After his disappearance in March, friends of Roger Vasquez described him as ambitious, driven, and dead set on being a Hollywood talent agent. In the year and a half since his graduation from USC film school, Vasquez worked in the mailroom of American Talent Artists, one of the largest talent agencies on the West Coast.
When Vasquez missed two days of work without contacting his employer, a co-worker visited his West Hollywood apartment building, where he and the landlord found Vasquez's apartment intact but seemingly abandoned. They also found his wallet, keys, and cell phone. His Toyota Camry was parked in the building's garage.
Sheriff's investigations of the other two missing persons cases showed that personal items such as wallets and keys were also found in the homes of Davidson and Clamp, along with their cars— details that continue to haunt both outraged West Hollywood residents and perplexed city officials.
"It's bizarre," says West Hollywood mayor pro tern John Quinn. "I know that missing-persons cases are more common than most of us like to believe. But if these young men weren't driving off somewhere themselves, that implies they were in the company of another person. It's very difficult not to believe that whoever these young men were with is the reason they didn't come home."
But Quinn does not believe that there is a serial killer at work in his small and relatively crime-free city. "It's an unfortunate truth, but we see a lot of young men go missing from West Hollywood on an annual basis. There's a party atmosphere here for some people that leads them to make some dangerous choices."
But for some people, public reassurances do not seem to be enough. For them, Leo Bodwell has become a possible face for a serial killer who had gone undetected until Clamp's disappearance.
Business at Leo's, Bodwell's restaurant, has plummeted, and employees resist any mention of the West Hollywood Slasher. At Bodwell's Spanish-style home in the West Hollywood flats, neighbors say several carloads of young men broke the front windows with rocks and beer bottles Saturday night. On Monday, a For Sale sign was placed on the house's front lawn.
Yesterday, a new flyer appeared on telephone poles along Santa Monica Boulevard. It bears the faces of Terrance Davidson, Roger Vasquez, and Ben Clamp, beneath the words YOU ARE NOT FORGOTTEN.
Chapter 6
Wednesday morning brought another marine layer over the city, and the light inside Corey Howards apartment had the quality of dawn below the surface of a cove. The stench of sour milk still lingered, and Corey's wallet and keys still rested on the counter. The downstairs neighbor hadn't responded to his doorbell, so Jimmy and I had entered through the back door I had left unlocked the day before.
Jimmy and I stood across from each other in the kitchen as he read the LA Times article on the West Hollywood Slasher. I had waited until we were in the apartment to give it to him. I wanted him to see firsthand the similarities between Corey's disappearance and those of the three young men my community referred to as the Vanished Three.
"You think a serial killer murdered Corey?" he asked when he was finished. "That shoots my theory about his meeting with Billy Hatfill to hell, doesn't it?"
"Not necessarily," I said.
I was still bowled over by the deductions Jimmy had made the day before and I wanted to hear his response to the LA Times piece before I gave mine. The night before, I had located a
"Memorial to the Vanished Three" website online and managed to print out relatively good copies of their photographs and the snippets of biographical information that accompanied them.
I handed this page to Jimmy.
Terrance Davidson had short but curly blond hair, round cheeks, and a creamy complexion.
His photograph was a professionally done head shot, his big blue eyes electrified by the studio lighting and his pouting lips glistening as if they had been slathered with lip balm. He had disappeared two and a half years ago, and the last time he had been seen alive was one January afternoon at a Gelson's grocery store on Santa Monica Boulevard.
Roger Vasquez stood posed confidently on a windswept beach, dressed in a wool skullcap and a heavy denim jacket that was unbuttoned over a white wife-beater. He had mahogany skin and a black goatee on his jutting chin. His ice-melting smile turned his cheeks into hard knots and his eyes into small slashes on either side of his button nose. He had disappeared two years ago last March. The last place he had been seen alive was Master Beat, a music store on Santa Monica Boulevard that specialized in dance music.
