Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense (78 page)

Here we go,
Jessica thought. Was he coming on to her? In the middle of all this? She shot a glance at Cahill. He was clearly fighting a smile. “Excuse me?”

“Ava Gardner,” Butler said. “A
young
Ava Gardner. Maybe around the time of
East Side, West Side.
”

“Uh, no,” Jessica said, brushing the bangs from her forehead. Was she primping?
Stop it.
“But thanks for the compliment. We’ll be in touch.”

Ava Gardner, she thought, walking to the elevators.
Please.

O
N THE WAY
back to the Roundhouse, they swung by Adam Kaslov’s apartment. Jessica rang the buzzer and knocked. No answer. She called his two places of employment. No one had seen him in the past thirty-six hours. These facts, added to the others, were probably enough to get a warrant. They couldn’t use his juvenile record, but maybe they wouldn’t need it. She dropped Cahill off at the Barnes & Noble on Rittenhouse Square. He said he wanted further peruse books on crime cinema, buying whatever he thought might be relevant. Nice to have Uncle Sam’s credit card, Jessica thought.

When Jessica returned to the Roundhouse, she wrote up a request for a search warrant and faxed it to the DA’s office. She didn’t expect much, but it never hurt to ask. As to phone messages, there was only one. It was from Faith Chandler. It was marked
URGENT
.

Jessica dialed the number, got the woman’s answering machine. She tried a second time, this time leaving a message, including her cell phone number.

She hung up the phone, wondering.

Urgent.

41

I
WALK THE
bustling street, blocking the next scene, body-to-body in this sea of cold strangers. Joe Buck in
Midnight Cowboy.
Extras greet me. Some smile, some look away. Most will never remember me. When the final draft is written, there will be reaction shots, and throwaway dialogue:

He was there?

I was there that day!

I think I saw him!

CUT TO:

A coffee shop, one of the cookie-cutter chains on Walnut Street, just around the corner from Rittenhouse Square. Coffee-cult figures hover over alternative weeklies.

“What can I get for ya?”

She is no more than nineteen, with fair skin, a thin intriguing face, frizzy hair pulled back into a ponytail.

“Tall latte,” I say. Ben Johnson in
The Last Picture Show.
“And I’ll have one of them there biscottis.” Them there? I almost laugh. I don’t, of course. I’ve never broken character and I’m not going to start now. “I’m new to this city,” I add. “I haven’t seen a friendly face in weeks.”

She makes my coffee, bags the biscotti, caps my cup, taps the touch screen. “Where are you from?”

“West Texas,” I say with a broad smile. “El Paso. Big Bend country.”

“Wow,” she replies, as if I had told her I was from Neptune. “You’re a long way from home.”

“Aren’t we all?” I hand her a five.

She stops, frozen for a moment, as if I have said something profound. I step out onto Walnut Street, feeling tall and fit. Gary Cooper in
The Fountainhead.
Tall is a method, like weakness.

I finish my latte, breeze into a men’s clothing store. I fashion up, vogue briefly near the door, gather my suitors. One of them steps forward.

“Hi,” the salesman says. He is thirty. His hair is cropped short. He is suited and booted, wearing a wrinkled gray T-shirt beneath a navy-blue three-button number at least one size too small. This seems to be a fashion statement of some sort.

“Hello,” I say. I wink at him and he colors slightly.

“What can I show you today?”

Your blood on my Bokhara?
I think, channeling Patrick Bateman. I give him my toothy Christian Bale. “Just looking.”

“Well, I’m here to offer assistance, and I hope you’ll allow me the privilege of doing so. My name is Trinian.”

Of course it is.

I think of those great St. Trinian’s British comedies from the 1950s and ’60s, and consider making a reference. I notice he has a bright orange Skechers watch on his wrist, and realize that I would be wasting my breath.

Instead, I frown—bored and beleaguered by my excessive wealth and station. He is even more interested now. In this setting, abuse and intrigue are lovers.

Twenty minutes later it hits me. Perhaps I have known it all along. It really is all about the skin. Skin is where you stop, and the world starts. Everything you are—your mind, your personality, your soul—is contained and constrained by your skin. In here, in my skin, I am God.

I slip into my car. I have just a few hours to get into character.

