Текст книги "The Last Thing I Saw "

Автор книги: Richard Stevenson

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

My nine o’clock appointment, Nate Gomez, had seen Wenske even more recently, around the first of March, he told me. We met in Gomez’s apartment near UCLA because he still worked for Hey Look Media and could not take the chance of being seen in public with me. By nine, I was starting to feel the jet lag but got by on coffee and declined to share the reefer Gomez fired up soon after my arrival in his airy digs with a nice view of the leafy college campus.

“You actually talked to Wenske this month?” I asked.

“We had Thai take-out here in the apartment, and I confirmed a lot of the hideous stories he’d heard by then from pissed-off HLM people. Eddie is a really serious journalist, checking details with multiple sources. I was impressed by how careful he was.”

“And this couldn’t have happened earlier in February or even back in December?”

“I just checked my calendar, and it was definitely March first.”

Gomez was long and lean and had a long lean nose to go with the rest of him and large black eyes. He was stretched out on his couch in gym gear under a blown-up poster of Barbara Stanwyck with her Double Indemnity ankle bracelet.

“I got the idea,” Gomez said, “that Eddie planned on being around L.A. for a while longer. I was really surprised when—it must have been a couple of weeks later—that people were saying he had disappeared and his family and friends were really worried about him.”

“Did he mention who he was interviewing next?”

“No, but I know he was staying with a newspaper guy he knew from Boston.”

“Paul Delaney?”

“I think so. Yes, Paul something.”

I had tried phoning Delaney earlier in the evening, but he didn’t answer and his voice mail box was still full.

I said, “I know that even beyond HLM’s crappy programming and obnoxious bosses, Wenske was digging into the company’s murky finances. Did he talk about that with you?”

“No, but he wouldn’t have necessarily. I’m with media relations, and all I know about HLM finances is that I didn’t get paid for a week in January, and I’ve gotten paid every week since then. You hear shit, but you would never, ever ask. If you even hinted to anybody that something funny might be going on finances-wise, Hal would find out about it, and he would sue you for character defamation. Or he might just come into your office and overturn your desk.”

“So Skutnik has been known to turn violent?”

“Just yelling and screaming. He doesn’t carry a gun, as far as I know, just a big set of lungs.”

“I don’t suppose you’re aware of this, Nate, but as far as I know, you’re the last person to have seen Eddie Wenske before he disappeared.”

“Shit. Really?”

“So he was here in your place—when? On the evening of March first?”

“Yeah. For a couple of hours. He probably left around nine.”

“Do you know where he was going when he left here?”

Gomez took a toke on his weed—I was enjoying the scratchy aroma—and said, “I do happen to know.” He had a funny little smile as he said it.

“Yeah?”

“He was going to the Melrose Spa.”

“The somewhat seedy gay bathhouse dating back to the twelfth century?”

“I told him if he needed a little attention in that department, I’d be happy to help him out. Have you met Eddie?”

“No. Just his family.”

“He’s a hottie. It would have been fun for me, and I feel confident enough that it would have been enjoyable for Eddie too. But he said he liked to keep sex compartmentalized and he never mixed it in with his work. He liked to stay focused when he was writing or researching. And if he wasn’t in a relationship and just needed to get his tubes cleared he’d go to a bathhouse or peep show where you can watch the videos and get a blow job and then walk out relieved and minus any mental complications. I took the rejection a little personally at the time, but after I thought about it, it made sense. You know?”

“It fits with what I’ve heard about Wenske.”

“That could have been just a line. Being polite. But I don’t think so.”

“I don’t either. It’s how I think too. About work.”

Gomez laughed. “You’re sure you don’t want a little of this good weed?”

“No, thank you.”

“As you wish, Donald.”

“So Wenske’s last known location before he vanished was the Melrose Baths? That’s unnerving. But I don’t suppose he met somebody there and went home with him. That’s not what he was looking for.”

“No, he told me he had an off-again-on-again boyfriend back in Boston, but the guy was driving him around the bend with his inability to commit. They were going to give it one more try, Eddie said, but he wasn’t all that optimistic. Anyway, he liked his work and his family and friends, and if he wanted to get off there were plenty of other ways to do that. It sounded as if he was one of those guys who’d go to the baths and be in and out in forty-five minutes.”