The picture of Ben Clamp stole my breath. The resemblance to Corey was striking. The young man whose disappearance had given birth to the legend of the West Hollywood Slasher had a smooth, statuesque torso and arms so ridged with muscle it looked like he couldn't straighten them. A small tattoo was barely visible above the navel on his flat stomach, and his biographical information told me that it depicted a crucifix wrapped in barbed wire. He wore a backward baseball cap and a leer, and his arms were outstretched as if he were inviting the photographer to take a crack at his chest. His leer revealed teeth that were too white and perfectly spaced for an aspiring auto mechanic who had been thrown out of his family's trailer by Bible-thumping parents. The memorial site's webmaster noted that it was impossible to determine the last place Clamp had been seen alive, because Leo Bodwell, the last person who claimed to have seen him in one piece, was also the only suspect in his disappearance.
Jimmy handed both sheets of paper back to me without comment and walked off into the apartment. I followed him into the back bedroom, where a beanbag chair rested on the floor next to a desk lamp. Jimmy opened a large walk-in closet. It was virtually empty.
"How long did Corey live here?" he asked.
"About six months," I said. "He didn't tell me where he lived before then."
"There's not even six months of life in this place/' Jimmy said. "Either he wasn't spending much time here or this place has been cleaned out."
He backed away from the closet door and turned to face me. His Hawaiian shirt had saddlebags and his face was flushed. "This whole apartment—everything about it looks staged.
The towel on the floor of the bathroom. The bed unmade just so. And there's nothing too personal here that Corey might not want anyone to see. Then there's the sour milk on the counter, which was going to lure someone up here eventually." He grimaced. "So where does that leave your West Hollywood Slasher?"
"Corey's sending a message," I said. "He's saying the reason he left town has some connection to the Vanished Three. The personal belongings left out in the open are the most obvious connection. Then there's the fact that Corey's about the right age and the right physical makeup. Anyone who plugged the words gay, West Hollywood, and disappearances into a search engine would have hit on this right away."
Jimmy extended his hand and I gave him the LA Times piece and the pictures of the Vanished Three.
"I know this woman," he said.
"Who?"
"Linda Walsh," he answered. "The one who wrote the article. Like everyone else who's worked at the LA Times, she's a fairly successful mystery novelist now." He gave me a bright smile. "We should go talk to her."
"Should we call first?" I asked.
"No. We shouldn't."
"Should I file a missing-persons report?" I asked.
He shook his head, folded up the papers I had given him, and shoved them in his back pocket. "That sounds like a request for the family to make. Ask Corey's uncle to do it when you meet with him. See how he responds. It should tell you something about their relationship."
The high shelf inside the closet wasn't as empty as it looked. I reached up and pulled out a large sketch pad. Jimmy came up behind me as I opened it.
Neither one of us said anything for a long while. I had been rendered by a skilled and steady hand that had captured every curve in my upper body. I slept with one cheek pressed against the pillow and my lips puffed open, the covers riding back over one bare shoulder. Above my sleeping form a row of steel windmills receded into an implied horizon as if
they were the contents of my dream.
"Corey drew this?" Jimmy asked.
"If he did, he never showed it to me," I told him. Jimmy heard something in my voice that made him straighten up. "The windmills," I said. "That's Banning Pass. On the way into Palm Springs. We spent a weekend there." Jimmy's face was still blank. "I told him about how the first time I drove into LA I thought they were, like, magical."
"Like magical?" he asked.
"I told him I thought they were a sign that I was entering a new world," I said, my voice shaky with embarrassment. "Where human failures were blown away before they could take root."
"That's good. Were you drunk?"
"No."
"Can I use it?"
"No," I said. I flipped through the sketch pad. The frayed binding told me that there had been other drawings inside the pad but they had been ripped out. Jimmy read my mind. "Maybe Corey wasn't just sending a message to anyone. He was sending it to you."
