The Last Thing I Saw

by Richard Stevenson

  Kelsey squinted over at me and shook his head. “Uh huh. Well, Strachey. You’ve never even met this guy. So it might not be wise of you to act like one of those folks on a TV news report who—when the truth comes out about some dark secret life their nice neighbor lived right under their noses—they tell the TV reporter, gosh, we had no idea, he just seemed so normal. Know what I mean?”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Kelsey told me the last person known to have seen or spoken with Eddie Wenske in late January was a neighbor of his, a widow who lived on the second floor of Wenske’s building. This Mrs. Lucinda Yeager had told Kelsey she knew it was January twenty-eighth because she had just arrived back from visiting her daughter in Charlotte, North Carolina, for her granddaughter’s birthday. She said just as she was arriving home from the airport, Wenske appeared and helped her carry her bag up to the second floor. They chatted briefly, and he had seemed normal, she said.

  I went back to the Westin and packed up. Before I checked out, I called Perry Dremel in New York and asked if Boo Miller had turned up yet.

  “No, and everybody is incredibly concerned. The guy who checks up on Boo’s cat doesn’t know what to do. Should the police be notified, do you think?”

  “That’s probably a good idea. Especially since Miller was going to Boston to see Bryan Kim, who was killed the same day. I’ve mentioned Miller to the Boston cop in charge of the Wenske missing-person investigation, and I’ll also talk to the detective working on the Kim murder.”

  “Now I am getting totally paranoid,” Dremel said. “I mean, three gay men who are all connected to each other are dead or disappeared? I am just totally freaked.”

  “Paranoia is irrational, but you’re not. I’m worried too, Perry.”

  “And Ogden will be back in the office at the end of the week, and he’ll see the videotapes and he’ll listen to the phone tapes, and he’ll see that Boo hasn’t been at his desk and he will go completely ballistic. The police might have to evacuate Chelsea. You’ll be able to hear the explosion in Boston.”

  “Winkleman is still in L.A.?”

  “He comes back Friday. He’ll come in and make several people cry before he goes into his office and reads The Wall Street Journal. God, I just hope that Boo turns up before then, because if he’s not here Ogden will fire his queer ass for sure.”

  I asked Dremel to phone me if he heard anything about Boo Miller. He said he would, and he said he’d suggest to Miller’s cat watcher that the police be notified. I said the cat watcher should be sure to mention Miller’s connection to Bryan Kim.

  After two tries, I got Marsden Davis on the phone and brought him up to date on my New York visit and what I had learned about Wenske’s investigation of Hey Look Media. And I told him about the missing Boo Miller, who may well have been the third person who was going to meet me for dinner on Saturday night.

  Davis said, “Has this Miller been reported missing in New York?”

  “Not yet. It’ll happen soon. People keep hoping he’ll turn up.”

  “There’s somebody I can talk to at NYPD. I’ll make a call.”

  “What are your latest leads, Lieutenant? Has anything developed with Kim’s ex-boyfriends in Providence? Lewis Kelsey told me you were working that angle.”

  “Oh, you saw Lew. Good. Did he have his boyfriend with him?”

  Boyfriend? “No, he didn’t.”

  “The guy’s a young patrolman, and sometimes Lew has him as a driver.”

  “I wasn’t aware that Detective Kelsey was gay. He didn’t mention it.”

  “He’s a late bloomer. Everybody in Boston knows except Lew’s wife.”

  “Not the way to go about it.”

  “Sooner or later, it’s gonna hit the fan. Anyway, here’s the thing. None of Bryan Kim’s exes look good for the murder. One dude, Mikey something, is still pretty pissed at Kim. Said he was a mental case and a torturer. But the guy has an alibi for Saturday afternoon. He runs a Lebanese deli in Providence for his uncle and was there all day Saturday.”

  “What kind of torturer? What’s does that mean?”

  “Just mind-fuck, apparently. No whips and chains, according to the man I sent down to interview him.”

  “What about stories Kim was working on at Channel Six? Is there anything there that might have made some unstable type mad enough to go after Kim?”

