New Jersey Noir--Cape May

by William Baer

  “What does he want?” I wondered.

  “It seems he believes that you can solve a crime. Remember them? When I asked him why, he said, ‘Because he’s supposed to be the best.’”

  “Who could dispute that?”

  Whether or not it was true, I’d picked up the “best” reputation two years ago when the governor’s loco youngest daughter went missing, and I tracked her down inside the Pine Barrens. A few other cases also cemented my rep, and the recent ugly business with the so-called “Little Girl Killer” didn’t hurt either. As a result, a parade of sadly desperate characters from all over the metro area, hoping against hope, tried to get through my door at 18 Marshall Street in downtown Paterson, two blocks from the courthouse, right across the street from the county jail.

  I decided that the poor guy in the waiting room had suffered enough. Besides, no one ever got the upper hand with Luca’s Nonna.

  “Send him in.”

  He came through my office door, carrying a little leather briefcase, and unlike most of my other “visitors,” he paid absolutely no attention to the surrounding office walls, covered with framed shots of NFL linebackers (I’d done a bit in the middle in high school) and all the legendary New Jersey singers.

  Whitney, Sinatra, Springsteen, etc.

  This guy was focused. He told me that he’d driven up from Cape May, which is about a two-and-a-half-hour drive, and I asked him why, and he told me.

  “A murder.” Then he corrected himself. “Two murders.”

  I was willing to listen.

  “Have a seat.”

  He sat down, on the other side of my desk, as I unholstered my Python and put it on the desk in front of him. It was my habit to make my clients nervous, to make them fully aware that I was serious, dead and deadly serious, and, of course, there was no more effective means of intimidation than the appearance of a Colt Python, the most accurate handgun in the world, the best all-around handgun in the world, given to me by my uncle when I was twelve years old.

  Created, of course, by the Colts.

  It’s deep royal blue, double-action, hyper-masculine, hyper-affirmative, and just like the old Revolution flag with the coiled snake that said “Don’t Tread on Me,” this particular python said, without equivocation, “Don’t F-Around with Me.”

  Luca Salerno was my best friend, but my Colt Python was my second best friend.

  O’Brien didn’t seem bothered by the gun at all. Maybe it reassured him. He wanted help, and he sat there and stared at me like a supplicant high-school student.

  Are you wondering what the guy looked like?

  Like a smaller Liam Neeson, maybe six foot, certainly not six-six, without the classic Neeson “edge,” wearing a blue-tinted dress shirt, tieless, with a preppy navy sports coat. Maybe fifty-five, nicely preserved, with that casual and unpretentious air of money and distinction.

  It was a longtime habit.

  One that was very helpful in my line of work. It was something that my uncle and I had started doing when I was still a kid, long before I went off to Rutgers to become the only nascent PI in the history of the world who double-majored in philosophy and cinema. So we started using the entire Hollywood “roster,” the wide range of Hollywood stars, to describe our clients, witnesses, snitches, thugs, etc. This one looks a bit like Bob Mitchum. This one looks a bit like the young Maureen O’Hara. This one “wishes” he looks like James Dean. Etc. Since the old man (my uncle) knew his films almost as well as me, we used the entire scope of Hollywood history, from the silents right to the present.

  So this one looked a little bit like Liam Neeson, without the “particular set of skills.”

  That was my job.

  “How can I help?”

  Amazingly, he told me that some guy named Edward Colt, who was apparently some kind of PI down in Cape May, had gotten himself shot to death last night in his own backyard.

  “Are you related?” he wondered.

  “Never heard of him. Are you sure he’s a PI?”

  I thought I knew every private dick in New Jersey. I also thought I knew every “Colt” in New Jersey.

  “I’m sure. I hired him nine days ago to look into a cold case involving my daughter. Now he’s dead, and I’m suspicious that the murders are related.”

  Which seemed feasible. But I was still baffled by this now-dead Colt character.

  “How long was he working in Cape May?”

  “Just a few months. Before that he worked in Pennsylvania. In Harrisburg. With good references.”

  “Tell me about the cold case.”

  It was perfectly obvious that that’s why O’Brien was really here.

  “My daughter was murdered ten years ago. She was seventeen at the time.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “She was out with some friends, vanished for a day, then someone saw her car driving across the beach into the ocean near the Cove Beach jetty. They found her dead in the trunk of the car.”

  I remembered it. Some of it. It got a lot of press.

  Naturally, the water and the trunk made me think of The Killing. That “Who Killed Rosie Larson?” television series that I’d watched when it first aired on AMC.

  I wondered if one inspired the other.

  “She had a twin, right?”

  “Yes, but her sister wasn’t there that night.”

  I was intrigued.

  Definitely.

  Luca said that I “needed” a case.

  “Tell me about yourself.”

  “I’m a judge at the Cape May County Courthouse. Mostly divorce-case arbitration. I’ve lived in Cape May my whole life, and I’m divorced myself, living with my daughter.”

