The Last Thing I Saw (14 page)

Gomez went on to tell me even more horror stories about HLM management, all of it either entertaining or hair-raising or both. None of it was helpful in any specific way in suggesting what might have become of Eddie Wenske. Though after my evening with Gomez, I did think I had a pretty good idea of what Wenske’s “secret life” was that he didn’t wish to discuss with his mother or sister.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I did eventually take Gomez up on his offer of some excellent weed—he had no beer on ice—and left his apartment well after midnight, three a.m. in the East. I collapsed into bed and slept deeply until my wake-up call went off like a tornado alert at eight in the morning.

I had two more appointments with embittered refugees from HLM set up for late in the day, and I thought I might track down Paul Delaney in the meantime. He still wasn’t answering his phone, and his mailbox continued to be full, both of which I didn’t like the sound of.

Out on the sunny hotel terrace with my coffee and grapefruit, I called Perry Dremel at HLM in New York. He said he was in a staff meeting and unable to chat. I asked if Boo Miller had been located yet. Dremel said no and hung up.

After several tries, I got Marsden Davis and asked for an update on the Bryan Kim murder investigation. Davis was in a hurry, on his way to a drug-gang shootout in Dorchester, and he told me that nothing in the Kim investigation was panning out yet but to stay in touch.

I got Timmy on his cell, but he couldn’t talk either, what with the state budget April first deadline looming and both the Legislature and the governor growing tense and testy.

Back in my room, I did a search on my laptop for Paul Delaney. I guessed he was an older man who still kept a land line, and indeed there he was in the L.A. telephone listings with an address in Santa Monica. I dialed the number again, but there was still no answer, mailbox full.

My rental Toyota came with its own GPS, and I let it lead me in its passive-aggressive way to Santa Monica and a pleasant three-story apartment building with a lot of balconies and flowering plants a couple of blocks from the beach. It took nearly an hour to drive the three and a half miles and then find a place to park legally, so by the time I approached the entrance and buzzed Delaney’s apartment, the morning was half gone. As I feared would happen, no one answered.

There was a little garden next to the entryway, and an old lady in a sun suit with a canary yellow bow in her canary yellow hair was sitting on a bench reading the L.A.
Times.

“Pardon me, ma’am,” I said, “I’m looking for Paul Delaney. He’s not home. Do you know him?”

She looked wary. “Maybe.”

“He’s a friend of a man I’m trying to locate on behalf of his mother.” I showed her my New York State investigator’s ID.

“Paul’s mother is living? He never mentioned her to me.”

“No, it’s Paul’s friend’s mother. The man who is missing, Eddie Wenske.”

She perked up. “Oh, Eddie! That nice young man.”

“Yes, I believe he was staying with Paul for a while. Maybe he still is.”

“Oh no, he left. I haven’t seen Eddie for quite some time. I thought he was coming back. Paul did too.”

“Eddie’s family and friends back east have reported him missing. They hired me to find him. That’s why I’m trying to speak with Paul. But he doesn’t answer his phone.”

She screwed up her face. “Well, that’s funny.”

“What?”

“Paul’s not back yet.”

“He went somewhere?”

“Why, yes, he did. I saw him get in the Super Shuttle last week. I’m in 2-C right up there, so I see people come and go. Paul got in a Super Shuttle last Wednesday, and he hadn’t even mentioned that he was going on a trip. That’s why I was puzzled.”

“That’s the shuttle van to LAX?”

“LAX or Burbank. He had a suitcase. One of those with wheels and a long handle. They’re handy, I suppose, if there’s no dog dirt where you’re going.”

“Doesn’t Paul have a job at a newspaper? Might they know where he is?”

“Oh, he was laid off it must have been two months ago. First he got fired by the
Times
when they were losing money. Then he worked for one of those papers you get free from a filthy box. But they laid him off too. He’s retired now, and I think he was mostly helping Eddie on a book he was writing. They were thick as thieves on that book, was what it seemed like to me.”

I wondered if she had a key to Delaney’s apartment but didn’t ask.

“I know about the book,” I said. “It’s about media—television and newspapers.”

“Yes,” she said, placing her
Times
in her lap. “Gay media, Eddie told me.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, it’s no skin off my nose, I always say.”

