The Extortionist

by Vincent Zandri

  Miller and I find ourselves standing at the end of Billy’s bed with zero to show for our efforts.

  “Let me ask you something, Jobz,” he says. “When you were a kid, where did you hang out at home?”

  “Not in my bedroom,” I say.

  “And why’s that?”

  “Because the only thing separating my parent’s bedroom from mine was a wall barely six inches thick.” Shaking my head. “Christ, they probably had the room bugged as it was. It was the late seventies and early eighties. Drugs were pretty prevalent, and my folks were always worried I’d get into something I shouldn’t, so they’d snoop around my junk. They never thought I knew about it, but I knew about it all right.”

  “Exactly,” he says. “Kid’s bedrooms aren’t always so private, nor should they be. So where d'you manage to find a private hideaway?”

  “I had a room down in the corner of the basement. It was a mess down there, so my folks stayed out of my hair when I was hanging there. They were just happy to know where I was. Plus, there were all sorts of places you could hide the Penthouses and Playboys if you were inventive enough. I used to store them up on top of the metal ductwork. They never had a clue.”

  Miller nods. “As for me,” he says, “I built a secret fort in the woods behind my house with some leftover plywood. That’s where my buddies and I would drink six packs and smoke cigarettes. We’d build bonfires and lots of kids would come around. That was before I went to ‘Nam in seventy-three. The woods are gone now. It’s turned into a cute little subdivision called Fox Run.”

  “I’m trying to picture you as a child, Miller. I always assumed you were born exactly the way you are now, trench coat and all.”

  “You’re a regular Rodney Dangerfield today, Jobz,” he says. “Now, let’s head down to the basement, see what secrets Billy might have hidden there.”

  ***

  When we pass by Nick Anthos’s bedroom, he’s sitting on the end of the bed, his head buried in his hands. He still hasn’t gotten himself dressed yet, as though he’s entirely incapable of any movement at present. We head into the train wreck of a kitchen and locate the door leading to the basement. Miller opens it, switches on the light. His smartphone in hand, we descend the wood staircase into the basement depths.

  It’s cool, and the smell is a combination must and body odor. Someone made an attempt at converting the empty space into extra rooms at one point, but then gave up part way through. More specifically, it looks like a couple of spare bedrooms have been constructed out of old, unfinished particle board and leftover paneling from the upstairs family room. The floor is partially covered in more of that puke orange carpet. I’m assuming it’s what’s responsible for the body odor/foot fungus stench.

  Miller opens the cheap, hollow-core wood door on the first room. It has a bed in it. But the bed is covered with all sorts of boxes and useless junk. In fact, every bit of floor space is covered with boxes. He snaps a couple of pictures, then closes the door.

  He goes to the second door, opens that one. It’s more of the same. A room filled with boxes and discarded crap. Only difference is, this time there’s no bed. He takes a few more pics and closes the second door.

  “Let’s go around the bedrooms,” he says.

  Reaching into his trench coat with his free hand, he pulls out the mini Maglite, flicks it on. We carefully make our way around the rooms while Miller illuminates the back portion of the basement. To our left is the water heater and an old furnace that looks like it should have been replaced back in the 1990s. The space is getting darker the further we proceed; the round white Maglite reveals bare concrete floors and walls. When Miller shines the light up at the bare floor joists, he illuminates thick spider webs. A couple black spiders are annoyed at the light and scurry for shelter inside the thick webs. They make my skin crawl. When he shines the light on the floor again, I make out a long centipede that quickly slithers its way back into the darkness. It’s almost like we’ve entered hell.

  The air is getting cooler and staler. This no longer feels like a basement, but an old prison or a dungeon instead. My gut grows tight, the hairs on the back of my neck stand upright. Miller redirects the Maglite to the partitions on our right.

  “Looks like these walls extend all the way to back of the basement,” he says.

  Then, handing me the Maglite, he snap a few more pictures with his smartphone.

