Текст книги "The Last Thing I Saw "
Автор книги: Richard Stevenson
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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 15 страниц)
CHAPTER NINE
The Boston city narc I should talk to about Eddie Wenske, Davis told me, was a detective named Lewis Kelsey. He was out of the office for the day, but I made an appointment for Tuesday morning. He was supposedly up to speed on both the Wenske missing-person case and any possible link between Wenske’s disappearance and Weed Wars, as well as Wenske’s Globe reporting on the pot wholesalers.
Meanwhile, the media-book question was wide open—I knew literally nothing about the project Wenske was deep into when he vanished—so I decided to rectify my ignorance. I took a cab to Logan airport, making some calls on the way, and then rode the Delta Shuttle to LaGuardia. The flight was fast and smooth, and I was in midtown Manhattan by eleven.
Luke Pearlman had a cubby hole of an office on the seventh floor at 30 Rock, no windows, just air freshener and a lot of electronics. Pearlman was small and sprightly, with sunken dark eyes and more hair on the back of his hands than on his head, and he talked a mile a minute.
“Oh, God, I was stunned when I heard about Bryan Kim. I mean, fuck, what is going on here? I mean, first Bryan’s boyfriend disappears, and now Bryan is fucking murdered? This is just fucking incredible. So, tell me, tell me everything you know about any of this. I mean, we’d even do something on it, except of course there’s no New York angle. Or is there? Bryan thought Eddie Wenske’s disappearance might’ve had something to do with the gay-media book Wenske was working on, and I know Bryan was talking to people at Hey Look Media, which everybody in gay New York knows is a viper’s nest of pettiness and spite and miserliness and incompetence and puttin’ on airs. So, what do you think—do you think they’re all connected? Wenske disappearing and Bryan getting stabbed to death? It’s all just—God, I don’t know what to make of any of it. So, for chrissakes, please fill me in.”
I gave Pearlman an honest if abbreviated account of the case as I knew it: my being hired by Susan Wenske to find out what happened to her missing son; my un-kept dinner date with Bryan Kim; Kim’s stabbing death; the mysterious third diner. I speculated about possible links to Wenske’s pot book and also to the gay-media book Wenske was researching when he vanished.
“Oh,” Pearlman said, “I’m sure if Wenske was going to write anything unfavorable about Hey Look Media, Hal Skutnik probably had him killed. The same with Bryan—I know he was involved in digging up dirt on Prince Hal. Just kidding, of course. HLM doesn’t murder people. They don’t have to. They just insult people and treat them like shit and totally fuck them over. I know three filmmakers who are still waiting to be paid for films they delivered, and the films were aired, and then there were accounting delays, so-called. Accounting delays that have gone on for three years. The same with writers and photographers at HLM’s magazines, Our Rainbow, Proud Man, and Bugger. Skutnik is ruthless and mean, and even if he didn’t physically murder anybody I’m sure he’s made at least a hundred people drop dead from heartbreak or disgust.”
I said, “Did you say Bryan told you he thought Wenske’s disappearance had something to do with the media book research? He told Wenske’s mother he had no clue as to what happened to Wenske.”
“Bryan didn’t see any connection to the media project, I don’t think, until quite recently. Then just last week I ran into Boo Miller on the street—he’s in marketing at Hey Look Media—and Boo had been talking to Bryan, and Boo said there was something new Bryan was all of a sudden wondering about or suspicious of about Eddie disappearing, and Boo was even going to sneak up to Boston and talk to Bryan this week sometime while Ogden Winkleman, the asshole who runs the HLM New York office, was in L.A. That is, if Boo could get away with not being at his desk. Winkleman has surveillance cameras in the office, and he does random checks on where people are, and if he goes away he checks the tapes when he gets back. Boo told me that one guy in marketing put a blow-up sex doll in his chair when he took a long lunch break one time, and when the guy got back the doll was gone and there was a note on his chair that said clean out your desk.”
