The Last Thing I Saw

by Richard Stevenson

  I said, “Susan Wenske said she thought Eddie might have some kind of secret life. Some dark side, was the way she put it. That sounds melodramatic, but do you have any idea what she might have been talking about?”

  Fino laughed. “Eddie? Dark side? Come on. What gave her that idea?”

  “She said Eddie’s sister Marilyn stayed with him for a while last year. He’d go off somewhere late at night and sometimes tell her he’d be at the Globe, and then she’d find out he hadn’t been here at all. And when she tried to bring it up with him, he’d shrug it off or just clam up.”

  “I met Marilyn. A nice woman who’d had a bad divorce, Eddie told me. Yeah, she has friends in the newsroom that I’m sure she talks to. But it’s hard for me to imagine any secrets Eddie had that weren’t work-related. I would bet he was researching something.”

  “I take it you know about the book he was working on about gay media.”

  “Sure. It sounded interesting, though not anything I knew anything about. But it fueled his sense of outrage as much as anything I’d ever seen. I faked a certain amount of enthusiasm about the project, which Eddie of course saw through and kidded me about. But with him, what he saw as the corruption of the whole idea of gay liberation was something he took very personally. He was hell-bent on exposing what he believed was a kind of betrayal of gay social progress in the country. I certainly hope it wasn’t any of that that led to whatever happened to him. Jesus, wouldn’t that be ironic?”

  “Yeah, or to his way of thinking, not ironic at all.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Bryan Kim’s body must have been discovered around the time I was checking in at the Westin. I figured that out later. At the time, just before four Saturday afternoon, I lay down in my room and checked my BlackBerry, and there was no message from Bryan, who I’d spoken to briefly the day before. It was at seven, when he didn’t meet me in the lobby for our dinner date, that I guessed something had gone wrong. I called his cell at seven thirty-five, and another man answered.

  “Bryan Kim’s phone.”

  “May I speak with Bryan? This is Don Strachey.”

  “Bryan can’t come to the phone.”

  “Okay.”

  “What’s your relationship with Bryan, Don?”

  “I was to meet him for dinner at seven. He didn’t show up. What’s yours?”

  “My what?”

  “Relationship with Bryan.”

  “I’m investigating his… I’m sorry to have to tell you this. Are you a friend of his?”

  “New acquaintance.”

  “Bryan is deceased.”

  “Oh.”

  “Were you dating Bryan?”

  “No. Were you?”

  “I’m a police detective, Lieutenant Marsden Davis. I’d like to speak with you if you wouldn’t mind.”

  “Sure. What happened to Bryan?”

  “I believe he was a victim of foul play.”

  “He was killed?”

  “He was stabbed multiple times and he’s dead, so you do the math.”

  Davis arrived at the Westin within fifteen minutes. He had a second cop in tow, and we went up to my room. Davis was a small skinny black man of indeterminate age in a leather jacket. He had a shaved head, inquisitive eyes and large teeth. The younger guy was white and bulky and appeared armed under his windbreaker. He said his name was Detective James Fuller.

  “Where was Kim’s body found?” I said. “Who found him?”

  “In his apartment in the South End. So, how do you know Kim? You said you were an acquaintance.”

  “I’d never actually met him before, just talked on the phone.”

  “This was your first date?”

  “It sounds as if you know Kim was gay, and so do I, but this wasn’t that kind of date. I was going to interview him.” I showed Davis my PI license and told him I had been hired by the missing man’s mother to find out what had happened to Eddie Wenske, Bryan Kim’s sometime boyfriend.

  Davis took all this in. “You work out of Albany?”

  “It’s Wenske’s home town. His mother lives near there.”

  “I know about Wenske. The dude’s got balls. He still hasn’t been located?”

  “No. It’s been close to two months.”

  “He majorly pissed off the weed industry.”

  “So I hear.”

  “I’d be surprised if you ever find him. I mean, some bones and bits of flesh could surface eventually. Sorry to have to be the bearer of that type of information.”

