by J. A. Kerley
“Jeremy Ridgecliff was adamant that he saved Charles’s life.”
“How?”
I frowned, as if sifting through hazy memories. “Jeremy Ridgecliff’s father was falling into pure madness. Harsher abuse, more frequent. The father had initiated the physical abuse when Jeremy Ridgecliff turned ten, like the kid reached some sort of point where the old man’s anger turned physical.”
“I’m not getting it.”
“A few days before his tenth birthday, a friend gave Charles a hamster as a gift. The kid hid it under his bed. On the night of the kid’s birthday, Mama and kids are in their usual tense state, no one knowing what Daddy’s gonna do. The cake is presented, Daddy gets a big-ass grin on his face, and runs off. He reappears with the hamster in his hand.”
Waltz shook his head. “Oh Lord.”
“Daddy screams, ‘I told you, no filthy animals in the house.’ He winds up like a major-league pitcher and fires the hamster into the wall. It falls to the floor, still alive, squeaking and twitching, blood coming from every opening. Hamsters scream …Ridgecliff told me that.”
Waltz could only shake his head in horror.
I said, “Daddy goes full berserk, smooshes Charles’s head into the cake. Mama disappears into her room to sew, like she always did. A week later, Ridgecliff kills his father.”
Waltz studied my eyes. “You never told me any of that.”
“Uh, I just remembered it, Shelly. But it’s what Jeremy Ridgecliff’s always told himself: He killed the father to save the brother.”
Shelly offered an enigmatic smile.
“Wonder what the brother thinks?”
I shrugged, spun away quick, an odd tingle rising up my spine. I left Shelly to his work, hoping Jeremy had received my message.
TWENTY-SEVEN
It was late afternoon and the streets were filling with people heading home from work. I was walking quickly, dodging bodies, when my phone rang. I pulled it out, jumped into the recessed storefront of an electronics store to keep from being trampled. Cameras, binoculars, flashlights, cellphones, and every kind of MP3 player filled the window at my back.
“Hey, Carson, Tom Mason.”
“Hey, Tom, great to hear from you again. What’s happening?”
“I got a call from Rick Saunders up in Pickens County, State Police. He said some guy’s been calling around about the Ridgecliff case. Pickens County is where the family was living when the kid killed his old man. The family rented a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere.”
My home, a million years ago. Fear rose to my throat like a lump of iron. A crowd of Oriental tourists walked to the window, pointing at the glittering electronic booty. I turned away and cupped the phone to my ear as Tom continued.
“The caller was that Waltz fellow. He was real interested in the family. I take it there was a younger kid, Ridgecliff’s brother, who seems to have fallen off the face of the earth.”
“Probably just Shelly checking loose ends, making sure Ridgecliff hasn’t holed up with relatives.”
“Doesn’t sound like there are any, ’cept this one kid. Guess he’d be in his mid-thirties or so.”
“I imagine he put a lot of gone between him and the family, Tom. I would.”
“Can’t blame him. Anyway, what I was gonna tell you, since things are a bit slow down here, knock wood –” I heard Tom rap his desk – “if you need Harry to take some more time and check out the Ridgecliff history a bit, don’t hesitate to ask. You can pass that on to Waltz as well.”
“Got it, Tom, though I expect it was just another shot in the dark.”
“Stay safe, see you soon.”
When I closed the phone, I couldn’t walk and leaned against the store for support. I must have been breathing, but I couldn’t feel any air in my lungs.
Shelly Waltz was digging in my past.
Jeremy Ridgecliff’s pre-paid cellphone rang. He set aside the newspaper and pulled the phone from his pocket. Folger was supine in a box, bound with tape, a pillow beneath her head, eyes wide, watching. Her mouth was stuffed with a washcloth, the cloth secured with bands of tape. The box was hand-painted with the legend, Antiques: Handle With Extreme Care. This Side Up. An arrow denoted the Up side.
Jeremy brought the phone to his mouth, leaned over the box. He frowned at Folger and switched to a nasal Yankee voice, an older homosexual man, what they used to call a queen.
