Light Before Day

by Christopher Rice

  Frank Murton had been the one to give me the tip about Emilio Vargas, the guy who fought back against the fag bashers, the week before. He was about five-eleven, with a broad-shouldered body, a square head, and knife slashes for eyes. He was as straight as they come, but he had confided in me that his brother was a closeted member of the LAPD who drank so heavily to drown the stresses of his double life that he sometimes woke up in a different city and had no idea how he got there.

  I was standing outside the entrance when the deputies arrived. Brenda was half a block away, standing watch over Nate, who hadn't moved from the spot he had been in when we first showed up. I told the two cops who they could expect to find inside and what I thought had been done to the guy. O'Brien entered the bathhouse. Something in my face must have told Frank Murton to stay behind. "You know the victim?" he asked.

  "Yes, I was supposed to have a meeting with him two hours ago."

  "What kind of meeting?"

  A second sheriff's cruiser pulled off the boulevard. I tried to focus on the deputy in front of me and not the ones that were advancing toward us. A third cruiser pulled up the street from the other direction.

  "What were you doing here tonight?" Murton asked.

  "I don't do bathhouses, Deputy. I was supposed to have a meeting with Scott Koffler at one A.M. We were supposed to talk about a story I was working on—"

  "What kind of story?" he asked, his voice gaining an edge.

  "You're going to want to take me in."

  "I am?"

  "At ten to two, I got a call from my friend Nate Bain over there. He asked me to come here. I went inside and I found the body."

  The radio at Murton's hip crackled. I recognized John O'Brien's voice, confirming that he had just found what I had told him he would find. Two of the deputies returned to their cars and positioned them to block off the street at both ends.

  "You'll want to talk to that guy, too," I said, gesturing to Nate. As I did, I saw Brenda lower her cell phone from her ear. Instead of putting it in her pocket, she held it out to one side as two deputies approached her. I couldn't hear what they were saying.

  "You want to tell me about this story you were doing," Murton said. It wasn't a question.

  I started with Nate's visit to my apartment the previous Friday night and his brief ride with Scott Koffler and a marine helicopter pilot named Daniel Brady. Then I included everything Melissa Brady had told me earlier that day. By the time I was finished, the sheriff's department helicopter was circling overhead, its rotors making a sound like speeding train cars.

  "Any idea what kind of relationship there was between Scott Koffler and Daniel Brady?"

  I wanted to take a deep breath, but I figured that would show Murton that I was hiding something. I met his eyes. "None."

  "Any idea where they went while they were here?"

  "No," I said.

  Nate and Brenda had both been shepherded off to different sheriff's cruisers, where they sat in the backseat as a deputy stood guard outside the door. When Murton's hand came down on my shoulder, I realized he was about to do the same to me.

  They took me to the West Hollywood substation, where I was deposited in a tiny office with an empty desk and blank walls. There was no phone. It was hardly an interrogation room, but Murton locked the door behind him after he left. The laughter of other deputies outside struck me as taunting and irreverent.

  As my head began to clear, I ran through what Scott Koffler had told me on the phone earlier that day. Corey had hired him to bring Daniel Brady to West Hollywood and then left town without paying him. I let this fact circle in my mind for a while. It left a vapor trail that stank to high heaven. After all the work he had gone to, I couldn't see Corey skipping town without sewing up this detail. Daniel Brady had died publicly and spectacularly, and Scott Koffler was part of the reason why. For Corey to leave the guy unpaid and unhappy was a phenomenally stupid move.

  Another detail nagged at me. Corey had turned the Daniel Brady video into a production.

  Jimmy was right; it was far more than a simple blackmail video. It was a production that involved brief choreography and costume elements, one of which concealed Brady's identity to anyone who didn't recognize his naked body. Why had Corey gone to all that trouble if the tape wasn't going to be broadcast to a wider audience? Why, in the e-mail sent to Melissa Brady, had there been no mention of such an audience?

