Richard Montanari

by The Echo Man

  Jessica made a few more notes as Cardigans looked closely at Byrne. 'You look familiar,' Cardigans said. 'You ever work the docks?'

  'My father did,' Byrne said. 'Thirty-five years.'

  Cardigans snapped his fingers. 'Paddy Byrne.'

  Byrne nodded.

  'You look just like him.' He turned to Fishing Hat. 'Did you know Paddy?'

  Fishing Hat shook his head.

  'This guy was a legend on Pier 96.' He turned back to Byrne. 'How is he these days?'

  'He's good,' Byrne said. 'Thanks for asking.'

  'So how come you didn't follow in his footsteps? Get an honest job?'

  'The docks are too dangerous for me,' Byrne said. 'And I prefer a higher class of criminal.'

  Cardigans laughed. 'Yeah. You're Paddy's boy.'

  'So, what else can you tell me about this other victim?' Jessica asked, trying to bring the conversation back around.

  Both men shrugged in tandem. 'Not much, 'cept that it was a woman,' Fishing Hat said. 'They locked the place up for years. Guy who owned it couldn't even go back in there. Said he was afraid of ghosts or something. He sold it to some guy from Pittsburgh, who sold it to someone else.'

  Jessica looked around. 'What's the neighborhood, guys?'

  'Some say Queen Village but they don't know shit.'

  'What do you say?'

  'We say Pennsport. Because it is Pennsport. We're south of Washington, for Chrissake.'

  'Did a detective talk to you guys about that case back in '02?' Jessica asked.

  'Just me,' Cardigans said.

  'Do you remember their names? The detectives?'

  Cardigans shook his head.

  'He don't remember his kids' names,' Fishing Hat said. 'And he's only got four of 'em.'

  'Did you know the victim?'

  'No. I heard she was a real hot number, though. Damn shame.'

  The information would be easy enough to find, but probably wasn't relevant. Jessica thanked the two men, got their contact information - names, addresses, phone numbers - and gave them both a business card, along with the standard request for them to call if they thought of anything else.

  'You come back anytime,' Fishing Hat said. 'We always have time to talk to pretty young girls.'

  Jessica smiled. Pretty young girls. She'd come back tomorrow.

  Jessica and Byrne returned to the Roundhouse, collated their witness statements, putting them in the binder. While they waited for the coroner's preliminary reports, as well as any forensic findings, they turned their attention to other matters of importance.

  They each had a case on which they were working. Both cases had stalled, and there was no worse feeling for a homicide detective than the sense that an investigation was slipping away from them. While Byrne made calls to the four witnesses he needed for the grand- jury probe of Eduardo Robles, just to keep the pot simmering, Jessica looked up some addresses, trying to align the witnesses in another case.

  Two weeks earlier a gun had been left at the scene of a drug- related homicide. The weapon had been traced back to a woman named Patricia Lentz, a known drug addict and prostitute.

  The Lentz apartment was on North 19th Street near Cecil B. Moore. When Jessica and Byrne arrived, they found the door open, TV blasting, something burning on the stove. The first floor was a haze of vile smoke, a landfill of soiled mattresses, broken furniture, spent crack vials and empty liquor bottles.

  They found Patricia Lentz passed out beneath a pile of clothing in the basement. At first Jessica did not think she was going to find a pulse. But the woman had just passed out and, once she'd been revived by paramedics, was taken into custody without incident.

  Whereas the suspect was in custody, her apartment had not yet been cleared. Jessica was quite familiar with the layout of these row houses and knew there were two more rooms upstairs. While Byrne turned the barely coherent woman over to the uniformed officers for transport to the Roundhouse, Jessica continued upstairs. She cleared the first small bedroom, and the bathroom. When she walked into the second bedroom she found there was a closet. She eased open the door.

  Jessica froze. There, on the floor in front of her, partially hidden by a plastic garbage bag bursting at the seams with rotting trash, was a little boy. No more than two years old. A dark-haired little boy dressed in a ragged T-shirt and diaper. It appeared that he had crawled beneath the garbage for warmth.

  Reaching down into the closet, she picked up the boy. He was shivering with fear, miserable in his soiled diaper. There were rashes on his arms and legs.

