“There’s a housing authority manager who’s been going around calling Kim a fucking faggot asshole media elite. Kim did a three-part series on Channel Six about this guy taking kickbacks from building contractors and tenants and anybody else he could squeeze a greasy nickel out of, plus of course the usual practice in these situations of putting his girlfriend on the housing authority payroll for a ninety-K a year job of little work.”

“It’s no longer the Massachusetts of William Bradford.”

“Kim’s material for his reports was mostly leaked from somebody in the AG’s office who’s been investigating this sleazoid for over a year. But this crook, Fabian Twomey, has decided to blame Kim for all his troubles. He told people in the housing authority Kim was soon going to be very sorry he didn’t mind his own fucking faggot business.”

“Right.”

“Twomey has no alibi for Saturday afternoon—or doesn’t have an alibi he’ll admit to anyways. There are reports of a second young lady in the picture who’s hotter than the ninety-K now-somewhat-older-and-tarnished girlfriend, and maybe he was enjoying her young, tasty, sweet-assed company Saturday afternoon. It looks like some fibbing is happening here. One possibility is, Twomey was actually on Tremont Street Saturday afternoon stabbing Bryan Kim to death. I’ll be speaking with Mr. Twomey myself later today, and then we’ll see what we might be working with here.”

“Does Twomey have a history of violence?”

“Just of the mouth. According to the suits in the AG’s office, he liked to brag about everything he was getting away with right up to the point where he wasn’t getting away with it anymore. Also, some of his maintenance crew told one of my officers that Twomey doesn’t like the sight of blood. Makes him want to faint or run away. That’s a complicating factor here. On the other hand, Twomey could have hired somebody to kill Kim. Twomey is the type of individual who has other people in his life who do his physical labor for him. And there are enough sociopaths running around loose in the Boston metro area for Twomey to take his pick for a one-time hit job. I hope you won’t think I’m employing a crude stereotype if I tell you that if you’re working in public housing, that’s a handy place to go recruiting for extreme hands-on types of work.”

“I would not accuse you of employing a crude stereotype, Detective.”

“Good ‘nuff. One thing that’s real interesting to me now, Strachey—and I think is gonna interest you—is Kim’s cell phone records, which I now have possession of. There were lots of calls to and from employees of Channel Six news all week long, and calls to and from people that the Channel Six folks have identified as sources for stories the station was working on. There was the call from you Friday afternoon. And there was one outgoing call each on both Thursday and Friday to Hey Look Media in New York City.”

“To their main number?”

“Right.”

“Boo Miller?”

“I’m wondering about that too.”

“But why would Kim not call Miller on his cell?”

“Maybe Miller wanted no record of the call on his cell.”

“Somebody should ask Miller about that when he turns up. If and when.”

“They should do that,” Davis said. “I see that Hey Look Media’s main office is in L.A.”

“It is.”

“There was one very long call to L.A. on March 16, an hour and sixteen minutes. That’s ten days ago, and we’re trying to reach that party. If Kim’s goin’ on and on for that length of time, maybe it’s a pal of his and this gentleman knows something useful for this investigation.”

“Right. Who is it?”

“The number is a land line in the name of Paul Delaney. Know who that is, by chance?”

“I do.”

“Well, tell me all about him. ’Cause now Mr. Delaney is not answering his phone.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Why had Bryan Kim phoned Paul Delaney, Eddie Wenske’s old Boston Globe editor, now living in Los Angeles, on March sixteenth? Maybe to ask Delaney if he had any idea what had happened to the missing Wenske. But would it take an hour and sixteen minutes to ask about that? Maybe Kim and Delaney had known each other in Boston, and they were just shooting the breeze, catching up. I’d have to ask Aldo Fino if Kim and Delaney overlapped in Wenske’s life. Delaney moved west some years earlier, so I was guessing they hadn’t.

Marsden Davis had given me Delaney’s number, and I tried it. I got his voicemail and would have left a message saying who I was and why I was arriving soon in L.A., but Delaney’s message box was full.

I checked out of the Westin, retrieved the car from the hotel garage, and found a Mass Pike entrance nearby. Boston now had so many major highways running underneath it that it had been able to lower its notorious traffic jams by fifty or sixty feet.

As I headed west on the interstate, I listened for a few minutes to the public radio fund drive on Marilyn Fogle’s station, then switched to another station whose fund drive had already been completed and whose staff was interrupting regular programming with short announcements thanking listeners for keeping public radio going for another four months. Apparently commercial radio was little more than an afterthought here in the Peoples Republic of Massachusetts. This station had a brief local newscast that included no mention of the Bryan Kim murder. Which meant no new developments.

I was back in Albany by two in the afternoon. I went home and got out some cheese and microwaved a chunk of baguette that some months earlier Timmy had brought home from La Serre, then labeled it, dated it, wrapped it in plastic and placed it in the freezer along with his other filched-from-expensive-restaurant treasures.

I went online and found the best deal I could for a ticket to L.A., flying out the next day but with an open return. It was quite a scam the airlines had going when it came to last minute reservations, and I mentally thanked Susan Wenske’s late mother, who was underwriting my so-far-futile search for her grandson.

I updated my notes, then took down our old copy of Notes from the Bush, Wenske’s famous memoir of coming out in middle school in East Greenbush. The cover photo was of Wenske at fourteen, and he was a cutie, and only a little more fresh-faced than he was in his twenties, pictured at that later age on the back cover when the book came out.

I skimmed the early chapters, marveling as I had when I first read it at the way Wenske had won over or at least neutralized so many peers and teachers—-who at first were uncomfortable with his outspokenness—simply by being cheerful and confident and at ease in his own gay skin. His sunny casual attitude had been infectious. There had been ugliness and confrontations, too, and the school board had tried to stop Wenske from bringing a sixteen-year-old male date from Simon’s Rock College in Massachusetts to a school dance. Wenske had not won that fight, but he’d gathered enough support so that, in the end, a second non-official all-inclusive dance was held in a hotel ballroom in Colonie, organized by a group of students and parents, including his own. I noted again the book’s dedication, To my parents, Herb and Susan Wenske, and I thought, what a lucky kid. Also, a good human being and a model citizen—no dark side in the making here.

I had placed my new copy of Weed Wars on the shelf next to the memoir, and I took it down again. Flipping through it, I was even more impressed at how knowing and attentive to detail Wenske’s writing was in the sections on marijuana wholesaling operations—the growers, the marketers, the mules who “carry weight” from the Mexican border towns and from the Klamath and Shasta mountain regions of Northern California. Any good reporter knew how to elicit this kind of information in interviews, but Wenske wrote with the kind of novelistic feel for the material that bespoke direct experience. One section, in particular, in which a mule had to navigate interstate highway stretches heavily populated with troopers in cruisers bristling with antennas and marked as K-9 drug spotters was spun out with sweaty palm suspense. I thought, Wenske has been there, he’s done this.