Thirteen Million Dollar Pop

“How’d you get this? Did you hurt him, by chance, or buy it?” Potempa wanted to know.

“Uh-uh, I entered his house and took it when he wasn’t there.”

“I’ll have to get that address from you, I’ve wanted it for some time. I’ve had other guys on this and they didn’t get this far …”

Potempa said distantly. Behr couldn’t help but admire the man’s skills. Though he’d come in with the advantage, and his boss was clearly struggling, Potempa had been the one to ask about a half dozen questions in a row and had Behr providing information, not vice versa. But enough was enough.

“Who is he-the guy you were talking to, and the one I assume is in the video?” Behr asked.

“My daughter’s boyfriend. Lenny Brennan Barnes. Little pimp motherfucker. I hated the cocksucker the first time I saw him, and it grew from there.” Potempa didn’t go in for blue language most of the time, so it marked the depth of his emotions on the topic. “He got his filthy hands on my Mary and just … ruined her.”

“What’s he threatening?” Behr asked.

“To release it,” Potempa said, thumping a finger on the DVD case, “on the Internet. To IPD e-mail addresses, Bureau offices. Her old high school. Local colleges. All over the damned place. To make it ugly for me. For her future.”

“Unless you pay?” Behr asked.

Potempa made an “of course” gesture with his hands, and Behr didn’t think much of it because of what was on his mind.

“Hold on, you said ‘boyfriend’?” Behr said, trying to assemble it. “And I saw them together. They look like they live together.”

“I know, I know. My daughter, she just … turned against me. By and by, I guess, though it felt like all at once. We started fighting. Over her friends. Men. Her lifestyle. Drugs. Back and forth like a couple of badgers, until it seemed like she was willing to go down herself just to see me suffer.” Potempa shook his head. Suffering he was.

“But if she’s party to it, if she’s okay with the clip getting out there,” Behr ventured as delicately as he could, “why not step aside and let it? The burn rate on this shit is like thirty seconds in today’s world. It’ll be forgotten before it’s done playing.”

He hoped to remind Potempa of what he, as a professional, already knew: that removing the leverage caused any extortion plot to fall apart instantly.

“Behr,” Potempa said, “she may be out of her mind, and willing to play at this, but I’m not. I can’t have it. I can’t have it. You read me? That’s my little girl …”

Even if Behr had never heard the English language, he couldn’t have missed the desperation and vulnerability in Potempa’s tone. Only a child in peril could bring forth such a sound. Only being a parent could make one that weak and susceptible. Behr just nodded, suddenly feeling as weary as the older man looked.

32

“Final numbers aren’t in yet, but second quarter operating expenses are running constant at roughly negative twenty-seven thousand per day. Projected per-player revenue is off target day by day at two sixteen, one forty-two, one eleven, two nineteen …”

The numbers washed over Lowell Gantcher. All bad news. He looked around him at the paneled walls of the L.G. Entertainment conference room. He glanced at the people sitting at the long table. Senior operations managers, project managers, sales managers, accountants, bean counters of every stripe, the ineffective marketing ass wipes, the pricks from promotions with their dinner giveaways and frequent player cards as the height of their uninspired ideas. All of them sat there at the trough, waiting for their next paycheck. But the truth was, they weren’t going to get them the following Thursday. There was no money left. They were alien beings to him, these workers, from another planet where you went to work, did your job, got paid for what you did, and lived on what you earned. If they understood overleveraging at all, it wasn’t something they did. It wasn’t their religion.

He was the real alien, he supposed. He wondered what he looked like to them: whether all the Xanax he’d been taking made him appear like a broken robot whose faceplate was about to spring off, or if their faith in him convinced them he looked normal.

It was supposed to be easy to be a CEO. The hard part was supposed to be getting there. Twenty years of building, working long hours, sucking up to bosses and bankers, hitting numbers, winning bids. But now look at him. He’d tripped at the finish line and gone facedown on the asphalt.

Gantcher raised his gaze to the glass that looked out into the main office in time to see a bulked-up, stocky figure moving quickly. Dwyer. A rush of adrenaline hit him in a sickening burst that almost had him throwing up and lunging out of his chair to run at the same time. The figure continued past the room. It was just Williams or Willoughby or whatever his name was, some fireplug he didn’t know well who worked in site planning. Gantcher caught himself gripping the edge of the table.

Relax, for god’s sake, he urged himself to no effect, when Janine Mohrer, a young woman from accounting who issued checks for most of her day, walked in.

“Mr. Gantcher …” She interrupted the meeting, her face chalky white with fear, causing his own alarm to deepen in a way he hadn’t thought possible moments before. “There’s a problem with the insurance policy on the town house job. It had lapsed.”

33

Lenny Brennan Barnes. That was the guy putting the squeeze on his boss.

Little pimp motherfucker. That’s what Potempa had called him.

Behr ran him and discovered the resume of an undergraduate hood scratching his way toward a master’s. There was a drunk and disorderly, a grand larceny for a car theft that he’d pled to, possessing stolen goods, possessing drug paraphernalia, and pandering. All it told him was that Barnes was a dirtbag, as advertised. Behr was tempted to go to his house and have a real personal conversation about all things Potempa, but he couldn’t risk pushing and causing the guy to go public with the video of the girl. It wasn’t his move to make.

Behr had gotten to the office early, and he left just as early, making his way out while the place was still humming with activity, the Payroll Place file on his plate hardly an afterthought, his concentration fragmented, and Potempa nearly in tears. The conversation had only gone on another minute or two. There was no point in asking whether he’d been to the police, but Behr had done so anyway. A defeated shake of the head was Potempa’s answer, and there was nothing else to say.

Instead of sticking around, Behr went to Donohue’s, where he hung on the bar through dead early afternoon quiet and into the fore-end of the minor happy hour wave. He got a hold of the bartender Arch Currey, the gatekeeper of Pal Murphy’s time, and requested an audience.

Pal owned the place and sat like a cardinal in a back booth, holding court. Nearly every piece of business information, both legitimate and illegitimate, of any consequence in Indy flowed through that booth. Pal would certainly know if any high-profile hit had been ordered in town. Whether he would tell Behr anything about it was the only question. Pal wasn’t in the taproom when he arrived, and most of the barstools around Behr were full by the time the familiar visage of white hair, chrome glasses with tinted lenses, white dress shirt and smooth leather blazer took the seat in the booth that had magically remained empty despite there not being a reserved sign resting on the table.

They’d always been on terms. Nothing Pal had ever helped Behr with had come back to hurt him. For his part, Behr had shared some things that had been useful to Pal over the years. Other than that, Behr was a good customer, a regular, at Donahue’s. Which made it all the more strange that Behr got no traction whatsoever tonight. Three hours and three nursed beers didn’t yield him an audience. Pal was there, five yards away, occasionally talking to his waitresses, shaking hands with other patrons, conferring head-to-head with some old-