  'It's okay, little man,' Jessica said. 'It's okay.'

  On the way out of the house, Jessica found a pile of papers on a card table near the front door. They were mostly unpaid bills, flyers for pizza and Chinese takeout, shut-off notices. Also on the table was a photograph of an infant lying on a dirty bed sheet. Jessica could not mistake those eyes. It was the little boy she had in her arms. She flipped the picture over. It read Carlos age three months.

  His name was Carlos.

  Jessica brought the boy back to the Roundhouse to await a representative from the Department of Human Services. She had stopped along the way and bought diapers, wipes, lotion, powder. It had been a long time since she had done these things with Sophie, but it was like riding a bike: she hadn't forgotten.

  Cleaned up, shiny and combed, Carlos sat at one of the desks, on top of a pile of phone books, secured to the chair with an empty ammunition belt. Someone found a Philadelphia Eagles child's sweatshirt. It was a little too big, so they rolled up the sleeves and Scotch-taped them gently around the boy's wrists.

  The boy's mother, Patricia Lentz, was booked on first-degree murder charges, and the case was a lock. They had the murder weapon, ballistics matched, and Lentz would not be coming back for a long time. Carlos would have children of his own by the time she got out.

  'What's going on with Carlos?' Byrne asked, bringing Jessica back to the present and the new case at hand.

  Jessica had to take a second. The last thing you wanted to do in this room, even with your partner, who knew you better than anyone in your life, was display any emotion besides anger.

  'Nothing,' Jessica said. 'They still haven't been able to find Patricia Lentz's sister. Word is that she's an even bigger crackhead.'

  Jessica knew it was no secret, especially to Kevin Byrne, that she and Vincent had been trying for two years to have another child. Sophie was now seven, and the longer they waited, well, all the books said you really didn't want too much of an age gap between siblings. The very notion of undertaking the monumental task of adopting Carlos was, of course, a ridiculous idea. During daylight hours, anyway. But when Jessica lay awake in the middle of the night it all seemed possible. Then the sun would come up again and she realized it would never happen.

  'How is he doing?' Byrne asked.

  'Good, I guess,' Jessica said. She really didn't know if that was true or not, but it was the only answer she had.

  'If you want, we can stop in at the Department of Human Services and check on him.'

  The sooner Jessica let go, the better it would be. Still, she knew what she was going to say. 'Sure. That would be good.'

  Before they could discuss it further, Nicci Malone poked her head into the duty room. 'Kevin, you have a call.'

  Byrne crossed the room, hit a button, answered. A few moments later he pulled out his notebook, wrote something in it, punched a fist through the air. It was clearly good news. Jessica needed some good news.

  Byrne hung up, grabbed his coat. 'That was the ID Unit.'

  The ID Unit processed latent fingerprints.

  'Are we on?' Jessica asked.

  'We are,' Byrne said. 'Our cleanshaven dead man has a name. Kenneth Arnold Beckman.'

  Chapter 11

  The Beckman house was a gaunt and peeling postwar row house on West Tioga Street, in the Nicetown area of North Philadelphia. Nicetown was a blue-collar section of the city that was slowly recovering after three decade
s of slow decline, a slide culminating in the Tastykake company moving out of the area in 2007. At one time it was rumored that Trump Entertainment would be building a casino on Hunting Park Avenue. It never happened. The only gambling being done in Nicetown these days was among those residents and store owners debating whether or not to hang onto their property.

  Before leaving the Roundhouse, Jessica asked Josh Bontrager to run a check on Kenneth Arnold Beckman. Bontrager would call if there was anything to report.

  When Jessica and Byrne pulled to a stop in front of the Beckman house, near Schuyler Street, it began to rain. The wind picked up, and when they stepped onto the porch wet leaves gathered at their feet.

  Jessica rang the bell three times before noticing that there was a wire hanging out from the bottom of the rusted panel. The bell didn't work. A quick look at the crumbling porch, with its leaning support pillars and brickwork desperately in need of tuck pointing, explained why. She knocked on the door, gently at first. The second time she knocked harder. Eventually they heard the deadbolts begin to turn. There were three of them.

