Natlik asked, “Do you really think there’s any significance to him saying that?”
“It means for sure he was gay,” Kaufman said.
“I’m not sure exactly what it means,” I said. “I just want to find this guy.”
No one knew anything else. After fifteen more minutes, they began to leave. When they were all gone, Scott and I decided to eat. This restaurant was as good a place as any. We were just finishing when Floyd Nelis returned. He was nearly as tall as Voronezh and thinner than the others. He was a swimmer. He came up to our table.
“Can I sit down?” he asked.
We moved a chair over for him. He clenched and unclenched long, thin fingers together. Finally, he hunched over the table close to us and said, “I need help. You guys are part of this. You seem to know what you’re doing. You knew this Ethan Gahain better than I did. He wasn’t really my coach. I was in the swimming program. Maybe you can help me.”
We leaned closer.
Nelis announced in a voice barely above a whisper, “I made a video for him.” His face flamed scarlet. “I really fucked up.”
Perhaps literally, I thought. I asked, “How did you happen to do that?”
“It started when I accidentally found out about his secret tapings. I walked back into the locker room unexpectedly before a meet last year at the University of Iowa. He didn’t seem real upset at what I saw.”
“What did you see, exactly?” I asked.
“I saw him setting up a bunch of gym bags and equipment with a camera hidden in the middle of all of it.”
Scott asked, “What did he say?”
“He was real calm about the whole thing. I don’t think it was the first time he’d been caught. I was flabbergasted. He began talking to me, real fast and low. He always spoke in this soft, deep voice, you know, kind of fatherly and comforting. He sat next to me on the team bus on the way home. He offered to put me in videos. You know how it is with amateur athletes. Nobody has any money. If you want real coaching and good facilities, you’ve got to pay. It cost one hell of a lot. It was a lot of cash. I agreed not to tell anybody what I saw.”
“Why didn’t you just blackmail him?” I asked. “What he was doing was clearly out of bounds.”
“I could never do that. Blackmail’s illegal. I’m a decent guy. I saw a chance to make some money. It was like working for a living, a little. I was getting paid for doing something, not trying to do something against the law. It might be immoral, but I know it’s not illegal to be in a porn movie.”
“What exactly did you do?” I asked.
“I didn’t have sex with anyone. No offense, you guys, but I’m not gay. He kept promising he’d set me up in videos with women. He never did. He kept trying to talk me into making videos with guys. I think that Josh Durst was the one he used a lot for making it with straight guys.”
“Josh made videos?”
“Sure. He worked the cameras some, starred in a few, and acted as, you know, one of those guys on porn sets who helps keep the guys turned on.”
I wanted Josh Durst found fast.
Scott asked, “How did the operation work?”
“When I was there, they used two cameras. Coach Gahain held one, and Josh had the other. The production took a whole lot more time than I thought. I did it twice in his house in St. Louis and once in some condo in Chicago. I remember most two things. That the rooms were cold and that it was pretty boring. They took forever to make sure the light settings were perfect, getting the camera angles right. Coach Gahain never really said a whole lot. Josh hardly stopped talking. I think he was trying to make me comfortable, put me at ease while I sat around naked or in my underwear. He did help. Once they took a video of me mostly with my clothes on sitting on a couch. Josh asked me questions about sex, like details about my first time beating off. I never talk about that kind of stuff, that’s sick, but they were paying me money, and Josh told some stories, too. Maybe they were true. So, then I got undressed. Mostly they taped me beating off while I watched a straight porn video. They were actually pretty nice, pretty patient. He paid me a thousand dollars for about six hours’ work each time.”
Hell of a scale to pay on.
“That was it?” I asked.
“Yeah. We could never agree on the details for making movies with more people. I got my money. I figured if I needed more, I could press them to put me in a straight video. They said I’d be more likely to be used in videos if I was willing to make them with men and women.” Nelis shrugged. “I wasn’t.”
“Where was the condo in Chicago?”
“I’m not sure. I’m not from here. I remember it wasn’t far from the lake.”
“Did any of the other guys in the group that was here make a video?” Scott asked.
“I sure didn’t hear them ever say anything,” Nelis said. “Derrick would have been the one I would have picked to try it.”
I said, “I would have picked all the others before you.”
