The skin Gods jbakb-2

by Richard Montanari

  Then one day a man walked into the dealership. An extraordinary- looking man: slender, dark-eyed, bearded, brooding. He reminded Seth of a young Stanley Kubrick in his guise and carriage. The man was Ian Whitestone.

  Seth had seen Whitestone's lone low-budget feature film and, although it had been a commercial flop, Seth had known that Whitestone would move on to bigger and better things.

  As it turned out, Ian Whitestone was a huge fan of noir. He knew Lily Trieste's work. Over a few bottles of wine they had discussed the genre. By morning's light, Whitestone hired him as a production assistant.

  Seth knew that a name like Jerzy Andres Kiedrau wouldn't get him too far in show business, so he decided to change it. The last name was easy. He had long considered William Goldman one of the screenwriting gods, had admired his work for many years. And if anyone made the connection, assuming that Seth was in some way related to the writer of Marathon Man, Magic, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, he would not go out of his way to disabuse them of the notion.

  Hollywood, after all, turned on illusion.

  Goldman was easy. The first name was a little harder. He decided to take a biblical name to make the Jewish illusion complete. Although he was about as Jewish as Pat Robertson, the deception didn't hurt. One day, he took out a Bible, closed his eyes, opened it at random, and stabbed a page. He would take the first name he came across. Unfortunately, he didn't really look like a Ruth Goldman. Nor did he favor Methuselah Goldman. His third stab was the winner. Seth. Seth Goldman.

  Seth Goldman would get a table at L'Orangerie.

  In the past five years he had risen quickly at White Light Pictures. He had begun as a production assistant, doing everything from setting up craft service, to shuttling extras, to picking up Ian's dry cleaning. Then he helped Ian develop a script that was to change everything, a supernatural thriller called Dimensions.

  Ian Whitestone's screenplay made the rounds, but because of his less-than-stellar box-office record, everyone turned it down. Then Will Parrish read it. The superstar actor who had made his name in the action genre had been looking for a change. The sensitive role of the blind professor appealed to him, and within a week the film was green-lighted.

  Dimensions became a worldwide sensation, grossing more than six hundred million dollars. It put Ian Whitestone instantly onto the A-list. It turned Seth Goldman from a lowly PA to Ian's executive assistant.

  Not bad for a trailer rat from Glades County.

  Seth flipped through his binder of DVDs. What to watch? He wouldn't be able to see all of the film before they landed, whatever he chose, but whenever he had even a few minutes of downtime, he liked to fill it with a movie.

  He decided on Les Diaboliques, the 1955 film with Simone Signoret; a film about betrayal, murder, and above all secrets-something Seth knew all about.

  For Seth Goldman, the city of Philadelphia was full of secrets. He knew where blood had stained the earth, where the bones were buried. He knew where evil walked.

  Sometimes, he walked with it.

  10

  For all that Vincent Balzano was not, he was a damn good cop. In his ten years as an undercover narcotics officer, he had put together some of the biggest busts in Philadelphia's recent history. Vincent was already an undercover legend due to his chameleon-like ability to move through drug circles on all sides of the table-cop, junkie, dealer, snitch.

  His Rolodex of informants and garden-variety skeeves was as thick as anyone's. Right now, there was one particular skeeve Jessica and Byrne were interested in. She hadn't wanted to call Vincent-their relationship teetered on the wrong word, the casual reference, the misplaced emphasis-and the marriage counselor's office was probably the best place for them to interact at this point.

  Still, there was a case on the wheel, and sometimes you had to overlook personal issues for the job.

  As she waited for her husband to come back to the phone, Jessica thought about where they were in this strange case-no body, no suspect, and no motive. Terry Cahill had run a VICAP search, which yielded nothing similar to the MO of the Psycho tape. The FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program was a nationwide data center designed to collect, collate, and analyze crimes of violence, specifically murder. The closest hits on Cahill's search were videotapes made by street gangs that recorded initiation rites of new recruits making their bones.

