by William Baer
New Jersey Noir: Cape May
new jersey noir:
C A P E M A Y
A Novel
by
William Baer
A B L E M U S E P R E S S
Copyright ©2021 by William Baer
First published in 2021 by
Able Muse Press
www.ablemusepress.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews. Requests for permission should be addressed to the Able Muse Press editor at [email protected]
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019937303
ISBN 978-1-77349-033-5 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-77349-034-2 (digital)
Cover image: “Just Wait” by Alexander Pepple
Cover & book design by Alexander Pepple
Able Muse Press is an imprint of Able Muse: A Review of Poetry, Prose & Art – at
www.ablemuse.com
Able Muse Press
467 Saratoga Avenue #602
San Jose, CA 95129
For my family and friends—
especially Sam
New Jersey Noir: Cape May
I
New Jersey has more laws than any other state, but a paucity of law-abiding citizens.
— Thomas C. Colt
1
Paterson, New Jersey
Tuesday, March 24th
42°
Wanna see some dead bodies?”
“How many?”
Yeah, yeah, I know. It sounds kind of callous, but when you’ve seen a billion stiffs, who cares about a few more?
Especially, if it’s not your case.
“Six.”
I was intrigued, ever so slightly, and Luca sensed it. He’d been my best friend since we were brats in grammar school, and he’d been kidding himself ever since that he could “read” me, that he could somehow “know” what I was thinking.
Well, maybe sometimes he could.
“You’ll want to see this, Jack. I guarantee it.”
Luca Salerno, former Paterson beat cop, was now the best detective working out of the Passaic County Courthouse in Paterson, New Jersey, and I knew what he was doing, and he knew that I knew what he was doing.
Trying to get me out of the house.
I was sitting in Stone House, my house, exactly a month after “the one whose name I dare not dwell on” jumped into her bright-red Neon and drove three thousand miles to California. It was also almost six weeks since my uncle was assassinated at the Paterson Falls, which was why the house was empty.
Except for me.
I stood up and looked out the back window of the house, which sits on top of Garrett Mountain, high above the nightlights of the city I loved, the city of Paterson. The city which, even though nobody knows it, made America the greatest country on earth. Yeah, the founders get some cred, and all the immigrants, and the much-praised “work ethic,” etc., but Paterson blasted off the great American industrial juggernaut, being the home of our “second” revolution: industry/business.
It was one of the founders, of course, who kicked everything off. Who had the vision. Who looked at the awesome power of the falls and saw the nascent “engine” of the revolution. A guy named Hamilton. Soon the place was “Silk City,” then it was “firearms” city, then it was “locomotive engines” city, then it was “aeronautics” city, with an awful lot of ups and downs along the way. Yeah, there’s way too much crime in Paterson, too much corruption, too many fatherless households, too many botched educational schemes, but I still love the place.
I love the mountain, I love the river, I love the falls, I love the food, and I love the people.
I especially love the parades:
The African-American Day Parade, the Dominican Day Parade, the Turkish-American Day Parade, the Bangladeshi Day Parade, the Peruvian Day Parade, and all the other countless “ethnic day” parades. There’s pretty much a new parade every week, which makes sense since Paterson is the most densely populated city in the US, excepting the big-boy across the Hudson, and the most ethnically diverse city in the US, excepting the same exception.
“You still there?” Luca wiseassed. “Or did the line go dead?”
I ignored his sarcasm, still staring at the glittering nightlights of the city which spread out before me. It was approaching midnight, and I’d been watching Godfather II, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to interrupt myself.
“Where?” I wondered.
“The riverbank. Off Totowa Ave.”
I was still thinking.
“You’ll enjoy it, Jack. I promise.”
Hell, maybe I should get out of the house. I wasn’t really sulking, and I certainly wasn’t depressed, as a matter of fact, I’ve never been depressed in my life. It’s not part of the family makeup. The genetic code. But after losing both my uncle and the pretty girl whom it’s probably best not to think about, I was much enjoying the elemental pleasures: The Godfathers I & II, Faulkner, and Ross Macdonald.
Do private dicks really read books about private dicks?
Sure, they do.
Do mob guys really read books about the mob?
Sure, they do.
Do politician really read books about politicians?
Maybe.
Which, of course, assumes that they can read in the first place. Maybe they just watch the movies.
I do both.
Besides, nothing interesting had crossed my desk recently. These days I’m able to pick and choose my cases, but after the recent bloody mess, nothing interesting had walked into my office.