I said, “It’s an extreme type of compartmentalization that works well for the people for whom it works well.”

“It’s not for me,” Gomez said. “I like love and affection. Want it, need it, thrive on it.”

“But you’re single at the moment?”

“Yes and no. James is in Afghanistan. It’s his third tour.”

“Oh.”

“He’ll be home July twenty-third if all goes as planned. Though we’ve thought that before.”

“Rough.”

“You’ll never know.”

“No.”

“It’s why I stick it out at HLM. It’s a rotten place to work, but I need stability in my life. James will be out of work when he gets home and goes back into the reserves. He’s a machinist, and the economy being what it is, it might be a while before he finds a job.”

“Right.”

“There’s a soldier James met on Kabul who’s in a similar situation, and they commiserate. Well, more than commiserate. Which is fine. I’m basically monogamous, but I like to tell myself it’s a sacrifice I’m making for my country.”

“War is complex.”

“What’s interesting is, this guy, Steve, is married with three young kids back in San Diego. He says he’s straight and James believes him.”

“Uh oh.”

“I mean, how straight can he be?”

“But James says it’s not serious? Their relationship? Whatever it is.”

“He says it’s just to help get them through the deployment.”

“Understandable. It’s commendable, I guess, that James told you about this, right? He’s being honest and up front.”

“Not really. I’d rather not know, to tell you the truth. It never entered my mind that this type of stuff went on in the army. I should have thought of it, of course. I mean, holy shit.”

“But for yourself, you’d prefer don’t ask, don’t tell.”

“I mean, it’s not like I don’t screw around a little. I’m young, I’m human, and I’m in L.A., not freakin’ Kabul.”

“What is James like?”

“Sweet.”

“You must miss him a lot.”

“I miss him rolling over on me in the morning, and I miss him hogging the shower, and I miss the smell of machine oil. I was walking by a construction site a couple of weeks ago, and they had some big motorized gizmo of some kind on the sidewalk, and when I smelled it I just about burst into tears. I stopped for a minute and just breathed it in, and then I had to get away as fast as I could.”

“Well, it’s only—what?—four months until he’s back. Though I guess in your situation the weeks don’t fly by.”

“No,” Gomez said, “but in a way it’s good that I’m working in a place where I have to think constantly about my own survival. I don’t mean physical survival. Hal Skutnik is not al Qaeda. But I definitely don’t want to get fired from HLM until James is back and has a job and is settled. Then I’ll start looking around.”

“That sounds sensible.”

“Of course, I just hope HLM lasts that long. There was the financial crisis in January. I have no idea how the company got through that. And there are so many nut jobs working for the company, you just never know from day to day whether or not the whole thing is going to melt down or blow up.”

“Who are the nut jobs?”

“Well, Hal. And Rover, naturally. He’s been arrested twice for driving under the influence of crystal meth. Lucky for him, this was up in Siskiyou County, where the Skutniks are people that law enforcement doesn’t fuck around with. And Mason Hively is the nuttiest of them all. Have you ever seen Dark Smooches?”

“People keep asking me that. I can’t say I’ve seen an entire episode.”

“It looks like it was made by a psychopath, and that crazy person is Mason.”

“I would have just said untalented.”

“My view of Mason might be colored by experience, that’s true. He came on to me one time, and when I said no thanks, he mixed crystal meth in the weed stash he knew I kept in my shoulder bag. He’s so stupid, he told somebody in the office—Mason thought it was a good joke everybody should enjoy along with him—and I was tipped off. It was never a good idea for me to carry my weed to HLM anyway, so I got it out of there in a hurry. After that, I was afraid to even get a freakin’ Diet Pepsi out of the office machine.”

Gomez went on to tell me even more horror stories about HLM management, all of it either entertaining or hair-raising or both. None of it was helpful in any specific way in suggesting what might have become of Eddie Wenske. Though after my evening with Gomez, I did think I had a pretty good idea of what Wenske’s “secret life” was that he didn’t wish to discuss with his mother or sister.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I did eventually take Gomez up on his offer of some excellent weed—he had no beer on ice—and left his apartment well after midnight, three a.m. in the East. I collapsed into bed and slept deeply until my wake-up call went off like a tornado alert at eight in the morning.

