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

by Richard Montanari

  Jessica wrote it down. “I’m also going to need the names and addresses of all the other employees.”

  Lenny frowned again, but didn’t even bother trying to object. “There are only two of us. Me and Juliet.”

  At this, a young woman poked her head out between the beaded curtains. She had clearly been listening. If Lenny Puskas was the poster boy for grunge, his co-employee was the poster girl for Goth. Short and stocky, about eighteen, she had purple-black hair, deep burgundy fingernails, black lipstick. She wore a long lemon vintage taffeta dress, Doc Martens, and thick white-rimmed glasses.

  “That’s fine,” Jessica said. “I just need home contact information for both of you.”

  Lenny scribbled down the information, handed it to Jessica.

  “Do you rent a lot of Hitchcock films here?” Jessica asked.

  “Sure,” Lenny said. “We’ve got most of them, including some of the early ones like The Lodger and Young and Innocent. But, like I said, most people rent the DVDs. The older movies look a lot better on disc. Especially the Criterion Collection editions.”

  “What are the Criterion Collection editions?” Byrne asked.

  “They put out classic and foreign films in remastered versions. Lots of extras on the disc. Real quality stuff.”

  Jessica made a few notes. “Is there anybody you can think of who rents a lot of Hitchcock movies? Or someone who has been asking for them?”

  Lenny thought about it. “Not really. I mean, not that I can think of.” He turned and looked at his coworker. “Jools?”

  The girl in the yellow taffeta dress swallowed hard and shook her head. She wasn’t handling a visit from the police all that well.

  “Sorry,” Lenny added.

  Jessica glanced at all four corners of the store. There were two surveillance cameras at the back. “Do you have tapes from these cameras available?”

  Lenny snorted again. “Uh, no. Those are just for show. They’re not connected to anything. Between you and me, we’re lucky there’s a lock on the front door.”

  Jessica handed Lenny a pair of cards. “If either of you think of anything else, anything that might be connected to this tape, please give me a call.”

  Lenny held the cards as if they might explode in his hands. “Sure. No prob.”

  The two detectives walked the half block to the department-issue Taurus, a dozen questions floating. At the top of this list was whether or not they were actually investigating a homicide. Homicide detectives in Philadelphia were funny that way. There was always an overflowing plate in front of you, and if there was even the slightest chance that you were off on a hunt over what was actually a suicide or an accident or something else, you generally bitched and moaned until you were allowed to pass it off.

  Still, the boss had handed them a job, and off they had to go. Most homicide investigations began with the crime scene and the victim. Rare was the case that began at a point before that.

  They got in the car and headed off to interview Mr. Isaiah Crandall, classic film buff and potential psychotic killer.

  Across the street from the video store, shadowed in a doorway, a man watched the drama unfold inside The Reel Deal. He was unremarkable in all ways, except in his capacity to adapt to his surroundings, like a chameleon. At this moment he might be mistaken for Harry Lime in The Third Man.

  Later in the day he might be Gordon Gekko in Wall Street.

  Or Tom Hagen in The Godfather.

  Or Babe Levy in Marathon Man.

  Or Archie Rice in The Entertainer.

  For when he stepped before his public he could be many men, many characters. He could be a doctor, a dockworker, the drummer in a lounge band. He could be a priest, a doorman, a librarian, a travel agent, even a law enforcement officer.

  He was a man of a thousand guises, skilled in the arts of dialect and stage movement. He could be whatever the day called for.

  This, after all, was what actors do.

  9

  AT ROUGHLY THIRTY-THREE thousand feet over Altoona, Pennsylvania, Seth Goldman finally began to unwind. For a man who had found himself inside an airplane an average of three days a week for the past four years—they had just taken off from Philadelphia, heading to Pittsburgh, they’d be returning in only a few hours—he was still a white-knuckle flier. Every bump of turbulence, every raised aileron, every air pocket filled him with dread.

  But now, in the well-appointed Learjet 60, he began to unwind. If you had to fly, sitting in a rich butter-cream leather seat, with burl wood and brass appointments around you, and a fully stocked galley at your disposal, was definitely the way to go.

