Light Before Day (2 page)

"You're too pretty to be a reporter," he said. "And too young," he told me when we finished the interview.

I thought I looked like a British orphan with a better haircut, but I accepted Emilio's compliment with a smile. We stood and I extended my hand. Instead of accepting it, Emilio reached for my face and brushed the chapped skin beneath my nostrils with one fingertip. I felt the rest of my face flush with embarrassment.

"You stay away from that stuff," he said. "It's no good. All the time I got boys coming to my bar. Sad boys doing sad things."

I mumbled something about how his was an inspiring story and I looked forward to telling it.

He gave me a brusque nod and a shake of the head and walked off.

I didn't tell him that I hadn't done a line of cocaine in over a week. In my current state, that was a triumph. I didn't tell him that I spent most of my days wondering just who it was I should be grieving: a drunken mother who had stumbled in front of a speeding taxicab or a boyfriend who had forcibly attempted to change my life over the course of three weeks and left me stunned and scarred.

Maybe Emilio was right. I was a sad boy who did sad things. I wondered if I was more addicted to being sad than I was to bourbon or cocaine.

* * *

Glitz
magazine kept an office in a 1980s glass and steel building on Hollywood Boulevard, just steps from Mann's Chinese Theatre. What was referred to on the magazine's masthead as Glitz Worldwide Headquarters consisted of a central area crammed with two desks, along with separate offices for the editor and advertising sales director. The walls were framed with blowups of past covers. Every other day a deliveryman asked me if we were running an underwear catalog.

It was four-thirty when I got to the office the Wednesday of my interview with Emilio Vargas, but Jason, the new receptionist, was still out to lunch. He had made it clear he thought I had an attitude problem. Considering that he had been given a brand-new PowerBook G5 with stereo-surround speakers to assist him in the task of answering the phones, I thought he had a blowing-the-boss-in-the-bathroom problem.

I found Tommy Banks in his office, staring down at a mess of papers with both hands

pressed lightly to the sides of his face as if he were assessing himself for a face-lift. The floor around his desk was piled with advance reader's editions of gay-themed novels that had been released months earlier and stacks of promo CDs from disc jockeys who had remixed Top 40 hits with the sounds of revving engines and what seemed to be bronzed sneakers tumbling inside a dryer. Tommy was long and lean with a blond-highlighted bouffant hairdo and a bushy mustache dyed to match. I had never seen him wear anything other than a white T-shirt and form-fitting Diesel jeans. When Tommy didn't ask me how the interview had gone, my heart sank and my fists tightened. He gave me a narrow look and held up a copy of the
West Hollywood Informant.

It was a pencil-thin local that covered new construction projects, purse snatchings, and local residents possessed of notable stamp collections. On the cover was a photograph of Emilio Vargas in all his sulking glory.

"Are you kidding me with this shit?" Tommy asked. "This guy looks like he should be walking in a Day of the Dead parade."

"Then don't put him on the cover," I said.

"I won't," he said. He pursed his lips, as if he didn't want to say what he would say next. "Oh, for Christ's sake, Adam."

"Bury it, Tommy. Don't kill it. I worked too hard on this one."

"Yeah, well, take it up with all your gay brothers out there who won't shell out for anything other than a hot boy in briefs. It's not going in, Adam. I'm sorry."

I took a step toward his desk, which made him slouch back in his chair. "It took five voice messages to get Emilio even to call me back. After that, I had to pay three visits to his bar before he agreed to talk to me."

"Since when is visiting a bar a problem for you?"

I ignored the jab. "This is crap, Tommy. This isn't about ad sales. This is about you not doing a story that doesn't involve a guy you're trying to sleep with."

Tommy's eyes went wide and he gave me a long slow nod, as if one of his dire suspicions about me had just been confirmed. "Adam Murphy. For the past six years, I have dragged this magazine along on an editorial budget that barely covers our phone bill. I'll fuck the janitor on my desk if I want to. And I won't answer to you about it." He cast his eyes back to the cover shot of Emilio Vargas. "Take the rest of the day off."

I willed myself to leave the office, but my feet didn't go along with the plan.

