Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense (65 page)

And then one night he attacked.

Julian Matisse had cut Victoria’s face with a box cutter, jigsawing her perfect flesh into a rough topography of gaping wounds. Byrne had seen the crime scene photographs. The amount of blood was staggering.

After nearly a month in the hospital, with her face still heavily bandaged, she had bravely testified against Julian Matisse. He received a sentence of ten to fifteen years.

The system being what it was, and still is, Matisse was released after forty months. His grim handiwork lasted much longer.

Byrne had first met her in her late teens, not long before she met Matisse; he had seen her literally stop traffic one day on Broad Street. With her silver eyes and raven hair and lucent skin, Victoria Lindstrom was once a stunningly beautiful young woman. She still was, if you could look past the horror. Kevin Byrne found that he could. Most men could not.

Byrne struggled to get to his feet, reaching for the cane halfway up, the pain shrieking through his body. Victoria put a gentle hand on his shoulder, leaned over, kissed him on the cheek. She eased him back down into the chair. He let her. For a brief moment, Victoria’s perfume filled him with a potent mixture of desire and nostalgia. It brought him back to the first time they had met. They had both been so young then, and life had yet to sling its arrows.

Now they were on the second-floor food court of Liberty Place, the office and shopping complex at Fifteenth and Chestnut streets. Byrne’s tour had officially ended at six o’clock. He had wanted to follow the Rivercrest Motel blood evidence for a few more hours, but Ike Buchanan had ordered him off duty.

Victoria sat down. She wore tight faded jeans and a fuchsia silk blouse. If time and tide had brought a few small crinkles to the corners of her eyes, they’d done nothing to her figure. She looked as trim and sexy as the first time they’d met.

“I read about you in the papers,” she said, opening her coffee. “I was very sorry to hear of your troubles.”

“Thank you,” Byrne replied. In the past few months, he had heard this many times. He had stopped reacting to it. Everyone he knew—well meaning, all—had a different term for it.
Troubles, incident, accident, confrontation.
He had been shot in the head. That was the reality. He guessed most people had trouble saying
Hey, I heard you were shot in the head. You okay?

“I wanted to … get in touch,” she added.

Byrne had heard this many times, too. He understood. Life flowed. “How have you been, Tori?”

She butterflied her hands. Not bad, not good.

Byrne heard giggling nearby, derisive laughter. He turned to see a pair of teenaged boys sitting a few tables away, wannabe bangers, suburban white kids in the standard baggy hip-hop drag. They kept glancing over, mimicking horror-mask faces. Perhaps the presence of Byrne’s cane meant they believed he was no threat. They were wrong.

“I’ll be right back,” Byrne said. He started to rise, but Victoria put a hand on his arm.

“It’s okay,” she said.

“No it isn’t.”

“Please,” she said. “If I got upset every time … “

Byrne turned fully in his chair, glared at the punks. They held his gaze for a few seconds, but were no match for the cold green fire of his eyes. None but the hardest of the hard cases were. A few seconds later, they seemed to understand the wisdom of leaving. Byrne watched them walk the length of the food court, then get on the escalators. They didn’t even have the balls to take one final shot. Byrne turned back to Victoria. He found her smiling at him. “What?”

“You haven’t changed,” she said. “Not one bit.”

“Oh, I’ve changed.” Byrne gestured to the cane. Even that simple movement brought a sword of agony.

“No. You are still gallant.”

Byrne laughed. “I’ve been called many things in my life. Never gallant. Not once.”

“It’s true. Do you remember how we met?”

Like it was yesterday, Byrne thought. He was working vice out of Central when they got the call to raid a massage parlor in Center City.

When they rounded up the girls that night, Victoria had descended the steps into the front room of the row house wearing a blue silk kimono. She had taken his breath away, along with that of every other man in the room.

A detective—a weasel-faced little shit with bad teeth and worse breath—made a derogatory remark about Victoria. Although he would have been hard-pressed to explain why at the time, or even now, Byrne had braced the man against a wall so hard that the drywall had caved in. Byrne didn’t remember the detective’s name, but he could easily recall the color of Victoria’s eye shadow that day.

