The Last Thing I Saw

by Richard Stevenson

Miller’s body had been found by hikers on the edge of a swamp on Cape Cod, near West Yarmouth. He had been bound and gagged and then stabbed. Davis said it appeared that Miller had been dead a little under a week, and was probably killed the same day Bryan Kim was stabbed. So far, there was no helpful forensic evidence, Davis said, but the Massachusetts State Police were working on that.

  I had brought along my Smith & Wesson. It was in my checked airline bag along with my permit to carry it. More and more, it seemed as though I was going to be dealing with people who were not merely obnoxious but a danger to life and limb. The hard job would be sorting out the murderous people from the mere assholes. If I were going to successfully finish the job I was hired to do—or finish any more jobs at all—it was going to be an important distinction to make.

  My flight landed in Redding just before two, and I was soon in a rental Honda for the hour’s drive up to Mount Shasta. The ride along Interstate 5 was lovely, with hilly pine forests on either side, gauzy fair-weather clouds in an azure sky, and high rocky peaks in the distance. I was glad to see that I had good cell service along the route and then as I approached the town of Mount Shasta, in case I needed to call 911.

  The GPS found the Pine Cone Inn on Mount Shasta Boulevard, the main drag. I’d called ahead from SFO and arranged for a nice woody clean room at what in Albany would have been considered a good rate. When I checked in, I told the desk clerk I was meeting a friend who was staying at the motel, Paul Delaney, and was he around anywhere? The clerk, a leathery woman in a bandanna, said she didn’t know, that she hadn’t seen Delaney all day. So far, so good.

  The magical GPS led me out to the edge of town and the headquarters for MS Enterprises, the Skutnik family logging business. The two-story frame building abutted a good-sized lumber yard and a saw mill that didn’t look busy. I assumed that this was where the salt mine was situated, the lair of Martine and Danielle Desault, the Skutnik business empire’s financial geniuses. I didn’t go in, but instead sat in the car and did a BlackBerry search for the Skutnik family home. Again, I was led by the electronic nose to a street that ran along a ridge on the west side of town with a dazzling view of the actual Mount Shasta off to the east. Vast and majestic, the old snow-capped dormant volcano dominated the horizon making me and everybody and everything beneath it seem satisfyingly puny.

  The old Skutnik house, now the home of the salt sisters according to my HLM informants in L.A., was a rambling two-story frame structure with big windows for the great eastern view and a three-car garage with all the doors closed. Two vehicles were in the driveway, a forest green Hummer—the Desaults didn’t seem to be Sierra Club members—and a red Ford pick-up.

  The sun was low in the sky now behind the Skutnik manse, and I drove on by and back down the hill and into town. The names of many of the businesses had a New Age ring: Yin Yang Yoga, Remover of Obstacles Massage, Metaphysical Hand-me-Downs. Others were of the more immediate world: Gussie’s Eats and a place that was just called The Bar. The last one was a short walk from the Pine Cone Inn, which was good. Because when I got back to the motel and asked again for Paul Delaney, the desk clerk said, “It’s after four. Try the place down the street called The Bar. It’s a bar.”

  I knew right away which one was Delaney. He was alone at a table in a corner with a bottle of Whitbread next to him, a glass half empty and a laptop computer up and running. None of this quite went with the Patsy Cline on the juke box, or so it seemed to me with my Eastern marginally-elite one-track mind. Delaney was tall with a long face, a beard that needed trimming, and big gray eyes behind rimless glasses. He had on khakis and what looked like a Brooks Brothers shirt that needed laundering and maybe the collar turned.

  I walked over and said, “Paul, your friend Jane Ware is worried about you.”

  Looking up at me blankly, Delaney said nothing. Then he began to cry.

  I seated myself in the empty chair across from Delaney. I said, “Is Wenske dead?”

  Delaney nodded.

  “Oh shit,” I said.

  He took out a rumpled handkerchief and wiped his eyes and mouth. “I know I should call Jane,” he said. “And of course Eddie’s family. And the police, I suppose. For what that’s worth.”

