Thirteen Million Dollar Pop

23

It was a lot to think about, that soliloquy Behr had gotten from Potempa. And Behr was giving it plenty of thought as he sat in his car outside the office, waiting for Potempa’s blue Cadillac to leave the lot. He’d told the client, Lutz, about the red flags an investigator looked for, and now he’d glimpsed a few himself. Potempa had been accommodating instead of pissed off. That was one. He’d been drinking. He’d even given Behr a drink. Maybe his boss had been in a sharing mood. Maybe. But Behr had been told to back off. Sure, it had been in gilded, metaphoric language, but the message was still clear enough. The words seemed to lock into place with the things that had been bothering Behr, and he knew that he wasn’t going to back off. Quite the goddamned contrary. The Caddie pulled out, humping down in the swale between garage and street, then came up and turned right onto Maryland.

Behr was already in gear, and left plenty of slack between the vehicles, more than he usually would. It didn’t really matter if Behr lost Potempa, since he could always pick him up again tomorrow, and whatever it was that had Karl Potempa so distracted, he was still former FBI, and getting burned on a tail of his boss was not the road to job security.

It was a fairly easy follow, with afternoon traffic flowing in between his and Potempa’s car, as they crossed into the downtown area. Potempa turned onto Illinois and went halfway down the block before reaching the Canterbury, a boutique hotel, where he pulled over. A parked minivan started up and signaled in front of Behr, and he allowed it to pull out, then took the metered space, which had a good view of the front of the hotel.

As soon as Potempa got out of his car, a couple stepped toward him from under the awning. The man was midtwenties, with slicked-back black hair and a chin beard. He was just under six feet, thin but athletic, and wore a waist-length leather jacket and tight jeans. The woman, a girl really, was younger than the man, attractive, and had long blond hair that hadn’t been washed in a long time. She wore a miniskirt with pale, pipe-thin legs shooting out from under it.

Potempa saw them, and the trio came together a few feet away from the hotel’s front door. There was no handshake between the men. Potempa moved clumsily to greet the woman, but she hung back a step behind the young guy. The two men started talking, and while it didn’t seem heated, it was a long way from friendly. Behr wanted to hear what they were saying, and slid down his window, but the traffic noise and distance made it impossible.

Behr considered what he was witnessing. The young woman was Potempa’s girlfriend and the man was her brother? Or husband? The girl was a hooker Potempa had become infatuated with and the guy her pimp? That’s when the young man reached to his waistband and pulled out a manila envelope, which he waved around a bit. This caused Potempa to lunge for it. But the younger man was light on his feet and slipped back a few steps out of range. Potempa squared with the pair and even from this distance Behr could see anger in the older man’s hiked-up shoulders and clenched fists. There was some more conversation, then a halfhearted reach for the girl by Potempa, which she shrugged off. Then the group parted ways. The young pair backed up a few feet, still facing Potempa, before turning and walking briskly around the corner. For his part, Potempa stood rooted to his spot for a moment, before his shoulders descended and he moved back toward his car.

So two choices, a fork in the road, presented for Behr: follow Potempa, see where he went, or track the young pair and that envelope Potempa had lunged for. Behr stayed with the envelope.

Behr fed the wafer-thin slim jim between the window and frame, and used it to reach for the latch lock. Countless seasons of alternating hot and cold weather had swelled and contracted the wood and left him a nice gap with which to work. The house was a small and aging bungalow common to the area. This one had a somewhat ratty lawn and peeling paint, and was not the kind of place Behr had been spending his time lately. He had picked up the couple, around the corner from the hotel, walking toward a five-year-old Lexus SUV. He followed them out of the downtown area for a few miles to the near west side and the formerly pleasant bedroom community of Riverside that had fallen on hard times that the weed and seed program hadn’t been able to rectify.

The pair had gone inside the house, the man carrying the manila envelope, and after forty-five minutes of sitting there, Behr watched them exit. The girl now wore a short black dress and silver high heels, and the man was empty-handed. Then they got back in their car and drove away. Behr was tempted to follow them, to see where they were going, but he figured that envelope was sitting inside and that now was his chance to see what was in it and why it had so agitated Potempa. So he’d gone around the back and banged hard on the window in case someone else was home. No one was. No one came to investigate the noise, at least.

