The Last Thing I Saw (15 page)

“Sure.”

“Great. Believe me, I’m relieved. I really didn’t know what to do.”

“It might be helpful,” I said, “if I could have a look at the HLM documents Eddie had collected. They seem to have pointed him in a particular direction, and maybe they’ll do the same for me. Do you know where they are?”

“In Paul’s apartment,” she said, “and I have a key. A lot of it, of course, is going to be on Eddie’s laptop, and he might have taken that along with him.”

“The old lady in Paul’s building who told me about you admitted to overhearing conversations in the elevator with you and Eddie and Paul. Something about offshore accounts and Panama. What’s that about?”

She gave me a droll look. “Donald, that ‘old lady,’ Mrs. French, is probably younger than I am.”

“Hardly. She’s easily seventy-five.”

“You’re right. I’m only seventy-three. I just feel older than Mrs. French.”

“I doubt that. She’s sitting around reading the paper. You’re busy writing it.”

“Yes, a large part of it I do write. I’ve been offered buyouts every time some new fool takes over our utterly anachronistic institution. But I can’t seem to let go. My husband George had to retire at sixty-two—he was a captain with TWA—and he’s perfectly content doing crossword puzzles, re-reading John D. McDonald, and fixing my supper. But I’m afraid if I couldn’t go into a newsroom most days of the week I’d have no idea who I was or why I was alive, and I might have to be drugged or hospitalized. It could be quite ugly.”

“Your compulsive nose for news must have made you and Paul and Eddie a formidable trio of diggers.”

“You bet, and I was the one with the financial news background. Learned it all on my own too. I majored in Romance languages at Pomona College way back when. Sometimes I traveled with George—I could ride free on TWA to just about anywhere—and I got interested in developing economies. Then in the seventies and eighties as our own economy began to devolve during the big globalization shakeout, I started writing about the way U.S. capital was moving offshore, for foreign investment and into tax havens. And that’s been my beat. Of course, now that our staff has been cut by more than half, I have other beats too. Everything except Sudoku, and that’s probably next.”

“So you noticed that Hey Look Media had overseas operations?”

“Operations would not be the word for it. No production overseas or even sales to any great extent. It’s just a matter of hiding cash from the IRS and also from—hold onto your hat—investors.”

“That’s criminal, isn’t it?”

“It can be. If, for example—as seems to have happened on multiple occasions—HLM borrows money or accepts money from investors for particular production deals and then sends that money flying off into a network of offshore shell corporations where it’s accessed only by other Skutnik-owned shell corporations for unknown purposes and is never used for its contracted purpose, that’s good for Hal Skutnik’s personal bottom line. Presumably it’s what has supported his pricey lifestyle—mansions and galas and Gulfstream jet rentals and what have you. But the company had to get its production and operating cash from somewhere—its low rate of viewer subscriptions was bringing in precious little. For a long time, it looks as if it was done Ponzi-like, with new investors paying off old ones. But by the end of last year, all that was about to blow up Madoff-like.”

“Collapse is the nature of Ponzi-ism.”

“But lucky for Hal Skutnik, his inheritance showed up in the nick of time this January. Or so it seemed briefly.”

“Briefly because there were too few trees left in the Skutnik forests?”

“Exactly.”

“So the inheritance was not a savior for Hey Look Media, just a reprieve?”

“A very brief one. By early February, things were starting to look desperate all over again. But that crisis was also brief, it turned out. Within a few weeks, cash was starting to flow again, both into the company and into the shell corporations in Panama, Liberia, and Curacao, the repositories for Hal’s personal piggy banks. We were all baffled as to where this sudden river of cash was and is coming from.”

“And Wenske’s sources didn’t know? The people who were feeding him all this lurid information?”

“What happened was, they all of a sudden clammed up. Eddie thought maybe their betrayal had been discovered. He said they seemed suddenly terrified and they said they were breaking off all contact with Eddie.”

“That does sound bad.”

“Eddie told Paul to sit tight, and that Eddie would talk to some HLM people here in L.A., and then he would go up to Shasta and try to figure out exactly what had gone wrong, going undercover if that’s what it took. Eddie has fake IDs and documents he used when he was writing
Weed Wars.
”

“I’ve heard about this risky practice of his.”

