laurel Canyon, I imagined myself at fifteen, sitting in front of a computer monitor as one of the Vanished Three downloaded onto my screen. Which one would I have responded to—the pretty boy, the Latin lover, or the jock?

  Ben Clamp bore a striking resemblance to the high school football players of my youth, the men I both lusted after and envied. When I was fifteen, an invitation from him would have sent me over the moon. I would have surrendered myself willingly to his late-night phone calls, his movie dates, his promises that I could have my own prom at a sparkling mansion full of men who seemed fully accomplished versions of the creatures I wanted to be. My surrender would have landed me in a stranger's bed, half conscious, aware that I was being raped but powerless to stop it.

  My knuckles went white against the steering wheel. The Vanished Three had helped make a horrifying stereotype of gay men a reality. What had been done to Brian Ferrin was more than every parent's nightmare; it was every young gay man's nightmare as well—that any attempt to explore your sexuality would meet with a swift and brutal retribution. And this retribution had been delivered by other gay men not much older than Ferrin himself.

  Roger Vasquez's swift removal of Brian from Spinotta's house as soon as the deed was done, along with his prepackaged lines intended to make Brian feel shame about what had taken place, suggested that this member of the Vanished Three had known full well what was going to happen to Brian from the minute Brian responded to the lure of Vasquez's face online.

  Yet against my will, I found myself rushing to dismiss Brian Ferrin's story. Maybe Brian was simply lying to explain away some other instance of behavior he wasn't proud of. On too many occasions, I had heard the date rape excuse used by many gay men to cover up for a night of blackout sex with a man they couldn't stand the sight of in the morning—or worse, a night of unsafe sex that had left them with an incurable illness.

  I realized what I was doing and fe
lt disgusted with myself. This very line of thinking was exactly what Roger Vasquez and Joseph Spinotta had been counting on with Brian Ferrin, convincing the victim to blame himself. Not to mention that Brian had kept quiet about what had been done to him because he had been waiting for Roger Vasquez to call him back.

  I got back to Jimmy's house around six-thirty. He had given me a gate opener, but I still felt like an intruder as I drove down the long gravel path. I glimpsed one of the security guards in the shadows between the eucalyptus trees. I waved at him, but he didn't wave back.

  All the lights were on inside Jimmy's office and the doors were wide open. Inside, a tall black woman was tacking a photo of Terrance Davidson to the corkboard wall behind Jimmy's desk. She wore blue nursing scrubs that bagged around her lean body.

  She turned and gave me her version of a smile: a slight furrow in her high brow and a tense set to her full glossy lips. Her hazel eyes made a subtle V with the bridge of her long nose. Her dreadlocks were dyed the color of gold dust and held in place by a barrette that matched their color exactly.

  Below Terrance Davidson's photograph were several note cards pinned to the board containing pieces of his biographical information. I figured the cards' large sloping cursive was the handiwork of the woman in front of me.

  "You looking for Jimmy?" she asked. "He's watching City Confidential. That show on A&E

  where everyone thinks their town is either the nicest or the cutest, and then you find out that the sheriff raped his daughter and left her for dead."

  "I've seen it," I said.

  "I'm his wife," she said, as if she thought this would relax me.

  "I suspected."

  "We've got TiVo, and he's got about five episodes on there, so you might want to get comfortable," she said. She turned to the board and tacked a photograph of Roger Vasquez right next to the one of Terrance Davidson. "Let me guess," she said without turning around. "You thought working for James Wilton was going to be more of a thrill ride. It is. But only when he's not working."

  I didn't respond. "TiVo's great," she went on. "They'll be shipping it to all the third world countries we invade pretty soon. Mark my words."

  I didn't laugh. She was ordering me to leave her husband alone. Jimmy had barely mentioned her, and I wasn't sure how I felt about her setting boundaries in our working relationship. She didn't seem to care how I felt. She handed me a slender file.

  "Jimmy asked me to assemble a file on this Martin Cale guy," she said. "He referred to it is a dossier. I call it a file. Anyway, there's not much in it. Cale's a nonentity and he leaves most of the business to his partner, a guy named Irwin Faulkner. Faulkner lives down in Laguna Hills with his wife. They've made the Orange County society pages a few times, and I'm sorry to report that's all that's in the file. Well, that and some press releases about their new subdivisions that mention Cale in passing."

  As I shuffled through the file, she crossed her arms over her chest and smiled at me with one corner of her wide mouth. "He told me was hiring an assistant. But you're a lot more than that, aren't you?"

  "Is that a compliment?"

  "I thought I might be able to help you guys out."

  "How does Jimmy feel about that?" I asked.

  A curtain fell across her face. "I don't think that's any of your business."

  I put two and two together and got marriage counseling. Jimmy was hiding out somewhere in the main house, even though he knew I was on my way back. Meanwhile, his wife had taken over his office, probably so she could meet me at the door and lay down some new ground rules.

  She lifted her chin slightly and narrowed her eyes, as if I had just confirmed a dire suspicion she held about me. "Two years ago a homicide detective came to this house and told my husband he had found the killer of a porn star named Jenna Hartt. I stood back and kept my mouth shut, listening to this detective feed my husband a line about how he wanted him to consult on the case. It turned out that this supposed killer was a big James Wilton fan. Maybe he had taken a few pointers from Jimmy's books."