"Come on, Adam," Tommy muttered, "go drink something. Get laid. We all know that when you took time off last month, it wasn't to help your sister move. It was about your mother, wasn't it?" I had made the mistake of confiding in Tommy about my mother's progressive and fatal alcoholic condition right after I had started working for the magazine. "How is she?" Tommy demanded.

I saw my mother as she had appeared in the crime scene photos I had forced myself to look at. She was lying facedown in the middle of Dumaine Street in the French Quarter. Her platinum hair was fanned forward from her head, and her right arm was extended as if she was pointing in the direction of the cab that had run her down at forty-five miles an hour.

"Or are you still caught up with your stud from the car wash? What's his name?" Tommy asked.

"Corey."

I could see Corey Howard so sharply he might as well have been looming over Tommy's

shoulder. He was six-foot-four, with briskly combed jet-black hair and hard plates of muscle armoring his chest, shoulders, and arms. Everything about the man was unyielding until you got to his dark eyes, deeply set beneath the hard line of his brow. I felt the man's breath in my ear, felt one of his hands pinning me to my mattress by my bare chest, urging me to relax. Tommy could read my face. "I guess it didn't end well."

I didn't answer. "Emilio Vargas didn't want to do the interview because he was afraid of disgracing his mother's name. The same mother who threw him out when he was sixteen because he was a fag. She went to her grave without saying another word to him. That's what I had to talk him through to get him to sit down with me today, Tommy. Any idea what I should say to him now?"

"Yeah," Tommy said. "Tell him to get a stylist."

I shut my eyes briefly and reminded myself why I worked at
Glitz
magazine. My position allowed me to avoid doing the legwork required to become a real journalist. I just had to find a subject who looked like an Abercrombie & Fitch model.

I was almost out the door when Tommy called out to me. He was standing over his desk. He handed me a computer printout of a
Los Angeles Times
article that I saw was almost two years old. The headline

read: GAY COMMUNITY BELIEVES SERIAL KILLER IS BEHIND DISAPPEARANCES.

I scanned the article as Tommy stood over me, but it didn't tell me anything I didn't already know. Some twenty-two months earlier, three model-perfect gay guys had vanished without a trace from West Hollywood. Local activists with too much time on their hands had become convinced that a serial killer was at work, even though there wasn't a shred of forensic evidence to support such a theory. Since then, the Slasher had become a punch line to an old joke.

Shortly after I moved to LA, I attended a Halloween party where one of the guests had come dressed in a black ski mask and a black sweater. He carried a bottle of Cristal champagne by the neck, its shattered base smeared with fake blood. He had pinned pictures of the three alleged victims to the back of his sweater. The real Ann Coulter would have received a warmer reception from the other guests.

"The West Hollywood Slasher?" I asked in disbelief.

"The guys who disappeared," Tommy said. "They call them the Vanished Three. Have you seen their pictures? They look like God's gift to the Undergear catalog. There's some little memorial to them online. I can give you the web address if you want it." I didn't respond.

"Anyway, they're superhot. I'd put all three of them on the cover. Twice."

"That's the only reason anyone cared when they went missing," I said. "Guys vanish from West Hollywood all the time and nobody pays attention."

"So I guess you're not interested?" Tommy asked.

"It's ancient history, Tommy. These guys went home with the wrong guy and there was never any evidence that it was the same one. Why don't I just try out Bigfoot instead?"

Tommy let out an exasperated sigh and sank down into his desk chair. I folded up the article and shoved it in my pocket.

"I'll see you at nine tomorrow," Tommy said. "I need you to stuff boxes for that promotion we're doing in P-Town." I turned on my heel. "And leave the hangover at home this time, please."

My apartment building sat a block below the Sunset Strip. It had stucco walls painted dark gray and one story of south-facing units above a row of driveways. Every night, the city of West Hollywood raised three concrete columns in the middle of my street to keep the traffic on the Strip from spilling over into the residential blocks below.

