Table of Contents
THE LAST THING I SAW
blurb
copyright
quote
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Epilogue
About the Author
Trademarks Acknowledgment
MLR PRESS AUTHORS
GLBT RESOURCES
THE LAST THING I SAW
A Donald Strachey Mystery
RICHARD STEVENSON
mlrpress
www.mlrpress.com
Eddie Wenske has gone missing. A popular investigative reporter renowned for both his gay-coming-out memoir and a frightening book on drug cartels, Wenske vanishes while investigating a gay media conglomerate with a controversial owner and dodgy business practices. Albany PI Don Strachey’s perilous search for Wenske takes him to Boston and to New York City, and finally to California and a media world that’s as deadly as it is unglamorous. In The Last Thing I Saw, Strachey fends off hired killers, but can he survive Hey Look Media?
“Entertaining and delectably complex.”
The Washington Post on Red White Black and Blue, winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Mystery of 2011
“As a page-turner, it couldn’t be better.”
EDGE New England on Red White Black and Blue
“As always with the Strachey novels, the murder and mayhem take a back seat to the keen social criticism and defiant wit of our detective.”
Maureen Corrigan of NPR, naming Death Vows one of the top five mysteries of 2008
“As much travel memoir as mystery, this tenth in a series spanning three decades is supremely satisfying as both.”
Bookmarks on The 38 Million Dollar Smile
“Lively, skillful…highly recommended.”
The New York Times on On the Other Hand, Death
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright 2012 by Richard Stevenson
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Published by
MLR Press, LLC
3052 Gaines Waterport Rd.
Albion, NY 14411
Visit ManLoveRomance Press, LLC on the Internet:
www.mlrpress.com
Cover Art by Deana Jamroz
Editing by Kris Jacen
Print format ISBN# 978-1-60820-706-0
ebook format ISBN#978-1-60820-707-2
Issued 2012
This book is licensed to the original purchaser only. Duplication or distribution via any means is illegal and a violation of International Copyright Law, subject to criminal prosecution and upon conviction, fines and/or imprisonment. This eBook cannot be legally loaned or given to others. No part of this eBook can be shared or reproduced without the express permission of the publisher.
“Television is a medium because anything well done is rare.”
Fred Allen, in 1950
CHAPTER ONE
“I told him not to write that book. If Eddie had listened to me and not written that stupid marijuana book and gotten mixed up with those ridiculous criminals, I’m sure he’d be alive today. We wouldn’t even be having this conversation, Donald. In fact, Eddie should never have left the Globe, is what he shouldn’t have done. Kept his newspaper job in Boston and written some nausea-inducing child-molester-priest book, even if a couple of other ones were already out there. But, no, he said, oh no, he just had to do that pot book. It was something about, when he was in college Eddie was a pothead himself and he thought it was so totally innocent. And then he found out what all was behind the mellowness, on up the line and at the higher levels—the sociopaths and violent people and what have you. At least I think that’s what was going on. How would I really know, he never really explained it to me, I’m only his goddamn agent!”
I said, “What makes you think Eddie is dead, Marva? His mother in Albany just described him as missing. Uncharacteristically out of touch for a couple of months, and that’s why she hired me.”
“Have you read the book?”
“No.”
“Read it. Then you’ll know that they killed him.”
“They?”
“Read the book. Here. It’s what they do to people who cross them.”
Marva Beers heaved herself up out of her office chair, stretched up, and took down a trade paperback book from one of the upper shelves next to her desk. She teetered and then caught herself, a good one-eighty in a pretty Mayan huapili, a heap of fluffy gray hair flopping in synch with her bosoms. She smelled faintly of hyacinth with a distant undertone of chardonnay. Behind her was an open window looking down on Hudson Street, and a friendly warm breeze, unusual for late March in New York, blew in and rattled the papers on the literary agent’s desk.
I recognized most of the authors’ names on the spines of the other titles on the shelves, all books, I assumed, by Beers’s other clients. Most were well known gay-lit figures, like the now missing Edward Wenske, whose 1995 memoir of coming out in the eighth grade in the not very enlightened Albany suburb of East Greenbush had won awards and racked up sales at the tail end of the post-Stonewall gay publishing boom. The book Beers handed me was not of that type. Against a marijuana leaf with blood dripping down it was the title Weed Wars: the Blood and Gore Behind America’s Nice Habit.
“Well, did you at least read Eddie’s memoir?” Beers asked me. “I thought somebody in your line of work would have done a little more homework before showing up here and taking up my time.”
“I read Notes from the Bush when it came out. Nearly everybody in gay Albany and literary straight Albany has read it. It’s wonderful.”
“It’s a classic, and one of the sweetest books by a highly intelligent person I’ve ever read, which is surprising what with people as brainy as Eddie sometimes being not all that sweet. I received the manuscript on a Friday—a friend at the Albany Times Union told me I had to look at it—and I read it over the weekend. I cried and I laughed and I cried. On Monday I sent it to six editors and said I was setting up an auction for the following week. I had five decent bids come in, and the editor who never bothered to bid was fired around the time the book came out. I doubt if there’s a connection, but there should have been. Notes is still in print, and I’ve got over four K in royalties for Eddie, which I wish I knew what the hell to do with. Estelle, my bookkeeper, keeps ragging me, like that’s more important, her accounts being tidy, than Eddie probably shoved through a wood chipper on Cape Cod somewhere and dumped in a swamp.”