Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense (72 page)

I’ll get back to you.

Jessica thought about how, when Stephanie made that cheerful greeting, she’d had no idea what was coming her way.

Jessica put everything back where she had found it, padded back down the hallway, stepped into the bathroom, flushed the toilet, ran the water in the sink for a few moments. She descended the stairs.

“… all her friends,” Faith said.

“Can you think of anyone who might have wanted to hurt Stephanie?” Byrne asked. “Someone who may have had a grudge against her?”

Faith just shook her head. “She didn’t have enemies. She was a good person.”

Jessica met Byrne’s eyes again. Faith was hiding something, but now was not the moment to press her. Jessica nodded slightly. They would take a run at her later.

“Again, we’re terribly sorry for your loss,” Byrne said.

Faith Chandler fixed them in a blank stare. “Why … why would someone do something like this?”

There were no answers. None that would suffice, or even begin to salve this woman’s grief. “I’m afraid we can’t answer that,” Jessica said. “But I can promise you that we’ll do everything we can to find who did this to your daughter.”

Like her offer of condolences, this seemed to ring hollow in Jessica’s mind. She hoped it sounded sincere to the grief-stricken woman sitting in the chair by the window.

T
HEY STOOD ON
the corner. They looked in two directions, but were of one mind. “I’ve got to get back and brief the boss,” Jessica finally said.

Byrne nodded. “I’m officially off for the next forty-eight, you know.”

Jessica heard the sadness in that statement. “I know.”

“Ike is going to tell you to keep me out of the loop.”

“I know.”

“Call me if you hear anything.”

Jessica knew she couldn’t do that. “Okay.”

25

F
AITH
C
HANDLER SAT
on her dead daughter’s bed. Where had she been when Stephanie had smoothed the bedspread for the last time, creasing it beneath the pillow in her precise and dutiful way? What had she been doing when Stephanie had placed her menagerie of plush animals in a perfect row against the headboard?

She had been at work, as always, dogging the end of another shift, her daughter a constant, a given, an absolute.

Can you think of anyone who might have wanted hurt Stephanie?

She had known the moment she opened the door. The pretty young woman and the tall, confident-looking man in the dark suit. They had a look about them that said they did this often. Brought heartache to the door like carryout.

It was the young woman who told her. She had known it would be. Woman-to-woman. Eye-to-eye. It was the young woman who had cut her in two.

Faith Chandler glanced at the corkboard on her daughter’s bedroom wall. Clear plastic pushpins prismed rainbows in the sun. Business cards, travel brochures, newspaper clippings. It was the calendar that hurt the most. Birthdays in blue. Anniversaries in red. Future past.

She had thought about slamming the door in their faces. Maybe that would have kept the pain from entering. Maybe that would have kept the heartache out there with the people in the papers, the people on the news, the people in the movies.

Police learned today that …

This just in …

An arrest has been made …

Always in the background as she made dinner. Always someone else. Flashing lights, white-sheeted gurneys, grim-faced spokesmen. Over at six thirty.

Oh, Stephie love.

She drained her glass, the whiskey in search of the sorrow within. She picked up the phone, waited.

They wanted her to come down to the morgue and identify the body. Would she know her own daughter in death? Wasn’t it
life
that made her Stephanie?

Outside, the summer sun dazzled the sky. The flowers would never be brighter or more fragrant; the children, never happier. All the time in the world for hopscotch and grape drink and rubber pools.

She slipped the photograph out of the frame on the dresser, turned it over in her hands, the two girls in it forever frozen at life’s threshold. What had been a secret all these years now demanded to be free.

She replaced the phone. She poured another drink.

There would be time, she thought. God willing.

There would be time.

26

P
HIL
K
ESSLER LOOKED
like a skeleton. In all the time Byrne had known him, Kessler had been a hard drinker, a two-fisted glutton, at least twenty-five pounds overweight. Now his hands and face were gaunt and pallid, his body a brittle husk.

Despite the flowers and bright get-well cards scattered around the man’s hospital room, despite the brisk activity of the crisply clad staff, a team dedicated to preserving and prolonging life, the room smelled like sadness.

