The Last Thing I Saw

by Richard Stevenson

  Fye grasped my hand briefly and looked straight through me as he was doing so, but Skutnik acted momentarily startled at the mention of my name. “And how do you know these two disgusting faggots, Don?” Skutnik asked me, and looked as if he was actually interested in my reply.

  I said, “I’m visiting from the East, and Rob and Floyd are showing me some L.A. local color. You know, a tour of the movie stars’ homes, the Getty, a reception honoring The Boys from Nipple Clamp Junction. I’m having a marvelous time, thanks to Rob and Floyd.”

  “Have fun,” Fye said tonelessly, looking over my shoulder for somebody who wasn’t a tourist.

  Skutnik said, “Are you in the industry back on the other coast, Don?”

  “No, I’m just a happy consumer of entertainment. I’m self-employed.”

  “At what?”

  “I’m a private investigator.”

  “A real, live PI! How exciting!”

  “Excitement is rare, luckily. Mostly I just go around poking my nose into other people’s business and asking questions.”

  “Rover!” Skutnik sang out. “A fag private eye. Maybe there’s a reality show in it? You are queer, aren’t you, Don?”

  “Actually, I have a wife and eleven children back east.”

  Fye was focused on something dramatic going on in his own head, but Skutnik was all ears. “I’m surprised to hear that. I’ve heard that Albany is gayer than Fort Lauderdale. Are your wife and kiddies here in L.A. with you? I suppose they’re out at Disneyland for the day, and you and Rob and Floyd are enjoying a boys’ night out. Did I hit the nail on the head?” He winked.

  I smiled and said, “I’m just pulling your leg, Hal. I’m gay as a coot. No wife, no young ‘uns. Just an Irish Catholic boyfriend, a thirty-year mortgage on a townhouse, and a couple of overpriced gym memberships.”

  “Oh, that’s funny! You really had me going. Are you and your perverted mister lawfully wed in the state of New York? I don’t see a ring on your finger, but maybe you’ve got it wrapped around some other fat digit, ha ha!”

  “Timothy and I have talked about marrying, and we’ll get around to it sooner or later. We’re devoted to each other, and we want to support the cause. Though there wouldn’t be all that many legal benefits for us, since there’s no federal recognition. I’m already in Timmy’s state-employee health insurance plan, which is lucky for me.”

  “Yes,” Skutnik said, looking at me carefully. “I suppose in your line of work, Don, you often get hurt.”

  “Once in a while it happens. Not as often as happens to private eyes in the movies, of course. We’re actually more like investigative reporters than tough guys with gats.”

  He didn’t pick up on that or at least didn’t register any change in expression. “What are you working on now, Don? Or are you on vacation?”

  Looking distracted, Fye excused himself with a little gesture.

  “I’d like to say I’m out here for the sunshine and salad bars, Hal. But I’m actually working on a missing person case.”

  “Really! What? Did Grandpa wander off, ha ha?”

  “No, a writer is missing. His mother hired me to find him. Eddie Wenske. He was on assignment for The New York Times when he seemed to disappear in January. He was seen out here early this month. But then the trail goes cold.”

  “Oh my God, Eddie Wenske!” Skutnik exclaimed. “That humpy young fag who wrote Notes from the Bush! I met him. He came in to see me, in fact. When was that? God, December, I think. Before Christmas.”

  “He was out here then, that’s right,” Tate said.

  “Yes, he was writing something about gay media, and of course he came up to have a look at our operation. I mean, if you’re writing about beans, you’d want to interview Heinz. Am I right?”

  Tate said, “The musical fruit.”

  Skutnik guffawed. “The musical fruit! Like Ricky Martin! Oh, Floyd, you are so funn-eee.”

  A well-groomed young man with a BlackBerry in his hand came over and looked nervously at Skutnik.

  “I’m talking to this man,” Skutnik snapped. “What’s your problem?”

  “Two of the boys aren’t here,” the young man said breathlessly. “Nobody knows where they are.”

  “The tit-clamp boys? The fucking stars of the fucking show?” Skutnik was reddening and now breathing faster himself.

