Light Before Day (14 page)

bears his first name, who told police that Clamp had lived with him since the

younger man's arrival in Los Angeles two years earlier. When police questioned

Bodwell at his restaurant, activists alerted reporters, and television cameras

captured a dozen people protesting what they called official reluctance to name

Bodwell a suspect in the case.

Leo Bodwell declined to be interviewed for this article, but after being questioned

by police, he issued a detailed statement to reporters in which he insisted that he

and Clamp did not have a sexual relationship and he knew nothing of the missing

man's whereabouts. According to Bodwell, the two met online in a popular gay chat

room when Clamp was still living with his parents in Knoxville, Tennessee. Bodwell

declared he took Clamp in after his parents learned he was gay and ejected him from

the house. Clamp stayed in his guesthouse, Bodwell said. "Our relationship was

distant but cordial," he said in his statement, saying that Clamp grew distant when the older man expressed concerns about his work in the sex industry.

For many West Hollywood residents, the strange case of Ben Clamp seems eerily

similar to the mysterious disappearances of two other young gay men whose faces

never appeared on the evening news.

Six months before Clamp's June disappearance, Terrance Davidson failed to meet

a group of his friends at Rage, a popular West Hollywood nightclub. After more than

a week of unreturned phone calls, those same friends contacted Davidson's parents

in West Virginia and learned that there had been no contact between the young man

and his family after he disclosed his sexuality to his parents on Christmas Eve. A

missing persons report was filed, and friends posted flyers bearing Davidson's

picture on telephone poles and in storefront windows along Santa Monica

Boulevard.

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.

C H A P T E R 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."