  “Kim and Wenske had been a couple for a while, and they were working at getting back together when Wenske disappeared. I’m wondering naturally if the disappearance and the murder are connected.”

  “Wonder away, Donald. I may join you.”

  Now Fuller spoke up. “Everybody knew Kim was gay.”

  Davis nodded. “That’s true, James.”

  “He was always in the gay parade. Channel Six put it on at eleven.”

  Ignoring this, Davis said to me, “When did you talk to Kim on the phone?”

  “Yesterday afternoon. I got his cell number from Susan Wenske, Eddie’s mother. He couldn’t talk then, but he seemed eager to meet with me. My impression was, the guy felt a little guilty over his role in his and Eddie’s rocky relationship, and he wanted to unburden himself. My hope of course was to come up with some actual leads.”

  I was seated on the edge of the bed, Fuller was on the desk chair, and Davis had remained standing in front of the big window with the Back Bay skyline lit up behind him.

  Davis said, “Do you know Elvis Gummer?”

  “Gummer? No.”

  “He found the body.”

  “Who is he?”

  “He’s Kim’s neighbor. He had a date to meet Kim at four in his apartment to pick up a recipe for ginger cheesecake. That’s what he told us.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “I guess that’s a gay thing.”

  “It is. I’m gay, and my boyfriend Timothy and I constantly exchange recipes with our neighbors.”

  Detective Fuller was hunched over and peering down at the Westin’s avocado green carpeting.

  “Elvis Gummer,” Davis said, “lives two floors down and had a key to Kim’s apartment. When Kim didn’t answer the door, Gummer let himself in, thinking his friend had run down to the corner or something. He found Kim on the living room floor seriously cut and not breathing, and he called nine-one-one. A patrolman arrived at four-oh-nine, and paramedics a minute later, but Kim did not respond to their efforts to get him up and running. Way too much blood loss, it looked like.”

  “You said Gummer let himself in. Was the door locked?”

  “Locked but not double-bolted. The perpetrator had pulled the door shut when he left and it locked automatically. No evidence of forced entry, so it looks like Kim had buzzed somebody into the building and allowed the individual to enter into his apartment.”

  “What about the neighbors? Did anyone see or hear anything?”

  “The couple underneath Kim weren’t home. They showed up after we did. Nobody else in the building noticed anything that got their attention.”

  “Any forensics yet?”

  “No. The team has Kim’s cell and they’re checking it. Where were you this afternoon, Don?”

  “Driving to Boston from Albany on Interstate 90 and then conducting an interview at The Boston Globe with a former colleague of Wenske’s there.” I gave Davis Aldo Fino’s name and number, and he wrote them down.

  “Pick up any leads on Wenske?”

  “Not really. The Globe people think it’s the pot thing, too.”

  “Did Kim’s name come up?”

  “Sure, as Wenske’s sometime boyfriend. That’s all.”

  “When you talked to Kim on the phone yesterday, how did he sound?”

  “He sounded upset over Wenske being missing and anxious to talk about it.”

  “Did he talk about anything else?”

  “No, but he was busy and we didn’
t chat. He was at work, he said, and was working on a story for six o’clock.”

  “What was the story?”

  “He didn’t say. Channel Six can tell you.”

  “I know that. I won’t have to look for them, they’ll find me. They’re at the precinct right now, alongside those handsome gents and foxy ladies from the other channels, looking for me. So I should probably go over there and turn myself into media meat. Donald, is there anything else you want to tell me that you think might be helpful to this investigation?”

  Davis had asked me what news story Bryan Kim had been working on, but he had not asked me what Wenske had been working on at the time of his disappearance. So I said, “There’s nothing I can think of.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Marsden Davis helpfully provided me with Elvis Gummer’s cell number, and I reached him at what he said was a friend’s apartment. He sounded badly shaken up, but when I told him I’d been hired by Eddie Wenske’s mother he agreed to talk to me in the morning. He said he’d be back in his apartment and to come there. Since Gummer had a key to Bryan Kim’s apartment, I figured I might also give it my own onceover if I could.

