Текст книги "The Last Thing I Saw "

Автор книги: Richard Stevenson

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

We needed allies, and if Delaney and I were correct in our belief that the salt sisters had been Wenske’s main sources for his plan to blow the lid off the assorted HLM criminal enterprises, they seemed like a good place to start looking for help.

On my phone, I said, “This is Stu Fulton. May I speak to Ms. Desault, please?”

“Which Ms. Desault? There are two.”

“Whichever one can sell me five hundred thousand board feet of pine.”

“You can speak to Martine.”

On came a polka band. I tried to polka on the table with the fingers of my right hand, and I did this about as deftly as I could have with my legs and feet.

“Mr. Fulton?”

“Ms. Desault?”

“Yes, how are you?”

“I’m not actually Fulton, I’m Don Strachey, a private investigator working out of Albany, New York, Eddie Wenske’s home town. I know you and your sister were among the primary sources for Wenske’s investigation into criminal practices at Hey Look Media. All this reeking garbage is going to come out, and I was hoping you’d want to get out in front of the legal and moral collapse of HLM by helping me and a colleague out and telling us what you know. Can we get together? I’m here in Mount Shasta for a couple of days. More, if that’s what’s needed.”

A long silence.

“I know,” I said, “that you broke off contact with Wenske several weeks ago. I assume that was because somebody tipped you off that higher-ups at HLM had figured out that Wenske was up here and what he was doing. And perhaps you were frightened, and you must have been even more frightened when you found out that Wenske had been killed. You are aware of that, aren’t you?”

Another silence, and then the line went dead.

“Hell.”

“She hung up?” Delaney said.

“Yeah. She never said a word after how-do.”

It was Saturday morning, and we were in Delaney’s room at the Pine Cone Inn. We had spent the previous evening looking through files on Wenske’s computer, which Delaney had retrieved from Wenske’s room and had the password for. Paper documents had been stashed in Delaney’s storage bin in the basement of his apartment building, not in the apartment itself where I had looked.

The data on the computer files was fascinating stuff that Delaney and I only half understood. It involved bank transfers in and out of multiple corporations in Curacao, Panama, Liberia, and the U.S. Delaney had seen much of this data previously along with Jane Ware, and he explained to me how HLM moved cash around. One trick was to do television production deals for budgeted amounts—a million, two million, three million dollars—and promise investors X amount of return once these programs or films were distributed or shown on HLM TV. The films were then made for a fraction of the amount budgeted, with the remainder flowing into dummy offshore corporations. Investors were repaid Ponzi-like from cash flowing in from new investors for newer projects that worked the same way. It was easy to see how this was both illegal and not going to work in the long run.

The Desault sisters were up to their necks in this funny business and outright fraud, so a question Delaney and I both had was this: Why had they blabbed only to Wenske? If they had wanted to bring Hal Skutnik down, why had they not gone directly to the state prosecutors? And if all the law enforcement agencies in Siskiyou County were somehow in the pockets of Maurice Skutnik Enterprises or HLM—and that seemed improbable—why couldn’t the salt sisters have gone to the feds? Presumably the DEA had a considerable presence in this region famous for its fine kush. Delaney had befriended a state narc who apparently was both competent and clean. Joe Willard had told Delaney that undercover agents had infiltrated at least some of the local growing operations and were methodically gathering evidence for eventual busts.

Delaney and I had breakfast at Gussie’s, down the road from the Pine Cone Inn. Walking back to the motel, we were strategizing as to how we might approach the Desault sisters again when what looked like the red Ford pick-up I’d seen at the Skutnik house pulled alongside us and a man in the passenger seat rolled down his window.

“Don Strachey?”

“Yeah.”

“Just keep walking.”

“Okay.”

“You stayin’ at the Pine Cone?”

“Yep.”

“See you there. You wanna hop in the back of the truck?”

“No thanks.”

The truck pulled on up ahead of us and into the Pine Cone parking area.

The man who spoke to me looked big enough to have carried Delaney and me not just in his truck bed but maybe in his back pocket. He wore a dirty blue sweatshirt and had a dirty brown beard that extended down toward his lap somewhere. The driver of the pick-up was darker and clean-shaven, and smaller but still big enough.

Delaney said, “Should I dial 911?”

“No, let’s meet these guys in the breakfast room at the motel and see who they are. It’ll be okay, I think.”

