Light Before Day (4 page)

"Why'd you really get in the car, Nate?" I asked. "Come on. You've got no shortage of willing sex partners, not in your line of work. Brady's hot, but he's not that hot. Why agree to go down on a guy who doesn't seem interested?"

I watched the fight go out of him. "I was high," he whispered.

"On what?" He didn't answer. "You asked me if I was a real reporter, Nate. These are the kinds of questions real reporters ask."

Slowly he reached inside the front of his shorts and removed something. Holding it in his fist, he sank to his knees on the carpet and laid a plastic bag of small white rocks and a glass pipe on the table. Even though this was one of the few drugs I had never done before, I knew what the rocks were the minute I saw them.

"You ever done Tina?" he asked as he loaded the pipe.

"No. I value my HIV-negative status."

"Some of us play safe," he said.

He extended the pipe toward me with a slight smile. I took it, turned it over, and tapped the rock out onto my coffee table.

"Koffler promised you some crystal meth if you screwed around with Brady You agreed and they humiliated you. Put your life in danger, even."

He shoved the bag and pipe back into his crotch, made a snorting sound in his throat, and started for the door with his eyes on the carpet.

"Do you want me to write this story or not, Nate?" I asked.

Nate whirled around. "The
story
is that some closet-case Marine thought he could come up to WeHo and fuck with some fags and it didn't go so well. A couple days later, the helicopter he happens to be flying makes a nosedive right into the ocean. Does that sound like a coincidence to you, Adam?"

"No, it doesn't," I said. "And I didn't say they had a right to humiliate you, Nate."

"What
were
you saying?"

"I don't get kicked to the curb when I'm not drinking," I said. "And you might not get thrown out of speeding cars if you're not tweaking."

His level stare told me my words had affected him. I needed to hear them as much as he did.

I wanted to tell him a story in the
LA Times
wouldn't erase the shame of being thrown out of a car like a piece of meat, but I figured that if I played this story right, the
LA Times
might be where I would end up.

"I'll see what I can do, Nate."

His face softened and he took several steps toward the sofa. "Seriously?"

"Seriously. Did either one of them say where they were headed that night?"

"No," he said. "Koffler talked the whole time, but just to me. To . . . urge me on."

"Can you ask around for me?" I said. "See if anyone else saw them?"

Nate nodded emphatically and for a second I thought he might hug me. If Brady had made many additional appearances that night, mouths would be flapping all over West Hollywood, and a real reporter would be on the story before I had time to blink. If this story was going to be my ticket out of
Glitz,
I would have to move fast.

"Thank you, Adam," he said breathily.

"Don't thank me yet," I said.

I got to my feet and waited for him to leave. He didn't. Instead, he chewed his lower lip and fiddled with the right leg of his shorts. After a painful moment he met my eyes and said, "How's Corey?"

At first I was too startled to say anything. The people close to me knew better than to ask me about a man named Corey Howard unless, like Tommy Banks, they enjoyed gouging my scabs.

"I wouldn't know," I said.

"You guys aren't seeing each other anymore, right?" he asked. "At least that's what I heard."

I just nodded, hoping whatever expression was on my face would scare him off the topic.

Nate sensed my anger but decided to ignore it. "Can I have his number?" He kept his eyes on the carpet. Instead of hurling him off my balcony, I went to my desk and wrote Corey's phone number on a note card. When I handed it to Nate, he stared down at it. "Just one number?"

"You're pushing it, Nate."

Nate turned red at the sound of my voice.

"There's no future for the two of you," I said. "Trust me. Corey Howard gives new meaning to the word
sobriety."

Nate didn't seem as disappointed as I expected him to be. He returned his attention to the note card.

"Corey only has a cell phone," I said. "My guess is whoever's paying his rent and whoever bought him that nice new pickup truck didn't feel like getting him a land line."

"No shit," Nate whispered. "Corey has a sugar daddy?"

"Ask Corey," I said. "See if you get a better answer than I did."

Nate gave me a brusque nod and a weak smile. Then he left.

