Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense: The Rosary Girls, the Skin Gods, Merciless, Badlands

by Richard Montanari

  Byrne had frozen that instant in his mind, the way he had stilled few others in his life. Over his twenty years on the force, he had found it almost routine to accept the moments of blind heroism and reckless courage in the people he loved and admired. He had even come to accept the senseless, random acts of savagery delivered by and unto strangers. These things came with the job: the steep premium to justice sought. It was the moments of naked humanity and weakness of flesh, however, he could not elude, the images of body and spirit betrayed that burrowed beneath the surface of his heart.

  When he saw the big man on the muddied tile of the diner, his body skirmishing with death, the silent scream slashed into his jaw, he knew that he would never look at Jimmy Purify the same way again. Oh, he would love him, as he had come to over the years, and he would listen to his preposterous stories, and he would, by the grace of God, once again marvel at Jimmy’s lithe and fluid abilities behind a gas grill on those sweltering Philly summer Sundays, and he would, without a moment’s thought or hesitation, take a bullet to the heart for the man, but he knew immediately that this thing they did—the unflinching descent into the maw of violence and insanity, night after night—was over.

  As much as it brought Byrne shame and regret, that was the reality of that long, terrible night.

  The reality of this night, however, found a dark balance in Byrne’s mind, a delicate symmetry that he knew would bring Jimmy Purify peace. Deirdre Pettigrew was dead, and Gideon Pratt was going to take the full ride. Another family was shredded by grief, but this time the killer had left behind his DNA in the form of a gray pubic hair that would send him to the little tiled room at SCI Greene. There Gideon Pratt would meet the icy needle if Byrne had anything to say about it.

  Of course, the justice system being what it was, there was a fifty–fifty chance that, if convicted, Pratt would get life without parole. If that turned out to be the case, Byrne knew enough people in prison to finish the job. He would call in a chit. Either way, the sand was running on Gideon Pratt. He was in the hat.

  “The suspect fell down a flight of concrete steps while he attempted to evade arrest,” Byrne offered to Dr. Hirsch.

  Avram Hirsch wrote it down. He may have been young, but he was from Jefferson. He had already learned that, many times, sexual predators were also quite clumsy, and prone to tripping and falling. Sometimes they even had broken bones.

  “Isn’t that right, Mr. Pratt?” Byrne asked.

  Gideon Pratt just stared straight ahead.

  “Isn’t that right, Mr. Pratt?” Byrne repeated.

  “Yes,” Pratt said.

  “Say it.”

  “While I was running away from the police, I fell down a flight of steps and caused my injuries.”

  Hirsch wrote this down, too.

  Kevin Byrne shrugged, asked: “Do you find that Mr. Pratt’s injuries are consistent with a fall down a flight of concrete steps, Doctor?”

  “Absolutely,” Hirsch replied.

  More writing.

  On the way to the hospital, Byrne had had a discussion with Gideon Pratt, imparting the wisdom that what Pratt had experienced in that parking lot was merely a taste of what he could expect if he considered a charge of police brutality. He had also informed Pratt that, at that moment, Byrne had three people standing by who were willing to go on the record that they had witnessed the suspect tripping and falling down the stairs while being chased. Upstanding citizens, all.

  In addition, Byrne disclosed that, while it was only a short ride from the hospital to the police administration building, it would be the longest few minutes of Pratt’s life. To make his point, Byrne had referenced a few of the tools in the back of the van: the saber saw, the surgeon’s rib-cracker, the electric shears.

  Pratt understood.

  And he was now on the record.

  A few minutes later, when Hirsch pulled down Gideon Pratt’s pants and stained underwear, what Byrne saw made him shake his head. Gideon Pratt had shaved off his pubic hair. Pratt looked down at his groin, back up at Byrne.

  “It’s a ritual,” Pratt said. “A religious ritual.”

  Byrne exploded across the room. “So’s crucifixion, shithead,” he said. “What do you say we run down to Home Depot for some religious supplies?”

  At that moment Byrne caught the intern’s eyes. Dr. Hirsch nodded, meaning, they’d get their sample of pubic hair. Nobody could shave that close. Byrne picked up on the exchange, ran with it.