  “Something about these walls,” he adds, while I continue to shine the light on them. The bedrooms didn’t look large enough to extend the full length of the basement.”

  “You think there’s a room behind the two bedrooms?” I ask.

  “Exactly what I’m thinking,” he says. “You know, a secret room, Jobz.”

  He starts knocking on the wall exteriors. The sound is dull and muffled from the batt insulation contained within. He works his way down the length of the partition, knocking on them every step of the way. When the sound goes from muffled to hollow, he stops.

  “Shine the light on this portion of partition,” he says, snapping another couple of photos. “There’s definitely a space in back of this panel.”

  The partition I’m spraying with Maglite is constructed from more of that old family room paneling.

  “But I’m not seeing a door,” I say.

  He goes from knocking to pounding on the paneling. That’s when something strange happens. The paneling trembles.

  “Jesus,” I say, “the entire panel extension is one big door.”

  “Must be hanging on hinges installed on the inside. But it’s locked.”

  “With what?” I ask.

  “Shine the light all the way down,” he insists.

  I do as he says.

  “There, Jobz,” he says. “On the floor.”

  In the circle of white light, is a door hasp and latch that’s padlocked.

  “Jobz,” Miller says, “we’ve found ourselves our secret room.”

  “How do we gain entry into said secret room, Miller?” I say. “Last I looked we don’t have a key.”

  “The old-fashioned way,” he says.

  Raising his leg, he kicks the panel in.

  ***

  Her face gazes back at me beneath the white Maglite spotlight. It startles me enough that I instinctively take a step back.

  “Anita Simon,” I say.

  The poster is life-size and takes up much of the wall directly opposite me.

  “Jesus, will you look at this,” Miller says, looking over both shoulders. “It’s a goddamn shrine.”

  He reaches overhead, pulls on a string that triggers the bare lightbulb over his head. The place comes alive in an eerie purple, iridescent glow. All four walls, including the one that doubles as a false door, are covered with photos of Loudonville Elementary School principal, Anita Simon. Pictures either printed off a computer, or somehow professionally printed, or clipped from local newspapers and school yearbooks.

  Set in the middle of the floor is a chair and a small table. A laptop is set up on the table. The screensaver on the laptop is a pretty picture of Anita. She’s wearing a red, V-neck sweater. Her hair is shoulder-length and parted on the left side. It rests gently on her shoulders. Her chin is set contemplatively in her right hand while her eyes gaze at the camera through a pair of round tortoise shell eyeglasses.

  Reaching into his back pocket, Miller pulls out a hanky. He closes the laptop lid, and pulls the plug from the wall, wraps it up and sets it down on the desk beside the computer.

  “This computer should provide a wealth of information,” he says. “We’ll take it with us and deliver it directly to the computer forensics lab techies.”

  Returning the hanky to his pocket, he aims his smartphone at the walls, and proceeds with recording not stills of the place, but a digital video. He speaks the date, time, and location aloud so the smartphone picks it up. When he’s done, he returns the phone to his pocket. I’m also looking over the room when I see something strange with Anita’s poster. There
’s a small area where the paper seems to go concave, almost like there’s a hollow space behind it.

  I make my way beyond the small table and past Miller to the far wall.

  Using an extended index finger, I start to poke at Anita’s poster. The wall behind it is solid and constructed of paneling nailed to what I’m guessing are two-by-four studs. I keep poking at the image until my finger pokes the small concave area. My finger goes right through the fragile paper poster. I tear the portion of poster away, revealing an empty space carved out of the wall. Reaching into the space, I touch a cold, solid metal object.

  Pulse elevates, and my heart jumps into my throat.

  “Miller,” I say with a dry mouth, “give me your hanky.”

  He steps toward me, hands me his hanky. I wrap it around my hand, then retrieve the knife that stabbed Anita Simon to death.

  “Jesus,” I say, “he didn’t even bother to clean the blood off of it.”

  Miller nods, inhales and exhales. The knife is a common eight-inch French knife. Something you might use to carve a turkey or a chicken. There’s blood on the blade and the wood grip.

