The Killing Room

by Richard Montanari

  ‘No. Every one takes a little something from you.’

  ‘And you never get it back.’

  ‘No,’ Byrne said. ‘You don’t.’

  Jessica recalled coming home from the hospital when her mother died. She was only five years old at the time, but she remembered it as if it were yesterday. She recalled sitting in the small living room of their Catharine Street rowhouse with her father and brother, no one speaking. The mail came, the neighbors stopped by with food, cars passed. Other than that the only noise was when the furnace kicked on, and Jessica recalled being grateful for the sound, any sound, that would replace that roaring silence of anguish.

  Sometimes, when she visited her father – who still lived in that house in which Jessica had grown up, who still had the same couches and tables and chairs – the silence returned, as did the reminder that there was still a hole in her heart, a hole that nothing would fill, no matter how long she lived.

  Loretta Palumbo was just beginning the process.

  When they got into the car Jessica told Byrne what she had seen in Danny Palumbo’s bedroom.

  ‘And the crosses looked burned in?’ Byrne asked.

  ‘Yeah. Like someone took a soldering iron and made crosses in the plaster.’

  ‘Not drawn.’

  ‘No,’ Jessica said. ‘Burned.’

  ‘And they were just in front of the doors and the windows? Not in the middle of the room? Not on the floors or furniture? Nowhere else?’

  ‘Just on the ceiling,’ Jessica said. ‘Above the doors and windows. Like maybe Danny was trying to keep something out.’

  ‘Or in.’

  Yeah, Jessica thought. Or in.

  Byrne looked back at the Palumbo rowhouse. ‘Do you think it was Loretta Palumbo who called you this morning?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Byrne took his cell phone out of his pocket, hit the button that took the phone from silent to ring tone. He hit a few more buttons. And Jessica understood. Byrne had called himself to get Loretta Palumbo’s number. If they requested a log of calls into homicide from that morning, they would be able to rule in or out whether or not the call came from this address. It was a lot easier, and faster, than getting a warrant to get a list of calls from Loretta Palumbo’s house phone.

  Byrne put his phone away.

  As Jessica buckled in she turned to look back at the rowhouse. Before Byrne pulled away Jessica glanced up at the second-floor window. There she saw a shadow behind the sheer curtains. It was Loretta Palumbo. She was in her dead son’s room.

  TEN

  The smell was overpowering. At first Shane thought it was a delectable brew of spoiled fish and rotting lemons, with a backstory of wet coffee grounds, but soon he detected the unmistakable top note of used kitty litter.

  There was nothing quite like that blend of pine-flavored clay and cat shit to open the sinuses, he thought. In fact, he had gotten so good – had acquired quite the nose, as oenophiles say – that he could instantly tell the difference between clumping and conventional litter at the very first whiff.

  Not that the subject would come up that often in his small circle of friends dining at Le Bec Fin or Striped Bass.

  In between the fish and the kitty he smelled banana peel, vinegar, something that had to be months-old tomato sauce, and it occurred to him – not for the first time by any means – that a good deal of his ability to read people was based on his aptitude in reading their garbage.

  People are their garbage.

  Tonight he had rubbed a little Vicks VapoRub under his nostrils so the smells were not that bad, all things considered. Standing in an alcove behind an upscale rowhouse in Society Hill, he knew he had to get in and out quickly. Dry heaving in the middle of Delancey Street was not part of the plan.

  As always, he sifted through the paper products first. Paper was his grail. First up was a wad of catalogs stuck together by God knows what: Restoration Hardware, Crate & Barrel, Pottery Barn, L. L. Bean, Land’s End. All the usual yuppie suspects. He gently peeled them apart. You never knew what people were going to use as bookmarks inside books or catalogs. He once found a very intimate letter inside a copy of Field & Stream, a missive left there – unsent and undelivered – by a married middle-aged man, addressed to a young girl who worked as a waitress at this man’s neighborhood Denny’s.

