Light Before Day

by Christopher Rice

  Taken aback, I turned to face him. He looked wary, as if I would lace into him. I didn't.

  Jimmy usually gave compliments on the back of his hand, but the idea that I could investigate the crimes of other gay men without taking responsibility for the criminals themselves flew in the face of every noble fantasy I had held about becoming a crusading journalist. It seemed that Jimmy was trying to strip away my arrogance and judgments, not because he thought I deserved to be punished, but because he liked the person he saw underneath.

  "You think Brian Ferrin will go on the record?" he asked.

  "I gave him my cell number."

  "You don't sound very hopeful."

  "I'm not. He's convinced what happened to him was his fault. I tried to make a plea to his inner victim, but I don't think it took."

  "Any word from Billy Hatfill?" he asked.

  "No," I said. "Maybe he changed his mind about getting me the meeting with Cale. He had some pretty strong words for me the other day."

  "Like what?"

  "Apparently, I bleed judgments. I leave a trail of them wherever I go. I'm going to drown in them someday." I had delivered Billy's words in a sarcastic tone of voice, but Jimmy didn't seem to get the joke. He furrowed his brow.

  "What?" I asked.

  "You're right," he said. "Those are strong words."

  "You think I should be afraid of him?"

  "I want you to remember every single word he says to you," Jimmy said. "If that's too difficult for you, hide a tape recorder in your pocket. I want to know where Billy fits in all of this. I also want to know why he wants you to meet with Martin Cale."

  "I'll find out when I meet Martin Cale."

  "You'll take Billy out to dinner first."

  "What am I going to talk to him about?" I asked. "If I ask him about any of this, I'll lose my meeting with Cale."

  "I said dinner, Adam. Billy Hatfill is leading you to Martin Cale for a reason. It would be nice to have some sense of what that reason is before you row yourself out to his yacht."

  I could tell he was holding out on me and I stared at him until he broke. "Our working theory is that Corey blackmailed Billy with something he learned from his uncle, right?" I nodded. "Our wild guess is that Corey was using some dirt on Joseph Spinotta. If that's the case, then maybe Billy is pissed about having to take a hit for his sugar daddy. That might explain why he was so helpful the other day."

  "You're saying Billy's not trying to help me find out what happened to Corey. He's trying to help me find out what dirt Corey used on him."

  Jimmy nodded.

  "That's all speculation, Jimmy."

  "I know," he said with a wan smile. "That's why you're going to take him out to dinner." I groaned. "I'm your new boss, remember? The other option is that you spend tomorrow morning in a judo class with my wife so you can make sure she doesn't land anyone in a wheelchair. You have three seconds to make your decision."

  Chapter 8

  Billy Hatfill came out of his front gate wearing a silver dress shirt that had a metallic sheen to it and black pleather pants that were so tight they squeaked like a small bird as he slid into the passenger seat. He directed me down the hill and onto Sunset Boulevard without telling me our destination. It was Thursday, so the traffic on the strip was light. The streetlights winked at me off the face of the silver Rolex on Billy's left wrist.

  "Martin Cale is coming to shore Saturday night," Billy said.

  "That was fast."

  "Well, I didn't tell him Corey was missing. I didn't want to steal your thunder."

  "Considering he never told you Corey was his nephew, I guess you two are even," I answered.

  "Good point," he said.

  "Why does he think I want to meet with him?"

  Billy emitted a long, pained sigh. "Martin Cale thinks that you are a very bright and adorable young man who is interested in taking a cruise on his yacht. I'm sending Everett with you just in case Cale gets too persistent."

  When I considered the prospect of having to fend off the advances of a wealthy closet case who put miles of ocean between himself and accountability, my forced dinner with Billy suddenly seemed more like a high tea.

  "How’s it going, by the way?" Billy asked. "Your little investigation, I mean."

  "Corey was a private guy when he was still around," I said carefully, my eyes locked on Doheny Boulevard's palm-tree-lined corridor into Beverly Hills. "I'm starting to understand why."