If there was anyone I knew in West Hollywood who might have some good dirt on Scott Koffler, it was my friend Rod Peters. The next day he met me for lunch at a restaurant on Santa Monica Boulevard where the waiters looked like Tom of Finland drawings and served steaks the size of puppies. As I told him Nate Bain's story, Rod listened with his hands clasped against his lips. We were sitting at a table on the restaurant's sidewalk patio, and I kept my voice low so we wouldn't be overheard by the transgendered matron who held a squirming pug on her lap. Rod's eyes were hidden behind gas-station sunglasses, and his hair was a mess of dirty blond spikes. As usual, he was wearing an outfit that would be more suited to his native South Carolina than the sleeveless sidewalks of West Hollywood: khaki shorts and a green-and-white-striped polo. "Koffler's connected, Adam. You really want to go after him?"

"What does 'connected' mean?" I asked.

"If I tell you, it's only going to make you want to go after him."

I gave him a slight smile. He let out a hiss.

"Koffler's boys aren't legal," Rod said. "He meets them online and then he promises them Hollywood gold if they do his bidding."

"What's his bidding?" I asked.

"You're asking if he sleeps with them?" Rod asked. I nodded. "I don't know for sure, but I wouldn't be surprised. I do know he gives them a fake ID and a different name they're supposed to use when they're in West Hollywood. He also promises to set them up with acting jobs and film careers."

"Does he make good on those promises?"

Rod asked me if I remembered a certain teen heartthrob who had almost risen to stardom the year before. I did. "He was one of Scott's kids," Rod said. "No acting experience, not even an acting class. Just a couple pool parties in the Hollywood Hills with Scott, and suddenly he's got supporting roles in two features."

"How do you know all this?" I asked.

"I met a recovering Scott's kid after I first moved here," he said. "Things didn't go so well for him. He told me Scott took him under his wing like he was his best pal. Then the threats started.

Scott would tell the guy that he needed someone to watch out for him—because what if someone back at his high school found out what he was doing every weekend? That kind of thing."

"What happened to this friend of yours?" I asked.

"You're really serious about this, Adam?" he asked. "Christ, I don't know who you should be more afraid of—Koffler or all the powerful men he's servicing."

"I'm not looking for a job on the studio lot."

Rod flashed me his palms and sank back into his chair. "The guy's name was Jim," he said.

"He moved back to Riloxi or wherever last year. I can try to find him, but I'm not promising anything. He did tell me that Koffler lives with his mother out in Palmdale. That's where he brings the boys first."

"His mother doesn't object?"

"Jim said Koffler has her wrapped around his finger."

Why would a closeted marine come to LA's gay ghetto in the company of a pimp who

specialized in underage twinks and used threats and intimidation to get what he wanted? The early news reports I had collected that morning online all hinted that the crash was a result of pilot error. Daniel Brady's error. I didn't want to get ahead of myself, but I thought it was possible that Daniel Brady had chosen to take his life and those of his three crewmates because Scott Koffler had made one threat too many.

For me, the result of my investigation would be a story that made a bloody statement about the military's "Don't ask, don't tell" policy, to say nothing of the fact that it would expose a devious bastard who used the fears and insecurities of self-hating teenagers to line his pockets. I thought of myself at sixteen and how I might have reacted if Scott Koffler had taken me to a party where all the gorgeous men seemed eternally twenty-five and I was the hot new thing. If Koffler had whisked me from being despised in the locker room to being worshipped poolside in just a day's time, I might have sold him my soul as well.

Even though his eyes were hidden behind sunglasses, I could tell that Rod was giving me one of his unnerving stares. If he knew about my ouster from The Abbey the night before, he wouldn't mention it.

"There's something else, Rod," I said. "I think I'm going to quit drinking."

I expected him to scoff, to make some remark about how every gay man gives up alcohol a thousand times, but instead he lowered his hands to his lap. His lips parted, but nothing came out, and for a while the two of us stared at each other as traffic chugged past us on the boulevard.

"I hope you're serious," he finally said.

I was too startled by his reaction to say anything. He sat forward and closed one hand over mine. "Please be serious, Adam."

When I gave him a nod, he withdrew his hand and inhaled deeply. "Will you still be my friend if I tell you I've started praying for you every night? And I'm not a big prayer person."

