Trophy Widow (30 page)

***

I decided on a private screening. No Benny, no Jacki, and no U.S. Marshal Tommy Jenkins, who'd followed me home and parked his car along the curb in front of my house. I opened a bottle of Pete's Wicked Ale and carried it and the videotape into the den. I closed the shades, turned on the television and VCR, inserted the videotape, and sat back on the couch to watch.

The screen flickered, and then a familiar building came into view. Displayed at the bottom right corner of the picture were the time and date coordinates—9:47 a.m. on a winter Thursday about four months before Michael Green was killed. A gray, chilly morning. Old snow along the curbs, pedestrians in heavy coats, whitish puffs of vapor from the exhaust pipes of idling cars and trucks. The soundtrack, such as it was, consisted of ambient street noise—a car horn, a bus accelerating, a muffled conversation fading.

Ron Blitz spoke in a voice-over: “Surveillance team in position across the street from target's place of residence.”

He announced the time, day of the week, and date, all of which matched up to the digital readout on the bottom of the screen. He concluded by stating the building's address, which made me realize why it looked familiar. I'd been there, upstairs and inside the loft where Sebastian Curry lived, and died.

The camera jerked toward the street corner and zoomed in on the street sign. Then it yanked back to the building and zoomed in on the address above the door, as if to corroborate Blitz's voice-over. The lens quickly pulled back, panning up to the level of Curry's loft, zooming in on a window that was opaque in the dull morning sun. The camera jumped back away and zipped diagonally down to street level. Blitz's camera technique made me nauseous.

I stared at the digital readout of the time and date as I thought back to what Reverend Wells had told me about the bonus Billy Woodward received for retrieving the video from Michael Green's condo. The person behind the killings probably assumed that the videotape retrieved from the condo wasn't the sole remaining copy, but unless he recognized Blitz's voice—not likely—there'd be no way to tell from the videotape itself who had filmed it. Blitz had confirmed that the two copies he gave Green were in their original Sony videotape containers with no external markings. As he explained while we waited for his video recorder to make my copy, he usually doesn't know what his clients do with the surveillance videotapes he creates for them, and thus he makes sure that there is nothing in or on the videotape that would identify him. The original master videotape—as with all of his originals—was stored in a safe-deposit box with instructions to turn it over to the police if something happened to him. The copy he made me came from his office copy.

On the videotape, we stayed in front of Curry's building, viewing it in twenty-second chunks throughout the day until 4:13 p.m., when Blitz zoomed in on the front door and announced, sotto voce, “Target apprehended.”

Sebastian Curry came through the front door and turned left. He was wearing a dark green trench coat over black slacks and black boots. Although the cloudy winter sky was already darkening, he wore sunglasses. The camera panned along, jerkily following him until he reached his car, a black BMW sedan. The picture jiggled as Blitz mumbled something, then the screen went dark. Filming resumed with Curry walking into the entrance of King Louie's restaurant. The shot appeared to have been filmed through the front windshield of Blitz's car with the left wiper visible in the lower half of the screen. Almost twenty minutes had elapsed since the last shot, according to the on-screen clock.

And so it went—Curry leaving his apartment, Curry shopping for groceries, Curry going into the restaurant where he worked, Curry leaving the restaurant. Three monotonous days in the life of Sebastian Curry, captured on nearly an hour's worth of videotape.

Blitz had warned me that my copy came from the original unedited videotape. He hadn't kept a copy of the version he'd given to Green, which he'd edited down to thirty minutes. Mine was almost three hours long.

“You got everything here you could want,” Blitz had told me, “plus probably a little more than you might want.”

An understatement.

I started fast-forwarding through the repetitive stuff, slowing at each scene change. I watched Sebastian's first visit to Samantha's art gallery—an event that, judging from Blitz's voice-over, intrigued the “surveillance team” as well. The scene had an eerie, melancholy quality—a moment of innocence before the fall. There was Sebastian Curry, alive and well and cheerful and vigorous. There was Samantha—a younger, prettier, and more vibrant version of the one I'd met at her lawyer's office last week. I watched her greet Sebastian in the front of her art gallery—a gallery that no longer existed and a man who no longer existed. When Blitz zoomed in for a close-up of Samantha, I paused the video and leaned forward. I could see the glitter of a diamond on her ring finger. A glance at the date in the lower right corner confirmed it. She was engaged to be married—no doubt delighted by the bright future that awaited her and her young son.

