The Last Thing I Saw

by Richard Stevenson

  Table of Contents

  THE LAST THING I SAW

  blurb

  copyright

  quote

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Trademarks Acknowledgment

  MLR PRESS AUTHORS

  GLBT RESOURCES

  THE LAST THING I SAW

  A Donald Strachey Mystery

  RICHARD STEVENSON

  mlrpress

  www.mlrpress.com

  Eddie Wenske has gone missing. A popular investigative reporter renowned for both his gay-coming-out memoir and a frightening book on drug cartels, Wenske vanishes while investigating a gay media conglomerate with a controversial owner and dodgy business practices. Albany PI Don Strachey’s perilous search for Wenske takes him to Boston and to New York City, and finally to California and a media world that’s as deadly as it is unglamorous. In The Last Thing I Saw, Strachey fends off hired killers, but can he survive Hey Look Media?

  “Entertaining and delectably complex.”

  The Washington Post on Red White Black and Blue, winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Mystery of 2011

  “As a page-turner, it couldn’t be better.”

  EDGE New England on Red White Black and Blue

  “As always with the Strachey novels, the murder and mayhem take a back seat to the keen social criticism and defiant wit of our detective.”

  Maureen Corrigan of NPR, naming Death Vows one of the top five mysteries of 2008

  “As much travel memoir as mystery, this tenth in a series spanning three decades is supremely satisfying as both.”

  Bookmarks on The 38 Million Dollar Smile

  “Lively, skillful…highly recommended.”

  The New York Times on On the Other Hand, Death

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright 2012 by Richard Stevenson

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Published by

  MLR Press, LLC

  3052 Gaines Waterport Rd.

  Albion, NY 14411

  Visit ManLoveRomance Press, LLC on the Internet:

  www.mlrpress.com

  Cover Art by Deana Jamroz

  Editing by Kris Jacen

  Print format ISBN# 978-1-60820-706-0

  ebook format ISBN#978-1-60820-707-2

  Issued 2012

  This book is licensed to the original purchaser only. Duplication or distribution via any means is illegal and a violation of International Copyright Law, subject to criminal prosecution and upon conviction, fines and/or imprisonment. This eBook cannot be legally loaned or given to others. No part of this eBook can be shared or reproduced without the express permission of the publisher.

  “Television is a medium because anything well done is rare.”

  Fred Allen, in 1950

  CHAPTER ONE

  “I told him not to write that book. If Eddie had listened to me and not written that stupid marijuana book and gotten mixed up with those ridiculous criminals, I’m sure he’d be alive today. We wouldn’t even be having this conversation, Donald. In fact, Eddie should never have left the Globe, is what he shouldn’t have done. Kept his newspaper job in Boston and written some nausea-inducing child-molester-priest book, even if a couple of other ones were already out there. But, no, he said, oh no, he just had to do that pot book. It was something about, when he was in college Eddie was a pothead himself and he thought it was so totally innocent. And then he found out what all was behind the mellowness, on up the line and at the higher levels—the sociopaths and violent people and what have you. At least I think that’s what was going on. How would I really know, he never really explained it to me, I’m only his goddamn agent!”

  I said, “What makes you think Eddie is dead, Marva? His mother in Albany just described him as missing. Uncharacteristically out of touch for a couple of months, and that’s why she hired me.”

  “Have you read the book?”

  “No.”

  “Read it. Then you’ll know that they killed him.”

  “They?”

  “Read the book. Here. It’s what they do to people who cross them.”

  Marva Beers heaved herself up out of her office chair, stretched up, and took down a trade paperback book from one of the upper shelves next to her desk. She teetered and then caught herself, a good one-eighty in a pretty Mayan huapili, a heap of fluffy gray hair flopping in synch with her bosoms. She smelled faintly of hyacinth with a distant undertone of chardonnay. Behind her was an open window looking down on Hudson Street, and a friendly warm breeze, unusual for late March in New York, blew in and rattled the papers on the literary agent’s desk.

  I recognized most of the authors’ names on the spines of the other titles on the shelves, all books, I assumed, by Beers’s other clients. Most were well known gay-lit figures, like the now missing Edward Wenske, whose 1995 memoir of coming out in the eighth grade in the not very enlightened Albany suburb of East Greenbush had won awards and racked up sales at the tail end of the post-Stonewall gay publishing boom. The book Beers handed me was not of that type. Against a marijuana leaf with blood dripping down it was the title Weed Wars: the Blood and Gore Behind America’s Nice Habit.

  “Well, did you at least read Eddie’s memoir?” Beers asked me. “I thought somebody in your line of work would have done a little more homework before showing up here and taking up my time.”

  “I read Notes from the Bush when it came out. Nearly everybody in gay Albany and literary straight Albany has read it. It’s wonderful.”