Now she counseled runaways. Now she talked to girls who had stood in her shoes fifteen years earlier.

Victoria stared out the window. The sunlight highlighted the bas-relief network of scars on her face.
My God,
Byrne thought.
The pain she must have endured.
A deep anger at the brutality of what Julian Matisse did to this woman began to rise within him. Again. He battled it back.

“I wish they could see it,” Victoria said. Her tone was distant, now, thick with a familiar melancholy, a sadness she had lived with for many years.

“What do you mean?”

Victoria shrugged, sipped her coffee. “I wish they could see it from the inside.”

Byrne had a feeling he knew what she was talking about. It appeared she wanted to tell him. He asked. “See what?”

“Everything.” She took out a cigarette, paused, rolling it between her long, slender fingers. There was no smoking here. She needed the prop. “Every day I wake up, I’m in a hole, you know? A deep, black hole. If I have a really good day, I just about break even. Reach the surface. If I have a great day? I might even see a little sliver of sunlight. Smell a flower. Hear a baby’s laugh.

“But if I have a bad day—which is most days—well, then.
That’s
what I wish people could see.”

Byrne didn’t know what to say. He had flirted with bouts of depression in his life, but nothing like what Victoria had just described. He reached out, touched her hand. She looked out the window for a few moments, then continued.

“My mother was beautiful, you know,” she said. “She still is to this day.”

“So are you,” Byrne said.

She looked back, frowned at him. Beneath the grimace, though, was the slightest blush. He could still bring the color to her face. That was good.

“You’re full of shit. But I love you for it.”

“I mean it.”

She waved a hand at her face. “You don’t know what it’s like, Kevin.”

“Yes, I do.”

Victoria looked at him, giving him the floor. She lived in the world of group therapy, and in it everyone told their story.

Byrne tried to organize his thoughts. He really wasn’t prepared for this. “After I was shot, all I could think about was one thing. Not about whether I was coming back to the job. Not about whether or not I could go out on the street again. Or even if I
wanted
to go out on the street again. All I could think about was Colleen.”

“Your daughter?”

“Yes.”

“What about her?”

“I just kept wondering if she was ever going to look at me the same way again. I mean, all her life, I’ve been the guy who’s looked out for her, right? This big, strong guy. Daddy. Daddy the cop. It scared me to death that she would see me so small. That she would see me diminished.

“After I came out of my coma, she came to the hospital alone. My wife wasn’t with her. I’m lying in the bed, most of my hair is shaved off, I’m twenty pounds down, fading in and out on the painkillers. I glance up and she’s standing at the foot of my bed. I look at her face and I see it.”

“See what?”

Byrne shrugged, searching for the word. He soon found it. “Pity,” he said. “For the first time in her life, I saw
pity
in my little girl’s eyes. I mean, there was love and respect there, too. But there was a look of pity and it broke my heart. It occurred to me that, at that moment, if she was in trouble, if she needed me, I wouldn’t have been able to do a damn thing.” Byrne glanced over at his cane. “I’m not in much better shape today.”

“You will come back. Better than ever.”

“No,” Byrne said. “I don’t think so.”

“Men like you always come back.”

Now it was Byrne’s turn to color. He fought it. “Men like me?”

“Yes, you are a big man, but that’s not what makes you strong. What makes you strong is inside.”

“Yeah, well …” Byrne let the sentiment settle. He finished his coffee, realizing it was time. There was no way to sugarcoat what he had to tell her. He opened his mouth and just said it: “He’s out.”

Victoria held his gaze for a few moments. There was no need for Byrne to qualify his statement, nor say any more. No need to identify the
he.

“Out,” she said.

“Yes.”

Victoria nodded, taking it in. “How?”

“His conviction is being appealed. The DA’s office believes it may have evidence that he was framed for the murder of Marygrace Devlin.” Byrne continued, telling her what he knew, about the allegedly planted evidence. Victoria remembered Jimmy Purify well.

She ran a hand through her hair, her hands betraying a slight shake. Within a second or two, she regained her composure. “It’s funny. I’m not really afraid of him anymore. I mean, when he attacked me, I thought I had a lot to lose. My looks, my … life, such as it was. I had nightmares about him for a long time. But now …”

Victoria shrugged and began to spin her coffee cup in her hands. She looked exposed, vulnerable. But she was, in reality, tougher than he was. Could he walk down the street with his face segmented like hers, head held high? No. Probably not.

