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

by Richard Montanari

  Jessica pulled her hair back, grabbed a rubber band off her wrist, ponytailed her hair. She snapped on a pair of latex gloves. “Detective Byrne has the afternoon off.”

  “Sweet,” Keegan mugged. “Must be nice to have seniority.”

  Jessica laughed. “What are you talking about? You’ve been here longer than anyone, Stan. It’s you who should be eating Milk Duds at the movies.”

  It was true. No one really knew how long Stan Keegan had been a Philadelphia police officer. White-haired, potbellied, bowlegged, a face like a just-boiled scampi, he seemed to have come with the city itself. Like an accessory. Keegan often told people he was on William Penn’s original security detail.

  “Last good movie I saw was The Quiet Man,” Keegan said.

  “What was that, 1950?”

  “Won two Oscars. 1952. John Wayne, Maureen O’Hara, Barry Fitzgerald. Directed by John Ford. Greatest film ever made.”

  Stan Keegan said fill-um. Jessica was going to ask him if he knew which Oscars the movie had won, but she figured he did. She stepped closer, glanced into the square hole. She couldn’t see much. She wasn’t looking forward to this. “Have you been down there?”

  Keegan shook his head. “That’s above my pay grade, Detective. Plus, I have this unnaturally low tolerance for the sight of dead bodies. Always have.”

  Jessica recalled her days in uniform, days when she’d had to secure a crime scene. It was always a relief when the detectives showed up. “I understand.”

  “Does that make me a homophobe?” Keegan asked.

  “Only if the dead person is gay, Stan.”

  “Ah.”

  Jessica knelt on the floor. There was no ladder, but that didn’t seem to be a problem. The crawlspace looked to be only about forty inches deep or so. “You sure I can’t promote you, just for the afternoon?” she asked.

  Jessica saw the right corner of Stan Keegan’s mouth rise a millimeter. For Officer Keegan, this was the equivalent of laughing hysterically. “No thanks.”

  “All right.” Jessica took a few deep breaths. “The sooner I get down there, right?”

  “Dia duit, Detective.”

  As far as Jessica knew, this was a Gaelic phrase meaning “God to you.” The long tradition of the Irish in law enforcement in most major cities in America infused a lot of Gaelic traditions and language into the department, even if the closest you came to being Irish was drinking Irish coffees. She’d heard many black and Hispanic officers spouting Irish proverbs in the past, albeit usually around last call. “Thanks, Stan.”

  Jessica swung her legs over the edge, sat on the floor for a moment. Beneath her, the temporary police lights in the crawlspace cast a yellow, ghostlike glow along the hard pack floor. Long shadows filtered across her field of vision.

  Shadows of what? Jessica wondered. She looked a little more closely and saw the vague outline of three boxes, their silhouettes elongated by the bright lights.

  Three boxes in a crawlspace. One female DOA.

  Jessica said a silent prayer, and lowered herself into the ground.

  | TWENTY-TWO |

  BYRNE STOOD ON THE CORNER OF TWENTIETH AND MARKET STREETS.

  As the lunchtime crowd flowed around him, he glanced at his phone. He had turned it off. He wasn’t supposed to do this, but he had half a day off, and he was going to take it. He could still think, even when he was off duty, couldn’t he? On the other hand, he couldn’t recall ever feeling completely off duty, not in the past fifteen years. He once took a week in the Poconos, and found himself mulling over his caseload while sitting in a creaky Adirondack chair, sipping Old Forester out of a jelly jar. Such was the life.

  His mind drifted from Caitlin O’Riordan to Laura Somerville to Eve Galvez.

  Eve.

  Somehow he had always known what happened to her. He hadn’t imagined such a gruesome fate, but he had known it was bad. He had always hoped that he was wrong. He knew that they were—

  He felt a hand on his arm.

  Byrne spun, his heart in his throat. It was his daughter, Colleen.

  “Hey, Dad,” she signed.

  “Hey.”

  His daughter hugged him, and the world broke out in roses.

  THEY WALKED DOWN MARKET STREET, toward the Schuylkill. The sun was high and hot. The lunchtime crowd streamed by.

  “You look so good,” she signed. “Like, really good.”

