From time to time, she glanced up at Byrne. He was much thinner; his skin had a deep gray pallor. His hair was just starting to grow back.
Around his neck he wore the silver crucifix that Althea Pettigrew had given him. Jessica wore the angel pendant she had received from Frank Wells. It seemed that they both had their talisman against the Andrew Chases of the world.
There was so much she wanted to tell him, about how Colleen was voted valedictorian at her deaf school, about the death of Andrew Chase. She wanted to tell him that, a week earlier, the FBI had faxed the unit with the information that Miguel Duarte, the man who confessed to the murder of Robert and Helen Blanchard, had an account at a New Jersey bank under a false name. They had traced the money back to a wire transfer received from an offshore account belonging to Morris Blanchard. Morris Blanchard had paid Duarte ten thousand dollars to kill his parents.
Kevin Byrne had been right all along.
Jessica turned back to her magazine, and an article about how and where walleyes spawn. She supposed it was Field & Stream after all.
“Hey,” Byrne said.
Jessica nearly jumped out of her skin at the sound of his voice. It was low and raspy and terribly weak, but it was there.
She scrambled to her feet. She leaned over the bed. “I’m here,” she said. “I’m . . . I’m here.”
Kevin Byrne opened, then closed his eyes. For a horrifying moment, Jessica was certain he would never open them again. But after a few seconds he proved her wrong. “Got a question for you,” he said.
“Okay,” Jessica said, her heart racing. “Sure.”
“Did I ever tell you why they call me Riff Raff?” he asked.
“No,” she said, softly. She would not cry. She would not.
The slightest smile graced his parched lips.
“It’s a good story, partner,” he said.
Jessica took his hand in hers.
She squeezed gently.
Partner.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Publishing a novel is truly a team effort, and no writer was ever blessed with a deeper bench.
Thanks to the Honorable Seamus McCaffery, Detective Patrick Boyle, Detective Jimmy Williams, Detective Bill Frazier, Detective Michele Kelly, Detective Eddie Rocks, Detective Bo Diaz, Sgt. Irma Labrice, Catherine McBride, Cass Johnston, and the men and women of the Philadelphia Police Department. Any mistakes in police procedure are mine and, if I ever get arrested in Philly, I hope this admission counts for something.
Thanks also to Kate Simpson, Jan Klincewicz, Mike Driscoll, Greg Pastore, JoAnn Greco, Patrick Nestor, Vita DeBellis, D. John Doyle, M.D., Vernoca Michael, John and Jessica Bruening, David Najfach, and Christopher Richards.
A huge debt of gratitude to Meg Ruley, Jane Berkey, Peggy Gordijn, Don Cleary, and everyone at The Jane Rotrosen Agency.
Special thanks to Linda Marrow, Gina Centrello, Rachel Kind, Libby McGuire, Kim Hovey, Dana Isaacson, Arielle Zibrak, and the great team at Random House/Ballantine Books.
Thanks to the city of Philadelphia for letting me create schools as well as mayhem.
As always, thanks to my family for living the writer’s life with me. It may be my name on the cover, but it is their patience, support, and love on each and every page.
The Rosary Girls is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2005 by Richard Montanari
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the publisher upon request.
Ballantine Books website address: www.ballantinebooks.com
eISBN: 978-0-345-48203-7
v3.0
THE SKIN GODS
A NOVEL
RICHARD MONTANARI
BALLANTINE BOOKS NEW YORK
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Epilogue
Translation of the Dedication
Acknowledgments
Copyright Page
FOR THE MEN AND WOMEN OF THE PHILADELPHIA POLICE DEPARTMENT.
Brìgh gach cluiche gu dheireadh.
1
“WHAT I REALLY want to do is direct.”
Nothing. No reaction at all. She stares at me with those big Prussian blue eyes, waiting. Perhaps she is too young to recognize the cliché. Perhaps she is smarter than I thought. This is either going to make the task of killing her very easy, or very difficult.
“Cool,” she says.
Easy.
“You’ve done some acting. I can tell.”
She blushes. “Not really.”
I lower my head, raise my eyes. My irresistible look. Monty Clift in A Place in the Sun. I can see it working. “Not really?”
“Well, when I was in junior high we did West Side Story.”
“And you played Maria.”
“Not hardly,” she says. “I was just one of the girls at the dance.”
“Jet or Shark?”
�
��Jet, I think. And then I did a couple of things in college.”
“I knew it,” I say. “I can spot a theatrical vibe a mile away.”
“It was no big deal, believe me. I don’t think anyone even noticed me.”
“Of course they did. How could they miss you?” She reddens even more deeply. Sandra Dee in A Summer Place. “Keep in mind,” I add, “lots of big movie stars started out in the chorus.”