  "What do you mean?" he asked.

  I shrugged, as if Billy needed some sort of security clearance before I told him anything else.

  He let out a sharp breath; then I heard his pants squeak as he shifted in his seat. He told me to take a left onto Burton Way, a four-lane thoroughfare that runs smack into downtown Beverly Hills. The wide median held clusters of tall and slender palm trees. Billy directed me to an eight-story concrete building with a row of backlit ficus hedges out front and rows of tiny rounded balconies on each floor. A massive sandstone overhang extended over a set of broad marble steps. The hovering valets wore khaki vests over white dress shirts that made them look like safari guides in search of their hats.

  I had read about the place in several magazines. It was an exclusive hotel popular with rap stars and the ten-person entourages that accompanied them. The lobby was an endless sweep of white travertine marble lit by banks of flickering tea candles. The dining room lay behind a series of hanging taffeta curtains that trembled in the breeze from a nearby patio.

  The maitre d' had a long pale face with pinprick eyes and an artful mess of pinkish-gold hair.

  He whispered something in Billy's ear as he showed us to a corner table. Billy dismissed him politely, as if the guy had asked him business advice during Billy's off hours. A swarm of fast-talking agents on the patio alternated between checking their watches and looking around in every direction, as if only they knew about the SWAT team that was about to come bursting through the entrance.

  I took my seat and tried to lose myself in the menu. It was written in some hotel hybrid of Romance languages. If the restaurant deigned to serve granola, they probably spelled it with an

  ~.

  "What's the look about?" Billy asked me. He was rolling up his sleeves.

  "Which one?"

  "The one on your face," he said. "What's the matter? They don't have travertine and tea candles back in New Orleans?"

  I obliged him and smiled.

  "You looked so put out that I thought it might have something to do with Greg," he said.

  "Who's Greg?"

  "The maitre d'." Billy gave me a narrow look. "You blew him."

  My eyes shot to the host's stand. The pale-faced host gave me an arch smile and waved at me with the middle three fingers on his right hand. "Oh, dear," Billy whispered. "You really don't remember him, do you? That's okay. He says you weren't the only two guys in the hot tub that night. That's what he was whispering to me, by the way."

  There had been a time when I listed every man I had slept with, a record intended to persuade me I was desirable. When it had become more and more difficult to remember those names, the list had shamed me instead of validating me.

  "Relax, Adam," he said. "Everyone has a blackout now and then." He returned his attention to the menu.

  Had he picked this restaurant solely because he knew I couldn't remember getting nasty with the maitre d'? "I don't get you, Billy. What other people say about you makes more sense than the things you say about yourself."

  "Other people don't say anything about me, Adam. They say things about Joseph, about the view from his house. You're the only one who's ever shown an interest in what I do once the party is over. You have no idea how much I would like to be flattered by the attention, Adam.

  But I know full well the two of us would never have seen each other in lighting this good if Corey Howard hadn't come to my house three weeks ago."

  He was trying to beg a set of questions I wasn't willing to ask until after my meetin
g with Martin Cale, so I decided to throw him off. "How did you meet Joseph?" I asked.

  He was visibly startled by the directness of the question. "My father set us up," he answered.

  He gave me a chance to express some kind of disgust or amusement. I didn't. "It's a long story."

  I toasted him with my water glass. He took the cue.

  "My parents didn't take much of an interest in anything I did. But they were still dead set on having me attend an Ivy League school. Probably because they thought a Yale education would fix everything they hadn't."

  He failed to suppress a smug little grin. "So I took the personal essay sections out of the applications for Harvard, Yale, and Brown, and I got some copies of Stroke magazine, made a little collage of body parts for each application, and dropped them in the mail. Months went by.

  Nobody said anything. Then one day my father comes to me and tells me he has a meeting in San Francisco with the IT guy for his investment firm."

  "Joseph Spinotta," I said.