  This night he found nothing inside the magazines. He checked the address labels. All the same, all belonging to the homeowner. No information or direction was to be gleaned in a dissimilar address.

  Next was a similarly clumped stack of magazines: Mac World, Architectural Digest, Tropical Fish Monthly.

  Mac user and fish aficionado, Shane thought, registering the two bits of data in his finely compartmentalized brain.

  An afishianado.

  Pay attention, Shane.

  He riffled through these mags. Nada. The only loose material the periodicals contained were those blow-in cards the magazines annoyed you with to get you to subscribe. Shane had never used a blow-in card, based solely on principle.

  The next paper products were a series of opened #10 and corresponding #6 return envelopes. These were mostly those not-so-cleverly disguised pitches for reduced credit-card APR rates that arrived in envelopes with no return address, designed to sucker the recipient into thinking it was some sort of invoice or bill.

  IMPORTANT ACCOUNT INFORMATION ENCLOSED! barked an announcement on the front of the envelope. Shane found almost all of these torn neatly in half, although some people, after perhaps the fourth or fifth ruse, took the time to tear them into confetti-sized pieces.

  Beneath the paper layer were smaller plastic trash bags. These were from the bathroom, kitchen, home office. As gross as most of this was, the smaller bags used in the bathroom posed other problems. Shane had once sliced a finger on a double-edge razor. Since that incident he always carried a small bottle of antibacterial foam in his pocket.

  The small bags in front of him now were from the kitchen, packed with crushed Diet Coke cans, cardboard coffee containers bearing the Starbucks logo, as well as a number of meal-sized Styrofoam containers. Inside these containers were nothing more than half-eaten sandwiches and salads, along a small pile of cigarette butts. He noted that half the butts had lipstick on the filters.

  Mac. Tropical fish.

  A girlfriend? Lover? Prostitute?

  He looked at his watch. He still had time.

  The last of the trash was a pile of crumpled bags from the Whole Foods on South Street, and a pair of large potato chip bags. The last bag he picked up had contents that rattled. There was something plastic inside. Shane eased open the top, and saw them.

  Jackpot.

  There, at the bottom of the empty super-size bag of Lay’s Potato Chips, were four empty pill vials.

  Heart racing, Shane carefully picked out the vials, shaking each one to make certain they were empty. They were.

  ‘And what have we here?’ he quietly asked the night.

  He angled the first vial’s label into the beam of his pen flashlight. The prescription was for a drug called mirtazapine. Shane had never heard of it. The others were diazepam, benazepril, and zolpidem.

  Shane fished out his smart phone, got on the Net. He entered the names of the drugs. Mirtazapine was used in the treatment of depression. The benazepril was used to treat high blood pressure. The others – diazepam and zolpidem – Shane knew all too well. They were the generic names of Valium and Ambien, respectively.

  Let’s see, he thought. High blood pressure, depression, anxiety, and insomnia.

  Not only was the man on the edge, all his medications were generic.

  Cheap prick.

  As Shane began to refill the garbage bag, he thought about how people didn’t realize that, if someone went through their trash, it was the same as having them go through their house. Better, actually, from Shane’s point of view. In your house you could hide things, keep visitors from going into certain rooms, lock closets and cabinets,
put things in a safe. When you threw things into a garbage can, rarely did you consider the order of it all.

  Shane was so accomplished at this, that he could – and many times had – determine a timeline for a person’s week. Monday on the bottom, Tuesday layered on top that, all the way to trash day. At home he had a database detailing every trash pickup in every neighborhood in Philadelphia. He was, in many ways, an archaeologist, wasn’t he?

  He looked at his watch again. Now he was late.

  Shane pulled together the four corners of the plastic sheet, gathered the middle sections, and stuffed it all back into the large Hefty bag. Somehow, it didn’t all fit. It never did. It was one of the great mysteries of life. It was like when you bought a portable television or some other kind of oddly shaped appliance. You could never get the pieces and cables and user manuals and adapters back into the box if you had to return it. Shane figured that manufacturers depended on this. He often wondered how many people kept some crappy item because they were too embarrassed to admit they couldn’t fit the thing back into the box.

