The Last Thing I Saw

by Richard Stevenson

  “It must be awful not knowing,” I said. “I’m going to talk about him as if he’s alive, which he may well be, and then hope I can help the truth emerge soon.”

  “Okay. Good, Donald. You bet. I’ll try to do the same.”

  “Susan, isn’t your son too young to know Lambert, Hendricks and Ross? You mean the be-bop vocal jazz trio of the fifties and sixties? My elderly Uncle Dick was a big fan of theirs.”

  “The father of a high school classmate had some of their records, and Eddie heard one one time, and he came home and said he just heard the sound of the way he wanted to live his life. It was the sound of bounce and joy and controlled grief and complicated intensity. We got hold of a couple of old vinyl discs, and that sound filled the house for weeks. It drove us all a little batty. Marilyn prefers Barry Manilow, and she spent a lot of that time going around the house wearing earplugs.”

  “I enjoy them both, but, no, those two musical worlds don’t mix.”

  “When Eddie was in law school,” she said, brightening again, “he had a friend, Elaine Lambert, and another friend, Leo Ross. Eddie joked that he wanted them to set up a law firm after graduation and find another lawyer named Hendricks to join them in Lambert, Hendricks and Ross. They would harmonize their opening statements to juries and do their closing arguments in alternating scat vocals.”

  “This is not the Harvard Law School of Alan Dershowitz, but I like the sound of it.”

  “I don’t think Harvard thought of itself that way either, but Eddie did well in the actual Harvard. He was on the Law Review just ten years after Obama. Although he never imagined himself practicing law. He was a natural writer who wanted more than anything to make his career in journalism and books, but he loved both the nuts and bolts of the law and the big constitutional questions. And he shared his father’s sense of outrage over powerful people using the law or skirting it to hurt or cheat weaker members of society. It’s the main thing Herb and Eddie had in common, that indignation, and they both so respected each other that it was just devastating for Eddie when Herb died. It’ll be ten years next month. Stomach cancer, which was bad. Really, really bad.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “My husband was only fifty-six. His own reaction to the diagnosis when he got it was stunned disbelief. As we all do until it happens to us, he thought dying so young was something that happened to other people. Interestingly, though, Eddie wasn’t surprised at all. He was grief-stricken and angry over the loss of his hero and pal, yes, but he wasn’t surprised. As a journalist, he’d seen so many examples of how life can be unfair. I suppose in your type of work, Donald, you see this, too—good people cut down in the prime of life.”

  “My cases are mostly more mundane than life and death. People suspected of stealing from employers, industrial espionage, snooping on wayward spouses or politicians. But it’s true that in my career I’ve also seen good people die too young, violently or otherwise. And I lived through the AIDS plague years. Plenty of injustice there. So, no, unfairness never surprises me anymore.”

  “One of the things I love about my business—which I started after Herb died—is seeing people marking happy milestones in their lives. These events—especially weddings—ritualize the way we try to make the most of the time we’ve got with one another while we’ve still got it. People at these rituals are saying, yes, death and loss are inevitable, but for now, isn’t life just so lovely?”

  “It’s true. People are wonderfully wise and brave to delude themselves into thinking it’s all going to go on quite a while longer.”

  “I’ve done a number of gay weddings since it was legalized in New York. I love it. I’m so proud to be part of history, and so are the brides and brides and grooms and grooms. These are among the most joyous events I’ve ever catered.” Again, she tried hard to smile. “I would love to have catered Eddie’s wedding. I would also love to have had the day off and just let somebody else worry about whether or not the cake was going to melt onto the floor of the delivery van or if the tables and chairs on the lawn might sink into the septic field. I think I would have insisted on running the show—I’m not sure I know how not to. But now all that seems unlikely, doesn’t it?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know enough yet to have an opinion.”

  “Well, okay. Maybe you don’t. And I’m trying hard to be delusional myself and avoid accepting the truth of what seems to have happened.”