I had two more appointments with embittered refugees from HLM set up for late in the day, and I thought I might track down Paul Delaney in the meantime. He still wasn’t answering his phone, and his mailbox continued to be full, both of which I didn’t like the sound of.

Out on the sunny hotel terrace with my coffee and grapefruit, I called Perry Dremel at HLM in New York. He said he was in a staff meeting and unable to chat. I asked if Boo Miller had been located yet. Dremel said no and hung up.

After several tries, I got Marsden Davis and asked for an update on the Bryan Kim murder investigation. Davis was in a hurry, on his way to a drug-gang shootout in Dorchester, and he told me that nothing in the Kim investigation was panning out yet but to stay in touch.

I got Timmy on his cell, but he couldn’t talk either, what with the state budget April first deadline looming and both the Legislature and the governor growing tense and testy.

Back in my room, I did a search on my laptop for Paul Delaney. I guessed he was an older man who still kept a land line, and indeed there he was in the L.A. telephone listings with an address in Santa Monica. I dialed the number again, but there was still no answer, mailbox full.

My rental Toyota came with its own GPS, and I let it lead me in its passive-aggressive way to Santa Monica and a pleasant three-story apartment building with a lot of balconies and flowering plants a couple of blocks from the beach. It took nearly an hour to drive the three and a half miles and then find a place to park legally, so by the time I approached the entrance and buzzed Delaney’s apartment, the morning was half gone. As I feared would happen, no one answered.

There was a little garden next to the entryway, and an old lady in a sun suit with a canary yellow bow in her canary yellow hair was sitting on a bench reading the L.A. Times.

“Pardon me, ma’am,” I said, “I’m looking for Paul Delaney. He’s not home. Do you know him?”

She looked wary. “Maybe.”

“He’s a friend of a man I’m trying to locate on behalf of his mother.” I showed her my New York State investigator’s ID.

“Paul’s mother is living? He never mentioned her to me.”

“No, it’s Paul’s friend’s mother. The man who is missing, Eddie Wenske.”

She perked up. “Oh, Eddie! That nice young man.”

“Yes, I believe he was staying with Paul for a while. Maybe he still is.”

“Oh no, he left. I haven’t seen Eddie for quite some time. I thought he was coming back. Paul did too.”

“Eddie’s family and friends back east have reported him missing. They hired me to find him. That’s why I’m trying to speak with Paul. But he doesn’t answer his phone.”

She screwed up her face. “Well, that’s funny.”

“What?”

“Paul’s not back yet.”

“He went somewhere?”

“Why, yes, he did. I saw him get in the Super Shuttle last week. I’m in 2-C right up there, so I see people come and go. Paul got in a Super Shuttle last Wednesday, and he hadn’t even mentioned that he was going on a trip. That’s why I was puzzled.”

“That’s the shuttle van to LAX?”

“LAX or Burbank. He had a suitcase. One of those with wheels and a long handle. They’re handy, I suppose, if there’s no dog dirt where you’re going.”

“Doesn’t Paul have a job at a newspaper? Might they know where he is?”

“Oh, he was laid off it must have been two months ago. First he got fired by the Times when they were losing money. Then he worked for one of those papers you get free from a filthy box. But they laid him off too. He’s retired now, and I think he was mostly helping Eddie on a book he was writing. They were thick as thieves on that book, was what it seemed like to me.”

I wondered if she had a key to Delaney’s apartment but didn’t ask.

“I know about the book,” I said. “It’s about media—television and newspapers.”

“Yes,” she said, placing her Times in her lap. “Gay media, Eddie told me.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, it’s no skin off my nose, I always say.”

“Paul lives in 2-E. So you two are practically neighbors.”

“He’s two doors down.” She pointed, and I guessed I could probably climb up onto that balcony without breaking my neck. But Delaney would certainly have all kinds of locks and security bars and probably an alarm system.

“Who waters Paul’s plants when he’s away? I see all kinds of pretty things hanging over his railing.”