Nelis grinned. “You gotta watch out for us quiet types.”
I asked, “Did you know anybody else who was ever taped?”
“No.”
I asked, “Did you ever know any of the business aspects of the operation? How the tapes were packaged, sold, or distributed?”
“Nah. I didn’t care anything about that. I figured my parents would never see me or know about it, so it made no difference to me. Now, I’m really worried. Me being caught naked has probably been all over the Internet, but maybe it hasn’t. If it’s possible, I don’t want what I did to get out. I guess some of my buddies would be envious if I did straight porn, but simply beating off isn’t going to convince anyone I’m less than a fool.”
“When did you do this?” I asked.
“I did the first tape about a year ago, the last a few months ago.”
“Do you have any idea of what Ethan or Cormac or Josh might have been afraid of recently?”
“Not really. Coach has been pretty much the same at practice. He was never a real emotional guy. He’d go all fatherly on you. His method helped me a lot.”
I asked, “You ever see him argue with anybody either at the school or with strangers at meets?”
“He used to feud with some of the other coaches on the opposing teams, but that was normal. People are competitive, but nobody really takes most of that rivalry stuff seriously. At least not seriously enough to kill somebody over it.”
Scott said, “When you came back, you said you wanted advice. What can we do for you?”
“I guess I really just wanted to talk to someone about it, and …” Nelis shook his head. “I don’t know what to do about those videos existing.”
“There’s not much you can do,” Scott said. “Chalk it up to experience, and get on with your life.”
“What if people find out?”
“You have no control over that,” Scott said. “You made a decision back then. You make decisions now.”
Nelis left.
On the way back to the Loop I called our answering service. My mother had left a message asking me to give her a call.
She said, “Ernie Gahain wants to talk to you. Caroline said it was important. Ethan’s parents found out this morning that Ethan owned a condo on the north side. Ernie and Caroline went there at Perry and Rachel’s request. I think Ernie and Caroline found something they want to talk to you about.”
“I learned about the condo just a few minutes ago. I wonder what they found.”
“Your sister wouldn’t tell me, so I suspect it’s more about the pornography connection.”
I agreed with her about that. I didn’t blame Caroline for not telling my mother. I hadn’t been tremendously eager to discuss porn with her either. She gave me the address on Buckingham, a half block west of Broadway.
As we cruised down the Kennedy Expressway, I called the police to see if they would give me their version of the meeting with Donny and his parents. After I dialed, I pushed the speakerphone button. We had one of those sets where you didn’t have to hold the phone to talk.
Detective Rohter answered our call: “I heard you found another dead body in St. Louis.”
“You heard correctly,” I said.
“What happened?”
I tried to eliminate all rancor from my voice as I said, “I have no doubt that you talked to the police in St. Louis. I’m sure they told you what they know, certainly everything they know about us and our involvement. I’m sure you shared all the information you had about us from up here. If you really want to make an issue of our involvement or try to turn us into suspects, why don’t you simply say that instead of playing some kind of gotcha game with us.”
I figured he’d simply hang up on me. He didn’t. Maybe he was working under the assumption that if you’ve got a suspect irritated and talking, you’re on the side of the angels.
“Who needs help from who?” Rohter asked.
I drew a deep breath and backed off: “Perhaps we should share information.” It was pretty clear we were at least on the periphery on any suspect list. How could we not be? Your average amateur sleuth seldom had a heap of bodies piling up such as we were beginning to accumulate. I figured maybe if I unbent a little, the cop would be a little more forthcoming. So I gave Rohter a brief version of finding Cormac’s body.
When I finished, he said, “Two bodies in twenty-four hours. Most people don’t find one dead body in their lifetime.”
“What can I say? Neither Scott nor I killed anybody, although for my money, I’d be suspicious of any amateur sleuth. I think it would be great if in the very last two-hour episode of your ordinary detective television series, it turned out the amateur sleuth committed all the murders, and he or she is the greatest serial killer in history.” He didn’t seem to be even the slightest bit amused by my observation. “Scott and I are just trying to look out for my parents’ best friends’ interests.”
Rohter harrumphed at this.
“What happened with my nephew?” Scott asked.