  “In the event that Eddie turns up safe and sound—and let’s hope that’s the way it goes—might he marry Bryan Kim? Is that the wedding you imagined Eddie having?”

  She thought about this. “At one point I did. But later less so. I’m not sure I can answer that question. Whenever I fantasized about Eddie’s wedding, the other groom I pictured was always a little bit hazy.”

  “You mentioned that Bryan had baggage. What kind of baggage?”

  She paused again and sipped her coffee. “I hesitate to talk about this. I don’t want to be unfair to Bryan.”

  “I know nothing about him, so you can just tell me what you know and what you think you know. Anyway, I’ll meet him and form my own opinion.”

  “Bryan is a charmer,” she said. “Good-looking and bright and fun. He’s a reporter on Channel Six in Boston. Eddie says he’s one of the few local TV news people you can really respect. He’s always pushing his editors to do real digging about important state issues and not just the celebrity gossip and fluff that local stations tend to fall back on. Eddie had a crush on Bryan even before he actually met him. Bryan was—and is—Mister Local-Station-Hot-Number in gay Boston, Eddie told me. Then they met and got involved—Bryan was aware of Eddie’s work at the Globe and had admired him, too—and after a while Bryan moved in with Eddie, and they had a wonderful five or six months together. And then it all came out.”

  “What did?”

  “Bryan came home from work one night and said he was sorry but that it was over between them and he was moving out that night. Eddie was flabbergasted. He said he had seen no clue that anything was wrong between them. Bryan would only say over and over that it just wasn’t working. Eddie tried to get him to be more specific—or to offer any specifics at all—but Bryan was evasive and said he was surprised that Eddie wasn’t feeling the same thing. Eddie was so stunned he thought he might be hallucinating. But Bryan actually packed up some clothes and left the apartment at one thirty in the morning.”

  “Eddie must have been reeling. But you said that it all came out—that was the term you used. What was it all?”

  She took a deep breath. “Here’s the thing. A friend told Eddie a few days later he’d heard that Bryan had done this before. Not once but many times. Five or six, anyway.”

  “Eddie hadn’t heard about this pattern before? And Bryan was some kind of local TV-news celeb?”

  “Bryan had come up to Boston from Providence, and it was down in Rhode Island that he’d gotten a reputation for getting men to fall for him and then abruptly dumping them after a couple of months. Eddie was just his first Boston dumpee.”

  “Nice guy.”

  “We’ve all known commitment-phobes. Straight or gay, that’s a known phenomenon, and people who are like that either get over it or they don’t, and the people who fall for commitment-phobes either get used to it or they say no thanks and move on. But this seemed to be more than that. It was passive-aggressive, maybe even calculated to hurt the other person.”

  “This was Eddie’s take on Bryan?”

  “No, it was mine. Eddie just thought he must have a blind spot or something. Then after Eddie’s pot book came out and made a splash and he was on CNN and Fox and MSNBC, suddenly Bryan showed up again. I wondered if Bryan was maybe wanting to use Eddie’s media connections to boost his career. But Bryan was apologetic about ditching Eddie and said he’d been in therapy and was learning to value what was really important in life, and he said he’d like to try it again with Eddie, pledging his love and devotion and of course flashing that smile and I
suppose other assets he had at his disposal. I have to admit, I always found Bryan extremely attractive.”

  “So they got back together?”

  “Not right away. Eddie was wary, having been so badly hurt by the abrupt breakup. Sometimes they went places together and I suppose slept together, but they lived separately. Bryan had kept his own apartment—and of course now I can see why. Eddie was feeling his way back into the relationship and trying to gauge whether or not he could really trust Bryan. He’d heard the Providence stories, so he was being careful. Eddie’s connections did actually lead to some discussions Bryan had with a network about doing some work for them from Boston. But then…well, then Eddie disappeared.”

  “Was Bryan’s possible job with one of the gay networks?”

