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

by Richard Montanari

  “Thanks.”

  Pacek nodded.

  “And, Monsignor?” Byrne added, slipping on his coat.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Psalms One Nineteen.”

  46

  WEDNESDAY, 11:15 AM

  JESSICA WAS IN HER FATHER’S KITCHEN, washing dishes, when the “talk” came. Like all Italian American families, anything of any importance was discussed, dissected, resected, and solved in only one room of the house. The kitchen.

  This day would be no different.

  Instinctively, Peter picked up a dish towel and stationed himself next to his daughter. “You having a good time?” he asked, the real conversation he wanted to have hiding just beneath his policeman’s tongue.

  “Always,” Jessica said. “Aunt Carmella’s cacciatore brings me back.” She said this, lost, for the moment, in a pastel nostalgia of her childhood in this house, in memories of those carefree years at family functions with her brother; of Christmas shopping at the May Company, of Eagles games at a frigid Veterans Stadium, of seeing Michael in his uniform for the first time: so proud, so fearful.

  God, she missed him.

  “. . . the sopressata?”

  Her father’s question yanked her back to the present. “I’m sorry. What did you say, Dad?”

  “Did you try the sopressata?”

  “No.”

  “Out of this world. From Chickie’s. I’ll make you a plate.”

  Jessica had never once left a party at her father’s house without a plate. Nor had anyone else for that matter.

  “You want to tell me what’s wrong, Jess?”

  “Nothing.”

  The word fluttered around the room for a while, then took a nosedive, as it always did when she tried it with her father. He always knew.

  “Right, sweetie,” Peter said. “Tell me.”

  “It’s nothing,” Jessica said. “Just, you know, the usual. Work.”

  Peter took a plate, dried it. “You nervous about the case?”

  “Nah.”

  “Good.”

  “Way beyond nervous,” Jessica said, handing her father another dinner plate. “Scared to death is more like it.”

  Peter laughed. “You’ll catch him.”

  “You seem to be overlooking the fact that I’ve never worked a homicide in my life.”

  “You’ll do fine.”

  Jessica didn’t believe it, but, somehow, when her father said it, it sounded like the truth. “I know.” Jessica hesitated, then asked, “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “And I want you to be completely honest with me.”

  “Of course, honey. I’m a policeman. I always tell the truth.”

  Jessica glared at him over the top of her glasses.

  “Okay. Point taken,” Peter said. “What’s up?”

  “Did you have anything to do with me getting into Homicide?”

  “Not a thing, Jess.”

  “Because, if you did . . .”

  “What?”

  “Well, you might think you’re helping me, but you’re not. There’s a very good chance I’m gonna fall flat on my face here.”

  Peter smiled, reached over with a squeaky-clean hand, and grabbed Jessica’s cheek, the way he had since she was a baby. “Not this face,” he said. “This is an angel’s face.”

  Jessica blushed and smiled. “Pa. Yo. I’m pushing thirty here. A little too old for the visa bella routine.”

  “Never,” Peter said.

  They fell silent for a little while. Then, as dreaded, Peter asked: “You getting everything you need from the labs?”

  “Well, so far, I guess,” Jessica said.

  “Want me to make a call?”

  “No!” Jessica replied, a little more forcefully than she wanted. “I mean, not yet. I mean, I’d like to, you know . . .”

  “You’d like to do it on your own.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What, we just met over here?”

  Jessica blushed again. She could never fool her father. “I’ll be okay.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll leave it up to you then. Somebody drags their feet, you call me.”

  “I will.”

  Peter smiled, gave Jessica a sloppy kiss on the top of her head, just as Sophie came tearing into the room with her second cousin Nanette, both little girls wild-eyed with all the sugar. Peter beamed. “All my girls under one roof,” he said. “Who’s got it better than me?”

  47

  WEDNESDAY, 11:25 AM

  The little girl giggles as she chases the puppy around and around the small, crowded park on Catharine Street, weaving through the forest of legs. We adults watch her, hovering nearby, ever vigilant. We are shields against the evils of the world. If you think about all the tragedy that could befall such a little one, the mind staggers.

