Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense (91 page)

He cracked a beer, picked up the remote. It was nearly midnight. He had not yet heard from Records.

As he cruised the cable channels, the images melted into each other. Jay Leno, Edward G. Robinson, Don Knotts, Bart Simpson, each face a—

68

—blur, linking to the next. Drama, comedy, musical, farce. I settle on an old noir, maybe from the 1940s. It isn’t one of the major noir films, but it looks as if it was shot fairly well. In this scene, the femme fatale is trying to get something out of the heavy’s raincoat while he talks on a pay phone.

Eyes, hands, lips, fingers.

Why do people watch movies? What do they see? Do they see who they want to be? Or do they see who they fear becoming? They sit in the darkness, next to total strangers, and for two hours they are the villains, the victims, the heroes, the forsaken. Then they get up, walk into the light and live their lives of despair.

I should rest, but I cannot sleep. Tomorrow is a very big day. I look back at the screen, turn the channel. A love story, now. Black-and-white emotions storm my heart as—

69

—J
ESSICA FLIPPED THROUGH
the channels. She was having a hard time staying awake. She had wanted to sift through the time line of the case one more time before going to bed, but everything was fog.

She glanced at the clock. Midnight.

She turned off the TV, sat at her dining room table. She spread the evidence out in front of her. To the right was the pile of three books on crime cinema she had gotten from Nigel Butler. She picked up one of them. In it, Ian Whitestone was briefly mentioned. She learned that his idol was a Spanish director named Luis Buñuel.

As with every homicide, there was a wire. A wire that plugged into every aspect of the crime, ran through every person. Like the old-style Christmas lights, the string did not light up until all the bulbs were snapped into place.

She wrote the names down on a legal pad.

Faith Chandler. Stephanie Chandler. Erin Halliwell. Julian Matisse. Ian Whitestone. Seth Goldman. Darryl Porter.

What was the wire that ran through all these people?

She looked at the notes on Julian Matisse. How did his print get on that gun? There had been a break-in at the home of Edwina Matisse a year earlier. Maybe that was it. Maybe that was when their doer had obtained Matisse’s gun
and
the blue jacket. Matisse had been in prison, and he might very likely have stored these items at his mother’s house. Jessica got on the phone and had the police report faxed over to her. When she read it, nothing out of the ordinary popped out at her. She knew the uniformed officers who took the initial call. She knew the detectives who caught the case. Edwina Matisse reported that the only thing that was stolen was a pair of candlesticks.

Jessica looked at the clock. It was still a reasonable hour. She called one of the detectives on that case, a longtime veteran named Dennis Lassar. They got their pleasantries out of the way quickly, in deference to the hour. Jessica got to the point.

“Do you remember a break-in at a row house on Nineteenth? A woman named Edwina Matisse?”

“When was it?”

Jessica gave him the date.

“Yeah, yeah. Older woman. Kinda nuts. Had a grown son doing time.”

“That’s her.”

Lassar detailed the case as he remembered it.

“So the woman reported that the only thing stolen was a pair of candlesticks? That sound right?” Jessica asked.

“If you say so. Lotta assholes under the bridge since then.”

“I hear you,” Jessica said. “Do you remember if the place was really ransacked? I mean, a lot more roughed up than a pair of candlesticks would have warranted?”

“Now that you mention it, it was. The son’s room was torn apart,” Lassar said. “But hey, if the vic says nothing’s missing, then nothing’s missing. I remember being in a hurry to get the hell out of there. Smelled like chicken broth and cat piss.”

“Okay,” Jessica said. “Do you remember anything else about the case?”

“I seem to recall there was something else about the son.”

“What about him?”

“I think the FBI had been watching him before he went up.”

The FBI had been watching a lowlife like Matisse?
“Do you remember what that was about?”

“I think it was some Mann Act violation. Interstate transport of underaged girls. Don’t quote me on it, though.”

“Did an agent show up at the crime scene?”

“Yeah,” Lassar said. “Funny how this shit comes back to you. Young guy.”

“Do you remember the agent’s name?”

