Текст книги "The Last Thing I Saw "
Автор книги: Richard Stevenson
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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 15 страниц)
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 course, 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.”
“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 presence 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.