  Jessica and Byrne had interviewed Emily Trager and Isaiah Crandall, the two people besides Adam Kaslov who had rented Psycho from The Reel Deal. Neither interview yielded much. Emily Trager was well over seventy and walked with an aluminum walker-a little detail Lenny Puskas had neglected to tell them. Isaiah Crandall was in his late fifties, short, and Chihuahua-jumpy. He worked as a short-order cook at a diner on Frankford Avenue. He nearly fainted when they showed him their badges. He didn't strike either detective as the type with the kind of stomach needed to do what was done on that tape. He certainly wasn't the body type.

  Both had said that they watched the movie, start to finish, and there was nothing out of the ordinary. A call back to the video store revealed that both had returned the film well within the rental period.

  The detectives ran both names through NCIC and PCIC, retrieving nothing. Both were clean. Ditto on Adam Kaslov, Lenny Puskas, and Juliet Rausch.

  Somewhere between the time Isaiah Crandall had returned the film and the time Adam Kaslov took it home, someone had gotten the tape and replaced the famous shower scene with one of their own.

  The detectives did not have a lead-without a body, a lead was not likely to fall into their laps-but they did have a direction. A little digging revealed that The Reel Deal was owned by a man named Eugene Kilbane.

  Eugene Hollis Kilbane, forty-four, was a two-time loser, a petty thief and pornographer, an importer of hard-core books, magazines, films, and videotapes, along with various and sundry adult sex toys and devices. Along with The Reel Deal, Mr. Kilbane owned a second independent video store as well as an adult bookstore and peep show on Thirteenth Street.

  They had paid a visit to his "corporate" headquarters-the back of a warehouse on Erie Avenue. Bars on the windows, shades down, door locked, no answer. Some empire.

  Kilbane's known associates were a Who's Who of Philly scumbags, many of whom plied the drug trade. And in the city of Philadelphia, if you sold drugs, Detective Vincent Balzano knew you.

  Vincent came back to the phone in short order with a location that Kilbane was known to frequent, a Port Richmond dive bar called The White Bull Tavern.

  Before hanging up, Vincent offered Jessica backup. As much as she hated to admit it, and as weird as it might sound to anyone outside law enforcement, an offer of backup was, in its way, kind of sweet.

  She declined the offer, but it went into the reconciliation bank.

  The White Bull Tavern was a stone-front hovel near Richmond and Tioga streets. Byrne and Jessica parked the Taurus and approached the tavern, with Jessica thinking: You know you're entering a tough place when the door is held together with duct tape. A sign on the wall next to the door proclaimed CRABS ALL YEAR!

  I'll bet, Jessica thought.

  Inside they found a cramped, dark bar, dotted with neon beer signs and plastic light fixtures. The air was thick with stale smoke and the high-sweet redolence of cheap whiskey. Beneath that was something reminiscent of the primate reserve at the Philly Zoo.

  As she stepped in and her eyes adjusted to the light, Jessica mind- printed the layout. A small room with a pool table to the left, fifteen- stool bar to the right, a handful of rickety tables in the center. Two men sat on stools, midbar. A man and a woman talked at the far end. Four men played nine-ball. She had learned her first week on the job that the first order of business upon entering a snake pit was to ID the snakes, and plot your exit.

  Jessica immediately made Eugene Kilbane. He stood at the other end of the bar, sipping coffee, talking to a bottle blonde who, a few years ago, and in some other light, might have had a shot at pretty. In here, sh
e was as pale as the cocktail napkins. Kilbane was thin and rawboned. He had dyed black hair and wore a wrinkled gray double-breasted suit, a brassy tie, pinkie rings. Jessica made him based on Vincent's description of his face. She noted that about a quarter of the man's upper lip, on the right side, was missing, replaced by ridged scar tissue. It gave him the appearance of a constant snarl, surely something he didn't have any desire to renounce.

  As Byrne and Jessica made their way to the rear of the bar, the blonde slid off her stool and walked into the back room.

  "My name is Detective Byrne, this is my partner, Detective Balzano," Byrne said, holding up his ID.

  "And I'm Brad Pitt," Kilbane said.

  Due to his partial lip, Brad came out Mrad.

  Byrne ignored the attitude. For the moment. "The reason we're here is that, in the course of an investigation we're working on, we ran across something in one of your establishments we'd like to talk to you about," he said. "You are the owner of The Reel Deal on Aramingo?"

