I took a seat on the other end of the bench. Melissa didn't seem to notice me. She was too busy watching two toddler-age children scale the jungle gym in front of us. "I don't know why everyone calls it the terrible twos," she said suddenly to no one in particular. "Everything's so new to them at that age. There's nothing terrible about it."
"You have kids?" I asked.
Startled, she looked in my direction. Her hazel eyes were round and hazy. She studied me for several seconds, lines appearing at the corners of her mouth. I figured she could see my resemblance to her husband and I felt guilty for inflicting it on her.
"No," she said as if I had insulted her. Her eyes wandered past me, and her brow wrinkled.
"My husband's dead," she said distantly, as if this new thought had just arrived on the wind.
"I'm sorry to hear that," I said. "But you could still have kids. Someday, right?"
"No," she said, shaking her head slowly. "I can't."
"Everything all right with your friend?" I asked.
It took some energy for her to draw her eyes back to mine.
"Sorry. I just noticed that little exchange," I said. "I kinda hung back 'cause I didn't want to intrude."
"This is a public beach," she said flatly.
I gave her a gentle smile. It made her eyes glaze and her lips purse. "You look like my husband," she said.
"Is that a good thing?"
"No."
She returned her attention to the playground. It was empty. The two kids who had been on the jungle gym were being herded down the bike path by their mother. Melissa watched their departure as if a shadow had fallen over us.
"I'm a homeless person," she said.
"Excuse me?"
"I said I talk to strangers now," she said. "Like a homeless person. You know?"
I thought she was more like a woman on several milligrams of Xanax, but I kept this insight to myself. Given how blunt she had been with me, I could have tried to hit her with the hard questions first. Instead, I decided to stick to my original plan.
I pulled out my wallet and removed the only photograph I had of Corey Howard. I had snapped the picture as he was lying on my love seat watching television. He was wearing jeans and a V-neck T-shirt and his typical stony expression made it appear as if he were watching news footage from 9/11.
Instead of telling the woman next to me that I knew her name, instead of doing anything that might make her think I was a reporter who had come to ask about her husband, I slid down the bench and showed her the picture.
"I'm looking for a friend of mine," I said. Her eyes fell to the picture in my hand and froze there. Her face remained blank. "I know he used to live down here, so I've just been asking around."
A slow transformation overtook her tiny face. The shock of recognition sparked there, but it was slowed and blurred by whatever medication was in her system. She closed her eyes, trying to fight off the few painful memories making it through the Xanax haze.
"That's Corey McCormick," she finally said.
"McCormick," I repeated for her. She didn't respond. "You said his last name was McCormick?"
She winced, screwing her eyes shut tighter, her breaths growing more rapid. "He's dead," she whispered.
"What?"
"He died of AIDS," she said quickly and flatly.
"Who told you that?" I asked, even though I thought I knew the answer already.
"Corey McCormick went to West Hollywood and died of AIDS," she said slowly her head nodding slightly with each word. It sounded like she was mimicking the inflections of the person who had told her this lie.
"Who told you that?" I asked, trying to keep my voice steady.
Her eyes popped open. She saw that I was still leaning toward her and holding the picture up in front of her. "Please put that away," she told me in a hoarse tone.
As soon as I did what she asked, she gripped the back of the bench and pushed herself to her feet. I almost said her name before I remembered she hadn't given it to me.
"I'm sorry your friend is dead," she rasped. Then she hurried past me toward the beach.
I took the cue and jumped to my feet. I found myself standing eye to eye witb Elena Castillo.
Her chest was heaving, but she had barely broken a sweat on her run. Beyond her, Melissa was heading toward the ocean as if she had no plans for stopping. Her steps quickened and then slowed, then quickened again.
"Keep moving," Elena said. "She's not on the market right now."
"I need to talk to her," I said.
"Did you hear what I said?"
"You first!" I snapped.
She took a step back and raised an arm between us, pointing a trigger finger at my chest.
"You better fucking cool it. Right now." Her voice came from her chest and her trigger finger looked stronger than my right arm.
"I'm gay, genius!"
I had hoped this information would get her to drop her guard. It didn't. It seemed to raise her suspicions even higher. Her jaw tensed. She lowered her hand to one side and it looked like she was getting ready to do something else with it. If she didn't know about the trip Daniel Brady had made to West Hollywood the week before, then she had some suspicions about die urges that had led him to make it.
"Get the fuck out of here."
"What's the matter with you?" I asked. "Is it a religious thing? Or maybe you're not that surprised that a gay guy wants to talk to Melissa right now?"
"Are you a reporter?" she demanded.
"No," I said, even though it felt like a lie.
"Is your daddy a reporter?"
"My father's a patent attorney," I said.
She hit me with an uppercut that slammed my bottom teeth into my top teeth. My world became the sky, and it was streaked with something that looked like microscope slides of skin cells. I felt my impact with the pavement several seconds after I knew it had taken place.
Then I felt Elena Castillo tugging at my pants pocket. She dropped my cell phone on my chest. "Call your daddy and tell him you just got hit by a girl."