  “Oh no, it was CNN or MSNBC or something serious. Eddie and Bryan both thought the gay networks were worthless except for one show they liked. Ron Paul’s Drag Race, I think it was called, about drag queens.”

  “RuPaul, not Ron.”

  “Eddie was even working on a book about how bad he thought American gay media had become.”

  “Yes, Marva Beers described it to me.”

  “One reason Eddie was pleased to be spending more time with Bryan again was, Bryan had friends at Hey Look Media and they knew all kinds of dirt they were going to be feeding to Eddie. In fact, it was those people Eddie was going to interview right around the time he disappeared. Might they be people you’ll want to question about what’s happened to Eddie?”

  I said I thought they might.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Boston Globe was housed in an Eisenhower-moderne sprawling brick building between an expressway and a Catholic high school a few miles south of downtown. I’d read that like all big-city papers, the Globe had barely staved off financial ruin in recent years by dumping personnel and looking borderline anorexic. It wasn’t a good sign that the dour geezer behind a reception desk in the front lobby was reading The Herald, the respectably liberal Globe’s scrappy right-wing competitor. I introduced myself, and the security man took time out from his Red Sox spring-training studies to phone Aldo Fino, Eddie Wenske’s colleague on the Spotlight Team, the paper’s famous investigative unit. Fino soon appeared and led me through a security gate and down a maze of subterranean corridors. I imagined the hectic newsroom up above somewhere, but the investigative unit seemed to have been stashed away down in the grottos where the Globe stored the bones of its saints.

  Of whom there were many, including dozens of Pulitzer Prize winners. That included Eddie Wenske, who appeared in a number of the award-ceremony group photos behind Fino’s cluttered desk. Two other men were intent at their computers in the digitalized calm, and an editor sat looking thoughtful behind a glass partition. Fino, neatly turned out but tieless, had a black scraggly beard, an impressive Roman snoot and large patient black eyes behind a pair of narrow spectacles.

  “Donald,” he said, “I was glad to hear that you’re working on Eddie’s disappearance. The cops seem to have lost interest, and here at the paper we haven’t been any help at all—not that we haven’t tried. So, good for you and good for Susan Wenske for hiring you.”

  “You must have your own sources in Boston’s seamier circles. I figured you would have exploited them as well as you could trying to find Eddie.”

  “Oh, we did. But our non-law-enforcement sources tend to be criminals or acquaintances of criminals of a higher-toned sort than the types that might actually make somebody physically disappear. They’re business people and public officials and people on the periphery of businessmen and public officials, and of course most of our sources have been developed around particular stories we’ve worked on or are working on. We don’t have an army of snitches and undercover types at our disposal the way the police do. But we did try to determine if Eddie’s disappearance might have had something to do with the marijuana stories he did for the paper and then the book he wrote using some of the same material. Have you read Weed Wars?”

  “I have. It’s unnerving.”

  “Pot is such a nice drug—so much easier on the digestive system than Flying Dog pale ale—but its production and marketing can be ugly, and a lot of bad people are involved in the trade. There was a straight line between our stories and a number of prosecutions, and there were even more prosecutions, especially of higher ups, triggered by Weed Wars. So naturally when Eddie disappeared, we all thought, oh shit. We’ve made a lot of people mad over the years—the federal and state prisons are well populated with miscreants the paper first exposed—but up until now none of these people or their friends has ever come after a Globe reporter physically. Lots of threats of lawsuits and lots of curses and rude names, but that’s all.”

  “And you thought Eddie might be the first reporter to be…I hate to use the word killed.”

  Fino nodded and looked grim. “That occurred to us all. Killed, yeah. Especially after a month or so. At first we thought he’d eventually turn up safe and sound. Eddie always liked undercover work. He told me once that it comes naturally to gay people, who in their early lives—or throughout their lives in many cases—spend a lot of time pretending to be something they aren’t. They develop a knack for camouflage.”

  “I know about this,” I said, “from personal experience.”

