“So Wenske has been up there in Mount Shasta?”

“He made two trips that I know of, and it’s possible he’s up there now.”

“This is heartening news, Jane. Wenske’s family and friends in Albany and Boston think he’s probably dead. Murdered by the drug gangs he wrote about at The Boston Globe and in Weed Wars. But maybe he’s just—out of touch? If he’s alive, I don’t understand why he hasn’t reassured people he’s close to so they’re not frantic with worry about him.”

“Yes,” Ware said, “actually now I’m worried too. And so was Paul. I have this awful feeling Paul went looking for Eddie up north, and I’m getting more and more concerned since I haven’t been able to reach him. Paul’s not in great shape. The guy is my age—a hundred and fifty, as you can see—and his knees are going. I was wondering…might you try to track him down? While you’re looking for Eddie?”

“Sure.”

“Great. Believe me, I’m relieved. I really didn’t know what to do.”

“It might be helpful,” I said, “if I could have a look at the HLM documents Eddie had collected. They seem to have pointed him in a particular direction, and maybe they’ll do the same for me. Do you know where they are?”

“In Paul’s apartment,” she said, “and I have a key. A lot of it, of course, is going to be on Eddie’s laptop, and he might have taken that along with him.”

“The old lady in Paul’s building who told me about you admitted to overhearing conversations in the elevator with you and Eddie and Paul. Something about offshore accounts and Panama. What’s that about?”

She gave me a droll look. “Donald, that ‘old lady,’ Mrs. French, is probably younger than I am.”

“Hardly. She’s easily seventy-five.”

“You’re right. I’m only seventy-three. I just feel older than Mrs. French.”

“I doubt that. She’s sitting around reading the paper. You’re busy writing it.”

“Yes, a large part of it I do write. I’ve been offered buyouts every time some new fool takes over our utterly anachronistic institution. But I can’t seem to let go. My husband George had to retire at sixty-two—he was a captain with TWA—and he’s perfectly content doing crossword puzzles, re-reading John D. McDonald, and fixing my supper. But I’m afraid if I couldn’t go into a newsroom most days of the week I’d have no idea who I was or why I was alive, and I might have to be drugged or hospitalized. It could be quite ugly.”

“Your compulsive nose for news must have made you and Paul and Eddie a formidable trio of diggers.”

“You bet, and I was the one with the financial news background. Learned it all on my own too. I majored in Romance languages at Pomona College way back when. Sometimes I traveled with George—I could ride free on TWA to just about anywhere—and I got interested in developing economies. Then in the seventies and eighties as our own economy began to devolve during the big globalization shakeout, I started writing about the way U.S. capital was moving offshore, for foreign investment and into tax havens. And that’s been my beat. Of course, now that our staff has been cut by more than half, I have other beats too. Everything except Sudoku, and that’s probably next.”

“So you noticed that Hey Look Media had overseas operations?”

“Operations would not be the word for it. No production overseas or even sales to any great extent. It’s just a matter of hiding cash from the IRS and also from—hold onto your hat—investors.”

“That’s criminal, isn’t it?”

“It can be. If, for example—as seems to have happened on multiple occasions—HLM borrows money or accepts money from investors for particular production deals and then sends that money flying off into a network of offshore shell corporations where it’s accessed only by other Skutnik-owned shell corporations for unknown purposes and is never used for its contracted purpose, that’s good for Hal Skutnik’s personal bottom line. Presumably it’s what has supported his pricey lifestyle—mansions and galas and Gulfstream jet rentals and what have you. But the company had to get its production and operating cash from somewhere—its low rate of viewer subscriptions was bringing in precious little. For a long time, it looks as if it was done Ponzi-like, with new investors paying off old ones. But by the end of last year, all that was about to blow up Madoff-like.”

“Collapse is the nature of Ponzi-ism.”

“But lucky for Hal Skutnik, his inheritance showed up in the nick of time this January. Or so it seemed briefly.”

“Briefly because there were too few trees left in the Skutnik forests?”

“Exactly.”

“So the inheritance was not a savior for Hey Look Media, just a reprieve?”

“A very brief one. By early February, things were starting to look desperate all over again. But that crisis was also brief, it turned out. Within a few weeks, cash was starting to flow again, both into the company and into the shell corporations in Panama, Liberia, and Curacao, the repositories for Hal’s personal piggy banks. We were all baffled as to where this sudden river of cash was and is coming from.”

“And Wenske’s sources didn’t know? The people who were feeding him all this lurid information?”

“What happened was, they all of a sudden clammed up. Eddie thought maybe their betrayal had been discovered. He said they seemed suddenly terrified and they said they were breaking off all contact with Eddie.”

“That does sound bad.”

“Eddie told Paul to sit tight, and that Eddie would talk to some HLM people here in L.A., and then he would go up to Shasta and try to figure out exactly what had gone wrong, going undercover if that’s what it took. Eddie has fake IDs and documents he used when he was writing Weed Wars.”

“I’ve heard about this risky practice of his.”

“Paul offered to go along. But Eddie said, no, not a chance. In fact, he told Paul, if this situation turned out to be what Eddie thought it was going to be, Paul needed to distance himself from all of it and pretend to anyone who asked that he had never gotten involved in the first place. Eddie made Paul promise to do that, and Paul reluctantly agreed. It was a promise that now I’m afraid Paul didn’t keep.”

“And what was this mysterious situation that Eddie thought he would likely have to contend with?”

“He didn’t tell Paul. Or if he did, Paul didn’t tell me.”

But I thought I knew what Wenske guessed he was onto, and I thought I knew why he was afraid.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

I had two more interviews scheduled with disaffected former HLM employees, one at five and one at 7:30 for dinner. I made my way inch by freeway inch back to the hotel in Westwood, getting there just in time to book a next-morning flight north and then meet Rickie Esteban, Rover Fye’s former personal assistant, in the hotel bar. I badly wanted to talk with Martine and Danielle, but they spent most of their time in Mount Shasta, I’d been told, so that was going to have to wait—if I could even make it at all into Desault mines.

Esteban was twenty minutes late, explaining that his bus had hit a pedestrian and had been impounded by the police, and he had walked the last half mile. He worked for a copy center now and had arranged to leave work two hours early just so he could meet me and say terrible things about Hal and Rover and Hey Look Media. He was a muscular young man with an Aztec face, a rhinestone stud in his right ear, and some kind of hieroglyphics carved into his millimeter-length haircut.

Esteban ordered a diet Coke and said, “So what’s the deal with Eddie Wenske? He disappeared or something?”

“No one has seen him since early March, and a lot of people are worried about him. His mother in New York hired me to try to find him.”

“Hey, that dude can take care of himself. He’s smart, that guy.”