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

“Gerri, dear! You’re such a true-blue friend to do this. I would have told me I’m busy getting the newspaper of record out before it goes bankrupt and I’ll try to fit me in next year sometime.”

Anastos hugged Beers and offered me her hand. “No trouble at all. If it has to do with Eddie, I’ll help in any way I can. How’s Linda, Marva? How’s her new hip?”

“Oh, fabulous, fabulous. She’s even thinking of resuming her career with River Dance.”

Anastos caught my look. “She’s kidding, Donald. Marva’s beloved teaches medieval European history at NYU.”

I said, “You never know. Didn’t Eddie Wenske have a dancer boyfriend at one time? A Boston friend of his mentioned that.”

“Could be,” Anastos said, “but I doubt if the guy was sixty-three and had a kryptonite hip.”

The waitress came back with our drinks. Anastos asked for a whiskey sour, and we ordered some eggplant and lamb patty appetizers.

“My Greek ancestors would roll over in their graves if they knew I was eating in here,” Anastos said. “But I don’t do this just to get a rise out of them. I happen to like the food.”

“I was in central Turkey one time,” Beers said, “and the tour guide announced, ‘And now vee vill go to za Greek village.’ When we got there, the Byzantine church was all boarded up, and I said, ‘Hey, where are all the Greeks?’ She waved that away, and said, ‘Oh, zere was an exchange of populations!’”

“Yeah, both sides running for their lives. My relatives might have been among them,” Anastos said. “But that was then and this is Ninth Avenue. Thank God.”

“Or Allah,” Beers said.

“I brought Eddie in here one time,” Anastos said. “He loved it. Boston—you know, it’s not renowned for its culinary variety.”

Beers snorted. “Their idea of ethnic food is cabbage. I wouldn’t set foot in the place.”

I asked Anastos when she last spoke with Wenske.

“Just before Christmas we talked on the phone. He’d been to L.A. and was back in Boston, and I was looking for an update on the gay-media piece and when I might get a look at something. You know, I don’t remember the conversation all that clearly. I mean, I had no idea it would be the last time I spoke with him. He seemed fine at the time. He was as excited about the project as he’d been when he first pitched it. And he was just as disgusted, I might add. Eddie might be a little more idealistic about gay businesses than a firm grip on reality calls for. I mean, Karl Marx never declared, ‘We must overthrow all the rotten capitalists except for those nice gay boys.’”

I asked Anastos if Wenske’s research concentrated on Hey Look Media or if there were other avenues that he mentioned.

“It was mainly HLM, he said, because they had bought up practically everything—television, magazines, a book publisher, online venues. He said the company called it cross-platforming. That is, sharing staff and overhead and promoting all of the company’s products in each of the company’s several venues. Each outlet was a cross-platform gay-media portal, so-called. Or, as one of Eddie’s embittered sources out there liked to refer to it, a cross-platform gay media cornhole.”

“He had multiple sources at Hey Look in L.A.?”

“He’d developed quite a few apparently. Most were former employees of the company who had been fired or quit under contentious circumstances. And there were two sources in particular, he said, who were giving him documents and providing the most incriminating material. They were people still working deep inside the company, was my impression. People with access to the most sensitive stuff. Eddie said it was a real bonanza, and his biggest problem was going to be picking and choosing what to concentrate on in the piece for me. The rest of it he’d use later when he wrote the gay-media book.”

“The book that wasn’t going to make any of us rich,” Beers said. “But that Eddie had to write to save gay America from homo Mammon.”

“Marva, I actually share his outrage,” Anastos said. “It’s one thing for gay men—and yes, it is men we’re talking about here—it’s one thing for a couple of gay men to control, say, the recreational vacuum penis pump industry. But when there’s a near monopoly on gay news and arts and entertainment, that has to be bad for the country’s gay social health.”

Beers was looking queasy. “What’s a recreational vacuum penis pump?”

“Donald, maybe you can explain that to my old friend here. I’ll just step outside.”

Beers said, “Never mind, dear.”

I said, “Gerri, you said these main sources of Wenske’s were providing material that was…the word you used was incriminating. Literally incriminating?”

“That was my impression.”

“Was it financial or other types of criminal activity?”

“I think at least partly financial. I know a friend of Eddie’s in L.A. had put Eddie in touch with a former L.A. Times financial writer to gather background material. Eddie mentioned that it was helpful that he’d gone to law school but an apprenticeship on Wall Street might have been even more helpful.”

“Was the L.A. Times friend a guy named Paul Delaney?”

“That rings a bell.”

“He’d been Eddie’s first editor at The Boston Globe and was a hero of his.”

“That’s the guy, I think.”

“Your conversation with Wenske was just before Christmas?”

“Yes, I know he said Bryan, his on-again-off-again boyfriend, was spending Christmas with his parents in Seattle, and Eddie was going to Albany to be with his mom for a few days. Then he said he’d be back in Boston to go over the material he had and start organizing it. He planned on spending New Year’s with Bryan, and I assume he did. You could ask Bryan about that.”

Beers stiffened. “Oh.”

“There’s bad news about Bryan,” I said.

“Gerri, it was in the Times. When I left you a message, I didn’t mention it because I thought you’d seen it.”

“Why? What happened?”

I said, “Bryan was stabbed to death in his Boston apartment on Saturday a few hours before I was to have met him for dinner.”

Anastos took her glasses off and stared at Beers. “That’s awful. Oh God. Oh no.”

“I’m sorry to say it’s true.”

“I mean—if you care deeply about Eddie and about finding him alive and well somehow—this is not what you want to hear.”

I said no, it wasn’t. I described to Anastos the circumstances of Kim’s murder and said the Boston police were sure to bring all kinds of resources to bear in this case involving a well-known local television personage.

She said, “This is a total mind-fuck. I mean, what do you think is going on here?”

“I don’t know, but there’s a Hey Look Media guy from their New York office who went up to Boston on Saturday to see Kim—this is the day he was killed—and maybe to see me. And now he might be missing too. So, yeah, there does seem to be something…going on.”

Anastos looked around for her drink, which hadn’t arrived yet. “I don’t know what to think. I have to say, I began to be afraid that the drug cartels had gotten Eddie. Their history of ruthlessness is obvious. But—what? A homicidal TV cable channel that hardly anybody watches? That’s just totally weird. I know—HLM is a lot more than that. But still. I’m perplexed.”

Now the waitress arrived with the whiskey sour, and Anastos went for it.

I said, “I have to ask both of you something that might sound odd, but here goes. Both Wenske’s mother and his sister told me they think Eddie had some kind of secret life, was the way they put it. Or even some dark side, so-called. Any idea what they might have been talking about?”

They both gave me a look.

“That seems off,” Anastos said.

“I’m dubious,” Beers said. “It sounds totally nuts.”

“What gave them that idea?” Anastos asked.

“Sometimes Eddie went out late at night in Boston and then lied to his sister about where he’d been. She lived with him for a while when she was going through a divorce.”