“Now,
that
part’s lost to the Wild Turkey forever. Sorry.”

“No problem. Thanks.”

She hung up, thought about calling Terry Cahill. He had been released from the hospital and was back working a desk. Still, it was probably a little late for a choirboy like Terry to be up. She’d talk to him tomorrow.

She put
Philadelphia Skin
into her laptop’s DVD drive, forwarded it. She freeze-framed the scene near the beginning. The young woman in the feather mask stared out at her, her wide eyes vacant and pleading. She ran a check on the name
Angel Blue,
even though she knew it was false. Even Eugene Kilbane had no idea who the girl was. He said he’d never seen her before or after
Philadelphia Skin.

But why do I know those eyes?

Suddenly Jessica heard a sound at the dining room window. It sounded as if it might be the laughter of a young woman. Both of Jessica’s neighbors had children, but they were boys. She heard it again. A girl’s giggle.

Close.

Very
close.

She turned and looked at the window. There was a face staring at her. It was the girl from the video, the girl in the teal feather mask. Except now the girl was skeletal, her pale skin stretched tight over her skull, her mouth a ragged grin, a red slash in her pallid smear of features.

Then, in an instant, the girl was gone. Jessica soon sensed a presence right behind her. The girl was
right behind her.
Someone flipped on the lights.

Someone is in my house. How did—

No, the light was coming from the windows.

Huh?

Jessica picked her head off the table.

Oh my God,
she thought. She’d fallen asleep at the dining room table. It was light out.
Bright
light out. Morning. She looked at her watch. No watch.

Sophie.

She shot to her feet, looked around, frantic for the moment, her heart racing to burst. Sophie was sitting in front of the TV, pajamas still on, a box of cereal in her lap, the TV showing cartoons.

“G’morning, Mom,” Sophie said through a mouthful of Cheerios.

“What time is it?” Jessica asked, even though she knew it was rhetorical.

“I can’t tell time,” her daughter replied.

Jessica darted into the kitchen, looked at the clock. Nine thirty. In her entire life, she had never slept past nine. Ever. What a day to set the record, she thought. Some task force leader.

Shower, breakfast, coffee, dressed, more coffee. All in twenty minutes. A world record. A personal best, at least. She gathered the photos and files together. The photo on top was a still of the girl from
Philadelphia Skin.

And that’s when she saw it. Sometimes extreme fatigue coupled with extreme pressure can open the floodgates.

The first time Jessica had watched the film, she thought she had seen those eyes before.

Now she knew where.

70

B
YRNE WOKE UP
on the couch. He had dreamed of Jimmy Purify. Jimmy and his pretzel logic. He had dreamed about a conversation they had once had, late one night in the unit, maybe a year before Jimmy’s bypass. They had just brought down a very bad man, wanted on a triple. The mood was smooth and easy. Jimmy was working his way though a huge bag of barbecued potato chips, feet up, tie and belt undone. Someone brought up the fact that Jimmy’s doctor had told him he had to cut down on fatty, greasy, sugary foods. These were three of Jimmy’s four basic food groups, the other being single-malt.

Jimmy sat up. He assumed his Buddha pose. Everyone knew a pearl was forthcoming.

“This happens to be health food,” he said. “And I can prove it.”

Everyone just stared, meaning,
Let’s have it.

“Okay,” he began, “Potatoes are a vegetable, am I right?” Jimmy’s lips and tongue were a bright orange.

“Right,” someone said. “Potatoes are a vegetable.”

“And
barbecuing
is just another term for
grilling,
am I also right?”

“Can’t argue with that,” someone testified.

“Therefore, I am eating grilled vegetables. This is health food, baby.” Straight-faced, perfectly serious. Nobody did deadpan better.

Fucking Jimmy, Byrne thought.

God,
he missed him.

Byrne got up, splashed some water on his face in the kitchen, put the kettle on. When he walked back into the living room, the case was still there, still open.

He circled the evidence. The epicenter of the case was right before him, and the door was maddeningly closed.

We didn’t do right by that girl, Kevin.