I’m thinking Gene Hackman in
Extreme Measures.

Or maybe even Gregory Peck in
The Boys from Brazil.

42

M
ATEO
F
UENTES FREEZE
-
FRAMED
the image at the point in the
Fatal Attraction
tape when the gun was fired. He toggled back, forward, back, forward. He ran the tape in slow motion, each field rolling top-to-bottom on the frame. On the screen, a hand came up on the right side of the frame and stopped. The shooter wore a surgical glove, but it wasn’t his hand they were interested in, although they had already narrowed down the make and model of the pistol. The Firearms Unit was still working on it.

The star of the movie, at this point, was the jacket. It looked like a satin jacket, the type of jacket that baseball teams or roadies at rock concerts wear—dark, shiny, and with a ribbed band at the wrist.

Mateo printed off a hard copy of the image. It was impossible to tell what color the jacket was—black or navy blue. This jibed with Little Jake’s recollection of a man in a dark blue jacket inquiring about the
Los Angeles Times.
It wasn’t much. There had to be thousands of jackets like that in Philly. Still, they would have a composite suspect sketch that afternoon.

Eric Chavez entered the room, extremely animated, a computer printout in hand. “We’ve got a location on where the
Fatal Attraction
tape is from.”

“Where?”

“It’s a dump called Flickz on Frankford,” Chavez said. “Independent store. Guess who owns it.”

Jessica and Palladino said the name at the same time.

“Eugene Kilbane.”

“One and the same.”

“Son of a bitch.” Jessica found herself subconsciously clenching her fists.

Jessica filled Buchanan in on their interview with Kilbane, leaving out the part about the assault and battery. If they brought Kilbane in, he was sure to bring it up anyway.

“You like him for this?” Buchanan asked.

“No,” Jessica said. “But what are the chances that this is coincidence? He knows something.”

Everyone looked at Buchanan with the anticipation of pit bulls circling the fight ring.

Buchanan said: “Bring him in.”

“I
DIDN’T WANT
to get involved,” Kilbane said.

For the moment, Eugene Kilbane was sitting at one of the desks in the duty room of the Homicide Unit. If they didn’t like any of his answers, he would soon be moving to one of the interrogation rooms.

Chavez and Palladino had found him at The White Bull Tavern.

“Did you think we wouldn’t be able to trace the tape back to you?” Jessica asked.

Kilbane looked at the tape, which was on the desk in front of him in a clear evidence bag. It appeared as if he thought scraping the label off the side might have been enough to fool seven thousand cops. Not to mention the FBI.

“Come on. You know my record,” he said. “Shit has a way of sticking to me.”

Jessica and Palladino looked at each other as if to say:
Don’t give us this kind of opening, Eugene. The fucking jokes will start writing themselves and we’ll be here all day.
They restrained themselves. For the moment.

“Two tapes, both of them containing evidence in murder investigations, both rented at stores you own,” Jessica said.

“I know,” Kilbane said. “It looks bad.”

“Gee, ya think?”

“I … I don’t know what to say.”

“How did the tape get here?” Jessica asked.

“I have no idea,” Kilbane said.

Palladino held up the artist’s sketch of the man who’d hired the bicycle messenger to deliver the tape. It was an extraordinarily good likeness of one Eugene Kilbane.

Kilbane hung his head for a few moments, then looked around the room, meeting the eyes of everyone there. “Do I need a lawyer here?”

“You tell
us,
” Palladino said. “You got something to hide, Eugene?”

“Man,” he said. “You try to do the right thing, see what it gets you.”

“Why did you send the tape to us?”

“Hey,” he said. “I got a conscience, you know.”

This time, Palladino held up Kilbane’s rap sheet, turned it to Kilbane’s face. “Since when?” he asked.

“Since always. I was raised a Catholic.”

“This from a pornographer,” Jessica said. They all knew why Kilbane had come forward, and it had nothing to do with conscience. He had violated his parole by having an illegal weapon on him the day before, and he was trying to buy them off. With one phone call he could be back in prison tonight. “Spare us the homily.”

“Yeah, okay. I’m in the adult entertainment business. So what? It’s legal. Where’s the harm?”

