The Last Thing I Saw - Stevenson Richard (книги без регистрации .txt) 📗

I was still in my hotel room, with a room service muffin and juice and coffee, and I had just finished reading the Monday Globe story on the Kim murder. The paper had no new information on the murder or any possible suspects or motive, just a lot of sad-making information on Kim’s educational and professional background and his family history. Kim’s prominence in the Boston gay community was also gone over again, though no mention was made of Eddie Wenske.

I said, “Aren’t those EZ Pass records supposed to be confidential? It sounds as if all the Big-Brother-is-tracing-your-movements fears some people had about that program have been realized.”

Davis laughed lightly. “Yeah, yeah. So when were you in there? You said you had never met Kim before. So either you lied to me about that—always a bad idea—and you had visited Kim in his nice pad on Tremont Street on some previous occasion. Or—now please listen carefully to this one—you mooched your way in there yesterday morning with Elvis Gummer’s key. So, which is it, Strachey? Think before you answer.”

“How come you didn’t confiscate Gummer’s key when you first interviewed him, anyway?”

“An oversight. I have since taken it away from Gummer, who won’t be needing it. The key is here on my desk.”

“So then I suppose Gummer told you he lent it to me. If you knew that, why are you playing games?”

“Games? Giving you every opportunity to act like the honest man you apparently are not is not playing games. Playing games is conducting your own investigation into a matter the Boston Police Department is handling professionally. Playing games is withholding information relevant to a police investigation. Playing games is fucking me over in a manner that people here in Boston know is a terrible way of trying to get anything done in this city or even of living in it with any degree of safety and comfort. That’s how I define playing games, and my definition is the one you had better consider going with here, if you get my drift.”

I got his drift. “Lieutenant, you said I was withholding information relevant to your investigation. What information are you referring to?”

“Whatever you found in Kim’s apartment of importance. What did you find?”

“Probably nothing you didn’t find. How about the cheesecake recipe?”

“You found it?”

“No. It was the ginger cheesecake recipe that didn’t bark. The killer might have taken it, but I doubt it.”

“I plan on talking to Elvis Gummer about that. He has no fingerprints on record, but he has agreed to be printed. He seems nervous, but I’m not inclined to consider him a suspect.”

“Same here. Not a murder suspect anyway. What other prints have you ID-ed?”

“Just building personnel. And both of them have alibis. I’m sure Eddie Wenske’s prints are among those our techies picked up, but his prints are not on record, him not having served his country in the manner you and I went ahead and did.”

“What about Channel Six? Any leads there? Stories Kim was working on? People he made mad?”

“There’s a slew of people Kim pissed off, but most of them are city councilmen and municipal employees and pizzeria owners with dirty kitchens. Detective Fuller and a couple of other officers are checking them out. Another thing about Kim that interests me is, he’s had a lot of boyfriends, it turns out, and some of them don’t like him anymore. Folks at Channel Nine in Providence, where Kim used to work, say he has a history of breaking up with boyfriends in a kind of nasty way. The station used to get calls sometimes from gay guys calling Bryan an asshole and worse names, and one guy saying, tell Bryan I want my Elton John CDs back and weird crap like that.”

I said, “Did Gummer tell you about the third diner?”

“The what?”

“I guess he didn’t. He mentioned it to me in passing. I was to meet Kim at the Westin at seven, but Gummer said Kim told him that someone else was coming to Kim’s apartment at six to accompany him to the dinner meeting. I knew nothing about this. I don’t know who the diner was or what became of him. Was he scared off, or what? It would be useful to know, I think.”

“Or,” Davis said, “did this person know that Kim was going to be killed and stayed away? Or did he arrive early, and was let in, and stabbed Kim himself?”

“Or was this man also killed? Were there any other murders in Boston yesterday?”

Davis was quiet for a moment. “No. None reported. But maybe the body was disposed of, and so far no one has reported anybody missing. That’s always a possibility.”

“This man, whoever he was,” I said, “may have been going to talk to me about Eddie Wenske’s disappearance. Why else would Kim have invited him to the dinner meeting with me? So maybe he’s somehow knowledgeable of, or involved in, the Wenske situation.”

“We don’t know,” Davis said, “what has become of Wenske, or even if he’s dead or alive. Maybe Wenske is alive, and he was going to be your third dinner companion. Or maybe he’s alive and he came back from wherever he was and he killed Kim.”

“Yeah, well. Not that, I don’t think.”

“They had their ups and downs, everybody says. Is there any violence in Wenske’s history?”

“No. Everybody says he’s a sweetheart of a guy. You’re way off on that one.”

“Probably. Though your line of work, Strachey, is enough like mine for you to know that even the nicest people sometimes have a dark side. Know what I mean?”

CHAPTER NINE

The Boston city narc I should talk to about Eddie Wenske, Davis told me, was a detective named Lewis Kelsey. He was out of the office for the day, but I made an appointment for Tuesday morning. He was supposedly up to speed on both the Wenske missing-person case and any possible link between Wenske’s disappearance and Weed Wars, as well as Wenske’s Globe reporting on the pot wholesalers.

Meanwhile, the media-book question was wide open—I knew literally nothing about the project Wenske was deep into when he vanished—so I decided to rectify my ignorance. I took a cab to Logan airport, making some calls on the way, and then rode the Delta Shuttle to LaGuardia. The flight was fast and smooth, and I was in midtown Manhattan by eleven.

Luke Pearlman had a cubby hole of an office on the seventh floor at 30 Rock, no windows, just air freshener and a lot of electronics. Pearlman was small and sprightly, with sunken dark eyes and more hair on the back of his hands than on his head, and he talked a mile a minute.

“Oh, God, I was stunned when I heard about Bryan Kim. I mean, fuck, what is going on here? I mean, first Bryan’s boyfriend disappears, and now Bryan is fucking murdered? This is just fucking incredible. So, tell me, tell me everything you know about any of this. I mean, we’d even do something on it, except of course there’s no New York angle. Or is there? Bryan thought Eddie Wenske’s disappearance might’ve had something to do with the gay-media book Wenske was working on, and I know Bryan was talking to people at Hey Look Media, which everybody in gay New York knows is a viper’s nest of pettiness and spite and miserliness and incompetence and puttin’ on airs. So, what do you think—do you think they’re all connected? Wenske disappearing and Bryan getting stabbed to death? It’s all just—God, I don’t know what to make of any of it. So, for chrissakes, please fill me in.”

I gave Pearlman an honest if abbreviated account of the case as I knew it: my being hired by Susan Wenske to find out what happened to her missing son; my un-kept dinner date with Bryan Kim; Kim’s stabbing death; the mysterious third diner. I speculated about possible links to Wenske’s pot book and also to the gay-media book Wenske was researching when he vanished.