  She stopped several feet away from me and knocked one fist lightly against the edge of the desk. "It turned out this supposed killer had a wife who gave him a solid alibi. And it soon became clear, to me at least, that this detective didn't want Jimmy as a consultant. He wanted Jimmy to send this man, this supposed killer, a message. Something along the lines of We got you even though we didn't get you.'"

  She studied me to see if she had my full attention. She did. I knew the homicide detective in question was Dwight Zachary and I was tempted to tell her that the two of us were hardly buddies. But I didn't think it would temper what she had to say to me.

  "Barely a week after that book hit the stores, I came home and saw this supposed killer in my bedroom. My husband's right leg was hanging off the bed as if it didn't belong to him and his face looked like Play-Doh. That's not going to happen again. Do you understand me?"

  "Yes," I heard myself whisper.

  "You are the only part of this investigation that comes back to this house. No one gets questioned here. No one gets the phone number here, and if anyone asks you who you're working for, you either tell them you're going solo or your benefactor is a mysterious man named Charlie who you talk to once a week on speakerphone. Is that clear?" I was strangely flattered by her comparison of me to one of Charlie's Angels, and I figured she wouldn't make it once she got to know me a little better. "And if I so much as see Detective Jackass turn the corner onto Mulholland Drive, I'll electrify the fence."

  I knew she was referring to Dwight Zachary. "Don't worry," I said. "I'm not a big fan of Detective Jackass."

  She liked my answer as well as the frightened sound of it. She grasped my shoulder firmly as she moved past me. "I made you a plate. You want me to get it for you?"

  "No thanks," I said.

  She paused in the doorway as if to appraise my value as an ally in her campaign to ensure her husband kept all his limbs. "Let's try to get along, Mr. Murphy. Just to see what happens."

  Once she was gone, I considered breathing again. If Brenda Wilton was going to shoot anyone else, I would be surprised if it wasn't me.

  Twenty minutes later, I was reading through the turgid file on Martin Cale when Jimmy came into the office carrying a ceramic plate covered in Saran Wrap. He put it on his desk and took a seat. "Just eat it," he said. "She didn't put anything in it."

  "There's no silverware."

  "Call Brenda and ask her to bring you some," he said, then guffawed. "Look, I'm sorry she chewed you a new asshole. She has to do it to someone at least once a month. For once, it wasn't me. Thank God!"

  "Please tell me what's going on."

  He clapped his hands together. "What's going on is that it could have been the Dalai Lama in our bedroom working me over with a tire iron and she still would have shot him and she still would have found a way to blame me for it."

  He pressed his palms against the desk and drew a deep breath. "Samuel Marchand murdered his sister because she was having sex on camera, and his wife gave him an alibi because she knew he'd beat the shit out of her if she didn't. And Last Daughter was not supposed to be a message to him. It was a message to the higher-ups at the LASD who didn't think the murder of a porn star was worth investigating because they thought anyone in her line of work had it coming, and because the suspect lived in Appleton, Wisconsin, and out of their jurisdiction.

  "And supposedly I meddled in a real-life case just to compensate for never scoring with the book critics. But the only reason I have any awareness of this is because that woman has made me sit through a year of therapy. You would think that would be enough of an admission, wouldn't you? But now that burnt-out Ocean Park hippie of a Brentwood therapist is trying to convince me that I constantly seek out evidence that the world is a brutal and dangerous place because my mother was distracted and inattentive when I was growing up."

  He leaned into my face. "Is the air clear yet? Or would you like to hear about our sex life
?"

  "I'd like to go home and wash my new asshole," I said.

  "Sit down!"

  I sat down in one of the Eames chairs. Jimmy left the room and returned with silverware and a napkin. I ate my dinner in silence. When I finished, Jimmy was slouched back in his desk chair, his hands folded over his stomach, his face expectant. I took him through the sad story of Brian Ferrin's brief relationship with Roger Vasquez.

  "The Vanished Three all sent Brian Ferrin their picture in that chat room?" Jimmy asked.

  "Yes. I showed Ferrin their pictures and he ID'd all three of them. Roger Vasquez was the only one he responded to."

  "And you think if he'd responded to one of the others, he still would have ended up in Spinotta's bed, drugged and assaulted?"

  "Yes. You told me these three guys were playing some special role in Spinotta's inner circle,"

  I said. "I think this is it. They were fishermen. Why would they do this shit? They had to know they had turned into everyone's worst nightmare of the predatory fag."

  Jimmy didn't answer. "What?" I asked him. "You think they were in it for money? You think Spinotta made them big promises?"

  "Yes," he answered. I expected him to say more, but he didn't.

  "What, Jimmy?"

  "Like I said, I think these guys left behind their old lives to go join a new and better one that Joseph Spinotta provided for them. I think they're probably enjoying it right now."

  I got to my feet and went to the office door. The slanting sunlight laced the swimming pool's surface with the shadows of tree branches. Brenda was brushing birdseed off the stone bench at the clearing's edge while Archer waddled eagerly around her feet. If she was so interested in helping us, why was she sitting out one of our major rap sessions?

  "You think you're one of these guys, Adam. And you're right that, superficially, their lives resemble yours. They moved to LA in their twenties, just like you did, to leave their difficult histories behind. They were struggling to make lives for themselves, just as you still are. Then they fell under Joseph Spinotta's spell for some reason and started doing this vile shit." He let this sink in for a few seconds. "You're not one of them, Adam. You don't have to take responsibility for them, and you don't have to answer for them. You are your own man even when you don't want to be."