Here Comes the Corpse

by Mark Richard Zubro

  “This is nuts,” Scott said. “Who saves empty boxes?”

  “My grandmother does. You should see her collection. She’s loath to throw out a box because she just might need one of exactly the size she’s got on hand.”

  “Her grandson seems to have somewhat the same problem.”

  I admit I’m a pack rat. While I doubt it is a genetic defect, Scott has found need to mention this peccadillo on more occasions than I prefer him to.

  Scott said, “But these are all the same size.”

  “I didn’t say it was logical. Let’s see how deep this thing goes.” At the back we discovered someone had cut a doorway into the side of the wall to the next storage compartment. The lights from the front of the complex were dim back here.

  Outside the door we listened intently, but heard no sound. The second of the two keys that Scott inserted fit this lock. We couldn’t find a switch to illuminate the darkness. The light grew dimmer as we crept forward. We found flattened mailers in a variety of sizes as well as massive piles of plastic tape containers. In some larger and heavier boxes I discovered hundreds of blank cassettes.

  We came to another door and used the same key to open it that had opened the second door. We listened again and moved cautiously into the third room. We were moving parallel to the drive outside.

  This time we found a light switch. Scott flipped it on. The wall directly ahead of us, front to back, floor to ceiling, had shelves bolted to it. These were completely filled with VCRs. The display lights on all of them were set to the correct time. A three-foot-wide-by-nine-foot-long wooden workbench sat in the middle of the room. A computer and a printer nestled on the far end of it. The wall on either side of the door had rows and rows of tapes all labeled and dated. Each of the narrower perpendicular walls had five four-drawer filing cabinets.

  I picked a tape at random and inserted it into a VCR that was connected to a small television. The first screen showed an opening disclaimer about the age of the people in the video, an FBI warning, and a date-of-production announcement. The film that followed was shot from one unvarying angle. It was a locker room. Guys were entering, taking off clothes, and putting on football uniforms. The men on-screen were obviously not performing erotically for the camera. It was a real locker room, with real guys, bantering, horsing around, and getting ready for a game. It was hard to guess exactly what year it might have been recorded. The hairstyles and clothing were from the midnineties. The quality of the film was a little grainy, but the images were clear. The logo on the uniforms said Iowa Teachers University.

  I said, “We’ve found the storage facilities for their Internet pornography business.” On one shelf the tapes were organized by month and date. Another had hundreds of them numbered consecutively. Others were alphabetized, many color-coded, some a mixture of these. I tried one of those dated thirty years before. The same warning labels appeared, but this time the guys’ clothes and hairdos indicated it was from the early days of disco. It was still a locker room, but definitely not the same as the first one. There were fewer guys, and the angle was different. This time they were putting on wrestling singlets, and there were only a few men at a time. On this one the photographer had caught a portion of the showers. The film quality was much poorer than that of the other.

  We spent nearly an hour looking through the materials. We opened numerous boxes from the previous room. Some contained hundreds of still shots, multiple copies of dozens of guys, sometimes the same guy in multiple poses. One box I found had movie underwear shots, different actors who’d appeared in films in Skivvies. I stuck in a tape I found in this box. Someone had frozen each frame from the start of the underwear-clad crotch’s appearance to the end, then made a continuous videotape of the sequential frames. Another had stills of nude scenes from famous movies.

  One of the most recent tapes had clips of male actors in movies or television. The video showed crotch shots of them either walking or sitting. For example, all the moments in Dawson’s Creek or White Squall when the hunky young actors were moving, standing, or sitting in such a way as to reveal a detailed outline of dick and balls through their pants, or revealing a prominent bulge. Presumably that being where a guy’s dick and balls must be. The scenes from White Squall included around thirty seconds of each frame of every instant of Ryan Phillippe appearing in his white briefs.