  “It’s a classic, and one of the sweetest books by a highly intelligent person I’ve ever read, which is surprising what with people as brainy as Eddie sometimes being not all that sweet. I received the manuscript on a Friday—a friend at the Albany Times Union told me I had to look at it—and I read it over the weekend. I cried and I laughed and I cried. On Monday I sent it to six editors and said I was setting up an auction for the following week. I had five decent bids come in, and the editor who never bothered to bid was fired around the time the book came out. I doubt if there’s a connection, but there should have been. Notes is still in print, and I’ve got over four K in royalties for Eddie, which I wish I knew what the hell to do with. Estelle, my bookkeeper, keeps ragging me, like that’s more important, her accounts being tidy, than Eddie probably shoved through a wood chipper on Cape Cod somewhere and dumped in a swamp.”

/>   “When was he last in touch with you?” I asked.

  “Not since the last weekend in January. What’s that? Not quite two months.”

  “That’s when his mom last heard from him, too.”

  “I got back from Key West, and we were going to have dinner. He never called and he never showed. I called his cell, and nothing. I called Bryan, his ex, up in Boston, and he hadn’t heard anything either, and they’d started talking again recently, trying to patch it up, I think. Eddie was supposed to be in the city doing research for the new book, but Craig Palmer, who he usually stays with, said he hadn’t shown up there either. We were all just perplexed, and then we got scared. We knew he’d had threats after the pot book came out last year. The narcs in Boston used the book to figure out the people running some big New England network, and they warned Eddie they heard he’d better watch his back.”

  “You’d think pot dealers would be laid back. But I’ve also heard bad things about the people who are the big operators. It’s only the users who are giggly or serene.”

  “It’s a hundred billion dollar industry that’s illegal, so naturally unsavory types are going to move in. Just read the goddamn book, okay? You’ll see what I mean. Care for a Necco wafer?”

  “Sure. Thanks. White or green?”

  She handed me the pack and I took the one on the end, pink, good enough.

  “When I quit smoking in ’93,” Beers said, “I bought a pack of these things to get me through the week, and lo these many years later, here I am. But I’m not diabetic. Yet. In Boston one time, Eddie took me over to the Necco factory in Cambridge, the New England Confectionary Company, where the name comes from. That’s gone now—they moved to some distant suburb somewhere, though at least not to Hanoi.”

  “When I gave up my beloved cigarettes,” I said, “it was carrot sticks. But that didn’t last long. Pretty soon it was cheeseburgers, and then I just had to get a grip.”

  “You look quite fit, Donald. Gay men don’t let themselves go the way we Sapphics sometimes do. I like to think it’s because we have more important things to think about, but I’m not a hundred percent sure that that’s it.”

  “So who notified the police that Eddie was missing?”

  “Bryan called the Boston cops after a week of asking around and getting more and more frantic. At first they were yada yada yada, just be patient, he’ll turn up, the way cops are trained to talk. And then Bryan finally got hold of somebody who’d read the book. That guy spoke to the feds, and then they all changed their tune. They agreed that maybe Eddie pissed off the wrong people and his disappearance was no coincidence. Supposedly they sent word out, asking all their people on the street if they knew anything about dealers teaching a rat journalist a lesson, but nothing came back. Likewise with the feds, who leaned on the unindicted co-conspirators who’d helped them nail the tycoons they tracked down using clues from Eddie’s book. After a couple of months, what the men in blue concluded was, it was not the drug people who had made Eddie vanish. This conclusion, of course, was based on their failure to establish the obvious and then do something about it. They couldn’t admit to being fuck-ups, so they said, oh, it has to be something else, what can we do?”

  I looked at the photo of Wenske on the back cover of Weed Wars. He was a bright-faced man of forty or so, with a dimpled chin, a crooked smile, an ample unkempt mane, and attentive hazel eyes. The jacket copy said Wenske was a graduate of both Harvard College and Harvard Law School and had worked as a journalist at The Concord Monitor and The Boston Globe. He had been part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team that exposed the Catholic priest pedophile cover-ups in 2002. His book before Weed Wars was a joint effort with two other reporters on a kick-back scandal among the leadership in the Massachusetts House of Representatives.

  I said, “Wenske seems to have made his reputation as an investigative reporter. There must be a lot of people who would have liked to be rid of him.”

  “You better believe it. Eddie told me stories. Even before Weed Wars there were plenty of people in Boston who loathed him. But they were generally white collar types. Or clerical collar. Somehow I don’t think the archdiocese put out a contract on a reporter. In the fourteenth century they might have, but not these days.”

  “It’s interesting,” I said, “that Wenske made a splash with his gay memoir but never wrote again mainly for a gay readership.”

  “Prior to the new book, the one he was researching, that’s true. The switch was partly economics. There was the bull market of the eighties and into the nineties, and then all the air went out of gay publishing, if you’ll pardon my mixed metaphor.”

  “The image of a deflating bull gets the point across.”