“Really?”
“Naturellement.”
She has high cheekbones, a golden French braid, lips painted a lustrous coral. In 1960 she would have worn her hair in a bouffant or a pixie cut. Beneath that, a shirtwaist dress with a wide white belt. A string of faux pearls, perhaps.
On the other hand, in 1960, she might not have accepted my invitation.
We are sitting in a nearly empty corner bar in West Philadelphia, just a few blocks from the Schuylkill River.
“Okay. Who is your favorite movie star?” I ask.
She brightens. She likes games. “Boy or girl?”
“Girl.”
She thinks for a few moments. “I like Sandra Bullock a lot.”
“There you go. Sandy started out in made-for-TV movies.”
“Sandy? You know her?”
“Of course.”
“And she really made TV movies?”
“Bionic Showdown, 1989. The harrowing tale of international intrigue and bionic menace at the World Unity Games. Sandy played the girl in the wheelchair.”
“Do you know a lot of movie stars?”
“Almost all of them.” I take her hand in mine. Her skin is soft, flawless. “And do you know what they all have in common?”
“What?”
“Do you know what they all have in common with you?”
She giggles, stamps her feet. “Tell me!”
“They all have perfect skin.”
Her free hand absently goes to her face, smoothing her cheek.
“Oh yes,” I continue. “Because when the camera gets really, really close, there’s no amount of makeup in the world that can substitute for radiant skin.”
She looks past me, at her reflection in the bar mirror.
“Think about it. All the great screen legends had beautiful skin,” I say. “Ingrid Bergman, Greta Garbo, Rita Hayworth, Vivien Leigh, Ava Gardner. Movie stars live for the close-up, and the close-up never lies.”
I can see that some of these names are unknown to her. Pity. Most people her age think that movies began with Titanic, and movie stardom is defined by how many times you’ve been on Entertainment Tonight. They’ve never been exposed to the genius of Fellini, Kurosawa, Wilder, Lean, Kubrick, Hitchcock.
It is not about talent, it is all about fame. To people her age, fame is the drug. She wants it. She craves it. They all do, in one way or another. It is the reason she is with me. I embody the promise of fame.
By the end of this night I will make part of her dream come true.
THE MOTEL ROOM is small and dank and common. There is a queen-size bed, and gondola scenes on delaminating Masonite nailed to the walls. The blanket is mildewed, moth-eaten, a frayed and ugly shroud that whispers of a thousand illicit encounters. In the carpeting lives the sour odor of human frailty.
I think of John Gavin and Janet Leigh.
I paid cash for the room earlier today in my midwestern character. Jeff Daniels in Terms of Endearment.
I hear the shower start in the bathroom. I take a deep breath, find my center, pull the small suitcase out from underneath the bed. I slip on the cotton housedress, the gray wig, and the pilled cardigan. As I button the sweater, I catch a glimpse of myself in the dresser mirror. Sad. I will never be an attractive woman, not even an old woman.
But the illusion is complete. And that is all that matters.
She begins to sing. Something by a current girl singer. Her voice is quite pleasant, actually.
The steam from the shower slithers under the bathroom door: long, gossamer fingers, beckoning. I take the knife in hand and follow. Into character. Into frame.
Into legend.
2
THE CADILLAC ESCALADE slowed to a crawl in front of Club Vibe: a sleek, glossy shark in neon water. The thumping bass line of the Isley Brothers’ “Climbin’ Up the Ladder” rattled the windows of the SUV as it rolled to a stop, its smoked-glass windows refracting the colors of the night in a shimmering palette of red and blue and yellow.
It was the middle of July, the slick belly of summer, and the heat burrowed beneath the skin of Philadelphia like an embolism.
Near the entrance to Club Vibe, on the corner of Kensington and Allegheny streets, beneath the steel ceiling of the El, stood a tall, statuesque redhead, her auburn hair a silken waterfall that graced bare shoulders before cascading to the middle of her back. She wore a short spaghetti-strap black dress that embraced the curves of her body, long crystal earrings. Her light olive skin glistened under a thin sheen of perspiration.
In this place, at this hour, she was a chimera, an urban fantasy made flesh.
A few feet away, in the doorway to a shuttered shoe repair shop, lounged a homeless black man. Of indeterminate age, he wore a tattered wool coat despite the merciless heat, and lovingly nursed a nearly empty bottle of Orange Mist, holding it tightly to his breast as one might nestle a sleeping child. Nearby, his shopping cart waited as a trusted steed, overflowing with precious urban plunder.
