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

by Richard Montanari

  Jessica looked at the clock. It was still a reasonable hour. She called one of the detectives on that case, a longtime veteran named Dennis Lassar. They got their pleasantries out of the way quickly, in deference to the hour. Jessica got to the point.

  “Do you remember a break-in at a row house on Nineteenth? A woman named Edwina Matisse?”

  “When was it?”

  Jessica gave him the date.

  “Yeah, yeah. Older woman. Kinda nuts. Had a grown son doing time.”

  “That’s her.”

  Lassar detailed the case as he remembered it.

  “So the woman reported that the only thing stolen was a pair of candlesticks? That sound right?” Jessica asked.

  “If you say so. Lotta assholes under the bridge since then.”

  “I hear you,” Jessica said. “Do you remember if the place was really ransacked? I mean, a lot more roughed up than a pair of candlesticks would have warranted?”

  “Now that you mention it, it was. The son’s room was torn apart,” Lassar said. “But hey, if the vic says nothing’s missing, then nothing’s missing. I remember being in a hurry to get the hell out of there. Smelled like chicken broth and cat piss.”

  “Okay,” Jessica said. “Do you remember anything else about the case?”

  “I seem to recall there was something else about the son.”

  “What about him?”

  “I think the FBI had been watching him before he went up.”

  The FBI had been watching a lowlife like Matisse? “Do you remember what that was about?”

  “I think it was some Mann Act violation. Interstate transport of underaged girls. Don’t quote me on it, though.”

  “Did an agent show up at the crime scene?”

  “Yeah,” Lassar said. “Funny how this shit comes back to you. Young guy.”

  “Do you remember the agent’s name?”

  “Now, that part’s lost to the Wild Turkey forever. Sorry.”

  “No problem. Thanks.”

  She hung up, thought about calling Terry Cahill. He had been released from the hospital and was back working a desk. Still, it was probably a little late for a choirboy like Terry to be up. She’d talk to him tomorrow.

  She put Philadelphia Skin into her laptop’s DVD drive, forwarded it. She freeze-framed the scene near the beginning. The young woman in the feather mask stared out at her, her wide eyes vacant and pleading. She ran a check on the name Angel Blue, even though she knew it was false. Even Eugene Kilbane had no idea who the girl was. He said he’d never seen her before or after Philadelphia Skin.

  But why do I know those eyes?

  Suddenly Jessica heard a sound at the dining room window. It sounded as if it might be the laughter of a young woman. Both of Jessica’s neighbors had children, but they were boys. She heard it again. A girl’s giggle.

  Close.

  Very close.

  She turned and looked at the window. There was a face staring at her. It was the girl from the video, the girl in the teal feather mask. Except now the girl was skeletal, her pale skin stretched tight over her skull, her mouth a ragged grin, a red slash in her pallid smear of features.

  Then, in an instant, the girl was gone. Jessica soon sensed a presence right behind her. The girl was right behind her. Someone flipped on the lights.

  Someone is in my house. How did—

  No, the light was coming from the windows.

  Huh?

  Jessica picked her head off the table.

  Oh my God, she thought. She’d fallen asleep at the dining room table. It was light out. Bright light out. Morning. She looked at her watch. No watch.

  Sophie.

  She shot to her feet, looked around, frantic for the moment, her heart racing to burst. Sophie was sitting in front of the TV, pajamas still on, a box of cereal in her lap, the TV showing cartoons.

  “G’morning, Mom,” Sophie said through a mouthful of Cheerios.

  “What time is it?” Jessica asked, even though she knew it was rhetorical.

  “I can’t tell time,” her daughter replied.

  Jessica darted into the kitchen, looked at the clock. Nine thirty. In her entire life, she had never slept past nine. Ever. What a day to set the record, she thought. Some task force leader.

  Shower, breakfast, coffee, dressed, more coffee. All in twenty minutes. A world record. A personal best, at least. She gathered the photos and files together. The photo on top was a still of the girl from Philadelphia Skin.

