The next afternoon, I had just finished working the heavy bag at Hammer’s gym in the basement of Johnny’s Icehouse when my phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number.
“This is Simon Kantor,” the caller said. “I want to meet you as soon as possible and talk about you taking on my father’s case.”
“If nothing, you’re persistent,” I said.
“I am. Can you meet this afternoon?”
“I’m hitting balls for an hour. I can meet you at my office after that.”
We arranged a time, and I jumped in my car and headed to the Jackson Park Driving Range situated just off Lake Michigan on the South Side. The temperatures were already hovering in the mid-sixties, which meant thousands of golf bags were being pulled from the back of cold garages and meticulously cleaned for the earnest start of a new season. At the end of last season, I had finally achieved a single-digit handicap, something that had taken me the last five years to achieve. Now the real work had begun—keeping it there.
My phone rang just as I had set up my clubs and a bucket of balls. It was Burke.
“You’re taking the case?” he said.
“‘Secrets travel fast in Paris,’” I said.
“You’re in Chicago, smart-ass.”
“Yes, but Napoleon was talking about Paris when he said it.”
“Jesus Christ,” he said. “Are you taking the case or not?”
“I’ll know for sure in a couple of hours.”
“What’s stopping you?”
“The size of their bank account,” I said.
“Meaning?”
“It always seems to work out that the richer the client, the more headaches and complications.”
“You took on the Gerrigan case a couple of years back.”
“And look how much of a pain in the ass they were.”
“Simon Kantor is pretty much a straight shooter,” Burke said.
“And his dad?” I said.
“He had his secrets.”
“Care to share?”
“We haven’t confirmed anything yet, but we’re hearing whispers about his nighttime extracurriculars. He didn’t exactly behave like you’d expect a seventy-seven-year-old billionaire with five grandchildren would.”
The first thing that came to my mind was drugs. “Was he a user?”
“Not of drugs,” Burke said. “But of people.”
“That’s surprising?”
“No, but who they’re saying he was using might raise a few eyebrows.”
“My eyebrows are waiting.”
“Young foreign nationals.”
“Girls?”
“Boys and girls.”
My eyebrows stretched upward.
“Any specific geography?”
“They were mostly Asian and South American.”
“Are you telling me that Elliott Kantor was caught up in sex trafficking?”
“We’re still digging for confirmation, but there’s some noise.”
I had very little experience in the world of sex trade. That was mostly handled by the Special Investigations Unit, and I had worked robbery and homicide. But what I had come to learn over the years was that not only was sex trafficking growing in this country but the perpetrators were rarely the creepy neighbor who drove an old tinted-window van and gave out full-size candy bars on Halloween. In fact, the most common procurers of these sexual services were normal-appearing, well-employed men who sat in boardrooms and looked into microscopes in acclaimed research laboratories. They taught high school science and held elected seats in statehouses. There wasn’t any singular type. These depraved and craven men came from all walks of life and every corner of society.
“Do you think the family knew about any of this?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Burke said. “But you’ll have an opportunity to ask when you finish whacking around that stupid little white ball.”
“You should see my five iron. I’m hitting it almost two hundred yards, a hundred and eighty all carry.”
“Is that supposed to impress or surprise me?”
“When was the last time you were surprised?”
“About an hour ago, when I learned Kantor had purchased that apartment under the name of a woman who works in his company’s mail room and lives in a one-bedroom apartment in Pilsen with three kids under the age of seven. She had no idea her name was on the title of a four-million-dollar Lincoln Park address.”
Five minutes after I had settled behind my desk and opened the window shades to allow a generous view of Buckingham Fountain and Grant Park, my buzzer sounded. I had installed this security system a few months ago, after some unwelcome guests had broken in and rummaged through my desk, though there hadn’t been much for them to find. My Walther PPQ 9mm was always locked in a secret compartment, and they would’ve needed ten sticks of dynamite to blow it open.
Simon Kantor walked in wearing tennis whites, as if he were about to jump into a convertible and head to the country club. His hair looked wet, as if he had just stepped out of a shower and hadn’t had time to towel off. He had a different Rolex on than the one he wore the night we had met in his father’s wine cellar. This one was rose gold with a blue face and diamond bezel. We exchanged pleasantries, he took a seat, and we got down to business.
“My father had a great heart,” he began.
Not according to the papers, I thought, but respectfully didn’t verbalize.
“My mother was the glue to our family,” he continued. “But Dad became the center once she died. We weren’t always super close to him. He spent most of his time working or attending dinners and events. But the last couple of years, we really got a chance to come together. Finding out what happened to him will never bring him back, but it will at least help us get some closure.”
“Closure is something that happens at the end of real estate deals,” I said. “You don’t find it after a relationship ends badly, and definitely not when it involves the murder of a loved one. You might get answers, and those answers might help you better understand what happened and why, but that doesn’t mean you have true closure.”
“Fair enough,” he said. “We want answers. We want to know who took our father away from us and why.”
