Sex and Murder.com: A Paul Turner Mystery (21 page)

Turner thought, all the unattractive ones don’t get solicited. He didn’t think Switzel looked particularly hot—he wasn’t Turner’s type. Looking at him objectively, he thought the guy might appeal to some men, in an undersized-athlete kind of way.

“Did you ask the other busboys?”

“No. I told him I was straight, and that I didn’t go in for that kind of thing. Then I shook my head and walked away. A few minutes later I saw him talking to Alex, who is a goof. He’s this tall, lanky blond who always claims he’s ready for anything. You know, hinting like he’s this big sexual adventurer. He talks about being a free spirit, but I think all that he does is ingest recreational drugs and screw women every chance he gets.”

“What did Alex do?” Fenwick asked.

“I saw Alex talking to Dave. They looked from me to the guy. I guessed the guy must have propositioned Alex. Now, Dave is real quiet, never says much. Just does a decent job and goes home. He’s trying to finish his undergrad degree and work at the same time. I’ve seen Dave with several women he dated. I didn’t think he was interested in men.”

“What happened?”

“Alex and Dave came over to me and said the guy had offered fifty thousand for the three of us to spend the night with him.”

“The price had gone up.”

“Yeah.”

“They were interested?”

“Alex was, for sure. He kept repeating he was straight, but for a one third portion of fifty thousand, he’d be ready to do it with a camel. He also kept saying that just because he did sex for money, didn’t mean he was gay. Dave said his third would pay for a lot of his bills at the University of Chicago.” Switzel took another deep breath. “This was all pretty illegal, huh?”

“Pretty much,” Turner said.

“Are you going to arrest me?”

“No,” Fenwick said. “We’re after a murderer.”

“I still don’t see how this is connected to any killing,” Switzel said.

Fenwick said, “Three names on a dead man’s computer. Three guys who happened to know each other and worked together, and on a night listed in his computer were doing something out of character and illegal.”

“Did anybody ever try to blackmail you because of what you did?” Turner asked.

“No.”

“You said you were getting divorced,” Turner said.

“That’s because my wife refuses to stay home. She goes out with her friends to party every weekend and most weeknights now. She never stayed home to take care of the baby. I have to work. I’ve got to get sitters, day care, or my mother to watch little Charlene.”

“So you had sex with him,” Turner stated.

“Look, I think I better be careful here. This guy made an offer. After what he had paid for that meal, he certainly seemed like he could deliver. The other two guys were certainly willing. Alex was convincing. It was only money. What did I care if some fag groped himself while he stared at me naked?”

“What actually happened that night?” Fenwick asked.

“He left. We worked the rest of our shift. I assumed it was a joke. Who would pay that much money for sex? He said there’d be a cab waiting for us outside the entrance when we got off. Alex insisted we walk out together. There was a cab with the door open, just like the guy said there would be, and we got in. The driver spoke no English. He drove us to this address on the north side. The cab was already paid for.”

Fenwick said, “You didn’t know who the guy was, yet you went along with it? He could have been a killer.”

“He seemed pretty harmless. There were three of us. What was one queer going to be able to do to us?”

Turner said, “The word queer is off limits for the rest of this conversation.”

“Huh?” Switzel said.

“Just tell the story,” Turner ordered.

Switzel continued, “We were at this mansion, all clustered around a gate. We could see ourselves on a security monitor set into the wall. Alex rang the bell, and a few seconds later the gate swung open.”

“You guys still weren’t worried?” Turner asked.

“I was a little. The front door swung open, and we entered this hallway. A door opened at the far end while the one behind us closed with a soft click. The guy was there. He led us to a room that didn’t have any windows. It was huge and luxuriously furnished, maybe half the size of my whole house. Lots of overstuffed chairs and pillows. Warm and bright colors. Beds and mirrors. A high ceiling, but not as high as a gymnasium.”

“Then what happened?” Turner asked.

Switzel did some nervous hand wringing. “It got even more strange. He had stacks of money on a desk. He said each one contained sixteen thousand, six hundred sixty-six dollars. Then he said, ‘You’re guaranteed that. You can earn a great deal more.’ Alex asked, ‘How?’ The guy said something like, ‘It depends on what you’re willing to do and how far you will go.’ Alex agreed right off to everything he asked us to do. Dave turned out to be real passive. He didn’t make any objections. For some of the stuff, I had to be convinced.”

“Like what?” Turner asked.

“He wanted us to rim each other, each of us had to screw the other. The more often we came, the more money we would get. It was weird, a bunch of straight guys doing all this fa—gay stuff.”

“Gay for pay,” Turner said.

“I guess.”

“Did you ever see anybody else?”

“No.”

Fenwick asked, “He wasn’t afraid the three of you would gang up on him and rob him? Even kill him? That’s a lot of money.”

“One of the first things he said was. ‘You may try to rob me. Harming me would be pointless. You have been recorded by the security cameras which are hooked to a recording device miles from here.’ I believed him, but it didn’t make a lot of difference. He was willing to pay so much, why get greedy? Every time we performed another. act, he added more money to the piles.”

“Did he go out of the room to get the money?”

“No. He had like an automatic teller machine attached to a computer right in the wall of his mansion. He’d type in a code, and money would come out.”

“What did the guy do while the three of you were having sex?”

“He watched.”

“That’s it?” Fenwick asked.

“Just about. He never even took his clothes off. Halfway through, he spent nearly a half hour caressing Alex’s waist, hips, stomach, and abs with his finger tips. I got pretty bored. Alex is really skinny—I guess the guy liked that. After that, the guy didn’t do a thing. He played straight porn videos all the time we were there. That helped me do stuff sometimes. I could shut out the guys and picture being in the scene on the television.”

“You spent the night?” Fenwick asked.

“We were there until about five. We stopped when I finally balked and refused to be talked into something. It was pretty disgusting. Doing sex stuff with guys,” he shrugged, “most of it wasn’t real bad. I mean a lot of the time I had to beat off to stay hard, but there weren’t any whips or chains or anything. What ended it all was when he asked us to piss on each other. I was too tired to listen to the guys anymore. It was all too much. He offered us an extra five thousand to piss. Those two guys did it on each other and got the money, but that was the end.”

“Did he tell you his name?”

“No.”

“This all seemed normal to you?” Fenwick asked.

“There was an awful lot of money on that table. That’s mostly what I thought about.”

“What did he look like?”

“He wasn’t an ugly guy, kind of young. You get used to being offered money by older, out-of-shape guys. He looked like he worked out a lot. He had these big enormous shoulders, a thick neck, and short hair.”

In the car Fenwick said, “We got piss from here to the east coast.”

“A vivid description if I ever heard one,” Turner commented.

Fenwick continued, “We got Lenzati. We got Werberg. We’ve got connections. We’ve got kinky sex.”

“If we add drugs and rock and roll, do we get a prize?”

“If there’s chocolate involved, I want to win.”

Turner said, “We did find that one room that matches what Switzel described, but we didn’t find a teller machine or a money outlet at the house.”

Fenwick said. “I wonder if maybe they did have a secret location, or maybe they moved their operation.”

“That’s real possible.”

“And Werberg claimed they were being secretly recorded and the records were miles away. We’ve got to find that place.”

Turner said, “Unless he was bluffing. Did you notice a lot of the guys we’ve talked to have been thin to the point of emaciation? Maybe that’s the kind of guy who turned Werberg on. Even that Terry Waldron was really skinny. Was he a conquest? Or did he have to let himself be conquered before he got the job?”

“We’ll have to ask,” Fenwick said. “What I still want to know is if Werberg wanted to hire a whore or whores, why risk asking guys who might very easily turn him in for solicitation? Or might be inclined to beat him up? Why engage in risky behavior?”

“Why are
we
in jobs that could put us at risk?”

“It’s not the same thing,” Fenwick said.

“I’m not sure sometimes.” Turner shrugged. “Why would he? The thrill of the asking? The thrill of the chance of making it with, or in this case watching straight guys do it?”

“You get turned on by watching straight guys?”

Turner said, “I can imagine a famous sports star naked, like Chipper Jones, who plays third base for the Atlanta Braves. He’s got a kid. I can assume he’s straight. I can picture him doing it with a woman. There’s an attraction to fantasizing about hot, straight guys doing sexual things, but I think that’s more of a kid fantasy. I prefer willing partners. However, I don’t think seeking risky sexual partners is an exclusively gay phenomenon.”

“I love it every time you say phenomenon.”

“Whatever turns you on, so to speak.”

18

Before they kill me, I’d like to be able to touch one. Not one that I’ve killed. It’s no good touching them when they’re a corpse. I want to touch a live one. I’d like him to touch me back.

The next two they wanted to speak with were Nancy Korleski and her husband. They lived on Webster Street in Lincoln Park several blocks from the DePaul University campus. When she answered the door she was wearing a Harvard University sweatshirt and faded jeans. She had a damp cloth in her hand and a babushka tied backwards around her hair. She was blond with a statuesque body. They introduced themselves and asked if they could come in.

“What’s this about?” she asked.

“We want to ask you about Craig Lenzati.”

“It’s a little late now to do anything about my complaint. I called every official I could think of about that son of a bitch. He had more protection than the pope.”

“Would you tell us about it?”

“You bet. Come on in.”

She led them into the living room, which was a mixture of chrome and comfort. Pillows and overstuffed chairs surrounded gleaming steel beams.

“What happened?” Turner asked.

“I went to Lenzati and Werberg for a job when I finished all of my training. I have three advanced degrees in computer operations, computer science, and engineering, plus undergrad degrees in physics and math. In college they told me I could write my own ticket. I tried to start a business with my husband, several businesses in fact. They all failed. We just don’t have any business sense.

“I promised myself I’d never work for someone else, but we were so far in debt, I had to get a job with a company. Theirs is the best, no doubt about it. I had fantastic credentials, so they interviewed me themselves. I could have gotten a job anyplace. Their offer was the best, with the highest salary and a huge bonus. Lenzati took my husband and me out to dinner. He said the job was mine if we agreed to have sex with them.”

“He out and out asked for sex?” Fenwick asked.

“He was actually pretty subtle. He kept hinting around about what he could do for Charley and me and what we should be able to do for them. Finally, when my husband was in the washroom, he said he had the power to make all our debts from our businesses go away. We wouldn’t have to wait years.”

“How far in debt were you?” Turner asked.

“A couple hundred thousand. And we had no income at all.”

“He knew this?”

“He seemed to know everything. Afterward, I realized he must have gotten into our financial and credit records. My husband had been laid off, with no severance package at all. I can’t prove it, but I think Lenzati may have had something to do with my husband losing his job at his company.”

“What was that?” Turner asked.

“He was a programmer at Silicon Techno Laser in Oak Brook. One day he was just let go. I bet that creep put them up to that.”

“Do you have any proof of that?”

“No, but you can add things up, and they make sense. At the time he asked for sex, we were about to lose our house and everything, but I said no. I didn’t wait for my husband to get back. I got up and left. I met Charley as he was coming back. I told him what happened. We left.”

“So you never had sex with him?” Fenwick asked.

“I called the sex discrimination offices at the city, state, and federal levels to report the son of a bitch. A guy named Girote showed up from the mayor’s office.”

“Vincent Girote?” Turner asked.

“Yes. Lenzati was creepy, but Girote was disgusting. I hated him on sight, and what he had to say was worse. I asked him how come the mayor’s office was interested in our case. He answered me with threats.”

“What kind of threats?” Turner asked.

“He told me that if I didn’t drop our sexual harassment complaint, he could make our lives miserable. We hired a lawyer, who we could not afford. That jerk told me I couldn’t prove anything. It would be my word against Lenzati’s. Later, I realized we should have lied and said my husband did hear the offer. We should have said that from the beginning. It was too late then. He advised us to give it up. We didn’t have the money to pursue the issue.

“After I called the police to complain, things started to happen. Inspectors showed up at the house: electric, water, sewer. They stopped picking up our garbage. I spent hours on the phone, which began to work intermittently. Our lawyer refused to pursue the case, and stopped returning our calls. We couldn’t find another lawyer in town who would touch the case. That first cut-rate guy we hired screwed everything up. No one showed up at the press conference he called. He tried visiting the newspapers. He got nowhere. I don’t know why not.”