The Last Thing I Saw (11 page)

“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.

I said, “Oh boy.”

Kelsey nodded. “Marilyn Fogle took me up to Wenske’s apartment on Charles Street. These documents were in an envelope taped to the underside of the top of Wenske’s desk inside a drawer.”

“Your search was thorough.”

“It was.”

“What did Ms. Fogle make of these items?”

“I didn’t mention them to her. I stuck them in my pocket and had them checked out.”

“Uh huh.”

“The driver’s licenses were issued by the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles. They are legitimate. Wenske must have used the passport as ID when he applied for the Michael Packer license. I don’t know what he used for the Parker license. Another fake passport? This passport is bogus—a forgery done by an accomplished professional. It’s the type of beautifully executed fake we sometimes find in the possession of high-level criminals such as blood diamond dealers or upper-level art forgers or the heads of drug cartels.”

“I see.”

“The street addresses on all the documents are Wenske’s Charles Street address. I checked with the Postal Service. There are actually three names registered with the postal service at the Charles Street address, Edward Wenske, Michael Packer, and James Parker. Ms. Fogle had been picking up the mail from her brother’s mailbox, and she began to return any Packer or Parker mail to its senders, thinking, she told me, that there had been some mistake. The only mail that came for Packer or Parker, in fact, were bank statements. They kept on coming, and Ms. Fogle turned them over to me at my request.”

“Good.”

“Each bank statement was for an account that contained several thousand dollars. Over eight thousand in the Packer checking account, just under four thousand in the Parker account.”

“Any deposits or withdrawals?”

“Not in the past two months. It’ll be a son of a bitch getting earlier statements. I’d have to go to court, which I may do at some point.”

“Marilyn Fogle doesn’t know about any of this?”

“I haven’t told her yet. It’s been just over two weeks since I found the documents, and it took time to check out the passport and verify that it was fake. I’m going to call her tomorrow and meet her and ask her if she knows why her brother would be in the possession of multiple illegal forms of identification.”

“Did you find anything else in Wenske’s apartment that meant anything or aroused your suspicion in any way? You gave his place a good going over.”

“Nothing useful at all. Some of his personal effects seemed to be missing. Travel bag with toothbrush, shaver and so on.”

I said, “I think I know what Fogle will say when you tell her about these fake IDs.”

“What’s that?”

“That her brother sometimes went undercover while on reporting assignments. It’s pretty apparent that while he was writing
Weed Wars
he actually spent time with the pot wholesalers. You’ve read the book. His knowledge and understanding is so nuanced and intimate about their daily lives that he must have taken on other identities and pretended to be somebody other than a writer doing research. So he would need documents of these types as well as a cash reserve for expenses or to help get him out of any jams he might have found himself in. This stuff is illegal, true. Wenske was taking a chance and maybe making a serious mistake using this material. But it certainly doesn’t suggest any larger illegal activity on his part. That would be totally out of character for Wenske, and if I were you, detective, I wouldn’t make too much of these items.”

Kelsey squinted over at me and shook his head. “Uh huh. Well, Strachey. You’ve never even met this guy. So it might not be wise of you to act like one of those folks on a TV news report who—when the truth comes out about some dark secret life their nice neighbor lived right under their noses—they tell the TV reporter, gosh, we had no idea, he just seemed so normal. Know what I mean?”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Kelsey told me the last person known to have seen or spoken with Eddie Wenske in late January was a neighbor of his, a widow who lived on the second floor of Wenske’s building. This Mrs. Lucinda Yeager had told Kelsey she knew it was January twenty-eighth because she had just arrived back from visiting her daughter in Charlotte, North Carolina, for her granddaughter’s birthday. She said just as she was arriving home from the airport, Wenske appeared and helped her carry her bag up to the second floor. They chatted briefly, and he had seemed normal, she said.

I went back to the Westin and packed up. Before I checked out, I called Perry Dremel in New York and asked if Boo Miller had turned up yet.

“No, and everybody is incredibly concerned. The guy who checks up on Boo’s cat doesn’t know what to do. Should the police be notified, do you think?”

“That’s probably a good idea. Especially since Miller was going to Boston to see Bryan Kim, who was killed the same day. I’ve mentioned Miller to the Boston cop in charge of the Wenske missing-person investigation, and I’ll also talk to the detective working on the Kim murder.”

“Now I am getting totally paranoid,” Dremel said. “I mean, three gay men who are all connected to each other are dead or disappeared? I am just totally freaked.”

“Paranoia is irrational, but you’re not. I’m worried too, Perry.”

“And Ogden will be back in the office at the end of the week, and he’ll see the videotapes and he’ll listen to the phone tapes, and he’ll see that Boo hasn’t been at his desk and he will go completely ballistic. The police might have to evacuate Chelsea. You’ll be able to hear the explosion in Boston.”

“Winkleman is still in L.A.?”

“He comes back Friday. He’ll come in and make several people cry before he goes into his office and reads
The Wall Street Journal.
God, I just hope that Boo turns up before then, because if he’s not here Ogden will fire his queer ass for sure.”

I asked Dremel to phone me if he heard anything about Boo Miller. He said he would, and he said he’d suggest to Miller’s cat watcher that the police be notified. I said the cat watcher should be sure to mention Miller’s connection to Bryan Kim.

After two tries, I got Marsden Davis on the phone and brought him up to date on my New York visit and what I had learned about Wenske’s investigation of Hey Look Media. And I told him about the missing Boo Miller, who may well have been the third person who was going to meet me for dinner on Saturday night.

Davis said, “Has this Miller been reported missing in New York?”

“Not yet. It’ll happen soon. People keep hoping he’ll turn up.”

“There’s somebody I can talk to at NYPD. I’ll make a call.”