He gave me a second to absorb this. Then I was listening to his footsteps shuffle off down the apartment's main center hallway. I had no idea that Corey Howard could draw. It was just one of many things I didn't know about the man. If Corey had left the pad out for me to find, that meant he wanted me to discover that he had used his secret talent to render a flattering depiction of me.
Maybe the picture was a goodbye letter, or maybe it was a sign that he wanted me to finally make my way into the parts of his life he had guarded so vigilantly during the three weeks we had lived together.
Jimmy was already heading down the back steps when I entered the kitchen. I picked Corey's keys up off the counter and shoved them in my back pocket.
Linda Walsh lived just north of Santa Monica's border with Venice, where the blocks rose and fell like ocean waves. Her house was a one-story concrete box with a line of clerestory windows below the lip of the flat roof.
She came to the door with a slobbering two-year-old on her hip. Her hair was dyed honey blond and held in a pile on her head by two wooden sticks. Her long face was bronze and deeply lined, and her small brown eyes had a perpetual squint.
The two-year-old gave me a lazy once-over and reinserted his action figure into his mouth, legs first. Linda saw Jimmy standing next to me and her polite smile dropped from her face like a married father's pants in a rural rest stop.
"Get off my property," she said.
"Morning, Linda!" Jimmy boomed. "This here's Adam, my new assistant. He has some questions to ask you about a piece you wrote for the Times a few years back."
"Seriously," she said. "Get off my property."
I introduced myself and gave her my hand. She shook it and gave me a glazed stare. "Why do you work for him?" she asked me.
"It was either Jimmy's or Denny's," I said.
"Fair enough," she said. "You can come in. Tell your boss to wait in the backyard. If he gets bored, he can walk my dog."
Inside, the weak gray light gave the blond wood a dull glare. The living room furniture was so spare it looked like a strong wind could blow it away, and the floor was covered with toys that looked like they might make ghastly music if I stepped on them.
Jimmy slipped in behind me and pushed the door shut. Linda sank down onto the black velour sofa and regarded me dispassionately. On the wall behind her there was a framed blowup of the cover of one of her novels. The words Blood Circus dripped over an image of the LA skyline visible through the open flaps of a big-top tent.
"Why, thank you, Linda!" Jimmy said. "I'll have a gin gimlet."
Linda Walsh popped a piece of nicotine gum into her mouth and clearly decided to say nothing. Jimmy broke the tense silence. "Linda and I sat on a panel together at Left Coast Crime a few years back. I gave her a hard time, and apparently she's still sore about it."
Linda Walsh cracked her gum. "The moderator asked me a question about how I come up with my characters. Jimmy started to answer. When the moderator stopped him, he apologized and said he thought the question had been directed at someone who actually created characters."
"Oh, come on!" Jimmy burst out. "You weren't the only one I gave it to that day. One of the other authors on the panel introduced himself as a writer of literary thrillers, so I asked him if that meant he took a break from the action to describe how a tree was a metaphor for human evil."
"I think it's safe to say that Jimmy charmed the pants off of everyone at Left Coast Crime that year," Linda remarked.
Jimmy turned to me. "Linda writes novels about a saucy but determined female reporter who's willing to break a high heel to get a good story. Check your local listings soon."
Linda said, "And Jimmy writes novels about loser vigilantes in which all of the female characters are either prostitutes or his mother. Check your local drunk tank soon."
"I'm happy to say I've never had an alcohol problem," Jimmy said. "Now, Adam, on the other hand—"
"Shut up, Jimmy!" I snapped.
After this, the conversation predictably stalled. Linda's son slid off her lap, surveyed the living room, and decided he didn't like his options. Jimmy strolled across the room with a bowed head and started poking at a Tickle Me Elmo with the tip of his cane.
"Well, this has been a real treat," Linda announced. She got to her feet. "Will I see you at Bouchercon, Jimmy?"
"Tell us about the West Hollywood Slasher, Linda," Jimmy said.
Sharp lines appeared at the corners of Linda Walsh's mouth. She hoisted her son onto her lap and put one arm tightly around his back as if trying to shield herself with his body.
