The Last Thing I Saw

by Richard Stevenson

  “This here’s my cousin Don Smith,” Ort said. “Just up from Fresno.”

  “Dried fruit,” Hively said. “That’s what Fresno is famous for. But you don’t look too dried out to me.”

  “I’m fruity enough,” I said to Hively and winked. “But I’m more of the fresh and juicy variety.”

  Ort laughed and said, “Don’s pullin’ your leg, Mason. Jesus.”

  Hively looked up at me and said, “Hold on a sec.”

  He tore off a bit of toilet paper, pinched some of the powder into it, and balled it up. He stuck out his tongue, placed the wad on top of it, then washed the little packet down with a swig of Coke.

  “Give me half a minute,” Hively said.

  Ort and I pulled out chairs and seated ourselves and watched as Hively relaxed and casually lit up a Marlboro light.

  He exhaled smoke and said, “I know, I know. These things’ll kill ya. But I’m down to half a pack a day.”

  “No weed for you?” I asked.

  “Can’t do it. Not when I’m working. Dampens my creative powers.”

  “Ort says you’re a movie director,” I said.

  “I direct and write. Ever see Dark Smooches on Hey Look TV?”

  “Sure. You directed that? Wow.”

  “I suspected that of you,” Hively said, looking me up and down. “Mmm. Nice.”

  “What are you working on now? Ort says you sometimes do filming right here at the lodge.”

  “Nothing’s in production at the present moment. We’ve got a script in development.”

  “Are you writing it?”

  “I’m working on this one with another writer. What do you do down in Fresno, Don? Do you spend your time putting the famous local raisins in those little red boxes, or are you an orthopedic surgeon, or a porn star, or what?”

  “How did you know I was one of those? I heard there were a lot of mind-readers in Mount Shasta, and I guess you must be one of them.”

  “I know a lot for a city boy out in the sticks. Let me guess. Porn star and orthopedist. You fix bones. Am I right, Don?”

  “I’ve fixed a few.”

  Ort was looking increasingly confused and uncomfortable. He said, “I ain’t seen Hal lately. He don’t like our country air? I guess Rover’s gonna show up. Martine and Danielle told me so.”

  “Rover’s due tonight. Hal will be here on Monday for a script conference. I’m sure he’ll be looking in on Danielle and Martine.”

  I said, “Hal’s the owner of this place? Mr. Skutnik? Ort says he’s a big media guy. Books, magazines, TV, what have you.”

  “HLM puts out Bugger,” Hively said. “I’ll bet you’ve read that one.”

  “I soitinly have!” I said, doing Curly Howard.

  “What’s that, a gay thing?” Ort asked cautiously.

  “Bugger is a fashion magazine,” I said, and Hively threw his head back and grinned.

  Suddenly Hively was on his feet. Something was different about his eyes now, and he drew a couple of quick circles in the air with his right arm. He said, “Oh fuck-a-duck, I better get this show on the road.”

  “What show’s that?” Ort asked.

  “None of your pissy-miss,” Hively said. “I hate to be rude… No wait, correction: I adore being rude. So please get your sorry-ass asses out of here, because art calls, and so does El Capitan Skutnik. Gotta go, gotta show, gotta ro-day-o!”

  “Is it okay,” Ort said, “if I show Don around the lodge? He never saw a celebrity house before, and he just wants to take a look-see and tell people in Fresno what it’s like.”

  I said, “I did see Elizabeth Taylor’s last husband’s basketball hoop one time on a tour of the movie stars’ homes. But that was nothing close-up like this.”

  “Sure, go ahead. Go for a swim if you want to. No bathing attire is required. You can lie right down on the diving board where Kirk Dirkley kissed Cleft Beardsley in the third episode of Dark Smooches. The blood stains are still on the board.”

  “I remember that scene so well,” I said. “Incredible.”

  “We don’t need to swim,” Ort said. “Right, Don? Just snoop around.”

  “Snoop? I wouldn’t do that, Ort. Pablo and Blanco might have to eviscerate the both of you. Their security measures can be excessive, I’ve tried to tell Hal, but I suppose I should be grateful that their loyalty to MS Enterprises and Hey Look Media is as dependable as it is. But, sure, do take a walk around and sniff the posies. Pablo and Blanco can let you know which areas of the grounds are off limits on account of security considerations.”