“Is this especially Orwellian, or is this just corporate America today?”
“It’s extreme. Boo thinks there’s also somebody in the office who’s in charge of taping people’s phone calls when he thinks somebody’s making a personal call on HLM time.”
“I’d like to talk to Miller. I assume he’s heard about what’s happened to Kim.”
“I haven’t talked to Boo, but I’m sure word has gotten to him. I’m surprised, actually, he hasn’t called.”
“His name is Boo?”
“Real name Buris. B-U-R-I-S.”
“Hey Look Media sounds like a hellish place to have to show up every day. Why do people work there?”
“If you’re gay and male,” Pearlman said, “and you want to work in gay media, your choices are few. It’s either HLM or Brand Gay, and Brand Gay is stultifyingly corporate on the one hand and creatively lighter-than-light on the other hand. Most of their creativity goes into having annoying promos for their upcoming programs jumping around on the screen. While one bad program is on, they’re trying to get people to watch upcoming programs that aren’t worth watching either. There’s also the embarrassing fact that a certain number of creative gay men are a good deal more gay than they are creative, and they don’t last in mainstream jobs where talent is more important than having a silver stud attached to your perineum. The least talented and most resplendently be-studded guys tend to be the ones who land at HLM and try to hang on there.”
“Which category does Boo Miller fit into?”
“Boo’s a good guy, and talented, and HLM is a way station for him. He’s young, no more than thirty. The turnover both in New York and L.A. is phenomenal, and I’m sure he’ll move on soon. I know he hates working for Skutnik and Winkleman, and he was feeding Eddie Wenske all kinds of vile stuff for his media book—leads and stories and maybe even computer files. Not just office gossip and personality stuff either. Some people think there’s a certain amount of financial funny business going on at HLM. I don’t know that Boo would have direct access to any of that, but I’m sure he could have pointed Wenske in the right direction. HLM is not on the scale of Madoff, but some people think it’s run pretty much the same way, and it’s a financial house of cards people hope they aren’t anywhere near when it comes crashing down.”
Pearlman’s cell warbled. He held up a this’ll-just-take-a-sec finger and said, “Luke.” He listened, said, “Ninety seconds, not a millisecond longer,” and hung up.
I said, “Eddie Wenske’s computer is also missing along with its owner.”
Pearlman raised a bushy eyebrow. “Yeah, well.”
“It’s easy to assume there are files on there that somebody did not want made public.”
“I’m sure there are. Or were.”
“Marva Beers thinks it’s probably Wenske’s pot book that got somebody mad at him. So do his mother and sister. Have you read Weed Wars?”
“I glanced at it. We had Eddie on at five when the book came out. It made a lot of people around here uncomfortable. Nobody who smokes pot wants to think they’re supporting a savage criminal enterprise.”
“Legalize it and they won’t be. But legalization doesn’t seem to be imminent.”
“Not as long as the drugs of choice in the New York State Legislature are Dewar’s and Rheingold light.”
“I’m not holding my breath.”
“I can see why Marva thinks the violent pot overlords did something to Wenske,” Pearlman said. “I’d say HLM is run by guys who are gangsters only in the moral sense. It’s true, yeah, that Skutnik hates criticism—you won’t find an unkind word about him or any of his enterprises in any HLM publication. But at the same time criticism rolls right off him. The company line is, anybody who badmouths HLM is either a jealous nobody or a disgruntled former employee. When people leave, they have to sign a non-disparagement agreement just to get out of their contracts. I don’t think Skutnik has—or needs—a posse of muscle boys who go around breaking guys’ legs. Or perineums.”
“Marva Beers told me she’d heard Skutnik and Winkleman were gangsters—the feyest gangsters in the country, I think she said.”