  Meanwhile, I had a key to Wenske’s apartment on Charles Street near Beacon that Susan Wenske had given me. She had been paying the exorbitant rent there, hoping against hope that her son would return. I had a quick Sam Adams and a Cobb salad in the hotel and then took a cab over to Charles.

  Wenske’s place was on the top floor of a four-story nineteenth century brick walk-up on elegant lower Beacon Hill, with views of brick-chimneyed rooftops like in Mary Poppins. His garret was more spacious than some. It had a good-sized living room with a big fold-out couch, a bedroom with a queen-sized bed, a tiny kitchen, and a bathroom with a stall shower and no tub. Susan Wenske said her daughter Marilyn had gone there with a cop at some point, and they hadn’t found anything useful or revealing, and they hadn’t taken anything away. There was no desktop computer, just a space on a desk where a laptop had probably rested, so I figured when Wenske left he must have taken it with him.

  There were lots of books on shelves in the two rooms—history, current affairs, both literary and pop fiction, and a small bedside porn stash that included well-thumbed magazines that I took a few moments to have a look at. There was nothing weird about the porn—no “dark side” stuff, just plenty of busy Czech and German working-class lads as well as some somber Japanese and a few laid-back Thais. The music set-up in the living room included jazz and pop CDs, plus a turntable and amplifier and a row of Lambert, Hendricks and Ross LPs that must have been fifty years old but appeared to be in tip-top shape. Although there was no Buddha figure or Christian icon or likeness of Ganesh, the Lambert, Hendricks and Ross part of the apartment had a shrine-like feel to it.

  I checked the bedroom closet for luggage. Two well-worn suitcases, airline-overhead-bin size, were stacked one atop the other. If Wenske owned a smaller overnight bag, there was no trace of it. Nor could I find a toiletries travel kit. So it seemed, if all this meant anything, he left two months earlier on what was to have been a brief trip and then didn’t return. Not good.

  I snooped in and around Wenske’s desk and found a November bank statement. At that time, he had over six thousand dollars in a checking account. Susan Wenske had told me her daughter had arranged for a neighbor to pick up her son’s mail, and Marilyn retrieved it periodically and dealt with anything that needed attention. She lived in Waltham, one of the closer-in west-of-Boston suburbs, and my plan had been to meet her the next day, although now it seemed that maybe that would have to be postponed in the wake of Bryan Kim’s murder.

  I looked for any sign of the research Wenske had been doing for his media book but found nothing. I concluded that he probably had it all on the missing computer.

  It was a cool but pleasantly dry early spring night, so I hoofed it across the Public Garden and on over to Back Bay and the hotel. On Saturday night the diners and drinkers and theater-goers were out and about. Bryan Kim and I were to have been among the culinary fun-seekers—he had suggested a Hungarian place near the hotel—and despite my not really knowing the man at all, I felt a terrible loneliness without him.

  Back in the hotel room, I phoned Timmy. He didn’t answer his cell, and I remembered that he was dining with friends in Troy and then going to a performance by a blues group at the Music Hall. I left a message telling him not to call, that I’d be asleep. Then I lay awake for well over an hour going over it all again and again.

  § § §

  Marilyn Fogle, Wenske’s sister, called my cell just after eight Sunday morning. I was in a hotel coffee shop reading the Globe’s account of the death of the popular and well-respected local television news reporter. The story added nothing to what I had learned from Marsden Davis about the crime itself. There were no suspects, the paper said, and robbery was not believed to have been a motive, since Bryan Kim had let the killer enter his building and nothing valuable seemed to be missing. His colleagues at Channel Six were said to be shocked and saddened. His parents and siblings were flying in from Seattle. Gay-rights advocates were quoted as saying Bryan’s death was a terrible loss to that community. One spokesperson said there was no indication that this was a gay-bashing. No one was speculating—yet—that this might have been a sexual pick-up gone wrong. It hadn’t been, of course, what with Elvis Gummer expected at four o’clock for some gay-singles cheesecake palaver, if in fact that’s what it was.

