The Last Thing I Saw - Stevenson Richard - Страница 21

That and the fake IDs Lewis Kelsey had discovered hidden in Wenske’s apartment made me think that Wenske was a man so comfortable doing undercover work, and so skilled at it, that maybe—just maybe—that’s where he was now. Not dismembered in a bog but pretending to be somebody else so that he could dig up information for—what? His gay media book? What else could it be? It’s what he cared about so deeply.

But if that was the case, why would he not tell his mother and his sister and Bryan Kim and Aldo Fino and other people close to him that he might be out of touch for two months?

No, that couldn’t be it.

Timmy came home from work, and I told him I’d be leaving for L.A. in the morning.

“I would try to come along,” he said, “but it’s the budget deadline. The governor may have to cave on a few items, and it’s not going to be pretty.”

“I’ve heard that when he doesn’t get his way, steam shoots out his navel.”

“That’s true.”

“I’ll manage traveling on my own, as I have been known to do.”

“I’d come out for the weekend, but it’s so expensive nowadays that it doesn’t make sense.”

“No problemo.”

“There you go again. Why, your Spanish is on a level with George Romney’s!”

I gave Timmy an update on the Kim murder and the connections between Kim and Wenske and Hey Look Media, one of whose New York staffers had vanished after apparently not showing up for a Saturday rendezvous with Bryan Kim and me.

Timmy said, “Ugh. It all sounds like one of Hey Look TV’s made-on-the-cheap private eye movies.”

“Except more plausible.” I laid out all the rumors of big-time financial sleight-of-hand at HLM and how Wenske had been gathering information that his main sources in L.A. had considered incriminating. I said, “Incriminating in the legal sense, according to at least two employees of the company.”

“Peculation?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Embezzlement?”

“Bigger than that, according to the unsubstantiated scuttlebutt, and higher up. Maybe swindling of investors by management. Certainly maltreatment of creditors, including writers and filmmakers.”

Timmy fixed each of us an iced tea from the big jar of sun tea he set out on the deck as soon as the first crocus burst forth. He said, “That sounds like a job for an entire law firm and probably the Attorney General of California and maybe the Securities and Exchange Commission. How long do you think you’ll be out there?”

“Three years at most.”

“No, really.”

“I don’t know. Some New York City HLM people gave me names of company people out there. They all loathe their bosses, so I’m guessing I’ll find out a lot in a hurry. Anyway, I’m only looking for information about Eddie Wenske. It won’t be my job to round up corporate miscreants and herd them over to the federal building. I’ll also get help, I think, from an old Boston editor friend of Wenske’s who’s in L.A., Paul Delaney. He put Wenske in touch with a financial writer at the L.A. Times, so I’ll track her down too, and he may know something about what Wenske was digging into.”

“So you don’t think it’s the pot dealers who are somehow responsible for Wenske disappearing? A few days ago, you were all hot to tie his fate to the weed people.”

“The Boston cops don’t think it’s that. And I think they did what they could to check out that theory.”

“You got that idea yourself after reading Weed Wars. It’s too bad Wenske didn’t finish his gay media book. You might find a clue in it about what’s happened to him. Though I guess that’s the point. He might have been killed to keep him from writing the gay media book. You’ve thought of that, of course.”

“It’s occurred to me.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I was in my room at the Westwood Holiday Inn Express on Santa Monica Boulevard by four Wednesday afternoon, and by 4:45 had four appointments lined up. It seemed that anybody who had ever worked for Hey Look Media or had done business with the company at any level was seething with anger and resentment and was eager to say very bad things about their former—and in one case current—employer, at least in private. I planned not to discourage them.

Laird Boxley and Robert Taibi were a couple who had met at HLM and worked together there for two years then more or less fell into each other’s arms as each was ushered out the door, Boxley told me on the phone. Boxley was now working for an ad agency and Taibi, a filmmaker, in media relations at UCLA.

We found each other in the hotel bar, the two showing up at 7:15, half an hour late. It was 10:15 back in Albany, and I had been taking in nourishment in the form of bar nuts and the two mini-bags of pretzels I’d pocketed on the plane.

“Sorry we’re late,” Taibi said, sliding into my booth. “L.A. traffic—it’s all true what you’ve heard. Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.”

I said, “It took me half the time to drive to Westwood from LAX that it took to cross North America.”

“There are people with helicopters who would get around L.A. through the air if the FAA would let them,” Boxley said. “There’s a lot of political pressure to let the upper classes fly around in their choppers. But the thing is, there are people out there who would shoot them down.”

“Prince Hal would get one,” Taibi said. “Rover could fly it, and they couldn’t even arrest him for operating under the influence up there—until he ran into something, such as the ground.”

“You’re talking about Hal Skutnik?”

Boxley said, “Hal and his main squeeze, Rover Fye. Can I say squeeze? Rover is so bulked up with muscle and the odd rolls of lard that you’d need airplane seatbelt extensions to organize any kind of squeezing activity.”

Boxley himself bordered on being ample in girth, fortyish like everybody in gay media seemed to be, fashionably micro-whiskered, and with milky blue eyes. Taibi was slender and clean-shaven, a little younger, with glossy brown lips and a golden hoop earring.

The waitress came over, and Boxley ordered a mimosa and Taibi a glass of Chablis. I asked for a beer and a club sandwich. The others, being on Pacific time and not weak with hunger, said they’d eat later.

I said, “Tell me all about Hal and Rover. They sound like quite a pair.”

This produced so much eye rolling I could almost feel motion sickness coming on.

“If there are two skuzzier characters in the industry, I can’t imagine who they are,” Boxley said.

Taibi added, “And that’s saying a lot.”

“Hal fucks people over and then brags about it. I know a photographer who did work for Bugger, and the company owed him eighteen K. Somebody heard Hal laughing about it and telling Ogden Winkleman that the photographer had missed his deadline by an hour and ten minutes, and the guy could go fuck himself. He never got paid.”

Taibi said, “There was a writer selling his book to the company for a film, and they offered the guy two-hundred-fifty dollars. When the writer complained about being ripped off for his life’s work, Hal told Winkleman to go tell the guy to take his faggoty novel and try selling it to George Cukor, but he shouldn’t get his hopes up because George Cukor has been dead for nearly thirty years.”

“Faggot is one of Hal’s favorite epithets,” Boxley said. “He uses it about every thirty seconds. This is a guy who sees himself as a major player in gay America, but his contempt for gay people is total.”

“You don’t have to know him to understand that,” Taibi said. “You just have to look at his programming.”

“I have. So all that uninteresting hokey stuff is on purpose?”

“Hal thinks if you hang a gay-friendly sign on something, it doesn’t matter if it’s a piece of shit,” Boxley said. “This is his idea of gay progress.”

“Skutnik sounds awful,” I said. “So how come you guys went to work for him?”