Pearlman thought about that. “I don’t know. Marva has her own reasons to think the worst of HLM. Skutnik and Winkleman are both the skuzziest types of misogynists. There are only two women I can think of in the entire company, and they are generally referred to as ‘those cunts in accounting.’ I’m sure they’re well paid and indispensible, because financially they must know where the bodies are buried, or at least suspect. But they’re treated as shittily as everybody else and called terrible names behind their backs. It all just gives you the heebie-jeebies.”
I said, “Is Skutnik decent to anybody? He makes Donald Trump sound like Mister Rogers.”
“Apparently he’s nice to Rover. That’s not his dog, it’s his boyfriend. Rover Fye is an actor—I use that term loosely—who’s been with Hal for about twenty years. Which is odd, because Rover’s IMDb page lists his age as thirty-one. One way or another, something doesn’t compute there. Rover produced, co-wrote, and co-starred in HLM TV’s series Dark Smooches. Did you see it?”
“Once, for about five minutes.”
“You’re a patient man. Boo was charged with promoting the series—of course with a budget of about twelve dollars. This was typical of the way HLM operates. Produce dreck, underfund marketing and distribution, making it impossible to succeed, and then scream at the poor shmuck who was supposed to make fois gras out of Hostess cupcakes.”
I said, “I think I need to talk to Boo. It sounds as if he must have given Eddie Wenske quite a computer full of hair-raising HLM stories. Can you get hold of him and set something up?”
“Maybe lunch, if you’re lucky,” Pearlman said, and placed a call.
“No answer. Let me try somebody else and find out if Boo is around.”
Another call. “Perry, hi, it’s Lukie-boy. I’m trying to get Boo, and he doesn’t answer. Any idea where he is?” Pearlman frowned. “Oh? Well, fuck. Hey, somebody wants to talk to Boo and maybe he should talk to you.” Pearlman explained who I was and what I was doing. He set up a meeting for two o’clock and rang off.
“That was Perry Dremel, who works with Boo in Hey Look marketing. He says Boo flew to Boston on Saturday, and as far as anybody can tell he hasn’t come back to the city, or at least he hasn’t arrived back at work or called in. Nobody seems to know where he is or what’s become of him.”
CHAPTER TEN
The question now was, was Boo Miller the third diner Bryan Kim was going to bring along Saturday night, and if so, what happened to him, if anything? Luke Pearlman said he would make some more calls, trying to locate anybody who knew of Miller’s whereabouts. Pearlman said he had limited time, inasmuch as he had two segments he was working on for Channel Four’s five o’clock news, but he would do what he could and then make more calls and send some texts after work around seven.
Hey Look Media’s New York headquarters was in an old Chelsea office block, in need of a coat of paint on the outside but bright and new in its fifth-floor glassed-in package, like a bottle of Grey Goose on a shelf at a Goodwill store. The receptionist was a willowy young man who had that schizoid PA look, suspicious and protective on the one hand but anxious not to offend somebody who might be investing in, or sleeping with, the boss.
The apprehensive kid phoned Perry Dremel, who soon came out and led me past twelve or fifteen cubicles occupied by a variety of broad-shouldered well-dressed men in their forties. There was no sign of “the cunts.”
Dremel, svelte, sandy-haired, and meticulously kempt like the others in the office, led me into a conference room with a window overlooking Sixth Avenue and shut the door.
“We’ll say you’re a filmmaker doing the festival circuit, and we’re sketching out a campaign, okay?”
“Cool. Should I look like I’m taking notes? I have a notebook.”
“That’d be fabulous. The room has a camera but no mikes as far as I know.”
“Okay.”
We sat across from each other and I brought out my pad. Dremel had a legal pad and scribbled on it as we conversed.
“Luke Pearlman says I can talk to you, that you’re working for Eddie Wenske’s family and trying to find him, right?”
“I am.” I explained that I was to meet Bryan Kim the evening of the day he was killed and discuss Wenske’s disappearance.
“That just sucks about Bryan. I’m still shaking just thinking about it. Do they have any idea who did it, or why?”