“Mr Matapang? Of course I’ll give him a reference. Honesto is a darling man, rents our cabin in Vail every year. We do an exchange with him now and then, he stays in our cottage on the Vineyard, we use his, get this …villa in Manila. He collects parrots …No, not real ones, cloisonné parrots, ruby eyes, that sort of thing, stunningly pricey and just to die for. He’s absolutely a sumptuous find.”
He hung up, set the phone on the table, waited. It rang.
This time he answered with his new voice and identity, a gay Filipino male in his forties. According to the newspaper, Senhor Caldiera had been discovered. Carson, no doubt. Snitch.
“ …Yes? Wonderful Mr Dammler. I can’t wait to get settled in. You have my money order? Splendid. Could you leave the key at your office? I’ll send a driver by to pick it up. I’ll be in residence in an hour or so, just have to –” he shot a wink at Folger – “pack a few things and call the movers.”
He hung up and studied his eyes, darkened by eye-liner, and adjusted the wig, silver-blonde, short haired, the hair layered. His new alias was Honesto Matapang, an excruciatingly gay and wealthy Filipino. He’d rubbed mascara into the creases around his mouth, eyes, and neck, then rubbed most away, accentuating his wrinkles, aging himself by years. Two sweat shirts beneath his silk tunic added twenty pounds. When outside, he stuffed tissue between his gums and cheeks to pooch them outward. From tinted hair to slipper-like shoes, he resembled a badly aging roué, a Nero-in-progress.
He hung up and winked his aged eyes at Folger. “Isn’t it wonderful, Miss Alice? There’s a whole network of fruity professionals just waiting to help us find new digs.” He cackled wickedly. “I was getting so tired of being a cauldron.”
Jeremy reached down and folded a length of tape over Folger’s eyes, pressing it down into her skin. He studied her bound body for a quiet minute, then picked up a hammer.
I sat on a bench in a green space beside a bank. If Waltz discovered the truth, I’d have to be ready to deal with it. It would be an exceptionally dangerous moment.
A tall and imperious woman walked by, breaking my concentration. She clicked on heels as slender as ice picks. When she was a dozen feet past, I smelled her perfume, delicate and strong in equal measure.
The potency of the scent reminded me of a thought I’d tucked away a few days earlier, less a thought than what Harry called a “flag moment”, when a conversation or event raised a tiny flag in the mind. Most were coincidence or misreading a person’s words or actions, and checking every tiny flag would be futile. It was when flags started to cluster that they became worth a look. I’d seen several since my arrival, a bouquet of poppy-red pennants.
Fifteen minutes later I was at Macy’s fragrance counter, looking among the dozens of perfumes out for sampling …there, the small crystal bottle that Shelly had sniffed the day I bought the briefcase.
The salesperson, a sixtyish woman with white corkscrewing hair, sidled over with nose lifted, as if spying a skunk in the lily patch.
“Can I help you?”
“This fragrance, is it common?”
“None of our fragrances are common, sir.”
“I mean, do you sell a lot of it?”
“It’s quite expensive, and rather individual. A very subtle blend.”
“Can I take that as meaning you don’t sell a lot of it?”
She thought a moment, scarlet nail tapping the mole.
“You may.”
I thanked la grande dame and left the store, unable to stop sniffing my wrist. As the scent faded, my memory of it grew stronger, a strange phenomenon. I pulled
my cell from my pocket, punched the number.
“This is Harry Nautilus, please leave a message at the …”
When the phone beeped its need for a message, mine was brief, and carried a furtive prayer beneath the words.
“Harry, it’s Carson with a huge favor to ask, bro. If it pans out, it just might save me from something real bad. Here’s what I need you to do, and at the speed of light, if possible …”
I returned to the hotel. I’d turned off my cell to give my head some space. The hotel phone blinked that a single message was waiting. I heard Waltz’s voice, neutral in tone.
“Hello, Detective Ryder. Listen, you’ve never been to my home – an omission on my part. Can you stop by this evening at nine? I’d like to talk about something.”
A tornadic wind was blowing toward my house of matchsticks. I set my cellphone on the table and prayed that Harry would call with the news that the pennants in my head were flying in a countering wind.