  “If you thought your little ceremony was gonna stop us from getting a sample, you’re officially an asshole,” Byrne said. “As if that was in some doubt.” He got within inches of Gideon Pratt’s face. “Besides, all we had to do was hold you until it grew back.”

  Pratt looked at the ceiling and sighed.

  Apparently that hadn’t occurred to him.

  BYRNE SAT IN THE PARKING LOT of the police administration building, braking from the long day, sipping an Irish coffee. The coffee was cop-shop rough. The Jameson paved it.

  The sky was clear and black and cloudless above a putty moon.

  Spring murmured.

  He’d steal a few hours sleep in the borrowed van he had used to lure Gideon Pratt, then return it to his friend Ernie Tedesco later in the day. Ernie owned a small meat packing business in Pennsport.

  Byrne touched the wick of skin over his right eye. The scar felt warm and pliant beneath his fingers, and spoke of a pain that, for the moment, was not there, a phantom grief that had flared for the first time many years earlier. He rolled down the window, closed his eyes, felt the girders of memory give way.

  In his mind, that dark recess where desire and revulsion meet, that place where the icy waters of the Delaware River raged so long ago, he saw the last moments of a young girl’s life, saw the quiet horror unfold . . .

  . . . sees the sweet face of Deirdre Pettigrew. She is small for her age, naïve for her time. She has a kind and trusting heart, a sheltered soul. It is a sweltering day, and Deirdre has stopped for a drink of water at a fountain in Fairmount Park. A man is sitting on the bench next to the fountain. He tells her that he once had a granddaughter about her age. He tells her that he loved her very much and that his granddaughter got hit by a car and she died. That is so sad, says Deirdre. She tells him that a car had hit Ginger, her cat. She died, too. The man nods, a tear forming in his eye. He says that, every year, on his granddaughter’s birthday, he comes to Fairmount Park, his granddaughter’s favorite place in the whole world.

  The man begins to cry.

  Deirdre drops the kickstand on her bike and walks to the bench.

  Just behind the bench there are thick bushes.

  Deirdre offers the man a tissue . . .

  Byrne sipped his coffee, lit a cigarette. His head pounded, the images now fighting to get out. He had begun to pay a heavy price for them. Over the years he had medicated himself in many ways—legal and not, conventional and tribal. Nothing legal helped. He had seen a dozen doctors, heard all the diagnoses—to date, migraine with aura was the prevailing theory.

  But there were no textbooks that described his auras. His auras were not bright, curved lines. He would have welcomed something like that.

  His auras held monsters.

  The first time he had seen the “vision” of Deirdre’s murder, he had not been able to fill in Gideon Pratt’s face. The killer’s face had been a blur, a watery draft of evil.

  By the time Pratt had walked into Paradise, Byrne knew.

  He popped a CD in the player, a homemade mix of classic blues. It was Jimmy Purify who had gotten him into the blues. The real thing, too: Elmore James, Otis Rush, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Bill Broonzy. You didn’t want to get Jimmy started on the Kenny Wayne Shepherds of the world.

  At first Byrne didn’t know Son House from Maxwell House. But a lot of late nights at Warmdaddy’s and trips to Bubba Mac’s on the shore had taken care of that. Now, by the end of the second bar, third at the latest, he could tell the difference between Delta and Beale
Street and Chicago and St. Louis and all the other shades of blue.

  The first cut on the CD was Rosetta Crawford’s “My Man Jumped Salty on Me.”

  If it was Jimmy who had given him the solace of the blues, it was Jimmy who had also brought him back into the light after the Morris Blanchard affair.

  A year earlier, a wealthy young man named Morris Blanchard had murdered his parents in cold blood, blown them apart with a single shot each to the head from a Winchester 9410. Or so Byrne had believed, believed as deeply and completely as anything he had understood to be true in his two decades on the job.

  He had interviewed the eighteen-year-old Morris five times, and each time the guilt had risen in the young man’s eyes like a violent sunrise.

