The Last Thing I Saw (3 page)

“That’s all a ways off, if you can believe Eddie Wenske’s book. The war-on-drugs establishment is too well entrenched. Their livelihoods depend on their maintaining the
Reefer Madness
myths about pot. It’s a shame the founding fathers hadn’t gotten mellow and added weed to the Bill of Rights. It would have made a nice substitute for the Second Amendment as it was written. Whatever social problems cannabis entails, it’s certainly preferable to living in a country that has more guns than people.”

Timmy said, “In his book, did Wenske come down on the side of legalization?”

“By implication, he did. He was mainly interested in telling the sordid story behind all the good feeling and then letting readers draw the obvious conclusion. It’s a hair-raising picture he paints. Hair-raising and evocative and detailed. Apparently he went undercover while he wrote the book. It’s full of details like how to avoid getting stopped by the cops on a long mule run from, say, California to Boston. How to obey all the traffic laws and blend in, and how to avoid interstate highways in the states with the harshest laws and the meanest judges. The people who do this all the time get paranoid and tetchy, and Wenske’s portraits of them are both poignant and creepy. They’re generally not people you’d want your sister to marry.”

“Especially not in my case, since my sister is a nun.”

“I meant generally speaking. Not brides of Christ, no. Anyway, I wonder if Jesus ever smoked. Maybe as a teenager. Is there scripture on this?”

Timmy gave me one of his you’re-about-to-go-too-far looks. “I really wouldn’t know. I suppose he observed whatever the acceptable customs of his time and place were.”

“We know he was a kind of vintner. That’s in the Bible.”

He moved into change-of-subject mode. “Wouldn’t it be highly unusual for Wenske to be abducted and killed or whatever by drug dealers? In this country, journalists are hardly ever targeted by criminals. Murdering aggressive reporters is an ugly phenomenon that’s common in Africa and Asia, but I think it’s rare here. Though there was a talk-radio guy in Colorado who was killed because of his views, as I recall.”

“And a newspaper reporter in Arizona who went after a crooked real estate developer, and the crook had a bomb planted in the reporter’s car. That was quite a while ago.”

“Anyway,” Timmy said, “couldn’t there have been any number of other reasons why Wenske might have disappeared? What else do you know about him besides his newspaper reporting and his books?”

“Not much. I’ll be finding out. There’s an ex-boyfriend in Boston, and of course his former colleagues up there at the newspaper. I’m meeting his mother early tomorrow at Starbucks. I saw her briefly in her office yesterday, just long enough to elicit a small retainer and get a few names and phone numbers. She didn’t have much time. She runs a catering business in Colonie and seems to spend most of her time on the phone reassuring people that she remembers who they are and she hasn’t misplaced the menus for their weddings and bar mitzvahs.”

Timmy set his spoon down. “So you’re going to Boston?”

“Maybe later tomorrow. I’ve got a call in to the ex-boyfriend over there, Bryan Kim. And an editor Wenske worked with at the
Globe.
”

“If it is a drug gang that did something to Wenske, I take it they won’t particularly appreciate your butting in.” Now Timmy was looking a little sweaty too.

I said, “Don’t worry, I’ll be careful. I’m the one who read the book, and I’m the one who knows all too well how dangerous these people can be.”

He didn’t look reassured. “I’ll read
Weed Wars
while you’re gone. I’ll read it and try not to fret.”

“That would be helpful. Especially the trying-not-to-fret part.”

“Anyway, maybe you were right to think it was an evil gay media conglomerate that did something to Wenske, and people like that will be less risky to go up against.”

“Maybe. Though Marva Beers told me Wenske had described the Hey Look owners as, quote, ‘the feyest gangsters in America, but still gangsters.’ It’s what stoked his outrage and got him working on the new book, an expose of corrupted gay social progress.”

He looked at me for a moment and said, “I hope it soon turns out that Wenske just went to Fiji for some R and R, and word didn’t reach his friends and family because the internet was down. Though I suppose that’s unlikely.”

I said, yep, it is, and ordered another Sam Adams.