  I explained who I was and that I had been hired to find Wenske by his mother. I told Delaney my investigation had taken me from Albany to Boston, to New York, back to Boston, to Los Angeles, and then to Mount Shasta. I said, “What happened to him?”

  “The cartel got him. They found out who he was.”

  “Meaning the author of Weed Wars?”

  “Somebody told them.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. He was undercover, one of the local narcs told me. Eddie had actually been working with one of the mules under the name of Wes Parker. He was staying over at the Pine Cone, registered there as Parker. I figured this out from getting friendly with Glenda, the desk clerk. She let me look at the register. About three weeks ago, Eddie disappeared. He’d paid the motel through the end of the week, and then he just didn’t come back. I have his clothes and other things in my room.”

  “Ah, jeez.”

  “The narc I met in here, Joe Willard, heard from one of his informants that the cartel found out that Eddie was a rat whose reporting got several networks shut down in New England. Somebody either recognized Eddie from back there or somebody knew he was here undercover and they told the bosses this. So the enforcers shot him and buried him up the canyon somewhere.”

  “I am so sorry to hear that.”

  Delaney closed the lid on his computer. “Yeah.”

  “So why are you still here?”

  He slumped. “I don’t know. I’ve just been taking long walks. I guess I have to leave.”

  “Jane is concerned about you. Probably other people are too.”

  “Yeah. I just have to make the plane reservation. I should do it.”

  “You haven’t been answering your phone. Your message box is full.”

  “Oh. Well, that’s not like me. I should listen to my messages. God.”

  “You should.”

  A waitress came over, and I ordered a beer.

  Delaney said, “He was like a son to me.”

  “That’s the impression I had from his sister and mother. And at the paper in Boston you were like a father to him.”

  “It sounds like a cliché to say it that way. As an editor, I would say get that outta there. Phrase it some other way. But sometimes the cliché is true. I loved that boy the way I’d have loved a son if I’d had one.”

  “Do you have other children? Daughters?”

  He said, “Kathleen died of breast cancer when she was 28. My wife Eileen made it to 47. Pretty bad, all that was.”

  “Awful.”

  “So Eddie was somebody I could teach what I know—whatever the hell that is—and then he became a real pal. You know, I did try to talk him out of coming up here. He had this suspicion that the Skutnik empire was involved in the drug trade somehow—he saw how the family cash was moving around and he knew the weed history of this area—and Eddie was determined to expose Skutnik. He considered him an embarrassment to gay America, and he really wanted to ruin Skutnik if he could. So he wasn’t thinking as clearly as he should have been. He minimized the risks in his own mind. I suppose he imagined that somebody here might connect him with his drug-gang reporting back in Boston if they knew who he was, but he thought the fake ID would protect him. But somehow the cartel found out, and what Eddie had done to them was unforgiveable. He had to be punished, and his death had to be an example to others. That’s how they think, the narcs say. There’s no give and take, no exceptions.”

  My beer arrived, and I was grateful.

  I said, “Bryan Kim called you last week at the motel. What was that about?”

  “Oh, you talked to Bryan? Didn’t he tell you? I called him at work at Channel Six, thinking Eddie might have been in touch with him, to reassure him or whatever. This was last week right a
fter I arrived here, before Joe Willard gave me the bad news. Bryan was about to go on the air, so he called me back later at the hotel, and he was surprised to hear that Eddie was up here. Surprised, excited and relieved too, because Eddie hadn’t been in touch with him at all. He said in Boston people thought Eddie was probably dead, killed by one of the Boston gangs. Eddie, of course, being Eddie, had been so focused on his role playing and his information gathering that he hadn’t been in touch with people back home for several weeks. When I explained all this to Bryan, he was so happy, and he said he was seeing somebody on Saturday who’d been hired to look for Eddie, and Bryan was going to put the two of us in touch—you and me.”

  “That sounds right.”

  “Bryan was also interested in the connection Eddie had found between the marijuana gangs and Hey Look Media. He had a friend at the HLM office in New York who was coming up to Boston on Saturday to meet you and discuss all that, and I take it that you all connected and compared notes.”

  I sipped my beer. I said, “Paul, I see that you have a laptop and an air card and that you’re in touch with the outside world. Don’t you read the Globe online?”