  “They were supposed to be here at six. Charles, Blair, and Rusty are here, but Nando and Glen aren’t, and they’re not answering their cells, and the photographer is here, and the writer from Proud Man and the writer from Bugger. We’re all set to go with your and Rover’s roll-out pitch, but we can’t get started until all the nipple-clamp boys are here, and the hotel says we have to be out of here by eight forty-five or they’ll have to charge us, and Ogden says no way.”

  Skutnik threw his drink in the kid’s face. “Who is fucking supposed to be chaperoning those stupid faggots!” he bellowed. A number of party-goers turned our way and gawked briefly, saw who it was doing the screaming, then turned carefully away.

  The young man with the dripping face said, “Lonnie was coordinating transportation. But he said they didn’t show up at the store when they were supposed to, and he’s got somebody over there on an open phone, and Nando and Glen still haven’t shown, and Lonnie is totally going out of his mind.”

  “Lonnie is gone!” Skutnik screeched. “Tell Lonnie to get the fuck out of here. I never want to lay eyes on Lonnie again. I hate that stupid fag! Just get him out of here!”

  “But he…”

  “Out! Out! Get him out!”

  Now a middle-aged man in a seersucker jacket and a polka dot bow tie came over. “Hal, what the hell is happening?”

  “Ogden, they’re not here! The fucking stars of the fucking show! Two of them are missing the fucking roll-out!”

  “Well, that is totally inexcusable!”

  “They are out of the show, that’s all there is to it. Those two are fired from the show!”

  The man who seemed to be Ogden Winkleman, the New York office head who also enjoyed telling people to clean out their desks, said, “It’s a reality show, but you’re right, Hal. We can get actors to play them.”

  “Actors? And fucking pay them?”

  Rover Fye returned now, looking even jumpier than before, as if maybe he had gone off and ingested or smoked something to help get him through the crisis. “I will kill those two if I ever lay eyes on their sorry-ass faces ever again! I cannot believe they would do this to you, Hal! Don’t they understand who they are fucking over? It’s just in-fucking-credible!”

  “All right, all right,” Winkleman said. “Here is what we are going to do. Jason, tell Lonnie we all want him gone. Gone. Got that?”

  “Okay,” said the wet-faced man.

  “We tell the writers and the photographer,” Winkleman said, “that Nando and Glen quit the sex toy store to go back to Transylvania where they came from or some crap like that, and their replacements are being auditioned. We restage their appearance at the roll-out next week in a studio situation with rear-screen projection or whatever. Have the photographer get some shots of the dais here and the bar and what have you.”

  “That should work,” Skutnik said.

  Tate said, “Sort of like the faked moon landing in ‘69.”

  Skutnik turned toward Tate and said in a frigid voice, “I fired you once, Floyd. I can’t fire you again, but I can destroy you in this town! You understand that, don’t you?”

  I could see that both Tate and Brandstein kind of wanted to laugh, but they knew that they didn’t dare, and they just stared at Skutnik awkwardly.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  I wasn’t sure if Skutnik’s slipping in that he knew I was from Albany was clumsy and inadvertent, or if it was intentional and he was sending me a signal: Don’t mess with me if you know what’s good for you. He seemed capable of sinister calculation, both tactical and strategic, but he was also volatile and maybe basically unbalanced. So it was hard to g
uess what was going on with him. I could see why people thought of him as being a weird combination of clueless, formidable, and highly combustible.

  Brandstein had been wrong about the crackers and Cheez Whiz. The hors d’oeuvres at the Peninsula were excellent, and I ate my fill of curried chicken in puff pastry, thanked Brandstein and Tate for the introduction to the Hey Look Media upper strata, and then left them and drove toward Paul Delaney’s apartment in Santa Monica. I had Jane Ware’s key, and I was eager to locate any of the documents, notes and computer files Wenske, Delany, and Ware had gathered on HLM and its shady finances and other dubious practices.