  Another film had clips from baseball games. These emphasized players with prominent crotch bulges and/or guys groping themselves. In the filing cabinets the tapes and boxes were cross-indexed by type of sexual activity, by sport, by movie, by year, and so on.

  One of the cabinets was filled with receipts in chronological order dating back over ten years.

  “He’s definitely been selling this stuff,” Scott said. He’d been hunting through the receipts. For the most recent years we found computer printouts of orders. Thousands of them made from two Web sites: sexandnakedstars.com and nakedathletes.com.

  Another drawer had a folder labeled PERSONAL. I found individual photos here. Many of these looked posed.

  I flipped on the computer. The Internet connection came on instantly. I called up the sites. Each was basically a catalog with extensive listings combining pictures of stars along with text describing the action contained within videos. It also had lists of photo sets being offered. None of the names stood out prominently. We found no references that would indicate a specific Michael was more significant than any other. Nothing of me or anybody I knew. Scott was not listed in the sports section.

  Where there had been blocks and codes at Ethan’s home, I found none on this computer. Perhaps he felt no need to hide here. At home a kid or an ex-wife might have been able to stumble onto something unexpectedly. On the hard drive I found a master list of the cast members. It ran on for page after page. If it wasn’t all of them, it had to be most of them. I printed it out. There were no names I recognized. I wasn’t surprised. Porn stars didn’t use real names. There were lots of variations of Rock Hard and Lance Thrust. They weren’t going to be helpful. I did not find model release records. As far as I was aware, all legitimate porn operations kept or were required by law to have on file ID, date of production, and release forms for people who performed in their videos.

  We found bank records. Ethan had at least four separate accounts. None had less than $50,000 on hand. In the last week alone $5,000 worth of orders had been filled.

  “This business was that profitable?” Scott asked.

  I said, “I’m obviously in the wrong profession.”

  Behind the last filing cabinet on the left near the back was another doorway. I asked, “Why was this one blocked with these filing cabinets? If the cops had a search warrant, wouldn’t they move everything and find it? Maybe it was just to deter possible thefts, if the crooks were in a hurry.”

  “Is there a big market for stolen porn?” Scott asked. “For that matter, why steal it in the first place? All you have to do is buy one copy and start making your own.”

  We emptied several of the drawers then wrestled the cabinet out of its slot. Scott unlocked the door.

  We entered the next storage space. From the soft, pale light dimly glowing behind us, we saw a room that seemed much deeper and narrower than the others. We groped for a hand’s span along each wall trying to find a light switch. Nothing. Guided by the light from the room behind, we carefully stepped forward. A central set of bookcases contained tons of electronic equipment: still, digital, and video cameras galore; computers, monitors, and more VCRs stacked to the ceiling. The aisles between the shelving in the center and the walls were so narrow, we had to turn sideways to pass through.

  Scott did say, “Isn’t this the point in teenage slasher movies that someone says they should leave and they don’t? Then a few seconds later someone dies?”

  I said, “I thought we didn’t admit to watching those.”

  “As long as we don’t admit it publicly, we’re okay.”

  We didn’t even discuss splitting up
and going down separate sides. Even somebody who never watched teenage slasher movies knew better than to split up.

  The dark was nearly complete as we approached the far side of the room. The equipment in the center was on cheap, metallic, eight-foot-high, black bookcases. I could barely see my hand in front of my face. When the center shelving ended, we stepped into pitch-dark, empty space.

  Scott let out a squawk, then said, “What the hell?”

  “What?”

  He sputtered and then whispered, “Something just brushed against my forehead.” I felt his arm reach up. I heard a soft click. A dim bulb flashed on.

  Six inches from my left hand an upturned face stared sightlessly at the ceiling.

  12

  Your average amateur sleuth might be able to trip happily through acres of bloody corpses, but at that moment I was unnerved. I don’t care how many dead bodies anyone has seen before, finding one where and when you don’t expect it is unnerving. I made some such noise as ulp or erp. I yanked my hand away and jerked back into the end of the center storage shelves, sending several video cameras crashing to the ground. Scott grabbed my elbow and steadied me. When I was stable again, Scott whispered the obvious: “He’s dead.”

