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

by Richard Montanari

  As she got closer, Byrne realized why he knew all this. It was Colleen. The young woman was his own daughter and, for a moment, he nearly hadn’t recognized her.

  She stood in the center of the square, looking for him, hand to her forehead, shielding her eyes from the sun. Soon she found him in the crowd. She waved and smiled the slight, blushing smile that she had used to her advantage her whole life, the one that got her the Barbie Bike with the pink-and-white handlebar streamers when she was six; the one that got her into the chichi summer camp for deaf kids this year, the camp her father could barely just afford.

  God, she is beautiful, Byrne thought.

  Colleen Siobhan Byrne was both blessed and cursed with her mother’s incandescent Irish skin. Cursed, because she could sunburn in minutes on a day like this. Blessed because she was the fairest of the fair, her skin nearly translucent. What was flawless splendor at the age of thirteen would surely blossom into heart-stopping beauty as a woman in her twenties and thirties.

  Colleen kissed him on the cheek, and hugged him closely—but gently, fully aware of his myriad aches and pains. She thumbed the lipstick off his cheek.

  When had she started wearing lipstick? Byrne wondered.

  “Is it too crowded for you?” she signed.

  “No,” Byrne signed back.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” Byrne signed. “I love crowds.”

  It was a bald-faced lie, and Colleen knew it. She smiled.

  Colleen Byrne had been deaf since birth, caused by a genetic disorder that had planted far more obstacles in her father’s path than her own. Where Kevin Byrne had wasted many years lamenting what he had arrogantly considered a handicap in his daughter’s life, Colleen had simply attacked life full-on, never once slowing down to bemoan her alleged misfortune. She was an A student, a terrific athlete, highly proficient in American Sign Language, as well as being an expert lip-reader. She was even learning Norwegian Sign Language.

  A lot of deaf people, Byrne had learned a long time ago, were very straightforward in their communication, not wasting their time on a great deal of pointless, inhibited conversation the way hearing people did. Many operated on what was jokingly referred to as DST—Deaf Standard Time—a reference to the notion that deaf people tend to be late, owing to their penchant for long conversations. Once they got going, it was hard to shut them up.

  Sign language, although highly nuanced in its own right, was, after all, a form of shorthand. Byrne did his best to keep up. He had learned the language when Colleen was still very young, had taken to it surprisingly well, considering what a lousy student he had been in school.

  Colleen found a spot on the bench, sat down. Byrne had stopped at a Cosi and picked up a pair of salads. He was pretty sure that Colleen was not going to eat—what thirteen-year-old girl actually ate lunch these days?—and he was right. She took the Diet Snapple out of the bag, worked off the plastic seal.

  Byrne opened the bag, began to pick at his salad. He got her attention and signed: “Sure you’re not hungry?”

  She gave him the look: Dad.

  They sat for a while, enjoying each other’s company, enjoying the warmth of the day. Byrne listened to the dissonance of summertime sounds around them: the discordant symphony of five different types of music, the laughter of children, the high spirits of a political argument coming from somewhere behind them, the endless traffic noise. As he had so many times in his life, he tried to imagine what it was like for Colleen to be in a place like this, the deep silence of her world.

  Byrne put the remainder of his salad back in the bag, got Colleen’s eye.

  “When do you leave for camp?” he signed.

  “Monday.”

  Byrne nodded. “Are you excited?”

  Colleen’s face lit up. “Yes.”

  “Do you want me to give you a ride there?”

  Byrne saw the slightest hesitation in Colleen’s eyes. The camp was just south of Lancaster, a pleasant two-hour ride west of Philadelphia. The delay in Colleen’s answer meant one thing. Her mother was going to take her, probably in the company of her new boyfriend. Colleen was as poor at concealing emotions as her father was practiced at it. “No. I’ve got it covered,” she signed.