  Ian Whitestone was sitting at the rear of the jet, shoes off, eyes closed, headphones on. It was at times like these—when Seth knew where his boss was, with the day’s activities planned and security in place—that he allowed himself to relax.

  Seth Goldman was born thirty-seven years ago as Jerzy Andres Kiedrau, hardscrabble-poor in Muse, Florida. The only son of a sassy, opinionated woman and a black-hearted man, he had been an unplanned, unwanted late-life baby, and from the first days he could remember, his father had reminded him of this.

  When Krystof Kiedrau wasn’t beating his wife, he was beating and berating his only son. Some nights the arguments got so loud, the bloodletting became so brutal, that young Jerzy had to flee the trailer, running far into the low scrub fields that bordered the trailer park, coming home at dawn covered with sand beetle bites and the welts of a hundred mosquito stings.

  During those years, Jerzy had one solace: the movies. He had worked odd jobs, scrubbing down trailers, running errands, cleaning pools, and as soon as he had enough for a matinee, he would hitchhike to Palmdale and the Lyceum Theater.

  He recalled many afternoons in the cool darkness of the theater, a place where he could lose himself in the world of fantasy. Early on he realized the power of the medium to transport, to exalt, to mystify, to terrify. It was a love affair that never ended.

  When he returned home, if his mother was sober, he would discuss the film he had seen with her. His mother knew all about the movies. She had once been an actress, having appeared in more than a dozen films, making her debut as a teenager in the late 1940s under the stage name Lily Trieste.

  She had worked with all the important directors of noir—Dmytryk, Siodmak, Dassin, Lang. The shining moment in her career—a career that mostly had her lurking in shadowed alleys, smoking unfiltered cigarettes with a slew of nearly handsome men sporting thin mustaches and double-breasted notch-lapel suits—had been a scene with Franchot Tone, a scene where she uttered one of Jerzy’s favorite lines of noir dialogue. Standing in the doorway to a cold-water walk-up, she had stopped brushing her hair, turned to the actor, who was being led away by the authorities, and said:

  “I spent the morning washing you out of my hair, baby. Don’t make me give you the brush.”

  By the time she reached her midthirties, the industry cast her aside. Not wanting to settle for the crazy-aunt roles, she moved to Florida to live with her sister, and it was there she met her future husband. Her career had long been over by the time she’d given birth to Jerzy at the age of forty-seven.

  At fifty-six, Krystof Kiedrau was diagnosed with advanced cirrhosis of the liver, the result of drinking a fifth of bottom-shelf whiskey every day for thirty-five years. He was told that if he drank another drop of alcohol, he could fall into an alcohol-induced coma, which could ultimately prove fatal. For a few months, the warning had scared Krystof Kiedrau into abstinence. Then, after losing his part-time job, Krystof had tied one on and come home blind drunk.

  He beat his wife mercilessly that night, the final blow, one that drove her head into a sharp cabinet handle, pierced her temple, causing a deep gash. By the time Jerzy got home from his job sweeping up the auto body shop in Moore Haven, his mother had bled to death in the corner of the kitchen, and his father was sitting in his chair, half a bottle of whiskey in his hand, three full bottles at his side, his grease-sta
ined wedding album in his lap.

  Fortunately for young Jerzy, Krystof Kiedrau was too far gone to stand up, let alone light into him.

  Late into the night Jerzy poured his father glass after glass of whiskey, at times helping the man bring the filthy tumbler to his lips. By midnight, with two bottles left, Krystof began to drift in and out of a stupor, and could no longer hold the glass. Jerzy then began to pour the whiskey directly down his father’s throat. By four thirty, his father had consumed a total of four full fifths of alcohol, and at exactly five ten that morning he fell into an alcohol coma. A few minutes later he took his final foul breath.

  A few hours later, with both his parents dead, the flies already seeking out their decaying flesh in the stifling confines of the trailer, Jerzy called the police.

  After a brief investigation, during which Jerzy said barely a word, he was placed into a group home in Lee County where he learned the art of persuasion and social manipulation. At eighteen he went to Edison Community College. He was a quick study, a brilliant student, and he attacked his studies with a fervor for knowledge he had never known was within him. Two years later, his associate’s degree in hand, Jerzy moved to North Miami, where he sold cars by day and earned his bachelor’s degree at night at Florida International University. Eventually he worked his way to sales manager.