“Paul lives in 2-E. So you two are practically neighbors.”

“He’s two doors down.” She pointed, and I guessed I could probably climb up onto that balcony without breaking my neck. But Delaney would certainly have all kinds of locks and security bars and probably an alarm system.

“Who waters Paul’s plants when he’s away? I see all kinds of pretty things hanging over his railing.”

“Yolanda when she cleans. She cleans for me too, but I look after my plants myself. Since my husband passed, it’s my begonias that get the TLC. They don’t give much TLC back—but then neither did Wallace.” She chuckled and I gave her a smile that said, oh, yeah, men, I know all too well what we’re like, me being one.

I said, “When does Yolanda clean? On a schedule?”

She squinted up at me. “You want to get in there, don’t you? And poke around.”

“It might help me find Eddie Wenske so that I can let his mother know where he is. She’s very anxious, as I’m sure you’ll understand.”

“Well, she should take a Xanax and try not to get too upset. If it was my son or daughter, she’d be glad they were out of her hair for a while. Eddie is certainly a nice young man, though. He always carried my laundry up if he saw me. Once, I think he pretended he didn’t see me with my big basket, but that was only that one time.”

I wasn’t about to inquire about her two middle-aged children getting in her hair. I said, “Might Yolanda be coming to clean today?”

She shook her head. “Yolanda isn’t gonna let anybody into her clients’ place. You’d have to shoot her first.”

“Good for her.”

“So forget that.”

“Do you have a key to your friend’s apartment?”

She wrinkled her nose. “No. I don’t.”

“You said Paul expected Eddie to be back sooner. Was Paul worried about him?”

“He didn’t say so straight out, but I had a feeling. Yes, I did.”

“He didn’t know where Eddie had gone?”

“No, I think he knew. Something about their book—Eddie’s book. Maybe Jane knows.”

“Who is Jane?”

“Paul’s friend Jane Ware. Here’s her name in the paper.” She rattled the newspaper around and opened it to the financial pages. An article on the collapsed housing market was bylined Jane Ware.

“Is that Paul’s girlfriend?”

“Oh heavens, no. Paul is a widower. His wife passed in Boston many years ago. And Jane is married to her second husband George. They all went out together, and Jane and George came over when Paul entertained. I think Jane was helping with Eddie’s book too.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Oh, I’d hear them talking. I wasn’t butting in. Just stuff you’d hear in the elevator. I’m not nosy.”

“Uh huh.”

“It was about shell corporations and things like that. I paid attention because I thought they were talking about sea shells. Wallace had a large collection of shells. My daughter has them now. I mean, where was I going to keep all those things in my little shoe box of a condo?”

“Interesting.”

“It was interesting to Wallace, that’s for dall-garn sure.”

“I mean the shell corporations.”

“It was islands and Panama and something. You could probably find out about it from Jane if you’re all that interested.”

I said I’d look her up.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Jane Ware agreed to meet me for a late lunch at a soup and salad place not far from the
Times
building downtown on First Street. She was in fact eager to talk to me, she said, because she was concerned about both Wenske and her friend Paul Delaney. She had expected to hear from Delaney over the weekend and hadn’t, and she had been unable to raise him on either his land line or his cell.

With no subway line running from Westwood, I drove to downtown L.A., the GPS making sarcastic cracks about my maneuvers along the way. It took nearly two hours, and I just barely made it to the restaurant for the two o’clock lunch date.

Ware was already seated, in fact, the West Coast edition of
The New York Times
, the competition, spread out in front of her. She had said to look for a seventy-year-old woman with an aubergine pants suit, frizzy hair, and bloodshot eyes, and I zeroed right in on her table.

“Let’s eat,” she said. “Do you mind? I’ve been in the office since six this morning—I am currently doing the work of eighteen people—and I need nourishment in order to go on.”

We helped ourselves at the vast fresh fruit and vegetable buffet, and it was good to be dining at a place where, unlike back in Albany, none of the vegetables being offered at the salad bar was pudding.

Ware had just forty-five minutes before she had to be back at
The Times
, so after I showed her my ID and convinced her that I was working for Eddie Wenske’s mother and I was not a crank or scam artist, she got to the point.