  The e-mail to Melissa itself struck me as half-assed, given all the work that had gone into making the tape. Not just half-assed. Last-minute. Rushed. Maybe Corey had intended to put the tape to a more elaborate use but couldn't. He didn't have time. Because he knew he was in danger. Because he had given Billy what he wanted, and Billy wanted him out of the way.

  The half-assed e-mail to Melissa. Not paying Koffler. They both added up to a theory I had been fighting off since I first set foot in Corey's apartment.

  Corey was dead.

  I saw his keys, wallet, and cell phone waiting for me on his kitchen counter. Not a message from Corey. It was a different kind of message sent by someone else. Had Billy Hatfill staged Corey's disappearance to look like those of the Vanished Three? Was it another attempt to ensure I came to Billy when I discovered Corey was missing? Maybe it was a backup plan in case Billy's warning about Corey's strange visit to his house didn't have the desired effect on me.

  I saw the shallow red line on Scott Koffler's throat. Suddenly I was once again outside of Billy Hatfill's front gate, being pawed by a precocious sex addict with a chunky silver bicycle chain around his neck. When I had rejected young Everett's advances, he had reached for the bicycle chain as if it were a weapon. Maybe Everett had used it tonight, wrapping it around Koffler's throat as he forced the bottle's contents down the guy's throat.

  It was almost four A.M., Saturday morning. In a little over twelve hours, I was supposed to meet with Martin Cale. Billy Hatfill was just hours away from providing me with a horrible revelation about myself, and he was cleaning up the wreckage of a deal gone bad.

  I felt the kind of nausea that usually followed a half bottle of bourbon. The ticks coming from the fluorescent light overhead seemed to be keeping time to a mad rhythm.

  If I mentioned Billy Hatfill's name to anyone from the LA County Sheriff's Department, I could kiss my meeting with Martin Cale goodbye. To say nothing of what Billy Hatfill might do with whatever he had on me.

  At ten minutes after five in the morning, the office door opened and Dwight Zachary entered. He was wearing exactly the same outfit he'd had on when we first met, except the polo shirt was dark blue this time.

  I felt a small sense of relief. Then I saw the threatening look on his face, remembered the remarks I had made to him the other day, and realized he was going to make this as painful as possible. I decided to make the first strike.

  "Where's Brenda?" I asked.

  He stuck his thumb in one corner of his mouth, bit at the nail loud enough to make a sound, and sat on the edge of the desk across from me. I figured he had gotten Brenda far away from the sheriff's station as soon as possible. She was evidence of the fact that Dwight had crossed the line years earlier.

  "Can I go?" I finally asked.

  "I just got here."

  "You caught this one?" I asked. There was disbelief in my voice.

  "In a manner of speaking."

  "I told Murton everything when he got to the scene. You want me to repeat it?"

  "Scene," he repeated with a faint smile. "Murton says you did a ride-along with him a few months ago. Already you're speaking the lingo. What other cool, official-sounding cop words do you know, Mr. Murphy?"

  I kept my mouth shut.

  "We had Oceanside PD check on that address you gave us for Elena Castillo. You told Murton the helicopter pilot's wife was staying there?" I nodded. "Looks like no one's home. The car's not there."

  "She said she might go stay with her uncle in San Diego," I said. "And she said she might take Melissa with her."


  "Might?"

  "Melissa was covering up for a pedophile, even if he was her husband. Elena didn't like that." I was relieved that they had not caught up with Melissa Brady or Elena Castillo. If they didn't have Corey's name, they were that much further away from Billy Hatfill.

  The cell phone on Dwight's belt rang. He answered, his face tightening when he heard the person on the other end. He grunted something. The person on the other end spoke again. I recognized Jimmy's voice.

  "Not a chance," Dwight said.

  Jimmy said something that made Dwight rise slowly to his feet, as if he had been told that an angry ex-wife was about to come charging into the office. He turned his back to me and inclined his head. I could see the back of his neck flex with tension. It was obvious that Jimmy had threatened him. But the threat was taking a while. Probably something about what happens to a homicide detective who recruits a private citizen to write a novel about an open case.

  Dwight turned, his eyes on the desk between us, and handed me his cell phone.