TWENTY-EIGHT
I jumped from the cab into a hard-blown rain, pulled my hat low and sprinted to a trim blue house on a broad Brooklyn avenue of other trim houses. Shelly had the door open as I leapt up the steps.
“Come in, Detective. Welcome.”
“Anything on Alice?” I asked.
He shook his head no. I looked to a dining-room table stacked with papers.
He saw my glance. “I’ve been looking through files your partner sent. As well as some others. It’s the only use I’ve found for the dining-room table, since I eat at the kitchen counter by the TV. The joys of bachelorhood.”
“Were you ever married, Shelly?”
A pause. “Once it seemed possible, but in hindsight it was never an option.”
Waltz went to grab himself a drink. I hadn’t known what to expect from his digs, thinking either neat as the proverbial pin, or as disheveled as a frat house. It turned out to be both: open and orderly rooms with dark carpet and a peach hue to the walls, solid furniture, a long shelf of books in the living room where I stood. The other side of the equation held in a small room to the side, centered by a table bearing stacks of books, magazines, a small fan that looked ready for repair, a shirt still in the wrapper, a box of candy, a handful of neckties, and so forth. The corners of the room were nests of items: spinning rods with red and white floats on the line, a vacuum cleaner, old shoes, a tennis racquet.
The home felt like Shelly Waltz. There was general order, but with a section of items awaiting categorization or some form of decision. An overstuffed chair, well worn, owned one corner of the room, and I pictured Shelly ruminating over the items from the chair, tented fingertips tapping pursed lips, sad eyes scanning the disorder in hope of a solution.
The light in the house was a low, warm yellow. Thunder shivered the windows as Waltz returned with his beer, nodded me to sit on the couch. He sat opposite in an armchair. On the low table between us was a manila folder, pages peeking from the edges.
“Pegging Jeremy Ridgecliff as a Portuguese businessman was a damn interesting piece of intuition, Detective.”
“It was just a hunch, but it felt right.”
“You play a lot of hunches, I take it.”
“They seem to work a fair amount of the time.”
He paused, as if gathering thoughts into a bundle. “Have you put any thought into contacts Ridgecliff might have in the area?”
“We’d all pretty much eliminated that line, I thought.”
“The Ridgecliff family never came up north, you said. Or if they did, it wasn’t long enough to leave traces.”
“True.”
“Not leaving traces,” Waltz said. “Isn’t that interesting?”
I smiled politely and nodded. But Waltz wasn’t done with the subject.
“Though it’s useless to us, there’s Ridgecliff’s bit with the hair, obliterating traces. And while he was on his spree years ago, he managed to obliterate all traces of himself, at least until viewed in hindsight after his capture. Perhaps obliterating traces is a Ridgecliff trait.”
“Umm, I suspect so, Shelly. Guess you hit a dead end.”
He crossed his legs, opened the file, set it on his knee. His finger tapped the pages. “I’m not sure. Ridgecliff has a brother. His name is Charles. They grew up together.”
“Sure. We’ve all seen the files. Charles disappeared.”
Waltz flipped open the file. “Charles went to college for two years in Mobile, edge-of-expulsion grades. A party boy, I’ll bet. Then Jeremy Ridgecliff gets nailed. Shortly after that, bang: Charles Ridgecliff disappears, leaving an empty bed and a lot of rumors. A guy who bunked with him for a while heard the guy ran off to a commune in Oregon. Others heard Charley-boy got wanderlust, headed to sea on a freighter. You studied at University of Alabama, right? Psychology? What year you start?”
My palms dampened. I pretended to stifle a yawn, told Waltz the year.
He nodded. “The year Charles turned to vapor.”
I feigned confusion. “Am I missing something here, Shelly?”
Waltz shifted pages in the folder. I tried to catch a glance of what he was looking at, but he held the edges high.
“There’s no ID photo of Charles in the college files. There should be, but back then hackers could dive right into databases, rearranging info, adding, deleting. But in checking with the university, I discovered Charles had been a member of the swimming club. I had a club photo sent up, a fax of a copy. It’s murky, but have a look.”