“Yolanda when she cleans. She cleans for me too, but I look after my plants myself. Since my husband passed, it’s my begonias that get the TLC. They don’t give much TLC back—but then neither did Wallace.” She chuckled and I gave her a smile that said, oh, yeah, men, I know all too well what we’re like, me being one.

I said, “When does Yolanda clean? On a schedule?”

She squinted up at me. “You want to get in there, don’t you? And poke around.”

“It might help me find Eddie Wenske so that I can let his mother know where he is. She’s very anxious, as I’m sure you’ll understand.”

“Well, she should take a Xanax and try not to get too upset. If it was my son or daughter, she’d be glad they were out of her hair for a while. Eddie is certainly a nice young man, though. He always carried my laundry up if he saw me. Once, I think he pretended he didn’t see me with my big basket, but that was only that one time.”

I wasn’t about to inquire about her two middle-aged children getting in her hair. I said, “Might Yolanda be coming to clean today?”

She shook her head. “Yolanda isn’t gonna let anybody into her clients’ place. You’d have to shoot her first.”

“Good for her.”

“So forget that.”

“Do you have a key to your friend’s apartment?”

She wrinkled her nose. “No. I don’t.”

“You said Paul expected Eddie to be back sooner. Was Paul worried about him?”

“He didn’t say so straight out, but I had a feeling. Yes, I did.”

“He didn’t know where Eddie had gone?”

“No, I think he knew. Something about their book—Eddie’s book. Maybe Jane knows.”

“Who is Jane?”

“Paul’s friend Jane Ware. Here’s her name in the paper.” She rattled the newspaper around and opened it to the financial pages. An article on the collapsed housing market was bylined Jane Ware.

“Is that Paul’s girlfriend?”

“Oh heavens, no. Paul is a widower. His wife passed in Boston many years ago. And Jane is married to her second husband George. They all went out together, and Jane and George came over when Paul entertained. I think Jane was helping with Eddie’s book too.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Oh, I’d hear them talking. I wasn’t butting in. Just stuff you’d hear in the elevator. I’m not nosy.”

“Uh huh.”

“It was about shell corporations and things like that. I paid attention because I thought they were talking about sea shells. Wallace had a large collection of shells. My daughter has them now. I mean, where was I going to keep all those things in my little shoe box of a condo?”

“Interesting.”

“It was interesting to Wallace, that’s for dall-garn sure.”

“I mean the shell corporations.”

“It was islands and Panama and something. You could probably find out about it from Jane if you’re all that interested.”

I said I’d look her up.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Jane Ware agreed to meet me for a late lunch at a soup and salad place not far from the Times building downtown on First Street. She was in fact eager to talk to me, she said, because she was concerned about both Wenske and her friend Paul Delaney. She had expected to hear from Delaney over the weekend and hadn’t, and she had been unable to raise him on either his land line or his cell.

With no subway line running from Westwood, I drove to downtown L.A., the GPS making sarcastic cracks about my maneuvers along the way. It took nearly two hours, and I just barely made it to the restaurant for the two o’clock lunch date.

Ware was already seated, in fact, the West Coast edition of The New York Times, the competition, spread out in front of her. She had said to look for a seventy-year-old woman with an aubergine pants suit, frizzy hair, and bloodshot eyes, and I zeroed right in on her table.

“Let’s eat,” she said. “Do you mind? I’ve been in the office since six this morning—I am currently doing the work of eighteen people—and I need nourishment in order to go on.”

We helped ourselves at the vast fresh fruit and vegetable buffet, and it was good to be dining at a place where, unlike back in Albany, none of the vegetables being offered at the salad bar was pudding.

Ware had just forty-five minutes before she had to be back at The Times, so after I showed her my ID and convinced her that I was working for Eddie Wenske’s mother and I was not a crank or scam artist, she got to the point.

“Paul told me a couple of weeks ago that he heard from people back in Boston that Eddie was considered missing. Eddie had told Paul, though, that he was going to be doing some kind of undercover work and not to mention this to anybody. Paul kept trying to get in touch with Eddie so he could tell him to reassure people back home, but Paul wasn’t having any luck reaching him. He figured he was somewhere with no cell phone reception. Which sounds weird, I know, but there are still such places. Especially up north, where Paul thought Eddie had probably gone.”

“Northern California?”

