“The first two, mob hits. The next three, for the pleasure of killing again.”
They walked in silence for half a minute. Then Jayme said, “The girl weighed a hundred and two. So maybe he cut the males up to make them easier to move. He’s a lot older now, not as strong as he used to be.”
DeMarco shook his head. “He got them into and out of his car without cutting them up. He cut them where they lay.”
It felt odd to be expressing such thoughts in full, unfiltered sunlight. Felt as if they were playing a game of some kind, working out a riddle. Two geese and four mallards floated across the park’s little pond. A long-legged jogger in a white tank top and red yoga pants, her ponytail bouncing, ran past them, so close that DeMarco could hear the music from her earbuds and smell her perfume.
Jayme said, when the girl was well past, “Who wears perfume when she’s jogging?”
“Never know who you might run into.”
They walked for a while. “I think he’s definitely opportunistic now,” Jayme said. “Picks his victims at random.”
DeMarco raised his eyes, shrugged, said nothing.
“Unless,” Jayme said, and thought for several seconds before finishing. “Maybe this time he’s trying to stay truer to the Cleveland pattern. And that’s why he picked a female. Except that he couldn’t finish the job.”
DeMarco had no response. They walked on. Then he shook his head, apparently in answer to a question he had been asking himself. “No evidence of semen on Samantha Lewis. But the coroner’s report does indicate that she probably had sex prior to her death.”
“And Hufford and Brenner still had their wallets and cash and phones on them.”
“So we rule out robbery as any kind of motive, even a secondary one. But can we rule out sexual gratification in Samantha’s case?”
“The killer might have used a condom,” Jayme suggested. “Or used a Kleenex or a rag or something.”
“It’s possible. What’s a big word for somebody like that?”
“Mmm,” Jayme said, “fastidious? Punctilious?”
“Punctilious,” DeMarco repeated with a smile. “Can’t wait to drop that one on Fascetti. We should make a list of big P words. Hit him with them whenever we can. The fact that they all start with a P will drive him crazy, make him think we’re up to something that we’re not.”
“Interesting,” she said. “What if that’s what the killer is doing—making us think that things are important that really aren’t?”
“Then he’s definitely a psychopath.”
Up ahead, where the walking path made a wide turn to the right, in a small shelter in a grove of tall oaks, a teenage boy sat on the edge of a picnic table, a young girl leaning into him.
“So if there was sexual gratification involved…” DeMarco said. “Was there anything in the files about Costa being gay?”
“Not that I recall. So are we ruling out sex as a motive or not? At least in regard to the males?”
“Sex,” DeMarco said, “but not arousal.”
“Nonsexual arousal?”
“What if he denuded the men to humiliate them? So his arousal would have been, I don’t know, the way a real estate agent feels when he gets a commission on a million-dollar sale? Or like when an accountant goes on safari and brings down a rhino?”
“The thrill of the big kill.”
“That moment of triumph. Feeling all-powerful.”
Jayme nodded, leafed through her notes. She read to herself while they walked. Then closed up the notebook and shoved it into a hip pocket. “Here’s what I don’t get,” she said. “If Brogan and Talarico were mob assassinations, why go to the trouble of copycatting the Cleveland murders?”
“It doesn’t seem necessary, does it?”
“Unless they weren’t sanctioned hits. They were personal.”
“In which case he would do what he could to muddy the scent. The Youngstown mob was still getting a lot of attention back then.”
They walked silently for the next ten minutes. At the end of the second lap, DeMarco paused a few feet from his car. Jayme stopped too. She said, “Are we done walking?”
“Let’s get to work,” he said. “Where do you want to start? With Costa, or the witness who used to be a child?”
Seventeen
DeMarco kept the speedometer needle around twenty. The street was full of potholes, broken glass, plastic and paper litter. Jayme waited for DeMarco to comment on it, but he didn’t. He drove without speaking, turning his gaze from one side of the street to the other.
Occasionally they passed a neat home with a small yard and well-maintained flower beds, but these buildings were outnumbered by those with peeled, faded paint, rotting clapboards and buckled siding. Some buildings were abandoned, windows shattered and doors missing, others boarded shut. In one lot nothing remained but a set of concrete steps where three young Black men stood, watching, motionless, as DeMarco’s car approached and then moved by.
While DeMarco drove, Jayme read from her phone. “Brier Hill gets an F for crime, employment, and housing.”
DeMarco said, “I remember when it was a solid D+.”
And then he became talkative. “The old-timers say Black Monday was as bad as Pearl Harbor. September 19, 1977. Every bit as devastating, they said. The day the Sheet and Tube works shut down. Beginning of the end for Youngstown steel.”
He nodded toward the Saint Anthony of Padua Church a block ahead on Jayme’s side, then slowed to a crawl, his foot riding lightly on the brake. The building sat atop a knoll, its past and present conjoined, one era embodied in a long trapezoid of red brick and gray concrete with a steeply slanting roof. It was attached by a low gallery to an older two-story rectangle, painted white, with a flat roof and shingled eaves. A single freestanding wall of red brick maybe fifteen feet long and six stories high stood in the building’s front yard, three heavy bells suspended in a square opening near the top. Attached to the narrow front face of the wall, a simple cross extended another ten feet into the sky.