At just after two o’clock the driver’s door of the Escalade swung open, spilling a fat column of pot smoke into the sultry night. The man who emerged was huge and quietly menacing. His thick biceps strained the sleeves of a royal blue double-breasted linen suit. D’Shante Jackson was a former running back for Edison High in North Philly, a steel girder of a man not yet thirty. He stood six three and weighed a trim and muscular 215 pounds.
D’Shante looked both ways up Kensington and, assessing the threat as nil, opened the rear door of the Escalade. His employer, the man who paid him a thousand dollars a week for protection, stepped out.
Trey Tarver was in his forties, a light-skinned black man who carried himself with a lithe and supple grace, despite his frame’s ever-expanding bulk. Standing five eight, he had broached and passed the two-hundredpound mark years earlier and, given his penchant for bread pudding and shoulder sandwiches, threatened to venture much higher. He wore a black Hugo Boss three-button suit and a pair of Mezlan calfskin oxfords. Each hand boasted a pair of diamond rings.
He stepped away from the Escalade and flicked the creases on his trousers. He smoothed his hair, which he wore long, Snoop Dogg style, although he was a generation-plus away from legitimately copping hip-hop fashion cues. If you asked Trey Tarver, he wore his hair like Verdine White of Earth, Wind & Fire.
Trey shot his cuffs and surveyed the intersection, his Serengeti. K&A, as this crossroads was known, had had many masters, but none as ruthless as Trey “TNT” Tarver.
He was about to enter the club when he noticed the redhead. Her luminous hair was a beacon in the night, her long shapely legs a siren call. Trey held up a hand, then approached the woman, much to the dismay of his lieutenant. Standing on a street corner, especially this street corner, Trey Tarver was in the open, vulnerable to gunships cruising up both Kensington and Allegheny.
“Hey, baby,” Trey said.
The redhead turned to look at the man, as if noticing him for the first time. She had clearly seen him arrive. Cool indifference was part of the tango. “Hey, yourself,” she said, finally, smiling. “You like?”
“Do I like?” Trey stepped back, his eyes roaming her. “Baby, if you was gravy I’d sop ya.”
The redhead laughed. “It’s all good.”
“You and me? We gonna do some bidness.”
“Let’s go.”
Trey glanced at the door to the club, then at his watch: a gold Breitling. “Gimme twenty minutes.”
“Gimme a retainer.”
Trey Tarver smiled. He was a businessman, forged by the fires of the stree
t, schooled in the bleak and violent Richard Allen projects. He pulled his roll, peeled a Benjamin, held it out. Just as the redhead was about to take it, he snapped it back. “Do you know who I am?” he asked.
The redhead took half a step back, hand on hip. She gave him the twice-over. She had soft brown eyes flecked with gold, full sensuous lips. “Let me guess,” she said. “Taye Diggs?”
Trey Tarver laughed. “That’s right.”
The redhead winked at him. “I know who you are.”
“What’s your name?”
“Scarlet.”
“Damn. For real?”
“For real.”
“Like that movie?”
“Yeah, baby.”
Trey Tarver considered it all for a moment. “My money better not be gone with the wind, hear’m saying?”
The redhead smiled. “I hear you.”
She took the C-note and slipped the bill into her purse. As she did this, D’Shante put a hand on Trey’s arm. Trey nodded. They had business to attend to in the club. They were just about to turn and enter when something caught the headlights of a passing car, something that seemed to wink and glimmer from the area near the homeless man’s right shoe. Something metallic and shiny.
D’Shante followed the light. He saw the source.
It was a pistol in an ankle holster.
“The fuck is this?” D’Shante said.
Time spun on a crazy axis, the air suddenly electric with the promise of violence. Eyes met, and understanding flowed like a raging current of water.
It was on.
The redhead in the black dress—Detective Jessica Balzano of the Philadelphia Police Department’s Homicide Unit—took a step back and in one smooth, practiced motion, pulled the badge on a lanyard from inside her dress, and slipped her Glock 17 out of her purse.
Trey Tarver was wanted in connection with the murder of two men. Detectives had staked out Club Vibe—as well as three other clubs—for four straight nights, hoping for Tarver to surface. It was well known that he did business in Club Vibe. It was well known he had a weakness for tall redheads. Trey Tarver thought he was untouchable.
Tonight he got touched.
“Police!” Jessica yelled. “Let me see your hands!”
For Jessica, everything began to move in a measured montage of sound and color. She saw the homeless man stir. Felt the weight of the Glock in her hand. Saw a flutter of bright blue—D’Shante’s arm in motion. A weapon in D’Shante’s hand. A Tec-9. Long magazine. Fifty rounds.
Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense: The Rosary Girls, the Skin Gods, Merciless, Badlands Page 36