The Last Thing I Saw Page 2

  “Timothy Callahan, my beau, and I tuned in a few times. Somebody told us a few of these shows were a guilty pleasure. But whenever we looked, we experienced neither guilt nor pleasure, and we quit watching.”

  “Then,” Beers said, “after his approaches to gay magazines didn’t pan out, Eddie thought maybe he could do a piece on this sorry state of affairs in gay America for The New York Times magazine. He thought it was that important as a social phenomenon. He talked to an editor at The Times who’s gay, and this gal, Gerri Anastos—I’ve known her for years—was interested. The more Eddie dug, though, the more he began to think he had the material for a big book on the subject. His idea was, he’d do the Times piece and live off that and the proceeds from his modest Globe buy-out while he finished what he saw as a major expose of the gay mediocrities and opportunists and scammers who’ve moved in in the wake of gay liberation.”

  I said, “This sounds interesting. It’s a book I’d read. But you said you thought it would be boring. How come?”

  “No, you wouldn’t be bored, and neither would I, and neither would several hundred other people. But the larger market? Who really cares about a specifically gay culture anymore? And maybe the market is right. Except in Gum Stump, P-A, we’re so assimilated now that we may not need our own magazines and TV channels. We’re on the sitcoms and Showtime and HBO and in the mainstream press. Every time you turn on an awards show, the winners are all up on the stage waving their trophies and tongue-kissing their same-sex boyfriends and girlfriends in America’s face while America shrugs or says oh isn’t that nice, sissies and dykes can be so adorable. And the mainstream gay stuff is generally so superior to the gay-channel gay stuff that what’s the point, really, in having our own separate news and entertainment venues?”

  “Did Wenske have a contract for the gay media book?”

  “A couple of university presses said they’d look at it. I told him he’d better be prepared to take another newspaper job, because this book was going to bring in pretty close to zilch in the way of an advance. I’ve got Mister New Rochelle Root Canal, but Eddie never had the good sense to marry and divorce a dentist. Which of course in gay old Massachusetts he could easily have done.”

  “It sounds as if he was as emotionally wrapped up in this project as he’d been with the pot book.”

  “Maybe even more so,” Beers said. “He was outraged that gay people could set up a business aimed at gay customers and then fuck over the gay people they’d hired to produce what they were selling. It seemed to Eddie like a betrayal of the cause of gay social progress. He seemed to expect gay tycoons to be more honest and more humane than straight tycoons. That struck me as naïve, and still does, but this innocence is one of the things I find so appealing about Eddie. I may sound like a cynic, but in current-day conglomerate-dominated publishing I’ve seen plenty to be cynical about. My dear, Alfred and Blanche Knopf are looonnngg in their graves, believe me.”

  “Straight or gay, I think we can consider all con artists objectionable.”

  “In his pitch to The Times, Eddie compared the Hey Look owners to the black poverty pimps who showed up in the wake of the civil rights movement. First it’s the selfless visionaries who push history ahead in some fine way, and then the exploiters and hustlers move in. It happened in the sixties with black civil rights, and it happened more recently with gay liberation. Of course this all struck a chord with Eddie, because he saw gay social progress as his movement. He took what had happened to the mistreated filmmakers personally.”

  Was Beers missing something here? I said, “If Wenske was researching the gay media book when he vanished, why couldn’t his disappearance have had something to do with that instead of the marijuana book?”

  Beers gave me her boy-is-this-bozo-dumb look and reached for another Necco wafer. “Just read the goddamn weed book, will you, please?”

