“I’ll look forward to it.”
“Don’t bother.”
Fye directed the three goons to take me into what he called the studio.
I said, “I’m not ready for my close-up.”
“Yeah, you think you aren’t.”
It was after nine at night and Pablo and Blanco were still lounging on their bench, floodlit now, outside the big metal building. They exhaled cigarette smoke and nodded as we approached, and Fye manipulated a big sliding bolt and then opened a walk-through door next to the high garage doors, which remained shut.
I followed Fye, the muzzle of the Glock close to my back and the hunting knife raised and glistening off to my side.
The building was in fact a film studio, with cameras and dollies and lighting overhead and on racks and poles. Taking up half the space in the back part of the structure was a film set, the much-talked about dungeon built for the unproduced The Boy with the Dragon Tattoo. There were torture devices—a medieval-style rack, some kind of hang-from-the-rafters mechanism, and a large leather-covered platform with whips and paddles next to it. And chained by the feet to a supporting I-beam were two men.
One of them was Paul Delaney, who nodded a kind of resigned greeting as I approached him. I think he mouthed the words, “Sorry, sorry.”
I also recognized the other man who was chained to a pole. I walked up to him and said, “Dr. Wenske, I presume.”
He laughed lightly and said, “You’re Don Strachey, I take it.”
“I sure am.”
“You didn’t happen to bring along a cake with a file in it, did you?”
“I meant to, but nope.”
Fye said, “I’m going to go up to the lodge and relax. I’ll see you all in the morning. Mason might drop by later to say nighty-night to y’all and get spanked. But I want to leave you alone so that Edward will explain what your role is going to be in HLM’s next production. I want you to understand how important that role is. I think it’ll be perfectly clear and you’ll know just what to do. And so will Mr. Wenske. Right, Eddie?”
Wenske looked pale and exhausted but otherwise unhurt. He was a slightly worn version of his Weed Wars jacket photo, with the hazel eyes, the shock of hair and the bent grin that was part of his natural physiognomy. He wore old jeans and a faded blue T-shirt, and he was borderline aromatic.
Wenske said, “Rover, you are nuts. I told you. This is not going to work.”
“Oh, sure it is,” Fye said, and directed his three goons to chain me up too.
Which they did. They attached a manacle to my ankle and locked it with a key one of the Mexicans kept on a ring on his belt. Welded to the manacle was a chain that was wrapped around the same upright I-beam that kept Wenske and Delaney from moving more than about twelve or fourteen feet in any direction. Off to the side about ten feet away was a porta-potty that I didn’t like the looks of.
I said, “Rover, are Paul and I going to be performers in a Hey Look TV production?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“I’m not in the actors’ union. Neither is Paul, I’ll bet.”
“Don’t worry. We don’t get involved with that guild shit. Anyway, there’s no union for the type of performing you’re gonna be doing.”
“Oh, okay.”
“Toodle-ee-oo, boys.”
Fye went out followed by the Mexicans, and then I could hear the bolt slide shut.
Delaney said, “I should have known. I’m so sorry I got you mixed up in this, Strachey.”
“Paul, you didn’t know,” Wenske said. “It was my mom who hired Don, and she couldn’t have known either. Don, care for a drink?”
“Sure.”
We all seated ourselves around an old formica-topped kitchen table, and Wenske opened a fresh bottle of water and passed it around.
“I had figured out,” Wenske said, “that the HLM people were crooked and obnoxious. What I didn’t know until it was too late is that they are criminally insane.”
“Meth freaks, apparently,” I said.
“Just Rover and Mason. That’s where Rover is headed now, I’m sure. They sit around the lodge and do meth. Skutnik doesn’t do drugs at all, as far as I can tell. But in a way he’s the worst of them all because he is delusional.”
“What are his delusions? Other than of grandeur?”