  Kilbane said nothing. He sipped his coffee. Stared straight ahead.

  "Mr. Kilbane?" Jessica said.

  Kilbane turned his gaze to her. "I'm sorry, what did you say your name was again, honey?"

  "Detective Balzano," she said.

  Kilbane leaned a little closer, running his eyes up and down her body. Jessica was glad she wore jeans and not a skirt today. Still, she felt like she needed a shower.

  "I mean your first name," Kilbane said.

  "Detective."

  Kilbane smirked. "Cute."

  "Are you the owner of The Reel Deal?" Byrne asked.

  "Never heard of it," Kilbane said.

  Byrne kept his cool. Barely. "I'm going to ask you one more time. But you should be aware that three is my limit. After three, we move the party to the Roundhouse. And my partner and I like to party well into the evening. In fact, some of our preferred guests have been known to stay in that cozy little room overnight. We like to call it Hotel Homicide."

  Kilbane took a deep breath. There was always a moment with tough guys when they had to weigh the posture against the outcome. "Yeah," he said. "That's one of my businesses."

  "We believe that one of the tapes available at that store might contain evidence of a rather serious crime. We believe that someone may have taken the tape off the shelf within the past week or so and recorded over it."

  Kilbane did not visibly react to this at all. "Yeah? And?"

  "Can you think of anyone who might have done something like that?" Byrne asked.

  "Who, me? I wouldn't know anything about that."

  "Well, we'd appreciate it if you'd give this matter some thought."

  "Is that right?" Kilbane asked. "What could possibly be in it for me?"

  Byrne took a deep breath, exhaled slowly. Jessica could see the muscle working on the side of his jaw. "You would have the gratitude of the Philadelphia Police Department," he said.

  "Not good enough. Have a nice day." Kilbane leaned back, stretched. When he did so, he exposed the two-finger handle of what was probably a game zipper in a sheath on his belt. A game zipper was a razor-sharp knife used for field-dressing game. Seeing as they were nowhere near a hunting preserve, Kilbane was most likely carrying it for other reasons.

  Byrne very deliberately looked down, staring at the weapon. As a two-time loser, Kilbane understood. Mere possession of this item would bust him back on a parole violation.

  "Did you say The Reel Deal?" Kilbane asked. Penitent now. Respectful.

  "That would be correct," Byrne replied.

  Kilbane nodded, looked at the ceiling, feigning profound thought. As if that were possible. "Let me ask around. See if anyone saw anything suspicious," he said. "I have a varied clientele at that location."

  Byrne put both hands up, palms heavenward. "And they say community policing doesn't work." He dropped a card on the bar. "I'll expect a call, one way or another."

  Kilbane didn't touch the card, didn't even look at it.

  The two detectives glanced around the bar. No one was blocking their exit, but they were definitely in everyone's periphery.

  "Today," Byrne added. He stepped to the side, motioned for Jessica to leave ahead of him.

  As Jessica turned to walk away, Kilbane slipped his hand around her waist and roughly pulled her toward him. "Ever been in the movies, baby?"

  Jessica had her Glock holstered on her right hip. Kilbane's hand was now just inches away from her weapon.

  "With a body like yours I could make you a fucking star," he continued, holding her even more tightly, his hand moving ever closer to her weapon.

  Jessica spun out of his grasp, planted her feet, and threw a perfectly aimed, perfectly leveraged left hook to Kilbane's midsection. The punch caught him just in front of his right kidney, landing with a loud splat that seemed to echo throughout the bar. Jessica stepped back, fists up, more out of instinct than any battle plan. But this little skirmish was over. When you train at Frazier's Gym, you know how to go to the body. The one punch took Kilbane's legs.

  And, it appeared, his breakfast.

  As he doubled over, a rope of foamy yellow bile spurted from beneath his destroyed upper lip, just missing Jessica. Thank God.

  After the blow, the two thugs sitting at the bar went on high alert, all puff and chest and bluster, fingers twitchy. Byrne held up a hand that fairly shouted two things. One, Don't fucking move. Two, Don't fucking move an inch.

