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

Tate said, “The musical fruit.”

Skutnik guffawed. “The musical fruit! Like Ricky Martin! Oh, Floyd, you are so funn-eee.”

A well-groomed young man with a BlackBerry in his hand came over and looked nervously at Skutnik.

“I’m talking to this man,” Skutnik snapped. “What’s your problem?”

“Two of the boys aren’t here,” the young man said breathlessly. “Nobody knows where they are.”

“The tit-clamp boys? The fucking stars of the fucking show?” Skutnik was reddening and now breathing faster himself.

“They were supposed to be here at six. Charles, Blair, and Rusty are here, but Nando and Glen aren’t, and they’re not answering their cells, and the photographer is here, and the writer from Proud Man and the writer from Bugger. We’re all set to go with your and Rover’s roll-out pitch, but we can’t get started until all the nipple-clamp boys are here, and the hotel says we have to be out of here by eight forty-five or they’ll have to charge us, and Ogden says no way.”

Skutnik threw his drink in the kid’s face. “Who is fucking supposed to be chaperoning those stupid faggots!” he bellowed. A number of party-goers turned our way and gawked briefly, saw who it was doing the screaming, then turned carefully away.

The young man with the dripping face said, “Lonnie was coordinating transportation. But he said they didn’t show up at the store when they were supposed to, and he’s got somebody over there on an open phone, and Nando and Glen still haven’t shown, and Lonnie is totally going out of his mind.”

“Lonnie is gone!” Skutnik screeched. “Tell Lonnie to get the fuck out of here. I never want to lay eyes on Lonnie again. I hate that stupid fag! Just get him out of here!”

“But he…”

“Out! Out! Get him out!”

Now a middle-aged man in a seersucker jacket and a polka dot bow tie came over. “Hal, what the hell is happening?”

“Ogden, they’re not here! The fucking stars of the fucking show! Two of them are missing the fucking roll-out!”

“Well, that is totally inexcusable!”

“They are out of the show, that’s all there is to it. Those two are fired from the show!”

The man who seemed to be Ogden Winkleman, the New York office head who also enjoyed telling people to clean out their desks, said, “It’s a reality show, but you’re right, Hal. We can get actors to play them.”

“Actors? And fucking pay them?”

Rover Fye returned now, looking even jumpier than before, as if maybe he had gone off and ingested or smoked something to help get him through the crisis. “I will kill those two if I ever lay eyes on their sorry-ass faces ever again! I cannot believe they would do this to you, Hal! Don’t they understand who they are fucking over? It’s just in-fucking-credible!”

“All right, all right,” Winkleman said. “Here is what we are going to do. Jason, tell Lonnie we all want him gone. Gone. Got that?”

“Okay,” said the wet-faced man.

“We tell the writers and the photographer,” Winkleman said, “that Nando and Glen quit the sex toy store to go back to Transylvania where they came from or some crap like that, and their replacements are being auditioned. We restage their appearance at the roll-out next week in a studio situation with rear-screen projection or whatever. Have the photographer get some shots of the dais here and the bar and what have you.”

“That should work,” Skutnik said.

Tate said, “Sort of like the faked moon landing in ‘69.”

Skutnik turned toward Tate and said in a frigid voice, “I fired you once, Floyd. I can’t fire you again, but I can destroy you in this town! You understand that, don’t you?”

I could see that both Tate and Brandstein kind of wanted to laugh, but they knew that they didn’t dare, and they just stared at Skutnik awkwardly.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

I wasn’t sure if Skutnik’s slipping in that he knew I was from Albany was clumsy and inadvertent, or if it was intentional and he was sending me a signal: Don’t mess with me if you know what’s good for you. He seemed capable of sinister calculation, both tactical and strategic, but he was also volatile and maybe basically unbalanced. So it was hard to guess what was going on with him. I could see why people thought of him as being a weird combination of clueless, formidable, and highly combustible.

Brandstein had been wrong about the crackers and Cheez Whiz. The hors d’oeuvres at the Peninsula were excellent, and I ate my fill of curried chicken in puff pastry, thanked Brandstein and Tate for the introduction to the Hey Look Media upper strata, and then left them and drove toward Paul Delaney’s apartment in Santa Monica. I had Jane Ware’s key, and I was eager to locate any of the documents, notes and computer files Wenske, Delany, and Ware had gathered on HLM and its shady finances and other dubious practices.

On the way, I phoned Perry Dremel at HLM in New York and got him on his cell. I reached him at a bar in Chelsea, where he and other HLM employees were girding themselves for Ogden Winkleman’s return to New York on Friday.

“I met Winkleman,” I said. “He seems marginally more stable than Hal or Rover. But I guess it’s all relative.”

“You’re in L.A.? You’re actually visiting the Mother Church?”

I told Dremel about my meetings with HLM’s disaffected past and present employees and my encounter with the mercurial top management folks.

“Do they know who you are and that you’re investigating them?”

“Skutnik does. He made some menacing gestures and veiled threats. But he can’t fire me, which I’m sure is a source of great annoyance to him.”

“Has anybody out there said anything about Boo being missing? He still hasn’t turned up, and everybody is extremely worried. His cat watcher, Orville, called the police, but I don’t know if they’re doing anything at all. Orville told the cops that Boo was going up to see Bryan Kim, who was murdered, so you’d think they’d fucking do something.”

I told Dremel I’d check with the Boston police, and as soon as I hung up with him I phoned Marsden Davis. I told him that Boo Miller was still missing, and he said he’d talked to an NYPD friend about Miller, but these things have a way of falling through the cracks and he said he’d call the New York cop again.

I asked Davis, “Any developments in the Kim stabbing?”

“Nothing interesting. The ex-boyfriends are all in the clear, and so’s the housing authority rip-off artist, and the neighbor is too. I knew Elvis Gummer was lying about that freakin’ ginger cheesecake recipe, and when we re-interviewed him and mentioned that we might have to bring in a voice stress detection specialist—a lot of bullshit, as you know—he told us the truth.”

“Let me guess. It was actually a lemon pound cake recipe.”

“It was sex. They had an appointment at four o’clock for sex in Kim’s apartment. Gummer said he and Kim were actually fuck buddies. I never heard that term before.”

“It’s another gay thing. Like exchanging cake recipes.”

“Who’d’ve thought?”

“It’s an unemotional, uncomplicated practice that works for some people. No fuss, no muss. Just good funky aerobic exercise and blessed relief. It’s like masturbation, but with less sense of aloneness and for Catholics fewer vestiges of guilt.”

“Sounds good to me.”

“So Gummer showed up at Kim’s apartment at four o’clock for sex and instead found Kim stabbed to death. The poor guy.”

“Yeah, but I wish we hadn’t had to drag it out of him. I mean, I’m not fuckin’ Cardinal O’Malley.”

“Sometimes the police are Cardinal O’Malley. I don’t blame Gummer for holding back.”

“Anyway, I was gonna call you, Strachey. If you’re in California, maybe you can help me out.”