“It is his belief that Hey Look TV will win an Emmy next year. He needs this to happen to make his mother proud. Mason told me she’s in an assisted living place in Beverly Hills, and she calls Hal once a week and says all the other old ladies there have sons and daughters who have won Emmys, and when is Hal going to win one and make her proud, too? Except, have you ever seen Hey Look TV programming?”
“One time I saw part of an episode of Dark Smooches.”
“So you know.”
“Yeah.”
“Mason and Rover are addicts and sadists—well, masochist in Mason’s case—and probably clinically insane.”
“And homicidal,” Delaney said. “I told Eddie about Bryan Kim and Boo Miller.”
Wenske shook his head. “I was so naïve. I just thought they were cynical jerks. Guys who held other gay people in contempt and then exploited them. But they’re actually far worse. Poor Bryan. God. If I had any idea he’d be hurt by this…”
“They are preposterous people,” Delaney said. “Lots of people are involved with shady business practices, but how could you have known they were killers?”
I said, “They killed Bryan and Boo Miller to warn off anybody like yourself, Eddie, who might expose how HLM is being propped up by screwing writers and filmmakers, Ponzi financing, and marijuana growing and wholesaling. But they didn’t kill you. And I think I know why.”
“Of course they didn’t kill me,” Wenske said. “They can’t do without me. I’m writing Hal’s Emmy-winning script for Notes from the Bush.”
“How’s it going?”
“Terrible. I don’t know how to write for film. It requires a totally different craft from what you use for prose. It’s about compression, and as a writer I’m about as compressed as Moby Dick. I’ve got these books, and they don’t help at all.” Wenske picked up a battered paperback copy of Making a Good Script Great—A Guide for Writing and Rewriting, by Hollywood script consultant Linda Seger. “I’ve read eight books on screenwriting, and I figure if I keep at this for another twenty years I might be able to learn the basics of the craft. Unfortunately, Hal’s mother isn’t going to live that long.”
“Anyway,” I said, “I take it your life will be worth less after you produce a usable script. I don’t like to bring that up, but I guess you’ve thought of that.”
“Yes, I have. What Hal tells me—he comes up here once a week to check on my progress—what he tells me is, he wants me there at the Emmys to collect my award and thank him profusely for giving me the opportunity to bring my book to the screen. Hal is crazy, and he may actually believe that once I’m out of here I won’t run screaming to the nearest police station. The guy is demented. Rover and Mason, on the other hand, are more connected to reality, meth freaks though they are. So once I finish the script…well, I am very afraid to think about that.”
“So,” Delaney said, “Eddie has two reasons for not finishing the script.”
“One is,” Wenske said, “I’m incompetent at screenwriting.”
“And number two is,” I said, “Rover and Mason might kill you soon after you’re done.”
Delaney said, “So what we have here is a variation on Scheherazade. Eddie has to keep turning in drafts that are bad. Because as soon as he finishes a good one, he’s done for.”
One part of the present equation was missing, however. I said, “But what about Paul and me? We’re onto all this crap. Why are we here in the dungeon? Why didn’t they just kill us and dump our bodies in the Siskiyou County woods?”
Wenske tensed up. “Because,” he said, “they don’t trust me. They think I’m malingering.”
“And how will our p
resence change that?”
“They plan on torturing you in my presence unless I hurry up and present them with a usable script.”
I looked around at the devices resting back in the shadows of Mason’s dungeon.
I said, “Then I guess we all have to get out of here somehow. Any ideas on how we can do it?”
Wenske said, “No. And believe me, I’ve thought of little else.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Wenske had some energy bars he’d been given by his captors, and I ate a couple of those for dinner. He showed Delaney and me the script he’d been working on on the laptop Hively had provided, but I didn’t know what to make of it. I tried to see the story and characters in my head as I read along, but it was all terribly sketchy. I admired anybody who could tell a story using this spare vocabulary, and I admired anybody who could make it all come to life with actors, lighting, a setting, and film or video cameras.
After I’d read several pages, I said, “What’s this? A nude scene? It says Eddie and Jarvis stare at each other’s genitals lustfully.”