“Siskiyou County. It might as well be Upper Burma.”

“Why would he go up there?”

Ware’s answer was no surprise. “The gay media book. Hal Skutnik’s family business is up there—his father’s logging empire—and we’d been finding more and more connections between the company in Mount Shasta and Hey Look Media. Skutnik’s father Maurice died early last year, and the estate was settled this January. Hal inherited the logging business, and that’s when a good deal of peculiar intermingling of business operations took place. HLM was in serious financial trouble before then—Hal had burned through an earlier inheritance from his grandfather—and at first Hey Look seemed to have been bailed out all of a sudden by all the family trees. I mean actual trees, pine and redwoods. The Skutniks, however, had not been good stewards of their forests, and there weren’t actually all that many harvestable trees left by the time Hal came into possession of the family properties. It’s kind of a mystery, actually, how MS Enterprises—the name of the logging firm—could have been in a position to save HLM.”

“I’m amazed,” I said. “How do you know all this inside stuff? The HLM people I’ve talked to say only a handful of top people understand the inner workings of the company’s finances.”

Ware peered at me over the bags under her eyes. “Multiple sources. Eddie had HLM people emailing him documents and actually stuffing paper documents in FedEx envelopes and leaving them under benches on the UCLA campus. If anything, there was too much good information to work with. That’s why Paul asked me to help. In my copious free time.”

“Who were the sources?”

“Eddie wouldn’t say. He said he’d promised not to tell anybody, and if you know Eddie, that’s a promise he’d keep. Of course, I’ve seen the documents, so I have my suspicions as to where they came from.”

“And they are?”

“Have people told you about Martine and Danielle?”

“Their names have come up. They worked for the senior Mr. Skutnik in the logging business.”

“They’re company accountants who seem to have actually managed the finances and kept the company afloat while Maurice Skutnik went bear hunting from his lodge in the Shasta wilderness and entertained state legislators and law enforcement types. The two of them now live in the former family homestead in the town of Shasta, what with Maurice’s elderly widow Sandra having been carted down to a posh old folks’ stash-a-torium in Beverly Hills. Martine and Danielle come down to the Hey Look L.A. office every three or four weeks, but mostly they run things from up North.”

“How,” I asked, “did it come to be that a pair of French lesbians rose so far in the Skutnik hierarchy? I’ve heard repeatedly that Hal is a misogynist who routinely uses ugly terms for women.”

Ware laughed. “French lesbians? That’s a good one. No, Martine and Danielle are from Maine originally. They’re sisters. And not lesbian at all, if the stories about them and the company’s lumberjack crews are to be believed. Their last name is Desault. Spelled D-E-S-A-U-L-T, but pronounced duh-SALT. Company people up in Mount Shasta, Eddie found out, refer to their office as Desault mines.”

“So Wenske has been up there in Mount Shasta?”

“He made two trips that I know of, and it’s possible he’s up there now.”

“This is heartening news, Jane. Wenske’s family and friends in Albany and Boston think he’s probably dead. Murdered by the drug gangs he wrote about at The Boston Globe and in Weed Wars. But maybe he’s just—out of touch? If he’s alive, I don’t understand why he hasn’t reassured people he’s close to so they’re not frantic with worry about him.”

“Yes,” Ware said, “actually now I’m worried too. And so was Paul. I have this awful feeling Paul went looking for Eddie up north, and I’m getting more and more concerned since I haven’t been able to reach him. Paul’s not in great shape. The guy is my age—a hundred and fifty, as you can see—and his knees are going. I was wondering…might you try to track him down? While you’re looking for Eddie?”

“Sure.”

“Great. Believe me, I’m relieved. I really didn’t know what to do.”

“It might be helpful,” I said, “if I could have a look at the HLM documents Eddie had collected. They seem to have pointed him in a particular direction, and maybe they’ll do the same for me. Do you know where they are?”

“In Paul’s apartment,” she said, “and I have a key. A lot of it, of course, is going to be on Eddie’s laptop, and he might have taken that along with him.”

“The old lady in Paul’s building who told me about you admitted to overhearing conversations in the elevator with you and Eddie and Paul. Something about offshore accounts and Panama. What’s that about?”