  Which was one of the reasons he carried a variety of plastic garbage bags with him at all times. If you had to re-trash a pile of garbage, for whatever reason – and yes, if re-gift was a word, re-trash was a word – you wanted to match the brand and size and color so as not to arouse suspicion. If there was an extra bag, so what? People never remembered how many bags they put out. But if they found a blue bag amidst their basic black – there was a flag. Shane always carried three colors and five sizes.

  He got all the garbage back inside the bags, tidied up the area. He looked at the photograph on his phone, the one he had taken on arrival, nudged two of the bags closer to the rear of the house.

  Perfect.

  He was just about to leave, newly acquired swag in hand – that being the four empty pill vials – when his phone vibrated. It was a text message. Three letters:

  WTF

  ‘I’m coming,’ Shane said. ‘Bitch.’

  Shane drove to North Philly. He parked, got out, climbed into the backseat of his car, eyed the area, taking it all in. As he took off his sweatshirt and undershirt he glanced at the rowhouses on the east side of the street. Typical North Philly clapboards. There was a bodega of sorts on the corner, a closed sandwich shop. Nothing terribly cinematic.

  He rummaged through his gym bag, found the Wet Wipes. He pulled two of them out, wiped under his arms. As he did this he scanned the other side of the street. On that side was a wig store and a nail salon, next to them a tavern. Oh, yes. He framed the tavern sign with his hands, and had a moment of Spielbergian inspiration.

  Perfect.

  He slipped on a dress shirt – like garbage bags, he always carried a fresh supply with him, highly starched and neatly folded in the backseat – then reached for the hanger bearing his collection of neckties. He then got out of the car, tucked in his shirt, knotted his tie. There was nobody faster on earth at tying a necktie without the aid of a mirror.

  Note to self: Pitch a reality around something like this.

  Shane circled to the back of his car, lifted the trunk lid, unzipped the garment bag inside. He slipped on a blazer, along with a cashmere overcoat.

  He began his vocal exercises – red leather yellow leather red leather yellow leather – took a deep breath, checked himself in the tinted rear window, channeling the late great Roy Scheider (who himself had channeled the late great Bob Fosse) and said:

  ‘Show time.’

  When Shane rounded the corner Cyndy was already there, stamping her feet against the cold, blowing into her gloved hands. He was only a few minutes late, but you didn’t want to piss off Cyndy Jovovich.

  Shane liked working with Cyndy, who was nicknamed Mortal Cyn, due to her fearlessness when moving in on a dead body with her camera. At just over six feet tall, weighing in at a solid 190, Cyndy Jovovich could bench press Shane Adams, then throw him like a shot-put. More than once she had run point on a story. Shane, of course, preferred to fight his own battles, but he was no dummy. Cyndy Jovovich could deck a professional hockey player with one whistling right hand.

  ‘Fucking diva,’ she said. ‘I’ve been here for ages.’

  ‘No, you haven’t.’

  Cyn was the hottest shooter at the station. For some reason, most of the television photographers Shane had worked with, regardless of market, had been women. He preferred it, actually. Of all those women, Cyndy Jovovich was the best.

  Unfortunately, she knew it.

  They were doing a follow-up to a story that had aired a week earlier, a story about a Philadelphia city councilman who had been under investigation on charges of corruption and kickbacks. The ruling had come down that afternoon – exonerating the four-term councilman of any wrong doings. The councilman had declined to comment on air, so they decided to do a standup across the street from his modest law offices, which were located on the second floor of the building that housed the tavern.

  Shane took Cyn aside and showed her what he was thinking. She shook her head, put the camera on the tripod, framed it, locked it down. ‘You are so bad.’

  ‘And still you won’t fuck me.’

  ‘Not if you were the last dick in the Delaware Valley.’

  Shane laughed. The best part of riding with Mortal Cyn was that she was openly gay, Shane was openly straight, so there was never any sexual tension between them. There was, and hopefully always would be, a lot of sexual banter.

