The Last Thing I Saw

by Richard Stevenson

  “Yeah, both sides running for their lives. My relatives might have been among them,” Anastos said. “But that was then and this is Ninth Avenue. Thank God.”

  “Or Allah,” Beers said.

  “I brought Eddie in here one time,” Anastos said. “He loved it. Boston—you know, it’s not renowned for its culinary variety.”

  Beers snorted. “Their idea of ethnic food is cabbage. I wouldn’t set foot in the place.”

  I asked Anastos when she last spoke with Wenske.

  “Just before Christmas we talked on the phone. He’d been to L.A. and was back in Boston, and I was looking for an update on the gay-media piece and when I might get a look at something. You know, I don’t remember the conversation all that clearly. I mean, I had no idea it would be the last time I spoke with him. He seemed fine at the time. He was as excited about the project as he’d been when he first pitched it. And he was just as disgusted, I might add. Eddie might be a little more idealistic about gay businesses than a firm grip on reality calls for. I mean, Karl Marx never declared, ‘We must overthrow all the rotten capitalists except for those nice gay boys.’”

  I asked Anastos if Wenske’s research concentrated on Hey Look Media or if there were other avenues that he mentioned.

  “It was mainly HLM, he said, because they had bought up practically everything—television, magazines, a book publisher, online venues. He said the company called it cross-platforming. That is, sharing staff and overhead and promoting all of the company’s products in each of the company’s several venues. Each outlet was a cross-platform gay-media portal, so-called. Or, as one of Eddie’s embittered sources out there liked to refer to it, a cross-platform gay media cornhole.”

  “He had multiple sources at Hey Look in L.A.?”

  “He’d developed quite a few apparently. Most were former employees of the company who had been fired or quit under contentious circumstances. And there were two sources in particular, he said, who were giving him documents and providing the most incriminating material. They were people still working deep inside the company, was my impression. People with access to the most sensitive stuff. Eddie said it was a real bonanza, and his biggest problem was going to be picking and choosing what to concentrate on in the piece for me. The rest of it he’d use later when he wrote the gay-media book.”

  “The book that wasn’t going to make any of us rich,” Beers said. “But that Eddie had to write to save gay America from homo Mammon.”

  “Marva, I actually share his outrage,” Anastos said. “It’s one thing for gay men—and yes, it is men we’re talking about here—it’s one thing for a couple of gay men to control, say, the recreational vacuum penis pump industry. But when there’s a near monopoly on gay news and arts and entertainment, that has to be bad for the country’s gay social health.”

  Beers was looking queasy. “What’s a recreational vacuum penis pump?”

  “Donald, maybe you can explain that to my old friend here. I’ll just step outside.”

  Beers said, “Never mind, dear.”

  I said, “Gerri, you said these main sources of Wenske’s were providing material that was…the word you used was incriminating. Literally incriminating?”

  “That was my impression.”

  “Was it financial or other types of criminal activity?”

  “I think at least partly financial. I know a friend of Eddie’s in L.A. had put Eddie in touch with a former L.A. Times financial writer to gather background material. Eddie mentioned that it was helpful that he’d gone to law school but an apprenticeship on Wall Street might have been even more helpful.”

  “Was the L.A. Times friend a guy named Paul Delaney?”

  “That rings a bell.”

  “He’d been Eddie’s first editor at The Boston Globe and was a hero of his.”

  “That’s the guy, I think.”

  “Your conversation with Wenske was just before Christmas?”

  “Yes, I know he said Bryan, his on-again-off-again boyfriend, was spending Christmas with his parents in Seattle, and Eddie was going to Albany to be with his mom for a few days. Then he said he’d be back in Boston to go over the material he had and start organizing it. He planned on spending New Year’s with Bryan, and I assume he did. You could ask Bryan about that.”

  Beers stiffened. “Oh.”

  “There’s bad news about Bryan,” I said.