  The body had a bullet entry wound just in front of its ear on the right side of the head. The exit wound was obvious from the blood and gore caked over the papers to the side and behind him. He was slumped to his left against a desk. His right arm dangled down to a gun lying near his right hand. I didn’t recognize whoever it was.

  “Suicide?” Scott said.

  “It looks that way or was made to look that way.” I didn’t see a note, but I wasn’t prepared to move the blood and goreencrusted papers to check for one. The blood was dry, but I saw no evidence of flies or bugs or maggots. I didn’t think he’d been dead long.

  I heard boxes being moved in the room behind us. It was too late to pretend we weren’t here. We’d been speaking in low voices but anyone would have heard us. The crash of equipment moments before would certainly have given us away. I pulled the string and turned the light off.

  A voice called, “I saw the light switch off. That’s not very subtle. Who’s there?”

  I didn’t recognize the voice. The tone sounded confident and sure, tough, as if a gun was behind it and someone who wasn’t afraid to use it. A male voice—deep and threatening. A murderer? The person didn’t identify himself as being from the police.

  We were far enough back in the room to have chanced a game of hide-and-seek in the dark. Then again, all whoever it was had to do was stand in the original doorway and wait. And there could be more than one of them behind us.

  With luck we could find the controls for the outside door opening, but we were extremely unlikely to find them in the darkness. If this person meant us harm, there wasn’t much we could do. Certainly there wasn’t any point to standing uselessly in the dark waiting for something to happen. If there were enough of them to be on guard outside as well, we were probably doomed anyway.

  I pulled the switch back on. I frantically scanned the walls for buttons to open the outer doors. I spotted a series of switches obscured by papers stacked on top of stuffed in-and out-trays. Unhesitatingly, I flung aside the papers and plastic and flicked all of them. More lights blazed, and the garagelike outer door rumbled upward. Orange sodium light swept in. We shoved aside boxes and in a moment stood in an alleyway between buildings. No one appeared behind us with a gun, but I’m not sure we gained much by the move. The place was deserted. The manager’s little shed where an indifferent teenager had been on duty was over half a mile away. Our car was at the opposite end of the building from where we were. At least we were no longer trapped. We ducked down the nearest side drive and peered cautiously back. A few seconds later Jack Miller appeared in the entrance to the first storage bay we’d entered.

  I stepped out. He saw me and placed his gun in its holster under his armpit. He walked over.

  “How’d you get in here?” I asked.

  “A hefty bribe to the teenager out front, and you?”

  “We had keys and an access code. I meant, how’d you know to come here?”

  “I got word this afternoon from the guy I hired to go through Cormac’s computer that this place existed. You were already gone. I hurried down. This has to be the heart of their operation.”

  I nodded toward the compartments. “We saw taping capability, hundreds, probably thousands of tapes and stills, and financial records.”

  “Have you seen Cormac?”

  “There’s a dead body in the fourth room.”

  Miller lost none of his suave, cool reserve. “You guys are hell on wheels.” He strode past us into the fourth space. He came out a moment later seeming a little less confident. I guess dead bodies weren’t on his daily menu. “It’s Cormac Macintire. Sure looks like suicide.”

  “Could be faked,” I said.

  “We better call the cops,” Scott said.

  It was morbid to think of hunting through any more boxes or files with the dead body sitting there. It was also useless. It would take days to inventory the whole thing. The idea of running away and pretending we’d never been here was nonsensical. Miller used his cell phone to summon help. While we waited, we phoned Todd Bristol, our lawyer. He said we should remain calm and tell the truth. He gave us the name of a lawyer in St. Louis to call if we needed to.

  While we waited, Miller asked, “How much of this stuff have you looked through?”

