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

by Richard Montanari

  “What about it?”

  “They have a video section.”

  Jessica hung up, briefed the other detectives. They had received more than fifty calls already that day, calls from people who claimed to have spotted the Actor on their block, in their yards, in the parks. Why should this one be any different?

  “Because there’s a video section in the store,” Buchanan said. “You and Kevin check it out.”

  Jessica got her weapon from her drawer, handed a copy of the street address to Eric Chavez. “Find Agent Cahill,” she said. “Ask him to meet us at this address.”

  THE DETECTIVES STOOD in front of the location, a crumbling storefront deli called Cap-Haitien. Officers Underwood and Martinez, having secured the scene, had returned to their duties. The façade of the market was a patchwork of plywood panels of bright red, blue, and yellow enamel, topped by bright orange metal bars. Skewed, handmade signs in the window hawked fried plantains, grio, Creole fried chicken, along with a Haitian beer called Prestige. There was also a sign proclaiming VIDEO AU LOYER.

  About twenty minutes had passed since the owner of the store—an elderly Haitian woman named Idelle Barbereau—had said the man had been in her market. It was unlikely that the suspect, if it was their suspect, was still in the area. The woman described the man just as he appeared in the sketch: white, medium build, wearing large tinted sunglasses, Flyers cap, dark blue jacket. She said he had come in the store, milled around the racks in the center, then drifted into the small video section at the back. He stayed there for a minute, then headed for the door. She said he came in with something in his hands, but was leaving without it. He didn’t purchase anything. She’d had the Inquirer open to the page displaying the sketch.

  While the man was in the back of the store, she had called her grandson up from the cellar—a strapping nineteen-year-old named Fabrice. Fabrice had blocked the door and gotten into a pushing match with the subject. When Jessica and Byrne talked to Fabrice, he looked a little shaken.

  “Did the man say anything?” Byrne asked.

  “No,” Fabrice replied. “Nothing.”

  “Tell us what happened.”

  Fabrice said he had blocked the doorway in the hope that his grandmother would have time to call the police. When the man tried to step around him, Fabrice grabbed the man by the arm, and within a second the man had him spun around, his own right arm pinned behind him. In another second, Fabrice said, he was on his way to the floor. He added that, on the way down, he lashed out with his left hand, striking the man, connecting with bone.

  “Where did you hit him?” Byrne asked, glancing at the young man’s left hand. Fabrice’s knuckles were slightly swollen.

  “Right over there,” Fabrice said, pointing to the doorway.

  “No. I mean on his body.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I had my eyes closed.”

  “What happened then?”

  “The next thing I knew, I was on the floor, facedown. It knocked the wind out of me.” Fabrice took a deep breath, either to prove to the police he was all right, or to prove to himself. “He was strong.”

  Fabrice went on to say that the man then ran out of the store. By the time his grandmother was able to get out from behind the counter, and onto the street, the man was gone. Idelle then saw Officer Martinez directing traffic and told him about the incident.

  Jessica glanced around the store, at the ceilings, at the corners.

  There were no surveillance cameras.

  JESSICA AND BYRNE searched the market. The air was dense with the pungent aromas of chilies and coconut milk, the racks were filled with standard bodega items—soups, canned meats, snacks, along with cleaning products and a variety of cosmetic sundries. In addition, there was a large display of candles and dream books and other assorted products associated with Santería, the Afro-Caribbean religion.

  At the rear of the store was a small alcove bearing a few wire racks of videotapes. Above the racks were a pair of faded film posters—L’Homme sur les Quais and The Golden Mistress. In addition, smaller images of French and Caribbean movie stars, mostly magazine cutouts, were attached to the wall with yellowing tape.

  Jessica and Byrne stepped into the niche. There were about one hundred videotapes in all. Jessica scanned the spines. Foreign titles, kids’ titles, a few six-month-old major releases. Mostly French-language films.

  Nothing spoke to her. Did any of these films have a murder committed in a bathroom? she wondered. Where was Terry Cahill? He might know. Jessica was starting to think the old woman was imagining things, and that her grandson had gotten body-slammed for nothing, when she saw it. There, on the bottom rack on the left, was a VHS tape with a rubber band doubled-banded around the center.