  “Gerri, it was in the Times. When I left you a message, I didn’t mention it because I thought you’d seen it.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  I said, “Bryan was stabbed to death in his Boston apartment on Saturday a few hours before I was to have met him for dinner.”

  Anastos took her glasses off and stared at Beers. “That’s awful. Oh God. Oh no.”

  “I’m sorry to say it’s true.”

  “I mean—if you care deeply about Eddie and about finding him alive and well somehow—this is not what you want to hear.”

  I said no, it wasn’t. I described to Anastos the circumstances of Kim’s murder and said the Boston police were sure to bring all kinds of resources to bear in this case involving a well-known local television personage.

  She said, “This is a total mind-fuck. I mean, what do you think is going on here?”

  “I don’t know, but there’s a Hey Look Media guy from their New York office who went up to Boston on Saturday to see Kim—this is the day he was killed—and maybe to see me. And now he might be missing too. So, yeah, there does seem to be something…going on.”

  Anastos looked around for her drink, which hadn’t arrived yet. “I don’t know what to think. I have to say, I began to be afraid that the drug cartels had gotten Eddie. Their history of ruthlessness is obvious. But—what? A homicidal TV cable channel that hardly anybody watches? That’s just totally weird. I know—HLM is a lot more than that. But still. I’m perplexed.”

  Now the waitress arrived with the whiskey sour, and Anastos went for it.

  I said, “I have to ask both of you something that might sound odd, but here goes. Both Wenske’s mother and his sister told me they think Eddie had some kind of secret life, was the way they put it. Or even some dark side, so-called. Any idea what they might have been talking about?”

  They both gave me a look.

  “That seems off,” Anastos said.

  “I’m dubious,” Beers said. “It sounds totally nuts.”

  “What gave them that idea?” Anastos asked.

  “Sometimes Eddie went out late at night in Boston and then lied to his sister about where he’d been. She lived with him for a while when she was going through a divorce.”

  Beers looked relieved. “Getting laid, of course. Boys will be boys. No mystery there. I mean, please.”

  “That’d be my guess too,” Anastos said. “Was this while Bryan was out of the picture? It sounds to me as if Eddie was dating somebody who got off from work late. A bartender? Another reporter? What about somebody at the Globe?”

  “His sister says no. He always told her who he was dating. He would not have been secretive about that, she insists.”

  “Maybe he was dating a person he was embarrassed to mention to his family. A Mormon or something.”

  “Or a Republican,” Anastos said.

  “Or both!”

  “Oh no!”

  Beers and Anastos laughed, and then they both grew quiet.

  “God, I miss that sweet young man,” Beers said. “Donald, are you going to find him for us? Or at least put our minds to rest a little bit over what the goddamn hell could have happened to that poor, dear boy?”

  I said, sure, I was going do that, and then our appetizers arrived.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Clouds had moved in and then drizzle. The flight back to Boston was bumpy, and from my window seat I saw nothing but blackness until the runway lights flashed up through the soup over Logan.

  During the cab ride into town, I phoned both Susan Wenske and Marilyn Fogle and updated them on my
meager progress. Mrs. Wenske seemed down, but maybe it was because I was calling her at ten at night and she was worn out from a day with anxious clients. She didn’t seem surprised that I had little tangible to report on my search for her son. Fogle was interested to hear about the Hey Look Media ugliness. She said she was so happy she was working in public radio, not that office politics didn’t require a certain amount of navigation just about everywhere. She told me that her girls were fine but that Bond was being especially moody and difficult because he had thrown out the ninth draft of his novel and was starting over.

  Back at the hotel, I tuned in the eleven o’clock report on Channel Six. More than forty-eight hours after the crime had taken place, the lead story was still the murder of the station’s prize-winning investigative reporter. Boston police still had no leads, the somber anchor team told viewers. We briefly saw Marsden Davis getting out of a patrol car. Then Bryan Kim’s parents were followed down a corridor at Logan. They stared straight ahead and had nothing to say.