“Paul offered to go along. But Eddie said, no, not a chance. In fact, he told Paul, if this situation turned out to be what Eddie thought it was going to be, Paul needed to distance himself from all of it and pretend to anyone who asked that he had never gotten involved in the first place. Eddie made Paul promise to do that, and Paul reluctantly agreed. It was a promise that now I’m afraid Paul didn’t keep.”

“And what was this mysterious situation that Eddie thought he would likely have to contend with?”

“He didn’t tell Paul. Or if he did, Paul didn’t tell me.”

But I thought I knew what Wenske guessed he was onto, and I thought I knew why he was afraid.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

I had two more interviews scheduled with disaffected former HLM employees, one at five and one at 7:30 for dinner. I made my way inch by freeway inch back to the hotel in Westwood, getting there just in time to book a next-morning flight north and then meet Rickie Esteban, Rover Fye’s former personal assistant, in the hotel bar. I badly wanted to talk with Martine and Danielle, but they spent most of their time in Mount Shasta, I’d been told, so that was going to have to wait—if I could even make it at all into Desault mines.

Esteban was twenty minutes late, explaining that his bus had hit a pedestrian and had been impounded by the police, and he had walked the last half mile. He worked for a copy center now and had arranged to leave work two hours early just so he could meet me and say terrible things about Hal and Rover and Hey Look Media. He was a muscular young man with an Aztec face, a rhinestone stud in his right ear, and some kind of hieroglyphics carved into his millimeter-length haircut.

Esteban ordered a diet Coke and said, “So what’s the deal with Eddie Wenske? He disappeared or something?”

“No one has seen him since early March, and a lot of people are worried about him. His mother in New York hired me to try to find him.”

“Hey, that dude can take care of himself. He’s smart, that guy.”

“You spent some time with him?”

“I took him around, yeah. We saw Daryl Tangelo, who does Hal’s hair transplants, and we went over to Gaylord Renzi’s, the trainer who does what he can with Hal’s butt. Myrna of Smyrna is Rover’s Jungian astrologer, and she even gave Eddie a good break on a one-time reading. We had a nice lunch with Jervis Melton, Rover’s nutritionist, though we had to make a pit stop at Wendy’s afterwards just like Rover always does. Hal’s yoga instructor, Bruce Stompanato, was on vacation in Tibet when we were going around in December, so I don’t know if Eddie ever got to meet him. But he got a pretty good idea of all the people who can’t stand Hal and Rover, and I think he really appreciated the opportunity.”

“These people all spoke openly of their dislike for Hal and Rover? Isn’t that risky—biting the hand that feeds?”

Esteban shrugged. “They only say this shit behind Hal and Rover’s back. They all kiss Hal’s ass when he’s around, then they laugh their nuts off when he turns the other way. This is L.A., man, whaddaya think?”

“The place seems to conform to a stereotype.”

“Yes and no. Most people here are honest enough and nice. They basically just get up and go to work in the morning. Me and my friends aren’t assholes, I don’t think. But a lot of people who make it in L.A. are like Hal and Rover, and that’s especially true in the industry. I’m staying out of it. I had enough. When Rover shit-canned me, I just said, fuck it, I’m outta this nut house.”

“Can I ask why Rover fired you?”

“Yeah. He wanted me to pick up some package in Venice and bring it on the bus back to Bel Air. I get out there to this place down from the beach and I can see that this is some bad-ass situation Rover is sending me into, smells like piss and broken down. Before I go into this building, I say to a little kid, ‘Hey, what is this place?’ And this little child—he must be about nine years old—this little child says, ‘That place is a meth factory. You want some?’”

“And you turned around and got the hell out of there.”

“I was in no hurry. I just walked on down to the next block, and then I walked down by the beach, and then I got back on the bus and rode back to Bel Air. I told Rover I could have been busted or murdered or I don’t know what all. Do you know what he said?”

“What?”

“He said, ‘
But I needed that meth
.’”

“He probably did, too.”

“Not as much as I needed to get the fuck out of Hey Look Media. I told Rover to go fuck himself, and he looked right through me and said bye-bye.”

I said, “I’ve heard that Rover uses meth and it makes him unstable.”