“There have to be four nude scenes, Mason told me. It’s Hey Look policy. In that scene, I just wrote what I was told to write. In the end, it will hardly matter.”
“But you’re supposed to bring your superior writing skills to the project so that Hal can win an Emmy. Hively is trying to turn Notes from the Bush into Dark Smooches. How is that going to make Mother Skutnik proud?”
Wenske said, “The nude scenes per se aren’t going to be the problem with the film. The story is about my experience coming out as a middle schooler, and such people do sometimes take their clothes off. Nudity is fine with me. But with the sex stuff—which in the book happens almost entirely in my head except for one kiss—they won’t be able to cast actual fourteen-year-olds and keep themselves out of jail. So Mason wants to cast Cleft Beardsley and Kirk Dirkley, and those guys are at least thirty-one.”
“The stars of Dark Smooches?”
“Being spectacularly untalented, they’re available and they’re cheap. And they’re not under-aged.”
“Not hardly.”
Delaney said, “This is total insanity. Eddie, your smart, sweet, brave book—fucked up! It must be agonizing to see this happening.”
“Yeah, the biggest problem,” Wenske said, “is not that Mason and Rover and Hal are insane. It’s that they’re hacks. One reason the pages I show them are unacceptable is that I don’t know screenwriting. But the other reason is, what they want is what most people think of as good writing, but these guys have no clue as to what good writing is. They wouldn’t recognize it if it bit them on the ass. Or, since they consider Dark Smooches one of HLM’s proudest achievements, I should probably say on the neck.”
“Then why have you write it at all?” I said. “If Mason believes he can do as well, why doesn’t he just write the script himself? He can go ahead and turn your parents into Blake and Crystal Carrington and you and your East Greenbush junior high school friends into a gay-ish cast of Oliver except naked and played by twenty-six-year-olds.”
“Mason would do that, of course. He’s already moved the setting from New York State to Pasadena, and he wants to turn Jarvis Landry, the Simons Rock student I wanted to take to the prom, into a ping pong paddle fetishist. It’s not Mason but Hal who’s insisting that I apply the skills that won Notes a lot of literary awards. Except, he doesn’t really know what those skills are. It’s not talent he understands, it’s promoting himself. And of course when it comes to Hal’s mother, it’s respectability.”
“It sounds like an impossible situation you’re in,” I said. “I mean, in addition to being kidnapped and threatened with death.”
Wenske heaved a deep sigh. “God. How did I ever manage to get into this—and drag other people into it too? I mean, you two. And Bryan. God. I can’t believe they did that to Bryan and that other guy from HLM. And my poor mom and my sister. Who think I’m probably dead. How could I have underestimated how savage Hal and his people are? I thought they were just hacks and incompetents and cynical crooks.”
“You’re used to the Massachusetts Legislature,” Delaney said. “Hacks and crooks are what you know.”
“Just one clarification,” I said. “When you disappeared, Eddie, a lot of people in Boston and New York, like Marva Beers, were afraid it was the drug lords who had gotten hold of you and done away with you. That you got them pissed off with your Globe drug-gang stories and then Weed Wars.”
“Which did turn out to have a major element of truth,” Wenske said. “It was all the Hey Look cash suddenly pouring out of Siskiyou County, the weed-growing capital of North America, that got me thinking about a connection to something I already knew all about.”
“But your mother and sister,” I said, “were afraid of something else. What they called your dark side. Or your secret life.”
“What? Why would they think that? Because of my undercover work for the Globe and for Weed Wars?”
“Your sister told me that when she stayed with you last year you’d disappear for hours at a time late at night. That’s when you lived your secret life. Something weird or occult or something.”
Wenske slapped his forehead and went through about twenty expressions in fast-forward. “Oh no. Oh fuck.”
“So there were no dark side activities? Grave robbing? Peculation? Sacrificial rituals under the Longfellow Bridge?”
“What’s peculation? I should know.”
