Light Before Day (24 page)

"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."

Her lips tensed and pulled back from her teeth, and from the look in her eye I could tell she didn't like any of her choices. "Does the name Corey Howard mean anything to you?"

"Corey..."

"Corey McCormick," I corrected myself.

She got to her feet, as if she needed to put some distance between herself and the name I had just spoken. "Corey was blackmailing Danny?" she asked.

"Sort of."

"Get up."

Elena's apartment had a large living room with a picture window that, fortunately for me, looked out onto the street. Above a white sectional sofa with torn stitching was a massive portrait depicting a handsome Latina woman reclining on a white chaise longue in a white pants suit with a shock of white in her cascade of black hair.

I walked my skateboard-wielding friend to the butcher-block table, pulled his cuffed wrists behind one of the chairs, and sat him down. Elena was in the kitchen frantically preparing an ice packet. I wasn't sure which one of us it was for. The kid's right eye would be swollen shut in a few hours. His top lip was busted, but the blood had already dried. I hadn't managed to check myself out in a mirror.

Elena returned and thrust a Ziploc bag full of ice cubes at me. I took it and stared at her. She pointed to her right temple and I followed her cue. I heard a dull whir and realized it wasn't coming from my head but from a white noise machine behind the closed door at the end of the apartment's hallway. Melissa Brady's desire to shut out reality included appliances as well as prescriptions.

I reached behind the kid's back and dug in his back pocket for a wallet. He squirmed and groaned in his throat. "Let me see your ID," I said.

He mumbled something, and I asked him to repeat it. "My sock," he muttered, kicking his right foot against the floor. I pulled out a credible-looking ID that told me his name was Philip Percy, that he was twenty-three years old and lived in Westlake Village.

"Your real ID," I said. I squatted in front of the kid. Up close, I could see his soft adolescent facial features: a dull jaw that would harden in a few years, naturally smooth skin, and a small rounded nose. But he was tall and built, just like the guy who had been following Nate the night before.

"Glenn has it."

"Glenn was driving the van?" I asked. Elena tried to cut in. I held up my palm to stop her.

"Where is Glenn going right now?"

The kid didn't answer.

"You work for Scott Koffler, don't you?" I asked him.

His eyes drifted shut and he sucked in his lower lip. I sank down into his level. "I know how Scott works, all right?" I said as sympathetically as I could. "I know the minute he gets you in his hot tub he starts feeding you a line about how you need his protection. 'Cause, after all, if the kids back at school find out you've been going to parties in West Hollywood with a bunch of fags, then your life is over, right? Your new friends may be rich, they may even be famous, but they're still fags."

"Fuck you," the kid whispered.

"I need to know what's going on!" Elena shouted. "Right now."

I looked at her. "Daniel Brady made a trip to West Hollywood last week. This kid's boss was his escort, and I think the guy took some photographs that he e-mailed to Melissa on Friday night."

The breath went out of her. "Jesus."

"Does any of this make sense to you?" I asked.

"Not enough."

A portable phone sat in its cradle on the kitchen counter, with a second handset on the end table next to the sofa. I grabbed one and handed it to Elena. Then I turned to the kid, holding the phone up between us as if it were a weapon. "We're going to call your boss right now," I said.

"Oh, yeah?" the kid rasped.

"Or else I'll call the police and everyone back at school will find out why you were arrested and who your new friends are."

His bruised lips sputtered. I gave him another minute for my threat to sink in. When I asked, he said Scott was at home in Palmdale, and I told him what to say when I put the phone to his ear. I dialed the number the kid gave me. I turned and saw that Elena had already brought her handset to her ear, her eyes fixed fiercely on mine.

After two rings, someone answered without speaking. I put the phone to the kid's ear. "I'm so sorry, Scott," the kid whined. "Everything went wrong. I'm so sorry."

I jerked the phone away from the kid's face and brought it to mine. "You sent two teenagers to abduct me in broad daylight," I said.

I heard nothing but silence and maybe breathing from the other end.

"You've fucked up twice now, Scott. Your little stunt with Nate Bain put me right on your fat ass. Now you sent these two kids to abduct me. One of them's right here and ready to wet his pants."

"They were supposed to
escort
you."

"To where?"

"I thought you and I should talk," he said. I said nothing, to lead him to say more. "You've got nothing on me with Philip there. You know what I do, Adam. It's rewarding, but there are risks involved. That's why I make sure I always have an insurance policy. It's very simple. I take pictures. And there are two people in every one. Both people have reputations to protect.

Including little Philip."

"You blackmail your own customers?" I said.

"I haven't had to. Yet."

Considering that Koffler furnished his young charges with fake IDs that said they were of age, it wasn't blackmail we were talking about. It was extortion.

"Did you
blackmail
Daniel Brady?" I asked.

Silence. I looked to Elena. She was hunched forward over the table, the phone to her ear. She shoved her bangs up with one palm.

"Why don't we meet?" Koffler asked.

"Give me something first."

"One A.M.," he said flatly. "Plummer Park, just off Fountain."

"Who hired you to bring Daniel Brady to West Hollywood?" I didn't expect him to answer, but I hoped he would say something that would convince Elena Castillo that I was telling her the truth. I was confident that it was Billy Hatfill who had hired him on Corey's behalf.

"You got me fired," I said. "You came to my apartment and said shit about my mother.

You're having Nate Bain followed, and today you tried to have these kids beat the shit out of me.

Daniel Brady was a special job for you. And you're scared shitless that your boss is going to find out that you exposed him while he was in West Hollywood."

"Let Philip go," he said.

"Who hired you, Scott?"

"You first," he said. "Where the hell is he? I haven't been paid."

My throat closed up and I had to focus on my feet to remind myself where I was. Jimmy's problem with my new theory had been that he didn't believe Billy Hatfill would hire a loser like Scott Koffler. Jimmy was right. I cursed myself for not having seen it sooner.

"Corey hired you," I heard myself say.

"Super Twink, Mr. Star Reporter, scores again," Scott murmured. "But that's just the half of it. Tell Philip to call me in ten minutes, and I'll see you tonight."

I put the phone to the kid's ear and told him to repeat the instruction Koffler had just given me. He did, his voice trembling. I brought the phone to my ear. Koffler had hung up.

Elena held her head in both hands.

I went into the kitchen and got a meat cleaver. Elena Castillo didn't move an inch as I sawed the plastic cuffs from the kid's wrists. It took more work than I expected, and after several minutes I felt like a cross between a psychopath and a jackass.