Why couldn’t he stop thinking about this? He remembered the night as if it were yesterday. Jimmy was having surgery to have bunions removed. Byrne had been partnered with Phil Kessler. The call came in around 10:00
PM
. A body was found in the bathroom of a Sunoco station in North Philly. When they arrived on the scene Kessler, as always, found something to do that had nothing to do with being in the same room as the victim. He started a canvass.

Byrne had pushed open the door to the ladies’ room. He was immediately accosted with the scents of disinfectant and human waste. On the floor, wedged between the toilet and the grimy tiled wall, was a young woman. She was slender and fair, no more than twenty years old. There were a few track marks on her arm. She was clearly a user, but not habitual. Byrne had felt for a pulse, found none. She was pronounced dead at the scene.

He recalled looking at her, so unnaturally posed on the floor. He recalled thinking that this was not who she was supposed to be. She was supposed to be a nurse, a lawyer, a scientist, a ballerina. She was supposed to be somebody other than a drug statistic.

There had been some signs of a struggle—contusions on her wrists, some bruising on her back—but the amount of heroin in her system, coupled with the fresh needle marks on her arms, indicated that she had recently shot up, and it had been far too pure for her system. The official cause of death was ruled an overdose.

But hadn’t he suspected more?

There was a knock at his door, bringing Byrne back from the memory. He answered. It was an officer with an envelope.

“Sergeant Powell said it was misfiled,” the officer said. “He sends his apologies.”

“Thanks,” Byrne said.

He closed the door, opened the envelope. The girl’s picture was clipped to the front of the folder. He had forgotten how young she looked. Byrne purposely avoided looking at the name on the folder for the moment.

As he stared at her photograph, he tried to recall her first name. How could he have forgotten? He knew how. She was a junkie. A middle-class kid gone bad. In his arrogance, in his ambition, she had been a nobody to him. Had she been a lawyer at some white-shoe firm, or a doctor at HUP, or an architect at the city planning board, he would have treated the case differently. As much as he hated to admit it, in those days, it was true.

He opened the file, saw her name. And everything made sense.

Angelika. Her name was Angelika.

She was Angel Blue.

He flipped through the file. He soon found what he was looking for. She was not just another stiff. She was, of course, somebody’s daughter.

As he reached for the phone, it rang, the sound echoing in tandem with the question caroming off the walls of his heart:

How will you pay?

71

N
IGEL
B
UTLER’S HOME
was a tidy row house on Forty-second Street, near Locust. The outside was as ordinary as any well-kept brick row house in Philadelphia—a pair of flower boxes beneath the two front windows, a cheerful red door, a brass mailbox. If the detectives were correct in their assumptions, a full litany of horrors had been planned inside.

Angel Blue’s real name was Angelika Butler. Angelika had been twenty years old when she was found in a North Philly gas station bathroom, dead from a heroin overdose. Or so the medical examiner’s office had officially ruled.

“I have a daughter studying acting,” Nigel Butler had said.

True statement, wrong verb tense.

Byrne told Jessica about the night he and Phil Kessler had gotten the call to investigate a dead girl in that North Philly gas station. Jessica told Byrne in detail of her two meetings with Butler. One, when she had met him at his office at Drexel. The other when Butler had stopped by the Roundhouse with books. She told Byrne of the series of eight-by-ten head shots of Butler in his many stage characters. Nigel Butler was an accomplished actor.

But Nigel Butler’s real life was a much darker piece of drama. Before leaving the Roundhouse, Byrne had run a PDCH on the man. A police department criminal history was a basic criminal history report. Nigel Butler had twice been investigated for sexually abusing his daughter: once when she was ten; once when she was twelve. Both times the investigation had hit a dead end when Angelika had recanted her story.

When Angelika had entered the adult-film world, and met an unseemly end, it had probably sent Butler over the edge—jealousy, rage, paternal concern, sexual obsession. Who knew? The point was, Nigel Butler was now at the center of their investigation.

Yet even with all this circumstantial evidence, they still did not have enough for a search warrant of Nigel Butler’s house. At that moment, Paul DiCarlo was going down a list of judges trying to change that.