“Not yet. It seems to be somebody he knew well enough to let into his apartment. That’s about as far as the investigation has gotten.”
“Oh, fuck. And now Boo. Where the fuck is Boo?”
“You have no idea? Luke Pearlman told me Boo told him he was going to Boston sometime soon to see Bryan. Boo didn’t tell you or any of his other friends he was meeting Bryan?”
“Friday afternoon he just said to me, ‘Gotta run up to Boston tomorrow, back late or on Sunday.’ I thought I might see Boo at a tea dance benefit Sunday afternoon—he’d been selling tickets for it—but he wasn’t there, and nobody knew why he hadn’t shown up. He had a lot of ticket money with him, and people were pulling their hair out trying to do the accounting for the event.”
“But they didn’t think he’d absconded with the funds.”
“With six or eight hundred dollars? No. That won’t buy you a new life in Rio a million miles from Ogden Winkleman. Anyway, Boo is a terribly responsible individual, and everybody was concerned that he was sick or something, with him not getting in touch. And now, with the terrible news about Bryan Kim, God, I am really worried, and I’m sure a lot of other people are too.”
“He didn’t say why he was going to Boston?”
“I can’t really remember. I don’t think so. He just said he had to fly up there or something. Maybe he was seeing Bryan. If Luke says so, he’d know. Luke and Boo are friends from way back, Tisch and NYU. And if Boo was seeing Bryan, what does that mean that nobody knows where Boo is?”
“Does Boo have other friends in Boston?”
“I think so, yeah. Eddie Wenske, of course, but Eddie is…nobody knows what the fuck has happened to Eddie. This is all just creeping me out, and I don’t know what to think.”
“I’ve heard that Boo was helping Wenske research his gay-media book. Were you aware of that?”
Dremel twisted his chair to the left a few degrees and leaned his face against his hand. “I’m turning this way because I don’t think that Ogden reads lips, but I’m not sure. The camera is at the end of the room over the PowerPoint board, but don’t look.”
Hard though it was, I maintained my straight-ahead gaze.
Dremel said, “Yes, I know Boo was feeding Eddie HLM dish. In marketing and publicity we’re largely kept out of the loop, but we know all the less important ugly shit, because we’re up to our necks in it every day. Ogden playing with people’s heads. His meltdowns and fits. The company making deals with filmmakers while the financial plan has no provisions to pay them. Starving the creative budget while the company pays for Hal’s and Ogden’s perks. I’m sure Boo gave Wenske quite an earful, and if Wenske had kept at it there would have been plenty more. I mean, in the last three months, things have gone from bad to worse.”
“Bad to worse, how so?”
“Oh,” Dremel said past the eastern side of his hand, “just more turnover than ever. People running screaming onto Sixth Avenue, or if it’s L.A., people jumping out of windows in Westwood. The company’s finances apparently turned even more teetery than ever just after the first of the year, and yet we’re all supposed to keep the company running like a new Beamer with basically no budget at all. It’s a fucking joke.”
“There were suicides among the L.A. staff?”
“No, not actual jumping out of windows. Just clutching their heads and running screaming down stairwells. Actually, maybe that’s why all those windows in L.A. are sealed shut. It’s not about climate control, it’s about keeping Hey Look Media employees from throwing themselves ten stories onto Wilshire Boulevard.”
“Do you have any idea what happened three months ago that made the company’s financial situation worse?”
“Not a clue. Only Ogden knows, and of course Hal. And I’m sure Martine and Danielle. They’re the purse-strings people in California.”
“I’ve heard that the women in the company are referred to by ugly names behind their backs. That’s those two, Martine and Danielle?”