  And that’s when she saw it. Sometimes extreme fatigue coupled with extreme pressure can open the floodgates.

  The first time Jessica had watched the film, she thought she had seen those eyes before.

  Now she knew where.

  70

  BYRNE WOKE UP on the couch. He had dreamed of Jimmy Purify. Jimmy and his pretzel logic. He had dreamed about a conversation they had once had, late one night in the unit, maybe a year before Jimmy’s bypass. They had just brought down a very bad man, wanted on a triple. The mood was smooth and easy. Jimmy was working his way though a huge bag of barbecued potato chips, feet up, tie and belt undone. Someone brought up the fact that Jimmy’s doctor had told him he had to cut down on fatty, greasy, sugary foods. These were three of Jimmy’s four basic food groups, the other being single-malt.

  Jimmy sat up. He assumed his Buddha pose. Everyone knew a pearl was forthcoming.

  “This happens to be health food,” he said. “And I can prove it.”

  Everyone just stared, meaning, Let’s have it.

  “Okay,” he began, “Potatoes are a vegetable, am I right?” Jimmy’s lips and tongue were a bright orange.

  “Right,” someone said. “Potatoes are a vegetable.”

  “And barbecuing is just another term for grilling, am I also right?”

  “Can’t argue with that,” someone testified.

  “Therefore, I am eating grilled vegetables. This is health food, baby.” Straight-faced, perfectly serious. Nobody did deadpan better.

  Fucking Jimmy, Byrne thought.

  God, he missed him.

  Byrne got up, splashed some water on his face in the kitchen, put the kettle on. When he walked back into the living room, the case was still there, still open.

  He circled the evidence. The epicenter of the case was right before him, and the door was maddeningly closed.

  We didn’t do right by that girl, Kevin.

  Why couldn’t he stop thinking about this? He remembered the night as if it were yesterday. Jimmy was having surgery to have bunions removed. Byrne had been partnered with Phil Kessler. The call came in around 10:00 PM. A body was found in the bathroom of a Sunoco station in North Philly. When they arrived on the scene Kessler, as always, found something to do that had nothing to do with being in the same room as the victim. He started a canvass.

  Byrne had pushed open the door to the ladies’ room. He was immediately accosted with the scents of disinfectant and human waste. On the floor, wedged between the toilet and the grimy tiled wall, was a young woman. She was slender and fair, no more than twenty years old. There were a few track marks on her arm. She was clearly a user, but not habitual. Byrne had felt for a pulse, found none. She was pronounced dead at the scene.

  He recalled looking at her, so unnaturally posed on the floor. He recalled thinking that this was not who she was supposed to be. She was supposed to be a nurse, a lawyer, a scientist, a ballerina. She was supposed to be somebody other than a drug statistic.

  There had been some signs of a struggle—contusions on her wrists, some bruising on her back—but the amount of heroin in her system, coupled with the fresh needle marks on her arms, indicated that she had recently shot up, and it had been far too pure for her system. The official cause of death was ruled an overdose.

  But hadn’t he suspected more?

  There was a knock at his door, bringing Byrne back from the memory. He answered. It was an officer with an envelope.

  “Sergeant Powell said it was
misfiled,” the officer said. “He sends his apologies.”

  “Thanks,” Byrne said.

  He closed the door, opened the envelope. The girl’s picture was clipped to the front of the folder. He had forgotten how young she looked. Byrne purposely avoided looking at the name on the folder for the moment.

  As he stared at her photograph, he tried to recall her first name. How could he have forgotten? He knew how. She was a junkie. A middle-class kid gone bad. In his arrogance, in his ambition, she had been a nobody to him. Had she been a lawyer at some white-shoe firm, or a doctor at HUP, or an architect at the city planning board, he would have treated the case differently. As much as he hated to admit it, in those days, it was true.

  He opened the file, saw her name. And everything made sense.

  Angelika. Her name was Angelika.