“They were quarreling when they walked into the station. Father and son yelled at each other intermittently. Mother kept trying to calm them down. During the intervals when we finally got them settled down, we didn’t get much information.”
“What were they fighting about?” Scott asked.
“The boy kept accusing them of not trusting him. The father kept talking about how he kept running away proved their need to keep a tight rein on him.”
“But they calmed down?” Scott asked.
“More like they had an outside group to focus their anger on for a little while. Even with his parents around, the kid was not cooperative. Hiram Carpenter seemed like he hated us as much as he hated his kid. He kept telling Donny to talk to us and then piling on what sure sounded like right-wing militia paranoia. Like, trust the cops, but hate the government. Weird.”
Scott said, “I don’t think he actually hates his own son. He is right-wing, but I don’t think he’s in any nut group.”
“His kid could be,” Rohter said. “Their crap is all over the Internet. If the kid was hearing a version of a nut group’s pitch from his dad, why wouldn’t he be susceptible to it when he found it on the Internet?”
As the cop spoke, we exited the expressway at Addison just after the junction. Scott drove east on Addison.
Scott said, “The kid did not come all the way from Georgia to kill somebody he never met.”
Rohter said, “I’m still waiting to decide on that. I sure think the kid has a tendency to violence.”
“Why do you say that?” Scott asked.
“They didn’t tell you what happened?” Rohter asked.
“No,” Scott said.
Rohter said, “He hit his mother. He didn’t just slap her or accidentally bump her, he hauled off and belted her.”
Stunned silence on our end.
“We’d just asked him why he hadn’t called for help, mentioning that maybe if he had, medical assistance might have arrived in time. Mrs. Carpenter began to chide him about what he should have done. I thought she was being pretty gentle in what she was saying. If he’d of been my kid, I’d’ve been ready to beat the shit out of him. He just shut his eyes one second. The next he was on his feet with a closed fist. The blow glanced off her ear. He cursed and spat at her and ran.”
“What did Hiram do?” Scott asked.
“He ran after the kid. He’s big, but his son weighs maybe half as much and was much quicker.”
“The police didn’t stop Donny?” I asked.
“He was gone too fast. Nobody expected the kid to run. He wasn’t in cuffs.”
“He hit his mother?” Scott said. I don’t think his question was prompted by doubt about the veracity of what Rohter had just told us, but by astonishment that it had happened at all.
“Yep,” Rohter said.
“There’s got to be a history of violence in the family,” I said. “This can’t be the first incident.” I also figured that the son was simply emulating the father.
Rohter said, “We checked into the boy’s background. He’s got an older brother who had some trouble with the law.”
Scott said, “I never heard anything about that.”
“Father and son got into it about Donny trying to take after his older brother, Darrell. At that moment Mr. Carpenter looked like he was ready to belt the kid a good one. The mother screamed at the two of them. Things calmed down for a while. Then, like I said, the kid clocked his mom and bolted out of here before anyone could stop him. We’d like to see the kid again.”
Scott said, “He must have been feeling guilt about not doing what he should have done. He could have saved a life. He should have felt guilt.”
Rohter said, “For whatever reason, he wouldn’t answer the questions. Your nephew was more recalcitrant than the most hardened gangbanger. Maybe the kid had something to do with pornography. He could also be the killer. That would explain his reluctance. Runaway kids often get involved in all kinds of seedy or illegal activities they wouldn’t normally.”
I said, “He’s hardly been gone long enough to hook up with anything shady. Although, I know deadly can happen in an instant.”
“Doesn’t take long,” Rohter confirmed. “Maybe this wasn’t his first time running. Maybe he was involved in something before he ran. Pornography—”
I cut Rohter off. “Nobody has mentioned anywhere that Ethan was connected in any way with child pornography. We found only consensual adult stuff.”
“Not so consensual if they didn’t know they were being photographed.”
“We didn’t see any pictures of kids,” I said.
“But you don’t know there weren’t any?”
“Did the St. Louis police say they found any?” I countered.
“No.”
I’m not sure why it was so important to me that Ethan be thought of as an adult pornographer and not a peddler of kiddie porn. Adult stuff was okay. Kid stuff would be a major stumbling block. Somehow thinking of Ethan as exploiting kids turned my few good memories into something soiled and dirty.
“Are you close to finding out who killed Ethan?” I sked.