“The cunts, they’re called. Or the skanks. I don’t use that terminology. I have a mother and two sisters and don’t talk like that. That’s Hal and Ogden and, I’m sorry to say, a number of other people. Martine and Danielle worked for Hal’s father in Northern California. He was some kind of lumber baron, and that’s where the money came from to start the company. Hal inherited sixty million dollars from his grandfather ten years ago, and more when his dad croaked last year, plus he inherited Martine and Danielle after his father passed on. He must have something on them is what everybody thinks. Why else would they come down from Mount Shasta once a month to be ridiculed and abused and forced to fuck over half the creative gay people in L.A. while they pay the bills for Hal’s Gulfstream rentals and his yoga instructor.”
“Those are perks the company pays for?”
“That’s the word in L.A. Plus his and his boyfriend’s personal trainer, personal security, and hair stylist. It’s a hair dresser in Rover’s case—that’s Hal’s spectacularly untalented boyfriend—and hair transplant artist in Hal’s case. The top of Hal’s head is said to look like the inflamed scrotum of a Great Dane with scurvy. The buying power of gay people in the United States is estimated to be over 700 billion dollars, and it’s frightening to think how much of that amount is currently going toward planting bristles on Hal Skutnik’s skull.”
“If Skutnik has something on Martine and Danielle, surely they must have plenty on him. It sounds like a prosecutor’s dream if there’s actually anything illegal going on.”
“Apparently Hal has an international law firm that keeps the company barely honest. Most of the lawyers are actually in Curacao. That’s where Hal keeps his money, people in L.A. say, and where he has a house that he lives in when he’s not at his place in Bel Air or his lodge up north in the mountains. I know, I know—some people like to say Hal is a kind of gay Bernie Madoff. And that the whole company is a big, huge, incredible Ponzi scheme that can’t last. But people who believe that are forgetting that the tax laws are written by friends of people like Hal to make what Hal does legal. Hal doesn’t need to be a crook to get rich at the expense of the gay men and women of America. He only has to be an asshole, and at that I’d have to say he is very, very good.”
I took all this in. “It sounds,” I said, “as if Eddie Wenske had his work cut out for him sorting this hideous mess out. The idea of one lone writer grasping the workings of HL Media’s complex corporate machinery—it just seems overwhelming.”
“That would depend,” Dremel said, “on who Wenske might have found who would open up to him and show him the family jewels. Hal and Ogden are vile people who are loathed by just about every human being they come into contact with, and there must be somebody somewhere who knows things and was or is ready to unburden himself or herself. Maybe Wenske found that person. Do you know if he spent any time in L.A. working on this?”
I said no, I didn’t. But I’d find out, I told Dremel, and then see where that led me.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I said to Timmy, “I think I’m in something over my head. I’m just this one-man schlemiel of a private eye. What’s really needed here is the FBI or the entire Justice Department or the Army of the Potomac or the Mossad or some combination of all of the above. It’s possible something very big is very wrong here, but I have no clue as to what it might be, and I can imagine myself flailing ridiculously for days or weeks or even months at Susan Wenske’s expense.”
“Where are you? In Boston?”
“I was until this morning.” I recapped my New York visit and said I had set up a dinner meeting with Marva Beers and the New York Times editor Eddie Wenske had pitched his gay-media story to. “I’ll be back in Boston late tonight, and tomorrow I’m seeing a narc who knows Wenske’s story—his pot reporting and his disappearance. This whole thing has so many angles to it, I almost wish I hadn’t blown off trigonometry.”
“Almost but not quite.”
“There’s the Weed Wars situation, and there’s the gay-media research into a company that’s a combination of Pee-wee’s Playhouse, No Exit, and the Soviet Politburo under Leonid Brezhnev. Then there’s this so-called dark side stuff that Wenske was supposedly into, though I can find no trace of that, and his best friend at The Boston Globe simply doesn’t believe it. I know basically nothing at this point except that Eddie Wenske is as missing as ever and Bryan Kim was stabbed to death in his home not long before he was to have had dinner with me on Saturday. That is, with me and with another person who has yet to be identified. Oh. One other thing. The third diner may well have been a guy from Hey Look Media named Boo Miller who lives in New York and went to Boston on Saturday, and now he’s disappeared too.”
