Light Before Day (11 page)

"One more thing," he said softly. "What hooked you into this? Are you sleeping with this Nate kid?" I shook my head. "Do you and Koffler have some land of history together aside from what you've told me?"

"No," I said tightly.

"What then?"

I could tell he wasn't going to give up.

"I had a relationship that ended badly," I finally said. "I'm tired of thinking about it. I wanted a distraction."

"Your mother wasn't enough?"

"No," I answered flatly.

"What happened with this guy? The one you were in a relationship with?"

I stared down at the table. "He wanted me to stop drinking."

"So it is a family disease after all," he said.

I expected to see some judgment or revulsion in his expression, but I didn't. Still, his frank and open stare did little to convince me that I wasn't about to lose the job that had just fallen into my lap. "Maybe he wanted you to quit some other stuff, too?" he asked.

"I've changed my ways since then," I said. "I just wasn't willing to change for him."

"Makes sense," he said. "What happened?"

"I've been humbled."

"What happened with
him,
little man?"

"I want this job, Mr. Wilton. You're right. I haven't been very good at showing my gratitude." I tried to keep my voice steady, but my words came out sounding like a plea.

"And now you're showing your gratitude by stonewalling me?" he asked with a devilish smirk.

I took a deep breath. The waitress delivered our entrees. I waited for her to leave.

"I had a dealer," I said. "This big fat guy who always used to grab my ass and pretend like I would have to put out to get what I wanted out of him. I used to pretend that was the reason I hated visiting his apartment. It was easier than admitting I had a problem. Corey and I spent three weeks together. Every night, every minute of every day—"

"Christ," Jimmy mumbled. "I hope the sex was good. I don't want to talk about it, but I hope it was good."

"Anyway, after three weeks, I felt like I needed some space." The dishonesty of this statement struck me the minute I voiced it. That afternoon I had wanted a lot more than space. I had wanted a total release from the nagging voices convincing me that I was not worthy of a man as strong, confident, and beautiful as Corey Howard. That, or I didn't want to admit that I was having trouble living with a guy who tucked in my shirts for me, cleared my coffee cups before they were empty, and responded to my every honest emotion with a grave and distant expression that suggested he would spend the rest of our lives trying to talk me out of feeling differently than he did.

"As soon as Corey left my place to go to work that day, I went to my dealer's apartment. He didn't have anything for me, but he told me to come back in a few hours. When I left, I thought I saw Corey's truck outside, but I told myself I was just being paranoid." I had Wilton's full attention and I wasn't sure I wanted it. "When I came back, my dealer didn't answer his buzzer. I waited for someone to go through the entry door, and I went in behind them. The door to the apartment was unlocked and Sa— my dealer was lying facedown on the floor. He was covered in blood. At first I thought he had been stabbed. He hadn't been. Someone had beaten the shit out of him and spread his stash all over the apartment. Practically every drug you could think of. It was everywhere."

"So you couldn't call the police," Jimmy said.

I shook my head. Wilton hadn't touched his food and neither had I.

"What did you do?" he asked.

"I called an ambulance and left."

"Did you clean up the drugs?"

"No."

He raised his eyebrows, but his stare was steady and unblinking. "I take it you didn't mind the thought of your dealer spending some time out of town. Maybe you thought it would help you on the road to recovery."

"I knew Corey had done it. I also knew that he couldn't afford a brand-new pickup truck and a three-bedroom apartment in West Hollywood on a car wash attendant's salary. He was getting checks from somewhere and didn't tell me where. At the end of three weeks, I barely knew anything about him, but he knew almost everything about me."

"Is that what you said to him?"

"Yes," I answered. "Then I told him I knew what he had done, and if he didn't stay out of my life, I was going to call the police."

Jimmy was visibly surprised by the story's ending. Maybe he thought that I had been

dumped. I picked up my fork and knife and cut off a piece of veal I didn't have the stomach for.

"Did he?" he finally asked. "Stay out of your life, I mean."

