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“Not as far as we know,” Virgil said. “But we think you might have some information that we need. It’s sort of secret, so... could you take a walk?”
Blackburn looked at the woman, shrugged, and said, “Sure, I guess. Let me put some shoes on and get my coat.”
—
Outside, they tooka sidewalk that stretched along the front of a couple of block-long residence halls.
Lucas: “We are inquiring about a man that you know in the Twin Cities. At the Silver Star. Do you remember Don Hess?”
Blackburn stopped walking and said, “Oh... shit.”
“So you know him,” Virgil said.
“Yeah, I know him,” Blackburn said.
“Did he make a sexual pass at you, while you were working out at the Silver Star?”
“Has he done something?”
“We don’t know, but we think it’s a possibility. And we think it might be bad.”
“Messing with kids?”
“Did he mess with you?”
“No, but he was going that way,” Blackburn said. “He was pushing me. I was embarrassed, I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. With him. I mean, we were friendly when I first started working out. Then it got weird.”
“How weird?”
“You know, he’d touch me, pat me, tell me I was doing good. I knew I wasn’t doingthatgood. I was basically there because my father wanted me to go.”
“You didn’t like it. The boxing,” Virgil said.
“Actually, after a while, I did like it,” Blackburn said. “I wasn’t bad at it, either, I have fast hands. I didn’t like getting hit in the face, though, even with the marshmallows we were wearing. You know, you read the Internet, and it says you’ll wind up mentally impaired. Or get a detached retina. That worried me. I really like working on the speed bags, that’s almost like a video game, but feels more real.”
“How old were you when he was trying to make friends?” Lucas asked.
“I started there when I was sixteen, left at the end of the summer when I came here. I kinda blew him off maybe when I was seventeen.”
“Did he have anything to do with younger kids?”
“I wasn’t in a younger kids’ class. So I don’t know,” Blackburn said. “But Don was weird. Is weird, I guess, or you wouldn’t be here. Another thing. He had this green duffel bag, pretty big one, you know? One day I was in the locker room and Don was taking a shower...”
“He took showers with you?”
“Yeah, but you know, nothing happened. Too many people around, maybe. I wouldn’t have wanted to be in there with him,alone,” Blackburn said. “Anyway, I got out of the shower first and my bag was near his, sitting on a bench facing the lockers, and I saw this... sparkle. This reflection. Nobody was around so I looked, and he had a camera in there. It was pointed inside the bag, not out of it, so... I don’t know if he was taking pictures.”
“You know about cameras?” Virgil asked.
“Not that much, but this wasn’t a little snapshot thing,” Blackburn said. “Wasn’t a big huge one, either. Middle-sized. We had a guy there who sometimes made videos of our boxing matches, so we could see ourselves, what we were doing wrong. It was that kind of camera. The kind that can take videos along with snapshots.”
Lucas rubbed his face: “Ah, boy.”
“I didn’t take any more showers after that,” Blackburn said. “Are you going to arrest him?”
“We can’t talk about it, much,” Lucas said. “You don’t know of any other relationships he had with the boys in the boxing classes?”
“No, I tried to stay away from him,” Blackburn said. “I didn’t know of anything. Maybe... I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to wind up telling my dad that he put me in a class with a pederast. So I stayed to myself. Did the boxing and got out.”