  I liked the guy, so I told him that I’d come down to Cape May and look into it.

  He was relieved, grateful.

  “There’s something else,” he said.

  I waited.

  “Two days ago, Colt came to my house and gave me the key to his office and a copy of his will, which he’d recently drawn up. For some reason, the will left me all of his money and all of his office files.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I was very uneasy about it, and I certainly don’t need the man’s money, but he said that he’d become ‘obsessed’ with my daughter’s cold case and that he wanted it solved, regardless of whatever might happen to him.”

  “Did he think he was in danger?”

  “He didn’t act like it.”

  “How well did you know him?”

  “I hardly knew him at all. We met a couple of times about the case. That was it.”

  “Didn’t he have any family?”

  “His mother died recently. I never heard about anyone else.”

  “So you went along with it?”

  “I did. I tried to discourage him, but he insisted, and I relented. I had no idea that he’d be dead the next day.”

  O’Brien opened his briefcase, pulled out a bunch of files, and put them on my desk.

  “When I heard he was shot last night, I immediately went to his office and got his files. There wasn’t much. He’d only been working the case for nine days. Then I found this.”

  He put a healthy stack of bills on my desk.

  “It was in one of the files. It’s twenty-five thousand dollars.”

  The bills had a yellow Post-it attached, so I picked up the twenty-five thousand and read the note:

  Remittance for Jack Colt.

  I looked back at the judge.

  “He wants you to solve the case,” he said. Then he corrected himself, “Both cases.”

  When O’Brien was gone, I entered my uncle’s dimly lit office and stuffed the cash in the safe. The room was full of books and files and documents, but it was empty, and I sat down on the top of the desk. Tom Colt, who was actu
ally my great-uncle, had been the most important person in my life, raising me after the death of my parents in a car crash thirty-one years ago. In truth, Tom Colt was the best private dick in the metro area, and he’d taught me everything I knew. The only thing he’d never taught me was how to deal with a life without him.

  I’ll have to figure that out on my own.

  I’m not a brooder, and the Colts certainly aren’t sentimentalists, but we’re human, and I miss him a lot. So I shifted focus and thought about Roxs, which he wouldn’t have minded at all. Two short months ago, the “boss” was working away in his office, right here in this room, and Roxs was sitting out in the waiting room at the reception desk. Life, despite all of its natural crap, was good. Very good. But now he was dead and buried in Cedar Lawn Cemetery, and Roxs was back home in California, Hermosa Beach, three thousand miles away, trying to figure me out.

  Good luck with that.

  Last night, just before I left Stone Tower, the old Jesuit asked me, “What’ll she do?”

  Meaning, “When her year of ‘thinking it over’ is over, what do you think she’d decide, ‘yes’ or ‘no’?”

  I told him what I thought.

  “No.”

  Why should she want me? As a matter of fact, why should any woman want any man, period, given our self-absorption and barbaric behavior?

  I stood up and looked at myself in the mirror.

  Tom Colt was never vain like his nephew, but he was always neat and meticulous and professional, and he never left the office without checking himself out.

  I stared at the creep in the mirror.

  He was thirty-two years old, trim, a tough guy, six foot two, and, essentially, in your face. He was wearing one of his two-dozen identical black Armani suits, with one of his three-dozen identical navy button-downs, with one of his four-dozen thin black ties.

  I couldn’t see the color of his eyes, which are dark-dark brown, because, all of the day and all of the night, he wears Lightforce shades from Ray-Ban. The Colts are pretty much immune to the cold and the heat, but they’re “light sensitive.” Whatever that means.

  Even in the dimly shadowed lights of the room, I could see the never-discussed, one-inch “cross” scar in the smack-dab center of his forehead. As for his hair, it was thick, the blackest black, and slicked-and-greased back like a Jersey guido.

  I looked at myself.

  As objectively as I could.

  I looked like some kind of a mob flunky. The scary kind. The one you don’t want to run into in a dark alley. I tried to imagine meeting myself in a dark alley, but it didn’t work. I was too cocky to be spooked by myself.

  Back to the fundamental question: how could a woman, any woman, want a piece of that?

  Especially a fun-loving California volleyball-playing beach girl. (What the hell is volleyball anyway?)

  But it wasn’t just me. How could any woman want any man?

  I thought of that scene in Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night. Gunnar Björnstrand (the greatest actor in film history, by the way, and my own particular favorite) has just fallen into a puddle, so his ex-lover, the lovely Eva Dalbeck, gives him a ridiculous nightshirt and an even more ridiculous night cap (with a tassel no less). Then she leads him over to a mirror to show him how silly he looks, and Björnstrand makes no attempt to duck the issue:

  “How could a woman ever love a man?”

  Good question.

  Then he wonders out loud:

  “Can you tell me that?”

  Dalbeck explains:

  “A woman’s view is seldom based on aesthetics.”

  Exactly.

  Another woman’s voice suddenly squawked out from the speaker on the desk in the next room.

  “Did he leave a retainer?”