  I said, “I heard you have a dungeon, Mason. Speaking honestly, I’m a little into that.”

  Hively had been fidgeting, but now I could see he was trying to focus his thoughts and get something right. “Oh. Fuck. No shit? Too bad you weren’t here a month ago. I’d loved to have given you a personal tour. A very personal tour, Don Smith from Fresno. But the dungeon is closed to the public right now. Off limits. Sorry. Some other time, I hope to heaven and pray down on my knees.”

  “Ah, come on. Just a peek? Something I can fantasize about when I get back to raisin country.”

  Hively was starting to look flustered. “What time is it?” he said and checked his watch. “Fuck shit fuck.”

  “You got an appointment, Mason?” Ort said.

  “A deadline. You two humpy lads had better go away now. Little Mason cannot play, so come again another day.”

  “Too bad our timing is wrong,” I said. “I’m a big Stieg Larsson fan, and I understand you are too, Mason.”

  “Truer words were never spoken, but I have moved on and on and on, and so, my brethren, should you.”

  “I was just hoping for a quick glance at where The Boy with the Dragon Tattoo would have been filmed. Ort told me about that movie that unfortunately never got made.”

  The smaller of the two Mexicans I’d seen out by the big metal building came into the kitchen now. He was carrying a tray and what looked like a plate with some half-eaten food on it. He set the tray on the counter and the plate and some utensils in the sink.

  Hively nodded at the Mexican and said, “Thank you, Blanco. Did you enjoy your supper?”

  The Mexican looked puzzled at first, before the message sank in. He said, “Yeah. That spaghetti tasted very good.”

  I tried again to get permission for a quick look at the dungeon, but now Hively began to get really agitated, his hands shaky and his eyes moving like a tilt-a-whirl. So I backed off. Ort and I walked out to his pick-up truck and drove back toward Mount Shasta.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  A late-model black van came bumping up the driveway as we exited the Skutnik lodge property. I couldn’t see who was in it, but there appeared to be two people in the front seat in addition to the driver, who looked like a compatriot of Pablo and Blanco. Were there others in the back of the van? Were they Mexican illegals who did the gardening around the lodge, or who eviscerated visitors who got too nosey for Mason Hively’s taste? Or was this crude racial profiling on my part?

  I asked Ort why there were so many Mexicans—if that’s what they were—working for Skutnik.

  “Hal’s cheap as shit,” Ort said. “Martine and Danielle do the hiring at MS and they pay okay, so we can get locals and legals. But at the lodge they get these illegals and also roughnecks who been in jail and shit. Also, Mason likes them to tie him up sometimes. I’ve heard that some of them’ll do it, but they think they should get paid extra for helping Mason get his jollies. Anyway, who are they gonna complain to?”

  “No, there’s no Saul Alinsky in Mount Shasta.”

  “No. Who?”

  “He organized poor people in Chicago in the forties and fifties.”

  “Like a union? The dude wouldn’t be welcome around Mount Shasta. He’d get hurt.”

  “I noticed that Pablo and Blanco carried side arms. Is this for protection or other uses?”

  As he pulled back onto highway eighty-nine, Ort said, “I reckon both. Of cour
se, a lot of the more dangerous Mexicans—the ones in the gangs—they like to stick people with knives. I guess it’s just a habit they have. Save on ammo or somethin’.”

  “Might Hal or Rover or Mason hire people like that?”

  “Not to keep around the house, I wouldn’t say. Some of them are mules. They carry weed shipments east. But those criminal types of individuals mostly work for the cartels. I saw some guys up at the lodge a couple of weeks ago I didn’t like the looks of. But they ain’t been back, as far as I know.”

  “Could Hal have his own weed growing and wholesaling operation? I thought that was Martine and Danielle’s department.”