  I checked my e-mail—spam, spam, spam—and watched Colbert for a while and then was out of it. I dreamed that I was incompetent.

  I woke up early, read the Globe with breakfast—no breaks in the Bryan Kim murder—and met Detective Lieutenant Lewis Kelsey at a coffee shop on Boylston. He was fit, relaxed, and dapper for a cop and had a head as clean-shaven as Marsden Davis’s. Did BPD have a no-hair-allowed policy, or what? I had coffee and Kelsey ordered green tea and a bran muffin.

  “Normally I work in narcotics,” Kelsey said, “but the Wenske case landed on my desk when it looked like the dope dealers might have been mad at Wenske and decided to make him go away. That kind of thing would be unusual, but the masters of the universe of the drug world aren’t as well-mannered as they used to be. And they were never all that rational. So do I think that weed wholesalers killed Eddie Wenske in order to punish him and to send a message to other reporters who are too aggressive? I’m guessing yes, they did, although I don’t have a shred of evidence to support that.”

  “Aldo Fino at the Globe told me your snitches all say they haven’t heard anything about a reporter being killed.”

  “Correct. And I can tell you the same is true with the feds I’m in touch with. It could have been some very quiet rogue operation, of course. Or a loner with his own gripe—Wenske’s stories sent his grandma to jail or whatever. But people who hurt other people at that level of society tend to be people who like to run at the mouth, and sooner or later somebody hears something. But not yet, I’m sorry to say.”

  “And you have no other leads?”

  “I talked to just about everybody Wenske knew, and nobody I met was either helpful or made me suspicious. Basically they were all just upset, and that includes Bryan Kim. Now, about Bryan Kim. Two months after Eddie Wenske mysteriously disappears, Bryan Kim is stabbed to death, apparently by someone he was acquainted with. What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Marsden Davis says there are a couple of Kim’s former boyfriends in Providence he needs to take a closer look at. It could be a jealousy thing, dunno. Or these guys had some unresolved issues. Davis tells me you’re gay. What do you think of the pissed-off-old-boyfriend theory?”

  “Not much. Gay guys whose hearts are broken by men tend not to murder the men who did it. They mostly lick their wounds and then go online and start looking for somebody else who won’t disappoint them. Jealous rages that lead to homicide among gay men are more pulp fiction of the 1930s than present-day reality. Still, it’s possible, I guess.”

  “Straight men sometimes murder their ex-wives’ boyfriends,” Kelsey said. “Are you saying gays are more emotionally stable?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far. They’re just more emotionally adaptable. It’s a survival skill we develop early.”

  “Oh, yeah? Hmm. Anyway, Davis has no other leads, to speak of. The neighbor who found the body, Elvis Gummer, strikes Davis as untruthful, and Marsden is going to talk to him again.”

  “Good idea. Though I’m guessing that’s all Gummer is, untruthful. I take it you’re aware that when he disappeared Wenske was deep into another story he was working on for The New York Times magazine, then it was going to be a book. He was looking into gay media—TV, print, online and so on. He was investigating a mega-company, Hey Look Media, that I’ve learned he suspected of a variety of illegalities.”

  Kelsey perked up. “His sister Marilyn told me he was working on this project, yeah, but she didn’t mention any illegalities. What kind of illegalities?”

  “I don’t know. Financial maybe. I’m trying to find out. I was in New York yesterday and talked to somebody at HLM, Hey Look Media. A friend of this guy’s at the company was feeding Wenske dirt on HLM, and now the friend, Boo Miller—real name Buris—may have disappeared too. He supposedly flew up to Boston Saturday to see Kim, and then he never showed up again in New York or anywhere else.”

  “What the fuck.”

  “So that’s the angle I’m following at the moment.”

  “Does Davis know about this media company stuff?”

  “I’ll tell him today. Or you can.”

  “He’ll want to talk to you.”

  “Sure.”

  Kelsey’s bran muffin arrived and he eyed it with disdain. “My daughter thinks I have to eat tasteless crap like this.”