“I think a kid who hears someone being murdered, but who doesn’t report it, needs to be talked to at great length. I think we should be very suspicious of people who find bodies, especially in two different jurisdictions.”
I said “Would it have made you feel any better if we found both bodies in the same jurisdiction?”
I got a frozen silence in response to that crack. I knew I didn’t kill anybody. I doubted if Donny had, but I didn’t know him all that well. I said good-bye to the cop.
Neither Scott nor I could think of a thing to do about his nephew for the moment. We agreed to stop at the Hotel Chicago later.
We drove over to Buckingham to see what Ernie Gahain wanted. Ethan’s condo was in a building on the north side of the street almost in the middle of the block between Broadway and Halsted. The brick was pinkish red, the shutters and fixtures bright white. It was three stories high with two condos on each of the first two floors and one penthouse on top. Ethan owned the penthouse. We rang the buzzer. Caroline’s voice asked who it was.
We took the elevator up. When we entered, Caroline was at the front window looking out on the trees below. Ernie was in his wheelchair. Half the living room ceiling was a skylight. For furniture the room had a pole lamp and nothing else. The windows did not have curtains.
After greetings I asked, “Did he actually live here?”
Caroline said, “The bedroom has a little more furniture than this, but not much. About a quarter of the place looks like a movie set.”
The northeast corner of the penthouse had movie lights, cameras, props, and VHS tapes still in plastic wrap. “It’s a porn studio,” Ernie said. “I came over here because my parents asked me to. They found keys and an address in his luggage.” Ernie handed me a package that had been sitting in his lap. “We found this in a briefcase behind a stack of videos.” It was a twenty-one-inch-by-fifteen-inch manila envelope at least two inches thick.
Ernie said, “I opened it. It’s pictures of naked men. We heard about what Ethan was doing in St. Louis.”
“Did you know about the pornography before this?” I asked.
“No. All I knew was my younger brother was a college coach. I never knew about and most certainly never had anything to do with anything illicit, immoral, or illegal.”
Caroline nodded. “The Gahains are just devastated by all the news. They aren’t angry at you for uncovering Ethan’s connection to pornography. Rachel said that whatever he was doing would have been discovered somehow. It isn’t your fault he was doing it.”
“My brother was always a shit to them,” Ernie said. “I’m glad you uncovered it. He was always the sainted younger brother. He was twelve years my junior, but he got more privileges than I ever did and at earlier ages. He always got away with everything.”
“You’re not kids anymore,” Scott said. “Why still be angry?”
Ernie glared.
Caroline said, “You don’t know how difficult it has been for Ernie. He’s covered for Ethan for years.”
“Covered what?” I asked.
Ernie said, “When Ethan refused to come home for holidays, anniversaries, or other family celebrations, I was always the one who made excuses for him.”
“Why?” Scott asked. “He was an adult making decisions. Why did you have to get involved?”
“I didn’t want my parents hurt.”
“Weren’t they hurt anyway?” Scott asked.
“Not in the same way. He never remembered their birthdays. He hasn’t sent them a Christmas present for years.”
“Is that why you guys didn’t get along?” Scott asked. “Because you felt you had to make excuses for him all these years?”
“It was his attitude more than anything. He just didn’t seem to give a shit. He didn’t really seem to care for people. He was a user and it extended into his family worst of all. He dropped out of I don’t know how many different colleges before he finally graduated. He’d borrow money and not pay it back. My guess is he used my parents’ money to start his porn empire.”
Caroline added, “He’s really very hurtful.”
I knew exactly how hurtful he could be.
Ernie continued, “As I got each new bit of bad medical news, he seemed to care even less about me. My parents won’t say it, but they always worried about him the most. Now we find out he’s involved in all this porn. It’s like he’s reaching out from beyond the grave to give my parents even more grief.”
“Porn by itself isn’t illegal,” I said.
Caroline said, “Let’s not split hairs, Thomas. It’s scandalous. Sure, it wasn’t Mr. and Mrs. Gahain making movies, but it was their kid. Worse, there’s no chance to make it better or talk about it or resolve it.”
“I don’t get it,” I said. “What’s to talk about or resolve about this issue that is so different from all the things he hasn’t talked about or resolved for years?”