The Last Thing I Saw - Stevenson Richard - Страница 18

Beers looked relieved. “Getting laid, of course. Boys will be boys. No mystery there. I mean, please.”

“That’d be my guess too,” Anastos said. “Was this while Bryan was out of the picture? It sounds to me as if Eddie was dating somebody who got off from work late. A bartender? Another reporter? What about somebody at the Globe?”

“His sister says no. He always told her who he was dating. He would not have been secretive about that, she insists.”

“Maybe he was dating a person he was embarrassed to mention to his family. A Mormon or something.”

“Or a Republican,” Anastos said.

“Or both!”

“Oh no!”

Beers and Anastos laughed, and then they both grew quiet.

“God, I miss that sweet young man,” Beers said. “Donald, are you going to find him for us? Or at least put our minds to rest a little bit over what the goddamn hell could have happened to that poor, dear boy?”

I said, sure, I was going do that, and then our appetizers arrived.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Clouds had moved in and then drizzle. The flight back to Boston was bumpy, and from my window seat I saw nothing but blackness until the runway lights flashed up through the soup over Logan.

During the cab ride into town, I phoned both Susan Wenske and Marilyn Fogle and updated them on my meager progress. Mrs. Wenske seemed down, but maybe it was because I was calling her at ten at night and she was worn out from a day with anxious clients. She didn’t seem surprised that I had little tangible to report on my search for her son. Fogle was interested to hear about the Hey Look Media ugliness. She said she was so happy she was working in public radio, not that office politics didn’t require a certain amount of navigation just about everywhere. She told me that her girls were fine but that Bond was being especially moody and difficult because he had thrown out the ninth draft of his novel and was starting over.

Back at the hotel, I tuned in the eleven o’clock report on Channel Six. More than forty-eight hours after the crime had taken place, the lead story was still the murder of the station’s prize-winning investigative reporter. Boston police still had no leads, the somber anchor team told viewers. We briefly saw Marsden Davis getting out of a patrol car. Then Bryan Kim’s parents were followed down a corridor at Logan. They stared straight ahead and had nothing to say.

I checked my e-mail—spam, spam, spam—and watched Colbert for a while and then was out of it. I dreamed that I was incompetent.

I woke up early, read the Globe with breakfast—no breaks in the Bryan Kim murder—and met Detective Lieutenant Lewis Kelsey at a coffee shop on Boylston. He was fit, relaxed, and dapper for a cop and had a head as clean-shaven as Marsden Davis’s. Did BPD have a no-hair-allowed policy, or what? I had coffee and Kelsey ordered green tea and a bran muffin.

“Normally I work in narcotics,” Kelsey said, “but the Wenske case landed on my desk when it looked like the dope dealers might have been mad at Wenske and decided to make him go away. That kind of thing would be unusual, but the masters of the universe of the drug world aren’t as well-mannered as they used to be. And they were never all that rational. So do I think that weed wholesalers killed Eddie Wenske in order to punish him and to send a message to other reporters who are too aggressive? I’m guessing yes, they did, although I don’t have a shred of evidence to support that.”

“Aldo Fino at the Globe told me your snitches all say they haven’t heard anything about a reporter being killed.”

“Correct. And I can tell you the same is true with the feds I’m in touch with. It could have been some very quiet rogue operation, of course. Or a loner with his own gripe—Wenske’s stories sent his grandma to jail or whatever. But people who hurt other people at that level of society tend to be people who like to run at the mouth, and sooner or later somebody hears something. But not yet, I’m sorry to say.”

“And you have no other leads?”

“I talked to just about everybody Wenske knew, and nobody I met was either helpful or made me suspicious. Basically they were all just upset, and that includes Bryan Kim. Now, about Bryan Kim. Two months after Eddie Wenske mysteriously disappears, Bryan Kim is stabbed to death, apparently by someone he was acquainted with. What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“What do you think?”

“Marsden Davis says there are a couple of Kim’s former boyfriends in Providence he needs to take a closer look at. It could be a jealousy thing, dunno. Or these guys had some unresolved issues. Davis tells me you’re gay. What do you think of the pissed-off-old-boyfriend theory?”

“Not much. Gay guys whose hearts are broken by men tend not to murder the men who did it. They mostly lick their wounds and then go online and start looking for somebody else who won’t disappoint them. Jealous rages that lead to homicide among gay men are more pulp fiction of the 1930s than present-day reality. Still, it’s possible, I guess.”

“Straight men sometimes murder their ex-wives’ boyfriends,” Kelsey said. “Are you saying gays are more emotionally stable?”

“I wouldn’t go that far. They’re just more emotionally adaptable. It’s a survival skill we develop early.”

“Oh, yeah? Hmm. Anyway, Davis has no other leads, to speak of. The neighbor who found the body, Elvis Gummer, strikes Davis as untruthful, and Marsden is going to talk to him again.”

“Good idea. Though I’m guessing that’s all Gummer is, untruthful. I take it you’re aware that when he disappeared Wenske was deep into another story he was working on for The New York Times magazine, then it was going to be a book. He was looking into gay media—TV, print, online and so on. He was investigating a mega-company, Hey Look Media, that I’ve learned he suspected of a variety of illegalities.”

Kelsey perked up. “His sister Marilyn told me he was working on this project, yeah, but she didn’t mention any illegalities. What kind of illegalities?”

“I don’t know. Financial maybe. I’m trying to find out. I was in New York yesterday and talked to somebody at HLM, Hey Look Media. A friend of this guy’s at the company was feeding Wenske dirt on HLM, and now the friend, Boo Miller—real name Buris—may have disappeared too. He supposedly flew up to Boston Saturday to see Kim, and then he never showed up again in New York or anywhere else.”

“What the fuck.”

“So that’s the angle I’m following at the moment.”

“Does Davis know about this media company stuff?”

“I’ll tell him today. Or you can.”

“He’ll want to talk to you.”

“Sure.”

Kelsey’s bran muffin arrived and he eyed it with disdain. “My daughter thinks I have to eat tasteless crap like this.”

“It must be working. You appear to be healthy.”

“I’m healthy because I spend two hours a day at the gym. And this thing is my reward?”

“I’ll bet you eat red meat for dinner.”

“Used to. Now it’s fish. My wife is overweight and has high cholesterol.”

“She’s looking out for both of you.”

“I read that somebody said the three most important things in life—the things that make life worth living—are work, love, and food. Anyway, I’ve got two out of three.”

“A good job and a good marriage. Good for you.”

Kelsey rolled his eyes at this and moved on to another subject. “I want to show you something.” He brought a manila envelope up from the floor next to his chair and opened it. He placed four objects on the table. Two were Massachusetts drivers’ licenses. One was a dark blue United States passport. Another was a Commonwealth Bank ATM card. “Take a look at these.”

I examined each item and saw that while two of the documents with photo IDs had the name Michael Packer on them, the picture on each was that of Eddie Wenske. The bank card also had the name Michael Packer embossed on it. The second driver’s license had Wenske’s photo but bore the name James Parker.