Both women were gone by the time I got to my feet. I fell into a seat on the bench, my vision blurry, listening to the sound of my own rasping breaths above the dull roar of the nearby surf. I felt eyes on my back and looked up.
A shirtless guy in a backward baseball cap stared down at me from the sidewalk overhead.
His eyes were hidden behind expensive Oakley sunglasses, and a battered skateboard rested under his right foot. His skin was the color of sandalwood and his well-defined chest had a sheen of sweat on it that looked camera-ready
"You all right?" he called down to me.
I tried to smile. It felt like a grimace. "You see which way she went?" I asked.
"Naw. Sorry, dude," the guy said. He kicked the pavement with his left foot and went rolling off down the sidewalk. I watched his departure with an open mouth and a stirring in my chest.
Maybe they were just the aftereffects of Elena's uppercut, or maybe I was no different from every other gay man on the planet.
I called Jimmy from a chain restaurant next to Interstate 5. Bright sunlight flared off the roofs of cars speeding down the interstate. I had decided to hang back for a few hours to give Elena Castillo the impression that I had left Oceanside. Brenda answered and asked me why I was talking funny. I didn't tell her I had been hit by a girl, because I figured she would want to send the girl flowers. I did tell her what Melissa Brady's neighbor had shared with me.
"Corey went by another last name down here—McCormick," I told her.
"I know Jimmy had Dwight run Corey's name," she said. "Nothing came up. Maybe Mr.
McCormick has a more interesting history than Mr. Howard."
"Jimmy didn't tell me he ran Corey's name."
"Yeah. Well. He didn't tell me you were going to Oceanside today either," she said. "Jimmy always gets this way in the middle of a project."
"How's that?"
"Distant," she said. "Jittery."
The waitress delivering my iced tea looked dubiously at the sunglasses I was wearing. I must have looked like an LA poseur calling his friends for directions back home. I went to take a sip of my iced tea and my jaw seized up.
"I thought we were going to try to get along," she said.
"I'd like that," I said.
"I didn't say we should like it. I just said we should try to get along."
Neither one of us said anything for several seconds.
"Feel like hearing the strange tale of Billy Hatfill and his English teacher?" she asked me.
Jimmy had asked for something concrete on Billy Hatfill and I had tossed this out just to appease him—and not only had he given the assignment to his wife, but she had apparently turned something up. "Sure," I said.
"I called the Rappaport School and spoke to their alumni director. When I said Billy's name, the woman sounded like she had passed a stone. I told her I worked for a charity organization and Billy had asked to do some work with us. Given all the controversy around Billy a few years ago, I thought I would check his references."
"Did it work?"
"What do you think? She gave me the name of an old drama teacher who hated Billy's guts."
"I'm listening," I said.
"Since it was pretty clear that nobody at Billy's alma mater liked him very much, I called the teacher and told her I wasn't interested in having Billy involved in my organization, but I gave her the impression that I wanted to feel justified in my decision. That got her talking. It turns out Billy did a lot of theater back in high school, and because his parents were big donors, this woman always had to give him a lead, even though he couldn't act for shit.
"Turns out she also suspected that Billy was trying to put the moves on a colleague of hers. A guy named Dan Braden. He taught English and directed some plays as well. The more she kept an eye on the two of them, the more it looked like they were up to something. Finally she said something to Dan Braden. She made it sound like a warning just to give her colleague the benefit of the doubt."
"And what happened?"
"Dan Braden turned the color of a milk carton and got defensive. Too defensive."
"Something was going on."
"That's what she thinks," Brenda said. "Then a couple of weeks later, Dan Braden was coming out of a gay bar at two in the morning when an unknown assailant beat the living shit out of him. He was in a coma for three weeks, and when he came to, he couldn't move the right side of his body."
Suddenly my aching jaw didn't seem like such a mortal injury. But Brenda wasn't finished.
"To make matters even more interesting, Dan Braden claimed he couldn't remember a thing and seemed to have no interest in helping the NYPD find his attacker. As soon as he was released from the hospital, he left New York City without speaking to any of his old colleagues and has not set foot inside the Rappaport School to this day."
"So the drama teacher you talked to thinks Billy was behind the attack?" I asked.
"Yes," Brenda answered. "She assumed that Dan Braden broke off the affair after she mentioned it to him, and Billy went ballistic. But Dan Braden wouldn't return her calls, she had no proof, and Billy's parents paid for a new gym."
"Where's Dan Braden now?"
"I'm trying to locate him as we speak," she said. "The teacher had no clue. No one at the school's had contact with him. I've been searching through the archives of every New York newspaper, and I can't find anything about the attack. Looks like everybody thought it was just another gay bashing."
"Because that's what Dan Braden wanted them to think."
She grunted in agreement. I recalled Billy's casual mention of an affair with his English teacher, after I told him I knew some of his former classmates. He'd sounded proud of the affair, said he had no hard feelings about the relationship.
Jimmy was convinced that Billy was using me to free himself from the yoke of Joseph Spinotta. At dinner the night before, Billy had expressed a depth of disdain for his former sugar daddy that seemed to confirm that theory. By telling me that Joseph had been a practicing pedophile, Billy had turned his former sugar daddy from a white-collar criminal to a sexual predator. Had his casual mention of this older affair been an attempt to send me a message—that the older men in Billy's life walk away on Billy's terms?