  “It must be working. You appear to be healthy.”

  “I’m healthy because I spend two hours a day at the gym. And this thing is my reward?”

  “I’ll bet you eat red meat for dinner.”

  “Used to. Now it’s fish. My wife is overweight and has high cholesterol.”

  “She’s looking out for both of you.”

  “I read that somebody said the three most important things in life—the things that make life worth living—are work, love, and food. Anyway, I’ve got two out of three.”

  “A good job and a good marriage. Good for you.”

  Kelsey rolled his eyes at this and moved on to another subject. “I want to show you something.” He brought a manila envelope up from the floor next to his chair and opened it. He placed four objects on the table. Two were Massachusetts drivers’ licenses. One was a dark blue United States passport. Another was a Commonwealth Bank ATM card. “Take a look at these.”

  I examined each item and saw that while two of the documents with photo IDs had the name Michael Packer on them, the picture on each was that of Eddie Wenske. The bank card also had the name Michael Packer embossed on it. The second driver’s license had Wenske’s photo but bore the name James Parker.

  I said, “Oh boy.”

  Kelsey nodded. “Marilyn Fogle took me up to Wenske’s apartment on Charles Street. These documents were in an envelope taped to the underside of the top of Wenske’s desk inside a drawer.”

  “Your search was thorough.”

  “It was.”

  “What did Ms. Fogle make of these items?”

  “I didn’t mention them to her. I stuck them in my pocket and had them checked out.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “The driver’s licenses were issued by the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles. They are legitimate. Wenske must have used the passport as ID when he applied for the Michael Packer license. I don’t know what he used for the Parker license. Another fake passport? This passport is bogus—a forgery done by an accomplished professional. It’s the type of beautifully executed fake we sometimes find in the possession of high-level criminals such as blood diamond dealers or upper-level art forgers or the heads of drug cartels.”

  “I see.”

  “The street addresses on all the documents are Wenske’s Charles Street address. I checked with the Postal Service. There are actually three names registered with the postal service at the Charles Street address, Edward Wenske, Michael Packer, and James Parker. Ms. Fogle had been picking up the mail from her brother’s mailbox, and she began to return any Packer or Parker mail to its senders, think
ing, she told me, that there had been some mistake. The only mail that came for Packer or Parker, in fact, were bank statements. They kept on coming, and Ms. Fogle turned them over to me at my request.”

  “Good.”

  “Each bank statement was for an account that contained several thousand dollars. Over eight thousand in the Packer checking account, just under four thousand in the Parker account.”

  “Any deposits or withdrawals?”

  “Not in the past two months. It’ll be a son of a bitch getting earlier statements. I’d have to go to court, which I may do at some point.”

  “Marilyn Fogle doesn’t know about any of this?”

  “I haven’t told her yet. It’s been just over two weeks since I found the documents, and it took time to check out the passport and verify that it was fake. I’m going to call her tomorrow and meet her and ask her if she knows why her brother would be in the possession of multiple illegal forms of identification.”

  “Did you find anything else in Wenske’s apartment that meant anything or aroused your suspicion in any way? You gave his place a good going over.”

  “Nothing useful at all. Some of his personal effects seemed to be missing. Travel bag with toothbrush, shaver and so on.”

  I said, “I think I know what Fogle will say when you tell her about these fake IDs.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That her brother sometimes went undercover while on reporting assignments. It’s pretty apparent that while he was writing Weed Wars he actually spent time with the pot wholesalers. You’ve read the book. His knowledge and understanding is so nuanced and intimate about their daily lives that he must have taken on other identities and pretended to be somebody other than a writer doing research. So he would need documents of these types as well as a cash reserve for expenses or to help get him out of any jams he might have found himself in. This stuff is illegal, true. Wenske was taking a chance and maybe making a serious mistake using this material. But it certainly doesn’t suggest any larger illegal activity on his part. That would be totally out of character for Wenske, and if I were you, detective, I wouldn’t make too much of these items.”