  The room went jungle-nervous as Eugene Kilbane tried to find his wind. He took a knee on the filthy floor instead. Dropped by a 130- pound girl. For a guy like Kilbane, it probably didn't get much worse than that. Body shot, no less.

  Jessica and Byrne edged toward the door, slowly, fingers on the snaps of their holsters. Byrne speared a cautionary forefinger at the miscreants around the pool table.

  "I warned him, right?" Jessica asked Byrne, still backing up, talking out of the side of her mouth.

  "Yes, you did, Detective."

  "It felt like he was going for my weapon."

  "Clearly, a very bad idea."

  "I had to hit him, right?

  "No question about that."

  "He's probably not going to call us now, is he?"

  "Well, no," Byrne said. "I don't think he is." OUT ON THE street, they stood by the car for a minute or so, just to make sure that none of Kilbane's crew were going to take this thing any farther. As expected, they did not. Jessica and Byrne had both encountered a thousand men like Eugene Kilbane in their time on the job- small-time hustlers with little fiefdoms, staffed with men who feed off the carrion left by real players.

  Jessica's hand throbbed. She hoped she hadn't injured it. Uncle Vit- torio would kill her if he found out she was punching people for free.

  As they got in the car and headed back to Center City, Byrne's cell phone rang. He answered, listened, closed it, said: "Audio Visual has something for us."

  11

  The audio visual unit of the Philadelphia Police Department was located in the basement of the Roundhouse. When the crime lab had moved to its bright new facilities on Eighth and Poplar, the AV Unit was one of the few sections that remained behind. The unit's main function was to provide audiovisual support services to all the other agencies in the city-supplying cameras, TVs, VCRs, photographic equipment. They also provided news composites, which meant they monitored and taped the news 24/7; if the commissioner or chief or any of the brass needed something, they had instant access.

  Most of the unit's work in support of the detective divisions was in the area of analyzing surveillance video, although the occasional audio- tape of a threatening phone call came along to spice things up. Video surveillance tapes were, as a rule, recorded with a time-lapse technology that allowed twenty-four hours or more of imagery to fit on a single T-120 VHS cassette. When these tapes were played back on a normal VCR, the movements were so fast that they could not be analyzed. Hence, a time-lapse VCR was needed to view the tape in what would be real time.


  The unit was busy enough to keep six officers and one sergeant hopping every day. And the king of surveillance video analysis was Officer Mateo Fuentes. Mateo was in his early thirties-slender, fashion- conscious, impeccably groomed-a nine-year veteran of the force who lived, ate, and breathed video. You asked him about his personal life at your peril.

  They assembled in the small editing bay near the control room. Above the monitors was a yellowing printout.

  YOU VIDEOTAPE IT, YOU EDIT IT.

  "Welcome to Cinema Macabre, detectives," Mateo said.

  "What's playing?" Byrne asked.

  Mateo held up a digital photograph of the Psycho videotape housing. Specifically, the side that held a short strip of silver-colored tape.

  "Well, first off, this is old security tape," Mateo said.

  "Okay. What does this breakthrough substantiation impart to us?" Byrne asked with a wink and a smile. Mateo Fuentes was well known for his prim and business-like manner, along with his Jack Webb delivery. It masked a frisky side, but you had to get to know him.

  "I'm glad you proffered this interrogative," Mateo said, playing along. He pointed to the silver band on the side of the tape. "This is an old- school loss-prevention tag. Maybe early-nineties vintage. The newer versions are a lot more sensitive, a lot more effective."

  "I'm afraid I don't know the first thing about this," Byrne said.

  "Well, I'm no expert, either, but I'll tell you what I know," Mateo said. "The system, as a whole, is called EAS, or Electronic Article Surveillance. There are two main types: the hard tag and the soft tag. The hard tags are those bulky, plastic tags they put on leather jackets, Armani sweaters, Zegna dress shirts, et cetera. All the good stuff. That kind of tag has to be taken off with a device once you pay for the item. Soft tags, on the other hand, have to be desensitized by swiping them over a pad or with a handheld scanner that tells the tag, essentially, it's okay to leave the store."