  “There’s a housing authority manager who’s been going around calling Kim a fucking faggot asshole media elite. Kim did a three-part series on Channel Six about this guy taking kickbacks from building contractors and tenants and anybody else he could squeeze a greasy nickel out of, plus of course the usual practice in these situations of putting his girlfriend on the housing authority payroll for a ninety-K a year job of little work.”

  “It’s no longer the Massachusetts of William Bradford.”

  “Kim’s material for his reports was mostly leaked from somebody in the AG’s office who’s been investigating this sleazoid for over a year. But this crook, Fabian Twomey, has decided to blame Kim for all his troubles. He told people in the housing authority Kim was soon going to be very sorry he didn’t mind his own fucking faggot business.”

  “Right.”

  “Twomey has no alibi for Saturday afternoon—or doesn’t have an alibi he’ll admit to anyways. There are reports of a second young lady in the picture who’s hotter than the ninety-K now-somewhat-older-and-tarnished girlfriend, and maybe he was enjoying her young, tasty, sweet-assed company Saturday afternoon. It looks like some fibbing is happening here. One possibility is, Twomey was actually on Tremont Street Saturday afternoon stabbing Bryan Kim to death. I’ll be speaking with Mr. Twomey myself later today, and then we’ll see what we might be working with here.”

  “Does Twomey have a history of violence?”

  “Just of the mouth. According to the suits in the AG’s office, he liked to brag about everything he was getting away with right up to the point where he wasn’t getting away with it anymore. Also, some of his maintenance crew told one of my officers that Twomey doesn’t like the sight of blood. Makes him want to faint or run away. That’s a complicating factor here. On the other hand, Twomey could have hired somebody to kill Kim. Twomey is the type of individual who has other people in his life who do his physical labor for him. And there are enough sociopaths running around loose in the Boston metro area for Twomey to take his pick for a one-time hit job. I hope you won’t think I’m employing a crude stereotype if I tell you that if you’re working in public housing, that’s a handy place to go recruiting for extreme hands-on types of work.”

  “I would not accuse you of employing a crude stereotype, Detective.”

  “Good ‘nuff. One thing that’s real interesting to me now, Strachey—and I think is gonna interest you—is Kim’s cell phone records, which I now have possession of. There were lots of calls to and from employees of Channel Six news all week long, and calls to and from people that the Channel Six folks have identified as sources for stories the station was working on. There was the call from you Friday afternoon. And there was one outgoing call each on both Thursday and Friday to Hey Look Media in New York City.”

  “To their main number?”

  “Right.”

  “Boo Miller?”

  “I’m wondering about that too.”

  “But why would Kim not call Miller on his cell?”

  “Maybe Miller wanted no record of the call on his cell.”

  “Somebody should ask Miller about that when he turns up. If and when.”

  “They should do that,” Davis said. “I see that Hey Look Media’s main office is in L.A.”

  “It is.”

  “There was one very long call to L.A. on March 16, an hour and sixteen minutes. That’s ten days ago, and we’re trying to reach that party. If Kim’s goin’ on and on for that length of time, maybe it’s a pal of his and this gentleman knows something useful for this investigation.”

  “Right. Who is it?”

  “Th
e number is a land line in the name of Paul Delaney. Know who that is, by chance?”

  “I do.”

  “Well, tell me all about him. ’Cause now Mr. Delaney is not answering his phone.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Why had Bryan Kim phoned Paul Delaney, Eddie Wenske’s old Boston Globe editor, now living in Los Angeles, on March sixteenth? Maybe to ask Delaney if he had any idea what had happened to the missing Wenske. But would it take an hour and sixteen minutes to ask about that? Maybe Kim and Delaney had known each other in Boston, and they were just shooting the breeze, catching up. I’d have to ask Aldo Fino if Kim and Delaney overlapped in Wenske’s life. Delaney moved west some years earlier, so I was guessing they hadn’t.

  Marsden Davis had given me Delaney’s number, and I tried it. I got his voicemail and would have left a message saying who I was and why I was arriving soon in L.A., but Delaney’s message box was full.