When we went in, some of the motel patrons were sipping their free not-fresh-squeezed OJ and nibbling at their mini cinnamon buns. We weren’t going to have much privacy here, and the bigger of the two men from the truck suggested we sit out in a gazebo at the edge of the parking area. The structure had a nice view of Mount Shasta, and people coming and going along Mount Shasta Boulevard had an unobstructed view of us. So I said that would be fine.

“You should leave town,” the big man said as soon as we were seated. “Nobody wants to talk to you. Martine don’t want to talk to you, and Danielle don’t want to talk to you.”

“How come? They talked to Eddie Wenske. I’m representing Wenske’s family.”

“Something happened to that guy. You know about that?”

“I heard about it. Somebody is going to be held responsible for Wenske’s death.”

The guy shook his head in disbelief. “You sure are full of shit, Strachey.”

The big guy’s companion sat giving me the fish eye, and Delaney was glowering at both of them.

“Ms. Desault and Ms. Desault are missing the point,” I said. “I don’t think they had anything to do with Wenske’s being murdered. I know they were helping him out in what he was working on, and now my friend and I here are picking up where Wenske left off. Paul here is a writer and I’m an investigator working for Wenske’s mother.”

“What you are is an asshole sticking your nose in where it don’t belong,” the big man said. “Martine and Danielle, they decided to let it go, at least for now. They gotta wait until things simmer down. You want to make a tree fall on Hal Skutnik, go ahead. But the ladies ain’t gonna help, so you might just as well go back to L.A. Times are tough enough up here as it is, without somebody fuckin’ up everybody makin’ a living. We all are just trying to get by, is all.”

“Look,” I said, “I’m not interested in disrupting the growing and selling of weed in Siskiyou County. In a way, you folks are performing a public service, providing America with a product that’s less harmful than most of what’s sold in every neighborhood liquor store across the nation and half the Walgreens and CVS’s. What I am interested in is the violence that goes along with the weed business and Hal Skutnik’s possible involvement in it. Did you know that two friends of Eddie Wenske were stabbed to death last week in Boston, and they were probably killed by dealers connected with Skutnik and HLM?”

The two men glanced at each other. “I heard,” the big guy said. “That ain’t got nothin’ to do with Danielle and Martine and their operation. That was some mules who are methies, or work for a couple of methies anyway. And meth people you can’t trust any further than you can throw ’em.”

Inasmuch as this man could probably throw a methie quite some distance, this was a confusing statement.

I said, “What’s your name?”

“Ort.”

“Ort?”

“That’s right. Ort.”

“Well, Ort, please tell Ms. Desault and Ms. Desault that my friend and I have all the HLM incriminating documents they gave Wenske, and these are going to end up at the federal building in San Francisco if the ladies don’t help us nail somebody for the three murders. Maybe that somebody will be Hal Skutnik, and if he goes down then they can probably resume their pot business that’s run under the guise of a logging business, which I assume is what’s really going on here. Does that make sense?”

Ort thought this over. “You know, we had a good thing going here for a goodly number of years. The logging economy has been for shit. People gotta feed their families, but there’s only so much wildcatting you can do to make ends meet, stealing trees from Forest Service concessions and not get caught. So everybody grows a little weed or helps out somebody else who does. Most of them are good, law-abiding people. Well, not law-abiding, but you know what I mean.”

“Sure.”

“But you have your bad apples who ruin it for everybody else.”

“I know.”

“It’s the meth people who are the worst.”

“I’ve heard that.”

“Martine and Danielle try to stay away from that type of person.”

“Good for them.”

“And we all were making good money, getting a fair return. Keeping the flat-on-its-ass lumber company going with the weed profits while old Maurice shot bear and shot the shit with movie stars and politicians.”

Now it was coming clear. “But then the senior Skutnik died.”

“Yeah, old Maurice, a total asshole.”

“And his son Hal started bleeding the logging-slash-pot-growing company’s profits to prop up his inept and mismanaged and partially crooked gay media empire.”

“Hal is crazy as a bedbug and queer to boot.”

“So Danielle and Martine thought they could discredit or maybe even ruin Hal Skutnik’s media business and somehow preserve the weed business that has helped the impoverished loggers of Siskiyou County stay afloat in bad times. And they were doing this through Eddie Wenske and his book exposing corruption in the gay media.”