“He’s going to do it again,” Byrne said.

“How do you know?”

“I just do.”

Victoria nodded.

Byrne said: “I want to stop him.”

Somehow, the world did not cease spinning when he said these words, the sky did not turn an ominous gray, the clouds did not split.

Victoria knew what he was talking about. She leaned in, lowered her voice. “How?”

“Well, I have to find him first. He’ll probably make contact with his old low-life crowd, the porno freaks and S-and-M types.” Byrne realized that this might have sounded harsh. Victoria had come from this milieu. Perhaps she felt he was judging her. Luckily, she did not.

“I’ll help you.”

“I can’t ask you to do that, Tori. That’s not why—”

Victoria held up a hand, stopping him. “Back in Meadville, my Swedish grandmother had a saying. ‘Eggs cannot teach a hen.’ Okay? This is
my
world. I will help you.”

Byrne’s Irish grandmothers had their wisdom, too. There was no arguing with it. Still seated, he reached out, took Victoria in his arms. They hugged.

“We begin tonight,” Victoria said. “I’ll call you in an hour.”

She slipped on her oversize sunglasses. The lenses covered a third of her face. She got up from the table, touched his cheek, and left.

He watched her walk away—the fluid, sexy metronome of her stride. She turned and waved, blew a kiss, then disappeared down the escalator. She was still a knockout, Byrne thought. He wished for her a happiness he knew she would never find.

He got to his feet. The pain in his legs and back were shards of fire. He had parked more than a block away, and the distance now seemed enormous. He inched his way along the length of the food court, leaning on his cane, down the escalator and across the lobby.

Melanie Devlin. Victoria Lindstrom. Two women full of sadness and anger and fear, their once happy lives shipwrecked on the dark shoals of one monstrous man.

Julian Matisse.

Byrne now knew that what had begun as a mission to clear Jimmy Purify’s name had become something else.

As he stood on the corner of Seventeenth and Chestnut, the maelstrom of a hot Philadelphia summer evening flowing around him, Byrne knew in his heart that, if he did nothing else with what was left of his life, if he found no higher purpose, he would make certain of one thing: Julian Matisse would not live to cause a single human being any more pain.

16

T
HE
I
TALIAN
M
ARKET
ran three blocks or so along Ninth Street in South Philly, roughly between Wharton and Fitzwater streets, and was home to some of the best Italian food in the city, probably the country. Cheese, produce, shellfish, meats, coffee, pastries, bread—for more than a hundred years, the market had been the beating heart of Philly’s large Italian American population.

As Jessica and Sophie walked up Ninth Street, Jessica thought about the scene in
Psycho.
She thought of the killer entering the bathroom, throwing back the curtain, raising the knife. She thought of the young woman’s screams. She thought of the huge splatter of blood in that bathroom.

She held Sophie’s hand a little tighter.

They were on their way to Ralph’s, the landmark Italian restaurant. They had dinner once a week with Jessica’s father, Peter.

“So how was school?” Jessica asked.

They walked in that lazy, no-place-to-be, not-a-care-in-the-world way that Jessica remembered from her childhood. Oh, to be three again.

“Preschool,” Sophie corrected.

“Preschool,” Jessica said.

“I had an awfully good time,” Sophie said.

When Jessica had joined the force, she’d spent her first year patrolling this beat. She knew every crack in the sidewalk, every chipped brick, every doorway, every sewer grate—

“Bella ragazza!”

—and every voice. This one could only belong to Rocco Lancione, owner of Lancione & Sons, purveyors of fine meats and poultry.

Jessica and Sophie turned around to see Rocco standing in the doorway of his shop. He had to be in his midseventies now. He was a short, plump man with jet-black dyed hair and a blindingly white, spotlessly clean apron, courtesy of the fact that his sons and grandsons did all the work at their meat store these days. Rocco had tips missing from two fingers on his left hand. A hazard of the butcher’s trade. To this day he kept his left hand in his pocket when he was outside the store.