CHAPTER THREE

“Sure, it
could
have been drug dealers who did something to Eddie,” Susan Wenske said. “But his life was always so incredibly complicated that I’m afraid it’s going to be just a monumental job sorting it all out. There were all the criminals he wrote about, but I also think his
personal
life had some kind of dark side to it, if I can use that term. This is just a weird suspicion I have—Bryan and some of his other friends might be able to shed light on it. I can tell you that when Marilyn, Eddie’s sister, stayed with him in Boston for three weeks after her divorce last year, she said he’d sometimes go off somewhere and come back late at night and say he’d been at the
Globe
, and then she’d find out later from people she knew there that it wasn’t true. It was obvious to Marilyn that he had a secret part of his life that he felt he had to lie about to her. So it’s possible that
that
—whatever it is—had something to do with his disappearance. I cling to the hope, of course, that this ‘dark side’ thing—” she waggled some air quotes “—is where Eddie has gone off to voluntarily. And that he’s alive, and he’ll soon come back to us all, and I can tell him again how much I love him and adore him and take such terrific pride in him and miss him, and then get a good night’s sleep for the first time since this idiotic nightmare began.”

Mrs. Wenske was a pale, pretty, neatly turned out woman in her early sixties with a confident manner and an easy smile, though the smile kept fading. Her son’s name would make her light up for an instant, and then talk of his disappearance made her face droop. She had Eddie’s alert hazel eyes, but they were ringed with sleeplessness or fatigue.

“My impression of your son from reading
Notes from the Bush
,” I said, “was of a man who can’t help being open and honest. So I can see why you’re worried about any secret he might have been carrying around.”

Again, she tried to smile. “Exactly. The way he was with Marilyn was just so weirdly out of character. Marilyn tried to ask him about it a few times. I mean she didn’t want to snoop, so she just gave him the opportunity to open up, but he didn’t take her up on it. He’d just give off some kind of intense don’t-go-there vibe and then change the subject. So she chose to butt out. She was sensitive herself about painful personal situations, and she didn’t push Eddie. Now she says she wishes she had. Marilyn is as mystified and upset over Eddie’s disappearance as I am.”

“Where was Bryan during the time you’re talking about?”

“Eddie and Bryan were on-again, off-again for over two years, and while Marilyn was staying with Eddie, Bryan was off-again. So he didn’t know what was going on with Eddie then either. After Eddie disappeared, Marilyn asked him what he knew, and Bryan was as perplexed as the rest of us. And just as desperate to know what happened. He and Eddie had been talking about giving their relationship another chance—Bryan is a bright and attractive man, but a man with a good deal of baggage—and now he’s feeling a little guilty that he hadn’t noticed anything going on in Eddie’s life that could have led to a catastrophe of some kind.”

“If he and Bryan were not yet back together, maybe your son had another boyfriend he was seeing at night. Why couldn’t it have been as simple as that?”

“No, because Eddie always talked about who he was dating. He came out to me and to Herb, my late husband, when he was fourteen, as you know from
Notes
. And we were fine with his being gay—we’d guessed that was the way it was by the time Eddie was eight or nine. So if he’d been dating another man, he would have told Marilyn who it was and would have talked about the guy, and he almost certainly would have introduced him. That’s just the way Eddie always was after he came out. Totally direct and casual about being gay. No, this seemed to be something Eddie was…I don’t know…embarrassed about? Ashamed of? Frightened of? I just have this sinking feeling he was involved in something that was dangerous or even self-destructive, and he didn’t tell any of us about it because we’d worry about him, or even that we would judge him.”

We were at a small table in the rear of the Wolf Road Starbucks. Even at seven on a Saturday morning—Mrs. Wenske had told me she had a wedding reception to prepare for later in the morning—the place was thronged, with cell phones going off, laptops blinking, and dozens of fingers doing Peggy Fleming routines on iPad surfaces. A few of the customers were even talking to one another.

I said, “You mentioned lots of complications in Eddie’s life. What else was there besides his newspaper work and his books and his boyfriends and this…unknown thing, whatever it was?”

