The Last Thing I Saw - Stevenson Richard. Страница 31

The magical GPS led me out to the edge of town and the headquarters for MS Enterprises, the Skutnik family logging business. The two-story frame building abutted a good-sized lumber yard and a saw mill that didn’t look busy. I assumed that this was where the salt mine was situated, the lair of Martine and Danielle Desault, the Skutnik business empire’s financial geniuses. I didn’t go in, but instead sat in the car and did a BlackBerry search for the Skutnik family home. Again, I was led by the electronic nose to a street that ran along a ridge on the west side of town with a dazzling view of the actual Mount Shasta off to the east. Vast and majestic, the old snow-capped dormant volcano dominated the horizon making me and everybody and everything beneath it seem satisfyingly puny.

The old Skutnik house, now the home of the salt sisters according to my HLM informants in L.A., was a rambling two-story frame structure with big windows for the great eastern view and a three-car garage with all the doors closed. Two vehicles were in the driveway, a forest green Hummer—the Desaults didn’t seem to be Sierra Club members—and a red Ford pick-up.

The sun was low in the sky now behind the Skutnik manse, and I drove on by and back down the hill and into town. The names of many of the businesses had a New Age ring: Yin Yang Yoga, Remover of Obstacles Massage, Metaphysical Hand-me-Downs. Others were of the more immediate world: Gussie’s Eats and a place that was just called The Bar. The last one was a short walk from the Pine Cone Inn, which was good. Because when I got back to the motel and asked again for Paul Delaney, the desk clerk said, “It’s after four. Try the place down the street called The Bar. It’s a bar.”

I knew right away which one was Delaney. He was alone at a table in a corner with a bottle of Whitbread next to him, a glass half empty and a laptop computer up and running. None of this quite went with the Patsy Cline on the juke box, or so it seemed to me with my Eastern marginally-elite one-track mind. Delaney was tall with a long face, a beard that needed trimming, and big gray eyes behind rimless glasses. He had on khakis and what looked like a Brooks Brothers shirt that needed laundering and maybe the collar turned.

I walked over and said, “Paul, your friend Jane Ware is worried about you.”

Looking up at me blankly, Delaney said nothing. Then he began to cry.

I seated myself in the empty chair across from Delaney. I said, “Is Wenske dead?”

Delaney nodded.

“Oh shit,” I said.

He took out a rumpled handkerchief and wiped his eyes and mouth. “I know I should call Jane,” he said. “And of course Eddie’s family. And the police, I suppose. For what that’s worth.”

I explained who I was and that I had been hired to find Wenske by his mother. I told Delaney my investigation had taken me from Albany to Boston, to New York, back to Boston, to Los Angeles, and then to Mount Shasta. I said, “What happened to him?”

“The cartel got him. They found out who he was.”

“Meaning the author of Weed Wars?”

“Somebody told them.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. He was undercover, one of the local narcs told me. Eddie had actually been working with one of the mules under the name of Wes Parker. He was staying over at the Pine Cone, registered there as Parker. I figured this out from getting friendly with Glenda, the desk clerk. She let me look at the register. About three weeks ago, Eddie disappeared. He’d paid the motel through the end of the week, and then he just didn’t come back. I have his clothes and other things in my room.”

“Ah, jeez.”

“The narc I met in here, Joe Willard, heard from one of his informants that the cartel found out that Eddie was a rat whose reporting got several networks shut down in New England. Somebody either recognized Eddie from back there or somebody knew he was here undercover and they told the bosses this. So the enforcers shot him and buried him up the canyon somewhere.”

“I am so sorry to hear that.”

Delaney closed the lid on his computer. “Yeah.”

“So why are you still here?”

He slumped. “I don’t know. I’ve just been taking long walks. I guess I have to leave.”

“Jane is concerned about you. Probably other people are too.”

“Yeah. I just have to make the plane reservation. I should do it.”

“You haven’t been answering your phone. Your message box is full.”

“Oh. Well, that’s not like me. I should listen to my messages. God.”

“You should.”

A waitress came over, and I ordered a beer.

Delaney said, “He was like a son to me.”

“That’s the impression I had from his sister and mother. And at the paper in Boston you were like a father to him.”

“It sounds like a cliche to say it that way. As an editor, I would say get that outta there. Phrase it some other way. But sometimes the cliche is true. I loved that boy the way I’d have loved a son if I’d had one.”

“Do you have other children? Daughters?”

He said, “Kathleen died of breast cancer when she was 28. My wife Eileen made it to 47. Pretty bad, all that was.”

“Awful.”

“So Eddie was somebody I could teach what I know—whatever the hell that is—and then he became a real pal. You know, I did try to talk him out of coming up here. He had this suspicion that the Skutnik empire was involved in the drug trade somehow—he saw how the family cash was moving around and he knew the weed history of this area—and Eddie was determined to expose Skutnik. He considered him an embarrassment to gay America, and he really wanted to ruin Skutnik if he could. So he wasn’t thinking as clearly as he should have been. He minimized the risks in his own mind. I suppose he imagined that somebody here might connect him with his drug-gang reporting back in Boston if they knew who he was, but he thought the fake ID would protect him. But somehow the cartel found out, and what Eddie had done to them was unforgiveable. He had to be punished, and his death had to be an example to others. That’s how they think, the narcs say. There’s no give and take, no exceptions.”

My beer arrived, and I was grateful.

I said, “Bryan Kim called you last week at the motel. What was that about?”

“Oh, you talked to Bryan? Didn’t he tell you? I called him at work at Channel Six, thinking Eddie might have been in touch with him, to reassure him or whatever. This was last week right after I arrived here, before Joe Willard gave me the bad news. Bryan was about to go on the air, so he called me back later at the hotel, and he was surprised to hear that Eddie was up here. Surprised, excited and relieved too, because Eddie hadn’t been in touch with him at all. He said in Boston people thought Eddie was probably dead, killed by one of the Boston gangs. Eddie, of course, being Eddie, had been so focused on his role playing and his information gathering that he hadn’t been in touch with people back home for several weeks. When I explained all this to Bryan, he was so happy, and he said he was seeing somebody on Saturday who’d been hired to look for Eddie, and Bryan was going to put the two of us in touch—you and me.”

“That sounds right.”

“Bryan was also interested in the connection Eddie had found between the marijuana gangs and Hey Look Media. He had a friend at the HLM office in New York who was coming up to Boston on Saturday to meet you and discuss all that, and I take it that you all connected and compared notes.”

I sipped my beer. I said, “Paul, I see that you have a laptop and an air card and that you’re in touch with the outside world. Don’t you read the Globe online?”

“I haven’t been. To tell you the truth, Don, the news these days is all too depressing. I mean literally. I guess I’m what you’d call clinically depressed. It’s the way the country is headed politically, economically, culturally. I saw something about forty-five percent of Republican voters in Mississippi believing that Obama is a Muslim, and I just tuned out for a while. The news is just too awful, and I’ve been watching Truffaut movies on Netflix and not much else. Have I missed anything in the news in Boston? I very much doubt it.”