I remembered the visit Corey had paid to Billy Hatfill, the warning he had given Billy about me and my dangerous addictions, a blatant attempt to deprive me of one of my more glamorous sources of free liquor. "Sort of," I answered.

He gave me some time to recover, and the two of us started eating our lunch. He took big bites that required him to work his jaw. I ate pieces so small a strong wind could have blown them off my fork.

"Where do you think Corey's checks were coming from?"

"I don't know."

"Guess."

"I know he was a Scorpio because he always wore this gold chain around his neck that had a scorpion on the medallion." I remembered how the medallion would brush up against my bare chest. "I know he didn't come from a rich family. I know he could barely remember his father, and he didn't want to talk about his mother. At one point, he mentioned tule grass—"

"Tule grass?" Jimmy asked.

"You can find it all over the Central Valley," I said. "From Bakersfield to Redding. It looks like wheat in the summer, and the Yokut Indians used it to make huts. He told me that someplace where he used to play when he was a kid was covered in the stuff. When I asked him where this place was, he changed the subject.

"There's no way a guy like Corey wasn't making money off his looks. Not in this city. I checked every listing of male escorts I could find, but I didn't see him. The guys who black out their faces in their ads are usually shirtless or naked, and none of them had Corey's body. That leaves a sugar daddy. I don't know—maybe this guy's closeted."

"Like the guys Scott Koffler pimps for," Jimmy said.

My eyes shot to his and he gave me a small, satisfied smile. Even though we had drifted far from the topic, he had just exposed one of my major motives for going after the Daniel Brady story, and with almost no help from me. James Wilton was not a mind reader, but he certainly subscribed to the belief that human beings were more basic and petty than most of them would like to admit. I wasn't sure which bothered me more: James Wilton's insight or the fact that I was just another human being.

"I'm still not sure why you hired me, Mr. Wilton," I said.

"Neither am I," he said. "But I think you'll answer that question for me in due time." We ate in silence for a few minutes, and when he spoke again, it sounded like he was continuing a conversation he had carried on in his own head.

"You're right," he said. "I want another
Blood and Flowers
and I want you to help me find it and research it. Preferably some case that hasn't been splashed all over CNN. It doesn't matter if it's closed or not. I want something everybody else overlooked."

I nodded, even though I wasn't sure why he needed me to help him in this endeavor.

"The downside of being a best-selling author is that I can't be the fly on the wall the way I was when I wrote
Blood and Flowers.
I was a success then, but as I've learned, there's no fame like the fame that comes after someone tries to bash your head in with a tire iron."

I thought his fame had more to do with the fact that his wife shot the guy. I realized we had been together a good two hours and he hadn't mentioned his wife once.

'What?" he asked.

"What does your wife do?"

"She's a nurse. Why?"

"Is she ever around?" I asked.

"We're still together, if that's what you're asking."

"Okay."

An uneasy few seconds passed between us. "Why do you ask?"

"No reason."

"Horseshit!" I saw realization in his eyes. "Oh, for Christ's sake," he said, dropping his fork.

"You really think I hired you because I wanted to sleep with you?"

"It's a valid concern."

"For you? Why? Because you're so young and impressionable? Please. Strip off all that lycra and leather and you've probably got the shine of an old shoe." He shook his head at his plate.

"Never fear, Lolita. I didn't even try that stuff in college. I can't even see how you—"

"How I what?"

"How you guys
. . .do
that," he said.

"It starts with a wheelbarrow full of Aveda products and a Fleet Enema," I said. "After that, it's mostly deep breathing."

James Wilton glared at me. The waitress came and asked him how our food was. He didn't acknowledge her, so she left. "You're fired," he whispered.

C H A P T E R 5

Nate Bain called me as soon as I pulled out of James Wilton's front gate. It was two o'clock, and I had strict instructions to be there at nine the next morning, after having discovered and researched several potential candidates for his next true crime masterpiece. Even though Jimmy had warned me off the Daniel Brady story, I agreed to meet Nate at the corner of Santa Monica and San Vicente Boulevard, the same place where Scott Koffler had picked him up.