  She stops for a moment, reaches to the ground, retrieving some little-girl treasure. She examines it closely. Her interest is pure and untainted by greed or possession or self-indulgence.

  What did Laura Elizabeth Richards say about purity?

  “The lovely light of holy innocence shines like a halo ’round her bended head.”

  The clouds threaten rain but, for the moment, a blanket of golden sunlight covers South Philadelphia.

  The puppy runs past the little girl, turns, nips at her heels, perhaps wondering why the game had stopped. The little girl doesn’t run or cry. She has her mother’s toughness. And yet there is something inside of her that is vulnerable and sweet, something that speaks of Mary.

  She sits on a bench, primly arranges the hem of her dress, pats her knees.

  The puppy leaps onto her lap, licks her face.

  Sophie laughs. It is a marvelous sound.

  But what if one day soon her little voice was silenced?

  Surely all the animals in her stuffed menagerie would weep.

  48

  WEDNESDAY, 11:45 AM

  BEFORE SHE LEFT her father’s house, Jessica had slipped into his small office in the basement, sat down at his computer, accessed the Internet, and navigated to Google. She found what she was looking for in short order, then printed it out.

  While her father and aunts watched Sophie at the small park next to the Fleisher Art Memorial, Jessica walked down the street to a cozy café on Sixth Street called Dessert. It was much quieter than a park full of sugar-amped toddlers and Chianti-primed adults. Besides, Vincent had shown up and she really didn’t need the fresh hell.

  Over a Sacher torte and coffee she perused her findings.

  Her first Google search had been the lines from the poem she found in Tessa’s diary.

  Jessica had her answer instantly.

  Sylvia Plath. The poem was called “Elm.”

  Of course, Jessica thought. Sylvia Plath was the patron saint of all melancholy teenaged girls, the poet who committed suicide in 1963 at the age of thirty.

  I’m back. Just call me Sylvia.

  What had Tessa meant by that?

  The second search she performed was about the incident regarding the blood that had been thrown on the door of St. Katherine on that crazy Christmas Eve three years earlier. There wasn’t much about it in the archives of either the Inquirer or The Daily News. Not surprisingly, The Report had done the longest piece on it. Written by none other than her favorite muckraker, Simon Close.

  It turned out that the blood had not been thrown on the door at all, but rather painted on with a brush. And it had been done while the congregation had been inside celebrating midnight mass.

  The picture that accompanied the article was of the double doors leading into the church, but it was not clear. It was impossible to tell if the blood on the doors represented anything or nothing. The article didn’t say.

  According to the item, police investigated the incident, but when Jessica searched further, she found no follow-up.

  She made a call and found out that the detective who lo
oked into the incident was a man named Eddie Kasalonis.

  49

  WEDNESDAY, 12:10 PM

  EXCEPT FOR THE PAIN in his right shoulder and the grass stains on his new jogging suit, it had been a very productive morning.

  Simon Close sat on his couch, contemplating his next move.

  Although he hadn’t expected the warmest greeting when he had revealed himself as a reporter to Jessica Balzano, he had to admit he was a little surprised by her violent reaction.

  Surprised and, he also had to admit, extremely aroused. He had done his best Eastern Pennsylvania accent and she hadn’t suspected a thing. Until he hit her with the bombshell question.

  He fished the tiny digital voice recorder out of his pocket.

  “Good . . . if you want to talk to me, you go through the press office there. If that’s too much trouble, then stay the fuck out of my face.”

  He opened his laptop, checked his e-mail—more spam for Vicodin, penis enlargement, great mortgage rates, and hair restoration, along with the usual fan mail from readers (“rot in hell you fukin hack”).

  A lot of writers resist technology. Simon knew quite a few who still wrote on yellow legal pads with a ballpoint pen. A few others who worked on ancient Remington manual typewriters. Pretentious, prehistoric nonsense. Try as he might, Simon Close could not understand this. Perhaps they thought it would put them in touch with their inner Hemingway, the Charles Dickens fighting to get out. Simon was all digital, all the time.