  Then one day a man walked into the dealership. An extraordinary-looking man: slender, dark-eyed, bearded, brooding. He reminded Seth of a young Stanley Kubrick in his guise and carriage. The man was Ian Whitestone.

  Seth had seen Whitestone’s lone low-budget feature film and, although it had been a commercial flop, Seth had known that Whitestone would move on to bigger and better things.

  As it turned out, Ian Whitestone was a huge fan of noir. He knew Lily Trieste’s work. Over a few bottles of wine they had discussed the genre. By morning’s light, Whitestone hired him as a production assistant.

  Seth knew that a name like Jerzy Andres Kiedrau wouldn’t get him too far in show business, so he decided to change it. The last name was easy. He had long considered William Goldman one of the screenwriting gods, had admired his work for many years. And if anyone made the connection, assuming that Seth was in some way related to the writer of Marathon Man, Magic, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, he would not go out of his way to disabuse them of the notion.

  Hollywood, after all, turned on illusion.

  Goldman was easy. The first name was a little harder. He decided to take a biblical name to make the Jewish illusion complete. Although he was about as Jewish as Pat Robertson, the deception didn’t hurt. One day, he took out a Bible, closed his eyes, opened it at random, and stabbed a page. He would take the first name he came across. Unfortunately, he didn’t really look like a Ruth Goldman. Nor did he favor Methuselah Goldman. His third stab was the winner. Seth. Seth Goldman.

  Seth Goldman would get a table at L’Orangerie.

  In the past five years he had risen quickly at White Light Pictures. He had begun as a production assistant, doing everything from setting up craft service, to shuttling extras, to picking up Ian’s dry cleaning. Then he helped Ian develop a script that was to change everything, a supernatural thriller called Dimensions.

  Ian Whitestone’s screenplay made the rounds, but because of his less-than-stellar box-office record, everyone turned it down. Then Will Parrish read it. The superstar actor who had made his name in the action genre had been looking for a change. The sensitive role of the blind professor appealed to him, and within a week the film was green-lighted.

  Dimensions became a worldwide sensation, grossing more than six hundred million dollars. It put Ian Whitestone instantly onto the A-list. It turned Seth Goldman from a lowly PA to Ian’s executive assistant.

  Not bad for a trailer rat from Glades County.

  Seth flipped through his binder of DVDs. What to watch? He wouldn’t be able to see all of the film before they landed, whatever he chose, but whenever he had even a few minutes of downtime, he liked to fill it with a movie.

  He decided on Les Diaboliques, the 1955 film with Simone Signoret; a film about betrayal, murder, and above all secrets—something Seth knew all about.

  For Seth Goldman, the city of Philadelphia was full of secrets. He knew where blood had stained the earth, where the bones were buried. He knew where evil walked.

  Sometimes, he walked with it.

  10

  FOR ALL THAT Vincent Balzano was not, he was a damn good cop. In his ten years as an undercover narcotics officer, he had put together some of the biggest busts in Philadelphia’s recent history. Vincent was already an undercover legend due to his chameleon-like ability to move through drug circles on all sides of the table—cop, junkie, dealer, snitch.

  His Rolodex of informants and garden-variety skeeves was as thick as anyone’s. Right now, there was one particular skeeve Jessica and Byrne were interested in. She hadn’t wanted to call Vincent—their relationship teetered on the wrong word, the casual reference, the misplaced emphasis—and the marriage counselor’s office was probably the best place for them to interact at this point.

  Still, there was a case on the wheel, and sometimes you had to overlook personal issues for the job.

  As she waited for her husband to come back to the phone, Jessica thought about where they were in this strange case—no body, no suspect, and no motive. Terry Cahill had run a VICAP search, which yielded nothing similar to the MO of the Psycho tape. The FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program was a nationwide data center designed to collect, collate, and analyze crimes of violence, specifically murder. The closest hits on Cahill’s search were videotapes made by street gangs that recorded initiation rites of new recruits making their bones.