  “Anyway, criminality was what was grabbing Eddie, turning him on. His father had been a New York State assistant attorney general who specialized in public corruption, and Eddie was heading in that direction himself until he realized that what he really wanted to do was write. Notes from the Bush was something he had to get off his chest—lucky us—and then he was free to go out and devote his life to exposing powerful types who were ripping people off. It’s just as well, because, as I say, gay publishing is all but pffffttt. The big houses don’t do much anymore, and with the small houses that have taken up the slack, writers had better not quit their day jobs. It’s a nice hobby and not much more.”

  I noted the books on the shelves next to Beers and said, “Most of your authors are gay people writing gay books. Somebody’s publishing them. Somebody’s reading them.”

  She sniffed. “Donald, honey, yes, some gay people still do read actual books, not just porn catalogs and tweets. But there’s not a book up there that received an advance of more than seven thousand dollars. Most of those titles were done by small houses that paid no advance at all. I suppose you’re wondering, how the hell do I pay the rent? Well, dear, if you must know, Doctor Beers, my ex, Mister Root Canal of New Rochelle, pays the freight here on posh Hudson Street. For me, this business is not much more than a labor of love—or, in these grim times, let’s just say labor of like. Or labor of what the fuck else am I gonna do?”

  “But Wenske’s pot book sold okay?”

  “It did. It was nicely reviewed in The Times, the Globe, and The Washington Post, and Eddie did the cable talk show circuit, and that juiced up sales. It’s a usefully controversial book. The people who think pot should be legalized held Weed Wars up as evidence that decriminalizing the trade will drive the goons and psychos out of the business. And of course the war-on-drugs law enforcement types used it to lobby for harsher laws and more funding for themselves. Eddie favored the former approach, as you’ll see, Donald, when you take the trouble to read the book.”

  “I’ll read it on the train back to Albany.”

  “That train must be even slower than I remember it.”

  “When it comes to AMTRAK, I’m always careful to bring something along to entertain myself.”

  “Well, you won’t be entertained by Weed Wars. You’ll be frightened and disgusted. And you’ll see why I’m so sure that something…something just horrible has happened to dear, stout-hearted Eddie Wenske.” Her voice faltered, and she shook her head and her eyes were wet.

  “God, why couldn’t Eddie have let well enough alone? He did this nice job at the Globe with his series on pot dealers using a poor people’s health clinic as a distribution center, and how the community group that ran the place got into a war with the dealers. But that’s when he realized how ruthless the dealers were, and he started digging and came up with the material for the book. He’d already been warned a number of times to back off, and I told him myself, don’t mess with those people, it’s a hopeless societal situation—the thugs on one side, the Puritanism and hypocrisy on the other side, the billions in profits, and all these entrenched habits you can’t fight. But he was fascinated and he was shocked, and he thought it was an important and dramatic story about American society. Which of course it is.”

  “I und
erstand that the big cartels are vicious, but I’m surprised about the mid-level people. Especially with weed, that benign product that in any sane society would be available at Stop & Shop. It’s not coke or heroin, or crystal meth, which makes users crazy.”

  “Ron Paul has the right idea. Just legalize it all and let people make their own choices.”

  “It’s a shame,” I said, “that Ron also appears to believe that people should be left alone to take out their own tonsils and build their own roads.”

  “Anyway, Eddie had moved on. That was good. He wasn’t about to devote his life to futzing around with the drug cartels. Not that this new project he was working on was going to set the publishing world on fire. I certainly wasn’t going to be setting up any auctions on that one. I have to say, I told him it was going to be borrring. But Eddie had this hair up his ass on gay media, and as usual he had his reasons, and I was basically instructed to get with the program, that that was the way it was going to be.”

  “Gay media? A book on gay media?”

  She popped another Necco wafer, a brown one this time. “Eddie had some filmmaker friends who’d been screwed by a gay TV network, Hey Look Media. Skeevy people run it who are cynical and cheap. They treat their own employees like crap, and they don’t pay people who do contract work for them. Half the writers and filmmakers in New York and LA are suing HLM for money owed. Eddie started hearing all these ugly stories about the company, and he thought, oh, well, maybe he’d do a magazine piece about these skuzzy creeps. I mean, is this what gay culture in America has come to? But then he found out that HLM itself had bought up most of the major organs of the gay press, both print and online, and of course no editor is going to do a story on how rotten their own bosses are.”

  “I’ve seen some of Hey Look’s programming. It’s mostly pretty shoddy.”

  “Shoddy and dumb. And the other gay network, Brand Gay, isn’t much better. You’d never know from these two channels that some of the smartest and most creative people in the country are gay. It’s all just so…lame. Clunky gay vampire series, cheesy private eye movies that look like they were made for about a dollar-eighty-five, and reality shows featuring supposedly glamorous gay men who have bronze asses, tiny IQs and the emotional development of eleven-year-old girls.”