  As they signed, Byrne could see people watching them. This was nothing new. He used to get upset about it, but had long since given that up. People were curious. A year earlier, he and Colleen had been in Fairmount Park when a teenaged boy who had been trying to impress Colleen on his skateboard had hopped a rail and wiped out big time, crashing to the ground right near Colleen’s feet.

  As he picked himself up, he tried to make light of it. Right in front of him, Colleen had looked at Byrne and signed: What an asshole.

  The kid smiled, thinking he had scored a point.

  There were advantages to being deaf, and Colleen Byrne knew them all.

  As the businesspeople began to reluctantly make their way back to their offices, the crowd thinned a little. Byrne and Colleen watched a brindle-and-white Jack Russell terrier try to climb a nearby tree, harassing a squirrel vibrating on the first branch.

  Byrne watched his daughter watching the dog. His heart wanted to burst. She was so calm, so even. She was becoming a woman right before his eyes and he was scared to death that she would feel he had no part in it. It had been a long time since they lived together as a family, and Byrne felt that his influence—that part of him that was still positive—was waning.

  Colleen looked at her watch, frowned. “I’ve got to get going,” she signed.

  Byrne nodded. The great and terrible irony of getting older was that time went way too fast.

  Colleen took their trash over to a nearby trash can. Byrne noticed that every breathing male within eyeshot watched her. He wasn’t handling this well.

  “Are you going to be okay?” she signed.

  “I’m fine,” Byrne lied. “See you over the weekend?”

  Colleen nodded. “I love you.”

  “I love you, too, baby.”

  She hugged him again, kissed him on the top of his head. He watched her walk into the crowd, into the rush of the noontime city.

  In an instant she was gone.

  HE LOOKED LOST.

  He sat at the bus stop, reading The American Sign Language Handshape Dictionary, a very important reference book for anyone learning to speak American Sign Language. He was attempting to balance the book on his knees while at the same time trying to fingerspell words with his right hand. From where Colleen stood, it appeared that he was speaking in a language either long dead or not yet invented. It certainly wasn’t ASL.

  She had never seen him at the stop before. He was nice looking, older—the whole world was older—but he had a friendly face. And he looked pretty cute fumbling his way through the book. He glanced up, saw her watching him. She signed: “Hello.”

  He smiled, a little self-consciously, but was clearly excited to find someone who spoke the language he was trying to learn. “Am … I … that … bad?” he signed, tentatively.

  She wanted to be nice. She wanted to be encouraging. Unfortunately, her face told the truth before her hands could form the lie. “Yes, you are,” she signed.

  He watched her hands, confused. She pointed to her face. He looked up. She rather dramatically nodded her head. He blushed. She laughed. He joined in.

  “You’ve really got to understand the five parameters first,” she signed, slowly, referring to the five basic strictures of ASL, that being handshape, orientation, location, movement, and nonmanual signals. More confusion.

  She took the book from him and flipped to the front. She pointed out some of the basics.

  He skimmed the section, nodding. He glanced up, formed a hand, roughly, into: “Thanks.” Then added: “If you ever want to teach, I’ll be your first pupil.”

  She smiled and said: “You’re very welcome.”

  A minute later, she got on the bus. He did not. Apparently he was waiting for another route. />
  Teaching, she thought as she found a seat near the front. Maybe someday. She had always been patient with people, and she had to admit she got a good feeling when she was able to impart wisdom to others. Her father, of course wanted her to be president of the United States. Or at least attorney general.

  A few moments later, the man who would be her student got up from the bus stop bench, stretched. He tossed the book into a trash can.

  It was a scorcher of a day. He slipped into his car, glanced at the LCD screen of his camera phone. He had gotten a good image. She was beautiful.

  He started the car, carefully pulled out into traffic, and followed the bus down Walnut Street.

  5

  THE APARTMENT WAS quiet when Byrne returned. What else would it be? Two hot rooms over a former print shop on Second Street, nearly Spartan in furnishings: a worn love seat and distressed mahogany coffee table, a television, a boom box, and a stack of blues CDs. In the bedroom, a queen-size bed and a small, thrift-store nightstand.