  Jessica and Byrne had interviewed Emily Trager and Isaiah Crandall, the two people besides Adam Kaslov who had rented Psycho from The Reel Deal. Neither interview yielded much. Emily Trager was well over seventy and walked with an aluminum walker—a little detail Lenny Puskas had neglected to tell them. Isaiah Crandall was in his late fifties, short, and Chihuahua-jumpy. He worked as a short-order cook at a diner on Frankford Avenue. He nearly fainted when they showed him their badges. He didn’t strike either detective as the type with the kind of stomach needed to do what was done on that tape. He certainly wasn’t the body type.

  Both had said that they watched the movie, start to finish, and there was nothing out of the ordinary. A call back to the video store revealed that both had returned the film well within the rental period.

  The detectives ran both names through NCIC and PCIC, retrieving nothing. Both were clean. Ditto on Adam Kaslov, Lenny Puskas, and Juliet Rausch.

  Somewhere between the time Isaiah Crandall had returned the film and the time Adam Kaslov took it home, someone had gotten the tape and replaced the famous shower scene with one of their own.

  The detectives did not have a lead—without a body, a lead was not likely to fall into their laps—but they did have a direction. A little digging revealed that The Reel Deal was owned by a man named Eugene Kilbane.

  Eugene Hollis Kilbane, forty-four, was a two-time loser, a petty thief and pornographer, an importer of hard-core books, magazines, films, and videotapes, along with various and sundry adult sex toys and devices. Along with The Reel Deal, Mr. Kilbane owned a second independent video store as well as an adult bookstore and peep show on Thirteenth Street.

  They had paid a visit to his “corporate” headquarters—the back of a warehouse on Erie Avenue. Bars on the windows, shades down, door locked, no answer. Some empire.

  Kilbane’s known associates were a Who’s Who of Philly scumbags, many of whom plied the drug trade. And in the city of Philadelphia, if you sold drugs, Detective Vincent Balzano knew you.

  Vincent came back to the phone in short order with a location that Kilbane was known to frequent, a Port Richmond dive bar called The White Bull Tavern.

  Before hanging up, Vincent offered Jessica backup. As much as she hated to admit it, and
as weird as it might sound to anyone outside law enforcement, an offer of backup was, in its way, kind of sweet.

  She declined the offer, but it went into the reconciliation bank.

  THE WHITE BULL Tavern was a stone-front hovel near Richmond and Tioga streets. Byrne and Jessica parked the Taurus and approached the tavern, with Jessica thinking: You know you’re entering a tough place when the door is held together with duct tape. A sign on the wall next to the door proclaimed CRABS ALL YEAR!

  I’ll bet, Jessica thought.

  Inside they found a cramped, dark bar, dotted with neon beer signs and plastic light fixtures. The air was thick with stale smoke and the high-sweet redolence of cheap whiskey. Beneath that was something reminiscent of the primate reserve at the Philly Zoo.

  As she stepped in and her eyes adjusted to the light, Jessica mind-printed the layout. A small room with a pool table to the left, fifteen-stool bar to the right, a handful of rickety tables in the center. Two men sat on stools, midbar. A man and a woman talked at the far end. Four men played nine-ball. She had learned her first week on the job that the first order of business upon entering a snake pit was to ID the snakes, and plot your exit.

  Jessica immediately made Eugene Kilbane. He stood at the other end of the bar, sipping coffee, talking to a bottle blonde who, a few years ago, and in some other light, might have had a shot at pretty. In here, she was as pale as the cocktail napkins. Kilbane was thin and rawboned. He had dyed black hair and wore a wrinkled gray double-breasted suit, a brassy tie, pinkie rings. Jessica made him based on Vincent’s description of his face. She noted that about a quarter of the man’s upper lip, on the right side, was missing, replaced by ridged scar tissue. It gave him the appearance of a constant snarl, surely something he didn’t have any desire to renounce.

  As Byrne and Jessica made their way to the rear of the bar, the blonde slid off her stool and walked into the back room.

  “My name is Detective Byrne, this is my partner, Detective Balzano,” Byrne said, holding up his ID.