by David Levien
The third to last thing Dwyer did was scroll the mobile and get Banco’s number from the contact list, memorizing it, then erasing it. The second to last thing he did was wipe down the phone and drop it on the couch and pick up his five thousand dollars. Then he noticed he was standing in blood, so the last thing he did was step out of his shoes and head for the door carrying them.
Now that he was back in his shite hole and all was cleaned up, including his shoes, he went on his computer to reverse directory Banco’s number. Banco had a bit of a head start, but hopefully it was one that Dwyer could make up.
31
Behr still got to work on the early side, and he watched as the office came to life around him. He would have preferred to be sitting in Potempa’s chair when his boss arrived for the day, surprising him into sharing some information. It was a technique Behr had learned from an old NYPD detective and had employed in the past when he had clients of his own who balked at paying their bills. They’d walk in the door of their office to find Behr had gained entry and was seated behind their desk, leafing through their bills.
“Telephone, office supplies, cable, electric,” Behr would say. “Why is mine all the way at the bottom of the pile?” Most of the time the shaken customer would pay him what was owed on the spot just to get him out of there. Of course that was when he was an independent operator. Now, at Caro, there was a billing department and accountants, and collection agencies after that, to chase down unwilling clients who refused to pay what they owed.
Behr figured he was owed something on this one too-namely answers. He’d put himself in harm’s way doing his job for the company, after all. But Potempa had a career in law enforcement behind him and wouldn’t be rattled by a cheap parlor trick like an office bushwhack.
Potempa walked in a little before 9:00, his perfect steel-gray coif floating above the tops of the cubicle dividers. Behr checked an urge to rush him with questions. He managed to sit out most of the day, doing a little work-as well as some Internet searches of Terry Cottrell that turned up nothing-but shortly after lunch, while the office was nearly emptied out, Potempa arrived back, and Behr made a beeline for his door. He had a hand against it before it had closed all the way.
“Karl, can I have a word?” Behr said.
“Make some time with Ms. Swanton-” Potempa began, before seeing the manila envelope in Behr’s hand.
“Now would be better,” Behr said, shaking the envelope a bit.
“All right,” Potempa said, a slight rigidity gripping his body.
Ms. Swanton looked on with muted curiosity as Behr went into Potempa’s office.
Potempa slid into his leather desk chair, and to Behr he appeared to have aged five years since the day before.
“Are we scheduling daily chats now?” Potempa said, a wary veil over his black eyes.
“I saw your conversation on the street in front of the Canterbury last night,” Behr said.
“Oh yeah?” Potempa said, the veil dropping lower.
“Yeah,” Behr said. A lot of people debated whether or not to tell a friend when they find out his wife is cheating on him. Behr preferred to lead with the truth, even if it was bad news. But then this wasn’t about a cheating wife, and he and Potempa weren’t friends.
“How’d that happen-coincidence or are you surveilling me?” Behr looked over Potempa’s shoulder at the photos of his daughter, pictured her as a dyed blonde, and was sure of what he’d discovered. By way of answer, Behr raised the envelope and flipped it onto Potempa’s desk.
“Is that …?” Potempa almost barked, leaning forward and reaching for the envelope. He tore into it like a battlefield medic ripping open a compression bandage over a wounded soldier. A gamut of emotions played over his face as he slid the jewel case free: horror, elation, relief. “I can’t believe you got it. I can’t believe you got it …” he said.
“Karl,” Behr said. “Karl,” he repeated. Potempa finally looked to him, his hands shaking slightly as he held the case. “We have to assume this isn’t the original. That there are copies. Multiple copies.”
Potempa’s shoulders sagged and he rocked back in his chair as the reality landed on him. “Right … of course …” It was too early for a drink, but Behr caught the older man’s eye glancing longingly at the decanter on the credenza.
“Did you look at it?” he asked.
“I did-”
“Ah, goddammit, Frank,” Potempa erupted, before his head sank into his hands.