“Paul told me a couple of weeks ago that he heard from people back in Boston that Eddie was considered missing. Eddie had told Paul, though, that he was going to be doing some kind of undercover work and not to mention this to anybody. Paul kept trying to get in touch with Eddie so he could tell him to reassure people back home, but Paul wasn’t having any luck reaching him. He figured he was somewhere with no cell phone reception. Which sounds weird, I know, but there are still such places. Especially up north, where Paul thought Eddie had probably gone.”

“Northern California?”

“Siskiyou County. It might as well be Upper Burma.”

“Why would he go up there?”

Ware’s answer was no surprise. “The gay media book. Hal Skutnik’s family business is up there—his father’s logging empire—and we’d been finding more and more connections between the company in Mount Shasta and Hey Look Media. Skutnik’s father Maurice died early last year, and the estate was settled this January. Hal inherited the logging business, and that’s when a good deal of peculiar intermingling of business operations took place. HLM was in serious financial trouble before then—Hal had burned through an earlier inheritance from his grandfather—and at first Hey Look seemed to have been bailed out all of a sudden by all the family trees. I mean actual trees, pine and redwoods. The Skutniks, however, had not been good stewards of their forests, and there weren’t actually all that many harvestable trees left by the time Hal came into possession of the family properties. It’s kind of a mystery, actually, how MS Enterprises—the name of the logging firm—could have been in a position to save HLM.”

“I’m amazed,” I said. “How do you know all this inside stuff? The HLM people I’ve talked to say only a handful of top people understand the inner workings of the company’s finances.”

Ware peered at me over the bags under her eyes. “Multiple sources. Eddie had HLM people emailing him documents and actually stuffing paper documents in FedEx envelopes and leaving them under benches on the UCLA campus. If anything, there was too much good information to work with. That’s why Paul asked me to help. In my copious free time.”

“Who were the sources?”

“Eddie wouldn’t say. He said he’d promised not to tell anybody, and if you know Eddie, that’s a promise he’d keep. Of course, I’ve seen the documents, so I have my suspicions as to where they came from.”

“And they are?”

“Have people told you about Martine and Danielle?”

“Their names have come up. They worked for the senior Mr. Skutnik in the logging business.”

“They’re company accountants who seem to have actually managed the finances and kept the company afloat while Maurice Skutnik went bear hunting from his lodge in the Shasta wilderness and entertained state legislators and law enforcement types. The two of them now live in the former family homestead in the town of Shasta, what with Maurice’s elderly widow Sandra having been carted down to a posh old folks’ stash-a-torium in Beverly Hills. Martine and Danielle come down to the Hey Look L.A. office every three or four weeks, but mostly they run things from up North.”

“How,” I asked, “did it come to be that a pair of French lesbians rose so far in the Skutnik hierarchy? I’ve heard repeatedly that Hal is a misogynist who routinely uses ugly terms for women.”

Ware laughed. “French lesbians? That’s a good one. No, Martine and Danielle are from Maine originally. They’re sisters. And not lesbian at all, if the stories about them and the company’s lumberjack crews are to be believed. Their last name is Desault. Spelled D-E-S-A-U-L-T, but pronounced
duh-SALT
. Company people up in Mount Shasta, Eddie found out, refer to their office as Desault mines.”

“So Wenske has been up there in Mount Shasta?”

“He made two trips that I know of, and it’s possible he’s up there now.”

“This is heartening news, Jane. Wenske’s family and friends in Albany and Boston think he’s probably dead. Murdered by the drug gangs he wrote about at
The Boston Globe
and in
Weed Wars
. But maybe he’s just—out of touch? If he’s alive, I don’t understand why he hasn’t reassured people he’s close to so they’re not frantic with worry about him.”

“Yes,” Ware said, “actually now I’m worried too. And so was Paul. I have this awful feeling Paul went looking for Eddie up north, and I’m getting more and more concerned since I haven’t been able to reach him. Paul’s not in great shape. The guy is my age—a hundred and fifty, as you can see—and his knees are going. I was wondering…might you try to track him down? While you’re looking for Eddie?”