The liquor store several blocks away was made famous when an Oscar-winner-to-be

slammed her car into its side wall. I stopped off there on my way home from the office and left with a bottle of Crown Royal, a six-pack of Diet Coke, and two bottles of cheap Chardonnay that I managed to convince myself were for guests. I had never hosted more than one guest in my tiny studio.

My bed was a mattress that sat on a short platform next to the living area, and I had placed a love seat in front of the television because I wanted room for an Ikea desk station I had never finished putting together. The vertical blinds were so old and tattered that I had purchased an Oriental screen to block out the morning sunlight. It was heavy, and on most nights I didn't feel like dragging it across the pseudo-shag carpet, so it rested on the wall just inside my front door, and I would awake in the morning squinting. From my tiny balcony, I could see all the way to that grounded UFO called downtown LA.

Before I poured my first drink, I shoved the
LA Times
article on the West Hollywood Slasher into my desk drawer and pushed my desk chair out onto my balcony. Across the cascade of rooftops, a police helicopter circled lazily above Santa Monica Boulevard, its searchlight stabbing the lingering haze.

Instead of calling Emilio Vasquez and breaking the news about the failed feature, I left a message for my friend Rod Peters. I didn't tell him what was wrong. Rod was an assistant to a celebrity manager and on the fast track to getting his own desk, which meant he didn't have the time for the land of self-obsession and drug use that I did. The last time we had seen each other, Rod had come to pick me up from a gas station in Silverlake after I emerged from a brownout with a dim memory of being tossed from some guy's pickup truck because I had made fun of his Daisy Dukes. I told myself that if he called me back within twenty minutes, I would fix myself one bourbon and Coke, then pour the rest of the bottle down the sink.

Rod didn't call. I remember pouring my first drink. I remember hearing the police helicopter I had watched earlier fly so low over my apartment building that it rattled my sliding glass door against its frame.

I remember composing part of a letter to my sister, Candace, a letter that thanked her for asking me to be in the room during her C-section and allowing me to witness my niece's first breath. A letter that tried to explain that I hadn't called her in the weeks since our mothers death because when our parents had divorced, she had picked the parent who didn't call you screaming in the middle of the night because the nightmares were back and you were in every single one of them. She had picked the right side, the side that had lived, but I still thought I deserved a medal for sticking with the side that had withered and died.

I remember balling up the letter and tossing it in the wastebasket.

To this day, I do not remember anything else about the night of Wednesday, June 2.

The next morning I woke up staring at a geisha's gold-leaf face. The Oriental screen I rarely touched had been opened and placed next to the bed. I was tucked neatly under the covers in boxers and a T-shirt, and the top sheet had been folded back over my comforter. It was seven A.M. and I still had two hours to get to work.

When I got to my feet, my butt knocked the screen and it went over. I heard a crash and saw pieces of the Crown Royal bottle dance out from under my coffee table. The vertical blinds were closed. To avoid cutting my bare feet, I walked the screen like a plank and then hopped to the carpet on the other side. It was a huge mistake. My stomach rose into my throat and my ass hit the floor. For a long while, I just sat there, fighting down bile, gazing dully at the poster for the Krewe of Dionysus on the wall above my love seat. It was one of the larger and more popular New Orleans Mardi Gras parade organizations, and my father had been a riding member since before I was born. If my mother had not given it to me as a housewarming present, I never would have hung it on my wall. My father and I had barely exchanged a word since their divorce. The poster featured a cartoon rendering of the god of wine lifting a golden goblet full of plastic Mardi Gras beads toward his leering mouth. I figured it was time to replace him with a picture of Bill W. When I was a senior in high school, my parents had purchased a condo on Florida's Gulf Coast, just a few hours' drive from where I grew up in the Lakefront area of New Orleans. On our first trip there, my mother threw a drink at my father because he refused to leave four days earlier than we had planned. This single act effectively ended a marriage that had been dead for years. On my mother's orders, I had helped pack all of his belongings before we left. I'm still not sure if she wanted him to follow us in pursuit of his shorts and polo shirts or if she just wanted to punish him for not giving in to her demands, as I had done. A few hours later, I was following my mother east on I-10, through a pelting rainstorm, when my father called her cell phone to tell her that their marriage was over.