“I’m sorry, Karl, I had to know what I was dealing with.”
“And do you now?” Potempa asked.
“It’s pretty clearly a sex-video blackmail scheme,” Behr said. “But I’d like to know the particulars.”
“Would ya?” Potempa said. His eyes went to the Scotch once again, but he turned admirably away from it. “I suppose you deserve to know,” Potempa said. “But first the video. Is it … bad?”
“I have the girl as your daughter,” Behr said.
Potempa nodded forlornly.
Any puritanical thinking about sex aside, Behr knew what he was asking. “Yeah, it’s bad.”
“Should I watch it?”
“It’s pretty rough. I wouldn’t if I were you,” Behr said, somehow feeling that Potempa would watch it at some point, perhaps late at night, alone in his house or this very office, driven past the point of good sense by a morbid need to know.
“Does he hurt her?” Potempa wondered.
“No. It’s what I’d call … consensual,” Behr said.
“How’d you get this? Did you hurt him, by chance, or buy it?” Potempa wanted to know.
“Uh-uh, I entered his house and took it when he wasn’t there.”
“I’ll have to get that address from you, I’ve wanted it for some time. I’ve had other guys on this and they didn’t get this far …”
Potempa said distantly. Behr couldn’t help but admire the man’s skills. Though he’d come in with the advantage, and his boss was clearly struggling, Potempa had been the one to ask about a half dozen questions in a row and had Behr providing information, not vice versa. But enough was enough.
“Who is he-the guy you were talking to, and the one I assume is in the video?” Behr asked.
“My daughter’s boyfriend. Lenny Brennan Barnes. Little pimp motherfucker. I hated the cocksucker the first time I saw him, and it grew from there.” Potempa didn’t go in for blue language most of the time, so it marked the depth of his emotions on the topic. “He got his filthy hands on my Mary and just … ruined her.”
“What’s he threatening?” Behr asked.
“To release it,” Potempa said, thumping a finger on the DVD case, “on the Internet. To IPD e-mail addresses, Bureau offices. Her old high school. Local colleges. All over the damned place. To make it ugly for me. For her future.”
“Unless you pay?” Behr asked.
Potempa made an “of course” gesture with his hands, and Behr didn’t think much of it because of what was on his mind.
“Hold on, you said ‘boyfriend’?” Behr said, trying to assemble it. “And I saw them together. They look like they live together.”
“I know, I know. My daughter, she just … turned against me. By and by, I guess, though it felt like all at once. We started fighting. Over her friends. Men. Her lifestyle. Drugs. Back and forth like a couple of badgers, until it seemed like she was willing to go down herself just to see me suffer.” Potempa shook his head. Suffering he was.
“But if she’s party to it, if she’s okay with the clip getting out there,” Behr ventured as delicately as he could, “why not step aside and let it? The burn rate on this shit is like thirty seconds in today’s world. It’ll be forgotten before it’s done playing.”
He hoped to remind Potempa of what he, as a professional, already knew: that removing the leverage caused any extortion plot to fall apart instantly.
“Behr,” Potempa said, “she may be out of her mind, and willing to play at this, but I’m not. I c
an’t have it. I can’t have it. You read me? That’s my little girl …”
Even if Behr had never heard the English language, he couldn’t have missed the desperation and vulnerability in Potempa’s tone. Only a child in peril could bring forth such a sound. Only being a parent could make one that weak and susceptible. Behr just nodded, suddenly feeling as weary as the older man looked.
32
“Final numbers aren’t in yet, but second quarter operating expenses are running constant at roughly negative twenty-seven thousand per day. Projected per-player revenue is off target day by day at two sixteen, one forty-two, one eleven, two nineteen …”
The numbers washed over Lowell Gantcher. All bad news. He looked around him at the paneled walls of the L.G. Entertainment conference room. He glanced at the people sitting at the long table. Senior operations managers, project managers, sales managers, accountants, bean counters of every stripe, the ineffective marketing ass wipes, the pricks from promotions with their dinner giveaways and frequent player cards as the height of their uninspired ideas. All of them sat there at the trough, waiting for their next paycheck. But the truth was, they weren’t going to get them the following Thursday. There was no money left. They were alien beings to him, these workers, from another planet where you went to work, did your job, got paid for what you did, and lived on what you earned. If they understood overleveraging at all, it wasn’t something they did. It wasn’t their religion.
