“My cases are mostly more mundane than life and death. People suspected of stealing from employers, industrial espionage, snooping on wayward spouses or politicians. But it’s true that in my career I’ve also seen good people die too young, violently or otherwise. And I lived through the AIDS plague years. Plenty of injustice there. So, no, unfairness never surprises me anymore.”

“One of the things I love about my business—which I started after Herb died—is seeing people marking happy milestones in their lives. These events—especially weddings—ritualize the way we try to make the most of the time we’ve got with one another while we’ve still got it. People at these rituals are saying, yes, death and loss are inevitable, but for now, isn’t life just so lovely?”

“It’s true. People are wonderfully wise and brave to delude themselves into thinking it’s all going to go on quite a while longer.”

“I’ve done a number of gay weddings since it was legalized in New York. I love it. I’m so proud to be part of history, and so are the brides and brides and grooms and grooms. These are among the most joyous events I’ve ever catered.” Again, she tried hard to smile. “I would love to have catered Eddie’s wedding. I would also love to have had the day off and just let somebody else worry about whether or not the cake was going to melt onto the floor of the delivery van or if the tables and chairs on the lawn might sink into the septic field. I think I would have insisted on running the show—I’m not sure I know how not to. But now all that seems unlikely, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know enough yet to have an opinion.”

“Well, okay. Maybe you don’t. And I’m trying hard to be delusional myself and avoid accepting the truth of what seems to have happened.”

“In the event that Eddie turns up safe and sound—and let’s hope that’s the way it goes—might he marry Bryan Kim? Is that the wedding you imagined Eddie having?”

She thought about this. “At one point I did. But later less so. I’m not sure I can answer that question. Whenever I fantasized about Eddie’s wedding, the other groom I pictured was always a little bit hazy.”

“You mentioned that Bryan had baggage. What kind of baggage?”

She paused again and sipped her coffee. “I hesitate to talk about this. I don’t want to be unfair to Bryan.”

“I know nothing about him, so you can just tell me what you know and what you think you know. Anyway, I’ll meet him and form my own opinion.”

“Bryan is a charmer,” she said. “Good-looking and bright and fun. He’s a reporter on Channel Six in Boston. Eddie says he’s one of the few local TV news people you can really respect. He’s always pushing his editors to do real digging about important state issues and not just the celebrity gossip and fluff that local stations tend to fall back on. Eddie had a crush on Bryan even before he actually met him. Bryan was—and is—Mister Local-Station-Hot-Number in gay Boston, Eddie told me. Then they met and got involved—Bryan was aware of Eddie’s work at the Globe and had admired him, too—and after a while Bryan moved in with Eddie, and they had a wonderful five or six months together. And then it all came out.”

“What did?”

“Bryan came home from work one night and said he was sorry but that it was over between them and he was moving out that night. Eddie was flabbergasted. He said he had seen no clue that anything was wrong between them. Bryan would only say over and over that it just wasn’t working. Eddie tried to get him to be more specific—or to offer any specifics at all—but Bryan was evasive and said he was surprised that Eddie wasn’t feeling the same thing. Eddie was so stunned he thought he might be hallucinating. But Bryan actually packed up some clothes and left the apartment at one thirty in the morning.”

“Eddie must have been reeling. But you said that it all came out—that was the term you used. What was it all?”

She took a deep breath. “Here’s the thing. A friend told Eddie a few days later he’d heard that Bryan had done this before. Not once but many times. Five or six, anyway.”

“Eddie hadn’t heard about this pattern before? And Bryan was some kind of local TV-news celeb?”

“Bryan had come up to Boston from Providence, and it was down in Rhode Island that he’d gotten a reputation for getting men to fall for him and then abruptly dumping them after a couple of months. Eddie was just his first Boston dumpee.”

“Nice guy.”

“We’ve all known commitment-phobes. Straight or gay, that’s a known phenomenon, and people who are like that either get over it or they don’t, and the people who fall for commitment-phobes either get used to it or they say no thanks and move on. But this seemed to be more than that. It was passive-aggressive, maybe even calculated to hurt the other person.”

“This was Eddie’s take on Bryan?”

“No, it was mine. Eddie just thought he must have a blind spot or something. Then after Eddie’s pot book came out and made a splash and he was on CNN and Fox and MSNBC, suddenly Bryan showed up again. I wondered if Bryan was maybe wanting to use Eddie’s media connections to boost his career. But Bryan was apologetic about ditching Eddie and said he’d been in therapy and was learning to value what was really important in life, and he said he’d like to try it again with Eddie, pledging his love and devotion and of course flashing that smile and I suppose other assets he had at his disposal. I have to admit, I always found Bryan extremely attractive.”

“So they got back together?”

“Not right away. Eddie was wary, having been so badly hurt by the abrupt breakup. Sometimes they went places together and I suppose slept together, but they lived separately. Bryan had kept his own apartment—and of course now I can see why. Eddie was feeling his way back into the relationship and trying to gauge whether or not he could really trust Bryan. He’d heard the Providence stories, so he was being careful. Eddie’s connections did actually lead to some discussions Bryan had with a network about doing some work for them from Boston. But then…well, then Eddie disappeared.”

“Was Bryan’s possible job with one of the gay networks?”

“Oh no, it was CNN or MSNBC or something serious. Eddie and Bryan both thought the gay networks were worthless except for one show they liked. Ron Paul’s Drag Race, I think it was called, about drag queens.”

“RuPaul, not Ron.”

“Eddie was even working on a book about how bad he thought American gay media had become.”

“Yes, Marva Beers described it to me.”

“One reason Eddie was pleased to be spending more time with Bryan again was, Bryan had friends at Hey Look Media and they knew all kinds of dirt they were going to be feeding to Eddie. In fact, it was those people Eddie was going to interview right around the time he disappeared. Might they be people you’ll want to question about what’s happened to Eddie?”

I said I thought they might.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Boston Globe was housed in an Eisenhower-moderne sprawling brick building between an expressway and a Catholic high school a few miles south of downtown. I’d read that like all big-city papers, the Globe had barely staved off financial ruin in recent years by dumping personnel and looking borderline anorexic. It wasn’t a good sign that the dour geezer behind a reception desk in the front lobby was reading The Herald, the respectably liberal Globe’s scrappy right-wing competitor. I introduced myself, and the security man took time out from his Red Sox spring-training studies to phone Aldo Fino, Eddie Wenske’s colleague on the Spotlight Team, the paper’s famous investigative unit. Fino soon appeared and led me through a security gate and down a maze of subterranean corridors. I imagined the hectic newsroom up above somewhere, but the investigative unit seemed to have been stashed away down in the grottos where the Globe stored the bones of its saints.