  From his Apple PowerBook, to his DSL connection, to his Nokia GSM phone, he was on top of the tech world. Go ahead, he thought, write on your slate tablets with a sharpened rock for all I care. I’m going to be there first.

  Because Simon believed in the two basic tenets of tabloid journalism:

  It’s easier to get forgiveness than it is to get permission.

  It’s better to be first than it is to be accurate.

  That’s what corrections are for.

  He flipped on the TV, cruised the channels. Soaps, game shows, shout shows, sports. Yawn. Even the esteemed BBC America had some idiot, third-generation clone of Trading Spaces on. Maybe there was an old movie on AMC. He looked it up in the listings. Criss Cross with Burt Lancaster and Yvonne De Carlo. A goodie, but he’d seen it. Besides, it was half over.

  He cruised the dial one more time, and was just about to flip it off when a breaking news flash came on a local channel. Murder in Philly. What a shock.

  But it wasn’t another victim of the Rosary Killer.

  The on-the-scene camera was showing something else altogether, something that made Simon’s heart beat a little faster. Okay, a lot faster.

  It was the alley in Gray’s Ferry.

  The alley out of which Kevin Byrne had stumbled the night before.

  Simon hit the RECORD button on his VCR. A few minutes later, he rewound and freeze-framed a shot of the mouth of the alley, and compared it, side by side, to the photo of Byrne on his laptop.

  Identical.

  Kevin Byrne had been in that same alley the night before, the night that a black kid had been shot dead. So it hadn’t been a backfire.

  This was so deliriously delicious, so much better than the possibility of catching Byrne at a crack house. Simon paced back and forth across his small living room a few dozen times, trying to figure the best way to play this.

  Had Byrne committed a cold-blooded execution?

  Was Byrne in the throes of a cover-up?

  Was this a drug deal gone wrong?

  Simon opened his e-mail program, calmed himself, somewhat, organized his thoughts and began to type:

  Dear Detective Byrne:

  Long time no see! Well, that’s not entirely true. As you can see by the attached photo, I saw you yesterday. Here’s my offer. I get to ride along with you and your scrumptious partner until you catch this very bad boy who has been killing Catholic schoolgirls. Once you do catch him, I want an exclusive.

  For this, I will destroy these photographs.

  If not, look for the pictures (yes, I have many) on the front page of the very next issue of The Report.

  Have a great day!

  As Simon looked it over—he always cooled off a bit before sending his most inflammatory e-mails—Enid meowed and leapt onto his lap from her perch on top of the file cabinet.

  “What’s up, dolly-doll?”

  Enid seemed to peruse the text of Simon’s mail to Kevin Byrne.

  “Too strident?” he asked the cat.

  Enid purred a response.

  “You’re right, kitty-kitty. Not possible.”

  Still, Simon decided he would read it over a few more times before sending it. Maybe he’d wait a day, just to see how big the story of the dead black kid in the alley would get. He could afford twenty-four more hours if it meant he could get a thug like Kevin Byrne under his thumb.

  Or maybe he should send the e-mail to Jessica.

  Brilliant, he thought.

  Or maybe he should just copy the photos to a CD and head down to the paper. Just publish them and see how Byrne liked it.

  Either way, he should probably make a backup copy of the photos, just to be safe.

  He thought about the headline, huge type over a photo of Byrne walking out of that alley in Gray’s Ferry.

  VIGILANTE COP? would read the headline.

  DETECTIVE IN DEATH ALLEY ON NIGHT OF MURDER! would read the deck. God, he was good.

  Simon walked over to the hall closet and fished out a clean CD-R.

  When he closed the door and turned back to the room, something was different. Maybe not so much different as off-center. It was like the feeling you get when you have an inner-ear infection and your balance is just that little bit tipsy. He stood in the archway leading to his tiny living room, trying to pin down the feeling.

  Everything seemed to be as he had left it. His PowerBook on the coffee table, his empty demitasse cup next to it. Enid purring on the throw rug near the heat register.