“When I had the money,” DeMarco said, “I used to come here for a pizza. The best in town. They make it in the church kitchen.”
“A pizza shop in the church?”
“Not every day but, you know. They grew the tomatoes and peppers behind the church.”
She said, teasing, “Did you eat the whole pizza yourself?”
“Sometimes. And sometimes me and my mom. She loved Brier Hill pizza.”
The vehicle stopped for a few moments as he gazed at the church through Jayme’s window. She powered the window down and leaned back in her seat.
Ten seconds later he faced the windshield again. Blinked once. Lifted his foot off the brake. And they crept forward once more.
“It will be on this side,” Jayme told him. “An even number.”
“Yeah,” he said. She knew then that he wasn’t searching for Costa’s place but still layering the past atop the present. How much had the neighborhood changed over the years? His eyes kept moving from one side of the street to the other, taking it all in, but his mouth remained the same, lips closed in a thin line that might have been the beginning of a smile but could also have been a frown about to fall.
Whatever he was feeling, she felt like an intruder and didn’t want to interrupt. Costa could wait.
Near the end of the street, an old Black man who looked close to ninety with his stooped back and headful of bristly white hair was standing in the center of the street, overturning a tall bag of black asphalt mix into a pothole in DeMarco’s lane. Two full bags sat atop the curb.
When DeMarco pulled the car abreast of him on Jayme’s side, the old man was tamping the asphalt down with the flat head of a sledgehammer.
The man looked up, surprised to see a car where none had been, and a pair of white people looking at him through the open window. “Y
ou two lost?” he said.
DeMarco said, “Just wondering why you’re doing the city’s job for them, sir.”
The old man straightened a bit and rested his palm on the tip of the handle. “That would be ’cause the city ain’t likely to do it, and my granddaughter don’t appreciate ruining the tires on her little red car when she comes to visit.”
“You plan to pave the whole street?” DeMarco asked.
“As much as I have to.”
“Doesn’t seem right to have to do it at your own expense.”
“Hasn’t for the last fifty years, far as I can tell.”
“Well,” DeMarco told him, “we know somebody who knows somebody. We’ll see if we can’t get this street taken care of for you.”
“’Preciate it,” the old man said. “But I won’t be holding my breath waiting for it.”
DeMarco gave him a nod and a smile. “You mind if I turn around in your driveway?”
“You want to drive over this minefield again? You’re better off making a turn at the corner.”
Jayme said, “We have some business back fifty yards or so.”
“If it will get this place cleaned up some, you go ahead and do it, missy.”
DeMarco pulled ahead to the driveway, made a slow turn, and said out his window as he passed the old man, “Have a good day, sir.”
“Whenever I can, young fella.”
A few seconds later, Jayme looked back through the rear window. The old man was dragging a second bag of asphalt into the street. “That’s kind of sad,” she said.
“Did you see the size of his forearms? I bet he used to be a steelworker.”
“Why won’t the city take care of the street?”
DeMarco shrugged. “Remind me to mention it to Ben later.”
He slowed the car and eased it up to the curb alongside a wide, two-story house with cement-block pillars holding up the tilting porch roof. The porch and pillars and three-inch clapboards were all painted the same shade of faded lime green. An unpainted wooden stairway, looking none too stable, ran up the side of the building to a second-floor apartment.
“You can wait here if you want,” he told her. “Those stairs look more than a little sketchy.”
She popped open her door. “Want me to run up and down them a couple times? Just to make sure you won’t hurt yourself?”
He shut off the engine, opened his door, and climbed out. “I was trying to be a gentleman,” he said.
“You’re not very good at it, are you, babe?”
At the bottom of the stairs, he stood aside. “Youth, beauty, and intelligence first.”
“So much better,” she told him.
He followed two steps below her, and told himself, The view is better from here anyway.
Eighteen
Despite the open windows in Freddy Costa’s apartment, the air was still and heavy. The only thing blowing in through the dirty screens was the scent of poverty, a scent DeMarco recognized and remembered, of dirty concrete and littered yards, old garbage and despair and a simmering outrage for everything at once and nothing in particular.
Native to the room was also a beery odor and the thick stench of cat litter in need of disposal. From Freddy himself came the sour stink of sweat.
“So you’re not the police,” Costa said, and leaned away from the IDPI card DeMarco held out to him. Jayme had ordered leather PI wallets for both of them, complete with mini-badges, but until they arrived in the mail, the simple cards she had designed online and printed on glossy white card stock would have to do. DeMarco felt a little foolish showing the homemade card, so he displayed it only for a couple of beats, then slipped it into his shirt pocket again.
Costa’s living room was dim and sparsely furnished. A gray thrift-store sofa with a black cat curled atop the center cushion. A green vinyl recliner with the footrest extended and cocked at an angle, a white long-haired cat curled against the armrest. A small gray cat watching from the windowsill. A scarred end table holding an unlit light made from a cast-iron hand pump and a too-small beige shade. A small flat-screen TV mounted precariously atop a pair of blue plastic crates, the volume loud. On the screen, Johnny Depp lay in the sand, his face painted white with black streaks, a stuffed raven, wings spread, mounted atop his head, his dark eyes studying action offscreen. The booming background music suggested something ominous about to happen.