  "Don't tell him shit," Jimmy said. The fear in his voice surprised me.

  "Okay."

  "Nate's here. So's your Jeep," he said. "Brenda's waiting outside the station."

  "Okay."

  As Jimmy spoke, Dwight threw open the door to the office, then took up a position against it, his arms crossed over his chest.

  Jimmy said, "If he doesn't let you out of there, you ask him about the unmarked car he had parked outside of my house three days before Samuel Marchand broke into my house with a tire iron. The car he pulled when his superiors got wind he'd assigned it there. You ask him about the phone call he got from Marchands wife. The one where she told him that her husband had read my novel, beat the shit out of her, and bought an Amtrak ticket for LA."

  "All right," I said, trying to absorb the flood of incrimination.

  "That son of a bitch set a trap for Marchand and I was the bait—and he knows it. If Brenda hadn't come early that night, I would be dead." Jimmy wanted me out of Dwight Zachary's custody. He was more afraid of what Billy Hatfill might have on me than I was. That was saying something.

  I told him goodbye and hung up. Without another word, I brushed past Dwight and out the open door. I was several steps away when I heard Dwight say my name. I turned. "My phone, please," he said meekly.

  I was still holding his cell phone. I gave it back to him, expecting him to get some last dig in.

  Instead he stared down at the floor, his lips pursed, his eyes vacant, his soul sold.

  The Cadillac was idling next to the curb, just outside the substation parking lot. Early-morning light misted the massive glass walls of the Pacific Design Center. Brenda appeared as caffeinated and alert as the other early-morning drivers. This wasn't the first time I had been chased home by the sunrise.

  As we pulled down the Wiltons' long gravel path, I noticed that my Jeep was nowhere to be seen. Jimmy was waiting for us in the living room. He hadn't changed clothes since the night before, and his hair was rumpled and sweat-matted. Brenda left us alone.

  "The bathhouse didn't have any kind of security system," he said, "and all the eyewitnesses fled when Nate started screaming. There was a back door. It was open, of course. The attendant says it was all regulars who came in. Except for Koffler, who arrived a few minutes after Nate did."

  "It was a trap," I said. "Koffler got me to wait for him at Hummer Park, then went after Nate."

  Jimmy didn't refute this.

  "Corey's dead," I finally said, surprised by the lack of emotion in my voice. "There's no way he would have left town without paying Koffler. And the e-mail to Melissa was last-minute, half-assed. That tape took too much work to fire off in a single e-mail. He and Billy must have agreed to do something else with it. But Billy decided he didn't want to."

  "You think Billy killed Corey?" he asked.

  "Yes."

  "And Scott Koffler? You think Billy killed him, too?"

  "Yes."

  "Too bad we've got no evidence that Koffler and Billy knew the other was involved."

  "We've got no evidence that they didn't."

  "True," he said quietly. "And I agree with you. I think Corey leaving town without paying Koffler is stupid. Beal stupid." He centered me in his weary gaze. "That's why Corey killed him."

  "Bullshit."

  "Is it?" he asked. "You just skip over the most relevant questions, don't you? Who stood to profit from Koffler's murder? The guy who had hired him. We know that wasn't Billy Hatfill."

  "Koffler's body was posed, Jimmy. He had a towel around his waist and his hands were folded across his chest. Earlier this year, my friend Paul Martinez died of a drug overdose in a bathhouse. They found him flat on his back, with a towel around his waist and his hands folded across his chest.

  "Last Saturday, when Billy first came to me, he asked me if I still thought about Paul. Billy knew the guy as well, you see? Billy was at the funeral. Paul's friends were all making inappropriate speeches about what a fabulous drug addict he was, in front of the guy's entire family. None of whom knew he was gay or a drug addict. I walked out. Billy told me that I made a lot of people angry when I did that. I got the sense that Billy was one of them."

  Jimmy looked at me hard. I could practically hear the gears working in his brain, and then I saw his thoughts clouded by worry or sympathy. "Get some sleep," he said. "There's a bedroom off the living room."