While a nurse took Kessler’s blood pressure, Byrne thought about Victoria. He didn’t know if this was the beginning of something real, if he and Victoria would ever be intimate again, but waking up in her apartment made him feel as if something had been reborn within him, as if something long dormant had poked through the soil of his heart.

It felt good.

Victoria had made him breakfast that morning. She had scrambled two eggs, made him rye toast, and served it to him in bed. She had put a carnation on his tray and a lipstick kiss on his folded napkin. Just the presence of that flower and that kiss told Byrne how much was missing from his life. Victoria had kissed him at the door and told him that she had a group meeting with the runaways she counseled later that evening. She said the group would be over by eight o’clock and that she would meet him at the Silk City Diner on Spring Garden at eight fifteen. She said she had a good feeling. Byrne shared it. She believed they would find Julian Matisse this night.

Now, sitting in a hospital room next to Phil Kessler, the good feeling was gone. Byrne and Kessler had gotten whatever pleasantries they had available to them out of the way, and had fallen into an uncomfortable silence. Both men knew why Byrne was there.

Byrne decided to get it over with. For any number of reasons he did not want to be in the same room with this man.

“Why, Phil?”

Kessler thought about his answer. Byrne didn’t know if the long lag time between question and answer was pain medication or conscience.

“Because it’s the right thing to do, Kevin.”

“Right thing for who?”

“Right thing for me.”

“But what about Jimmy? He can’t even defend himself.”

This seemed to reach Kessler. He may not have been much of a cop in his day, but he understood the process of due process. Every man had the right to face his accuser.

“The day we took Matisse down. You remember it?” Kessler asked.

Like yesterday,
Byrne thought. There were so many cops on Jefferson Street that day, it looked like an FOP convention.

“I went into that building knowing that what I was doing was wrong,” Kessler said. “I’ve lived with it ever since. Now I can’t live with it anymore. I’m sure as hell not going to die with it.”

“You’re saying that Jimmy planted the evidence?”

Kessler nodded. “It was his idea.”

“I don’t fucking believe it.”

“Why? You think Jimmy Purify was some kind of saint?”

“Jimmy was a great cop, Phil. Jimmy was stand-up. He wouldn’t do it.”

Kessler stared at him for a few moments, his eyes seeming to focus on a middle distance. He reached for his water glass, struggling to get the plastic cup off the tray and up to his mouth. Byrne’s heart went out to the man at that moment. But he didn’t help. After a while, Kessler got the cup back onto the tray.

“Where did you get the gloves, Phil?”

Nothing. Kessler just stared at him with those cold, light-fading eyes. “How many years you got left, Kevin?”

“What?”

“Time,” he said. “How much time you got?”

“I have no idea.” Byrne knew where this was going. He let it play.

“No, you don’t. But I do, see? I got a month. Less, probably. I ain’t gonna see the first leaf fall this year. No snow. I ain’t gonna see the Phillies fuck up in the play-offs. By the time Labor Day rolls around I’m gonna be dealing with it.”

“Dealing with it?”

“My life,” Kessler said. “Defending my life.”

Byrne got up. This was going nowhere, and even if it was, he couldn’t bring himself to badger the man any longer. The bottom line was that Byrne could not believe it of Jimmy. Jimmy had been like his brother. He had never known a man to be more in tune with the right and wrong of a situation than Jimmy Purify. Jimmy was the cop who went back the next day and paid for the hoagies they got on the cuff. Jimmy Purify paid his fucking
parking
tickets.

“I was there, Kevin. I’m sorry. I know Jimmy was your partner. But this is the way it went down. I ain’t saying Matisse didn’t do it, but the way we got him was wrong.”

“You know Matisse is on the street, right?”

Kessler didn’t respond. He closed his eyes for a few moments. Byrne wasn’t sure if he had fallen asleep or not. Soon he opened his eyes. They were wet with tears. “We didn’t do right by that girl, Kevin.”

“What girl? Gracie?”

Kessler shook his head. “No.” He held up a thin, bony hand, offering it up like evidence. “My penance,” he said. “How are
you
going to pay?”