  Marilyn Fogle and I cancelled our planned lunch in Waltham and made a tentative dinner date instead. She asked me if I thought Bryan Kim’s murder had anything to do with Eddie’s disappearance, and I said I had no idea.

  I walked over to the South End through the nearly deserted Sunday morning streets. Gummer buzzed me into his building, a stalwart, big-roomed five-story brick block on the neighborhood’s main drag, Tremont Street.

  “God, I am still freaked,” Gummer said, and he looked it. He was appealingly stocky and muscular in jeans, a tank top, and bare feet, but his pug nose was red and his big brown eyes were bloodshot. “I know it’s irrational—I’m sure the killer isn’t still here in the building somewhere, but after something like this you just feel so incredibly vulnerable. Poor Bryan, the poor guy, what he went through. It’s just so cruel and so totally ridiculous.”

  “It is.”

  “I’m like, I mean, is blood going to start dripping through the ceiling? I keep looking up, even though I’m two floors down from Bryan. I’ve never seen so much blood. I really did try not to panic, and I didn’t. I called nine-one-one on Bryan’s land line—thank God he still had one, although I guess a cell would work. But I didn’t have mine with me. I knew he must be dead. How could anybody have that much blood drain out and still be alive? His jeans were soaked and his t-shirt was all ripped up and soaked with blood that was turning black. I wanted to help him, and I’m not that squeamish, but what could I do?”

  “It sounds as though you did everything you could.”

  “I didn’t really know Bryan all that well. We were just neighbors, but he was really a nice guy and I just feel so terrible for him. Why would anybody do that to Bryan? Maybe it had something to do with his reporter’s job—I don’t know. The police asked me who his enemies were, and I said I had no idea.”

  “Detective Davis told me you and Bryan were into exchanging recipes. So if you were friendly enough to be doing that, I can see why you’re upset.”

  He gave me a look. “You sound suspicious or something.”

  “No.”

  “Bryan saw me on the stairs one time carrying a cheesecake box. He said he had the best ginger cheesecake recipe in the world, and when he made one sometime he’d give me a piece. He never got around to it—he was so busy being on the news and all—but then when I wanted to make a cheesecake for a friend’s birthday on Saturday, I ran into Bryan and thought I’d ask him for that recipe. He said he’d make a copy, and I was supposed to pick up the recipe at four.”

 
“What do you do, Elvis?”

  “I’m a sales rep for Old Plymouth Bay Candles.”

  This helped explain the profusion of tall fat multi-colored candles around the otherwise simply furnished apartment, as well as the fruity aroma.

  “When did you make your four o’clock date with Bryan? Earlier in the day?”

  “I saw him in the morning when I was doing my laundry. He said he had somebody coming over at six, and they were meeting somebody else for dinner at seven, and could I come by at four o’clock? TV people are used to tight schedules and all that.”

  “Right.”

  “I said thanks, sounds good, and I did some stuff, and then I came home and showered and went upstairs right at four. Bryan didn’t answer, and I figured he went out for something or he was in the shower, so I went down and got my key and then went on in. And there he was on the floor by the coffee table in this incredible pool of blood. Oh God, I never saw anything like it. I mean, it’s not like in the movies. It’s like…I was in a butcher shop in Mexico one time, and it was like that. Gory and horrible and putrid, and right in the middle of it was Bryan, that nice, sweet, sexy guy.”

  “You said he was expecting somebody to come by at six. Did he say who?”

  “No. Just somebody he was going to dinner with.”

  “And they were meeting somebody else at seven?”

  “At the Westin, I think he said.”

  So who was this that Kim was bringing along on our dinner date? He hadn’t said anything to me about a third party.

  “Elvis, may I ask why you had a key to Bryan’s apartment? That’s pretty friendly in itself—I mean what with your relationship pretty much limited to cheesecake recipe exchanges.”

  “I had a key because I used to look after Bryan’s cat when he was away overnight. The cat got cancer and died, but Bryan said to hang on to the key, since he might get another cat. He just never got around to it.”