“His name is Boo?”
“Real name Buris. B-U-R-I-S. He had been blabbing to Wenske HLM’s dirty secrets, and there are a lot of those. It’s mostly repugnant personality stuff about how obnoxious the owners are. There are rumors of illegality, but one HLM wage slave says the owners don’t need to be crooks since being cheap and mean and cynical is good enough for them. But Kim supposedly had some new brainstorm, or maybe actual information, about Wenske’s disappearance, and some connection it had to HLM, and Miller had flown up to Boston to talk to Kim about it. To Kim, and maybe to me.”
“Donald, it sounds to me as if you know a lot more than you think you know. And that, like you said, you’re…I don’t want to say in over your head. But up to your waist in something that’s actually quite dangerous. I mean, dangerous for you. It sounds as if people are being killed or made to disappear on account of knowledge they had or have. If you acquire knowledge, then you’ll be…well…you know.”
“I know. I’ve thought about that.”
“So please don’t just say, ‘Yeah, yeah, but trouble is my business.’ Be careful, or come home. Or something.”
“Don’t worry, I will.”
“Which one?”
“I’ll let you know. I’ll be careful for sure.”
“Good.”
“But I may have to go to L.A.”
Audible breathing, an indication of an increased heart rate. “Why?”
“That’s where the Hey Look Media numero uno assholes are. Somebody out there may know something about Wenske’s disappearance—if, that is, the disappearance had to do with the gay-media connection and not the pot connection. It’s all still frustratingly confusing.”
“I can see that I’ll never dissuade you from going out there. You’re already practicing your Spanish.”
“I’ll come home first, maybe late tomorrow or Wednesday.”
“I’ll look forward to it.”
He told me some legislative and Albany gossip. But he could tell I was not paying attention, so he gave up and said so-long.
§ § §
I had called Marva Beers and planned to meet her for an early supper at a Turkish place on Ninth Avenue in the forties. It wasn’t far from the Times’ new building, and she said she’d left a message and thought she would be able to get Gerri Anastos, her busy editor friend, to come by at least for coffee and brief me on where Wenske’s gay-media story stood before his disappearance in late January.
Beers showed up first, hauling a multi-colored Kenyan cloth bag full of what might have been twenty pounds of books or, judging from what the load seemed to be doing to her posture, scrap metal.
“Donald, this is the first time I’ve been above Fourteenth Street since 1979. Only for Eddie Wenske would I do this. Oh God, I’m exhausted!”
“I hope I can tell him face to face the sacrifice you were willing to make for him.”
“I see you’re still the optimist. Pin a rose on you.”
We were at a corner table in the front of the restaurant next to the window looking out on lively Ninth Avenue. The weather had warmed up again—global warming moving inexorably northward from Battery Park—and people were out with their jackets flung over their shoulders. A waitress took our drink orders—chardonnay for Beers, Sam Adams for me—as the place started to fill up with pre-theater diners.
“Gerri mentioned this place once and likes it,” Beers said. “I don’t know this neighborhood from Poughkeepsie, but it looks like it’s no longer the Black Hole of Calcutta it was the last time I was up here.”
“Where did you and Eddie last dine together? In the Village, I suppose.”
“I don’t remember, but I suppose it was in the meat packing district. Eddie had this weird fascination with that neighborhood. We used to meet once in a while at Florent before it closed.”
“The fashionably seedy bistro on Gansevoort? Whenever we went down there, Timothy Callahan always said he felt as if he was back in the Peace Corps.”
“How sentimental of him. What was his work in the Peace Corps? Did he help the homeless or was he setting up back-room sex clubs?”
“Poultry development in India. Pretty vanilla stuff.”
“Well, good for him. I approve.”
Among the people pouring in through the front door now was an angular dark-haired woman in a black pants suit who spotted us and headed our way. She had a tired smile, wore big glasses, and was slinging a laptop in a black case.