  I checked out of the Westin, retrieved the car from the hotel garage, and found a Mass Pike entrance nearby. Boston now had so many major highways running underneath it that it had been able to lower its notorious traffic jams by fifty or sixty feet.

  As I headed west on the interstate, I listened for a few minutes to the public radio fund drive on Marilyn Fogle’s station, then switched to another station whose fund drive had already been completed and whose staff was interrupting regular programming with short announcements thanking listeners for keeping public radio going for another four months. Apparently commercial radio was little more than an afterthought here in the Peoples Republic of Massachusetts. This station had a brief local newscast that included no mention of the Bryan Kim murder. Which meant no new developments.

  I was back in Albany by two in the afternoon. I went home and got out some cheese and microwaved a chunk of baguette that some months earlier Timmy had brought home from La Serre, then labeled it, dated it, wrapped it in plastic and placed it in the freezer along with his other filched-from-expensive-restaurant treasures.

  I went online and found the best deal I could for a ticket to L.A., flying out the next day but with an open return. It was quite a scam the airlines had going when it came to last minute reservations, and I mentally thanked Susan Wenske’s late mother, who was underwriting my so-far-futile search for her grandson.

  I updated my notes, then took down our old copy of Notes from the Bush, Wenske’s famous memoir of coming out in middle school in East Greenbush. The cover photo was of Wenske at fourteen, and he was a cutie, and only a little more fresh-faced than he was in his twenties, pictured at that later age on the back cover when the book came out.

  I skimmed the early chapters, marveling as I had when I first read it at the way Wenske had won over or at least neutralized so many peers and teachers—-who at first were uncomfortable with his outspokenness—simply by being cheerful and confident and at ease in his own gay skin. His sunny casual attitude had been infectious. There had been ugliness and confrontations, too, and the school board had tried to stop Wenske from bringing a sixteen-year-old male date from Simon’s Rock College in Massachusetts to a school dance. Wenske had not won that fight, but he’d gathered enough support so that, in the end, a second non-official all-inclusive dance was held in a hotel ballroom in Colonie, organized by a group of students and parents, including his own. I noted again the book’s dedication, To my parents, Herb and Susan Wenske, and I thought, what a lucky kid. Also, a good human being and a model citizen—no dark side in the making here.

  I had placed my new copy of Weed Wars on the shelf next to the memoir, and I took it down again. Flipping through it, I was even more impressed at how knowing and attentive to detail Wenske’s writing was in the sections on marijuana wholesaling operations—the growers, the marketers, the mules who “carry weight” from the Mexican border towns and from the Klamath and Shasta mountain regions of Northern California. Any good reporter knew how to elicit this kind of information in interviews, but Wenske wrote with the kind of novelistic feel for the material that bespoke direct experience. One section, in particular, in which a mule had to navigate interstate highway stretches heavily populated with troopers in cruisers bristling with antennas and marked as K-9 drug spotters was spun out with sweaty palm suspense. I thought, Wenske has been there, he’s done this.

  That and the fake IDs Lewis Kelsey had discovered hidden in Wenske’s apartment made me think that Wenske was a man so comfortable doing undercover work, and so skilled at it, that maybe—just maybe—that’s where he was now. Not dismembered in a bog but pretending to be somebody else so that he could dig up information for—what? His gay media book? What else could it be? It’s what he cared about so deeply.

  But if that was the case, why would he not tell his mother and his sister and Bryan Kim and Aldo Fino and other people close to him that he might be out of touch for two months?

  No, that couldn’t be it.

  Timmy came home from work, and I told him I’d be leaving for L.A. in the morning.

  “I would try to come along,” he said, “but it’s the budget deadline. The governor may have to cave on a few items, and it’s not going to be pretty.”

  “I’ve heard that when he doesn’t get his way, steam shoots out his navel.”

  “That’s true.”

  “I’ll manage traveling on my own, as I have been known to do.”

  “I’d come out for the weekend, but it’s so expensive nowadays that it doesn’t make sense.”