“What are your latest leads, Lieutenant? Has anything developed with Kim’s ex-boyfriends in Providence? Lewis Kelsey told me you were working that angle.”

“Oh, you saw Lew. Good. Did he have his boyfriend with him?”

Boyfriend? “No, he didn’t.”

“The guy’s a young patrolman, and sometimes Lew has him as a driver.”

“I wasn’t aware that Detective Kelsey was gay. He didn’t mention it.”

“He’s a late bloomer. Everybody in Boston knows except Lew’s wife.”

“Not the way to go about it.”

“Sooner or later, it’s gonna hit the fan. Anyway, here’s the thing. None of Bryan Kim’s exes look good for the murder. One dude, Mikey something, is still pretty pissed at Kim. Said he was a mental case and a torturer. But the guy has an alibi for Saturday afternoon. He runs a Lebanese deli in Providence for his uncle and was there all day Saturday.”

“What kind of torturer? What’s does that mean?”

“Just mind-fuck, apparently. No whips and chains, according to the man I sent down to interview him.”

“What about stories Kim was working on at Channel Six? Is there anything there that might have made some unstable type mad enough to go after Kim?”

“There’s a housing authority manager who’s been going around calling Kim a fucking faggot asshole media elite. Kim did a three-part series on Channel Six about this guy taking kickbacks from building contractors and tenants and anybody else he could squeeze a greasy nickel out of, plus of course the usual practice in these situations of putting his girlfriend on the housing authority payroll for a ninety-K a year job of little work.”

“It’s no longer the Massachusetts of William Bradford.”

“Kim’s material for his reports was mostly leaked from somebody in the AG’s office who’s been investigating this sleazoid for over a year. But this crook, Fabian Twomey, has decided to blame Kim for all his troubles. He told people in the housing authority Kim was soon going to be very sorry he didn’t mind his own fucking faggot business.”

“Right.”

“Twomey has no alibi for Saturday afternoon—or doesn’t have an alibi he’ll admit to anyways. There are reports of a second young lady in the picture who’s hotter than the ninety-K now-somewhat-older-and-tarnished girlfriend, and maybe he was enjoying her young, tasty, sweet-assed company Saturday afternoon. It looks like some fibbing is happening here. One possibility is, Twomey was actually on Tremont Street Saturday afternoon stabbing Bryan Kim to death. I’ll be speaking with Mr. Twomey myself later today, and then we’ll see what we might be working with here.”

“Does Twomey have a history of violence?”

“Just of the mouth. According to the suits in the AG’s office, he liked to brag about everything he was getting away with right up to the point where he wasn’t getting away with it anymore. Also, some of his maintenance crew told one of my officers that Twomey doesn’t like the sight of blood. Makes him want to faint or run away. That’s a complicating factor here. On the other hand, Twomey could have hired somebody to kill Kim. Twomey is the type of individual who has other people in his life who do his physical labor for him. And there are enough sociopaths running around loose in the Boston metro area for Twomey to take his pick for a one-time hit job. I hope you won’t think I’m employing a crude stereotype if I tell you that if you’re working in public housing, that’s a handy place to go recruiting for extreme hands-on types of work.”

“I would not accuse you of employing a crude stereotype, Detective.”

“Good ‘nuff. One thing that’s real interesting to me now, Strachey—and I think is gonna interest you—is Kim’s cell phone records, which I now have possession of. There were lots of calls to and from employees of Channel Six news all week long, and calls to and from people that the Channel Six folks have identified as sources for stories the station was working on. There was the call from you Friday afternoon. And there was one outgoing call each on both Thursday and Friday to Hey Look Media in New York City.”

“To their main number?”

“Right.”

“Boo Miller?”

“I’m wondering about that too.”

“But why would Kim not call Miller on his cell?”

“Maybe Miller wanted no record of the call on his cell.”

“Somebody should ask Miller about that when he turns up. If and when.”

“They should do that,” Davis said. “I see that Hey Look Media’s main office is in L.A.”

“It is.”

“There was one very long call to L.A. on March 16, an hour and sixteen minutes. That’s ten days ago, and we’re trying to reach that party. If Kim’s goin’ on and on for that length of time, maybe it’s a pal of his and this gentleman knows something useful for this investigation.”

“Right. Who is it?”

“The number is a land line in the name of Paul Delaney. Know who that is, by chance?”

“I do.”

“Well, tell me all about him. ’Cause now Mr. Delaney is not answering his phone.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Why had Bryan Kim phoned Paul Delaney, Eddie Wenske’s old
Boston Globe
editor, now living in Los Angeles, on March sixteenth? Maybe to ask Delaney if he had any idea what had happened to the missing Wenske. But would it take an hour and sixteen minutes to ask about that? Maybe Kim and Delaney had known each other in Boston, and they were just shooting the breeze, catching up. I’d have to ask Aldo Fino if Kim and Delaney overlapped in Wenske’s life. Delaney moved west some years earlier, so I was guessing they hadn’t.

Marsden Davis had given me Delaney’s number, and I tried it. I got his voicemail and would have left a message saying who I was and why I was arriving soon in L.A., but Delaney’s message box was full.

I checked out of the Westin, retrieved the car from the hotel garage, and found a Mass Pike entrance nearby. Boston now had so many major highways running underneath it that it had been able to lower its notorious traffic jams by fifty or sixty feet.

As I headed west on the interstate, I listened for a few minutes to the public radio fund drive on Marilyn Fogle’s station, then switched to another station whose fund drive had already been completed and whose staff was interrupting regular programming with short announcements thanking listeners for keeping public radio going for another four months. Apparently commercial radio was little more than an afterthought here in the Peoples Republic of Massachusetts. This station had a brief local newscast that included no mention of the Bryan Kim murder. Which meant no new developments.