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

I told him about Bryan Kim and about Boo Miller.

Delaney stared at me.

Then he said, “I must have caused it.”

“Maybe. Inadvertently.”

“No, it can’t be coincidental.”

“Probably not.”

“Oh, God.”

“You had no way of knowing.”

“I told Bryan,” Delaney said, “that Eddie was out here somewhere digging into Hey Look Media and its drug-gang ties, and then he must have told this guy at HLM in New York. Somebody higher up in New York found out about it and alerted Skutnik or whoever it is in the company who talks to the cartels, and the people who killed Eddie killed Bryan and this Miller guy in New York for the same reasons. As punishment for challenging the gangs and to send a message.”

“That’s possible. The HLM management in New York does various kinds of surveillance of its employees, including monitoring phone calls, and could have known about your conversation with Bryan and then Bryan’s conversations with Boo Miller. Or maybe Miller carelessly mentioned it to somebody who’s a company rat.”

Delaney reddened behind his beard. “This is making me mad.”

“Me too.”

“I mean, it’s just too goddamned rotten. Is it possible that Skutnik and the Hey Look Media people are not only into money laundering for a drug cartel but are actually deep into the drug business themselves and its despicable culture of violence?”

“It looks that way.”

“Well, then, my God, somebody has to do something about it!”

I said, “That’s what I think.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

We needed allies, and if Delaney and I were correct in our belief that the salt sisters had been Wenske’s main sources for his plan to blow the lid off the assorted HLM criminal enterprises, they seemed like a good place to start looking for help.

On my phone, I said, “This is Stu Fulton. May I speak to Ms. Desault, please?”

“Which Ms. Desault? There are two.”

“Whichever one can sell me five hundred thousand board feet of pine.”

“You can speak to Martine.”

On came a polka band. I tried to polka on the table with the fingers of my right hand, and I did this about as deftly as I could have with my legs and feet.

“Mr. Fulton?”

“Ms. Desault?”

“Yes, how are you?”

“I’m not actually Fulton, I’m Don Strachey, a private investigator working out of Albany, New York, Eddie Wenske’s home town. I know you and your sister were among the primary sources for Wenske’s investigation into criminal practices at Hey Look Media. All this reeking garbage is going to come out, and I was hoping you’d want to get out in front of the legal and moral collapse of HLM by helping me and a colleague out and telling us what you know. Can we get together? I’m here in Mount Shasta for a couple of days. More, if that’s what’s needed.”

A long silence.

“I know,” I said, “that you broke off contact with Wenske several weeks ago. I assume that was because somebody tipped you off that higher-ups at HLM had figured out that Wenske was up here and what he was doing. And perhaps you were frightened, and you must have been even more frightened when you found out that Wenske had been killed. You are aware of that, aren’t you?”

Another silence, and then the line went dead.

“Hell.”

“She hung up?” Delaney said.

“Yeah. She never said a word after how-do.”

It was Saturday morning, and we were in Delaney’s room at the Pine Cone Inn. We had spent the previous evening looking through files on Wenske’s computer, which Delaney had retrieved from Wenske’s room and had the password for. Paper documents had been stashed in Delaney’s storage bin in the basement of his apartment building, not in the apartment itself where I had looked.

The data on the computer files was fascinating stuff that Delaney and I only half understood. It involved bank transfers in and out of multiple corporations in Curacao, Panama, Liberia, and the U.S. Delaney had seen much of this data previously along with Jane Ware, and he explained to me how HLM moved cash around. One trick was to do television production deals for budgeted amounts—a million, two million, three million dollars—and promise investors X amount of return once these programs or films were distributed or shown on HLM TV. The films were then made for a fraction of the amount budgeted, with the remainder flowing into dummy offshore corporations. Investors were repaid Ponzi-like from cash flowing in from new investors for newer projects that worked the same way. It was easy to see how this was both illegal and not going to work in the long run.

The Desault sisters were up to their necks in this funny business and outright fraud, so a question Delaney and I both had was this: Why had they blabbed only to Wenske? If they had wanted to bring Hal Skutnik down, why had they not gone directly to the state prosecutors? And if all the law enforcement agencies in Siskiyou County were somehow in the pockets of Maurice Skutnik Enterprises or HLM—and that seemed improbable—why couldn’t the salt sisters have gone to the feds? Presumably the DEA had a considerable presence in this region famous for its fine kush. Delaney had befriended a state narc who apparently was both competent and clean. Joe Willard had told Delaney that undercover agents had infiltrated at least some of the local growing operations and were methodically gathering evidence for eventual busts.

Delaney and I had breakfast at Gussie’s, down the road from the Pine Cone Inn. Walking back to the motel, we were strategizing as to how we might approach the Desault sisters again when what looked like the red Ford pick-up I’d seen at the Skutnik house pulled alongside us and a man in the passenger seat rolled down his window.

“Don Strachey?”

“Yeah.”

“Just keep walking.”

“Okay.”

“You stayin’ at the Pine Cone?”

“Yep.”

“See you there. You wanna hop in the back of the truck?”

“No thanks.”

The truck pulled on up ahead of us and into the Pine Cone parking area.

The man who spoke to me looked big enough to have carried Delaney and me not just in his truck bed but maybe in his back pocket. He wore a dirty blue sweatshirt and had a dirty brown beard that extended down toward his lap somewhere. The driver of the pick-up was darker and clean-shaven, and smaller but still big enough.

Delaney said, “Should I dial 911?”

“No, let’s meet these guys in the breakfast room at the motel and see who they are. It’ll be okay, I think.”

When we went in, some of the motel patrons were sipping their free not-fresh-squeezed OJ and nibbling at their mini cinnamon buns. We weren’t going to have much privacy here, and the bigger of the two men from the truck suggested we sit out in a gazebo at the edge of the parking area. The structure had a nice view of Mount Shasta, and people coming and going along Mount Shasta Boulevard had an unobstructed view of us. So I said that would be fine.

“You should leave town,” the big man said as soon as we were seated. “Nobody wants to talk to you. Martine don’t want to talk to you, and Danielle don’t want to talk to you.”

“How come? They talked to Eddie Wenske. I’m representing Wenske’s family.”

“Something happened to that guy. You know about that?”

“I heard about it. Somebody is going to be held responsible for Wenske’s death.”

The guy shook his head in disbelief. “You sure are full of shit, Strachey.”

The big guy’s companion sat giving me the fish eye, and Delaney was glowering at both of them.

“Ms. Desault and Ms. Desault are missing the point,” I said. “I don’t think they had anything to do with Wenske’s being murdered. I know they were helping him out in what he was working on, and now my friend and I here are picking up where Wenske left off. Paul here is a writer and I’m an investigator working for Wenske’s mother.”