  “I haven’t been. To tell you the truth, Don, the news these days is all too depressing. I mean literally. I guess I’m what you’d call clinically depressed. It’s the way the country is headed politically, economically, culturally. I saw something about forty-five percent of Republican voters in Mississippi believing that Obama is a Muslim, and I just tuned out for a while. The news is just too awful, and I’ve been watching Truffaut movies on Netflix and not much else. Have I missed anything in the news in Boston? I very much doubt it.”

  I told him about Bryan Kim and about Boo Miller.

  Delaney stared at me.

  Then he said, “I must have caused it.”

  “Maybe. Inadvertently.”

  “No, it can’t be coincidental.”

  “Probably not.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “You had no way of knowing.”

  “I told Bryan,” Delaney said, “that Eddie was out here somewhere digging into Hey Look Media and its drug-gang ties, and then he must have told this guy at HLM in New York. Somebody higher up in New York found out about it and alerted Skutnik or whoever it is in the company who talks to the cartels, and the people who killed Eddie killed Bryan and this Miller guy in New York for the same reasons. As punishment for challenging the gangs and to send a message.”

  “That’s possible. The HLM management in New York does various kinds of surveillance of its employees, including monitoring phone calls, and could have known about your conversation with Bryan and then Bryan’s conversations with Boo Miller. Or maybe Miller carelessly mentioned it to somebody who’s a company rat.”

  Delaney reddened behind his beard. “This is making me mad.”

  “Me too.”

  “I mean, it’s just too goddamned rotten. Is it possible that Skutnik and the Hey Look Media people are not only into money laundering for a drug cartel but are actually deep into the drug business themselves and its despicable culture of violence?”

  “It looks that way.”

  “Well, then, my God, somebody has to do something about it!”

  I said, “That’s what I think.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  We needed allies, and if Delaney and I were correct in our belief that the salt sisters had been Wenske’s main sources for his plan to blow the lid off the assorted HLM criminal enterprises, they seemed like a good place to start looking for help.

  On my phone, I said, “This is Stu Fulton. May I speak to Ms. Desault, please?”

  “Which Ms. Desault? There are two.”

  “Whichever one can sell me five hundred thousand board feet of pine.”

  “You can speak to Martine.”

  On came a polka band. I tried to polka on the table with the fingers of my right hand, and I did this about as deftly as I could have with my legs and feet.

  “Mr. Fulton?”

  “Ms. Desault?”

  “Yes, how are you?”

  “I’m not actually Fulton, I’m Don Strachey, a private investigator working out of Albany, New York, Eddie Wenske’s home town. I know you and your sister were among the primary sources for Wenske’s investigation into criminal practices at Hey Look Media. All this reeking garbage is going to come out, and I was hoping you’d want to get out in front of the legal and moral collapse of HLM by helping me and a colleague out and telling us what you know. Can we get together? I’m here in Mount Shasta for a couple of days. More, if that’s what’s needed.”

  A long silence.

  “I know,” I said, “that you broke off contact with Wenske several weeks ago. I assume that was because somebody tipped you off that higher-ups at HLM had figured out that Wenske was up here and what he was doing. And perhaps you were frightened, and you must have been even more frightened when you found out that Wenske had been killed. You are aware of that, aren’t you?”

  Another silence, and then the line went dead.

  “Hell.”

  “She hung up?” Delaney said.

  “Yeah. She never said a word after how-do.”

  It was Saturday morning, and we were in Delaney’s room at the Pine Cone Inn. We had spent the previous evening looking through files on Wenske’s computer, which Delaney had retrieved from Wenske’s room and had the password for. Paper documents had been stashed in Delaney’s storage bin in the basement of his apartment building, not in the apartment itself where I had looked.

  The data on the computer files was fascinating stuff that Delaney and I only half understood. It involved bank transfers in and out of multiple corporations in Curacao, Panama, Liberia, and the U.S. Delaney had seen much of this data previously along with Jane Ware, and he explained to me how HLM moved cash around. One trick was to do television production deals for budgeted amounts—a million, two million, three million dollars—and promise investors X amount of return once these programs or films were distributed or shown on HLM TV. The films were then made for a fraction of the amount budgeted, with the remainder flowing into dummy offshore corporations. Investors were repaid Ponzi-like from cash flowing in from new investors for newer projects that worked the same way. It was easy to see how this was both illegal and not going to work in the long run.

