“Sure,” Timmy said, “I suppose lots of scenarios are plausible. But don’t you think it’s more than coincidence that Kim was killed just before he was bringing somebody along to meet you to talk about Wenske’s disappearance?”
“Probably.”
“And you haven’t heard from the third diner?”
“No, but he may not have my cell number or email address. I take it there have been no odd messages at the house.”
“None, no.”
“Anyway, with Kim killed, the third diner may have been scared off. I might never know who he is.”
“Is or was. Maybe he was killed too.”
This had not occurred to me—maybe because my need to talk to this mystery man was so great that I had to believe that eventually I would identify him and track him down and learn why Bryan Kim was bringing him along to talk about the missing Eddie Wenske.
“Timothy, that’s an unsettling possibility you have introduced into the equation. Maybe I should be looking into who else in greater Boston was murdered yesterday afternoon.”
“That should be easy, right? Boston is not the murder capital of North America.”
“No, but it’s not Walden Pond in the 1840s either. There’s a lot of drug-related violence. Bad gang stuff, including innocent bystanders dying young and pointlessly. Of course, it’s unlikely Bryan Kim would be bringing any of those people along to dine out in Back Bay on a Saturday night.”
“Really? But there’s the drug connection coming up again. Maybe all that ugly Weed Wars stuff really will end up leading to an explanation for Eddie Wenske’s disappearance.”
Why was it that whenever I discussed anything important with Timothy Callahan, I nearly always ended up thinking, yes, on the one hand this, on the other hand that. Maybe because it was so often true that the way things eventually worked out was awfully complicated.
§ § §
I meant to get in touch with Marsden Davis first thing Monday morning, but I didn’t have to, because he called me.
“What were you doing in Bryan Kim’s apartment, Strachey? That location is a crime scene, as was clearly indicated. You entered the apartment illegally. Please tell me, if it wouldn’t put you out too much, what the fuck am I supposed to think of that?”
“I don’t know. What do you think of it?”
“I think the forensics team did a second sweep of the scene late yesterday afternoon looking for prints, and I already have a couple of hits. Yours was one of them. You didn’t mention to me that you were once in Army Intelligence.”
“I’m sworn to secrecy. I can’t talk about that.”
“Bullshit. I’ve seen your military records. You’ve been an intel analyst, and you are also a good marksman. And I’ll bet you anything that you also received training in hand to hand combat, including how to cut a man with a knife and leave him dead.”
“There was something in basic training on that, but I wasn’t paying attention. So, am I now a suspect in the murder of Bryan Kim? You’re informing me in a casual phone call that I might soon be arrested and charged in the case?”
“Of course not. Your story checks out on visiting the Globe offices, and before that your EZ Pass records have you on the Mass Pike from 11:42 am to 1:58 pm yesterday. So you couldn’t have done it. Bryan Kim was killed, we now know, between two and three o’clock, while you were at the Globe offices. But you were in Kim’s apartment at some point—specifically in the kitchen and the bathroom and touching the books on Kim’s book shelves—and I would like you to please tell me exactly when that was and also what the fuck you thought you were doing in there?”
I was still in my hotel room, with a room service muffin and juice and coffee, and I had just finished reading the Monday Globe story on the Kim murder. The paper had no new information on the murder or any possible suspects or motive, just a lot of sad-making information on Kim’s educational and professional background and his family history. Kim’s prominence in the Boston gay community was also gone over again, though no mention was made of Eddie Wenske.
I said, “Aren’t those EZ Pass records supposed to be confidential? It sounds as if all the Big-Brother-is-tracing-your-movements fears some people had about that program have been realized.”
Davis laughed lightly. “Yeah, yeah. So when were you in there? You said you had never met Kim before. So either you lied to me about that—always a bad idea—and you had visited Kim in his nice pad on Tremont Street on some previous occasion. Or—now please listen carefully to this one—you mooched your way in there yesterday morning with Elvis Gummer’s key. So, which is it, Strachey? Think before you answer.”