“You sure should,” Delaney said. “Having spent so many years around Boston. It’s embezzlement.”
“The word sounds like something racier,” I said. “I only recently learned what it meant.”
“Well, if it’s racy, maybe I did it. I used to go over to the gay peep show in Somerville late at night and hang around and look at the videos and exchange blow jobs with other guys who wanted some uncomplicated sexual adventuring. All perfectly wholesome in a perfectly unwholesome way. But… Jesus! Of course I didn’t tell my sister.”
“She said you always told her who you were dating.”
“Dating, sure.”
Delaney had been listening to this exchange with fierce concentration. He said, “I don’t know. For me, this falls into the area of TMI. Boy oh boy. I mean, I have nothing against fellatio. A whore did that to me in Mexico many years ago. I’ll never forget it.”
With that, the bolt slid back and the door swung open.
Mason Hively appeared in leather chaps and nothing else. He was skeletal and gray. Blanco came in just behind Hively carrying two ping pong paddles. Blanco shut the door behind the two of them.
Hively chimed, “I’ve been bad again, parachuting into enemy territory without a map. Blanco is going to punish me, and I hope while I’m getting what I deserve I don’t scream too loudly and keep you weary travelers awake all night. Wanna watch, boys? I know you’ll want to get a good look at my dragon tattoo. Guess where it is?”
I didn’t see it happen, but I’m sure Wenske, Delaney, and I all shut our eyes at exactly the same instant.
CHAPTER THIRTY
As soon as Hively and Blanco left just after eleven, Wenske said, “Oh Jesus. We have to get out of here. Watching that was brutal, but it’s only going to get worse. A lot worse.”
“There are some people who are going to notice I’m missing,” I said. “Ort Nestlerode, for one. Do you know him?”
“Isn’t he married to one of the salt sisters?”
“Well, both of them.”
“Ah.”
“They’re with you all the way, as you know.”
“You bet they are. They despise Hal and the rest of them. He says awful things about them behind their backs and, worse, he’s skimming the profits off their lucrative weed business.”
“Ort was going to check in with me and then help find Paul. He’ll figure out where I am.”
“He won’t get in here. Nobody gets past Pablo and Blanco. And those three psychos who dragged you up here—they could still b
e around. From your description, I think they work for one of the Mexican cartels. They’re mules who double as enforcers. They moonlight for Mason and Rover, too, and they are not to be messed with.”
I said, “There must be other doors leading out of this building. Where are they?”
“Not within fourteen feet of this girder there aren’t.”
“Anyway,” Delaney said, “how do we get these manacles off?”
“I’ve tried,” Wenske said. “I’ve been trying for a month.”
“The locks on these things are crap. I could pick them if I had my kit. What’s over there in your pantry?”
“Just a few grocery items. They bring me a hot dinner every night. Hot meaning Spaghetti-Os or fish sticks. There’s some stale bread here and a couple of cans of SPAM.”
I walked over dragging my chain and looked over the items on a folding table: some packaged and canned food, paper plates, utensils, a bucket of water and some plastic cups. One cup had a toothbrush in it, and I wondered if the three of us were going to share it. I was just grateful Timmy wasn’t there, as he gets grossed out at the thought of using even my toothbrush.
“The SPAM can has a pull tab instead of the kind of key that tinned meats used to have. I can’t do anything with this tab. But this fork might work. I might be able to do something with one tine. The lock has a simple pin and tumbler mechanism.”
The fork was a cheap stainless steel job, and with a little effort I was able to bend back three of the four tines. Then I bent the tip of the fourth tine back an eighth of an inch using the table edge and a metal rod that was part of one of Hively’s torture machines. I sat back down and propped my right ankle up on my left knee.
“Do you need more light?” Wenske said. “I can bring the reading lamp over.”
“No, it’s done by feel. Though the tine might be too thick.”
The manacle appeared to be a farm implement, probably designed for restraining animals—animals that were not going to be adept at picking locks.
The Last Thing I Saw Page 17