  Colleen Siobhan Byrne had been deaf since birth, proficient at American Sign Language since the age of seven. These days she taught it part-time at an inner-city school. Her father was pretty good at it too.

  “I’m getting there,” Byrne said. It had been a slow climb back since he had been shot three years earlier. He had realized this past spring, on a damp morning when everything, including his eyebrows and ankles and tongue hurt like hell, that he had to do something. He’d had a man-in-the-mirror talk with himself. He knew that if he didn’t make a move, at this age, he never would. He was even considering a yoga class, although he would never tell anyone. Even his daughter. He’d even gone so far as to pick up a yoga DVD, and had tried a few of the breathing exercises. He had also been working with weights twice a week, too. Anything to stay out of physical therapy.

  “Have you been working out?” she asked.

  “A little,” Byrne signed.

  “A little?” She grabbed his upper left arm, squeezed. “Don’t get too buff on me, Dad,” she signed. “All my girlfriends think you’re pretty cute as it is.”

  Byrne blushed. No one could get to him like his daughter.

  Colleen looped her arm through his.

  At Twenty-first, a pair of spike-haired boys approached them, boys around seventeen, both wearing torn jeans, black T-shirts bearing some death message. They both leered at Colleen in her white sundress, at Byrne’s signing, then back to Colleen. They nudged each other, as if to say that the fact that this hot blond was deaf made her even hotter. The boys smiled at his daughter. Byrne wanted to drop them where they stood. He resisted.

  When they stopped, waiting for the light on Twenty-second Street, Byrne knew it was time to ask. He got his daughter’s attention.

  “So,” he began. “What’s this all about?”

  Two days earlier, Donna Sullivan Byrne, Kevin Byrne’s ex-wife, Colleen’s mother, had called out of the blue. She said she wanted to see him, to have lunch. Just like that. Lunch. It was nearly an alien construct for the two of them.

  They hadn’t really had lunch since they were courting. Their divorce had been reasonably amicable—if you considered the Crimean War amicable—but they had tolerated seeing each other over the years for Colleen. The other day, on the phone, Donna had seemed kind of like the old Donna. Flirtatious and happy. Happy to talk to him. It didn’t take the world’s greatest detective to know that something was up. Byrne just didn’t have a clue what it could be.

  Of course, he hadn’t slept more than two hours in a row thinking about this.

  “I swear I don’t know,” Colleen signed on the tail of a mysterious smile.

  She stopped at a metal box of newspapers, one of a half dozen, and picked up a copy of The Report, the sleaziest free weekly in Philly, which was saying something. Even for free it was grossly overpriced. Byrne winced. Colleen laughed. She knew her father’s history with the paper. As they walked on, Colleen flipped to page three, halved it, like she knew where she was going. She did. She pointed to the picture of Caitlin O’Riordan.

  “This is your case, isn’t it?” she signed.

  Byrne hated to talk about the ugliness of his job with Colleen, but he had to constantly remind himself of late that she was no longer a child. Far from it. She would be in college before he knew it.

  He nodded.

  “The girl was a runaway?”

  “Yes,” Byrne signed. “She was from Lancaster.”

  Colleen looked at the article for a few moments, then folded the paper and put it into her tote bag.

  Byrne thought about how blessed
he was, how bright, and capable and resourceful his daughter was. He then thought of Robert O’Riordan, and the four months of hell through which the man had lived. Byrne had no idea if they were ever going to close the O’Riordan case. About this Kevin Byrne had a number of hopes, as well.

  When they reached the building, Byrne looked at his daughter, she at him. He must have looked exactly the way he felt.

  Colleen rolled her eyes, swatted him on the arm. “You are such a baby.”

  Byrne silently agreed and held open the door.

  __________

  BYRNE AND COLLEEN were seated at a table at Bistro St. Tropez, near the windows overlooking the Schuylkill River. The sun had come out again, and the water sparkled. They sat without conversing for a while, just enjoying their nearness.

  Soon a shadow crossed the table. Byrne looked up. A woman stood next to their table, a butterscotch blond with a slender figure and a beautiful smile. She wore a pale-lemon linen suit.

  The woman was his ex-wife, the love of his life. Byrne stood. Donna kissed him on the cheek. She thumbed off her lipstick—an old endearment—and his legs wobbled.