“I wondered all along,” Ort said, “if they could get rid of Hal and still keep the business doin’ okay otherwise. It sounded to me like that was gonna be work. But the gals are whizzes at the bookkeeping and the deals. Old Maurice knew that, and that’s why he let them pret’ near run the company for twenty years all by their selves.”

I said, “You seem to be highly knowledgeable of company operations under Martine and Danielle. You’re a trusted associate, it appears. Or are you more than that? May I ask if you are in a relationship with Martine or Danielle?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Which one?”

“Both of ’em.”

I thought of Rick Santorum and his slippery slope argument, but I didn’t mention it to Ort.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

In Delaney’s motel room, he was busy making notes for the book he was now planning on writing, and I was checking email and phone messages. Word had reached HLM’s New York office of Boo Miller’s death, and I had messages from both Perry Dremel and Luke Pearlman expressing shock and sorrow as well as fear about what might happen next.

Ogden Winkleman was back in New York, Dremel told me, and was ranting about various misdeeds by staffers that he could only have known about from lip-reading the security-camera tapes or—more likely, Dremel believed—hacked phones or hidden listening devices. So it was almost certainly Winkleman who had found out about Bryan Kim and Boo Miller being in touch with Delaney and thereby learning of Wenske’s information gathering on HLM’s corrupt and even violent practices. And it must have been Winkleman who alerted somebody in the Siskiyou drug world that Kim and Miller had to be dealt with, just as Wenske had been.

It hadn’t, however, been the Desaults Winkleman notified. They were in fact eager for Skutnik to be embroiled in scandal or even criminal proceedings. Even if they had been alerted, they would have done nothing—except maybe warn Kim that he was in danger. It had to have been somebody else in Siskiyou County that Winkleman had tipped off, but who? I needed to find out.

Ort Nestlerode, as his full name was soon revealed to be, told us he would inform the salt sisters that Delaney and I were reasonable people who were not bent on interfering with the local pot trade, and he said maybe they would talk to us. He called me an hour after he left the motel and said we were invited to lunch at the Skutnik family house, where the sisters lived. He gave me directions, and I didn’t tell him I had already scouted the place out.

Delaney and I pulled in next to the Hummer and the red pick-up at twelve fifteen, right on time. Ort was waiting and led us around to the deck on the side of the house with its nice view of Mount Shasta and some well-tended flower beds at the side of the wide yard.

Ort’s driver, whose name we had learned was Clovis, was fixing some burgers on a gas grill, and the Desault sisters were seated in some gaily be-cushioned deck chairs with drinks in their hands. They were not twins, as far as I knew, but they looked a lot alike: forty-five-ish, handsome and big-featured, and that included commodious butts in tight shorts and some impressive décolletage not quite spilling out of halter tops. It was not the picture that was ordinarily conjured up by the term financial wizards, but this was California.

The sisters looked up at me with forced smiles, and one of them said, “We’re feeding you lunch, so that means you can’t make trouble.”

“Deal,” I said.

Delaney was peering all around, making mental notes, I figured, in his journalist’s way.

The sisters introduced themselves, Martine in the blue shorts, Danielle in green.

Ort took our drink orders, Calistoga water for both Delaney and me, and Danielle asked us how we liked the view of Mount Shasta. “People come from all over,” she said, “and not just ’cause it’s a beautiful mountain.”

“It’s got powers, some people say,” Martine added. “It’s the middle of an energy vortex.”

“No kidding?”

“In 1987 the Harmonic Convergence was held here, and the town was like the center of the universe for a while.”

“I’ll bet the Chamber of Commerce liked that.”

“Lots of smokers,” Danielle said, and they both laughed.

“That’s all bullshit,” Martine said. “But who cares? Different strokes for different folks.”

Delaney said, “The area seems to represent quite a combination of new and old California.”

Ort was back with our drinks now. He said, “Yeah, there’s assholes up here with mud on their boots and there’s assholes up here with their boots up their asses.”

“Ort, shut up,” Martine said. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Ort, honey,” Danielle said, “would you freshen my sombrero?”

“Sure, hon.”

“Mine too, honey,” Martine said. “While you’re at it.”

“I understand,” Delaney said, “that some of the finest marijuana in the world is grown in Siskiyou County.”

“You bet your bippy,” Martine said. “We get fan letters from all over.”

“Yeah” Ort said, “the county sheriff, the DEA. The letters come registered mail.”