  Maybe he was mistaken.

  He looked at the floor.

  He saw the shadow first, a shadow that mirrored his own. He knew enough about key lighting to know that you need two light sources to cast two shadows.

  Behind him, there was only the small ceiling fixture.

  Then he felt the hot breath on his neck, smelled the faint scent of peppermint.

  He turned, his heart suddenly in his throat.

  And stared straight into the eyes of the devil.

  50

  WEDNESDAY, 1:22 PM

  BYRNE HAD MADE A FEW STOPS before returning to the Roundhouse and briefing Ike Buchanan. He then arranged for one of his registered confidential informants to call him with the information about Brian Parkhurst’s whereabouts. Buchanan faxed the DA’s office and arranged for a search warrant of Parkhurst’s building.

  Byrne called Jessica on her cell phone and found her at a café near her father’s house in South Philly. He swung by and picked her up. He briefed her at the Fourth District headquarters at Eleventh and Wharton.

  THE BUILDING PARKHURST owned was a former florist shop on Sixty-first Street, itself converted from a spacious brick row house built in the 1950s. The stone-front structure was a few battered doors down from the Wheels of Soul clubhouse. The Wheels of Soul was an old and venerable motorcycle club. In the 1980s, when crack cocaine had hit Philly hard, it was the Wheels of Soul MC, as much as any law enforcement agency, that had kept the city from burning to the ground.

  If Parkhurst was taking these girls somewhere for short periods of time, Jessica thought as they approached the property, this place would be ideal. There was a rear entrance large enough to pull a van or minivan partially inside.

  When they arrived at the scene, they drove slowly behind the building. The rear entrance—a large, corrugated-steel door—was padlocked from the outside. They circled the block and parked on the street, under the El, about five addresses west of the location.

  Two patrol cars met them. Two uniformed of
ficers would cover the front; two, the rear.

  “Ready?” Byrne asked.

  Jessica felt a little shaky. She hoped it didn’t show. She said: “Let’s do it.”

  BYRNE AND JESSICA APPROACHED THE DOOR. The front windows were whitewashed, impossible to see through. Byrne slammed a fist into the door three times.

  “Police! Search warrant!”

  They waited five seconds. He pounded again. No response.

  Byrne turned the handle, pushed on the door. It eased open.

  The two detectives made eye contact. On a count, they rolled the jamb.

  The front room was a mess. Drywall, paint cans, drop cloths, scaffolding. Nothing to the left. To the right, stairs leading up.

  “Police! Search warrant!” Byrne repeated.

  Nothing.

  Byrne pointed to the stairs. Jessica nodded. He would take the second floor. Byrne mounted the stairs.

  Jessica worked her way to the rear of the building on the first floor, checking every alcove, every closet. The interior was half renovated. The hallway behind what was once a service counter was a skeleton of open studs, exposed wiring, plastic water lines, heat ducts.

  Jessica stepped through a doorway, into what had once been the kitchen. The kitchen was gutted. No appliances. Recently drywalled and taped. Beneath the pasty smell of the drywall tape, there was something else. Onions. Jessica then saw a sawhorse in the corner of the room. On it sat a half-eaten take-out salad. Next to it was a full cup of coffee. She dipped a finger into the coffee. Ice cold.

  She walked out of the kitchen, inched toward the room at the back of the row house. The door was only slightly ajar.

  Drops of sweat rolled down her face, her neck, then laced her shoulders. The hallway was warm, stuffy, airless. The Kevlar vest felt confining and heavy. Jessica reached the door, took a deep breath. With her left foot she slowly edged the door open. She saw the right half of the room first. An old dinette chair on its side, a wooden toolbox. Smells greeted her. Stale cigarette smoke, freshly cut knotty pine. Beneath it was something ugly, something rank and feral.

  She kicked the door open fully, turned into the small room, and immediately saw a figure. Instinctively she spun and pointed her weapon at the shape, silhouetted against the whitewashed windows in the rear.