The Skin Gods (46 page)

THE VIDEOTAPE FOUND IN CAP-HAITIEN WAS A FRENCH FILM, released in 1955. The title was
Les Diaboliques.
In it, Simone Signoret and Vera Clouzot— who portray the wife and former mistress of a thoroughly rotten man played by Paul Meurisse— murder Meurisse by drowning him in a bathtub. Like the rest of the Actor’s masterpieces, this tape had a re-created murder replacing the original crime.

 

 

In this version of
Les Diaboliques,
a barely glimpsed man in a dark satin jacket with a dragon embroidered on the back pushes a man beneath the surface of the water in a grungy bathroom. Again, a bathroom.

 

 

Victim number four.

 

 

* * *

THERE WAS A clean print on the gun, a .25 ACP Raven manufactured by Phoenix Arms, a popular junk gun on the streets. You could pick up a Raven .25 anywhere in the city for under a hundred dollars. If the shooter was in the system, they would soon have a match.

 

 

There had been no slug recovered at the Erin Halliwell scene, so they would not know for certain if this weapon was used to kill her, even though the ME’s office had presumptively concluded that her single wound was consistent with a small-caliber weapon.

 

 

Firearms had already determined that the Raven .25 was the gun used to shoot Terry Cahill.

 

 

As they had thought, the cell phone attached to the videocassette belonged to Stephanie Chandler. Although the SIM card was still active, everything else had been erased. There were no calendar entries, no address book listings, no text or e-mail messages, no logs of calls made or received. There were no fingerprints.

 

 

* * *

CAHILL GAVE HIS statement while getting patched up at Jefferson. The wound was a flesh wound, and he was expected to be released within a few hours. In the ER waiting room, half a dozen FBI agents congregated, giving a visiting Jessica Balzano and Kevin Byrne their backs. Nobody could have prevented what happened to Cahill, but tightly knit squads never looked at it that way. According the suits, the PPD had fucked up, and one of their own was now in the hospital.

 

 

In his official statement, Cahill said that he had been in South Philly when he had received the call from Eric Chavez. He had then monitored the channel and heard that the suspect was perhaps in the area of Twenty-third and McClellan. He had begun a search of the alleyways behind the storefronts when his assailant had come up behind him, put the gun to the back of his head, and forced him to say the lines from
The Godfather
into the two-way radio. When the suspect reached for Cahill’s weapon, Cahill knew he had to make his move. They struggled, and the assailant punched him twice— once in the small of the back, once on the right side of his face— then the suspect’s gun discharged. The suspect then fled down the alley, leaving his weapon behind.

 

 

A brief canvass of the area near the shooting yielded little. No one had seen or heard a thing. But now the police had a firearm, and that opened up a broad avenue of investigation to them. Guns, like people, had a history.

 

 

* * *

WHEN THE TAPE of
Les Diaboliques
was ready to be screened, ten detectives assembled in the studio room of the AV unit. The French-language film ran 122 minutes. At the point where Simone Signoret and Vera Clouzot drown Paul Meurisse, there is a crash edit. When the film changes over to the new footage, the new scene is a filthy bathroom— grimy ceiling, peeling plaster, filthy rags on the floor, stacked magazines next to dirty toilet. A bare-bulb fixture next to the sink casts a dim, sickly light. A large figure on the right side of the screen holds the thrashing victim underwater with clearly powerful hands.

 

 

The camera shot is stationary, meaning that the camera was most likely on a tripod, or perched on something. To date there had been no evidence of a second suspect.

 

 

When the victim stops thrashing, his body floats to the surface of the dirty water. The camera is then picked up and moved in for a close-up. It was there that Mateo Fuentes froze the image.

 

 

“Jesus Christ,” Byrne said.

 

 

All eyes turned to him. “What, you know him?” Jessica asked.

 

 

“Yeah,” Byrne said. “I know him.”

 

 

* * *

DARRYL PORTER’S APARTMENT above the X Bar was as sleazy and ugly as the man. All the windows were painted shut, and the hot sun on the glass gave the cramped space a cloying, dog-kennel smell.

 

 

There was an old avocado-colored sleeper couch covered with a filthy bedspread, a pair of stained armchairs. The floor, tables, and shelves were covered with water-stained magazines and newspapers. The sink offered a month of dirty dishes and at least five species of scavenging insects.

 

 

On one of the bookshelves over the TV were three sealed DVD copies of
Philadelphia Skin.

 

 

Darryl Porter was in his bathtub, fully clothed, fully dead. The filthy bathwater had shriveled and leached Porter’s skin a cement-gray color. His bowels had released into the water, and the stench in the confines of the small bathroom was overpowering. A pair of rats had already begun to seek out the gas-bloated corpse.

 

 

The Actor had now claimed four lives, or at least four of which they were aware. He was getting bolder. It was a classic escalation, and no one could predict what was coming next.

 

 

As the CSU set up to process yet another crime scene, Jessica and Byrne stood in front of the X Bar. They both looked shell-shocked. It was a moment where the horrors were flying fast and fleet and words were hard to come by.
Psycho, Fatal Attraction, Scarface, Les Diaboliques
— what the hell was coming next?

 

 

Jessica’s cell phone rang, bringing with it the answer.