I tried to picture a teenage Billy Hatfill beating the living shit out of a fully grown man. Even today, Billy didn't seem to have the chops for that kind of job. Like all spoiled brats, he had probably found someone else to do his dirty work.
Billy was determined that I meet with Martin Cale and I had agreed to go. Maybe my pursuit of Corey was just the bait, and Billy really intended for Martin Cale to tell me something about Billy's old sugar daddy that would whet my appetite as a so-called reporter to go after him. If that was the case, then I had already started to do Billy's dirty work for him.
My head was spinning. I was being manipulated by two different men: Corey, who had never told me he was a marine and left behind an empty apartment designed to look like a crime scene, and Billy Hatfill, who shared salacious tidbits of his past as if they were little more than self-deprecating revelations designed to elicit my sympathy.
Brenda had said my name a few times and I had answered with grunts. I told myself to focus and then said to Brenda that I had found a connection between Corey Howard and Daniel Brady.
She congratulated me. I was surprised.
I spent the next few hours circling Elena Castillo's neighborhood. She didn't emerge from her building. Despite the fact that she had tried to realign my facial features, Elena was my new target. She seemed to have firsthand knowledge of what had led Melissa to take comfort in a prescription bottle. She was also playing a role I was unfortunately familiar with: caretaker of a woman who held most of her conversations with the voices in her head.
My going theory was the obvious one. Corey and Daniel Brady had been lovers. Melissa had discovered their affair. Brady had used the threat of a discharge to drive Corey from the Marine Corps in a desperate attempt to please his wife and save his marriage. Flash-forward to an incriminating e-mail, an airborne computer, and a suicide flight that killed four other men as well as Brady. I needed more confirmation of this conjecture before I tried to connect it up with Corey's movements back in West Hollywood.
By three-thirty, there hadn't been a peep from Elena Castillo's apartment building and I was impatient. I parked two blocks from the building and fished a UCLA baseball cap out of my backseat. Clotted clouds moved in off the ocean, their underbellies steel gray with a load of rain they probably wouldn't deliver, but I donned my sunglasses anyway. The neighborhood was desolate. Most of its residents were probably still on base or otherwise at work. It was quiet enough to hear the surf a few blocks away.
I thought it was possible that Elena might have put Melissa to bed after our altercation on the beach. If so, I could knock on the door, tell Elena I had no hard feelings about her attitude or her right fist, and try to convince her that I had information that might salvage her friend's sanity.
I was half a block from the apartment building when I saw a flash of movement behind the gauze curtains in Elena's apartment. I forced myself to keep walking. Several yards ahead of me, a guy descended the front steps of the building directly across the street from Elena's. He clasped his cell phone shut and shoved it in his pocket. There was a skateboard under his right arm. He was wearing a blue polo shirt with the collar turned up, but I caught a glimpse of his Poco shell necklace.
Suddenly he was coming toward me with a determined gait and a toothy smile on his face.
Just then I heard a car engine rev behind me. I glanced over my shoulder and saw a white Econoline van speeding toward us. I put two and two together too late to get a sum.
The skateboards first blow sent me to my knees. I glimpsed a scraped wheel spinning madly in front of my nose as the skateboard was whipped back, then
forward again. I kissed a piece of sidewalk lashed with my own blood, heard my agonized groan inside my temples.
My wrists were yanked behind my back. I heard the van screech to a halt and its side door fly open. I heard the driver pop out, sneakers squeaking against asphalt. He whispered fiercely to his comrade. I felt something thin and plastic encircle my linked wrists.
Then I heard a sharp hissing sound followed by a young man's pained cry. There was a scuffle of footsteps behind me. A van door slammed. My captor was yanked from behind my back and I saw only his sneakered feet fly upward as he was thrown to the pavement several feet away, with an impact hard enough to make me wince.
I heard a screech of rubber and managed to roll over onto my back. Blood plugged my nostrils and greased my lips. I blinked away more blood and saw Elena Castillo holding my skateboard-wielding friend facedown on the pavement by the back of his neck. The plastic cuffs he had tried to tie around my wrists now snared his.
The white van swerved down the street and jumped the curb; then its tires slammed down onto the cross street one block away before it swerved out of sight. There was a can of Mace in Elena's left fist. I realized she must have used it on the driver.
Elena gave me a blazing look over one shoulder. Her ponytail was coming loose. "This guy's a kid!" she hissed. It took me a second to realize she was talking. "You want me to call the police?"
I shook my head and she glowered at me, confused. I tried to summon words and failed.
Elena straightened. "Don't move, jackass. I mean it." She lifted the kid by his wrists and slammed him back to the pavement just to emphasize her point.
She knelt down over me, shaking her head and giving me a piteous look. "Who the fuck are you?" she said under her breath, with more concern in her voice than anger.
I coughed, trying to clear my throat of mucus and maybe blood. "That kid's boss is the reason Melissa threw her computer out the window last week," I croaked. "What do you say we take him inside? Ask him a few questions."
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