  “He wanted to preserve her blood,” he says, “so that he could revisit it again and again.”

  I hand him the knife and he wraps it entirely in the handkerchief. He then places it on top of the laptop computer. He stares at the damning evidence for maybe a full minute, until he whispers, “Jackpot.”

  I clear my throat.

  “You think Billy’s parents had any clue about this room, Miller?” I ask.

  “If they did, they didn’t seem to mind it.”

  “How could they not mind it? The boy was obsessed and psychotic.”

  “You’d be surprised the extent some parents will go to ignore the obvious problems in their children.”

  “Everyone wants to be normal,” I say. “Or appear that way, anyhow.”

  Miller nods while his eyes remain glued to walls covered with Anita Simon.

  “I went to high school with a guy, let’s call him Jack, who was a straight-A student,” he says after a beat. “Catholic, great kid, do anything for anyone type of guy. He goes on to an Ivy League college, then marries a beautiful blonde who comes from a prominent family. Big wedding at the country club. He enters into law in Manhattan, and before long, he’s a Junior Partner at a mega uptown firm. He must be bringing in half a mil a year back in the early nineties when half a mil meant something. He and the blonde start pumping out the kids, Catholic style, one after the other. The kids grow, and he makes partner. That five-hundred K now turns into one point five mil per year. Nice spread in Westchester, a condo in Palm Beach, and they’re looking at property in Tuscany. Everybody’s jealous of them.”

  “Even you, Miller?” It’s a question for which I know the answer.

  For the first time since we entered the room, he glances at me, cracks a hint of a smile.

  “Yeah,” he says, “Even me. Anyway, as his oldest son enters his teens, Jack notices something quirky about the kid. I mean, he seems normal on the outside, anyway. Dresses just like the parents in Izod, pressed khakis, and expensive loafers with no socks. But there’s something wrong. Jack just can’t put his finger on it, but he knows in his gut something’s wrong. He calls me, starts asking me all sorts of questions. It seems pets have gone missing in the neighborhood, and he found one of them, a cat, beheaded in one of his half a dozen garages. The cat had begun to stink the joint up while it decomposed. Whoever put it there, never thought to realize the thing is made of meat and bones, and that shit stinks to high heaven when it decomposes.”

  “Jesus,” I say.

  “It gets worse. My friend finds a couple of dogs and a few more cats. Same deal. All of them are decapitated. When I ask him if his boy could be responsible, Jack nervously laughs it off, telling me he’s convinced a neighbor has been breaking in somehow and placing them there. But here’s what I’m thinking. Jack knows in his gut his oldest son is responsible, yet he does nothing about it. He never calls me again. When I call him, all I get is the runaround from his secretary or his answering service.”

  The old detective shifts his gaze from the pictures of Anita to the floor, like what he’s about to tell me breaks his heart, almost as much as the house we’re standing in breaks mine.

  “So, what happened?” I say.

  “A few more years go by,” he says. “I’m checking the little local Westchester rag almost on a daily basis and I can see that more pets are going missing. Until they don’t anymore. Something else has started going missing in their place.”

  “People,” I say, swallowing something bitter and dry.

  “Children,” he says. “Young girls.”

  “Sweet Jesus,” I utter, feeling my stomach tighten.

  “I watch this shit unfold from a distance until my gut nags me so bad I start losing sleep. One morning, I give the Westchester County Chief of Police a call, and I explain everything I’m telling you right now, Jobz. Later that day, the cops show up at Jack’s mansion with a warrant. They bring in the backhoes, and they start digging up a plot of woods behind the in-ground swimming pool. The first body they discovered was of a little girl barely five years old who’d gone missing six years earlier.”

  “Six years,” I say.

  “Turns out, Jack’s seemingly perfect son started abducting and murdering his fellow human beings at the ripe old age of fifteen. They found six more bodies in that patch of woods, and my friend’s son is presently doing three consecutive life sentences at Green Haven Max. The family lost their estate, the Palm Beach condo, their money, their credit, their jobs, and their sanity. His wife lives in a sanitarium near Pearl River, New Jersey, the other siblings have scattered across the country, a few of them have taken up aliases.”

