“What you are is an asshole sticking your nose in where it don’t belong,” the big man said. “Martine and Danielle, they decided to let it go, at least for now. They gotta wait until things simmer down. You want to make a tree fall on Hal Skutnik, go ahead. But the ladies ain’t gonna help, so you might just as well go back to L.A. Times are tough enough up here as it is, without somebody fuckin’ up everybody makin’ a living. We all are just trying to get by, is all.”

“Look,” I said, “I’m not interested in disrupting the growing and selling of weed in Siskiyou County. In a way, you folks are performing a public service, providing America with a product that’s less harmful than most of what’s sold in every neighborhood liquor store across the nation and half the Walgreens and CVS’s. What I am interested in is the violence that goes along with the weed business and Hal Skutnik’s possible involvement in it. Did you know that two friends of Eddie Wenske were stabbed to death last week in Boston, and they were probably killed by dealers connected with Skutnik and HLM?”

The two men glanced at each other. “I heard,” the big guy said. “That ain’t got nothin’ to do with Danielle and Martine and their operation. That was some mules who are methies, or work for a couple of methies anyway. And meth people you can’t trust any further than you can throw ’em.”

Inasmuch as this man could probably throw a methie quite some distance, this was a confusing statement.

I said, “What’s your name?”

“Ort.”

“Ort?”

“That’s right. Ort.”

“Well, Ort, please tell Ms. Desault and Ms. Desault that my friend and I have all the HLM incriminating documents they gave Wenske, and these are going to end up at the federal building in San Francisco if the ladies don’t help us nail somebody for the three murders. Maybe that somebody will be Hal Skutnik, and if he goes down then they can probably resume their pot business that’s run under the guise of a logging business, which I assume is what’s really going on here. Does that make sense?”

Ort thought this over. “You know, we had a good thing going here for a goodly number of years. The logging economy has been for shit. People gotta feed their families, but there’s only so much wildcatting you can do to make ends meet, stealing trees from Forest Service concessions and not get caught. So everybody grows a little weed or helps out somebody else who does. Most of them are good, law-abiding people. Well, not law-abiding, but you know what I mean.”

“Sure.”

“But you have your bad apples who ruin it for everybody else.”

“I know.”

“It’s the meth people who are the worst.”

“I’ve heard that.”

“Martine and Danielle try to stay away from that type of person.”

“Good for them.”

“And we all were making good money, getting a fair return. Keeping the flat-on-its-ass lumber company going with the weed profits while old Maurice shot bear and shot the shit with movie stars and politicians.”

Now it was coming clear. “But then the senior Skutnik died.”

“Yeah, old Maurice, a total asshole.”

“And his son Hal started bleeding the logging-slash-pot-growing company’s profits to prop up his inept and mismanaged and partially crooked gay media empire.”

“Hal is crazy as a bedbug and queer to boot.”

“So Danielle and Martine thought they could discredit or maybe even ruin Hal Skutnik’s media business and somehow preserve the weed business that has helped the impoverished loggers of Siskiyou County stay afloat in bad times. And they were doing this through Eddie Wenske and his book exposing corruption in the gay media.”

“I wondered all along,” Ort said, “if they could get rid of Hal and still keep the business doin’ okay otherwise. It sounded to me like that was gonna be work. But the gals are whizzes at the bookkeeping and the deals. Old Maurice knew that, and that’s why he let them pret’ near run the company for twenty years all by their selves.”

I said, “You seem to be highly knowledgeable of company operations under Martine and Danielle. You’re a trusted associate, it appears. Or are you more than that? May I ask if you are in a relationship with Martine or Danielle?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Which one?”

“Both of ’em.”

I thought of Rick Santorum and his slippery slope argument, but I didn’t mention it to Ort.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

In Delaney’s motel room, he was busy making notes for the book he was now planning on writing, and I was checking email and phone messages. Word had reached HLM’s New York office of Boo Miller’s death, and I had messages from both Perry Dremel and Luke Pearlman expressing shock and sorrow as well as fear about what might happen next.

Ogden Winkleman was back in New York, Dremel told me, and was ranting about various misdeeds by staffers that he could only have known about from lip-reading the security-camera tapes or—more likely, Dremel believed—hacked phones or hidden listening devices. So it was almost certainly Winkleman who had found out about Bryan Kim and Boo Miller being in touch with Delaney and thereby learning of Wenske’s information gathering on HLM’s corrupt and even violent practices. And it must have been Winkleman who alerted somebody in the Siskiyou drug world that Kim and Miller had to be dealt with, just as Wenske had been.

It hadn’t, however, been the Desaults Winkleman notified. They were in fact eager for Skutnik to be embroiled in scandal or even criminal proceedings. Even if they had been alerted, they would have done nothing—except maybe warn Kim that he was in danger. It had to have been somebody else in Siskiyou County that Winkleman had tipped off, but who? I needed to find out.

Ort Nestlerode, as his full name was soon revealed to be, told us he would inform the salt sisters that Delaney and I were reasonable people who were not bent on interfering with the local pot trade, and he said maybe they would talk to us. He called me an hour after he left the motel and said we were invited to lunch at the Skutnik family house, where the sisters lived. He gave me directions, and I didn’t tell him I had already scouted the place out.

Delaney and I pulled in next to the Hummer and the red pick-up at twelve fifteen, right on time. Ort was waiting and led us around to the deck on the side of the house with its nice view of Mount Shasta and some well-tended flower beds at the side of the wide yard.

Ort’s driver, whose name we had learned was Clovis, was fixing some burgers on a gas grill, and the Desault sisters were seated in some gaily be-cushioned deck chairs with drinks in their hands. They were not twins, as far as I knew, but they looked a lot alike: forty-five-ish, handsome and big-featured, and that included commodious butts in tight shorts and some impressive decolletage not quite spilling out of halter tops. It was not the picture that was ordinarily conjured up by the term financial wizards, but this was California.

The sisters looked up at me with forced smiles, and one of them said, “We’re feeding you lunch, so that means you can’t make trouble.”

“Deal,” I said.

Delaney was peering all around, making mental notes, I figured, in his journalist’s way.

The sisters introduced themselves, Martine in the blue shorts, Danielle in green.

Ort took our drink orders, Calistoga water for both Delaney and me, and Danielle asked us how we liked the view of Mount Shasta. “People come from all over,” she said, “and not just ’cause it’s a beautiful mountain.”

“It’s got powers, some people say,” Martine added. “It’s the middle of an energy vortex.”

“No kidding?”

“In 1987 the Harmonic Convergence was held here, and the town was like the center of the universe for a while.”

“I’ll bet the Chamber of Commerce liked that.”