Thirteen Million Dollar Pop

by David Levien

  “Care to enlighten me?”

  “Shit you don’t need to know. Can’t.”

  “Still, I’d like to,” Behr said, forcing himself not to lean forward in his seat.

  Potempa paused and scratched his chin. “Well, one bit I can tell you is: we weren’t hired for security. It was just meant to be risk assessment, and an … advisory role.”

  “The political thing.”

  “That’s right. We’re not just steaming envelopes and running drivers’ licenses here.”

  “I know that,” Behr said.

  “That exec protection bullshit was just something we threw in for … it was loss leader for—” Potempa stopped himself.

  Behr suddenly understood. “For when he goes to Washington. So he’d be happy with you when he became important.”

  “And he is. He’s happy. Thanks to you.” Potempa smiled and put his hands out in a you-see gesture.

  “Uh-huh,” Behr breathed. “But he went with another company as soon as he announced.”

  “Well, it’s unfortunate, but I’ve seen it before. They’re looking for a little distance. We’re hoping it’s temporary. Look, Frank, this is a complicated situation. Caro is a sophisticated organization. Protecting people, property, that’s just the surface. There’s another layer—risk assessment, assets, digital proprietary—we’re like … Do you play the piano?”

  “The piano? No.”

  “Me neither. Well, I play a little. Not well. My daughter, now she …” There was a slight hitch in Potempa’s voice, then he gathered himself and continued. “She was a hell of a little player. I could’ve had a ski condo in Vail for what I paid in lessons for her.”

  Potempa looked to Behr for the sympathetic laugh between well-to-do fathers. There was nothing there for him. “I picked up a few things coming in and out during her lessons, her practice.” Behr’s eyes went to the photos behind Potempa, to the pretty, dark-haired girl in them, who became a woman in the shots, and then went absent.

  “Anyway, this place”—Potempa waved his hands toward the outer office and beyond—“is a grand piano. It runs on a complex set of levers and wires, various offices and pieces, all interconnected. And the personnel, we’re all the keys. We each have our role, our note to play. Without any one of us, things aren’t complete. But the A sharp doesn’t necessarily know what the D flat is doing, when it’s going to sound. And it doesn’t need to. The keys all just need to be ready when they’re called on to do their part. Like you were the other night. You performed, no question. And Kolodnik was goddamned lucky it was you there. But now it’s time to stop the inquiries and go back to position until you’re pressed into service again. The rest will work itself out. You know what I’m saying?”

  Behr let the aria settle. “Maybe,” he finally said, standing.

  “Maybe,” Potempa said, laughing to himself and pointing at Behr, who headed for the door and paused before leaving.

  “What does she do with it now?” he asked.

  “What’s that?” Potempa wondered.

  “Your daughter. The piano. Does she still play?”

  “No,” Potempa said, a new gravity joining the worn aspect. “She doesn’t do that anymore.”

  Potempa turned his chair, picking his glass off the desk as he went, and faced the window. The room descended into a stony silence. Behr lingered for another moment and then left.

  22

  Spiker’s Tavern was a taproom near the American football stadium. It had sawdust on the floor; a worn wooden bar; and was in a roughish—or at least an industrial-looking—part of town, so Dwyer knew it would make Gantcher nervous. He was sitting on a corner barstool, thanking bloody Jehovah that the marketing department at Guinness had finally penetrated America as he was hunkered over a decently poured pint of the stuff when a man entered who could only be Gantcher. Dressed in khaki trousers, tasseled loafers, and a melon-colored polo shirt, the tosser was a half step away from a country club and bleeding madras. It also looked as if he hadn’t picked up a barbell in his life, and spent his time shielded from the sun in a sweet shop, pale and pudgy as he was. Dwyer watched him glance around the half-dark pub, struggling and nervous, and take a step in the wrong direction toward a punter in a Carhartt jacket before he rethought it and stopped. Finally he found Dwyer at the bar and Dwyer nodded, jumped off his barstool, and signaled to a secluded table, where they sat.

  “If you want something you’re gonna have to get it from the barman. No waiters here,” Dwyer advised.

  “No. I don’t really drink much. I mean, wine, but I doubt they have much of a list,” Gantcher said.

  Dwyer said nothing.

  “Never been here before, maybe I’ll come back later and become a regular,” Gantcher chattered uncomfortably to fill the silence.

  “I’m sure you’ll be real popular in your poofter shirt,” Dwyer said, causing Gantcher to pull back as if he’d been slapped. It was clear he wasn’t used to chopsing like that.

  Good, Dwyer thought, at least he’s listening now.

  “We’ve had complications, obviously,” Dwyer said, using the silence. “This needs to be sanitized. Now. And I need more money.”

  “More money?”

  “Correct. For operational expenses and fee,” Dwyer said.

  “How much?”

  If word was going to get out and this was going to be the last job, then he needed the whole amount. “A million American.”

  “A million!” Gantcher lunged forward. “The whole job didn’t cost that.”

  “But it isn’t a job anymore. It’s an emergency override, like at a leaky nuclear plant. And the money’s necessary to buy safety,” Dwyer said, knowing the effect the threat of his words carried.

  “I know it is,” Gantcher said, sounding forlorn, “but I don’t have it.”

  Dwyer expected resistance. Rich blokes never wanted to pay. But when they were short of cash, they acted like they didn’t like the idea, rather than admitting they didn’t have the money. So the fact that Gantcher was sitting there actually volunteering he didn’t have the cash was problematic. “The bloody ’ell do you mean you don’t have it?” he demanded.

  “I just … don’t.”

  A beat. “How much do you have, then?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Fuck off, nothing.”

  “Really. I’m tapped. I’ve broken T-bills. Drained retirement accounts, kids’ college funds. I’m drawing down lines of credit now to keep my office open, and I’m almost empty.”

  “Look, man, you may think you’re having problems now, but if this thing goes unmanaged and becomes the dog’s dinner, you’re going to know sorrow you never imagined,” Dwyer said, causing Gantcher to go green.

  “I’ve gotta go get to work, but we’re going to meet again,” Dwyer said, slamming his fist on the table, which lifted his pint glass with a rattle. Gantcher’s eyes bulged with fear. “In the meantime, find some fucking dosh,” Dwyer snarled, and with that he left Gantcher sitting alone in the bar.

  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 lo
st 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 kno
wn 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.

  24

  Dwyer sat quietly in the back corner of La Pasión, the Latin restaurant his lead shooter supposedly favored, spooning black beans and rice into his mouth and watching the place unfold in front of him. It was a small, local spot, undecorated save tables and chairs and a cerveza calendar next to the cash register, so it was a bit unusual for him to be there. He’d sat and ordered, and after a while they had forgotten about him more or less. He saw that most of their business was takeaway. There were a few mothers with children who chatted in Spanish with the counter girl, who was also the waitress. She was a pleasant eighteen-year-old who spoke good English and had gone a little plump from too much comida criolla. There was a wizened old cook, his whites food stained and sweat soaked, who appeared from time to time in the kitchen doorway in the back. Dwyer asked a young, wiry busboy for a refill of his water and noticed a jailhouse tattoo of three teardrops near the webbing of his thumb and a scar on his face. The tattoo was gang or prison code, either of membership or signifying he’d killed. Dwyer didn’t know whether the three represented a first killing or a total number of victims. Of course the kid could’ve been some aspirant who’d done the inking himself.