  “Kevin,” she said. Byrne walked over.

  Jessica pulled on a latex glove and picked up the tape without thinking. Although there was no reason to think that there might be an explosive device attached to it, there was no telling where this murderous crime spree was headed. She chastised herself immediately after picking up the tape. This time she had dodged the bullet. But there was something attached.

  A pink Nokia cell phone.

  Jessica carefully turned the box over. The cell phone was turned on, but there was nothing visible on the small LCD screen. Byrne held open a large evidence bag. Jessica slipped the videocassette box in. Their eyes met.

  They both had a pretty good idea whose phone it was.

  A FEW MINUTES later they stood in front of the secured store, waiting for CSU. They looked up and down the street. The film crew were still gathering the tools and detritus of their craft—spooling cables, storing lights, breaking down craft service tables. Jessica scanned the workers. Was she looking at the Actor? Could one of these people walking up and down the street be responsible for these horrible crimes? She glanced back at Byrne. He was locked on the façade of the market. She got his attention.

  “Why here?” Jessica asked.

  Byrne shrugged. “Probably because he knows we’re watching the chain stores and the independents,” Byrne said. “If he wants to get a tape back on the shelf, he’s got to come somewhere like this.”

  Jessica considered this. It was probably the case. “Should we be watching the libraries?”

  Byrne nodded. “Probably.”

  Before Jessica could respond, she received a transmission on her two-way radio. It was garbled, unintelligible. She pulled it off her belt, adjusted the volume. “Say again.”

  A few seconds of static, then: “Goddamn FBI don’t respect nothin’.”

  It sounded like Terry Cahill. No, it couldn’t be. Could it? If it was, she had to have heard him wrong. She exchanged a glance with Byrne. “Say again?”

  More static. Then: “Goddamn FBI don’t respect nothin’.”

  Jessica’s stomach dropped. The line was familiar to her. It was a phrase that Sonny Corleone says in The Godfather. She had seen the movie a thousand times. Terry Cahill wasn’t kidding around. Not at a time like this.

  Terry Cahill was in trouble.

  “Where are you?” Jessica asked.

  Silence.

  “Agent Cahill,” Jessica said. “What is your twenty?”

  Nothing. Dead, icy silence.

  Then they heard the gunshot.

  “Shots fired!” Jessica yelled into her two-way radio. Instantly she and Byrne had their weapons drawn. They looked up and down the street. No sign of Cahill. The rovers had a limited range. He couldn’t be far.

  Within seconds an officer needs assistance call went out on the radio dispatch, and by the time Jessica and Byrne got to the corner of Twenty-third and Moore there were four sector cars already there, parked at all angles. The uniformed officers were out of their cars in a flash. They all looked to Jessica. She directed the perimeter as she and Byrne began to make their way down the alley that cut behind the stores, weapons drawn. There was no further communication from Cahill’s two-way.

  When did he get here? Jes
sica wondered. Why didn’t he checked in with us?

  They moved slowly down the alley. On either side of the passageway were windows, doorways, niches, alcoves. The Actor might have been in any one of them. Suddenly a window flew open. A pair of Hispanic boys, six or seven years old, probably drawn by the sound of the sirens, popped out their heads. They saw the weapons, and their expressions changed from surprise to fear to excitement.

  “Please get back inside,” Byrne said. They immediately shut the window, drew the curtains.

  Jessica and Byrne continued down the alley, every sound drawing their attention. Jessica fingered the volume on the rover with her free hand. Up. Down. Back up. Nothing.

  They turned a corner, into a short lane that led to Point Breeze Avenue. And they saw him. Terry Cahill was sitting on the ground, his back to the brick wall. He was holding his right shoulder. He had been shot. There was blood beneath his fingers, scarlet spreading onto the sleeve of his white shirt. Jessica rushed over. Byrne called in their location, kept an eye out, scanning the windows and rooftops above them. The danger had not necessarily passed. Within a few seconds, four uniformed officers arrived, Underwood and Martinez among them. Byrne directed them.