He was the real alien, he supposed. He wondered what he looked like to them: whether all the Xanax he’d been taking made him appear like a broken robot whose faceplate was about to spring off, or if their faith in him convinced them he looked normal.
It was supposed to be easy to be a CEO. The hard part was supposed to be getting there. Twenty years of building, working long hours, sucking up to bosses and bankers, hitting numbers, winning bids. But now look at him. He’d tripped at the finish line and gone facedown on the asphalt.
Gantcher raised his gaze to the glass that looked out into the main office in time to see a bulked-up, stocky figure moving quickly. Dwyer. A rush of adrenaline hit him in a sickening burst that almost had him throwing up and lunging out of his chair to run at the same time. The figure continued past the room. It was just Williams or Willoughby or whatever his name was, some fireplug he didn’t know well who worked in site planning. Gantcher caught himself gripping the edge of the table.
Relax, for god’s sake, he urged himself to no effect, when Janine Mohrer, a young woman from accounting who issued checks for most of her day, walked in.
“Mr. Gantcher …” She interrupted the meeting, her face chalky white with fear, causing his own alarm to deepen in a way he hadn’t thought possible moments before. “There’s a problem with the insurance policy on the town house job. It had lapsed.”
33
Lenny Brennan Barnes. That was the guy putting the squeeze on his boss.
Little pimp motherfucker. That’s what Potempa had called him.
Behr ran him and discovered the resume of an undergraduate hood scratching his way toward a master’s. There was a drunk and disorderly, a grand larceny for a car theft that he’d pled to, possessing stolen goods, possessing drug paraphernalia, and pandering. All it told him was that Barnes was a dirtbag, as advertised. Behr was tempted to go to his house and have a real personal conversation about all things Potempa, but he couldn’t risk pushing and causing the guy to go public with the video of the girl. It wasn’t his move to make.
Behr had gotten to the office early, and he left just as early, making his way out while the place was still humming with activity, the Payroll Place file on his plate hardly an afterthought, his concentration fragmented, and Potempa nearly in tears. The conversation had only gone on another minute or two. There was no point in asking whether he’d been to the police, but Behr had done so anyway. A defeated shake of the head was Potempa’s answer, and there was nothing else to say.
Instead of sticking around, Behr went to Donohue’s, where he hung on the bar through dead early afternoon quiet and into the fore-end of the minor happy hour wave. He got a hold of the bartender Arch Currey, the gatekeeper of Pal Murphy’s time, and requested an audience.
Pal owned the place and sat like a cardinal in a back booth, holding court. Nearly every piece of business information, both legitimate and illegitimate, of any consequence in Indy flowed through that booth. Pal would certainly know if any high-profile hit had been ordered in town. Whether he would tell Behr anything about it was the only question. Pal wasn’t in the taproom when he arrived, and most of the barstools around Behr were full by the time the familiar visage of white hair, chrome glasses with tinted lenses, white dress shirt and smooth leather blazer took the seat in the booth that had magically remained empty despite there not being a reserved sign resting on the table.
They’d always been on terms. Nothing Pal had ever helped Behr with had come back to hurt him. For his part, Behr had shared some things that had been useful to Pal over the years. Other than that, Behr was a good customer, a regular, at Donahue’s. Which made it all the more strange that Behr got no traction whatsoever tonight. Three hours and three nursed beers didn’t yield him an audience. Pal was there, five yards away, occasionally talking to his waitresses, shaking hands with other patrons, conferring head-to-head with some old-timers, and getting his coffee refilled by Arch Currey every once in a while. Behr tried to keep his cool, but at the two-hour mark he broke protocol.