  Cyn flipped on the light, and silently counted him down.

  Exactly thirty-one seconds later, wrapping up:

  ‘This is Shane Adams, Action News.’

  In this follow-up piece about the councilman (who everyone in the city of Philadelphia believed was guilty of taking kickbacks), they had framed the shot of Shane’s stand-up carefully to include a portion of the neon sign for the Crooked Toad Tavern on the corner. The way they composed the shot, with the tavern’s sign at the right side of the screen, cut out most of it, leaving a single truncated word over Shane’s left shoulder while he was talking. A word written in bright yellow letters:

  CROOK

  Shane watched the playback on the camera’s LCD screen.

  Perfect.

  God, he loved his job.

  At home, Shane showered and ran an electric razor over his face. He followed with toner and moisturizer. Next to the bathroom mirror he always kept a life-size color photograph of his face, taken on the first of every month. He had these pictures going back nearly ten years. He had a file of more than one hundred of them. In this way he charted the changes to his face, which was his life. He’d never had any plastic surgery, not even a dermabrasion or single shot of Botox, but now that he was getting older he was already pricing various procedures.

  Still in his robe, he sat at his iMac, launched his database application, clicked onto the file he needed. He then launched iPhoto, maneuvered over to the corresponding folder.

  He had first noticed her coming out of her rowhouse on Fitzwater Street about six months ago, and had watched her a few times since. She was tall and leggy, had deep auburn hair (Clairol Dark Spice Natural Reddish Brown). She was well dressed (Nordstrom and Bluefly), and had what appeared to be an Imelda Marcos-sized shoe collection (mostly Zappos, with a lot of returns).

  Shane had systematically gone through her trash every other week for the past three months, meticulously recording the details he might need, inputting it all into his ever-growing database.

  For instance, he knew she subscribed to Wine Spectator and, according to three separate receipts from a Center City chi-chi eatery, had ordered a Barolo. She was also a fan of novelist Sue Miller, having recently bought a copy of The Good Mother at amazon.com. Three of her recent emails – which she for some reason printed out and subsequently discarded – had recommended the book to friends.

  She also ordered Mexican food from a delivery service, favoring tapas on Tuesday and frijoles on Friday nights.

  Note to self: Write a Broadway l
yric around this.

  Shane closed his eyes, visualized the upcoming encounter. He had learned this technique from a shrink he had been forced to see as a result of a run-in with the PPD the first week he had been on the job in Philadelphia. The court had thought he might be unstable.

  Little did they know.

  Twenty minutes later he dressed in a Zegna sport coat, Seven For All Mankind jeans, along with an inexpensive white shirt from J. Crew, locked the two deadbolts on his door, and left the building.

  After stopping at the Barnes & Noble at Rittenhouse Square, and making his purchase, Shane entered the lobby bar at Le Meridien at just after nine. There was only one seat open at the bar. A Sixers game was on the plasma.

  He saw her at her favorite banquette with her overweight work friend – older woman, mid-forties, wearing a navy blue, off-the-rack Chico’s pantsuit. Shane knew this woman to be Arlene. He had found a Christmas and birthday card from her in the trash.

  Shane took up a position a few seats down from them. He slipped in a pair of earbuds, but did not start any music on his iPod. He needed to be able to hear. He opened his brand new copy of The Good Mother, began to read. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the woman look over, then look a second time a few seconds later, the way people do when they think they know someone, but they’re not sure in which world to place them. School, work, social, casual. Ever since Shane had become an on-air personality in Philly it had started. This worked in his favor, as well as against, in seemingly equal measure.

  Tonight it was golden.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said. As she said this, she reached over and touched his arm. He glanced at her wine glass. It was almost empty.

  Perfect.

  Shane looked up, made eye contact. He felt a shiver of excitement. He imagined that it was the same feeling that prosecutors get when they trap a witness in a lie, or that of a marlin fisherman when he feels that unmistakable pull on the line.

  He took the earbuds out, smiled. ‘Hi.’