  Byrne had directed the CSU team repeatedly to comb Morris’s car, his dorm room, his clothing. They never found a single hair or fiber, nor a single drop of fluid that would place Morris in the room the moment his parents were torn apart by that shotgun.

  Byrne knew that the only hope he’d had of getting a conviction was a confession. So he had pressed him. Hard. Every time Morris turned around, Byrne was there: concerts, coffee shops, studying in McCabe Library. Byrne had even sat through a noxious art house film called Eating, sitting two rows behind Morris and his date, just to keep the pressure on. The real police work that night had been staying awake during the movie.

  One night Byrne parked outside Morris’s dorm room, just beneath the window on the Swarthmore campus. Every twenty minutes, for eight straight hours, Morris had parted the curtains to see if Byrne was still there. Byrne had made sure the window of the Taurus was open, and the glow of his cigarettes provided a beacon in the darkness. Morris made sure that every time he peeked he would offer his middle finger through the slightly parted curtains.

  The game continued until dawn. Then, at about seven thirty that morning, instead of attending class, instead of running down the stairs and throwing himself on Byrne’s mercy, babbling a confession, Morris Blanchard decided to hang himself. He threw a length of towrope over a pipe in the basement of his dorm, stripped off all his clothes, then kicked out the sawhorse beneath him. One last fuck you to the system. Taped to his chest had been a note naming Kevin Byrne as his tormentor.

  A week later the Blanchard’s gardener was found in a motel in Atlantic City, Robert Blanchard’s credit cards in his possession, bloody clothes stuffed into his duffel bag. He immediately confessed to the double homicide.

  The door in Byrne’s mind had been locked.

  For the first time in fifteen years, he had been wrong.

  The cop-haters came out in full force. Morris’s sister Janice filed a wrongful death civil suit against Byrne, the department, the city. None of the litigation amounted to much, but the weight increased exponentially until it threatened to break him.

  The newspapers had taken their shots at him, vilifying him for weeks with editorials and features. And while the Inquirer and Daily News and CityPaper had dragged him over the coals, they had eventually moved on. It was The Report—a yellow rag that fancied itself alternative press, but in reality was little more than a supermarket tabloid—and a particularly fragrant piece-of-shit columnist named Simon Close, who had made it personal beyond reason. For weeks after Morris Blanchard’s suicide, Simon Close wrote polemic after polemic about Byrne, the department, the police state in America, finally closing with a profile of the man Morris Blanchard would have become: a combination Albert Einstein, Robert Frost, and Jonas Salk, if one were to believe.

  Before the Blanchard case, Byrne had given serious consideration to taking his twenty and heading to Myrtle Beach, maybe starting his own security firm like all the other burned-out cops whose will had been cracked by the savagery of inner-city life. He had done his time as interlocutor of the Bonehead Circus. But when he saw the pickets in front of the Roundhouse—including clever bons mots such as BURN BYRNE!—he knew he couldn’t. He couldn’t go out like that. He had given far too much to the city to be remembered that way.

  So he stayed.

  And he waited.

  There would be another case to take him back to the top.

  Byrne drained his Irish, got comfortable in his seat. There was no reason to head home. He had a full tour ahead of him, starting in just a few hours. Besides, he was all but a ghost in his own apartment these days, a dull spirit haunting two empty rooms. There was no one there to miss him.

  He looked at the windows of the police administration building, the amber glow of the ever-burning light of justice.

  Gideon Pratt was in that building.

  Byrne smiled, closed his eyes. He had his man, the lab would confirm it, and another stain would be washed from the sidewalks of Philadelphia.

  Kevin Francis Byrne wasn’t a prince of the city.

  He was king.

  2

  MONDAY, 5:15 AM

  This is the other city, the one William Penn never envisioned when he surveyed his “green countrie town” between the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers, dreaming of Greek columns and marble halls rising majestically from the pines. This is not the city of pride and history and vision, the place where the soul of a great nation was created, but rather a part of North Philadelphia where living ghosts hover in darkness, hollow-eyed and craven. This is a low place, a place of soot and feces and ashes and blood, a place where men hide from the eyes of their children, and remit their dignity for a life of relentless sorrow. A place where young animals become old.