  Byrne flipped on the window air conditioner, made his way to the bathroom, split a Vicodin in half, swallowed it. He splashed cool water on his face and neck. He left the medicine cabinet open. He told himself it was to avoid splashing water on it, thereby avoiding the necessity to wipe it down, but the real reason was that he wanted to avoid seeing himself in the mirror. How long had he been doing that, he wondered?

  When he returned to the living room he slipped a Robert Johnson disc into the boom box. He was in the mood for “Stones in My Passway.”

  After the divorce, he had come back to the old neighborhood: the Queen Village section of South Philadelphia. His father had been a longshoreman, a Mummer of citywide fame. Like his father and uncles, Kevin Byrne was, and would always remain, a Two-Streeter at heart. And although it took a while to get back into the rhythms of the neighborhood, the older residents wasted no time in making him feel at home with the three standard South Philly questions:

  Where you from?

  Did you buy or rent?

  Do you have any children?

  He had thought, briefly, of plunking down a chunk for one of the recently rehabbed homes at Jefferson Square, a newly gentrified area nearby, but he wasn’t sure that his heart, unlike his mind, was still in Philadelphia. For the first time in his life, he was a man untethered. He had a few dollars put away—over and above Colleen’s college fund—and he could go and do whatever he pleased.

  But could he leave the force? Could he turn in his service weapon and badge, turn in his papers, take his retirement ID, and simply walk away?

  He honestly did not know.

  He sat on the love seat, ran through the cable channels. He thought about pouring himself a tumblerful of bourbon and just riding the bottle until nightfall. No. He wasn’t a very good drunk these days. These days, he was one of those morbid, ugly drunks you see with four empty stools on either side of him in a crowded tavern.

  His cell phone beeped. He pulled it out of his pocket, stared at it. It was a new camera phone that Colleen had gotten him for his birthday, and he wasn’t quite familiar with all the settings yet. He saw the flashing icon and realized that a text message had come in. He had just gotten a handle on sign language, now there was a whole new vernacular to learn. He looked at the LCD screen. It was a text message from Colleen. Text messaging was the hottest thing among teenagers these days, but especially for deaf teenagers.

  This was an easy one. It read:

  TY 4 LUNCH :)

  Byrne smiled. Thank You For Lunch. He was the luckiest man in the world. He typed:

  YW LUL

  The message meant: You’re Welcome Love You Lots. Colleen messaged back:

  LUL 2

  Then, as always, she signed off by typing:

  CBOAO

  The message stood for Colleen Byrne Over And Out.

  Byrne closed the phone, his heart full.

  The air conditioner finally began to cool off the room. Byrne considered what to do with himself. Maybe he’d take a ride down to the Roundhouse, hang around the unit. He was just about to talk himself out of that idea when he saw that there was a message on his answering machine.

  What was it, five steps away? Seven? At the moment, it looked like the Boston Marathon. He grabbed his cane, braved the pain.

  The message was from Paul DiCarlo, a star ADA in the district attorney’s office. Over the past five years or so, DiCarlo and Byrne had made a number of cases together. If you were a criminal on trial, you didn’t want to look up one day and see Paul DiCarlo enter the courtroom. He was a pit bull in Perry Ellis. If he got you in his jaws, you were fucked. Nobody had sent more killers to death row than Paul DiCarlo.

  But the message Paul had for Byrne this day was not good. One of his quarry, it seemed, had loosed itself: Julian Matisse was back on the street.

  The news was impossible, but it was true.

  It was no secret that Kevin Byrne took a special interest in cases involving the murders of young women. He had felt this way ever since the day Colleen was born. In his mind and heart, every young woman was forever somebody’s daughter, somebody’s baby girl. Every young woman, at one time, had been that little girl who learned to hold a cup with two hands, had learned to stand up, sea-legged, five tiny fingers on the coffee table.