He was standing on the corner when I got there, watching the sheriff's department helicopter descend out of the clear blue sky as it came in for a landing on the roof of the brown brick substation across the street. Nate was getting his fair share of looks from passersby, but he was too busy watching the helicopters landing, like an ineffectual dictator about to be forcibly removed from his island country.

He wore a light blue polo shirt that had bleach spots on it and a pair of navy running pants with a white side stripe. He had cleaned up well. His face had a moisturized shine to it that almost distracted me from his etched cheekbones. But his eyes were glassy and his face frozen in the first threat of a scowl, and he held himself as if he had just been sucker-punched.

Nate saw me coming, slid his backpack off one shoulder, and unzipped it. I expected him to produce some piece of evidence about his meeting with Daniel Brady and I had already mentally prepared a brief statement about why I couldn't work the story anymore. I was startled when he plucked a blue hardcover book out of his backpack, the words
Alcoholics Anonymous
on the spine. He pulled an envelope from the book's pages and handed it to me.

I tore the envelope open and removed the greeting card inside. There as a Maxfield Parrish print on the front, and inside Nate had written the words "Thank you" in a chicken scratch that reminded me of the time I wrote my rent check on the morning after a long weekend.

"You didn't have to do this," I said.

"My sponsor says people stay sober by doing estimable acts," he said.

"AA?" I asked.

He nodded and looked at the traffic surging through the intersection.

"That's great, Nate. Who's your sponsor?"

"I can't tell you. It's an anonymous program."

I tucked the card in my pants pocket.

"I've already been to two meetings today," he said quickly. "It's all right, I guess. The speaker at the second meeting, she talked about how she got drunk and shot her husband and how today they're, like, best friends. You've probably heard of her. She was in that—"

"It's an anonymous program, Nate."

"Right," he whispered. "Sorry. My brain . . ."

I smiled. Two Hispanic boys with swollen chests and enormous sunglasses walked by. One of them whistled at Nate, and then once they were several feet past us, the other turned around and cried, "Love your work!"

Nate stared after them with what I assumed was anger. "My sponsor has me on this whole celibacy thing right now," he said in a low voice, and I realized his anger was actually desire.

The fact that anger felt like desire to Nate might have played a role in his little meth problem.

"Try not to bite off more than you can chew," I said. "So I guess the pom's out?"

"No," Nate answered. "He said porn is a job. Just as long as I don't try to convince myself I'm in love with any of my costars."

The logic of this was beyond me. "Thanks for the card."

"I didn't want you to see me like that, Adam."

"You don't want anyone to see you like that. That's why you're getting sober, right?"

He reacted to my parental tone with a wounded look, then said yes unconvincingly.

"Look, I don't mean to sound like an asshole, but I'm kind of speaking from experience here," I said. Forty-eight hours of experience, I thought, but what the hell. "Be proud of yourself.

My mother couldn't do it and she died."

His eyes widened slightly and a line appeared across the bridge of his nose. "Maybe you could come to a meeting with me sometime."

"Maybe," I muttered, even though I knew I wouldn't.

"The guys are hot, Adam. Trust me. They're, like, hot and conscious."

I chuckled, but when I saw that Nate's smile looked almost genuine, I got the sense that he didn't care whether the men in AA were good looking or not. He wanted me to stay sober, which meant he cared for me, in a way that probably felt as new to him as it did to me.

"I'll think about it," I said. "Listen, Nate. I dropped the story. I don't want to go into too much detail, but let's just say I wasn't the man for the job."

His eyes fell to the pavement. "It doesn't matter, Adam," he said. "My sponsor said the same thing you did."

"What did I say?" I asked.

"I don't get thrown out of speeding cars when I'm not tweaking."

He was more willing to let the story go than I was. I wondered if he would revisit it with fresh anger once the reality of sober living began to set in. Nate stepped forward and gave me a quick peck on the cheek.

"Why don't you call me?" I asked him. "Every day. Just to check in." I was thinking of the threat Scott Koffler had made against him, but I thought if I told him about it, I might be endangering his newfound sobriety. He smiled and said sure.