  “Talk to me, Terry,” Jessica said.

  “I’m good,” he said through gritted teeth. “It’s a flesh wound.” A slight amount of fresh blood tipped his fingers. The right side of Cahill’s face was starting to swell.

  “Did you see his face?” Byrne asked.

  Cahill shook his head. He was clearly in a world of pain.

  Jessica communicated the information that the suspect was still at large into her two-way. She heard at least four or five more sirens approaching. You sent out an officer needs assistance call in this department, and everyone and his mother came.

  But even with twenty cops combing the area, it became clear, after five minutes or so, that their suspect had slipped away. Again.

  The Actor was in the wind.

  BY THE TIME Jessica and Byrne returned to the alley behind the market, Ike Buchanan and half a dozen detectives were on the scene. Paramedics were attending to Terry Cahill. One of the EMS techs found Jessica’s eyes, nodded. Cahill would be okay.

  “There goes my shot at the PGA tour,” Cahill said as they loaded him onto a stretcher. “Want my statement now?”

  “We’ll get it at the hospital,” Jessica said. “Don’t worry about it.”

  Cahill nodded, winced in pain as they lifted the gurney. He looked at Jessica and Byrne. “Do me a favor, will you guys?”

  “Name it, Terry,” Jessica said.

  “Take this fucker down,” he said. “Hard.”

  THE DETECTIVES MILLED around the perimeter of the crime scene where Cahill had been shot. Although no one said it, they all felt like rookies, like a group of green recruits fresh out the academy. CSU had set up a perimeter of yellow tape and, as always, a crowd was gathering. Four CSU officers began to comb the area. Jessica and Byrne stood against the wall, lost in their thoughts.

  Granted, Terry Cahill was a federal agent, and quite often there was an intense rivalry between agencies, but he was nonetheless a law enforcement officer working a case in Philadelphia. The grim faces and steely looks on all concerned spoke to the outrage. You don’t shoot a cop in Philadelphia.

  After a few minutes, Jocelyn Post, a veteran of CSU, held up a pair of tongs, smiling from ear to ear. Between the tips was a spent bullet.

  “Oh yes,” she said. “Come to Mama J.”

  Although they had found the discharged slug that had hit Terry Cahill in the shoulder, it was not always easy to determine the caliber and type of bullet when it had been fired, especially if the lead had struck a brick wall, which it had in this case.

  Nonetheless, this was very good news. Anytime a piece of physical evidence was found—something that could be tested, analyzed, photographed, dusted, traced—it was a step forward.

  “We’ve got the slug,” Jessica said, knowing that this was a baby step in the investigation, happy to have the lead nonetheless. “It’s a start.”

  “I think we can do better than that,” Byrne said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look.”

  Byrne crouched down, picked up a metal rib from a broken umbrella lying in a pile of trash. He lifted the edge of plastic garbage bag. There, next to the Dumpster, partially hidden, was a small-caliber handgun. A banged-up, cheap black .25. It looked like the same weapon they had seen in the Fatal Attraction video.

  This was no baby step.

  They had the Actor’s gun.

  64

  THE VIDEOTAPE FOUND in Cap-Haitien was a French film, released in 1955. The title was Les Diaboliques. In it, Simone Signoret and Vera Clouzot—who portray the wife and former mistress of a thoroughly rotten man played by Paul Meurisse—murder Meurisse by drowning him in a bathtub. Like the rest of the Actor’s masterpieces, this tape had a re-created murder replacing the original crime.

  In this version of Les Diaboliques, a barely glimpsed man in a dark satin jacket with a dragon embroidered on the back pushes a man beneath the surface of the water in a grungy bathroom. Again, a bathroom.

  Victim number four.

  THERE WAS A clean print on the gun, a .25 ACP Raven manufactured by Phoenix Arms, a popular junk gun on the streets. You could pick up a Raven .25 anywhere in the city for under a hundred dollars. If the shooter was in the system, they would soon have a match.