  Girls like Gracie. Two years earlier, Julian Matisse had raped and murdered a young woman named Marygrace Devlin.

  Gracie Devlin was nineteen years old the day she was killed. She had curly brown hair that fell in soft ringlets to her shoulders, a light dusting of freckles. She was a slight young woman, a freshman at Villanova. She favored peasant skirts and Indian jewelry and nocturnes by Chopin. She died on a frigid January night in a filthy, abandoned movie theater in South Philadelphia.

  And now, by some profane twist of justice, the man who took her dignity and her life was out of prison. Julian Matisse had been sentenced to twenty-five years to life and he was being released after two years.

  Two years.

  The grass had only grown fully on Gracie’s grave this past spring.

  Matisse was a small-time pimp, a sadist of the first order. Before Gracie Devlin, he had spent three and a half years in prison for cutting a woman who had refused his advances. Using a box cutter, he had slashed her face so savagely that she had required ten hours of surgery to repair the muscle damage, and nearly four hundred stitches.

  Following the box cutter attack, when Matisse was released from Curran-Fromhold prison—after serving only forty months of a ten-year sentence—it didn’t take long for him to graduate to homicide. Byrne and his partner Jimmy Purify had liked Matisse for the murder of a Center City waitress named Janine Tillman, but they were never able to find any physical evidence tying him to the crime. Her body was found in Harrowgate Park, stabbed and mutilated. She had been abducted from an underground parking lot on Broad Street. She had been sexually assaulted both pre- and postmortem.

  An eyewitness from the parking lot came forward and picked Matisse out of a photo lineup. The witness was an elderly woman named Marjorie Samms. Before they could find Matisse, Marjorie Samms disappeared. A week later they found her floating in the Delaware River.

  Supposedly Matisse had been staying with his mother after his release from Curran-Fromhold. Detectives staked out Matisse’s mother’s apartment, but he never showed. The case went cold.

  Byrne knew that he would see Matisse again one day.

  Then, two years ago, on a freezing January night, a 911 call came in that a young woman was being attacked in an alleyway behind an abandoned movie theater in South Philadelphia. Byrne and Jimmy were eating dinner a block away and took the call. By the time they reached the scene, the alley was empty, but a blood trail led them inside.

  When Byrne and Jimmy entered the theater, they found Gracie on the stage, alone. She had been brutally beaten. Byrne would never forget the tableau—Gracie’s limp form on the stage in that frigid theater, steam rising from her body, her life force depart
ing. While the EMS rescue was on the way, Byrne frantically tried to give her CPR. She had breathed once, a slight exhalation of air that had gone into his lungs, the existence leaving her body, entering his. Then, with a slight shudder, she died in his arms. Marygrace Devlin lived nineteen years, two months, and three days.

  The Crime Scene Unit found a fingerprint on the scene. It belonged to Julian Matisse. With a dozen detectives on the case, and more than a little intimidation of the low-life crowd with whom Julian Matisse consorted, they found Matisse huddling in a closet in a burned-out row house on Jefferson Street, where they also found a glove covered in Gracie Devlin’s blood. Byrne had to be restrained.

  Matisse was tried and convicted and sentenced to twenty-five years to life in the state penitentiary at Greene County.

  After Gracie’s murder, Byrne walked around for many months with the belief that Gracie’s breath was still inside him, that her strength impelled him to do his job. For a long time, he felt as if it were the only clean part of him, the only piece of him that had not been sullied by the city.

  Now Matisse was out, walking the streets, his face to the sun. The thought made Kevin Byrne sick. He dialed Paul DiCarlo’s number.

  “DiCarlo.”

  “Tell me I heard your message wrong.”

  “Wish I could, Kevin.”

  “What happened?”

  “You know about Phil Kessler?”

  Phil Kessler had been a homicide detective for twenty-two years, a divisional detective ten years before that, a loose cannon who more than once had put a fellow detective in jeopardy with his inattention to detail or ignorance of procedure or general lack of nerve.