“You mind turning that off for a couple minutes?” DeMarco said.
Costa looked at him, then at Jayme. He bore the appearance of a super middleweight boxer gone soft and paunchy, naked arms flabby in a black tank top furred with three colors of cat hair, vein-gnarled calves extending below the red basketball shorts. He was five ten, with a round, battered face, his thin gray hair slicked down and combed straight back from the forehead.
Jayme smiled and said, “Please? It’s a little loud.”
He said, “You think I’m loud, you oughta hear the assholes downstairs when they wake up, which thank God won’t be till suppertime or later.”
She leaned forward, still smiling. “I’m sorry; could you say that again?”
He gave a nod, turned and crossed to the recliner, picked up the remote, and muted the TV. “It’s crap anyway,” he said. “He’s supposed to be Tonto. Looks like he came straight from one of them pirate movies and stuck a crow on his head.”
He waved a hand at the sofa. “You might as well set down. I’m going to. Don’t worry about Connie. She won’t hurt you.” He picked the white cat off the recliner, flopped onto the seat, lifted his bare feet to the cockeyed footrest, and lay the cat across his lap.
He didn’t wait until DeMarco and Jayme were seated. “They can’t find anything on me, can they? Because I didn’t do nothin’. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”
While Jayme brushed the cat hair off her cushion, DeMarco sat and took out his notebook. Flipped through the first couple of pages. Connie studied Jayme for a few moments, then crawled onto her lap.
“July 11, 1988,” DeMarco said. “Between 11:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m.”
“Fuck, man,” Costa said, and scratched one naked foot with the other one. “Didn’t they give you a report to read? There’s gotta be a dozen of them by now. Why do you have to bother me with this shit again?”
Jayme said, “We just need to know if you have anything to add.”
“Add to what? You think I’m gonna change my mind about it? I wasn’t there. I wasn’t there in 1988, and I wasn’t there for any of them people this past month. How many times does a guy have to say it?”
“So where were you?” DeMarco asked. “July 11, 1988. Between 11:00 a.m.—”
“Ah for chrissakes,” Costa interrupted. “I was with a guy in Canfield. His car. Sussing out some houses.”
DeMarco told him, “It says in the reports you can’t remember where you were.”
“Fascetti and me don’t like each other,” Costa said. “I like her.” And he gave Jayme a wink.
“You were looking for a house to rob?” she asked.
“No, to give them a Publishers Clearing House check for a million dollars.”
“Were you looking for anything in particular?” said DeMarco.
“Personally, I was hoping to score a computer or two. Everybody was talking about them back then. I wanted to see what all the excitement was about.”
“So this was freelance?”
“It’s what I did. Me and Zero and a couple of other guys. We hired out when we could, but those jobs were few and far between.”
Jayme said, “Did you find a house you liked? That night in Canfield?”
“Shit,” Costa said. “We were so drunk and high we were lucky to find our way home. Zero blacked out and put us in a ditch. I did the last mile and half on foot, left the dumb bastard there to sleep it off.”
“Zero being…
?” Jayme asked.
“Jimmy Skirowski. But you already know that, don’t you?”
“What route did you take back from Canfield?” DeMarco asked.
“Didn’t I tell you we were too drunk and high to see straight?”
DeMarco looked at his notes. “You used to know.”
“625 and 62, okay? You happy now?”
“Did you stop anywhere along the way? Either coming or going?”
“You think we were stupid? We knew what we were doing.”
Jayme said, “Is that why you were drunk and high?”
He grinned. “You got a sharp little tongue on you, don’t you? I gotta be honest; you’re turning me on a little bit.”
DeMarco said, “We’re having so much fun here, I’m thinking I should call Fascetti and have him join us. That okay with you, Freddy?”
Costa rolled his head from side to side. “I am so fucking tired of you people. If you had anything on me, I’da been in jail a long time ago. But I’m not. Koenig couldn’t do it, Fascetti couldn’t do it, and neither will you, no matter what you try to pin on me. Times like now, though, I almost wish I was in jail. So how about you just get the fuck outta here and go ruin somebody else’s life? You’ve done all the damage to mine you can. Prison would be a freaking vacation for me.”
DeMarco closed up his notebook. “What would you say if I told you that gray hairs were found on the victims? Gray hairs that match your own?”
Costa laughed. “I’d say you’re grasping at straws that ain’t there. How dumb do you think I am?”
Jayme said, “You seem a little angry, Mr. Costa. Were you angry the nights you killed Hufford and Brenner?”
Costa laughed another sour laugh. He shook his head and stroked the white cat. Then he leaned toward Jayme, looked her in the eye. “Sweetie, you’re a good-looking girl. When I look in those pretty eyes of yours, I don’t see stupid. So you should be smart enough to understand this. The guys I used to work for are all either dead or locked up or senile, and none of the younger ones will have anything to do with me. I’m supposed to be the nobody who wasted a couple of big earners. You think the bosses would’ve let me live to see 1989 if they believed it was me?”
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