  Billy nodded and cradled his double scotch in both hands. "My father had never met with an IT guy in his life. He'd certainly never asked me to accompany him on a business trip. Our first night in San Francisco, we had dinner with Joseph. He wouldn't shut up about this website he was planning to start. Bam. I thought it sounded like he was selling cleaning supplies. But he kept running on about all the opportunities it would afford young people. Suddenly my father was talking about opportunities and young people as well. Together, they both said those words so many times I thought I was at a NAMBLA meeting."

  He sipped from his scotch. "I never went back to New York." His eyes betrayed a pain that seemed unrehearsed, a recollection of how it felt to be traded from one businessman to another like a wholly owned subsidiary.

  "Did you love him?"

  He raised his eyebrows at my audacity, but then some other emotion commandeered his face and he brought one edge of his napkin to his mouth in a poor attempt to hide it. "I thought he could own the world if he wanted to," he said. "I thought this made him as happy as it made me.

  But it didn't."

  "What made him happy?"

  "Nothing," he said. "Certain things just made him shut up for a while."

  "Like what?"

  He met my eyes. "Young people."

  I did my best to suppress the thought of the young person whose pain I had pried my way into that afternoon at Back Beats on Ventura Boulevard. "How young, Billy?"

  "Let me put it this way," he said, resting his elbows on the edge of the table. "I was never young enough."

  I didn't press. I couldn't. Every question I wanted to ask might endanger my meeting with Martin Cale. The fact that Billy had smeared Joseph's name without much provocation was information enough for now. It supported Jimmy's theory that Billy was trying to cut himself loose from Spinotta's psychic dominion over him. But it didn't confirm it.

  "You don't have some informed opinion to offer?"

  "I'm trying to work on not bleeding judgments, Billy."

  He smiled at the table. "You aren't going to ask me why I stayed with him?"

  "The answer's pretty obvious, Billy. You're wearing it."

  He glanced down at the expensive Rolex on his wrist and laughed.

  We drove back to his house in silence. Martin Cale was coming to shore on Saturday night; that meant I had a day or two before I could back Billy to the wall about the real reason Corey had come to his house, and the magic key Corey had used to get in the front door. After I rolled to a stop in front of his gate, Billy didn't move. He sat with his hands folded in his lap. "I never apologized to you for Everett's behavior," he said.

  "Shouldn't Everett do that?"

  When he turned his face to mine, the halos from the security lights atop the front gate slid across his pale cheek. "I stayed with Joseph because I thought I could learn from him." His voice had sudden gravity to it. His earlier confession had not gotten the reaction out of me that he wanted, so now he was offering up another answer to a question I hadn't asked. "I thought I could do a better job with his life than he did."

  "Have you?"

  "Does asking redundant questions like this make you hard?" he whispered. "You think I don't know what you're doing, asking me out to dinner like this?"

  "What am I doing?" I asked redundantly, with a redundant smile.

  He let out a hiss of breath. I felt his hand enclose my left thigh. He leaned over until our noses were almost touching. In the darkness, I could not make out his face.

  "You think Corey's coming here to my house two weeks ago might have something to do with why he's no longer around."

  I didn't say anything.

  "Is that really the truth, Adam? Or is that just what you've convinced yourself of—because it gives you an excuse to circle me like this? To try to figure me out? Eventually, you would have found a way to write about me, even if Corey still worked at that car wash, and you know it. I see it on your face every time I run into you. But when I give you the story, you reject it.

  Because it's not the one that you've made up. The kept boy gone wrong."

  His hand worked its way to my crotch, and I felt his hot breath against my lips. "You're no better than I was with Joseph. You see my life and you think you can do better with it." He squeezed my groin. "Prove it. Come inside." His eyes fell to my crotch. They were wide and dead, full of something that looked like scientific inquiry instead of lust. He might have spent most of his afternoons polishing and rehearsing every sentence that came out of his mouth until he sounded like a cross between a British playwright and a West Side therapist, but his innate desire to sleep with men who held a cold disdain for him marked him as a spoiled adolescent.