  Big city cop, Byrne thought. Real tough guy. He’d been shot, stabbed, and punched more times than he could count. The slightest touch of his wife’s thumb and he was down for the count.

  THEY SIPPED THEIR WATERS, glanced around at the well-dressed clientele, made their small talk. They perused the menus. Okay, Byrne did. It seemed Donna and Colleen had been here before, and knew what they wanted long before he did. They both ordered salads—one Poulet Moroccan, one Belle Mer—and Byrne ordered the Burger St. Tropez.

  No one was surprised.

  While they waited for their food, Byrne tried to keep up with the gossip, but he was really lost in a fog. Donna Sullivan was still the most beautiful and vibrant woman he had ever met. From the moment he first laid eyes on her next to a 7-Eleven, when they were both teenagers, he had always been in her thrall. He’d had many affairs since the divorce, had even thought he felt the real thing a few times, but his heart still stuttered every time they met.

  Donna had worked as a real-estate agent for the past five years, but had recently joined a small interior design firm. She had always been creative, had taken design courses in college, but had never found the proper outlet. Now, it seemed, she had.

  The lunch hour passed far too quickly. At least a dozen times as they ate and talked and laughed, Byrne thought, I’m with my wife and daughter. I’m actually sitting in a restaurant with the two girls who actually mean something to me on this planet.

  Okay, two of the three. Jessica would kill him.

  At just before two o’clock Donna glanced at her watch. She grabbed the check. Byrne objected, but just a little. She made a lot more than he did.

  She signed, the leatherette notebook was whisked away, they finished their coffees. She then reached into her bag, pulled out a photo, showed it to Byrne.

  “We’re redoing a house in Bryn Mawr. They want us to reupholster this couch. Isn’t it fabulous?”

  Byrne looked at the picture. It was an antique red velvet backless couch, with one end raised. He had no idea how anyone could actually sit on it. “Where’s Cate Blanchett?”

  Colleen laughed, signed, “You are so hip, Dad.”

  “It’s called a fainting couch,” Donna said. “I think they paid about fourteen thousand dollars for it.”

  “I understand the fainting part, then.”

  “Look, I have to go check out some fabrics for it,” Donna said as they were getting ready to leave. “It’s just upstairs. Why don’t you come up with us? It will be fun.”

  Fabrics. Fun.

  “You know, as much as I would love to do this—you know me and fabrics—I really have to get back,” he said.

  Byrne made eye contact with Colleen. Colleen’s eyes said that she knew he was talking about the Caitlin O’Riordan case. She gave a slight nod, meaning it was okay. She could not only read his lips like an expert, she could read his heart.

  Byrne immediately felt bad about taking the rest of the day off. He’d head back to the Roundhouse from here. Either that or lie to his daughter. It was no contest.

  “Oh all right, macho man,” Donna said. They left the bistro, stood in the fourth floor hallway, waiting for the elevator. Then, completely out of the blue, Donna kissed him. Not on the cheek. Not a two-peck Euro style kiss. It was a full-blown, let’s-get-a-room-sailor French kiss, the first in years. Many years. Donna pulled back, looked deep into his eyes. Kevin Byrne tumbled, teetered on the edge of saying something stupid, caught himself, then said it anyway.

  “Yeah. Well. I didn’t feel a thing,” he said. “You?”

  Donna shrugged. “I think one toe may have curled just a little, but that’s about it.”

  They both laughed.

  “We’ll walk you down,” she said.

  Byrne, still reeling, watched his ex-wife and daughter step into the elevator ahead of him. They were the same height now. They looked so much alike that his heart ached. From behind, they were almost indistinguishable. Two women.

  In the lobby, Colleen took out her digital camera, took a picture of Byrne and Donna.

  Byrne hugged them both again, made his good-byes. Donna walked toward the elevators, cell phone out. Colleen lingered for a moment.

  Byrne pushed through the huge doors, into the bright afternoon sun. He took out his handkerchief, wiped his lips. Donna’s lipstick glanced seductively back. For some reason he stopped, turned. Colleen was watching him. She was perfectly framed in the lobby’s square front window. She smiled her melancholy, teenage smile, held up her hand.