  She was busting my balls again.

  “Yeah, twenty-five thousand dollars.”

  I thought that might shut her up.

  “Is that all?”

  6

  Appendix I

  LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF EDWARD J. COLT

  I, Edward J. Colt, a thirty-eight-year-old adult residing at 921 Benton Avenue, Cape May, New Jersey, being of sound mind, declare this to be my Last Will and Testament. I revoke all previous wills and codicils.

  ARTICLE I

  I appoint Richard O’Brien as my Personal Representative to administer this Will, and ask that he be permitted to serve without Court supervision and without posting bond.

  ARTICLE II

  I direct my Personal Representative to pay out of my residuary estate all the expenses of my last illness, funeral expenses, a suitable marker for my grave, administration expenses, all legally enforceable creditor claims, all federal estate taxes, state inheritance taxes, and all other governmental charges imposed by reason of my death.

  ARTICLE III

  I devise, bequeath, and give the entirety of my estate, including my business files and records, to Richard O’Brien.

  ARTICLE IV

  Should the beneficiary not survive me by thirty days, his bequeathment shall be distributed to his surviving daughter.

  Edward J. Colt [signature]

  SELF-PROVING AFFIDAVIT

  This instrument was signed and acknowledged by Testator as his Last Will and Testament in our presence, and we, at his request, and in his presence, and in the presence of each other, have subscribed our names as witnesses. Under penalties for perjury, we, the undersigned Testator and witnesses declare:

  1. That the Testator executed this instrument as his Will;

  2. That in the presence of witnesses, the Testator signed this Will;

  3. That the Testator executed the Will as his free and voluntary act;

  4. That the Testator was of sound mind.

  WITNESS: Lloyd Harrison [signature]

  WITNESS: Julie Lennox [signature]

  7

  Stone Tower

  Wednesday, March 25th

  41°

  Who the hell’s Edward Colt?

  Asked Monsignor John C. Colt, old-school renegade Jesuit, canon lawyer, and the uncle of my great uncle Tom, thus making him my great-great-uncle.

  He wasn’t really mad, he was just baffled.

  He was also a ninety-eight-year-old “hellologist,” who’d written over thirty-five highly regarded theological treatises, including a book on Gehenna that made Dante look like a walk in the park. It was dedicated to me, apparently intended to keep me on the straight and narrow.

  For much of my adult life, he was off at the Vatican, either running the place or raising havoc, depending on which version you believed. Now he was back in New Jersey, blind as a bat, frail, ready to die, and attempting to serve as my moral compass, my Jiminy Cricket. He was, even now, well connected in Paterson, and the mayor and the bishop got him back into his old quarters, the room at the top of the Lambert Tower, sitting on a rise on Garret Mountain overlooking Lambert Castle.

  Yeah, Paterson has a castle.

  (Doesn’t every US city?)

  It was built by Catholina Lambert, the textile baron, back in 1892, and now it’s a historical monument. The high stone tower was built nearby, with a panoramic view of Paterson below, which, of course, the old blind priest could no longer see. Maybe Lambert built the tower so he could see the mobs of union thugs coming up the mountain like the townspeople at the end of Frankenstein.

  (I made that up.)

  Tonight, the little man was standing at the little window of his elevated priestly cell, staring out at nothing.

  Tell me.

  I’ve got no idea. I never heard of him. I thought I knew all the New Jersey Colts.

  Me, too.

  (Beat)

  He got himself shot to death last night in Cape May, so I’m heading down there to check it out.

  You’ll miss the
city.

  Meaning Paterson. It was no secret that I wasn’t much of a traveler.

  Actually, I’m looking forward to it. A bit like Nicholson in The Pledge, when he moves into the small town to try and solve an unsolved murder. I always liked that premise.

  Which means you didn’t like the execution.

  Exactly. I never liked how he used the little girl as bait, and I thought the ending was deus ex machina.

  (Beat)

  You ever see it?

  The last film I saw was Babette’s Feast. A great film.

  A great film.

  Then I gave up filmwatching.

  Why?

  Someone was sick, so I offered it up.

  Who was sick?

  You.

  I’ve never been sick in my life. Not that sick.

  You were back then.

  When was Babette’s? 1988?

  1987.

  I was five back then.

  And burning with a fever.

  [Pause]

  Thanks.

  Don’t mention it.

  8

  Riverfront Park

  Wednesday, March 25th

  38°

  It was a lovely day, much less lonely than the rest.

  But now the day is done, and you’re staring across the dark Susquehanna towards City Island and the distant Blue Mountain. Since it’s the middle of the night, Blue Mountain looks black.

  The park is empty and comforting.

  Its views, as always, are lovely.

  You’ve never felt vulnerable here at Riverfront Park.

  All your vulnerabilities lie within your heart.

  Earlier, you’d spent a wonderful day with little Emily, your sister’s ten-year-old, at Hersheypark. Then Chocolate World. What in the world could be more marvelous, at any age, than something called Chocolate World?