Waltz passed the photo over. I was in the back row of the twenty or so swimmers standing at the edge of the pool. I hadn’t changed much.
“You’re Charles Ridgecliff,” Waltz said.
I handed the photo back. It was shaking. “I’m Carson Ryder.”
“Let me re-phrase, Detective: I believe that for the first twenty-one years of your life your name was Charles Ridgecliff. What is it preachers like to say …Can I get an Amen on that?”
I closed my eyes. “It’s not like you think. It’s –”
Waltz’s voice turned to a whisper. “Are you here to fuck up the case, sabotage it? Did you pass the information to the Watcher?”
“No to the first question.”
“And the second one?”
I held Waltz’s eyes. “Yes.”
Waltz slammed the file to the floor, pages scattering like white leaves. He stood, shoulders forward, hands clenched into fists, his eyes like jets of flame.
“Get the hell out of my house.”
“I’m trying to bring Jeremy in, Shelly.”
He stormed to the door, opened it. “You hid the fact that the perp we’re after – a man who’s killed three women in a week – is your goddamn brother! Then you tipped him off that we were on to his disguise.”
“I also told you what the disguise was.”
“Because you’re probably as sick as your brother and get off on pulling our chains. Get out of my house. Expect a visit from the NYPD tonight. You better damn well be at your hotel.”
I looked into the controlled chaos of Shelly’s room to the side, my mind racing. I had one card to play. I pulled it from smoke, from nagging moments of the past few days, from red flags unfurled in far corners of my mind. I looked Waltz in the eyes and threw my card on the table.
“You knew her, Shelly.”
Hesitation, a millisecond. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Vangie. You didn’t just know who she was, you knew her personally. She was a friend of yours. Or a relative.”
“What?”
“The tape from LaGuardia. You picked her from the crowd while her face was a blur, even though I couldn’t make her out. Several times while talking about her, your throat ‘got dry’ or you claimed an allergy, wiped your eyes. Talking about Vangie nearly broke you up, you needed to reach down and hold it together.”
“That’s laughable. Preposterous.”
“You refer to Bernal and Anderson as vics or victims. You refer to Vangie as ‘the lady’ or �
�Dr Prowse’.”
Waltz’s face was scarlet. “This isn’t about me, this is about you withholding infor—”
“Three days back, Shelly. At Macy’s. You were at the perfume counter, sampling something. It seemed to hit you hard. When you walked away I sniffed the scent. It was familiar but I wasn’t sure, so tonight I sent my partner to Vangie’s house to check. It was the perfume she wore.”
His index finger jabbed anger at my face. “Don’t muddy the situation with your wild accu—”
“DON’T LIE TO ME, SHELLY! Look me in the eyes and tell me you didn’t know Evangeline Prowse. LOOK IN MY EYES!”
He didn’t meet my eyes. His shoulders slumped.
I lowered my voice to a hiss. “You spill my secret and it’s over for me. But I’ll spill yours and you’ll be gone, too. When the NYPD brass hears you hid a personal relationship with a victim, your ass gets kicked off the case. Bang! No chance to find Vangie’s killer. No chance to help Folger. I know things, Shelly. Folger is alive. My brother sent a message to that effect.”
I pulled the postcard from my pocket. Handed it to Waltz. He saw Folger’s handwriting, read her words.
Do what he says. Please. Alice.
“We can avenge Vangie’s death,” I pleaded. “We can save Folger. Help me, Shelly.”
Waltz never met my eyes. Thunder rumbled across the night sky, flickered the lights in the house. He retreated into the shadows of a dark hall. I heard a drawer open in a back room, then slowly shut. His footsteps started back down the hall, and he emerged from the shadows with eyes filled with pain.
And a revolver in his hand.
TWENTY-NINE
It was a big gun, a .357 Colt Python, blue steel, the bluing dulled with age. I hefted its weight in my palm, then handed it back to Waltz, who gently set the weapon on the table.
“This was Vangie’s father’s service weapon?” I said. “He was a cop?”
“Sergeant John Edward Prowse. Killed in action in 1962 when she was seventeen.”