  I love you, Dad, she signed.

  Byrne’s heart flew.

  | TWENTY-THREE |

  FROM THE MOMENT JESSICA LOWERED HERSELF INTO THE CRAWLSPACE she was confronted with the smell of old death. All around her she heard vermin scurrying through dry trash.

  She thought of Eve Galvez in her shallow grave.

  The crawlspace was at one time a storage area for whatever enterprises had occupied the first floor of the building. In the corners were dusty wooden crates, stacks of flattened and twined cardboard boxes, plastic milk crates.

  Jessica Maglite around the corners. The crawlspace measured the approximate size of the building above, that being sixteen by twenty-five or so. Rusted iron pipes and commercial-gauge electrical wire ran overhead. To her left, near the front of the building, was a sanitary stack. Between the joists overhead a spider had spun a silken, silvery web, spanning the trusses. Small carcasses hung from its outer edges.

  In the center of the crawlspace were three large wooden boxes.

  The boxes were not aligned in a row. The center box was off to one side, forming, from Jessica’s perspective, a blocky letter C. Each cube measured about thirty inches, each a different color—one yellow, one blue, one red.

  The three marks on the page of the Bible, she thought. The red, blue, and yellow squares.

  She looked at the first box, the one painted yellow. She knew this one had been opened. There was a slight gap between the door on top and the sides, a gap of an inch or so. Jessica was concerned that the person who opened it had been Officer Caruso, a clear breach of procedure. In a situation such as this, all kinds of precautions could have, and should have, been taken.

  Jessica eased open the lid. The hinges creaked, echoing off the hard walls. She angled the beam of her flashlight.

  Inside was a thing of nightmares.

  The partial, long-decayed corpse wore a spangled red sweater, big silver hoop earrings. Around the neck was a distinctive black opal necklace. Jessica had seen it before. She knew who this was. She might have known all along.

  It was the girl in the photograph they had found in the Bible. The girl irretrievably connected to Caitlin O’Riordan.

  The girl they were supposed to find.

  | TWENTY-FOUR |

  HE HAD GIVEN THE GIRL A MUCH-NEEDED BATH, WASHED AND CONDITION her hair,
averting his eyes as much as he could and still do a proper job, lest the girl find him immodest or, even worse, lecherous.

  He used a mint shampoo from Origins.

  Restoration, he had thought with a smile. In which an object is restored to its original condition.

  When they were finished, he wheeled her down the hall. She was still a little groggy. He had given her yet another Brisette, one of his crushable ampoules containing chloroform. In the 1970s his father had purchased hundreds of them from an English woman who worked as a midwife. Joseph knew all too well their effect.

  “Are you comfortable, my love?”

  She turned her head slowly, remained silent.

  They entered an upstairs sewing room. It was one of Joseph’s favorite rooms. The wallpaper was a blowsy floral in water silk, papered from the skirting board up to the dado rail. But the room was much more than beautiful. It was magic. With the touch of a button, located behind the reproduction of William Beattie-Brown’s Golden Highlands, the eastern wall would rise and give onto a small parlor overlooking the rear of the property. The touch of another button, this one beneath the spy window overlooking the great room, would release a four-by-four trapdoor behind the divan. Swann had never found the need to use either.

  He positioned her in front of the television and pressed the play button on the remote, starting the video.

  “Attend, the Great Cygne,” Swann said.

  He had transferred all the old film footage—there was precious little of it, reaching back to his father’s early performances in 1948—to videocassette years ago. The original 8 mm footage had been brittle, and he had found a company in South Philly that transferred old home movies to CD, DVD, and videocassette.

  The first images were of his father as a very young man, perhaps twenty. An entertainer of German extraction, performing in New York City in the late 1940s. What courage it must have taken, Joseph often thought.

  A quick cut found his father at about twenty-eight. He now sat at a nightclub table with five others. It was a static, high-angle shot. Vegas, late 1950s. The very best place at the one of the very best times in history. The Great Cygne performed some coin magic to a delighted crowd. He executed Four Coins to a Glass, the Flying Eagles, the Traveling Centavos. In a flourish he grabbed an ice bucket from a passing cart and presented a variation on Miser’s Dream.