  She was Angel Blue.

  He flipped through the file. He soon found what he was looking for. She was not just another stiff. She was, of course, somebody’s daughter.

  As he reached for the phone, it rang, the sound echoing in tandem with the question caroming off the walls of his heart:

  How will you pay?

  71

  NIGEL BUTLER’S HOME was a tidy row house on Forty-second Street, near Locust. The outside was as ordinary as any well-kept brick row house in Philadelphia—a pair of flower boxes beneath the two front windows, a cheerful red door, a brass mailbox. If the detectives were correct in their assumptions, a full litany of horrors had been planned inside.

  Angel Blue’s real name was Angelika Butler. Angelika had been twenty years old when she was found in a North Philly gas station bathroom, dead from a heroin overdose. Or so the medical examiner’s office had officially ruled.

  “I have a daughter studying acting,” Nigel Butler had said.

  True statement, wrong verb tense.

  Byrne told Jessica about the night he and Phil Kessler had gotten the call to investigate a dead girl in that North Philly gas station. Jessica told Byrne in detail of her two meetings with Butler. One, when she had met him at his office at Drexel. The other when Butler had stopped by the Roundhouse with books. She told Byrne of the series of eight-by-ten head shots of Butler in his many stage characters. Nigel Butler was an accomplished actor.

  But Nigel Butler’s real life was a much darker piece of drama. Before leaving the Roundhouse, Byrne had run a PDCH on the man. A police department criminal history was a basic criminal history report. Nigel Butler had twice been investigated for sexually abusing his daughter: once when she was ten; once when she was twelve. Both times the investigation had hit a dead end when Angelika had recanted her story.

  When Angelika had entered the adult-film world, and met an unseemly end, it had probably sent Butler over the edge—jealousy, rage, paternal concern, sexual obsession. Who knew? The point was, Nigel Butler was now at the center of their investigation.

  Yet even with all this circumstantial evidence, they still did not have enough for a search warrant of Nigel Butler’s house. At that moment, Paul DiCarlo was going down a list of judges trying to change that.

  Nick Palladino and Eric Chavez were staking out Butler’s office at Drexel. The university had told them that Professor Butler was out of town for three days, and could not be reached. Eric Chavez had used his charm to find out that Butler had allegedly gone camping in the Poconos. Ike Buchanan had already put in a call to the Monroe County sheriff’s office.

  As they approached the door, Byrne and Jessica caught each other’s eye. If their suspicions were correct, they were standing in front of the Actor’s door. How would it play out? Hard? Easy? No door ever gave a clue. They drew their weapons, held them at their sides, glanced up and down the block.

  Now was the time.

  Byrne knocked on the door. Waited. No answer. He rang the bell, knocked again. Again, nothing.

  They took a few steps back, looked at the house. Two windows upstairs. Both had white curtains drawn. The window to what was certainly the living room had matching curtains, slightly parted. Not enough to see in. The row house was in the middle of the block. If they wanted to go around back, they would have to walk all the way around. Byrne decided to knock again. Louder. He stepped back to the door.

  That’s when they heard the shots. They came from inside the house. A large-caliber weapon. Three quick blasts that rattled the windows.

  They would not need a search warrant after all.

  Kevin Byrne slammed a shoulder into the door. Once, twice, three times. It splintered open on the fourth attempt. “Police!” he yelled. He rolled into the house, gun raised. Jessica called for backup on her two-way, then followed, Glock poised, ready.

  To the left, a small living room and dining room. Mid-day dark. Empty. Ahead, a hallway to what was probably the kitchen. Stairs up and down to the left. Byrne met Jessica’s eyes. She would take the upstairs. Jessica let her eyes adjust. She scanned the floor in the living room and hallway. No blood. Outside, two sector cars screeched to a halt.

  For the moment, the house was deathly quiet.