"Why?" she asked in a small, tight voice. The mention of the Slasher pained her and I was curious to know why.
"Adam here thinks the guy might have nabbed his boyfriend," Jimmy said. It was basically a lie, but I could tell that Linda Walsh wasn't about to give us any information unless the stakes were high and personal.
She put her son's head on her shoulder. "People usually go missing when they're driving from one place to another," she began. "These guys vanished out of thin air. All of them had barely been in LA for a year, and according to their friends they were the type of West Hollywood guys who thought they would catch fire if they went east of Fairfax or west of Doheny. None of them took any long road trips. None of them were driving on any isolated highways.
"We're also talking about type A guys who worked out at the gym five times a week. You don't abduct someone like that off a street corner without someone noticing. West Hollywood is the most densely populated area of the Southland, and even after pictures of these guys were flashed all over the news, no one came forward to report anything suspicious. No one saw them leaving a bar with a strange guy. No one saw them, period."
"Was there any evidence these guys visited chat rooms?" I asked. "It's a popular way to meet people in my part of town."
"That's a good theory," she said. "So you think they were lured out of their apartments by someone they met online, then the guy drove back to their places and put their personal items out for anyone to see?" I still thought a chat room might have been the Vanished Three's portal to oblivion, but I didn't believe they had met up with one individual. I nodded anyway, just to keep her talking. "Too bad none of them had Internet access."
"You're kidding," I said.
"Terrance Davidson had an America Online account he canceled a few months before he disappeared," she responded. "He also didn't have cable TV. Out of the three, he was habitually unemployed, so it made sense that he wasn't willing to pay for it. But Roger Vasquez had steady employment and he never subscribed to any service. I thought for sure that Ben Clamp would have taken out an escort advertisement online, but it turned out he ran ads in the back of a couple of gay magazines with his beeper number and that was it."
"Leo Bodwell," I said quietly. "The man Ben Clamp was living with."
Linda gave me an unblinking stare. I saw a slight pulse beating in the side of her neck.
"What about him?"
"What did you think of him?"
> "He didn't deserve what happened to him. At all."
I glanced at Jimmy and saw that he was staring at Linda with one eyebrow slightly raised.
His eyes flicked to mine and he gave me a small nod.
"I'd like to talk to him," I said.
"You can't. He's dead." She put her son down and walked quickly into the kitchen, her child waddling after her. "He died of an aneurysm last year. He moved to Arcadia after I wrote my story and ended up managing an Olive Garden."
"Kind of a long fall from owning your own restaurant," Jimmy noted.
She bristled and took a slug of water. I got the sense that she was having an argument with herself.
"So it wasn't Leo Bodwell's arrest that got you on the story?" Jimmy asked. "It was your brother." Linda gave Jimmy a piercing look. "How's he doing, by the way?" Jimmy asked.
"He committed suicide," she said quietly. She held her water bottle halfway to her mouth.
"All those wonder drugs weren't working for him, and he'd seen what happened to his friends at the end."
"AIDS?" I asked.
Linda looked like she was about to pounce on Jimmy and wring his neck. I thought that was our cue to leave. Jimmy didn't. "What got you so invested in this, Linda?" he asked. "Were you just acting out of obligation to your brother?"
Jimmy had an agenda here. I wasn't sure what it was, so I kept my mouth shut. "You created the story, didn't you?" he asked. "Your brother called you about these disappearances, and you went to the West Hollywood Sheriff's Station and convinced them they would have a riot in the middle of Santa Monica Boulevard if they didn't storm Leo Bodwell's restaurant."
"No! And I don't use my novels to accuse men of murders they might not have committed!"
Jimmy's lips set into a thin line. I knew she was referring to the man who had broken into Jimmy's house in the middle of the night with a tire iron. She turned to me. "I was looking out for your community! I was trying to keep those men from being turned into a statistic!"
Light Before Day Page 11