  On the way, I phoned Perry Dremel at HLM in New York and got him on his cell. I reached him at a bar in Chelsea, where he and other HLM employees were girding themselves for Ogden Winkleman’s return to New York on Friday.

  “I met Winkleman,” I said. “He seems marginally more stable than Hal or Rover. But I guess it’s all relative.”

  “You’re in L.A.? You’re actually visiting the Mother Church?”

  I told Dremel about my meetings with HLM’s disaffected past and present employees and my encounter with the mercurial top management folks.

  “Do they know who you are and that you’re investigating them?”

  “Skutnik does. He made some menacing gestures and veiled threats. But he can’t fire me, which I’m sure is a source of great annoyance to him.”

  “Has anybody out there said anything about Boo being missing? He still hasn’t turned up, and everybody is extremely worried. His cat watcher, Orville, called the police, but I don’t know if they’re doing anything at all. Orville told the cops that Boo was going up to see Bryan Kim, who was murdered, so you’d think they’d fucking do something.”

  I told Dremel I’d check with the Boston police, and as soon as I hung up with him I phoned Marsden Davis. I told him that Boo Miller was still missing, and he said he’d talked to an NYPD friend about Miller, but these things have a way of falling through the cracks and he said he’d call the New York cop again.

  I asked Davis, “Any developments in the Kim stabbing?”

  “Nothing interesting. The ex-boyfriends are all in the clear, and so’s the housing authority rip-off artist, and the neighbor is too. I knew Elvis Gummer was lying about that freakin’ ginger cheesecake recipe, and when we re-interviewed him and mentioned that we might have to bring in a voice stress detection specialist—a lot of bullshit, as you know—he told us the truth.”

  “Let me guess. It was actually a lemon pound cake recipe.”

  “It was sex. They had an appointment at four o’clock for sex in Kim’s apartment. Gummer said he and Kim were actually fuck buddies. I never heard that term before.”

  “It’s another gay thing. Like exchanging cake recipes.”

  “Who’d’ve thought?”

  “It’s an unemotional, uncomplicated practice that works for some people. No fuss, no muss. Just good funky aerobic exercise and blessed relief. It’s like masturbation, but with less sense of aloneness and for Catholics fewer vestiges of guilt.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  “So Gummer showed up at Kim’s apartment at four o’clock for sex and instead found Kim stabbed to death. The poor guy.”

  “Yeah, but I wish we hadn’t had to drag it out of him. I mean, I’m not fuckin’ Cardinal O’Malley.”

  “Sometimes the police are Cardinal O’Malley. I don’t blame Gummer for holding back.”

  “Anyway, I was gonna call you, Strachey. If you’re in California, maybe you can help me out.”

  “Sure.”

  “Bryan Kim’s cell records show a call to a number in Northern California two days before he was killed. It’s to a motel in Mount Shasta, the Pine Cone Inn. I talked to the motel manager, but they have no way of knowing who Kim was calling. They would just have connected Kim to a room extension. It seems weird that Kim would call the motel instead of whoever it was’s cell phone. People don’t do that so much anymore.”

  “Unless,” I said, “Kim was calling somebody who didn’t own a cell phone.”

  “Possible. You still run into a few.”

  “Or there was no cell phone reception in Mount Shasta.”

  “The motel manager says reception is good. Another possibility is, Kim tried the party’s cell and he wasn’t getting any response. And him being so anxious to talk to this party, he tried the motel to see if his caller was actually still there.”

  “That could be. I’ll find out what I can. I’ll be in Mount Shasta tomorrow.”

  “What for?”

  I explained to Davis the Hal Skutnik/HLM/Mount Shasta connection and how my search for Eddie Wenske was leading north into the California mountain wilderness.

  Davis said, “If you need law enforcement assistance up there, call me. The area is crawling with feds, DEA mostly. That’s a big pot-growing area. It’s where most of the domestic crop comes from.”

  I said, “I’ve heard that.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Paul Delaney’s apartment turned up little of interest, which I didn’t get. I tossed the place at my leisure but found nothing that seemed to have any direct connection to Hey Look Media or Eddie Wenske’s gay media research. There was a desktop computer that refused to spring to life without a password and some disks with labels that were unrelated to the Wenske project, as far as I could tell.

