“West Texas,” I say with a broad smile. “El Paso. Big Bend country.”
“Wow,” she replies, as if I had told her I was from Neptune. “You’re a long way from home.”
“Aren’t we all?” I hand her a five.
She stops, frozen for a moment, as if I have said something profound. I step out onto Walnut Street, feeling tall and fit. Gary Cooper in The Fountainhead. Tall is a method, like weakness.
I finish my latte, breeze into a men’s clothing store. I fashion up, vogue briefly near the door, gather my suitors. One of them steps forward.
“Hi,” the salesman says. He is thirty. His hair is cropped short. He is suited and booted, wearing a wrinkled gray T-shirt beneath a navy-blue three-button number at least one size too small. This seems to be a fashion statement of some sort.
“Hello,” I say. I wink at him and he colors slightly.
“What can I show you today?”
Your blood on my Bokhara? I think, channeling Patrick Bateman. I give him my toothy Christian Bale. “Just looking.”
“Well, I’m here to offer assistance, and I hope you’ll allow me the privilege of doing so. My name is Trinian.”
Of course it is.
I think of those great St. Trinian’s British comedies from the 1950s and ’60s, and consider making a reference. I notice he has a bright orange Skechers watch on his wrist, and realize that I would be wasting my breath.
Instead, I frown—bored and beleaguered by my excessive wealth and station. He is even more interested now. In this setting, abuse and intrigue are lovers.
Twenty minutes later it hits me. Perhaps I have known it all along. It really is all about the skin. Skin is where you stop, and the world starts. Everything you are—your mind, your personality, your soul—is contained and constrained by your skin. In here, in my skin, I am God.
I slip into my car. I have just a few hours to get into character.
I’m thinking Gene Hackman in Extreme Measures.
Or maybe even Gregory Peck in The Boys from Brazil.
42
MATEO FUENTES FREEZE-FRAMED the image at the point in the Fatal Attraction tape when the gun was fired. He toggled back, forward, back, forward. He ran the tape in slow motion, each field rolling top-to-bottom on the frame. On the screen, a hand came up on the right side of the frame and stopped. The shooter wore a surgical glove, but it wasn’t his hand they were interested in, although they had already narrowed down the make and model of the pistol. The Firearms Unit was still working on it.
The star of the movie, at this point, was the jacket. It looked like a satin jacket, the type of jacket that baseball teams or roadies at rock concerts wear—dark, shiny, and with a ribbed band at the wrist.
Mateo printed off a hard copy of the image. It was impossible to tell what color the jacket was—black or navy blue. This jibed with Little Jake’s recollection of a man in a dark blue jacket inquiring about the Los Angeles Times. It wasn’t much. There had to be thousands of jackets like that in Philly. Still, they would have a composite suspect sketch that afternoon.
Eric Chavez entered the room, extremely animated, a computer printout in hand. “We’ve got a location on where the Fatal Attraction tape is from.”
“Where?”
“It’s a dump called Flickz on Frankford,” Chavez said. “Independent store. Guess who owns it.”
Jessica and Palladino said the name at the same time.
“Eugene Kilbane.”
“One and the same.”
“Son of a bitch.” Jessica found herself subconsciously clenching her fists.
Jessica filled Buchanan in on their interview with Kilbane, leaving out the part about the assault and battery. If they brought Kilbane in, he was sure to bring it up anyway.
“You like him for this?” Buchanan asked.
“No,” Jessica said. “But what are the chances that this is coincidence? He knows something.”
Everyone looked at Buchanan with the anticipation of pit bulls circling the fight ring.
Buchanan said: “Bring him in.”
“I DIDN’T WANT to get involved,” Kilbane said.
For the moment, Eugene Kilbane was sitting at one of the desks in the duty room of the Homicide Unit. If they didn’t like any of his answers, he would soon be moving to one of the interrogation rooms.
Chavez and Palladino had found him at The White Bull Tavern.
“Did you think we wouldn’t be able to trace the tape back to you?” Jessica asked.
