“If Skutnik has something on Martine and Danielle, surely they must have plenty on him. It sounds like a prosecutor’s dream if there’s actually anything illegal going on.”

“Apparently Hal has an international law firm that keeps the company barely honest. Most of the lawyers are actually in Curacao. That’s where Hal keeps his money, people in L.A. say, and where he has a house that he lives in when he’s not at his place in Bel Air or his lodge up north in the mountains. I know, I know—some people like to say Hal is a kind of gay Bernie Madoff. And that the whole company is a big, huge, incredible Ponzi scheme that can’t last. But people who believe that are forgetting that the tax laws are written by friends of people like Hal to make what Hal does legal. Hal doesn’t need to be a crook to get rich at the expense of the gay men and women of America. He only has to be an asshole, and at that I’d have to say he is very, very good.”

I took all this in. “It sounds,” I said, “as if Eddie Wenske had his work cut out for him sorting this hideous mess out. The idea of one lone writer grasping the workings of HL Media’s complex corporate machinery—it just seems overwhelming.”

“That would depend,” Dremel said, “on who Wenske might have found who would open up to him and show him the family jewels. Hal and Ogden are vile people who are loathed by just about every human being they come into contact with, and there must be somebody somewhere who knows things and was or is ready to unburden himself or herself. Maybe Wenske found that person. Do you know if he spent any time in L.A. working on this?”

I said no, I didn’t. But I’d find out, I told Dremel, and then see where that led me.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I said to Timmy, “I think I’m in something over my head. I’m just this one-man schlemiel of a private eye. What’s really needed here is the FBI or the entire Justice Department or the Army of the Potomac or the Mossad or some combination of all of the above. It’s possible something very big is very wrong here, but I have no clue as to what it might be, and I can imagine myself flailing ridiculously for days or weeks or even months at Susan Wenske’s expense.”

“Where are you? In Boston?”

“I was until this morning.” I recapped my New York visit and said I had set up a dinner meeting with Marva Beers and the New York Times editor Eddie Wenske had pitched his gay-media story to. “I’ll be back in Boston late tonight, and tomorrow I’m seeing a narc who knows Wenske’s story—his pot reporting and his disappearance. This whole thing has so many angles to it, I almost wish I hadn’t blown off trigonometry.”

“Almost but not quite.”

“There’s the Weed Wars situation, and there’s the gay-media research into a company that’s a combination of Pee-wee’s Playhouse, No Exit, and the Soviet Politburo under Leonid Brezhnev. Then there’s this so-called dark side stuff that Wenske was supposedly into, though I can find no trace of that, and his best friend at The Boston Globe simply doesn’t believe it. I know basically nothing at this point except that Eddie Wenske is as missing as ever and Bryan Kim was stabbed to death in his home not long before he was to have had dinner with me on Saturday. That is, with me and with another person who has yet to be identified. Oh. One other thing. The third diner may well have been a guy from Hey Look Media named Boo Miller who lives in New York and went to Boston on Saturday, and now he’s disappeared too.”

“His name is Boo?”

“Real name Buris. B-U-R-I-S. He had been blabbing to Wenske HLM’s dirty secrets, and there are a lot of those. It’s mostly repugnant personality stuff about how obnoxious the owners are. There are rumors of illegality, but one HLM wage slave says the owners don’t need to be crooks since being cheap and mean and cynical is good enough for them. But Kim supposedly had some new brainstorm, or maybe actual information, about Wenske’s disappearance, and some connection it had to HLM, and Miller had flown up to Boston to talk to Kim about it. To Kim, and maybe to me.”

“Donald, it sounds to me as if you know a lot more than you think you know. And that, like you said, you’re…I don’t want to say in over your head. But up to your waist in something that’s actually quite dangerous. I mean, dangerous for you. It sounds as if people are being killed or made to disappear on account of knowledge they had or have. If you acquire knowledge, then you’ll be…well…you know.”

“I know. I’ve thought about that.”

“So please don’t just say, ‘Yeah, yeah, but trouble is my business.’ Be careful, or come home. Or something.”

“Don’t worry, I will.”

“Which one?”

“I’ll let you know. I’ll be careful for sure.”

“Good.”

“But I may have to go to L.A.”

Audible breathing, an indication of an increased heart rate. “Why?”

“That’s where the Hey Look Media numero uno assholes are. Somebody out there may know something about Wenske’s disappearance—if, that is, the disappearance had to do with the gay-media connection and not the pot connection. It’s all still frustratingly confusing.”

“I can see that I’ll never dissuade you from going out there. You’re already practicing your Spanish.”

“I’ll come home first, maybe late tomorrow or Wednesday.”

“I’ll look forward to it.”

He told me some legislative and Albany gossip. But he could tell I was not paying attention, so he gave up and said so-long.

§ § §

I had called Marva Beers and planned to meet her for an early supper at a Turkish place on Ninth Avenue in the forties. It wasn’t far from the Times’ new building, and she said she’d left a message and thought she would be able to get Gerri Anastos, her busy editor friend, to come by at least for coffee and brief me on where Wenske’s gay-media story stood before his disappearance in late January.

Beers showed up first, hauling a multi-colored Kenyan cloth bag full of what might have been twenty pounds of books or, judging from what the load seemed to be doing to her posture, scrap metal.

“Donald, this is the first time I’ve been above Fourteenth Street since 1979. Only for Eddie Wenske would I do this. Oh God, I’m exhausted!”

“I hope I can tell him face to face the sacrifice you were willing to make for him.”

“I see you’re still the optimist. Pin a rose on you.”

We were at a corner table in the front of the restaurant next to the window looking out on lively Ninth Avenue. The weather had warmed up again—global warming moving inexorably northward from Battery Park—and people were out with their jackets flung over their shoulders. A waitress took our drink orders—chardonnay for Beers, Sam Adams for me—as the place started to fill up with pre-theater diners.

“Gerri mentioned this place once and likes it,” Beers said. “I don’t know this neighborhood from Poughkeepsie, but it looks like it’s no longer the Black Hole of Calcutta it was the last time I was up here.”

“Where did you and Eddie last dine together? In the Village, I suppose.”

“I don’t remember, but I suppose it was in the meat packing district. Eddie had this weird fascination with that neighborhood. We used to meet once in a while at Florent before it closed.”

“The fashionably seedy bistro on Gansevoort? Whenever we went down there, Timothy Callahan always said he felt as if he was back in the Peace Corps.”

“How sentimental of him. What was his work in the Peace Corps? Did he help the homeless or was he setting up back-room sex clubs?”

“Poultry development in India. Pretty vanilla stuff.”

“Well, good for him. I approve.”

Among the people pouring in through the front door now was an angular dark-haired woman in a black pants suit who spotted us and headed our way. She had a tired smile, wore big glasses, and was slinging a laptop in a black case.