She gave me a droll look. “Donald, that ‘old lady,’ Mrs. French, is probably younger than I am.”

“Hardly. She’s easily seventy-five.”

“You’re right. I’m only seventy-three. I just feel older than Mrs. French.”

“I doubt that. She’s sitting around reading the paper. You’re busy writing it.”

“Yes, a large part of it I do write. I’ve been offered buyouts every time some new fool takes over our utterly anachronistic institution. But I can’t seem to let go. My husband George had to retire at sixty-two—he was a captain with TWA—and he’s perfectly content doing crossword puzzles, re-reading John D. McDonald, and fixing my supper. But I’m afraid if I couldn’t go into a newsroom most days of the week I’d have no idea who I was or why I was alive, and I might have to be drugged or hospitalized. It could be quite ugly.”

“Your compulsive nose for news must have made you and Paul and Eddie a formidable trio of diggers.”

“You bet, and I was the one with the financial news background. Learned it all on my own too. I majored in Romance languages at Pomona College way back when. Sometimes I traveled with George—I could ride free on TWA to just about anywhere—and I got interested in developing economies. Then in the seventies and eighties as our own economy began to devolve during the big globalization shakeout, I started writing about the way U.S. capital was moving offshore, for foreign investment and into tax havens. And that’s been my beat. Of course, now that our staff has been cut by more than half, I have other beats too. Everything except Sudoku, and that’s probably next.”

“So you noticed that Hey Look Media had overseas operations?”

“Operations would not be the word for it. No production overseas or even sales to any great extent. It’s just a matter of hiding cash from the IRS and also from—hold onto your hat—investors.”

“That’s criminal, isn’t it?”

“It can be. If, for example—as seems to have happened on multiple occasions—HLM borrows money or accepts money from investors for particular production deals and then sends that money flying off into a network of offshore shell corporations where it’s accessed only by other Skutnik-owned shell corporations for unknown purposes and is never used for its contracted purpose, that’s good for Hal Skutnik’s personal bottom line. Presumably it’s what has supported his pricey lifestyle—mansions and galas and Gulfstream jet rentals and what have you. But the company had to get its production and operating cash from somewhere—its low rate of viewer subscriptions was bringing in precious little. For a long time, it looks as if it was done Ponzi-like, with new investors paying off old ones. But by the end of last year, all that was about to blow up Madoff-like.”

“Collapse is the nature of Ponzi-ism.”

“But lucky for Hal Skutnik, his inheritance showed up in the nick of time this January. Or so it seemed briefly.”

“Briefly because there were too few trees left in the Skutnik forests?”

“Exactly.”

“So the inheritance was not a savior for Hey Look Media, just a reprieve?”

“A very brief one. By early February, things were starting to look desperate all over again. But that crisis was also brief, it turned out. Within a few weeks, cash was starting to flow again, both into the company and into the shell corporations in Panama, Liberia, and Curacao, the repositories for Hal’s personal piggy banks. We were all baffled as to where this sudden river of cash was and is coming from.”

“And Wenske’s sources didn’t know? The people who were feeding him all this lurid information?”

“What happened was, they all of a sudden clammed up. Eddie thought maybe their betrayal had been discovered. He said they seemed suddenly terrified and they said they were breaking off all contact with Eddie.”

“That does sound bad.”

“Eddie told Paul to sit tight, and that Eddie would talk to some HLM people here in L.A., and then he would go up to Shasta and try to figure out exactly what had gone wrong, going undercover if that’s what it took. Eddie has fake IDs and documents he used when he was writing Weed Wars.”

“I’ve heard about this risky practice of his.”

“Paul offered to go along. But Eddie said, no, not a chance. In fact, he told Paul, if this situation turned out to be what Eddie thought it was going to be, Paul needed to distance himself from all of it and pretend to anyone who asked that he had never gotten involved in the first place. Eddie made Paul promise to do that, and Paul reluctantly agreed. It was a promise that now I’m afraid Paul didn’t keep.”

“And what was this mysterious situation that Eddie thought he would likely have to contend with?”

“He didn’t tell Paul. Or if he did, Paul didn’t tell me.”

But I thought I knew what Wenske guessed he was onto, and I thought I knew why he was afraid.