“Gerri, dear! You’re such a true-blue friend to do this. I would have told me I’m busy getting the newspaper of record out before it goes bankrupt and I’ll try to fit me in next year sometime.”
Anastos hugged Beers and offered me her hand. “No trouble at all. If it has to do with Eddie, I’ll help in any way I can. How’s Linda, Marva? How’s her new hip?”
“Oh, fabulous, fabulous. She’s even thinking of resuming her career with River Dance.”
Anastos caught my look. “She’s kidding, Donald. Marva’s beloved teaches medieval European history at NYU.”
I said, “You never know. Didn’t Eddie Wenske have a dancer boyfriend at one time? A Boston friend of his mentioned that.”
“Could be,” Anastos said, “but I doubt if the guy was sixty-three and had a kryptonite hip.”
The waitress came back with our drinks. Anastos asked for a whiskey sour, and we ordered some eggplant and lamb patty appetizers.
“My Greek ancestors would roll over in their graves if they knew I was eating in here,” Anastos said. “But I don’t do this just to get a rise out of them. I happen to like the food.”
“I was in central Turkey one time,” Beers said, “and the tour guide announced, ‘And now vee vill go to za Greek village.’ When we got there, the Byzantine church was all boarded up, and I said, ‘Hey, where are all the Greeks?’ She waved that away, and said, ‘Oh, zere was an exchange of populations!’”
“Yeah, both sides running for their lives. My relatives might have been among them,” Anastos said. “But that was then and this is Ninth Avenue. Thank God.”
“Or Allah,” Beers said.
“I brought Eddie in here one time,” Anastos said. “He loved it. Boston—you know, it’s not renowned for its culinary variety.”
Beers snorted. “Their idea of ethnic food is cabbage. I wouldn’t set foot in the place.”
I asked Anastos when she last spoke with Wenske.
“Just before Christmas we talked on the phone. He’d been to L.A. and was back in Boston, and I was looking for an update on the gay-media piece and when I might get a look at something. You know, I don’t remember the conversation all that clearly. I mean, I had no idea it would be the last time I spoke with him. He seemed fine at the time. He was as excited about the project as he’d been when he first pitched it. And he was just as disgusted, I might add. Eddie might be a little more idealistic about gay businesses than a firm grip on reality calls for. I mean, Karl Marx never declared, ‘We must overthrow all the rotten capitalists except for those nice gay boys.’”
I asked Anastos if Wenske’s research concentrated on Hey Look Media or if there were other avenues that he mentioned.
“It was mainly HLM, he said, because they had bought up practically everything—television, magazines, a book publisher, online venues. He said the company called it cross-platforming. That is, sharing staff and overhead and promoting all of the company’s products in each of the company’s several venues. Each outlet was a cross-platform gay-media portal, so-called. Or, as one of Eddie’s embittered sources out there liked to refer to it, a cross-platform gay media cornhole.”
“He had multiple sources at Hey Look in L.A.?”
“He’d developed quite a few apparently. Most were former employees of the company who had been fired or quit under contentious circumstances. And there were two sources in particular, he said, who were giving him documents and providing the most incriminating material. They were people still working deep inside the company, was my impression. People with access to the most sensitive stuff. Eddie said it was a real bonanza, and his biggest problem was going to be picking and choosing what to concentrate on in the piece for me. The rest of it he’d use later when he wrote the gay-media book.”
“The book that wasn’t going to make any of us rich,” Beers said. “But that Eddie had to write to save gay America from homo Mammon.”
“Marva, I actually share his outrage,” Anastos said. “It’s one thing for gay men—and yes, it is men we’re talking about here—it’s one thing for a couple of gay men to control, say, the recreational vacuum penis pump industry. But when there’s a near monopoly on gay news and arts and entertainment, that has to be bad for the country’s gay social health.”
Beers was looking queasy. “What’s a recreational vacuum penis pump?”