  If Fino made a mental note of this, he didn’t let on. “Eddie said that if he hadn’t been a writer, he might have been a spy working under deep cover somewhere. The problem with that was, he said, he’d have trouble deciding which intelligence service to work for in which country. I don’t think he approved of any of them.”

  “This was journalism’s gain.”

  “It was. Eddie was…I hate to keep saying was. He was or is a talented, principled, thoughtful, and indefatigable ferret of a reporter.”

  “You must have been disappointed when he left the paper.”

  “We all were. But he felt hemmed in here, and he really wanted to write books. And when the company went through one of its periodic cost-cutting spasms and offered buyouts to employees with contracts, Eddie saw it as an opportunity and went his own way. He was the youngest Globe reporter to take a buyout, and the higher-ups wondered if they hadn’t made a mistake in offering deals to people who were in the prime of their careers. Of course, a lot of people weren’t offered anything at all. They were just shit-canned and told to clean out their desks and turn in their BlackBerries. The journalism schools these days, if they were connected to the real world, would offer a course called Turn-in-Your-BlackBerry 101.”

  “By now, I guess, you don’t think Eddie has just gone undercover.”

  “Not after nearly two months, no. He would have informed certain people of what he was doing—or at least let them know he’d be out of touch. He’d tell his mother, his friend Bryan, his agent, a number of other people. And he’d tell me. After he left the paper, Eddie and I talked on the phone at least once a week, and we tried to meet for dinner or drinks every month or so. But after the end of January, nothing. No word. I called around and it just got weirder and weirder that nobody knew where Eddie was or what had become of him. That’s when I suggested to Bryan that he call the cops, and he did.”

  “And they took the disappearance seriously?”

  “It was pro forma at first, but when at my suggestion they looked at his reporting history—especially his drug pieces here and then Weed Wars—after that they decided, oh yeah, maybe somebody needs to take a closer look at this. I know both city and DEA people, and I accept their word that they tried to find out if some psycho pot dealer had done a revenge killing on a reporter. They didn’t turn up anything at all—though of course they admit that they can’t know everything that goes on in that murky world.”

  “So Bryan Kim filed the original missing-person report. I take it you know Bryan.”

  “Oh sure. My wife Lorna and I went to concerts and plays at the ART with Eddie and Bryan. I know they had their ups and downs, but I’ve always liked Bryan despite t
he way he drove Eddie crazy sometimes.”

  “Crazy in what way?”

  “Professionally the guy is solid. When Channel Six does any original reporting at all on matters of substance, you can bet Bryan is behind it. But personally he’s unreliable. It’s as if he has two personalities. He once walked out on Eddie for no reason at all—or none he was willing to talk about. Eddie was just flummoxed and it really hurt him. Then he found out that Bryan had a history of abrupt boyfriend dumping down in Providence. They’d been gradually getting back together before Eddie went missing, but Eddie was taking it a step at a time, and I didn’t encourage him to re-connect with Bryan. Why risk getting fucked over in that painful way a second time?”

  “It does sound as if Wenske could have done better than Bryan Kim.”

  “That’s what Lorna always said. For somebody as decent and honest as Eddie, why Bryan? Eddie had had some other boyfriends over the years that seemed less fucked up, but with at least two of those that I know of it was Eddie who was the problem. He told me that, and I suppose it was true. He’d get into some story he was working on, and that was where his mind would be for weeks at a time. Or he’d go undercover the way he did with Weed Wars and be out of touch for days or weeks. After a young dancer broke up with Eddie and told him he needed somebody a lot more available than Eddie was, Eddie told me he knew he was not good boyfriend material and this was always going to be true and he was afraid there was nothing he could do about it. It’s a shame, because Eddie is such a good friend that it’s hard to imagine him not being a good companion and lover. Bryan never had any complaints about Eddie’s demanding work life. His life at Channel Six made for its own complications. I’m biased, of course, but my take on all this is, Eddie is possibly a little too dedicated to his profession, yes, but Bryan was just a prick.”