  The master bedroom contained a neatly made queen-sized bed. The bathroom was squeaky-clean, Yolanda’s handiwork. There might have been one piece of luggage missing from a hall closet, but I was basing that on Mrs. French’s report of Delaney getting into an airport shuttle as much as anything. A second smaller bedroom had a single bed in it, also freshly made, and some clothes that I suspected were Wenske’s, not Delaney’s. Delaney’s closet contained middle-aged-grown-up suits, shirts and slacks, and the items in the guest bedroom were shorts, jeans, and t-shirts.

  One item in a stack of odds and ends on Delaney’s desk did look as if it would be more than useful. It was a printout of a motel reservation in Delaney’s name with an arrival on March 22, eight days earlier, at the Pine Cone Inn, in the town of Mount Shasta.

  After a night of restless sleep, I checked out of the hotel and made my way to the airport for my nine thirty-five flight to San Francisco. It took only two and a half hours to get to LAX this time, and my GPS complimented me before I returned the rental car.

  I had an hour and a half layover at SFO before my flight to the North. I phoned Timmy from a United Express gate and caught him in his office. I told him where I was on my way to, and he was of course unhappy. I had considered not telling him, but it was better that he received a phone call from me that made him worry than his getting a call from someone else saying I had been badly injured when I was run over by an ATV.

  He said, “So you think Wenske is up in the California pot-growing region? I mean Wenske or his decomposing corpse.”

  “It makes sense for him to have gone up there. It’s the center of the Skutnik family enterprises, and it’s the apparent source of much of HLM’s income these days. It’s also the chief lair of Martine and Danielle Desault, the two sisters who are the Skutnik family financial wizards who most company people think keep HLM from collapsing in on itself.”

  “And you think these two über capitalists will talk to you? You’re quite the charmer, I always tell people, Donald, but your wiles have their limits.”

  “There’s evidence that the sisters might have been spilling the beans on company malfeasance to Wenske, so if they talked to him maybe they’ll talk to me, his mother’s representative. Or maybe I’ll find Wenske alive, and he’ll introduce me to the salt sisters, as they’re called, and we’ll all join together and see to it that Hal Skutnik ends up behind bars. That’s my hope.”

  “That would be great. Good luck.”

  “There is some unsettling business about Wenske’s main information source—presumably the Desaults—freaking out about a month ago and shu
tting off all contact. I’m concerned about that. Also, Wenske’s old Boston Globe friend Paul Delaney apparently went looking for Wenske in Mount Shasta last week and hasn’t been heard from since. Anyway, I just wanted you to know where I am.”

  A significant pause. “Right. So I won’t worry.”

  “I thought about not telling you.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “But I figured that on balance you’d rather know.”

  “On balance, you’re right.”

  “Good.”

  “I’m glad you told me.”

  “Okay.”

  “But I’m sorry I know.”

  “Yeah, well, now I’m a little sorry I told you.”

  “Oh, swell.”

  “But I guess I can’t un-tell you.”

  “No, but you could—where did you say you are?”

  “San Francisco airport.”

  “You could take a cab into town and have a nice—what time is it there? Lunch?”

  “I just had a veggie wrap.”

  “Dinner then. And I could fake a serious illness at work and fly out to San Francisco, and we could have a nice couple of days and then come on home where we have such a good life together. How about that?”

  “Sounds lovely, but what about Eddie Wenske? What about his mother, who loves him and aches for him and is paying for my plane tickets?”

  “She could—hire somebody else.”

  “Timothy?”

  “Okay, okay.”

  “It’s always like this. I know.”

  “Just—stay in touch, okay?”

  “Of course.”

  “Call me twice a day.”

  “If I can.”

  “You can.”

  I had another incoming call, and I saw it was from Marsden Davis.

  “Gotta go—love you,” I told Timmy and rang off.

  It was good that I took the call. Davis was calling to tell me that Boo Miller had been found dead.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE