Sex and Murder.com: A Paul Turner Mystery (25 page)

“I’m protecting no one.”

“What’s so sacred about these guys’ reputations?” Fenwick asked. “They’re dead. Trust me, they won’t care. It strikes me, you’re the one worried now, and only about yourself.”

Girote harumphed, but said nothing.

Turner said, “Tell us about the complaints you got about Lenzati.”

“There was only the one.”

Turner and Fenwick waited patiently.

“Korleski had a lawyer. She was dangerous.”

“Bull pizzle,” Fenwick said. “Some big deal rich guy screws a woman he shouldn’t. A few moral crusaders talk a lot, several of the unwashed titter a bit, but most everybody else doesn’t give a shit.”

Girote flew into a rage. “What planet are you from? This is America, land of the morally superior and home of the indignantly self-righteous. A taint on someone’s reputation can have all kinds of consequences. Why can’t you even begin to understand? Public outrage does make a difference. Dealing with wealthy business people is vitally important. Keeping them from being harassed by ignorant fools is paramount.”

Fenwick asked, “If he was a sex-crazed maniac using his powerful position to force women to have sex with him, then doesn’t he deserve to take a fall?”

“He wasn’t a sex-crazed maniac. He was a good man. All kinds of people have it in for the rich and famous. They have a right to be protected from people like Korleski, who are nothing more than opportunistic whores, trying to inflict guilt on mostly innocent people or to milk them for money or personal gain.”

“Why not just settle out of court?” Turner asked. “So she makes an accusation. Why not just find out how much she intends to sue for and pay her? He’s got enough money. There’s got to be a lot more to this. What you’ve explained so far doesn’t add up to a need to go to such great lengths to cover up—and certainly does not lead to murder.”

“Don’t you see? Don’t you understand?”

“I guess I don’t,” Fenwick said. “Try again.”

“It’s all public perception. The competition is greater than ever in the computer industry. If it got out about what he did, people might not run from him, but they might trickle away in a steady stream until he had nothing left.”

Turner said, “And the city of Chicago cares that much? That’s just one major crock.”

“Perhaps there’s a more personal reason,” Fenwick said.

“What!?”

Fenwick said, “Maybe you yourself had something to gain. You’ve been covering up, and maybe the whole scheme was beginning to unravel because of Korleski, or some other woman who wasn’t willing to play his games. You were going to be caught in the middle and you had to get rid of him.”

“If that were true,” Girote said, “why get rid of Lenzati? Wouldn’t it be a lot easier to get rid of the woman involved?”

“I thought I was on a roll,” Fenwick said.

“Not if there were a lot of women,” Turner said.

“There was only one. After Korleski, he got smarter. He got his dick out of his business. Lenzati may have been a sexual moron, but he wasn’t stupid. He got talked to. He understood what he could not do, no matter how rich he was.”

Turner asked, “Why didn’t the national news magazines or gutter television shows follow up?”

“A fortuitous concurrence of life, fast work on my part, and back then these guys weren’t all that famous. In Chicago, sure. Give them another couple years, and it might become a huge problem. My ability to stonewall and obfuscate is second to none, and Nancy Korleski and her husband came across as true dopes. The Internet is a great place for stupid rumors. And maybe the Korleskis were big into hacking. Maybe they had some criminal problems in their past.”

“She didn’t tell us about that,” Fenwick said.

“Are you surprised?” Girote asked.

“Maybe Lenzati had something on you personally,” Turner said. “They were computer geniuses. They could find anything.”

“There’s nothing to find.” But his tone by now was more defeated than defiant.

“Did you kill them?” Turner asked.

Girote said, “This is ridiculous. I didn’t kill either of them. Yeah, I helped cover up some sexual shenanigans. So fucking what?”

Fenwick said, “So one of the people involved in his orgies may have fucking killed him.”

Girote said, “To quote a wise sage of short acquaintance, ‘bull pizzle.’”

“Werberg called you that morning, didn’t he?” Turner asked.

“Yes.”

“Why the big secret about it?” Fenwick asked.

“Cover up. Cover up. Cover up. The modern politician’s mantra.” He stood up. “I’m not finished with you two yet.” He marched out.

In the car Turner used his cell phone to call Ben and tell him he would not be home for dinner.

22

I don’t want them to know anything about me. I’m not stupid like some killers. I don’t write manifestos. I just want these people dead, and I want to enjoy doing it.

In the winter gloom of the late afternoon, they began touring the city in search of all the properties on the list they’d gotten from Lenzati’s accountant. They found four businesses closed for the day, three apartment houses, several fast-food franchises, and a convenience store.

Fenwick said, “Any of those apartments could have vast warrens of hidden cells designed for concealing the secret headquarters of a computer genius.”

“I picture something bigger,” Turner said.

Their next stop was west of the Goose Island redevelopment section of the city, just north and west of downtown. There were a lot of micro breweries and trendy upscale developments mixed with the crumbling older structures. The one Lenzati owned was an apartment house with all the windows gone and the roof missing.

“He was a slum lord?” Fenwick said.

Turner said, “Or he was on the cutting edge of where the next real estate boom was going to take place.”

They walked around the perimeter of the building. There was no doubt it was vacant. Broken windows let in sufficient light for them to see a barren interior. There was no need for a key. They easily forced a door and walked in. The place had been abandoned, even by the rats.

The next building was a monolithic yellow box half a city block long at the corner of Grand and Damen Avenues. Swirls of stucco surrounded solar collector cells, which were flush to the building. None was the same geometric shape as another.

“What the hell is this place?” Fenwick asked.

Turner said, “It’s listed as a business address. Drive around to the alley.” There was a small cube-shaped garage which repeated the color scheme and solar panel look of the larger structure.

Turner and Fenwick got out of the car and approached the only entrance they could see. Hanging next to the portal was a square box with a slot on the right side for inserting a personal identification card.

“Those are not smears of blood,” Fenwick said pointing to what for all the world looked like smears of blood on the ground and parts of the door.

Turner shone his flashlight on them. “If I was a smear of blood, that’s what I’d look like.” The two of them stooped down to look.

“Someone was attacked here?” Fenwick asked. “Or is this random blood?”

“Nobody has random blood in a murder investigation,” Turner said. “We need to get inside here.”

The door was built flush with the back of the building. There was no handle. Fenwick took out a Swiss army knife and smashed the little slot box. The door opened.

They entered darkness. The light from outside showed a carpeted floor. Turner felt on the wall on the right and found a light switch. The new brightness revealed a reception room out of a Victorian whorehouse. The ceiling was completely mirrored. The furnishings were red and maroon plush. The coverlets on the seven-foot couches had a red and black checkerboard pattern. Turner noted that it was the same color scheme as in Lenzati’s master bedroom. All four walls were solid leather, two all black, two all red. The room had lush purple carpeting and soft pink, blue, and yellow lighting.

They walked through doors which led into other chambers with a variety of scenarios. One was a working dungeon, another was a jail cell, a third was a motel, a fourth a college dorm room. The room set up as a bar looked to be more than a stage set. The bottles behind the mahogany barrier were filled. Turner unscrewed the cap of one and sniffed. It was real liquor. Every single room was straight-from-the furniture-store clean.

“This is about half the building,” Turner said. They came to further barred doors in a bare unfurnished room, where they found smears that were almost certainly blood in front of the door. They had no key. Turner inspected the blood closely. It wasn’t completely dry. They forced the door open.

Inside was a set of stairs leading up. The door at the top led to a room that seemed to stretch above all the others below. They found miles of cables leading from cameras to outlets in the wall. An entire wall was filled with shelves containing pornographic movies, some in professionally-made boxes, others with hand lettering on the sides. They decided to inspect the details of this room more fully later. First, they had to complete a quick walk-through to make sure there wasn’t someone injured in the building.

The detectives went through a door into the next room. They found themselves on the second floor balcony of a room that seemed to stretch for the other half of the building. Unpainted gray struts and duct work filled the space above their heads. Along all four walls were computers, hundreds of them. There were monitors galore built into shelving on all four walls. In the center of the room were what looked to be two command centers. Facing each other were vast consoles with hundreds of buttons under giant screens with two massively comfy chairs in front of them.

In the middle of the room, sprawled backwards in one of the vast comfy chairs, they could see a man’s body.

“If the last room was an El Dorado of clues,” Fenwick said, “this is the whole fucking California gold rush.”

They approached the body carefully. There were occasional smears of blood. The body itself had been stabbed at least as often as Lenzati’s. The difference here was a stainless-steel knife had been left protruding from the center of the man’s chest. It was a huge hunting knife with one serrated edge. This corpse’s eyes were open. It glared unseeing at a computer screen which had a message in seventy-two point type. GOTCHA, YOU SON OF A BITCH.

“Who the hell is this?” Fenwick said.

Blood had splashed and gushed over every nearby surface. There was a stain on his pants below his waist—Turner smelled urine. The man wore dark blue jeans and the remnants of a gray sweatshirt. A black jacket lay on the floor. He was tall, skinny, blond—and dead.

With exquisite care, after donning his plastic gloves, Turner lifted a wallet out of the man’s back pocket. He looked inside. He found a Social Security card but no driver’s license. He said, “We’re not going to have to worry about finding Eddie Homan to interview.”

While they waited for the requisite murder scene personnel, they returned to what Turner thought of as a trophy room and examined it.

Turner pointed to a number of different pornographic box covers. “We didn’t find nearly this many at Lenzati’s house.” Some showed only women, others men and women, and some only men. “We’ve got gay and straight ones here.”

All the walls were lined with dressers. Turner opened the top drawer of one on the north end of the building. He found men’s briefs and boxer shorts in freezer bags. He put on his plastic gloves before he touched any of them.

“Souvenirs,” he said to Fenwick.

“Got to be,” his partner replied.

“The results of their game,” Turner said. “These are intimate reminders or proof they had.”

The dressers on the south wall had jeans and jockey shorts in sealed plastic bags. Turner, still with his gloves on, opened one. The odor of urine poured out. He quickly resealed it. He said, “I think we’ve found the trophy case.”

Fenwick said, “I’ve got a picture and mementos drawer.” They also found the jockstraps and the baseball bat from the infielders in Iowa. Encased in white silk were the jockstrap and mouth protector which had the name of the hockey player Werberg had written about.

“Didn’t he just retire?” Turner asked.

“I think so,” Fenwick said.

Other items had dates and names; usually just first, sometimes only last names, and a few full names. They found hundreds of photos. They’d have to look through them thoroughly to see if there were any of the people they had interviewed.

“You know,” Turner said, “I just don’t see Werberg and Lenzati blackmailing these people. To get them into bed, maybe, but not after they’d had sex with them—there would be no point. Those guys didn’t need money or a job; their companies weren’t going broke. We’ve got no evidence they tried or wanted to do repeat business with any of these people. There was no boss to tattle to. They were the bosses.”

Other dressers on the east walls were filled with male paraphernalia; besides underwear, there were used condoms, pairs of jeans, more photographs, T-shirts, socks, glasses with fingerprints on them, a few combs, toothbrushes—anything that a person might use that would retain some remnant of themselves.

Against the west wall the dressers were filled with feminine apparel. “Lenzati’s trophy case,” Turner said.

“Is this clue heaven or what?” Fenwick asked.

Turner inserted one of the tapes with hand lettering in one of the six video machines in the room. It began to whir. He found a remote control and pressed the on button. A small screen nearby leapt to life. The tape was obviously homemade in black and white. The lighting was alternately too light and too dark, creating vast shadows or turning everyone horror movie white. A man and a woman cavorted in a cell block, presumably the one below them. Turner ejected the tape. It was labeled by date. He checked their list.

“These are going to match.” He spent several minutes walking along the wall. “There aren’t any dates before the last few months. That’s when they must have set up this place.”

“I think this was their general pornography collection and the ones which they personally developed,” Fenwick said.