New Jersey Noir--Cape May

by William Baer

  “I know about you and Deborah Rockingham.”

  There was apprehensive silence.

  “Everything,” I assured him.

  There was more silence, so I waited. Sometimes, I can be pretty good at waiting.

  “Does Rikki have to know?”

  40

  Stone Tower

  Sunday, March 29th

  44°

  Any progress?

  Still working on it.

  The old Jesuit seemed pleased.

  You don’t need to check up on me, Jack.

  He was probably right. He might have both feet in the grave, but he was also indestructible. Even though he looked like he hadn’t eaten in a year.

  Like a cadaver.

  You’re the only Colt left.

  Except for you.

  Actually, there were lots of multifarious Colts roaming around out there, but only two of us remained from our particular branch of the tree.

  He remembered something.

  What about Edward Colt?

  His real name was William Kelly.

  Then why’d he call himself a Colt?

  I don’t know. But let’s face it, if you’ve got to be somebody, why not be a Colt?

  Yeah, why not?

  There was a momentary pause.

  Who’s the girl?

  What girl?

  The one in the Beach Haven cottage.

  How do you know about Beach Haven?

  I know about all kinds of stuff. I’ve been around for ninety-eight years.

  How did you know about her?

  He smiled.

  I refuse to answer on the grounds that I might incriminate myself.

  I smiled. In spite of myself.

  Did you ever consider the fact that you might know too much? Too much about everything? That it might be clogging up your brain?

  Yes, but it hasn’t killed me yet. Stop ducking the question. Who’s the girl?

  The sister of the dead girl.

  The twin?

  Yes.

  Did she kill her sister?

  No.

  Are you sure?

  Yes.

  He thought it over. In the same way that he might have evaluated a theological fine point regarding Liguori vis-à-vis Aquinas.

  Has she fallen for you yet?

  I think so.

  Have you fallen for her yet?

  I think so.

  I qualified.

  As much as possible under the circumstances.

  He looked at me like I was an idiot.

  You’re an idiot.

  I had no counterargument.

  Yes.

  You need to straighten out your life.

  Yes.

  Yes, yes, yes.

  He was frustrated, a condition rare in his previous ninety-eight years.

  I’m getting tired of praying for you.

  I said nothing.

  It’s wearing me out.

  41

  Appendix III

  Perquisition:

  I’m doomed to try and describe the indescribable.

  Billy had vanished off the face of the earth.

  Probably thinking, I’m sure, that he was the primary suspect for the murder that I’d committed.

  With all my daughterly wiles, I’d managed to manipulate my manipulatable mother into moving to North Jersey.

  “Why, honey?”

  “It’s too sad here.”

  Meaning Nikki’s death.

  “Why Wayne?”

  “Because it’s where Aunt Helen used to live, and I always loved it there.”

  The good news is that nurses can get a job pretty much anywhere, and my mom was already tired of her situation in Cape May.

  “All right.”

  So we found a little brick in Pompton Lakes, not far from Wayne.

  So I could search for Billy.

  Relentlessly, I talked to his friends, his teachers, his neighbors, and, several times, to his Aunt Rosaline.

  “I honestly don’t know, sweetheart. I really don’t.”

  She was a lovely woman, but I didn’t believe her. Despite her “honestly.” Except for me, she was all that Billy had left in this life. After all, she’d been his surrogate mother since he’d been abandoned at birth.

  “Please.”

  “I’m sorry, dear.”

  So I dove back into the web, googling every word and every name, first and last, in the English language that might lead me back to my Billy.

  For over two years.

  Then it happened.

  “Sehorn.”

  One afternoon when his aunt was out of the house, I snuck into Billy’s room. I’d been there many times before, and a few times I’d even slept in his bed. I already knew everything in the room by heart, but that day, as I lay back in his bed and looked at the far wall, I stared, once again, at what he stared at every night before he went to bed: a collage of photos and posters related to the New York Giants, his favorite football team, something I’d become a bit of an expert about.

  And there, in the midst of Tittle and Huff and Simms and Carson and all the rest of them, was a photo of Jason Sehorn’s pick-six in the 2001 NFC Divisional Playoff against the Philadelphia Eagles.

  I suddenly realized that, for some reason, I’d never tried the cornerback before.

  That night I initiated an intensive “Sehorn” search, and I eventually found a suspicious one in Canada, at McGill University.

  His name was Casey Sehorn. He had a negligible web trail, and he was majoring in Billy’s favorite subject: criminal justice. At the time, I was enrolled, pre-law, at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, but the next day, I flew to Canada.

  The day after that I “bumped” into Billy on campus, on the lower lawn, and he was very happy to see me. We immediately started hanging around together, and, eventually, we talked about Nikki’s death. I was very supportive. Billy wondered if it might have been her old boyfriend, Tommy Garrison, and I encouraged the idea.

  I took it slow, and I won him over.

  It was wonderful.