  CHAPTER TWO

  “My thinking when I left the city,” I told Timmy, “was that Wenske’s disappearance might have had something to do with the book he was working on at the time, this gay media book. The controversial marijuana book was behind him by then, and according to Marva Beers he was considerably worked up over all the jerks and sociopaths he’d been hearing about in gay TV and magazines. But then I read Weed Wars on the train, and I saw why Beers was sure of a connection between the pot book and his going missing. You should read it. We think of pot as so innocuous, and of course the stuff itself is—sweet and companionable and harmless when not over-indulged-in. But the business of producing and marketing weed is not so mellow. It’s cut-throat, and I mean in the literal sense. Anybody who cheats or steals or screws up or even just competes too assertively can end up in a shallow grave in the woods somewhere. Knowing this, I don’t think I’ll ever toke again so casually.”

  “You hardly ever do, anyway,” Timmy said. “Your primary drug of choice has been Sam Adams almost as long as I’ve known you. Sam Adams and green curry.”

  “And both are especially satisfying tonight after the micro-waved hot dog I had for lunch on AMTRAK.”

  We were at the Thai place on Lark Street, after Timmy had walked over from Assemblyman Lipshutz’s office at the end of his work day and I’d taken a cab from the train station in Rensselaer back into Albany.

  “You can actually get a little bit of a high from a strong curry,” Timmy said. “It’s the chili peppers.”

  “So when you were in the Peace Corps, were the Indians you worked with all chillin’ and groovy? The ones in your poultry development project—were those farmers constantly getting the munchies and eating all the eggs?”

  “You don’t get that kind of a high from curry. Donald, when you order your curry Thai-spicy instead of farang-spicy, don’t you get a little buzz?”

  “No, just a little sweaty.”

  “Actually, I can see it happening now. Something is dripping off the end of your nose. Unless after your long, tiring day that’s beer that you carelessly sucked up into the wrong hole in your face.”

  I used my napkin and said, “It really is an eye-opener, Wenske’s book. The wars in Weed Wars is exactly the right word. We often read about the drug violence in Mexico, but we don’t really hear much about the U.S. gangs and their ruthlessness with their own people and the deadly turf battles. It’s like Prohibition and the criminal life in the twenties, except worse, because of the technology—cell phones and tracking devices and the easy access to automatic weapons. Nobody knows exactly how big it is. Estimates on the reefer trade in the U.S. range from ten billion to a hundred and thirteen billion dollars a year. Law enforcement tends to exaggerate the size of it to keep their own multibillion-dollar industry prosperous, but there’s no doubt that it’s gargantuan.”

  Timmy helped himself to more rice and a spoonful of the robust curry. “I believe what you’re telling me,” he said, “and I will read this book that seems to have made such an impression on you. But it’s hard to think of what’s-his-name, that old blacksmith in Half Moon who sells pot to the smokers we know, as being part of a monstrous criminal enterprise. He’s just so unthreatening and…laid-back.”

  “The lowest-level local retailers often are. It’s the next level up where it gets dicey. It’s the mules and the wholesalers who take on the greatest risks, and they tend to be a hard-bitten bunch. And the sums of money at play are so huge that a lot of the people involved will do just about anything to hold on to their market share. Torture, dismemberment, cow-pasture executions—they’re not all that rare. In the weed business, you can’t just hire a lobbying firm and buy off a few elected officials with campaign donations to protect your interests.”

  “Not yet, anyway.”

  “How long will it be until we get to that point? Twenty years?”

  “Maybe. Though the pressure to legalize pot and regulate sales and tax the heck out of it like alcohol and tobacco will keep looking better and better at budgeting time in the Legislature. It’s really a question of who’ll have the courage to prop
ose it first—and then find out to his or her relief and amazement that the electorate thinks, well, yes, okay, we guess it’ll be all right with us.”

  “It’ll be like the end of Prohibition when relative calm returned to the urban landscape and the bootleggers all went straight and became semi-respectable burghers.”

  “And,” Timmy said, “they could start planning for their sons to become president of the United States.”

  “Was Nixon’s mother a rum runner? I thought she was a Quaker.”

  “You know who I mean. I wonder who’ll become the Joseph P. Kennedy of weed kingpins with an eye on the White House?”

  “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 noti
ced 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.”