  “If Hal sold weed, he’d fuck it up like he does everything else. The guy is freakin’ incompetent, plus of course being kind of a whack job. Anyway, Hal doesn’t know for shit. It’s Rover and Mason who use some of the cartel mules for certain jobs, I think. I don’t know exactly what. I’d hate to think. But Rover and Mason don’t grow, I wouldn’t guess. Those two wouldn’t know how to plant a petunia. They are strictly movie stars and porn and shit like that.”

  By the time Ort dropped me off back at the motel, it was after five o’clock. Paul Delaney wasn’t in his room, so I walked down to The Bar, thinking he might be there. He wasn’t at his customary corner table in his cozy hang-out with the harmonic convergence going on outside and the Patsy Cline records playing inside, and the waitress said she hadn’t seen Delaney.

  I went back to the motel and made arrangements for Ricky Esteban’s flight to Redding the next day and his rental car, then texted Ricky with the details.

  I banged on the door of Delaney’s room again. Still no answer. His rented Nissan was parked outside the room, so he hadn’t driven anywhere. I called Ort and said I couldn’t find Delaney and I was worried. Ort said he’d stop by the motel later and maybe we could both look around.

  I phoned Marsden Davis and got him just heading home from the precinct.

  “Any news of the Kim and Miller homicides? I looked at the Globe online, but the paper’s not reporting anything new.”

  “It’ll be in tomorrow’s paper, but I’ll give you a preview. It looks like Miller was killed in a van he was forced into behind Kim’s building. Forensics found footprints in the blood in Kim’s apartment, and the same blood—Bryan Kim’s—was found on Miller’s shoes and on the back stairs and on the pavement in the alley. We’re thinking that Miller was actually present when Kim was stabbed. He figured rightly that as a witness he was gonna get it next, and he ran out and down the back stairs, and the killer or killers chased him and grabbed him and tossed him in what we think was their van and stabbed him in there until he bled out and then dumped him on the Cape, poor guy. A lot of this is theorizing, but it’s where we think this is headed.”

  “What van? This is news about a van.”

  “A neighbor saw three Hispanic males park a van in the alley behind Kim’s building. This citizen thought the two were cleaning or construction people, but later he wondered about that and he talked to an officer. This guy said he looked out later when a patrol car was checking the alley, and the van was gone. So now we’re getting somewhere, a little bit.”

  “How little a bit?”

  “The dude who saw the van didn’t remember any useful detail. We’ve got a woman in forensics who helps people recollect stuff like that, and she’s workin’ on this guy’s brain. But all we know for sure is, the van was dark colored and probably on the late-model side. There’s a security camera at the end of the alley for the condo units down there. I’ve got people looking at the tapes.”

  “No tag ID?”

  “Would I forget to mention that? We’re hoping the tapes will get us a read.”

  I said, “There might be a connection to drug dealers here in Mount Shasta. I saw a black van with three Hispanics in it this afternoon.”

  “No shit,” Davis said. “You saw three brown men in a black van, and you didn’t make a citizen’s arrest?”

  “These guys are almost certainly up to their eyebrows in Siskiyou County pot growing and wholesaling. If these three are who I think they are, they have connections to one of the big cartels, but I’m not sure about that. They’re probably mules who were doing an eastern run, and while they were in Boston they did a side job, killing Bryan Kim. Somebody at Hey Look Media had monitored Miller’s phone conversation with Kim. Kim had found out from a guy named Paul Delaney, an old friend of Eddie Wenske, that Wenske had discovered drug-dealing connections with Hey Look Media and Wenske was in Siskiyou County investigating this and living undercover among the mules when he disappeared.”

  Davis said, “That’s pretty convoluted, but I guess plausible.”

  “So Kim was killed for the same reason Wenske had to be silenced—to protect the drug operation that was basically keeping the ineptly run Hey Look Media empire afloat. And Boo Miller was both the mechanism by which HLM found out that Wenske was onto them, and then he was in the wrong place at the wrong time—the right place for HLM—when he showed up at Kim’s Boston apartment to pool their information and then to brief me that night at dinner.”

  “What about this Delaney, the source of the information on Wenske’s investigation? Why wasn’t he killed?”

  My phone went shaky in my hand. “Good question, Lieutenant.” I wondered if by now he had been.