  I said, “We spent about an hour before we found the fourth room. There’s zillions of tape and photos. I’m wondering, how did these two get started? What was the original connection?”

  Miller said, “Hard to know if how they met or how they got started means anything.”

  Scott suggested, “Maybe Macintire was in a sport Ethan filmed.”

  I asked, “How did you get permission to get into Cormac’s office?”

  “Ethan let me into Cormac’s office when he hired me. Nothing I found in my first search indicated why he might be missing or in danger. I found a computer expert down here to continue cracking the codes on Cormac’s hard drive. I tried and I couldn’t. Before I came here, I went back to Cormac’s to make a second search. There was no hint about who killed Ethan Gahain.”

  We explained to the beat cops. We gave details to the detectives. We spoke with higher officials. The son of Cecil Macintire dead in their city was going to rattle news cages across the country. The deceased scion being a mogul of a porn empire was going to make immense headlines. That one of the most famous baseball players in America had been among those who had found the body was only going to increase the furor.

  The detective in charge, Jerry Berke, was tall and burly and didn’t seem to like us or anybody else for that matter. He maintained a stoical silence in front of his superiors. He snapped and barked at peers, subordinates, and possible witnesses/suspects.

  “You were here because the parents asked you to come down?” he repeated for the third time. The sneer in his voice had an added note of warning and threat that it would take Scott’s nephew years to master.

  I certainly didn’t think we needed our lawyer here, but I wasn’t about to put up with an asshole cop. I said, “We’ve answered that question and all your others. We’re leaving.” I wasn’t about to attempt an imitation of an amateur sleuth and start pushing this guy or suggesting how he should be investigating. I didn’t sense a lovable, kindly interior behind his gruff exterior.

  “I don’t care for private investigators,” the cop said, “and I dislike any kind of interference from anybody, whether disguised as help or not. Stay away.” The detective turned to Scott. “I’ve got a gay son who would want your autograph. Would you mind?”

  Scott’s fame is immense. He’s had tons of press coverage and media attention. One morning over my winter break last year, we were in Battle Mountain, Nevada, eating at Frieda’s Diner. I couldn’t imagine a spot we’d be less likely to be recognized. In
minutes the place began to fill, people whispering and a few pointing. We were given breakfast on the house. It’s an oddity. Fame can trump homophobia—sometimes. Or maybe the people of Battle Mountain are more enlightened and sophisticated than other members of the population. Or maybe they just like to gawk.

  Scott signed the cop’s notebook.

  The last thing the cop said was “I don’t advise you guys to leave town.”

  I said, “Neither Scott nor I killed anybody. Unless we’re suspects, I don’t think we need to deal with that kind of warning, but we’ll have our lawyer call you.” I didn’t want to be stuck in St. Louis. I didn’t want to deal with even one police jurisdiction hassling us, much less two.

  It was late. It would take five hours to drive back to Chicago. I wasn’t in the mood to back up my brave words and actually risk leaving town until I had spoken with Todd Bristol again.

  Scott and I found a room at the renovated train station on the west edge of downtown St. Louis. Miller already had reservations at the Adams-Mark hotel. After we checked in, I called Todd. He said he’d deal with the police. My mother had left a message with our service to call her no matter what the time. She told me the funeral would be next Saturday. There would be a wake the night before. I didn’t see any reason why I wouldn’t be back for both of those things.

  “Have you found anything out?” my mother asked.

  I told her about Cormac’s death and the porn empire. I was sure she’d be hearing about it soon enough. She could decide on the course she should take when the news broke to Ethan’s parents. Sex and murder mixed would make the top of all the local newscasts as long as there wasn’t a currently burning building to exploit.

  Miller, Scott, and I stood in the barrel-ceilinged lobby of the Hyatt Regency Train Station and talked about the murders. Miller leaned his butt against the marble-tiled wall. Jeans, T-shirt, leather jacket, running shoes—a young track star in his prime.