  In time, he fell in love with the one who loved him more than he could have ever imagined.

  We married in Halifax, the most spectacular day of my life, in the history of the world, and we honeymooned on beautiful Prince Edward Island.

  I’d never made love before, and it was everything that I’d been dreaming about for the past nine years.

  Eventually, we moved back to New Jersey, into my mom’s brick house in Pompton Lakes. My relationship with my mother was always good, always supportive, especially after my father died when I was five years old, especially since she had gargantuan guilts about spending so much time at the hospital working long shifts when I was younger.

  As anticipated, she thought Billy was the greatest, and he thought the same of her. I enrolled at Rutgers Law in Newark, Billy (Casey) got a big-shot job at Ellis Security, and our lives were perfect.

  Then it happened again.

  It happened again.

  Billy vanished off the face of the earth.

  Without a word.

  Without a note.

  Without a text.

  I cried, I searched, I cried some more. The police, of course, were perfectly useless, and all kinds of foul and creepy theories infected my disordered mind, mostly relating to Cape May.

  For example, what if Tommy Garrison had tracked Billy down, thinking that Billy had killed Nikki, and killed my Billy.

  That kind of thing.

  Eventually, somehow, I learned to live with his absence because I never really believed that I wouldn’t find him again. A few months later, my mother thought it would be a good idea for both of us to “get aw
ay for a bit,” visiting relatives in Washington state. But I didn’t want to leave New Jersey, not with Billy out there somewhere, so she went by herself. On the third day in Tacoma, I got a call from her cousin, Ellen, who told me that my mom had had a fatal heart attack.

  It seemed inexplicable.

  I was crushed into nothingness and perfectly inconsolable. Somehow, I boarded the plane, arriving in time for the funeral and the burial, but I remember very little of those numbed-out days on the West Coast.

  Once again, I entered a familiar state of suspended animation.

  Back home in New Jersey, I was completely overwhelmed with loss and loneliness. Eventually, to keep myself from going insane, I started looking for Billy again.

  Searching.

  Maybe I could find him a second time.

  It took me two long years, but I finally found him in the Gap.

  His credit cards were long since blank, as was any kind of web presence, or anything else. But, this time, he didn’t change his name, and I found a “C. Sehorn,” living off Old Mine Road, who’d purchased a used Chevy Malibu from a used car lot in Blairstown, New Jersey.

  Why had he left me?

  I had no idea.

  Why had he left without a word?

  I knocked on the front door of his little house.

  When you knock on a door, you never know what’s going to happen next.

  Sometimes, you don’t get what you expect.

  When the door opened, I found myself looking into the face of my dead mother, looking, until she realized it was me, quite happy. Quite content. Looking rather pretty, I’d have to admit, for someone who was my mother, who was fifty-two years old.

  Nothing was said.

  Despite the pain, despite the discombobulation in my screwed-up mind, I somehow knew, almost instantly, that my husband Billy had run off with my own mother, who’d used her relatives to stage her death.

  I fell down, collapsing to the ground, remembering little afterwards.

  Somehow I ended up back in Pompton Lakes. I was reading the online obituaries for North and Central Jersey. Then I found what I was looking for in Somerville. A dead cop. His name, oddly enough, sounded familiar. Sergeant Bruno Vitelli. I remembered that Ronnie Miller had an uncle named Vitelli who was a cop.

  Perfect.

  I bought a cheap red wig, went to the reception at the Vitelli house, snuck into the main bedroom, and found the dead guy’s service revolver.

  The next day, I knocked on the front door again.

  My mother opened the door, and I shot her in the face. It felt good. Earlier, on my drive to the Gap, I wondered if I would kill Billy too. I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t have to decide. He wasn’t home.

  I got my mom in the trunk of my car, drove down to the Delaware, waited until evening, tied on the weights I’d purchased at Home Depot, and dumped my mother over a cliff into the waters below.

  She sank much quicker than I’d expected.

  Then I went back home and tried to decide about Billy.

  The next day, I went back, intending to give him another chance, fully intending to kill him if he didn’t take it. But the house was smoldering, burned to the ground.

  Once again, Billy had vanished off the face of the earth.

  42

  Beach Haven

  Sunday, March 29th

  38°

  It was time to tell her what I knew.

  At least, what I thought I knew.

  At least, most of it.

  We were sitting on the Beach Haven couch in the dimly lit living room. It was three minutes before midnight, and she was wearing ridiculously baggy black sweats, which she’d obviously taken from the bureau in my bedroom.

  She smelled like mango and tangerine.

  I tried not to be distracted.

  “Rita first saw Billy Kelly when she was ten years old, up in North Jersey, and she fell instantly in love with him. Yes, instantly. I know that ten year olds aren’t supposed to fall into that kind of love, so I’ll let you call it whatever you want. She was totally obsessed from afar, cyberstalking Billy, and she told no one how she felt, not even her mother.