  The woman who answered the door was a hard forty. Her platinum hair was perm-fried, her make-up looked like it had been applied with a paper towel. She wore black Capri pants and battered pink running shoes. A lighted cigarette hung from the corner of her mouth.

  Looking Byrne up and down, she tossed a sideways glance at Jessica.

  'Are you Mrs. Beckman?' Byrne asked.

  'Well, now,' she replied. 'That would depend on two things, wouldn't it?'

  'And what would those two things be?'

  'Who you are and what the fuck you want.'

  Oh boy, Jessica thought. We've got a real charmer here.

  Byrne took out his ID, badged the woman. She stared at it far too long. Jessica figured this was an attempt on the woman's part to establish some sort of power dynamic. What the woman didn't know was that Kevin Byrne could outlast a glacier. She looked at Jessica, raising a painted-on eyebrow. Jessica reached into her pocket, showed the woman her ID. The woman sniffed, turned back to Byrne.

  'Well, that answers one of my questions,' she said.

  'May we come in?' Byrne asked.

  The woman blinked a few times, as if Byrne was speaking another language. 'Can you hear me?' she asked.

  'Ma'am?'

  'Can you hear my voice?'

  'Yes,' Byrne said. 'I can hear your voice.'

  'Good. I hear you too. We can talk right here.'

  Jessica sensed Byrne's gloves coming off. He pulled out his notebook, flipped a few pages. 'What's your first name, ma'am?'

  Pause. 'Sharon.'

  'Is your husband Kenneth Arnold Beckman?'

  The woman snorted. 'Husband? That's one way of putting it.'

  'Are you married to him, ma'am?'

  The woman took a long drag on her cigarette. Jessica noted that the nicotine stains on her fingers reached down to her knuckles. She blew out the smoke, and with it her answer. 'Barely.'

  'When was the last time you saw him?'

  'Why?'

  'Right now I just need you to answer the question, ma'am. I'll explain why in a moment.'

  Another drag. Jessica estimated that, if they were going to get through the basic questions at this pace, Sharon Beckman would go through a pack and a half. 'Yesterday afternoon.'

  'About what time?'

  Another sigh. 'About three o'clock.'

  'And where was this?'

  'It was at the MGM Grand in Vegas. I'm a dancer there.'

  Byrne stared, the woman stared. She rolled her eyes.

  'It was right about where you're standing,' she said. 'I think he said something like "Clean the kitchen, you lazy fucking bitch." Real Hallmark moment.'

  The wind picked up again, blowing a thin cold rain across the porch. Byrne moved a few feet to his right, making sure that Sharon Beckman caught the rain directly in her face.

  'Was he alone at the time?'

  'Yeah,' Sharon Beckman said, stepping back a foot. 'For once.'

  'And he did not come home last night?'

  The woman snorted. 'Why break with tradition?'

  Byrne pressed on. 'Does anyone else live here?'

  'Just my son.'

  My son, Jessica thought. Not our son.

  'How old is he?'

  The woman smiled. Her teeth were the same color as her tobacco- stained knuckles. 'Why, officer. That would be giving away my age.' When Byrne didn't respond, didn't budge, didn't seem to be weak- kneed by the woman's coquettish charms, she repositioned her scowl, hit her cigarette again, and said, 'He's nineteen. I had him when I was six.'

  Byrne made the note. He then asked her what the kid's name was. She told him. Jason Crandall.

  'Where does your husband work?'

  'Hey. You writing a fucking book here? My autobiography, maybe?'

  'Ma'am, we're just trying to—'

  'No. What you need to do is tell me what this is about or we're done here. I know my rights.'

  Jessica knew the notification was coming, so she watched the woman's face as she took in the news. You could tell a lot from the initial reaction to the news that a loved one has been killed. Or even one not so loved.

  'Mrs. Beckman, your husband was murdered yesterday.'

  The woman drew a sharp intake of breath, but other than that betrayed nothing. Except, perhaps, for a slight shake in her hands, which deposited a long cigarette ash on the floor. She stared out at the street for a moment, turned back. 'How did he get it?'

  Get it, Jessica thought. Most people said 'What?' or 'Oh my God' or 'No!' or something like that. How did he get it? No, not too many people ask how the deceased became deceased. That usually came a bit later in the conversation.