  The Desault sisters were up to their necks in this funny business and outright fraud, so a question Delaney and I both had was this: Why had they blabbed only to Wenske? If they had wanted to bring Hal Skutnik down, why had they not gone directly to the state prosecutors? And if all the law enforcement agencies in Siskiyou County were somehow in the pockets of Maurice Skutnik Enterprises or HLM—and that seemed improbable—why couldn’t the salt sisters have gone to the feds? Presumably the DEA had a considerable presence in this region famous for its fine kush. Delaney had befriended a state narc who apparently was both competent and clean. Joe Willard had told Delaney that undercover agents had infiltrated at least some of the local growing operations and were methodically gathering evidence for eventual busts.

  Delaney and I had breakfast at Gussie’s, down the road from the Pine Cone Inn. Walking back to the motel, we were strategizing as to how we might approach the Desault sisters again when what looked like the red Ford pick-up I’d seen at the Skutnik house pulled alongside us and a man in the passenger seat rolled down his window.

  “Don Strachey?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Just keep walking.”

  “Okay.”

  “You stayin’ at the Pine Cone?”

  “Yep.”

  “See you there. You wanna hop in the back of the truck?”

  “No thanks.”

  The truck pulled on up ahead of us and into the Pine Cone parking area.

  The man who spoke to me looked big enough to have carried Delaney and me not just in his truck bed but maybe in his back pocket. He wore a dirty blue sweatshirt and had a dirty brown beard that extended down toward his lap
somewhere. The driver of the pick-up was darker and clean-shaven, and smaller but still big enough.

  Delaney said, “Should I dial 911?”

  “No, let’s meet these guys in the breakfast room at the motel and see who they are. It’ll be okay, I think.”

  When we went in, some of the motel patrons were sipping their free not-fresh-squeezed OJ and nibbling at their mini cinnamon buns. We weren’t going to have much privacy here, and the bigger of the two men from the truck suggested we sit out in a gazebo at the edge of the parking area. The structure had a nice view of Mount Shasta, and people coming and going along Mount Shasta Boulevard had an unobstructed view of us. So I said that would be fine.

  “You should leave town,” the big man said as soon as we were seated. “Nobody wants to talk to you. Martine don’t want to talk to you, and Danielle don’t want to talk to you.”

  “How come? They talked to Eddie Wenske. I’m representing Wenske’s family.”

  “Something happened to that guy. You know about that?”

  “I heard about it. Somebody is going to be held responsible for Wenske’s death.”

  The guy shook his head in disbelief. “You sure are full of shit, Strachey.”

  The big guy’s companion sat giving me the fish eye, and Delaney was glowering at both of them.

  “Ms. Desault and Ms. Desault are missing the point,” I said. “I don’t think they had anything to do with Wenske’s being murdered. I know they were helping him out in what he was working on, and now my friend and I here are picking up where Wenske left off. Paul here is a writer and I’m an investigator working for Wenske’s mother.”

  “What you are is an asshole sticking your nose in where it don’t belong,” the big man said. “Martine and Danielle, they decided to let it go, at least for now. They gotta wait until things simmer down. You want to make a tree fall on Hal Skutnik, go ahead. But the ladies ain’t gonna help, so you might just as well go back to L.A. Times are tough enough up here as it is, without somebody fuckin’ up everybody makin’ a living. We all are just trying to get by, is all.”

  “Look,” I said, “I’m not interested in disrupting the growing and selling of weed in Siskiyou County. In a way, you folks are performing a public service, providing America with a product that’s less harmful than most of what’s sold in every neighborhood liquor store across the nation and half the Walgreens and CVS’s. What I am interested in is the violence that goes along with the weed business and Hal Skutnik’s possible involvement in it. Did you know that two friends of Eddie Wenske were stabbed to death last week in Boston, and they were probably killed by dealers connected with Skutnik and HLM?”