Kilbane looked at the tape, which was on the desk in front of him in a clear evidence bag. It appeared as if he thought scraping the label off the side might have been enough to fool seven thousand cops. Not to mention the FBI.
“Come on. You know my record,” he said. “Shit has a way of sticking to me.”
Jessica and Palladino looked at each other as if to say: Don’t give us this kind of opening, Eugene. The fucking jokes will start writing themselves and we’ll be here all day. They restrained themselves. For the moment.
“Two tapes, both of them containing evidence in murder investigations, both rented at stores you own,” Jessica said.
“I know,” Kilbane said. “It looks bad.”
“Gee, ya think?”
“I … I don’t know what to say.”
“How did the tape get here?” Jessica asked.
“I have no idea,” Kilbane said.
Palladino held up the artist’s sketch of the man who’d hired the bicycle messenger to deliver the tape. It was an extraordinarily good likeness of one Eugene Kilbane.
Kilbane hung his head for a few moments, then looked around the room, meeting the eyes of everyone there. “Do I need a lawyer here?”
“You tell us,” Palladino said. “You got something to hide, Eugene?”
“Man,” he said. “You try to do the right thing, see what it gets you.”
“Why did you send the tape to us?”
“Hey,” he said. “I got a conscience, you know.”
This time, Palladino held up Kilbane’s rap sheet, turned it to Kilbane’s face. “Since when?” he asked.
“Since always. I was raised a Catholic.”
“This from a pornographer,” Jessica said. They all knew why Kilbane had come forward, and it had nothing to do with conscience. He had violated his parole by having an illegal weapon on him the day before, and he was trying to buy them off. With one phone call he could be back in prison tonight. “Spare us the homily.”
“Yeah, okay. I’m in the adult entertainment business. So what? It’s legal. Where’s the harm?”
Jessica didn’t know where to start. She started anyway. “Let’s see. AIDS? Chlamydia? Gonorrhea? Syphilis? Herpes? HIV? Ruined lives? Destroyed families? Drugs? Violence? Let me know when you want me stop.”
Kilbane just stared, a little overwhelmed. Jessica stared him down. She wanted to go on, but what was the point? She wasn’t in the mood, and it wasn’t the time or the place to debate the sociological ramifications of pornography with someone like Eugene Kilbane. There were two dead people to think about.
Bested before he even began, Kilbane reached into his briefcase, a tattered faux-alligator attaché. He pulled out another tape. “You’ll change your tune when you see this.”
THEY SAT IN a small room in the AV Unit. Kilbane’s second tape was surveillance footage from Flickz, the store where the Fatal Attraction tape had been rented. Apparently, the security cameras were real at that location.
“Why are the cameras active at this store and not at The Reel Deal?” Jessica asked.
Kilbane looked dope-slapped. “Who told you that?”
Jessica didn’t want to get Lenny Puskas or Juliet Rausch, the two employees at The Reel Deal, in any trouble. “Nobody, Eugene. We checked it out ourselves. You really think it’s a big secret? Those camera heads at The Reel Deal are from, what, the late seventies? They look like shoe boxes.”
Kilbane sighed. “I got more of a theft problem
at Flickz, okay? Fucking kids rob you blind.”
“What exactly is on this tape?” Jessica asked.
“I maybe got a lead for you.”
“A lead?”
Kilbane looked around the room. “Yeah, you know. A lead.”
“Watch much CSI, Eugene?”
“Some. Why?”
“No reason. So what is this lead?”
Kilbane put his hands out to his sides, palms up. He smiled, destroying whatever was remotely likable about his face, and said: “That’s entertainment.”
A FEW MINUTES later, Jessica, Terry Cahill, and Eric Chavez crowded around the editing bay in the AV Unit. Cahill had returned from his bookstore project empty-handed. Kilbane sat in the chair next to Mateo Fuentes. Mateo looked disgusted. He cocked his body at about a forty-five-degree angle away from Kilbane, as if the man smelled like a compost heap. In fact, he smelled like Vidalia onions and Aqua Velva. Jessica had the feeling that Mateo was ready to spray Kilbane with Lysol if he touched anything.
