The Last Thing I Saw

by Richard Stevenson

  “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 m
onth 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? Wh
enever 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!’”