  There had been no slug recovered at the Erin Halliwell scene, so they would not know for certain if this weapon was used to kill her, even though the ME’s office had presumptively concluded that her single wound was consistent with a small-caliber weapon.

  Firearms had already determined that the Raven .25 was the gun used to shoot Terry Cahill.

  As they had thought, the cell phone attached to the videocassette belonged to Stephanie Chandler. Although the SIM card was still active, everything else had been erased. There were no calendar entries, no address book listings, no text or e-mail messages, no logs of calls made or received. There were no fingerprints.

  CAHILL GAVE HIS statement while getting patched up at Jefferson. The wound was a flesh wound, and he was expected to be released within a few hours. In the ER waiting room, half a dozen FBI agents congregated, giving a visiting Jessica Balzano and Kevin Byrne their backs. Nobody could have prevented what happened to Cahill, but tightly knit squads never looked at it that way. According the suits, the PPD had fucked up, and one of their own was now in the hospital.

  In his official statement, Cahill said that he had been in South Philly when he had received the call from Eric Chavez. He had then monitored the channel and heard that the suspect was perhaps in the area of Twenty-third and McClellan. He had begun a search of the alleyways behind the storefronts when his assailant had come up behind him, put the gun to the back of his head, and forced him to say the lines from The Godfather into the two-way radio. When the suspect reached for Cahill’s weapon, Cahill knew he had to make his move. They struggled, and the assailant punched him twice—once in the small of the back, once on the right side of his face—then the suspect’s gun discharged. The suspect then fled down the alley, leaving his weapon behind.

  A brief canvass of the area near the shooting yielded little. No one had seen or heard a thing. But now the police had a firearm, and that opened up a broad avenue of investigation to them. Guns, like people, had a history.

  WHEN THE TAPE of Les Diaboliques was ready to be screened, ten detectives assembled in the studio room of the AV unit. The French-language film ran 122 minutes. At the point where Simone Signoret and Vera Clouzot drown Paul Meurisse, there is a crash edit. When the film changes over to the new footage, the new scene is a filthy bathroom—grimy ceiling, peeling plaster, filthy rags on the floor, stacked magazines next to dirty toilet. A bare-bulb fixture next to the sink casts a dim, sickly light. A large figure on the right side of the screen holds the thrashing victim underwater with clearly powerful
hands.

  The camera shot is stationary, meaning that the camera was most likely on a tripod, or perched on something. To date there had been no evidence of a second suspect.

  When the victim stops thrashing, his body floats to the surface of the dirty water. The camera is then picked up and moved in for a close-up. It was there that Mateo Fuentes froze the image.

  “Jesus Christ,” Byrne said.

  All eyes turned to him. “What, you know him?” Jessica asked.

  “Yeah,” Byrne said. “I know him.”

  DARRYL PORTER’S APARTMENT above the X Bar was as sleazy and ugly as the man. All the windows were painted shut, and the hot sun on the glass gave the cramped space a cloying, dog-kennel smell.

  There was an old avocado-colored sleeper couch covered with a filthy bedspread, a pair of stained armchairs. The floor, tables, and shelves were covered with water-stained magazines and newspapers. The sink offered a month of dirty dishes and at least five species of scavenging insects.

  On one of the bookshelves over the TV were three sealed DVD copies of Philadelphia Skin.

  Darryl Porter was in his bathtub, fully clothed, fully dead. The filthy bathwater had shriveled and leached Porter’s skin a cement-gray color. His bowels had released into the water, and the stench in the confines of the small bathroom was overpowering. A pair of rats had already begun to seek out the gas-bloated corpse.

  The Actor had now claimed four lives, or at least four of which they were aware. He was getting bolder. It was a classic escalation, and no one could predict what was coming next.

  As the CSU set up to process yet another crime scene, Jessica and Byrne stood in front of the X Bar. They both looked shell-shocked. It was a moment where the horrors were flying fast and fleet and words were hard to come by. Psycho, Fatal Attraction, Scarface, Les Diaboliques—what the hell was coming next?

  Jessica’s cell phone rang, bringing with it the answer.

  “This is Detective Balzano.”