“I just meant that he had so many interests, so many enthusiasms. Eddie is one of the most curious people I’ve ever known. He got that from his father. Herb was passionate about his work as a prosecutor, but he also loved opera and fly fishing and food and the Yankees. Eddie had completely different interests, but he brought the same Herb-like focus and intensity to any current preoccupation, whether it was ice hockey or entomology or hiking or constitutional law or Lambert, Hendricks and Ross. He just dove headlong
into things.” She froze for an instant and then blinked. “Oh. I seem to keep talking about Eddie in the past tense. Oh hell.”

“It must be awful not knowing,” I said. “I’m going to talk about him as if he’s alive, which he may well be, and then hope I can help the truth emerge soon.”

“Okay. Good, Donald. You bet. I’ll try to do the same.”

“Susan, isn’t your son too young to know Lambert, Hendricks and Ross? You mean the be-bop vocal jazz trio of the fifties and sixties? My elderly Uncle Dick was a big fan of theirs.”

“The father of a high school classmate had some of their records, and Eddie heard one one time, and he came home and said he just heard the sound of the way he wanted to live his life. It was the sound of bounce and joy and controlled grief and complicated intensity. We got hold of a couple of old vinyl discs, and that sound filled the house for weeks. It drove us all a little batty. Marilyn prefers Barry Manilow, and she spent a lot of that time going around the house wearing earplugs.”

“I enjoy them both, but, no, those two musical worlds don’t mix.”

“When Eddie was in law school,” she said, brightening again, “he had a friend, Elaine Lambert, and another friend, Leo Ross. Eddie joked that he wanted them to set up a law firm after graduation and find another lawyer named Hendricks to join them in Lambert, Hendricks and Ross. They would harmonize their opening statements to juries and do their closing arguments in alternating scat vocals.”

“This is not the Harvard Law School of Alan Dershowitz, but I like the sound of it.”

“I don’t think Harvard thought of itself that way either, but Eddie did well in the actual Harvard. He was on the Law Review just ten years after Obama. Although he never imagined himself practicing law. He was a natural writer who wanted more than anything to make his career in journalism and books, but he loved both the nuts and bolts of the law and the big constitutional questions. And he shared his father’s sense of outrage over powerful people using the law or skirting it to hurt or cheat weaker members of society. It’s the main thing Herb and Eddie had in common, that indignation, and they both so respected each other that it was just devastating for Eddie when Herb died. It’ll be ten years next month. Stomach cancer, which was bad. Really, really bad.”

“I’m sorry.”

“My husband was only fifty-six. His own reaction to the diagnosis when he got it was stunned disbelief. As we all do until it happens to us, he thought dying so young was something that happened to other people. Interestingly, though, Eddie wasn’t surprised at all. He was grief-stricken and angry over the loss of his hero and pal, yes, but he wasn’t surprised. As a journalist, he’d seen so many examples of how life can be unfair. I suppose in your type of work, Donald, you see this, too—good people cut down in the prime of life.”

“My cases are mostly more mundane than life and death. People suspected of stealing from employers, industrial espionage, snooping on wayward spouses or politicians. But it’s true that in my career I’ve also seen good people die too young, violently or otherwise. And I lived through the AIDS plague years. Plenty of injustice there. So, no, unfairness never surprises me anymore.”

“One of the things I love about my business—which I started after Herb died—is seeing people marking happy milestones in their lives. These events—especially weddings—ritualize the way we try to make the most of the time we’ve got with one another while we’ve still got it. People at these rituals are saying, yes, death and loss are inevitable, but for now, isn’t life just so
lovely
?”

“It’s true. People are wonderfully wise and brave to delude themselves into thinking it’s all going to go on quite a while longer.”

“I’ve done a number of gay weddings since it was legalized in New York. I love it. I’m so proud to be part of history, and so are the brides and brides and grooms and grooms. These are among the most joyous events I’ve ever catered.” Again, she tried hard to smile. “I would love to have catered Eddie’s wedding. I would also love to have had the day off and just let somebody else worry about whether or not the cake was going to melt onto the floor of the delivery van or if the tables and chairs on the lawn might sink into the septic field. I
think
I would have insisted on running the show—I’m not sure I know how not to. But now all that seems unlikely, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know enough yet to have an opinion.”

“Well, okay. Maybe you don’t. And I’m trying hard to be delusional myself and avoid accepting the truth of what seems to have happened.”