  “And your friend?”

  “Last I heard, he’s working the cash register at Trader Joes not far from the Meadowlands.”

  “That shit’s not gonna happen to my family,” comes a gruff voice.

  I turn quick. It’s Nick Anthos.

  He’s pointing a shotgun at us.

  Pointblank.

  “Take it easy, Nick,” Miller says in a professional, nonthreatening voice. “We’re all on the same team here.”

  He cocks the shotgun, and the unmistakable sound of a shell entering the chamber fills the small windowless room.

  “You’re not my friends,” he says. “You’re here to lock my little boy away for good. He’s all I got left.”

  “It’s quite possible your boy did a real bad thing, Nick,” I say. “Listen, if in the end, it’s proven in a court of law he didn’t murder Anita Simon, then you’ll have him back forever.”

  Nick’s face turns so red it might explode like an overly ripe melon. He shoulders the shotgun and triggers a round. Miller and I duck at the last millisecond, otherwise, we’d no longer have faces.

  “Just take it easy!” Miller repeats.

  “I missed on purpose,” Nick says. “The next one blows you both in half at the waist.”

  If only I had my gun on me. Maybe Miller could somehow distract him, and I could quick draw on him. I guess that’s just wishful thinking. But then, Miller has his gun.

  “Whadda we do, Miller?” I say under my breath.

  “Just try not to piss him off any more than he already is.”

  “Get up,” Nick demands. “Get the fuck up now.”

  He cocks another round into the chamber. The empty shell casing flies out, bounces off the cold, hard concrete floor.

  “Nick,” Miller says, his hands raised over his head like mine. “You’re not doing Billy any favors by doing this.”

  Nick smiles then, baring brown, rotting teeth.

  “If the courts decide to put my boy away for life,” he says, “he’ll be awfully glad I blew away the cops who arrested him.”

  “Tell me something, Nick,” I say, “did you know about this room? Did Kyle?”

  His smile melts from his face, he stares into my eye
s.

  “My son has a right to his privacy. This was his special place. And don’t you mention the name Kyle. It just makes me want to kill you all the more.”

  “Were you aware of Kyle’s extortion racket at the Loudonville School, and other places too? Did you know she was impersonating her dead mother?”

  Nick shifts his aim to Miller’s head.

  “What did I just tell you about mentioning the name Kyle in my presence?” he says. “You got a death wish or something? Kyle left us a long time ago. I don’t know anything about what she’s doing now. She did a real job on me and her only son. So, don’t talk about her, or I’ll have to kill you.”

  “It’s not me you want to kill,” Miller says.

  “What’s that mean?” Nick says.

  “It’s him,” Miller says. “The little guy.”

  I feel my stomach drop to somewhere around my ankles.

  “What the hell you doing, Miller?”

  The old detective stares at me with his steely gray eyes. Eyes that can cut holes in you. Clint Eastwood, Dirty Harry eyes.

  “You see, Nick,” Miller says in his cold, stoic voice, “It was Jobz here who started poking his nose in this whole thing in the first place. If not for him snooping around the Loudonville School and interviewing Principal Simon, your boy Billy would be home safe and sound in his bed.”

  My mouth goes dry, my temples pound, brain lights on fire. I can only hope Miller knows what the hell he’s doing. Nick shifts his aim back to me. He takes a step forward, the shotgun barrel coming ever closer to my face.

  “Do it, Nick,” Miller says. “Send Jobz back to hell. Won’t that make you feel better?”

  Nick is so close, I can make out the beads of sweat building on his forehead. I can see the gray/black hairs that cover his round red face. I can see the big black pores. He’s smiling like he’s enjoying every bit of this—like he can see my blood, brains, and bone matter spattered all over the Principal Simon-covered wall even before it happens.