“When was he last in touch with you?” I asked.
“Not since the last weekend in January. What’s that? Not quite two months.”
“That’s when his mom last heard from him, too.”
“I got back from Key West, and we were going to have dinner. He never called and he never showed. I called his cell, and nothing. I called Bryan, his ex, up in Boston, and he hadn’t heard anything either, and they’d started talking again recently, trying to patch it up, I think. Eddie was supposed to be in the city doing research for the new book, but Craig Palmer, who he usually stays with, said he hadn’t shown up there either. We were all just perplexed, and then we got scared. We knew he’d had threats after the pot book came out last year. The narcs in Boston used the book to figure out the people running some big New England network, and they warned Eddie they heard he’d better watch his back.”
“You’d think pot dealers would be laid back. But I’ve also heard bad things about the people who are the big operators. It’s only the users who are giggly or serene.”
“It’s a hundred billion dollar industry that’s illegal, so naturally unsavory types are going to move in. Just read the goddamn book, okay? You’ll see what I mean. Care for a Necco wafer?”
“Sure. Thanks. White or green?”
She handed me the pack and I took the one on the end, pink, good enough.
“When I quit smoking in ’93,” Beers said, “I bought a pack of these things to get me through the week, and lo these many years later, here I am. But I’m not diabetic. Yet. In Boston one time, Eddie took me over to the Necco factory in Cambridge, the New England Confectionary Company, where the name comes from. That’s gone now—they moved to some distant suburb somewhere, though at least not to Hanoi.”
“When I gave up my beloved cigarettes,” I said, “it was carrot sticks. But that didn’t last long. Pretty soon it was cheeseburgers, and then I just had to get a grip.”
“You look quite fit, Donald. Gay men don’t let themselves go the way we Sapphics sometimes do. I like to think it’s because we have more important things to think about, but I’m not a hundred percent sure that that’s it.”
“So who notified the police that Eddie was missing?”
“Bryan called the Boston cops after a week of asking around and getting more and more frantic. At first they were yada yada yada, just be patient, he’ll turn up, the way cops are trained to talk. And then Bryan finally got hold of somebody who’d read the book. That guy spoke to the feds, and then they all changed their tune. They agreed that maybe Eddie pissed off the wrong people and his disappearance was no coincidence. Supposedly they sent word out, asking all their people on the street if they knew anything about dealers teaching a rat journalist a lesson, but nothing came back. Likewise with the feds, who leaned on the unindicted co-conspirators who’d helped them nail the tycoons they tracked down using clues from Eddie’s book. After a couple of months, what the men in blue concluded was, it was not the drug people who had made Eddie vanish. This conclusion, of course, was based on their failure to establish the obvious and then do something about it. They couldn’t admit to being fuck-ups, so they said, oh, it has to be something else, what can we do?”
I looked at the photo of Wenske on the back cover of Weed Wars. He was a bright-faced man of forty or so, with a dimpled chin, a crooked smile, an ample unkempt mane, and attentive hazel eyes. The jacket copy said Wenske was a graduate of both Harvard College and Harvard Law School and had worked as a journalist at The Concord Monitor and The Boston Globe. He had been part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team that exposed the Catholic priest pedophile cover-ups in 2002. His book before Weed Wars was a joint effort with two other reporters on a kick-back scandal among the leadership in the Massachusetts House of Representatives.
I said, “Wenske seems to have made his reputation as an investigative reporter. There must be a lot of people who would have liked to be rid of him.”
“You better believe it. Eddie told me stories. Even before Weed Wars there were plenty of people in Boston who loathed him. But they were generally white collar types. Or clerical collar. Somehow I don’t think the archdiocese put out a contract on a reporter. In the fourteenth century they might have, but not these days.”
“It’s interesting,” I said, “that Wenske made a splash with his gay memoir but never wrote again mainly for a gay readership.”
“Prior to the new book, the one he was researching, that’s true. The switch was partly economics. There was the bull market of the eighties and into the nineties, and then all the air went out of gay publishing, if you’ll pardon my mixed metaphor.”
“The image of a deflating bull gets the point across.”
“Anyway, criminality was what was grabbing Eddie, turning him on. His father had been a New York State assistant attorney general who specialized in public corruption, and Eddie was heading in that direction himself until he realized that what he really wanted to do was write. Notes from the Bush was something he had to get off his chest—lucky us—and then he was free to go out and devote his life to exposing powerful types who were ripping people off. It’s just as well, because, as I say, gay publishing is all but pffffttt. The big houses don’t do much anymore, and with the small houses that have taken up the slack, writers had better not quit their day jobs. It’s a nice hobby and not much more.”
I noted the books on the shelves next to Beers and said, “Most of your authors are gay people writing gay books. Somebody’s publishing them. Somebody’s reading them.”
She sniffed. “Donald, honey, yes, some gay people still do read actual books, not just porn catalogs and tweets. But there’s not a book up there that received an advance of more than seven thousand dollars. Most of those titles were done by small houses that paid no advance at all. I suppose you’re wondering, how the hell do I pay the rent? Well, dear, if you must know, Doctor Beers, my ex, Mister Root Canal of New Rochelle, pays the freight here on posh Hudson Street. For me, this business is not much more than a labor of love—or, in these grim times, let’s just say labor of like. Or labor of what the fuck else am I gonna do?”
“But Wenske’s pot book sold okay?”
“It did. It was nicely reviewed in The Times, the Globe, and The Washington Post, and Eddie did the cable talk show circuit, and that juiced up sales. It’s a usefully controversial book. The people who think pot should be legalized held Weed Wars up as evidence that decriminalizing the trade will drive the goons and psychos out of the business. And of course the war-on-drugs law enforcement types used it to lobby for harsher laws and more funding for themselves. Eddie favored the former approach, as you’ll see, Donald, when you take the trouble to read the book.”
“I’ll read it on the train back to Albany.”
“That train must be even slower than I remember it.”
“When it comes to AMTRAK, I’m always careful to bring something along to entertain myself.”
“Well, you won’t be entertained by Weed Wars. You’ll be frightened and disgusted. And you’ll see why I’m so sure that something…something just horrible has happened to dear, stout-hearted Eddie Wenske.” Her voice faltered, and she shook her head and her eyes were wet.
“God, why couldn’t Eddie have let well enough alone? He did this nice job at the Globe with his series on pot dealers using a poor people’s health clinic as a distribution center, and how the community group that ran the place got into a war with the dealers. But that’s when he realized how ruthless the dealers were, and he started digging and came up with the material for the book. He’d already been warned a number of times to back off, and I told him myself, don’t mess with those people, it’s a hopeless societal situation—the thugs on one side, the Puritanism and hypocrisy on the other side, the billions in profits, and all these entrenched habits you can’t fight. But he was fascinated and he was shocked, and he thought it was an important and dramatic story about American society. Which of course it is.”