 

 

“This is Detective Balzano.”

 

 

The call was from Sergeant Nate Rice, head of the Firearms Unit. He had two pieces of news for the task force. One was that the gun recovered from the scene behind the Haitian market was very likely the same make and model as the gun on the
Fatal Attraction
videotape. The second piece of news was a lot harder to digest. Sergeant Rice had just spoken to the fingerprint lab. They had a match. He gave Jessica the name.

 

 

“What?”
Jessica asked. She knew she had heard Rice correctly, but her brain was not prepared to process the data.

 

 

“I said the same thing,” Rice replied. “But it’s a ten-point match.”

 

 

A ten-point match, police were fond of saying, was name, address, Social Security number, and high school picture. If you had a ten-point, you had your man.

 

 

“And?” Jessica asked.

 

 

“And there’s no doubt about it. The print on the gun belongs to Julian Matisse.”

 

 

 

65

WHEN FAITH CHANDLER HAD SHOWN UP AT THE HOTEL, HE knew it was the beginning of the end.

 

 

It was Faith who had called him. Called to tell him the news. Called to ask for more money. It was now only a matter of time until all the pieces began to fall into place for the police, and everything would be exposed.

 

 

He stood, naked, considering himself in the mirror. His mother stared back, her sad, liquid eyes judging the man he’d become. He brushed his hair, gently, using the beautiful brush Ian had bought for him at Fortnum & Mason, the exclusive British department store.

 

 

Don’t make me give you the brush.

 

 

He heard activity outside the door to his hotel room. It sounded like the man who came around each day at this time to replenish the mini-bar. Seth looked at the dozen empty bottles scattered around the small table near the window. He was barely drunk. He had two bottles left. He could use more.

 

 

He pulled the tape out of the cassette housing, allowing it to pool on the floor at his feet. Next to the bed were already a dozen empty cassettes, their plastic hulls stacked like crystalline bones.

 

 

He looked next to the television. There were only a few more to go. He would destroy them all, then, perhaps, himself.

 

 

There came a knock at his door. Seth closed his eyes. “Yes?”

 

 

“Mini bar, sir?”

 

 

“Yeah,” Seth said. He was relieved. But he knew it was only temporary. He cleared his throat. Had he been crying? “Hang on.”

 

 

He slipped on his robe, unlocked the door. He stepped into the bathroom. He really didn’t want to see anyone. He heard the young man enter, replace the bottles and snacks in the mini bar.

 

 

“Enjoying your stay in Philadelphia, sir?” the young man called from the other room.

 

 

Seth almost laughed. He thought about the past week, about how it had all come apart. “Very much,” Seth lied.

 

 

“We hope you’ll return.”

 

 

Seth took a deep breath, scrambled his courage. “Take two dollars from the dresser,” he called out. For the moment, his volume masked his emotions.

 

 

“Thank you, sir,” the young man said.

 

 

A few moments later Seth heard the door close.

 

 

Seth sat on the edge of the tub for a full minute, his head in his hands. What
had
he become? He knew the answer, but he just could not admit it, even to himself. He thought about the moment that Ian Whitestone had walked into the car dealership so long ago, how they had talked well into the night. About film. About art. About women. About things so personal that Seth had never shared the thoughts with anyone else.

 

 

He ran the tub. After five minutes or so he toed the water. He cracked one of the two remaining little bottles of bourbon, poured it into a water glass, drank it in one gulp. He stepped out of his robe, slipped into the hot water. He had thought about a Roman death, but had quickly ruled it out. Frankie Pentangeli in
The Godfather: Part II.
He didn’t have the courage for such a thing, if courage was indeed what it took.

 

 

He closed his eyes, just for a minute. Just for a minute, then he would call the police and start talking.

 

 

When had it begun? He wanted to examine his life in terms of grand themes, but he knew the simple answer. It began with the girl. She had never shot heroin before. She had been scared, but willing. So willing. As they all had been. He remembered her eyes, her cold dead eyes. He remembered loading her into the car. The terrifying ride into North Philly. The filthy gas station. The guilt. Had he slept through the night even
once
since that terrible evening?

 

 

Soon, Seth knew, there would be another knock at the door. The police would want to talk to him in earnest. But not just yet. Just a few minutes.

 

 

Just a few.

 

 

Then, faintly, he heard . . . moaning? Yes. It sounded like one of the porno tapes. Was it in the adjoining hotel room? No. It took a moment, but Seth soon realized that the sound was coming from his hotel room. From
his television.

 

 

He sat up in the tub, his heart racing. The water was warm, not hot. He had been out for a while.

 

 

Someone was in the hotel room.

 

 

Seth craned his neck, trying to look around the bathroom door. It was ajar, but the angle was such that could not see more than a few feet into the room. He looked up. There was a lock on the bathroom door. Could he get out of the tub quietly, slam shut the door and lock it? Maybe. But then what? What would he do then? He had no cell phone in the bathroom.

 

 

Then, from right outside the bathroom door, just inches away, he heard a voice.

 

 

Seth thought of T. S. Eliot’s line from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

 

 

Till human voices wake us . . .

 

 

“I’m new to this city,” the voice outside his door said. “I haven’t seen a friendly face in weeks.”

 

 

And we drown.

 

 

 

66