“Ort, don’t even say that,” Danielle said. “We mind our P’s and Q’s, and the law leaves us alone. We’re a relatively small operation, fourteen million gross. The narcs mostly go after the Mexicans and the big guys. We’re small garbanzas and also we’re not going around killing anybody. Maybe a wedgie once in a while, but that’s about all. Right, Ort?”

“Yeah.”

“We were making a nice living, actually, for Mr. Skutnik senior and ourselves and maybe forty or fifty other people. Then Hal took over the company and stuck his hand in the till.”

“We told him,” Martine said, “that we were willing to move his dough around and keep Hey Look in business, even with all his phony production deals and ripping off investors and contractors. That was up to Hal if he wanted to do business that way, and if the feds ever came around we’d just say we did it all at gunpoint and Hal’s father raped us and we were gonna cooperate with the U.S. attorney and the hell with Hal.”

Delaney said, “Mr. Skutnik Senior raped you? Both of you?”

“Raped might be too strong a word for it,” Danielle said. “But in that type of situation you say what you have to.”

Martine went on, “But stupid Hal couldn’t just leave it alone, keeping the family business going, selling a high-grade product, donating to United Way, et cetera. He had to over-extend, and he’s got all these banks and investors being so mean as to want their money back, so he starts looting the weed operation. He skimmed off a mil in a period of about a month. That’s when we got totally pissed off, and when we heard about Eddie Wenske trying to ruin Hal, we said what a godsend, and we started helping Eddie out. Feeding him all the HLM dirt. Well, maybe not all.”

“But then you suddenly cut Eddie off. Why was that?”

Ort said, “We heard tell that Hal had found out Eddie bein’ up here and talkin’ to us all.”

“And we figured we needed to cool it at least temporarily,” Martine added.

“And then,” Ort said, “the next thing we find out is, Eddie is dead. So now how the hell were the ladies here gonna help out Wenske if he was six feet under up the canyon somewhere?”

“Where did you hear this?” I asked.

“Not the most reliable source,” Martine said, “but word got back to us from our own people that it was true. We heard it from Rover Fye, Hal’s boyfriend. He said he found out about it from Mason Hively, the guy who filmed Dark Smooches up at Hal’s lodge in the canyon. Did you ever look at Dark Smooches? Probably not.”

“I saw part of one episode,” I said.

Ort asked, “Turn your stomach?”

“Pretty much.”

“Mason’s a meth freak,” Danielle said, “and so is Rover, so you have to take what they say with a grain of salt.”

I wondered if Martine and Danielle knew that people at HLM referred to them as the salt sisters and used contemptuous misogynistic terms to describe them. I didn’t ask, but I didn’t have to.

“One reason we can’t stand Hal and Rover and Mason,” Martine said, “is the way they call us bitches and those cunts and insulting filthy language behind our back. After all we’ve done for the Skutniks, keeping their businesses going and their asses out of jail, and we are treated totally like crap.”

“The thing is,” Danielle said, “we thought Wenske’s book could ruin Hal, maybe even get him sent to the pokey, and we’d cooperate and plead out of anything that dropped on us, and then we’d come back here and keep the business going and make some serious moolah what with Hal out of the picture.”

“Maybe that can still happen,” Martine said, “if you all write that book and fuck Hal to Jesus and back.”

Delaney said, “Maybe we can do that.”

“Just be careful of the methies, Rover and Mason. You don’t want to cross them. They’re in with some of the Mexies who are mean as sin. They like to stick people with big knives. They’ve killed a lot of people, maybe even Eddie. The word is, Eddie was offed by a gang with more Eastern connections—New York and New England—but nobody is really sure. I seriously doubt Rover and Mason would be involved in killing anybody. But they are methies, so who knows?”

“We do know,” Danielle said, “that Mason likes to lock people up in his dungeon out at the lodge.”

“But that’s just for sex,” Martine said.

“Mason has a dungeon?”

“It was built when they were gonna film Mason’s big pet project, The Boy with the Dragon Tattoo. But then legal said no to that. They warned Mason that Stieg Larsson’s estate would sue Hey Look’s ass for sure, and Larsson wasn’t just some sorry-ass little New York or L.A. gay filmmaker.”

I said, “Is Mason out there now at the lodge? He didn’t seem to be at HLM’s reception at the Peninsula on Thursday.”

“He’s been there at lot lately,” Martine said. “And I know Rover is due up here shortly. There’s some new project they’re working on supposedly that Hal is all hot to trot with. But if those two are producing it, I think you can guess how really rotten it’s gonna turn out to be.”