My eyes misted suddenly, and I felt my face go tense as I shifted my attention to the street.

Neither one of us said anything for a while. "A friend of mine just started going to AA," Rod finally said. "I can give you his number if—"

"I'm not going to do the AA thing," I said. "I'm not a fan of folding chairs, and if I drink any more coffee my heart will explode."

* * *

The drive to Palmdale took me farther outside the city limits than I had ever ventured. I was one of those West Side boys who thought the San Fernando Valley started at Laurel Canyon and extended to San Francisco.

Interstate 5 brought me to the 14 freeway, which threaded through the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. I drove past rolling grasslands marked by the occasional farmhouse and a few unfinished subdivisions with freshly laid streets terracing the sandblasted hillsides. The freeway made a sudden descent, and the Antelope Valley opened up before me, the westernmost corner of the Mojave Desert. The city of Palmdale is a small grid tucked against the base of the hills, with its own small reservoir. The map told me that Edwards Air Force Base was due north, but all I could see was an expanse of desert enveloped by haze.

After I had said goodbye to Rod, I had gone home and found a Palmdale listing for an Edina Koffler. I had also made a few calls to social acquaintances and found out that the night before, Scott Koffler had failed to show up at a barbecue hosted by a gay investment analyst. He and his product had been sorely missed.

I was counting on the fact that I was the last person Scott Koffler would expect to come asking him about a marine named Daniel Brady. The most Scott knew about me was that I wore a leather motocross jacket everywhere I went. In the year that I had lived in LA, I had been a social guy merely because it afforded me the chance to drink other people's alcohol. I was hoping that when I asked him about Daniel Brady, Koffler would give me either an outright denial I could disprove or a bogus cover story that I could go back to West Hollywood and unspun thread by thread.

Edina Koffler lived on a curved street lined with split-level stucco houses that looked exactly like her own. Each one had a mini-cathedral window above the front door and a willow tree out front, its branches thin and dry from too many buffetings by the desert winds. At the front door, I heard furious bass beats rattling a stereo that was blasting into the backyard, followed by a young man's peal of laughter. I rang the doorbell three times and got no answer.

A service alley the width of a garbage truck ran behind the house. As I made my way toward Edina Koffler's back gate, I could make out Britney Spears cursing the fact that her latest love interest was, in her opinion, toxic. I reached over the top of the gate, found the latch, and cracked it by a few inches.

Two boys sat in a gurgling Jacuzzi positioned against the back wall of the house's garage. It was impossible for me to determine the ages of the boys from their appearance alone; they had the smooth limbs and defined muscles of the average twenty-something party boy. They slugged awkwardly from beer bottles as they watched Scott Koffler perform a gyrating parody of Miss Spears's music-video dance down the aisle of a jet plane. Koffler wore his ubiquitous backward baseball cap and an unbuttoned short-sleeved blue shirt, revealing his sagging chest and swell of belly. Both were shaved smooth. The boys' laughter had more derision than enjoyment in it, and I couldn't tell if Koffler's gyrations were truly a burlesque of the pop diva or his own sexuality.

When the song finished, I shut the gate and pounded on it with my fist. I heard several splashes; then the stereo died, and Scott Koffler opened the gate. His eyes were tiny black dots above long and sunburned cheeks, and his weak chin was frosted with brown stubble. He looked like he'd been hiding out at his mother's house for a few days now—maybe ever since the night he drove Daniel Brady around West Hollywood.

"Adam Murphy is at my house," he said in a soft and breathy voice that gave the illusion of Zen-like calm. "What could this mean?"

"I had a little incident at The Abbey last night," I said. "I'm tracking down everyone who might have been there and giving them a personal apology."

"I wasn't at The Abbey last night," he said with the obligatory flicker of a smile.

"That's a relief," I answered.

He gestured me inside the yard. The Jacuzzi was empty but ringed with beer bottles. A Chiminea sat next to a parched willow tree that had a rope swing dangling from one of its branches. A picture window gave me a view into the living room, where a huge flat-screen television presided over an assemblage of black leather furniture that would have looked more at home in a drug runner's South Beach pied-a-terre. It looked like Koffler's mother benefited from her son's operations.