  If there are slums in hell, they will surely look like this.

  But in this hideous place, something beautiful will grow. A Gethsemane amid the cracked concrete and rotted wood and ruined dreams.

  I cut the engine. It is quiet.

  She sits next to me, motionless, as if suspended in this, the penultimate moment of her youth. In profile, she looks like a child. Her eyes are open, but she does not stir.

  There is a time in adolescence when the little girl who once skipped and sang with abandon finally dispatches these ways with a claim on womanhood, a time when secrets are born, a body of clandestine knowledge never to be revealed. It happens at different times with different girls—sometimes at a mere twelve or thirteen, sometimes not until sixteen or older—but happen it does, in every culture, to every race. It is a time not heralded by the coming of the blood, as many believe, but rather by the awareness that the rest of the world, especially the male of the species, suddenly sees them differently.

  And, from that moment on, the balance of power shifts, and is never the same.

  No, she is no longer a virgin, but she will be a virgin once again. At the pillar there will be a scourge and from this blight will come resurrection.

  I exit the vehicle and look east and west. We are alone. The night air is chilled, even though the days have been unseasonably warm.

  I open the passenger door and take her hand in mine. Not a woman, nor a child. Certainly not an angel. Angels do not have free will.

  But a calm-shattering beauty nonetheless.

  Her name is Tessa Ann Wells.

  Her name is Magdalene.

  She is the second.

  She will not be the last.

  3

  MONDAY, 5:20 AM

  DARK.

  A breeze brought exhaust fumes and something else. A paint smell. Kerosene, maybe. Beneath it, garbage and human sweat. A cat shrieked, then—

  Quiet.

  He was carrying her down a deserted street.

  She could not scream. She could not move. He had injected her with a drug that made her limbs feel leaden and frail; her mind, thick with a gauzy gray fog.

  For Tessa Wells, the world passed by in a churning rush of muted colors and glimpsed geometric shapes.

  Time stalled. Froze. She opened her eyes.

  They were inside. Descending wooden steps. The smell of urine and rotting lunch meat. She hadn’t eaten in a long time and the smell made her stomach lurch and a trickle of bile rise in her throat.

>   He placed her at the foot of a column, arranging her body and limbs as if she were some sort of doll.

  He put something in her hands.

  The rosary.

  Time passed. Her mind swam away again. She opened her eyes once more as he touched her forehead. She could sense the cruciform shape he inscribed there.

  My God, is he anointing me?

  Suddenly, memories shimmered silver in her mind, a mercurial reflection of her childhood. She recalled—

  —horseback riding in Chester County and the way the wind would sting my face and Christmas morning and the way Mom’s crystal captured the colored lights from the enormous tree Dad bought every year and Bing Crosby and that silly song about Hawaiian Christmas and its—

  He stood in front of her, now, threading a huge needle. He spoke in a slow monotone—

  Latin?

  —as he tied a knot in the thick black thread and pulled it tight.

  She knew she would not leave this place.

  Who would take care of her father?

  Holy Mary, mother of God . . .

  He had made her pray in that small room for a long time. He had whispered the most horrible words in her ear. She had prayed for it to end.

  Pray for us sinners . . .

  He pushed her skirt up her thighs, then all the way to her waist. He dropped to his knees, spread her legs. The lower half of her body was completely paralyzed.

  Please God, make it stop.

  Now . . .

  Make it stop.

  And at the hour of our death . . .

  Then, in this damp and decaying place, this earthly hell, she saw the steel drill bit glimmer, heard the whir of the motor, and knew her prayers were finally answered.

  4

  MONDAY, 6:50 AM

  “COCOA PUFFS.”

  The man glared at her, his mouth set in a tight yellow rictus. He was standing a few feet away, but Jessica could feel the danger radiate from him, could suddenly smell the bitter tang of her own terror.

  As he held her in his unwavering stare, Jessica sensed the edge of the roof approaching behind her. She reached for her shoulder holster but, of course, it was empty. She rummaged her pockets. Left side: something that felt like a barrette, along with a pair of quarters. Right side: air. Great. On her way down she would be fully equipped to put her hair up and make a long-distance call.