I hit the play button. Through the big picture window at the front of the gallery, you could see the painting that Sebastian had brought her that day. The two of them, their backs to the camera, were admiring it. Blitz was filming from across the street, the view interrupted occasionally by the blur of a passing car. Traffic sounds mixed with the other street noises. I looked closer at the painting. It was the same one Benny and I had seen at the Foleys' house. I paused the video again. There was Sebastian. There was Samantha. There was one of the twenty-three paintings. Only Michael Green was missing, lurking somewhere offstage, soon to be forever offstage.

I fast-forwarded through his next visit to Samantha's gallery and the rest of that day, slowing the video to normal as he emerged from a Washington Avenue nightclub with a pair of laughing women, one on each arm. The handheld camera followed the trio down the street, jiggling along behind them, until they disappeared into another nightclub. Almost two hours later, according to the on-screen clock, Sebastian came out of the nightclub alone. He staggered the two blocks back to his building where, at 3.28 a.m., he boarded his elevator. The screen briefly went dark. When the scene resumed, the camera angle had shifted to a new view, looking directly into the darkened windows of Sebastian's loft from the same level aboveground. Blitz must have found an empty office in the building across the street.

The lights inside Sebastian's loft across the street clicked on. He was locking his front door, his back to the camera. Then he hung his trench coat on the coat stand near the door. As he moved toward the bedroom area in the back, Blitz panned along from window to window. Sebastian was shedding clothing as he walked, piece by piece, until he was down to a pair of red bikini briefs. He stretched near a window, displaying a body that was absolutely gorgeous—tall and supple, with long athletic legs, high round buttocks, narrow torso. Over the next few minutes, I watched him smoke a joint, brush his teeth, take a pill, wash it down with a glass of water, and reach for the lights by his bed. The screen went dark and remained that way for nearly a minute. Blitz's voice-over announced that the “team will recommence stakeout of target tomorrow at zero-nine-hundred.”

We were now almost two hours into the video and beginning the ninth day of surveillance. That day began like days one through eight except that now we had a view directly into Sebastian's loft, where, at 2:24 p.m., he was standing in front of an easel and contemplating a painting in progress. Today he was wearing a black T-shirt, snug black jeans, and black boots. Over the next several minutes he daubed at the canvas and spoke briefly on the phone. He moved into the kitchen and took a beer out of the fridge and a small jar off the shelf. Blitz kept the camera rolling as we watched him do what appeared to be a line of cocaine on a clear plastic cutting board. As the day progressed in two- or three-minute scenes, he went to the grocery store, picked up some dry cleaning, had a couple of beers at a corner bar, grabbed dinner at a nearby Chinese restaurant, and returned to his apartment around seven-thirty.

He was watching TV in the bedroom at ten minutes to nine when apparently someone knocked at his door. He stood, went to the front of the loft, opened the door and admitted a male figure wearing a long overcoat, gloves, and a snap-brim hat that hid his face. The man was carrying a large briefcase.

“This is the first visitor to target's place of residence since surveillance operation commenced,” Blitz said in a dramatic voice. He then stated the time and date “for the record.”

The camera zoomed in as the male visitor first removed his gloves and then his hat and coat.

I hit the pause button, leaning forward astounded. Standing in the entranceway to Sebastian Curry's loft was none other than Nathaniel Turner, commissioner of redevelopment for the city of St. Louis. He was dressed in shiny blue Nike warm-ups and sneakers.

I hit play and watched as the two of them shared a laugh and then walked into the kitchen area, where Sebastian pulled an open bottle of white wine out of the refrigerator and poured them each a glass. They touched their glasses and toasted something, and then Turner drained his in two gulps while Sebastian took a sip and watched the other man with mild amusement. I hit the pause button as Turner refilled his glass.