Jessica studied Kilbane’s body language. Kilbane seemed both nervous and excited. Nervous the detectives could understand. Excited, not so much. Something was up here.
Mateo hit the PLAY button on the surveillance tape VCR. Immediately the image rolled to life on the monitor. It was a high-angle shot of a long, narrow video store, similar in layout to The Reel Deal. Five or six people milled about.
“This is from yesterday,” Kilbane said. There was no date or time code readout on the tape.
“What time?” Cahill asked.
“I don’t know,” Kilbane said. “Sometime after eight. We change the tapes around eight and we’re open until midnight at that location.”
A small corner of the front window of the store revealed that it was dark outside. If it became important, they’d check the sunset stats from the day before to pin down a more precise time.
On the tape, a pair of black teenaged girls cruised the racks of new releases, keenly observed by a pair of black teenaged boys who acted out, playing the fools, trying to get their attention. The boys failed miserably and, after a minute or two, skulked off.
At the bottom of the frame, a serious-looking older man with a white goatee and black Kangol cap read every word on the back of a pair of tapes in the documentary section. He moved his lips as he read. The man soon left, and for a few minutes there were no customers visible.
Then a new figure walked into the frame from the left side, into the middle section of the store. He approached the center rack that held older VHS releases.
“There he is,” Kilbane said.
“There who is?” Cahill asked.
“You’ll see. That rack goes from f to h,” Kilbane said.
On the tape, it was impossible to gauge the man’s height from such a high angle. He was taller than the top rack, which probably put him over five nine or so, but beyond that he looked exceedingly average in all ways. He stood still, back to the camera, perusing the rack. So far, there had been no profile shot, no glimpse of his face, just a vantage from behind as he entered the frame. He wore a dark bomber jacket, dark ball cap, and dark trousers. Over his right shoulder was a slim leather shoulder bag.
The man picked up a few tapes, flipped them over, read the credits, put them back on the rack. He stepped back, hands on hips, surveyed the titles.
Then a middle-aged, quite rotund white woman approached from the right side of the frame. She wore a flower-print shift and had her thinning hair in hot rollers. It appeared as if she said something to the man. Staring straight ahead, still denying the camera his profile—as if he knew the security camera position—the man answered her, gesturing to his left. The woman, nodded, smiled, smoothed the dress over her abundant hips, as if waiting for the man to continue the conversation. He did not. She then huffed out of the frame. The man did not watch her go.
A few more moments passed. The man looked at a few more tapes, then quite casually took a videotape out of the bag and put it on the shelf. Mateo rewound the tape, replayed the section, then froze the tape and slowly zoomed in, sharpening the image as much as possible while he did so. The graphic on the front of the videotape box became clearer. The image was a black-and-white photograph of a man on the left and a woman with curly blond hair on the right. Down the center, splitting the photo in two, was a ragged red triangle.
The tape was Fatal Attraction.
The sense of excitement was palpable in the room.
“Now, see, the employees are supposed to make customers leave bags like that at the front counter,” Kilbane said. “Fucking idiots.”
Mateo rewound the tape to the point where the figure entered the frame, played it back in slow motion, froze the image, enlarged it. It was very grainy, but it was clear that there was elaborate embroidery on the back of the man’s satin jacket.
“Can you get closer?” Jessica asked.
“Oh, yeah,” Mateo said, firmly center stage. This was his wheelhouse.
He began to work his magic, tapping keys, adjusting levers and knobs, bringing the image up and in. The embroidered picture on the back of the jacket appeared to be a green dragon, its narrow head breathing a thin crimson flame. Jessica made a note to look into tailors who specialized in embroidery.
Mateo worked the image to the right and down, centering it on the man’s right hand. It was clear that he was wearing a surgical glove.
“Jesus,” Kilbane said, shaking his head, running a hand over his jaw. “Fucking guy comes in the store wearing latex gloves and there’s no red flag with my employees. They are so fucking yesterday, man.”