“Arch,” he said, when the bartender moved by, “he’s aware that I’m-”
“He’s aware,” was all Arch said.
Behr was trying to gauge whether it was a case of Pal having an inkling of what he was there for-because he would certainly have heard it was Behr in that parking garage-and had no information to share, or if some more direct insult was being communicated. Things were pretty chilly when it came to acquaintances willing to help him. He wondered if it was coincidence or like forest animals going to their burrows before a storm. Maybe Pal knew something, but it was too big for him to get involved. That thought made Behr uncomfortable. Then he got a new idea. He needed someone who knew things but didn’t know any better. There was a different Murphy besides Pal-a McMurphy anyway-who might be able to help.
“Some other time,” Behr said to Arch, and tossed a quick two-finger wave Pal’s way as he headed for the door.
34
“Uh-oh, nightmare walking, psychopath stalking,” Kid McMurphy said, his face falling, when he saw Behr.
Kid swallowed a gulp of his drink, which looked to be only water. Stepping off a riser after his sound check, Kid looked pale and much thinner than the last time Behr had seen him. “Kid McMurphy” was a stage name. The singer was Pal’s nephew, and he shared the family talent, albeit unpolished, for information tracking. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Here” happened to be the Vollrath Tavern, which had been in operation on Palmer since the day it opened as a speakeasy back during Prohibition. It still retained the old-time saloon feel, with its ornate wood-and-mirror bar and tile floor, as when John Dillinger used to frequent the place. Nowadays it was a live music venue, and tonight it happened to be hosting one Kid McMurphy and band.
“Hoping to ask you a few questions,” Behr said.
“What makes you think I’d help you?”
“I just think you’re a helpful guy,” Behr said evenly.
“You know, that dude was plenty pissed off about that thing,” Kid said a bit sulkily. Kid had introduced him to a source of information when they’d first met, and Behr had been none too gentle with the man.
“I’m guessing he got over it,” Behr said. He hadn’t come here to discuss past matters. “You don’t need him as a friend anyway-you’re better than that.”
This seemed to brighten Kid’s mood. “You think so?”
“Yeah. Come on, you’ve got talent and what does he got?” Behr had heard Kid on the radio, and the last few bars on the stage ju
st now. He wasn’t bad.
“You know anything about your uncle cooling me? I can’t seem to get booth time with him,” Behr asked.
“Could be. I don’t know anything about it directly, but that’s ‘how he do,’ as the bros say. Either way, the minute I saw you here, I figured you must be fresh out of friends.”
The truth in the musician’s words landed on Behr like a cold, wet blanket. He thought of his usual sources and how little they’d yielded-and those were the ones he could find. The news about Pal was more troubling. The old man was secure enough to say “I don’t know” if it came to it, but he’d refused Behr an audience altogether. Bad sign.
“Maybe I could buy you a few of those whiskey and Cokes you love so much and we can have a talk?” Behr asked.
“I don’t think so …” Kid said, causing Behr to think he was on the verge of another strikeout. “Caught a wicked case of pancreatitis a little while ago. If I drink now, I die.”
“So you’re sober?” Behr asked. Kid’s pupils were the size of pinheads and he didn’t look fully zeroed.
“I still take pills.”
“Oh, good,” Behr said.
“But they don’t do shit without mixing ’em with booze.”
“I’m sure you’ll keep trying.”
“You got that right.”
They moved off to a corner of the bar, away from Kid’s band-mates and the tavern staff, and Behr broke down what was happening from the night of the shooting, his visit with Kolodnik, the lack of security footage, and Breslau telling him to leave it alone. Kid appeared to half listen, his head turned away, bobbing to some inner sound track, until Behr got to the part about the sex DVD he’d recovered, then Kid slowly turned and faced Behr and suddenly became all ears. When Behr mentioned the name Lenny Brennan Barnes, Kid came to life.