“Did you ever hear of meth calming anybody down? No, you don’t want to be around Rover when he’s using. I don’t think he ever killed anybody or anything, but he ran over somebody with an ATV at Hal’s place up in the mountains and broke the dude’s pelvis. I was even there when it happened. Hal had to pay off the cops and the guy and his girlfriend too.”

“This is at the family home in Mount Shasta?”

“No, the salt mine sisters live in there now. This is at the lodge on up the canyon. It’s where they made
Dark Smooches
. Ever see that show?”

“
Dark Smooches
was the first thing I ever saw on Hey Look TV, and it was the last thing I saw.”

“It was Rover’s idea and he was in it and he’s the producer. That means he can charge whatever he wants to the budget. I told him one time I liked some boots I saw, and Rover gives me the credit card and says go help yourself. Then I saw the boots were deducted from my pay check. He’s always all methed up, so you never know what he’s gonna do from one hour to the next. And Mason Hively is even worse.”

“The writer and director of
Dark Smooches
?”

“Mason’s a meth freak too, and he binges and you just have to protect yourself. Sometimes he’s having a good time. He goes around yelling,
Party in your pants! Party in your pants!
But then he all of a sudden gets mean, and then—look out.”

“Is he ever violent? I mean, other than when he’s driving an ATV?”

“That’s Rover who uses the ATV. Mason likes to stay indoors unless it’s dark out or cloudy. Is Mason violent? He screams his head off, but I don’t think he’d cut anybody or shit like that. I know he likes to be tied up and slapped around a little himself. The PAs are always complaining about that. It’s not in the job description, they say, but what can they do? Rover and Mason used to do porn shoots at the lodge, but Hal didn’t like it. He said what if the media found out about all that jizz hitting the ceiling beams at the Skutnik family lodge and somebody blabbed to his mama? So then they had to start doing their porn shoots down here, out in the valley like everybody else. Though that meant the PAs up at the lodge started getting hit on instead of the stars. Some of them thought it was okay if it might help their careers. But most of them figured out that even if they stuff toilet paper up their nose so they won’t retch while they’re making Mason’s ass red with a ping pong paddle, really they were just being totally fucked over and they weren’t going to get parts or be made associate producers, and so they took their leave of Hey Look Media, just like I did.”

“Why,” I asked, “was Skutnik afraid the gay media would embarrass him? Doesn’t he own most of the gay media? That’s part of what Eddie Wenske’s book was going to be about.”

“Yeah, but he doesn’t own the straight media. I know he knew Eddie was writing an article for
The New York Times
, and he was scared as shit that Eddie would say all kinds of nasty stuff about himself and Rover. Which he would’ve. That was the point. Tell the truth about HLM.”

“Did Hal say anything to anybody about trying to stop Eddie from publishing his piece?”

“Oh yeah. One of the PAs told me he heard Hal tell the salt mines—that would be Martine and Danielle in accounting—that this article would never see the light of day. He really thought he could stop
The New York Times
from doing whatever the fuck it wanted to do. That’s how full of shit Hal and Rover are. Can you believe it?”

“Were they planning to sue, or what?”

“Nah, that was all just Hal lighting farts. Eddie is too smart for those dick asses, and I don’t think they would have done anything at all. I mean, what could they?”

I noted the handsome tattoo on Esteban’s well-muscled upper right arm. “Were you a Marine? Or is your tat just decorative?”

“I did one tour in Iraq, and then I got out. I grew up in a neighborhood in East L.A. where you could get shot. I already had enough of that shit.”

“So you know how to protect yourself, it sounds like. And other people, too.”

“You bet your ass I do. But my idea of protection is, don’t go where trouble is.”

“But if somebody you liked had been hurt or killed, you’d want to do what you could to keep that from happening to other good people, wouldn’t you?”

“Sure. Wouldn’t anybody?”

I already had Esteban’s cell number, and I told him I might give him a call.

CHAPTER TWENTY

“Instead of dinner, how would you like to meet Hal Skutnik?” Rob Brandstein said when he called me at six thirty. “There’ll be plenty of Ritz crackers and Cheez Whiz at this event—HLM’s hors d’oeuvres are as classy as its programming—and if we feel like it we can still eat something afterwards. But an evening with HLM is always a bit of an appetite suppressant.”