Mateo flipped on a second monitor. On it was the freeze-frame of the killer’s hand holding the weapon in the Fatal Attraction killing tape. The gunman’s right sleeve had a ribbing similar to the jacket in the surveillance video. Although not concrete evidence, the jackets were definitely similar.
Mateo hit a few keys and began printing off hard copies of both images.
“When was the Fatal Attraction tape rented?” Jessica asked.
“Last night,” Kilbane said. “Late.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. After eleven. I could look it up.”
“And you’re saying that whoever rented it watched the tape and brought it back to you?”
“Yeah.”
“When?”
“This morning.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. Ten, maybe?”
“Did they drop it in the bin or did they bring it inside?”
“They brought it right to me.”
“What did they say when they brought the tape back?”
“Just that there was something wrong with it. They wanted their money back.”
“That’s it?”
“Well, yeah.”
“They didn’t happen to mention that someone had spliced in an actual homicide?”
“You gotta understand who comes into that store. I mean, at that store, people brought back that movie Memento saying that there was something wrong with the tape. They said the movie was on the tape backward. You believe that?”
Jessica continued to stare at Kilbane for a few moments, then turned to Terry Cahill.
“Memento was a story told in reverse,” Cahill said.
“Uh, okay,” Jessica replied. “Whatever.” She turned her attention back to Kilbane. “Who rented the Fatal Attraction tape?”
“Just a regular,” Kilbane said.
“We’ll need the name.”
Kilbane shook his head. “He’s just a regular schmuck. He ain’t got nothing to do with this.”
“We’ll need the name,” Jessica repeated.
Kilbane stared at her. You’d think a two-time loser like Kilbane would know better than to try to finesse the cops. On the other hand, if he was smarter, he wouldn’t be a two-time loser. Kilbane was just about to object when he glanced at Jessica. Perhaps a phantom pain in his side flared momentarily, recalling Jessica’s wicked body shot. He acquiesce
d and gave them the name of the customer.
“Do you know the woman on the surveillance tape?” Palladino asked. “The woman who talked to that man?”
“What, that heifer?” Kilbane screwed up his face, as if GQ gigolo studs like him would never associate with an overweight middle-aged woman who went out in public wearing hot rollers. “Uh, no.”
“Have you seen her in the store before?”
“Not that I remember.”
“Did you watch the whole tape before you sent it to us?” Jessica asked, knowing the answer, knowing that someone like Eugene Kilbane could not resist.
Kilbane looked at the floor for a moment. Obviously, he had. “Yeah.”
“Why didn’t you bring it in yourself?”
“I thought we went over this.”
“Tell us again.”
“Look, you might want to be a little nicer to me.”
“And why is that?”
“Because I can break this case wide open for you.”
Everyone just stared at him. Kilbane cleared his throat. It sounded like a farm tractor backing out of a muddy culvert. “I want assurances that you’re going to overlook my little, uh, indiscretion of the other day.” At this he lifted up his shirt. The game zipper he’d had on his belt—the weapons violation that would have put him back in prison—was gone.
“We’ll want to hear what you have to say first.”
Kilbane seemed to think about the offer. It wasn’t what he wanted, but it appeared as if it was all he was going to get. He cleared his throat again, looked around the room, perhaps expecting everyone to hold their breath in anticipation of his earth-shattering revelation. It didn’t happen. He plowed ahead anyway.
“The guy on the tape?” Kilbane said. “The guy who put the Fatal Attraction tape back on the shelf?”
“What about him?” Jessica asked.
Kilbane leaned forward, playing the moment for all that it was worth, and said: “I know who he is.”
43
“SMELLS LIKE A slaughterhouse.”
He was rake-handle-skinny, and looked like a man unstuck in time, unencumbered by history. There was good reason for that. Sammy DuPuis was trapped in 1962. Today Sammy wore a black alpaca cardigan, blue-on-blue point-collar dress shirt, gray iridescent sharkskin pants, and pointy cap-toe oxfords. His hair was slicked back, fused with enough hair tonic to grease a Chrysler. He smoked an unfiltered Camel.
Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense: The Rosary Girls, the Skin Gods, Merciless, Badlands Page 56