  "No thanks."

  "How much do you want to meet with Martin Cale?"

  "How much do you want me to hear what Cale has to say?" He loosened his hand, but he didn't turn away from me. The lights that lined the top of his front gate threw him into silhouette.

  "Corey was blackmailing you," I said.

  I heard the breath go out of him and his next inhalation sounded shockingly like a sob. He turned forward and slumped in his seat, his eyes screwed shut and his chest rising and falling. I had scored a hit. "Blackmail's a crime, Billy."

  "And you want to know why I didn't go to the police?" He had just confirmed Jimmy's initial theory. I was startled silent for a few seconds.

  "I want to know what Corey wanted," I said. "Was it money?" After several agonizing seconds, Billy unsnapped his seat belt and reached for the door handle. I put my hand on his shoulder and he batted my arm away. "I know the time I spent with Corey can't hold a candle to the time you two spent together," he said, his voice trembling. "But I saw someone you refuse to see, Adam.

  He's full of rage and convinced it's something else. Martin Cale can tell you the rest."

  Before I could say another word, he had gotten out and slammed the gate behind him.

  "He really wants you to meet with Martin Cale, doesn't he?" Jimmy asked. I was pacing back and forth in my apartment, the poster of Dionysus leering at me.

  "Yes."

  "The restaurant," Jimmy said. "You think Billy picked it just because you slept with the host while you blacked out."

  "I have no idea," I said. "And if I asked Billy about it, I'd get a ten-minute response that evaded the question."

  "But Billy basically confirmed that Corey was blackmailing him."

  "Yes."

  "Don't meet with him again," Jimmy said firmly.

  "Fine with me," I said, startled by this sudden about-face.

  I counted long seconds while Jimmy said nothing on the other end of the phone. Something about my conversation with Billy was bothering him, and he didn't feel like sharing it with me. "I want something real on this guy," he said. "Something that didn't come out of his mouth."

  "I can try to find some witnesses to this meeting he had with Corey. It shouldn't be hard.

  There was a party going on
."

  "I doubt the two of them got into it in front of the other guests, but go ahead."

  "There's another thing," I said. "Billy went to a famous prep school back in New York called Rappaport. He told me he had an affair with one of his English teachers."

  "When did Billy tell you this?"

  "The first night I was out asking around about Daniel Brady. I told him I'd gone to college with some of his classmates, and he asked me if they mentioned the guy who had slept with his English teacher."

  "So this affair wasn't a secret?" Jimmy asked.

  "Apparently not. But Billy said he had no hard feelings about the relationship."

  "I wonder if the English teacher feels the same way," he said.

  "You want me to find out?"

  "I'll look into it first," he said. "Tomorrow I want you to retrace some of Linda Walsh's footsteps. Her file doesn't exactly set my heart racing. But I need you to verify that restaurant manager's story about firing Terrance Davidson."

  I sat on my response.

  "What?" he finally asked.

  "Nothing," I said. "It just feels like a demotion." When he didn't answer, I decided to voice the worry gnawing on me since the ride home. "I went too far, didn't I? Asking Billy if Corey blackmailed him."

  For a moment he said nothing, and I assumed that Jimmy agreed with me. "Little man, tonight Billy Hatfill tried to humiliate you and insult you, and you didn't let him do either. He also accused you of having an unnatural obsession with him when it's patently obvious that the opposite is the case. On top of all that, he's withholding information about the disappearance of a man you had deep feelings for. Frankly, I think the fact that you didn't spring across the table and wring his neck is deserving of a Purple Heart."

  I was too surprised to speak.

  "You are more cut out for this than you think you are," he said. "But you're not a reporter.

  You're something else."

  "What?"

  "I'm not sure," he said. "I'm leaning toward infection."

  "That's flattering."

  "It is," he said. "Look at who you've infected."