  Then there was music. A piano. Heavy footsteps. Byrne and Jessica leveled their weapons toward the stairs. Sounds were coming from the basement. Two uniformed officers arrived at the door. Jessica instructed them to check upstairs. They drew their weapons, made their way up the steps. Jessica and Byrne began to descend the stairs into the basement.

  The music became louder. Strings. The sound of waves on a beach.

  Then came a voice.

  “Is that the house?” a boy asked.

  “That’s it,” a man answered.

  A few moments of silence. A dog barked.

  “Hey. I knew there was a dog,” the boy said.

  Before Jessica and Byrne could round the corner into the basement, they looked at each other. And understood. There had been no gunshots. It had been a movie. When they stepped into the dim basement, they saw that the film was Road to Perdition. The film was playing on a large plasma screen, running through a 5.1 Dolby system, the volume cranked very high. The gunfire was from the film. The windows had rattled courtesy of a very large subwoofer. On the screen, Tom Hanks and Tyler Hoechlin stood on a beach.

  Butler had known they were coming. Butler had set this all up for their benefit. The Actor was not ready for his final curtain.

  “Clear!” one of the uniforms shouted above them.

  But the two detectives already knew that. Nigel Butler was gone.

  The house was empty.

  BYRNE REWOUND THE tape to the scene where Tom Hanks’s character—Michael Sullivan—kills the man he believes to be responsible for the murder of his wife and one of his sons. In the film, Sullivan shoots the man in a bathtub at a hotel.

  The scene had been replaced with the murder of Seth Goldman.

  SIX DETECTIVES SCOURED every inch of Nigel Butler’s row house. On the basement walls were even more head shots of Butler’s various stage roles: Shylock, Harold Hill, Jean Valjean.

  They had issued a nationwide APB on Nigel Butler. State, county, local, and federal law enforcement agencies all had a photograph of the man, as well as a description and license plate of his car. Another six detectives fanned out across the Drexel campus.

  In the basement was a wall of prerecorded videotapes, DVDs, and reels of sixteen-millimeter film. What they did not find were any video editing decks. No camcorder, no homemade videotapes, no evidence that Butler had spliced footage of the homicides into prerecorded tapes. Within an hour they would, with any luck, have a warrant to search the film department and all its offices at Drexel. Jessica was searching the basement when Byrne called her from the first floor. When she got upstairs and into the living room, she found Byrne by the bookshelf.

  “You’re not to going to believe this,” Byrne said. In his hand was a large, leatherette-bound photo album. He flipped to a page about halfway through the book.

  Jessica took the photo album from him. What she saw nearly took her breath away. There were a dozen page
s of photographs of the teenage Angelika Butler. In some she was standing alone: at a birthday party, at a park. In some she was with a young man. A boyfriend perhaps.

  In almost all of the pictures, Angelika’s head had been replaced with a cutout photograph of a movie star—Bette Davis, Emily Watson, Jean Arthur, Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly. The young man’s face had been defaced with what might have been a knife or an ice pick. Page after page, Angelika Butler—in the guise of Elizabeth Taylor, Jeanne Crain, Rhonda Fleming—stood next to a man whose face had been obliterated in a terrible rage. In some instances, there were rips in the page where the young man’s face once was.

  “Kevin.” Jessica pointed to one picture, a picture where Angelika Butler wore the mask of a very young Joan Crawford, a picture where her defaced companion sat on a bench next to her.

  In this picture, the man was wearing a shoulder holster.

  72

  HOW LONG HAS it been? I know to the hour. Three years, two weeks, one day, twenty-one hours. The landscape has changed. The topography of my heart has not. I think of the thousands and thousands of people who have passed by this place in the past three years, the thousands of dramas unfolding. Despite all our claims to the contrary, we really do not care about each other. I see it every day. We are all simply extras in the movie, not even worthy of a credit. If we have a line, perhaps, we will be remembered. If not, we take our meager pay and strive to be the lead in someone’s life.

  Mostly, we fail. Remember your fifth kiss? The third time you made love? Of course not. Just the first. Just the last.