“How come you didn’t confiscate Gummer’s key when you first interviewed him, anyway?”
“An oversight. I have since taken it away from Gummer, who won’t be needing it. The key is here on my desk.”
“So then I suppose Gummer told you he lent it to me. If you knew that, why are you playing games?”
“Games? Giving you every opportunity to act like the honest man you apparently are not is not playing games. Playing games is conducting your own investigation into a matter the Boston Police Department is handling professionally. Playing games is withholding information relevant to a police investigation. Playing games is fucking me over in a manner that people here in Boston know is a terrible way of trying to get anything done in this city or even of living in it with any degree of safety and comfort. That’s how I define playing games, and my definition is the one you had better consider going with here, if you get my drift.”
I got his drift. “Lieutenant, you said I was withholding information relevant to your investigation. What information are you referring to?”
“Whatever you found in Kim’s apartment of importance. What did you find?”
“Probably nothing you didn’t find. How about the cheesecake recipe?”
“You found it?”
“No. It was the ginger cheesecake recipe that didn’t bark. The killer might have taken it, but I doubt it.”
“I plan on talking to Elvis Gummer about that. He has no fingerprints on record, but he has agreed to be printed. He seems nervous, but I’m not inclined to consider him a suspect.”
“Same here. Not a murder suspect anyway. What other prints have you ID-ed?”
“Just building personnel. And both of them have alibis. I’m sure Eddie Wenske’s prints are among those our techies picked up, but his prints are not on record, him not having served his country in the manner you and I went ahead and did.”
“What about Channel Six? Any leads there? Stories Kim was working on? People he made mad?”
“There’s a slew of people Kim pissed off, but most of them are city councilmen and municipal employees and pizzeria owners with dirty kitchens. Detective Fuller and a couple of other officers are checking them out. Another thing about Kim that interests me is, he’s had a lot of boyfriends, it turns out, and some of them don’t like him anymore. Folks at Channel Nine in Providence, where Kim used to work, say he has a history of breaking up with boyfriends in a kind of nasty way. The station used to get calls sometimes from gay guys calling Bryan an asshole and worse names, and one guy saying, tell Bryan I want my Elton John CDs back and weird crap like that.”
I said, “Did Gummer tell you about the third diner?”
“The what?”
“I guess he didn’t. He mentioned it to me in passing. I was to meet Kim at the Westin at seven, but Gummer said Kim told him that someone else was coming to Kim’s apartment at six to accompany him to the dinner meeting. I knew nothing about this. I don’t know who the diner was or what became of him. Was he scared off, or what? It would be useful to know, I think.”
“Or,” Davis said, “did this person know that Kim was going to be killed and stayed away? Or did he arrive early, and was let in, and stabbed Kim himself?”
“Or was this man also killed? Were there any other murders in Boston yesterday?”
Davis was quiet for a m
oment. “No. None reported. But maybe the body was disposed of, and so far no one has reported anybody missing. That’s always a possibility.”
“This man, whoever he was,” I said, “may have been going to talk to me about Eddie Wenske’s disappearance. Why else would Kim have invited him to the dinner meeting with me? So maybe he’s somehow knowledgeable of, or involved in, the Wenske situation.”
“We don’t know,” Davis said, “what has become of Wenske, or even if he’s dead or alive. Maybe Wenske is alive, and he was going to be your third dinner companion. Or maybe he’s alive and he came back from wherever he was and he killed Kim.”
“Yeah, well. Not that, I don’t think.”
“They had their ups and downs, everybody says. Is there any violence in Wenske’s history?”
“No. Everybody says he’s a sweetheart of a guy. You’re way off on that one.”
“Probably. Though your line of work, Strachey, is enough like mine for you to know that even the nicest people sometimes have a dark side. Know what I mean?”
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?”
The Last Thing I Saw Page 6