  'May we come in, ma'am?' Byrne said. 'It's getting a little nasty out here.'

  The news had undone the woman's resolve, as well as her animosity. Without saying a word, she opened the door and stepped to the side.

  They entered the house, a standard porchfront-style row house, large by Philly standards, probably measuring around 1500 square feet on three floors. It was quickly degenerating, already long past its sell- by date.

  The living room was directly to the left, with a hallway leading to a kitchen and a stairway at the back of the house. The walls were painted a cheerless, faded baby blue. The furniture was worn, mismatched, spring-shocked. A half-eaten Weight Watchers dinner sat on a coffee table, next to an overflowing ashtray. Cat hair covered nearly every surface. The place smelled like microwave popcorn.

  Sharon Beckman did not offer them a seat. Jessica would have passed on that offer anyway.

  'Ma'am,' Byrne said. 'We're here because your husband was a victim of homicide. We're trying to find out who did this, and bring that person to justice.'

  'Yeah? Well, look in the fucking mirror,' the woman spat.

  'I understand your anger,' Byrne continued. 'But if there's anything you can think of that might help us, we would really appreciate it.'

  The woman lit another Salem off the first cigarette, held them both for a few moments, one in each hand.

  'Can you think of anyone who might have had a problem with your husband?' Byrne asked. 'Someone he owed money to? Someone with whom he had a business problem?'

  The woman took a full five seconds to answer. Maybe she did have something to hide.

  'Do I need a lawyer?' Sharon Beckman asked. She butted out the short cigarette.

  'Have you done anything wrong, Mrs. Beckman?' Byrne asked. It was Cop Speak 101. Standard across the world when police arrive at the lawyer moment.

  'Plenty,' she said.

  Wrong answer, Jessica thought. The woman was trying to be cute, but she didn't realize that a picture was being painted, and every stroke mattered.

  'Well, then, I can't answer your question,' Byrne said. 'If you feel the need for counsel at this time, by all means call your attorney. I can tell you that you are not suspected of anything. You are a witness, and a very impor
tant witness. All we need to do is ask you a few questions. The more you tell us, the likelier it will be that we can find the person who did this to your husband.'

  Jessica made another quick perusal of the room. There were no photographs of the Beckmans on the mantel over the bricked-in fireplace, no soft-focus wedding day portraits in tacky gold-painted frames.

  'If you'll just bear with us a little longer,' Byrne continued, 'we'll get the information we need, and we'll leave you to your thoughts and your arrangements.'

  Sharon Beckman just stared. Byrne led her through the rest of the standard questions, giving her the standard assurances. He concluded by asking her if she had a photograph of her husband.

  While Sharon Beckman was in the hallway, going through a legal- sized cardboard box, looking for the photograph, the front door opened.

  The kid who entered looked younger than nineteen. Stringy blond hair, surfer cool, hooded, stoned eyes. When he saw Byrne he must have figured him for a cop, and he shoved his right hand deep into his baggy shorts. Dope pocket.

  'How ya doin?' the kid mumbled.

  'Good, thanks,' Byrne said. 'Are you Jason?'

  The kid looked up, shocked, like there was no way that Byrne could have possibly gotten this information. 'Yeah.' Barely audible. The kid leaned back on his heels, as if that might increase the distance between them. Jessica could smell the marijuana on his clothes from ten feet away.

  'Kenny's dead,' Sharon Beckman said, walking back into the room, a pair of old snapshots in her hand. She handed them to Jessica.

  Jason stared at his mother, blinking. It was as if the words hadn't yet reached his brain. 'Dead?'

  'Yeah. Like in not alive anymore?'

  Jessica looked at the kid. No reaction.

  Over the next few minutes Byrne asked Jason the basic questions, got the expected answers. Jason said he had not seen his stepfather in more than three days.

  'Once again, we're sorry for your loss,' Byrne said to them both, putting away his notebook. He dropped a pair of business cards on the cluttered coffee table. 'If you think of anything that might help us, please call.'

  They walked the half-block to the car, adrift on their own thoughts, sizing up the subdued reactions of Beckman's widow and stepson. It was not the usual response they got from notification, to say the least.