  “No problemo.”

  “There you go again. Why, your Spanish is on a level with George Romney’s!”

  I gave Timmy an update on the Kim murder and the connections between Kim and Wenske and Hey Look Media, one of whose New York staffers had vanished after apparently not showing up for a Saturday rendezvous with Bryan Kim and me.

  Timmy said, “Ugh. It all sounds like one of Hey Look TV’s made-on-the-cheap private eye movies.”

  “Except more plausible.” I laid out all the rumors of big-time financial sleight-of-hand at HLM and how Wenske had been gathering information that his main sources in L.A. had considered incriminating. I said, “Incriminating in the legal sense, according to at least two employees of the company.”

  “Peculation?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Embezzlement?”

  “Bigger than that, according to the unsubstantiated scuttlebutt, and higher up. Maybe swindling of investors by management. Certainly maltreatment of creditors, including writers and filmmakers.”

  Timmy fixed each of us an iced tea from the big jar of sun tea he set out on the deck as soon as the first crocus burst forth. He said, “That sounds like a job for an entire law firm and probably the Attorney General of California and maybe the Securities and Exchange Commission. How long do you think you’ll be out there?”

  “Three years at most.”

  “No, really.”

  “I don’t know. Some New York City HLM people gave me names of company people out there. They all loathe their bosses, so I’m guessing I’ll find out a lot in a hurry. Anyway, I’m only looking for information about Eddie Wenske. It won’t be my job to round up corporate miscreants and herd them over to the federal building. I’ll also get help, I think, from an old Boston editor friend of Wenske’s who’s in L.A., Paul Delaney. He put Wenske in touch with a financial writer at the L.A. Times, so I’ll track her down too, and he may know something about what Wenske was digging into.”

  “So you don’t think it’s the pot dealers who are somehow responsible for Wenske disappearing? A few days ago, you were all hot to tie his fate to the weed people.”

  “The Boston cops don’t think it’s that. And I think they did what they could to check out that theory.”

  “You got that idea yourself after reading Weed Wars. It’s too bad Wenske didn’t finish his gay media book. You might find a clue in it about what’s happened to him. Though I guess that’s the point. He might have been killed to keep him from writing the gay media book. You�
��ve thought of that, of course.”

  “It’s occurred to me.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I was in my room at the Westwood Holiday Inn Express on Santa Monica Boulevard by four Wednesday afternoon, and by 4:45 had four appointments lined up. It seemed that anybody who had ever worked for Hey Look Media or had done business with the company at any level was seething with anger and resentment and was eager to say very bad things about their former—and in one case current—employer, at least in private. I planned not to discourage them.

  Laird Boxley and Robert Taibi were a couple who had met at HLM and worked together there for two years then more or less fell into each other’s arms as each was ushered out the door, Boxley told me on the phone. Boxley was now working for an ad agency and Taibi, a filmmaker, in media relations at UCLA.

  We found each other in the hotel bar, the two showing up at 7:15, half an hour late. It was 10:15 back in Albany, and I had been taking in nourishment in the form of bar nuts and the two mini-bags of pretzels I’d pocketed on the plane.

  “Sorry we’re late,” Taibi said, sliding into my booth. “L.A. traffic—it’s all true what you’ve heard. Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.”

  I said, “It took me half the time to drive to Westwood from LAX that it took to cross North America.”

  “There are people with helicopters who would get around L.A. through the air if the FAA would let them,” Boxley said. “There’s a lot of political pressure to let the upper classes fly around in their choppers. But the thing is, there are people out there who would shoot them down.”

  “Prince Hal would get one,” Taibi said. “Rover could fly it, and they couldn’t even arrest him for operating under the influence up there—until he ran into something, such as the ground.”

  “You’re talking about Hal Skutnik?”

  Boxley said, “Hal and his main squeeze, Rover Fye. Can I say squeeze? Rover is so bulked up with muscle and the odd rolls of lard that you’d need airplane seatbelt extensions to organize any kind of squeezing activity.”