  "Where's my Jeep? You said it was here."

  Jimmy leaned on his cane so his spine was straight where he sat. "When you wake up, you're going to call Billy Hatfill and ask him to meet you on neutral territory. Brenda and I will follow you. He wants you to find out what he has on you as much as you want to know. You're going to play that. You're going to tell him what you've figured out and see where that gets you."

  I glared at him. His gaze didn't waver.

  "In the meantime, your Jeep will remain at an undisclosed location and the two security guards will prevent you from leaving this property." He gave me a few seconds to absorb this.

  "Until when?" I asked.

  "Until I say so!" he snapped. He got to his feet and smoothed the flaps of his shirt as if we had just concluded a routine business meeting. "You are not setting foot on Martin Cale's yacht.

  I don't care if it ends up in my swimming pool. You're not setting foot on it."

  He limped off into the kitchen. I was too exhausted to rebel against the fact that I had been turned into a prisoner. When I looked up, I saw Brenda's shadow retreat from the top of the stairs. I heard the door to the master bedroom close a few seconds later.

  The guest bedroom had a queen-size bed with a square black leather headboard. The heavy velvet curtains had been drawn, but a thin sliver of gray light fell across Nate's sleeping form. I stripped down to my underwear and crawled into bed beside him.

  Brenda Wilton had told me that I needed to find faith. I tried to replay her words, in her gentle voice, over and over again, hoping that slumber would follow. It almost did. But then I was roused out of my near sleep by the wet sounds of Nate crying into his pillow. I put an arm around him and pulled his body against mine. He fell asleep again.

  I felt my feet hit the floor. I walked into the living room. I opened the door to the liquor cabinet. Less than an hour before, it had been fully stocked. Now it was completely empty. I remembered how Jimmy had gone into the kitchen and waited for me to leave. In the kitchen, I looked in the wastebasket and saw that Jimmy had poured out every bottle so quietly that he hadn't made a sound I could hear from just down the hall.

  A week earlier, I would have pulled out one of the bottles and tried to shake the last drops down my throat. I might even have hurled the empty bottle through the kitchen window in a blind rage. But now I returned to the bedroom, my limbs as light as if I had downed a stiff drink in one swallow. Being cared for was starting to feel less new and less frightening.

  I feel asleep within minutes.

  My cell phone awakened me. It
was ringing inside my crumpled jeans, several feet away from the bed. It was a little past noon and Nate was curled into the fetal position with a sheet-covered fist in front of his mouth and a lax expression that told me his dreams were providing him with a nice escape. My keys rested on the nightstand, but my Jeep key had been removed from the ring.

  "Did you hear about Scott Koffler?" Billy Hatfill asked me.

  I groped for the right response and missed.

  "He was murdered," he said mildly, as if being murdered was a minor indignity, like shitting your pants. In the background, I could hear the chirping anchors of some noon news broadcast. I figured Billy was calling me to gloat. "Are you there?" he asked.

  "I'm here. Let's meet. How about an hour from now? Lunch, maybe?"

  "No."

  The curtness of his response set my pulse racing. He hadn't taken the bait because he knew it was bait. It was a small confirmation of Jimmy's theory.

  "Everett will be at your place around nine," he said. "Wear that leather jacket of yours. It's colder out on the water."

  "I don't think I'm going to be able to make it."

  He fell silent. He didn't lower the volume on the television.

  "Cale won't be willing to reschedule."

  "That's a shame," I said.

  I listened for the sound of the receiver cracking in his grip. I heard him lower the volume on the television. Nate rolled over in bed and blinked at me. I turned my back to him.

  "Who are you and what have you done with Adam Murphy?" Billy asked. He was struggling to control his voice. I remembered Jimmy's instructions from earlier that morning: Give Billy something. Let him know what I was onto and see how he reacted.

  "Ever heard of the Vanished Three?" I asked him.

  No response.

  "Terrance Davidson. Roger Vasquez. Ben Clamp. I heard they spent some time up at your place. Back when it was Joseph's place."