Jessica didn’t know where to start. She started anyway. “Let’s see. AIDS? Chlamydia? Gonorrhea? Syphilis? Herpes? HIV? Ruined lives? Destroyed families? Drugs? Violence? Let me know when you want me stop.”

Kilbane just stared, a little overwhelmed. Jessica stared him down. She wanted to go on, but what was the point? She wasn’t in the mood, and it wasn’t the time or the place to debate the sociological ramifications of pornography with someone like Eugene Kilbane. There were two dead people to think about.

Bested before he even began, Kilbane reached into his briefcase, a tattered faux-alligator attaché. He pulled out another tape. “You’ll change your tune when you see this.”

T
HEY SAT IN
a small room in the AV Unit. Kilbane’s second tape was surveillance footage from Flickz, the store where the
Fatal Attraction
tape had been rented. Apparently, the security cameras were real at that location.

“Why are the cameras active at this store and not at The Reel Deal?” Jessica asked.

Kilbane looked dope-slapped. “Who told you
that
?”

Jessica didn’t want to get Lenny Puskas or Juliet Rausch, the two employees at The Reel Deal, in any trouble. “Nobody, Eugene. We checked it out ourselves. You really think it’s a big secret? Those camera heads at The Reel Deal are from, what, the late seventies? They look like shoe boxes.”

Kilbane sighed. “I got more of a theft problem at Flickz, okay? Fucking kids rob you blind.”

“What exactly is on this tape?” Jessica asked.

“I maybe got a lead for you.”

“A lead?”

Kilbane looked around the room. “Yeah, you know. A
lead.
”

“Watch much
CSI,
Eugene?”

“Some. Why?”

“No reason. So what is this lead?”

Kilbane put his hands out to his sides, palms up. He smiled, destroying whatever was remotely likable about his face, and said: “That’s entertainment.”

A
FEW MINUTES
later, Jessica, Terry Cahill, and Eric Chavez crowded around the editing bay in the AV Unit. Cahill had returned from his bookstore project empty-handed. Kilbane sat in the chair next to Mateo Fuentes. Mateo looked disgusted. He cocked his body at about a forty-five-degree angle away from Kilbane, as if the man smelled like a compost heap. In fact, he smelled like Vidalia onions and Aqua Velva. Jessica had the feeling that Mateo was ready to spray Kilbane with Lysol if he touched anything.

Jessica studied Kilbane’s body language. Kilbane seemed both nervous and excited.
Nervous
the detectives could understand.
Excited,
not so much. Something was up here.

Mateo hit the
PLAY
button on the surveillance tape VCR. Immediately the image rolled to life on the monitor. It was a high-angle shot of a long, narrow video store, similar in layout to The Reel Deal. Five or six people milled about.

“This is from yesterday,” Kilbane said. There was no date or time code readout on the tape.

“What time?” Cahill asked.

“I don’t know,” Kilbane said. “Sometime after eight. We change the tapes around eight and we’re open until midnight at that location.”

A small corner of the front window of the store revealed that it was dark outside. If it became important, they’d check the sunset stats from the day before to pin down a more precise time.

On the tape, a pair of black teenaged girls cruised the racks of new releases, keenly observed by a pair of black teenaged boys who acted out, playing the fools, trying to get their attention. The boys failed miserably and, after a minute or two, skulked off.

At the bottom of the frame, a serious-looking older man with a white goatee and black Kangol cap read every word on the back of a pair of tapes in the documentary section. He moved his lips as he read. The man soon left, and for a few minutes there were no customers visible.

Then a new figure walked into the frame from the left side, into the middle section of the store. He approached the center rack that held older VHS releases.

“There he is,” Kilbane said.

“There
who
is?” Cahill asked.

“You’ll see. That rack goes from
f
to
h,
” Kilbane said.

On the tape, it was impossible to gauge the man’s height from such a high angle. He was taller than the top rack, which probably put him over five nine or so, but beyond that he looked exceedingly average in all ways. He stood still, back to the camera, perusing the rack. So far, there had been no profile shot, no glimpse of his face, just a vantage from behind as he entered the frame. He wore a dark bomber jacket, dark ball cap, and dark trousers. Over his right shoulder was a slim leather shoulder bag.