The notch of the slim jim found the latch, and Behr pulled, feeling it yield. His heart picked up its pace to a brisk hum as he slid the window up and glanced around the patch of backyard for any witnesses. He realized he was finally pulling that B and E Caro had been looking for. He fed a leg inside, sat, swiveled, and brought the rest of his body along.

Behr found himself inside a living room that was sloppy with clothing and scattered magazines and redolent of burned hashish. The place was sparsely decorated, but what furniture was there looked expensive, including a Persian-style carpet, a large flat-screen television, and a buttery-looking leather couch. There was also a high-end digital video camera mounted on a tripod standing in a corner. A mission-style desk pressed against a wall was buried in newspapers and held a computer with a webcam mounted on top of the screen. Behr hurried toward it to see if it was a security measure that was activated, but it wasn’t. The computer, hard drive, and camera all appeared dormant.

Taking a quick tour around the house, Behr found the two bedrooms, one bathroom, and kitchen were all vacant. The same was true of the unfinished basement, which featured a brand-new side-by-side washer and dryer. He returned upstairs and gave the kitchen a closer look, which is where he found the manila envelope, resting on top of a yellow pages on the counter. The envelope was closed by a clasp and wasn’t sealed, and Behr opened it to find an unmarked DVD in a jewel case. He set it aside and gave the living room a quick going over. On a cluttered coffee table Behr found a saucer full of ashes and a blackened piece of hash impaled on the end of a large safety pin. Next to it was a glass pipe, heavy with resin. As much as he looked, Behr could not find the other things he was looking for: a deed, a mortgage paper, credit card statement, a phone bill, or checkbook with the resident’s name on it. He heard cars passing outside, and froze, ready to leap out the window, each time one occasionally slowed.

Before long Behr started to feel that sticking around was going to present increasing risk and diminishing return, and that it was time to leave. He cast a last look around, grabbed the envelope with the DVD, and let himself out the window through which he had come.

Behr had seen videos like it many times before, in fact it seemed he could hardly help but see them, even if he was trying not to-the Internet was so full of this particular type of material. He sat in his car four blocks away from the house with his laptop out, watching the DVD. It was amateur porn, shot in the bedroom of the house he’d just left. It wasn’t badly lit, as the new cameras were very light sensitive. A girl walked into frame, in short shorts and bra, Behr was sure he recognized her as the one he’d just seen on the street and entering and exiting the house. He also figured he knew what would happen next: Potempa would join her in a compromising situation. But Behr was wrong about that.

While he considered it, the girl’s clothes came off, revealing a slender and supple young body, pubic hair trimmed almost completely, with a tiny Playboy bunny tattoo on her hip. She lay down and started caressing herself. There was some banal conversation between her and an off-camera male about how horny she was, and then the man joined her in shot. He was young also, slim and muscled, but his face was never in frame, probably by design, as the width was occasionally adjusted, by remote, Behr assumed.

It’s the sleazy guy from the meeting. If Behr had to hazard one, that would be his guess. The faceless man, tattoos of Far Eastern characters covering his forearms, “T-Bone” stitched across his abdomen in gothic script, pulled out his genitals, also groomed, and the girl serviced him with her mouth. Then the couple had sex, first in missionary position, her legs up, moaning and groaning into the camera. Next, she turned around and opened herself to the lens and he continued from behind in a three-quarter profiling shot, everything above his shoulder still out of frame.

The scene went on and on, and though Behr was tempted to speed the frame rate, he didn’t. He needed to scan the whole disk so he didn’t miss anything, like specific names being mentioned or any other important piece of conversation, or other people joining in. Nothing like that occurred, but the thoroughness paid off at about the seven-minute mark. That’s when Behr began to realize there were edits, cuts to different angles, close-ups from below the genitalia known euphemistically in the porn world as scuba shots. The camera came off the tripod and started to move. All of it told Behr that there had to be at least one other person in the room, if not more, which meant that unlike some victims of spy cam setups, the girl had to know she was being filmed.

The whole thing was nineteen minutes and twelve seconds long. It was a clip like tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands or millions, all over DVDs in porn shops and on Internet sites. But Potempa had been reaching for this one. Finally the girl went to her knees and the man finished in her face in a close-up. That’s when Behr was able to finally recognize her. It was why his boss had been so interested in the envelope. Though she had her hair dyed blond now, the girl was Potempa’s daughter.