The Last Thing I Saw (12 page)

I was back in Albany by two in the afternoon. I went home and got out some cheese and microwaved a chunk of baguette that some months earlier Timmy had brought home from La Serre, then labeled it, dated it, wrapped it in plastic and placed it in the freezer along with his other filched-from-expensive-restaurant treasures.

I went online and found the best deal I could for a ticket to L.A., flying out the next day but with an open return. It was quite a scam the airlines had going when it came to last minute reservations, and I mentally thanked Susan Wenske’s late mother, who was underwriting my so-far-futile search for her grandson.

I updated my notes, then took down our old copy of
Notes from the Bush
, Wenske’s famous memoir of coming out in middle school in East Greenbush. The cover photo was of Wenske at fourteen, and he was a cutie, and only a little more fresh-faced than he was in his twenties, pictured at that later age on the back cover when the book came out.

I skimmed the early chapters, marveling as I had when I first read it at the way Wenske had won over or at least neutralized so many peers and teachers—-who at first were uncomfortable with his outspokenness—simply by being cheerful and confident and at ease in his own gay skin. His sunny casual attitude had been infectious. There had been ugliness and confrontations, too, and the school board had tried to stop Wenske from bringing a sixteen-year-old male date from Simon’s Rock College in Massachusetts to a school dance. Wenske had not won that fight, but he’d gathered enough support so that, in the end, a second non-official all-inclusive dance was held in a hotel ballroom in Colonie, organized by a group of students and parents, including his own. I noted again the book’s dedication,
To my parents, Herb and Susan Wenske,
and I thought, what a lucky kid. Also, a good human being and a model citizen—no dark side in the making here.

I had placed my new copy of
Weed Wars
on the shelf next to the memoir, and I took it down again. Flipping through it, I was even more impressed at how knowing and attentive to detail Wenske’s writing was in the sections on marijuana wholesaling operations—the growers, the marketers, the mules who “carry weight” from the Mexican border towns and from the Klamath and Shasta mountain regions of Northern California. Any good reporter knew how to elicit this kind of information in interviews, but Wenske wrote with the kind of novelistic feel for the material that bespoke direct experience. One section, in particular, in which a mule had to navigate interstate highway stretches heavily populated with troopers in cruisers bristling with antennas and marked as
K-9
drug spotters was spun out with sweaty palm suspense. I thought, Wenske has been there, he’s done this.

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?”

They both looked glum.

“Only gay game in town,” Boxley said. “There’s Brand Gay, yeah, but they’re more New York-based and not all that wonderful either. The place isn’t run by a psycho, just tight-assed corporate types.”

“Brand Gay does seem to have been designed by focus groups composed of somewhat dim people,” I said.

Our drinks arrived and we all availed ourselves.

“We’d have stuck it out at HLM,” Taibi said, “hoping that Hal would become less hands on and some talented people might be brought in, even if only accidentally. But we both got bounced at the same time last year, and now we look back and consider ourselves blessed. No more hissy fits from Hal, no more mind games from Ogden, no more having to deal with Rover’s dumb-ass programming ideas that he comes up with whenever he’s stoned, which is most of the time.”

“May I ask why you were both fired?”

More eye rolling. I held on to the table.

“Hal had surveillance cameras installed in the office,” Boxley said. “Just like Ogden had done in New York. Unfortunately, we both forgot about them. I took a day off without asking anybody when my sister was visiting from New Hampshire and Hal was in New York. Hal looked at the tapes when he got back and saw that I was gone and started screaming that I was stealing from the company and I was lucky he didn’t call the police. He told me to get out of his sight, and he never wanted to lay eyes on me again.”

“My case was similar,” Taibi said, “but a little bit embarrassing. One day I was checking out some porn on my computer, and I made the mistake of actually taking my dick out and…you know. Fuck, there it was on the tape. Not a lot of detail, but clear enough. Hal started screaming that I could be spreading disease in the office, and I should get out of his sight and he never wanted to lay eyes on me again, and I was lucky he didn’t call the police about me jerking off on HLM’s office furniture.”

I said, “This place sounds like its personnel policies were formulated by some satanic combination of Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum.”

They laughed lightly. Taibi said, “Maybe they were. A lot of people think Ogden is actually straight and works for Hey Look because he’s been fired everywhere else. He’s always talking about cocks and asses and ‘gittin’ a little,’ as he calls it, but when he goes on like that it sounds like George Romney talking about grits. It feels totally phony. Ogden was brought into the company for his management expertise, supposedly, but that’s a joke. The place is always in chaos. Luckily, Ogden is in New York most of the time, so people out here only have to deal with Hal the psychopath and Rover the dope fiend.”

“I understand that you were two of Eddie Wenske’s sources for his research on gay media.”

“Eddie was great,” Boxley said. “He found all these horrors fascinating, and we could tell he was really going to do a job on HLM. We told him everything we knew, and so did ten or twelve other people who’d been screwed by Hal.”

“Were there any people he might have interviewed who would have said nice things about HLM?”

“If it was in the office, the marketing and promotion people, sure. But then they’d slip Eddie their phone numbers and meet him after work and unload. I know several situations where this was the case.”

“So he actually came to the office?”

“He wanted to get a feel for the place,” Taibi said, “and naturally he had to interview Hal to get his take on things.”

“Any good journalist would.”

My club sandwich arrived and I went at it.

“They were in Hal’s office for an hour and a half one day,” Boxley said, “and I could hear Hal yelling. Eddie told a bunch of us afterwards that Hal apparently wasn’t used to having anybody challenge his ideas or seem to disagree with him. He went ape shit when Eddie suggested that the reason so few people watched HLM was the poor quality of the programming. Hal said most gay people don’t
care
about the quality of the programming, that gay men just want to look at tight asses and big pecs and that gay women only watched ESPN and they weren’t big spenders anyway.”