Kessler turned his head, looked out the window again. The sunlight revealed the skull beneath the skin. Beneath that, the soul of a dying man.

As Byrne stood in the doorway he knew, the way he had known so many things over the years, that there was something else to this, something other than a man’s reparation in the last moments of his life. Phil Kessler was hiding something.

We didn’t do right by that girl.

B
YRNE TOOK HIS
hunch to the next level. On the promise of discretion, he called an old friend in the homicide division of the DA’s office. He had trained Linda Kelly, and since that time she had risen steadily through the ranks. Discretion was certainly in her purview.

Linda ran Phil Kessler’s financials, and one red flag flew high. Two weeks ago—the day Julian Matisse was released from prison—Kessler had made a ten-thousand-dollar deposit in a new account in an out-of-state bank.

27

T
HE BAR IS
straight out of
Fat City,
a North Philly dive with a broken air conditioner, a grimy tin ceiling, and a graveyard of dead plants in the window. It reeks of disinfectant and old pork fat. There are two of us at the bar, four more scattered at tables. The jukebox plays Waylon Jennings.

I glance at the guy on my right. He is one of those Blake Edwards drunks, an extra in
Days of Wine and Roses.
He looks like he could use another. I get the guy’s attention.

“How’s it going?” I ask.

It doesn’t take long for him to summarize. “Been better.”

“Who hasn’t?” I reply. I point to his nearly empty glass. “One more?”

He looks at me a little more closely, perhaps searching for motive. He’ll never find it. His eyes are glassy, veined with drink and fatigue. There is something beneath the exhaustion, though. Something that speaks of fear. “Why not?”

I motion to the bartender, swirl my finger over our empties. The bartender pours, grabs my check, retreats to the register.

“Tough day?” I ask.

He nods. “Tough day.”

“Like the great George Bernard Shaw once said: ‘Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.’ ”

“I’ll drink to that,” he says on the tail of a sad smile.

“There was a movie once,” I say. “I think it was with Ray Milland.” Of course, I
know
it was with Ray Milland. “He played an alcoholic.”

The guy nods.
“Lost Weekend.”

“That’s the one. There’s one scene where he talks about the effect that alcohol has on him. It’s a classic. An ode to the bottle.” I stand straighter, square my shoulders. I do my best Don Birnam, quoting from the movie: “It tosses the sandbags overboard so the balloon can soar. Suddenly I’m above the ordinary. I’m competent. I’m walking a tightrope over Niagara Falls. I’m one of the great ones.’ ” I put my glass back down. “Or something like that.”

The guy stares at me for a few moments, trying to focus his eyes. “That’s pretty fucking good, man,” he finally says. “You’ve got a great memory.”

He is slurring his words.

I hoist my glass. “Better days.”

“Couldn’t be worse than this one.”

Of course it could.

He downs his shot, drains his beer. I follow suit. He begins to fish around in his pocket for his keys.

“One more for the road?” I ask.

“No thanks,” he says. “I’m good.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah,” he says. “I gotta get up early tomorrow.” He slides off his stool, heads for the rear of the bar. “Thanks anyway.”

I drop a twenty on the bar, glance around. Four dead drunks at the rickety tables. Myopic barkeep. We don’t exist. We are background. I’m wearing a Flyers cap and tinted shades. Twenty extra foam pounds around my waist.

I follow him to the back door. We step into the wet kiln of the late afternoon, emerging into the small parking lot behind the bar. There are three cars.

“Hey, thanks for the drink,” he says.

“You are more than welcome,” I reply. “You okay to drive?”

He holds up a single key attached to a leather fob. A door key. “Walking home.”

“Smart man.” We are standing behind my car. I open the trunk. It is lined with clear plastic. He glances inside.

“Wow, that is one clean car you’ve got,” he says.

“I have to keep it spotless for work.”

He nods. “What do you do?”

“I’m an actor.”

It takes a moment for the absurdity to register. He scans my face again. Soon recognition dawns. “We’ve met before, haven’t we?” he asks.

“Yes.”

He waits for me to say more. I do not offer more. The moment drags out. He shrugs. “Well, okay, good seeing you again. I’m gonna get going.”