Of course
, I told myself, as several pieces fell into place. Nate the Great was the perfect City Hall connection—a powerful insider who could make sure that Michael Green's loan deals got approved without the requisite personal guarantees. Sebastian functioned essentially as Nate's money-laundering machine via the phony Millennium commissions that Green ran through the offshore bank account before funneling back to Nate.

But Sebastian was Nate's man
, I thought,
not Green's
. Michael Green had known nothing about him—including even his name—before the scam began. That had to be a little unsettling for the guy running the scam. As I recalled from my interview with Samantha, Green had apparently grown troubled by some aspect of Sebastian. He'd starting asking her questions about him—but long after the scam had begun. Maybe the reason Green hired the Blitz Agency was to find out the nature of Sebastian's relationship with Nate. Or maybe he wanted to find out whether Sebastian had any tie to that creepy Herman Borghoff, who'd been so obsessed with my investigation into the real estate deals that he'd confronted me in my office and later snooped around the microfilm I'd been reviewing.

I hit the play button.

I watched as each of them did a line of cocaine on the cutting board, wondering to myself about their connection. A struggling artist and a City Hall wheeler-dealer. A true odd couple—a nobody and a somebody. How had Nate selected Sebastian? And why?

I didn't have to wonder long.

Nate was wiping the powder remnants from his nose. Sebastian stood watching him, his back against the kitchen counter, arms crossed over his chest. Nate looked up. Sebastian towered over him, his powerful biceps swelling against the sleeves of his black T-shirt.

Nate came around the table and sank to his knees in front of Sebastian. Like a supplicant before a deity, he reached forward and gently, almost reverentially, cupped his hands over the bulging crotch of the black jeans. He gazed up at Sebastian, who nodded once, unsmiling. Nate unzipped Sebastian's jeans and reached inside. Carefully, he pulled out Sebastian's penis, cradling it in his hands. Already partially tumescent, the uncircumcised phallus was enormous—curved like a banana, thick and black, with a bulging vein visible even on videotape. Worshipfully, Nate began kissing and licking it.

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” Blitz mumbled in voice-over. “Goddamn faggot cocksucker.”

The picture jiggled for a few seconds until Blitz remembered his role and steadied the camera. Even so, he couldn't help uttering an occasional grunt of disgust as the scene unfolded. I watched, astounded, as Nate, on his knees, used his mouth and hands to bring Sebastian first to an erection and then to an orgasm. At the moment of climax, Nate drew his head back, fiercely pumping on Sebastian's penis with both hands, and sprayed three big jets of semen onto his face.

“Oh, Christ Almighty,” Blitz whispered hoarsely as Nate wiped the semen off his face with his hands and then licked them clean, “you fucking pervert loser.”

I hit the pause button and leaned back.

I shook my head in wonder at the thought of what this videotape must have meant to Michael Green. I could almost imagine him chuckling with surprised delight. The last two scenes made it the ultimate blackmail weapon against Nate the Great—and Green would have grasped that immediately. The blackmail threat was not one of general disclosure, of course. A public outing of Nate the Great, even with the added cocaine angle, might have generated a scandal with a half-life of a month in a country long inured to the sordid peccadilloes of its politicians. But Green would have had a special audience in mind—an audience of one. Green would have known that the mere sight of the commissioner doing a line of cocaine would have been enough to cause Congressman Orion Sampson to strip his nephew of office and power. But the prospect of Nate's uncle watching him give another man a blow job would have triggered abject panic in Nate. Possessing that videotape of Nate was the equivalent of holding a loaded gun to his head.

I hit the play button.

Sebastian and Nate had another round of drinks and did another line of coke. As Sebastian headed for the bedroom, Nate hurried back to the living room to fetch his briefcase. He carried it into the bedroom. Sebastian seemed reluctant when he arrived, gesturing toward the briefcase and shaking his head. Nate tried to convince him. He got down on his knees and begged.

Actually begged.

Nate the Great begging
. I couldn't believe it.