“I really don’t know how to put this delicately, so I’m just gonna shoot straight. Often in life we want answers, but sometimes the unknown is better for us than the known. What we hope to get from knowing only deepens whatever pain or anxiety we were feeling by not knowing.”
“You sound more like a psychologist than a private investigator.”
“That’s what happens when you grow up with a psychiatrist for a father.”
“I have a hard time taking no for an answer,” Simon said. “I need you to agree to find out what happened.”
“That’s why we’re sitting here.”
“You’ll do it?”
“‘Many strokes, though with a little axe, hew down and fell the hardest-timber’d oak.’”
He looked at me quizzically.
“Shakespeare,” I said. “His way of saying persistence overcomes resistance.”
“I was told you like to quote Shakespeare.”
“Marvin Gaye too.”
Simon smiled, flashing a perfect set of veneers. “So how do we start?”
“By you honestly answering some indelicate questions.”
“I’m ready.”
“Who would’ve wanted your father dead?” I asked.
“You mean a specific person?”
“Yes.”
“No one. My father had a lot of friends. He was good to many people. He was well-liked. Everyone loved him.”
“Maybe someone got the short end of a business deal and didn’t want to forget about it.”
“Par for the course. My father was tough. A master negotiator. He won a lot more than he lost. But he wasn’t ruthless. He didn’t try to hurt people. He just knew what he wanted, and he went for it.”
“Did he ruin anyone? Destroy anyone’s business?”
“Not that I know of, but I didn’t work that closely on his side of the business. I handled more of the customer accounts. He dealt with the manufacturing side. He spent a lot of his time over in Asia, working with our factory partners.”
“Who worked closely with him?”
“His two assistants and Peggy.”
“Peggy?”
“She managed his business relationships. She made sure the trains ran on time and stopped at the right stations.”
“Have you talked to the three of them about how and where he actually died?”
“It’s too embarrassing. I don’t want them to remember my father that way.”
“What did your father do in that apartment?”
“He stayed there when he was too tired to go back home.”
“He had a driver around the clock. If he was tired, he could sleep in the back of the car on the ride home. Give me a better reason.”
Simon sighed softly then said, “My father was very depressed when my mother died. There was a time I thought he was going to take his own life. We asked him to talk to a professional, but he refused. He stayed home. He refused to go out. He would only speak to a few people. He went to work, came to see us, and that’s it. Then he went away for two months to the Bahamas. When he came back, he was a new person.”
“What do you mean ‘new’?”
“He had his energy back. He was smiling and laughing again. He still talked about my mother, but it didn’t make him cry anymore. He became social again.”
“Was he dating?”
“I don’t know if he was dating, but I know he had women.”
“Women as in more than one?”
“Yes.”
“Did you ever meet them?”
Simon shook his head. “He would never let that happen. He would find that disrespectful to my mother’s memory.”
“So how did you know about the women?”
“His assistants told me. They were worried.”
“Worried about what?”
“He was spending a lot of money on them. Flying them all over the world. Buying cars, jewelry, handbags, all kinds of expensive gifts. They didn’t want him to be taken advantage of.”
“Do you know what kind of women they were?”
“I don’t. I didn’t want to know, so I didn’t ask. No one wants to think about their father having sex, especially as old as he was.”
“Were you surprised he was tied up and wearing women’s panties?”
“Very. Who expects to see their father in panties? He was always a man’s man.”
“Was he into young women?”
“I don’t know. If I were his age and had his money, that would be my preference.”
“Do you think your father cheated on your mother?”
“My father loved my mother more than anything in this world.”
“That might be, but you didn’t answer my question.”
“I believe he had friends,” Simon said. “He was very quiet about it, but I think he had company.”
“Thus the apartment in the city.”
“Have you ever been married?”
“Close once, but no Cohiba.”
“My parents were married for fifty-seven years. Relationships change when you’ve been together that long. Things that once were important don’t seem so important when you get to a certain age. What my father did on his own time was not a reflection of what he thought about my mother. The fact that he went to such lengths to be discreet about it was a real testament to how much he loved her.”
“Your father died tied up with a leather dog collar around his neck and wearing red panties,” I said. “I’m not making any moral judgment or even calling that strange. Plenty of people are into that kind of stuff. But what does strike me as just a little strange is that a man your father’s age and establishment enjoyed bondage and gender transposition.”
Simon noticeably winced.
“I can’t explain it,” he said. “I guess he liked to kink it up. I honestly don’t know what else to say.”
“Was your father bisexual?” I asked.
Simon stared at me as if I had smacked him in the face. The question had not only rattled him but also seemed to offend.
“Totally out of the question,” he shot back indignantly. “My father loved women. He would never think about being with a man. He would never find another man attractive like that. Don’t get me wrong. He wasn’t against homosexuality and people making their own choices, but he was old-school. That’s just not something he’d get into. It’s not who he was or who his friends were.”
Listening to Simon and watching how vehemently he shot down the possibility instantly made me think of the old Hamlet line: The lady doth protest too much, methinks.