Light Before Day Page 3

  "I'm not a porn star, Adam," he said. "There have only been, like, two gay porn stars in history and they don't exactly have houses in the Hollywood Hills, all right?"

  I just stared at him. He grabbed the remote, found an eleven o'clock news broadcast, gave me a grave look, and raised the volume. The two of us sat there as an eighty-one-year-old woman described what it was like to have her arms ripped off by her nephews pit bull. When the reporter asked her what the worst part of her experience had been, the woman replied, "Losing my arms."

  I squawked with laughter, but suddenly Nate grabbed my knee. He raised the volume even more, and I found myself staring at a rolling patch of black ocean pierced by the searchlights of Coast Guard cutters. A reporter's voiceover informed me that a UH-1 Huey helicopter had gone down that afternoon without warning during a training exercise, ten miles off the coast of Oceanside. Four members of a Marine Light Attack Helicopter Squadron had been on board, all of whom were only a few months home from Iraq. A search and rescue mission was under way, but the prospects looked grim.

  They showed a photograph of the pilot in full dress. His name was Daniel Brady, and the first thing I noticed about him was that he and I had the same eyes: big, blue, and widely spaced, the kind that make someone look surprised even when he's not. We were the same age, twenty-six, with the other resemblances between us more subtle: the rounded chin, the baby-fat padded cheeks. Brady had sharper versions of each.

  "Hot, right?" Nate asked.

  If I agreed, I would be flattering myself. I watched as Brady's distraught wife was led away from a duplex apartment building by a tall, big-boned Hispanic woman whose furious expression didn't dim in the lens flare of the surrounding cameras. The most I could see of Melissa Brady was her tangled honey blond hair as she sobbed against her friend's shoulder.

  When the story ended, Nate killed the volume and said, "Daniel Brady was in West Hollywood this week."

  I pondered this for a second. My head was starting to hurt as the aftereffects of the alcohol kicked in. "Start at the beginning," I said.

  He took a deep breath and got to his feet. "It was Wednesday night. Around midnight. I went on a walk, just to get some air, you know?" I didn't believe that any gay man in his twenties who took a walk in West Hollywood at midnight was out just to get some air. But I kept my mouth shut. "I was right down on Santa Monica and San Vicente when this black BMW X5 pulled to the curb beside me. Scott Koffler was driving."

  He let this name hang. In the rarified social scene of West Hollywood, Scott Koffler was notorious for bringing barely legal pretty boys to the most exclusive pool parties. In fact I was fairly sure his young charges weren't legal at all, so I stayed the hell away from him. He seemed to have no actual profession aside from high-class pimp, and even though he was in his early thirties, he always dressed the part of the college undergrad, in university sweatshirts and backward baseball caps. He and I had never exchanged anything aside from a thin smile.

  "So anyway," Nate continued, "Koffler asks me to get in, so I do. I mean, he's not my favorite guy or anything, but he's kinda cool." I didn't ask him how a jailbait supplier could be considered cool. "So I climb in the backseat, and guess who's in there with me?"

  "Daniel Brady."

  He nodded. "Brady was nice enough at first. Kinda antsy. Freaked out. I figured he was closeted, but I didn't have any idea he was a marine."

  "Or married," I said.

  "He's hot, though," Nate said, as if this dismissed the fact I had just given him. "I almost thought he was you. You guys have the same build and everything."

  He gave me a slight smile, and I wondered if he was buttering me up in anticipation of how this story of his was going to end. I didn't smile back.

  "Suddenly Koffler's asking me if I would like to do stuff. You know, like, mess around. With Brady." Nate didn't see what he wanted to in my face. "So I started following Scott's instructions. The whole setup. I don't know. It turned me on." His voice lacked conviction, which told me there was another layer to the story he was leaving out. His hollow cheeks and the welts on his arms gave me some idea what it might be.

  "For a second, I thought Brady was going to go along with it," Nate said. "Then he just flipped out. He slammed my head into the side of the door, and the next thing I knew the motherfucker had thrown me out into the street and I was lying there watching them speed off. I almost got run over."

  I gave him a moment to catch his breath, and then I said, "Sorry, Nate. I'm not buying it."

  "What?" he barked. He turned his back to me and peeled the back of his tank top up over a skid mark that covered the right half of his lower back. His skin had been turned to ribbons over a bruise that looked like a giant ink stain. "What about this?" he cried.

  "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.