  “Ten years ago, when she was finally ready to act on her five obsessive years of meticulous planning, she took a bus to Baltimore, sat through a Johns Hopkins student tour, and somehow, somewhere on campus, encountered Billy, probably inviting him to visit her in Cape May.

  “When he arrived, bringing along his friend Sonny, he took one look at Nikki on the promenade and decided, suddenly, that he wanted nothing else in life. I have to admit, I’ve wondered a good bit about what might have happened if you’d been there. How would he have reacted with the two of you there?

  “It’s a foolish and wasteful speculation.

  “On the other hand, it’s not too hard to imagine Rita’s reaction. Take your pick: shock, outrage, exasperation, jealousy, hatred. All of the above. The very next night she incapacitated your sister, put her into the trunk of your Mustang, and drove it into the ocean. But it didn’t help because Billy Kelly was gone. Most likely believing that he was the main suspect, which he was, he never returned to his home in Packanack Lake. In Wayne, New Jersey. Undeterred, Rita somehow convinced her mother to move to North Jersey so she could search for the one she loved.

  “Eventually, she tracked him down. I have no idea how she did it. He was using the name Casey Sehorn, and he was studying at McGill University in Montreal. Rita immediately went to Canada, matriculated at McGill, found him on campus, and, within a year, they were married. The next year, they moved back to New Jersey, into her mother’s house in Pompton Lakes. Maybe they were happy for a while. I have no idea. Then Billy left her, and her mother faked her death, and they ran off to the Delaware Water Gap together.

  “The son-in-law and his mother-in-law.”

  Saying it out loud didn’t make it any less crazy.

  Rikki was stunned.

  How could she not be stunned?

  “They were lovers?”

  “Yes.”

  I waited a moment, then continued:

  “When Rita found out about the betrayal, she stole the Beretta after the funeral reception in Somerville, and, I assume, shot and killed her mother. I say ‘assume’ since the body’s never been found. Once again, Billy hit the road and vanished, trying to hide himself under a second alias in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, before coming to Cape May.”

  “To solve Nikki’s murder?”

  “I think so. I think he was now convinced that Rita had killed both Nikki and her own mother, and he wanted to close the case, exonerate himself, and put Rita in jail.”

  As Rikki was thinking things over, it seemed a good time to qualify everything.

  “At least, that’s what I think happened.”

  “Then Rita tracked down Billy one more time and killed him?”

  “Yes. I think she probably confronted him, and when he rejected her, she killed him with the same Beretta. Then she discovered that he’d had a girlfriend in Harrisburg, and I think she drove to Pennsylvania and killed her with the same weapon. The one she put in Nikki’s desk drawer. We’ll know for sure soon, once we get the ballistics from Harrisburg. Her name was Ginger Addison.”

  The name didn’t register with Rikki.

  “Now Rita’s after me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Probably because you had three diner dates with Edward.”

  She shook her head in disbelief.

  “I’m the one who told her about it.”

  I was surprised, but not astonished.

  “At the courthouse?”

  “Yes. I thought it was just ‘girl talk.’ She said she’d read about the murder of someone named Edward Colt, and I told her that I knew him a bit and that I even went out with him a couple of ti
mes. She seemed very sympathetic.”

  “Psychos often do.”

  “It’s hard to believe, Jack.”

  “Murder often is.”

  She thought it over.

  “I’ve alerted Dawson,” I explained. “I have a feeling that she’s gone totally off the rails.”

  “Why?”

  “She’s getting sloppy, which isn’t at all like Rita. I think she doesn’t care anymore.”

  “Suicidal?”

  “Maybe.”

  My cell vibrated:

  Your father’s next, Rikki. Meet me at Antonio’s tomorrow night at 10:30. You can bring Colt.

  Speak of the devil.

  43

  Antonio’s

  Monday, March 30th

  38°

  Luca decided to come down “just for the hell of it.” His decapped-heads case was, as expected, going nowhere, so he took the day off and drove down from Paterson.

  To help out.

  He was sitting in the opposite corner of the mostly empty restaurant, sitting across a red-and-white tablecloth from a young Cape May cop, both of them dressed in casuals, finishing their entrees.

  Dawson was also in the room, sitting by himself, always alert, sipping an after-dinner dark beer.

  I was back in the far back corner, facing the front door, just like Wild Bill should have been sitting on the night Jack McCall shot him in the back in Deadwood. Across from me, dressed like Rikki in a dark “bob” wig, was another Cape May cop, young Jennie Ryerson who seemed quite excited, even delighted, to be the bait, the undercover decoy.

  Maybe Deadwood was a cue to the universe. My cell vibrated, and it was Roxs’s daily text. Then I took a quick look at her text from a month ago, when she’d finished her cross-country tour, getting as far away from me as her little red Neon would take her:

  Back home in Hermosa, Colt, roasting on the beach in my yellow bathing suit.

  “Anything important?” Ryerson wondered.

  I shrugged.

  “Nah.”

  I put my cell away.