I said I could only begin to imagine.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

I called Timmy and said I was making some progress and it was great to be in Northern California with its spectacular scenery. He knew I was skipping over a number of crucial details, and he proceeded with some hand-wringing over my safety and well-being. This was reassuring and endearing in its way but went on just a little too long. Anyway, he was up to his receding hairline in state budgetary matters—the governor had screamed obscenities at Assemblyman Lipshutz over the phone that very morning—and Timmy soon rang off and went back to his complex duties. I wondered if it might help if the salt sisters were turned loose on the New York State budget.

Delaney was having knee problems—I could sometimes see him wincing when he walked more than half a mile—and I guessed I would need the help of someone younger and in better shape for what I thought I might need to do next.

I called Ricky Esteban. I got him on his cell at the copy center and explained that Delaney and I had picked up where Eddie Wenske left off and we might need assistance coping with some bad people, including Rover Fye and Mason Hively. Esteban said he could take time off from his job but he needed the income. I offered him three times the pittance he was earning at the copy center—Susan Wenske’s mom would approve, I somehow knew—and I told Esteban I’d email him an airline e-ticket to Redding for the next day. He said that was cool. I asked him if he owned a firearm. He said no but he knew how to get one. I advised him to place it in checked baggage and not try to carry it on the plane. He said, yeah, he knew about that.

I told Ort I needed to check out Mason Hively and the Skutnik mountain lodge, if what I now suspected was an actual possibility. I especially wanted to get a look at Hively’s dungeon, where The Boy with the Dragon Tattoo would have been filmed if the HLM lawyers hadn’t put the kibosh on it.

Ort said, “If you go in there, I hope you like to take it up the butt.”

I said, “I do,” and he slapped his enormous knee and laughed.

Hively would not know who I was, and I wanted to keep it that way for the time being. Rover would be turning up soon, and I knew he might recognize me from the HLM reception in L.A.—or maybe not, since he was plainly drug-addled at the nipple clamp boys’ reception. Ort said he could introduce me to Hively as an old high school friend, Don Smith. But I didn’t know if I could convincingly portray a Siskiyou County native, so we settled on a Don Smith who was Ort’s second cousin from Fresno.

We drove out of Mount Shasta in the pick-up, Ort behind the wheel. We took the interstate south a few miles, then cut east on state highway eighty-nine. The road twisted up a canyon, and then we turned off onto a side road, paved but in need of repair, that climbed higher into the mountains. Soon Ort swung the truck onto a long private drive—a conspicuous sign read NO ENTRY—TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED—DOGS AND SECURITY—and as we came around a forested bend into a broad clearing the Skutnik lodge came into view.

The wildflowers along the drive bloomed prettily, and a hill leading up to a mowed lawn was thick with daffodils in bloom. Beyond that was a group of rustic, mostly wooden buildings. There was the rambling lodge itself with its broad porch, then a barn-like structure, a separate multi-vehicle garage, a low building that looked as though it might be a swimming pool cabana behind a dense wall of shrubbery, and a sizeable more modern metal outbuilding that could have been a gym or squash court or even a film studio. Three vehicles were parked in front of the garage, a vintage Chevy SUV, a dusty Jeep Cherokee, and a newer gray Lexus. A pale sun shone down on all this, and on the two Mexican-looking men sitting and smoking on a bench in front of the metal building. One of the two was almost Ort’s size, with a boulder of a paunch instead of a long beard, and both were wearing holsters containing objects too bulky to be cell phones.

Ort parked and yelled out, “Where’s Mason?”

Both men gestured vaguely in the direction of the lodge.

We walked up the steps and on in the front door—Ort seemed to have the run of the place—and on through the big dining room and into the kitchen.

“I figured you’d be out here,” Ort said to a man seated at the kitchen table with a plate of powder, a roll of toilet paper and a Diet Coke on the table in front of him.

Hively looked up at us, grinned and said, “Join me, boys?”

“You parachutin’?”

“Looks that way.”

In worn jeans and a faded green polo shirt, Hively was nearly as skinny as the young birches along highway eighty-nine. I guessed his age to be between thirty-five and eighty-five, but hard to gauge with a once-handsome face that apparently had been severely damaged by his habits. Hively’s nose was all but collapsed in on itself and when he smiled a couple of teeth were missing.

“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.