  After a moment, Davis said, “I think I should put you in touch with some reliable law enforcement out there, Strachey. I’ll get a name, and let me get back to you.”

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  “Give me an hour or two.”

  “There’s one other thing I should tell you. I’m all but certain Eddie Wenske is alive.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “With luck, I’ll know soon.”

  “If these bad actors killed Kim and Miller and maybe Delaney to keep Wenske from exposing all this criminal behavior, why wouldn’t Wenske have been their first and foremost victim?”

  “I think they had planned on making him just that,” I said. “But then they had what they thought was a better idea.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  I guessed the knock at my door just after eight was going to be Ort or, even better, Paul Delaney. But instead it was three Hispanic men instructing me to step through the back doorway of their black van. One of the three men had a Glock nine-millimeter semiautomatic drawn, another waved what looked like a jagged-edged hunting knife at my jugular, and the third man gestured impatiently for me to get in. I said I’d like to bring my phone, which was next to my bed, but the meanest-looking of the three, the one with the knife, snapped, “Fuck that. Get your ass in the vehicle now.”

  My impulse was to run, but I thought I knew enough about these three—were they the Hispanics with a van who probably killed Bryan Kim and Boo Miller?—that the chances were good that the one with the Glock would shoot me down in the motel parking lot and then the one with the dagger would plunge it into my heart. So I climbed into the van.

  I was shoved onto the floor while the others sat on the metal benches that ran along either side of the van’s interior. The back door was slammed shut and we quickly took off, the van driven by a fourth man I didn’t get a look at.

  There was some dirty carpeting under me, and I wondered if its putrid stench was from Boo Miller’s blood.

  “Where are we headed?” I said.

  “Shut your mouth.”

  The Glock was still aimed at my midsection, and I said, “Is the safety on on that thing? Glocks are known for discharging in a light breeze.”

  He just grunted, holding no interest in anything I had to say on gun safety.

  None of these three was Pablo or Blanco, so were we headed for the Skutnik lodge or elsewhere? And when we arrived, wherever it was, would I find Paul Delaney? If I did find him and he was alive, that offered hope for me. If I found him and he was not alive, that was bad all the way around.

  I assumed the van I was in was the one I had seen earlier in the day as Ort
and I were driving away from the Skutnik lodge, but I wasn’t sure.

  I hadn’t had any dinner, so the queasiness I felt had to have been from the stinking carpet and from fear.

  “Mind if I sit up on the bench?” I said. “You can still blow my guts out if you think you need to.”

  “Stay down! Stay down!”

  I imagined the Glock going off and the bullet passing through my viscera and on down through the floor to the van’s gas tank where it would set off an explosion that would blow us all to bits. That would represent a crude form of justice, but I wouldn’t get a lot of satisfaction from it. Nor would it punish or restrain whoever was behind all this bloody mayhem.

  We sped along a straight smooth highway—Interstate 5?—and then veered onto a road with twists and turns and a lower speed limit. Highway 89, I was thinking.

  The three men had not bound me—not necessary with their arsenal aimed at me—and they had not blind-folded me either. I wished they had. That would have been an indication that I would be unable to tell the authorities where I had been held captive after I had gotten out of this alive.

  After ten minutes or so—I was able to glance at my watch from time to time—the van turned left onto a secondary road, and I thought: This is it. I’m getting my wish. I’m going to see Mason Hively’s dungeon.

  We made another turn onto a bumpier road—the Skutnik driveway—and soon the van slowed and came to a halt.

  We all stayed put until the driver came around and opened the back door. I looked out and was interested to see that it was Rover Fye. The other three exited the van first. Then I climbed out.

  I said, “Am I in a Hey Look TV reality show? You’re Hal Skutnik’s boyfriend, I think I recall. Am I on gay TV?”

  “Yeah, you’re in a reality show, you stupid asswipe. You and your friend Delaney. But the reviews aren’t going to be all that good.”

  “Par for the course at Hey Look TV,” I said.

  Fye didn’t fly into a rage. He said coolly, “You’re going to get a dose of reality you won’t soon forget, Strachey. And the reviews are going to be great. Because I’m the reviewer, and I know you’re going to receive raves.”