“You coming or not?”
Somebody was impatient.
“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”
2
Cape May
Tuesday, March 24th
40°
Your name is Colt (oddly enough).
You’re a private investigator (even more oddly enough).
You come home (alone) from a dinner date with a pretty young woman at Tisha’s on the Washington Mall. You pour yourself a brandy, a twelve-year-old Korbel, take off your clothes, fold them neatly on a leather chair, and go outside behind the house to your heated swimming pool. Why people have swimming pools a few blocks from the beach I have no idea, but I guess a heated pool makes a modicum of sense in the month of March.
You jump in, climb in, or dive in, then swish around for a while. You’re thirty-eight years old, trim, attractive, competent, and likeable.
What are you thinking about?
Your past? Your future? Your job?
The difficult case you’re working on?
Or maybe, probably, the pretty girl you took to Tisha’s before dropping her off at her home on Beach Avenue.
The water’s warm and intimate, the night’s cool and brisk, the moonlight’s soft and faint.
Not at all foreboding.
When you’ve had enough of its comforting wetness, you go to the ladder and rise from the pool. Did you sense something before it happened? Who knows? You’re a private dick, and they all believe that they’ll survive the darkness of the night and live to work the case another day.
Before you can reach for your white towel, waiting on a nearby deck chair, a figure appears in front of you, as if from nowhere, as if unthreateningly, then lifts a handgun of some kind and blows a tunnel through your forehead. You’re dead, of course, before
you hit the ground, before the bleeding starts, but, as for me, at that exact precise present moment, I know nothing about any of it.
3
The Waterfront
Tuesday, March 24th
37°
The best is yet to come. . . .”
Yeah, I hope so.
Some Jersey guy named Sinatra was singing away, and I was wondering if it was true.
I was cruising my hyper-black Vsport, 410-hp twin-turbo XTS through the mean streets of Paterson heading for the Passaic River. Most of the good people were home and/or asleep, but disparate packs of loitering cretins still roamed the city streets.
Did I mention crime?
For a while, Camden got all the publicity. Newark too. But we’ve had more than our fair share. Then it got worse. Four years ago, the city ended up with a seventy-million-dollar budget deficit (don’t get me started on that), and the town geniuses dealt with the “shortfall” by laying off 125 cops, which was about twenty-five percent of the total force, which was ridiculous.
Which naturally pumped up the crime stats.
Which was good for business if you were a private investigator.
Off Totowa Avenue, I pulled into Westside Park, parking next to Federici’s World War I Monument, a good-looking Lady Liberty. Then I strolled over to the riverbank, past some boys in blue, past some yellow crime-tape, past a couple of media parasites, and found Luca.
He nodded to his right, and I took a look.
He was right.
It was interesting.
There were six heads in a neat row on the riverbank staring rather wistfully at the endlessly flowing blackness of the Passaic River. It looked like they’d been buried in the ground with just their heads protruding, but I figured they were probably decaps.
“You promised ‘bodies,’” I said.
Luca smiled.
He still had a small bandage over his throat where he’d been shot with an M24 sniper rifle four weeks ago. It put a bit more masculine gravel in his voice.
“We’ll find them eventually.”
(Meaning the bodies.)
“Your paisans?”
(Meaning the killers.)
“I’m thinking Peruvians.”
“Why?”
He handed me a candy wrapper.
“We found it in a garbage can.”
It was an empty bag of Lantejas. Very popular with the Peruvians.
Grageas de Pasta Sabor Chocolate Confitado.
“That sounds convenient.”
“Too conveninent?”
I shrugged.
“Who found the heads?”
“Somebody called Joe Murphy at the Herald and told him to come over here. Somebody obviously wanted to make a statement.”
Tomorrow, the six heads would be all over the news, and each and every one of the numerous ethnic mobs in Paterson would be thinking twice about expanding their turf.
Or messing with the Ravellos.
I took a closer look at the heads. An unhappy lot. It was hard to determine ethnicity in the mushy moonlight.
Maybe South America. Maybe Eastern European.
What difference did it make? No one would ever pin it on Don Ravello, and Luca knew it, and it infuriated him. He was a “good” Italian, and he hated the bad ones.
To distract himself, he decided to bust my balls.
“You keeping busy?”
I knew what he was doing.
“Yeah.”
“That’s not what Nonna says. She says you watch the two Godfathers over and over, back to back.”
“You got something better to do?”
He was stumped.
“You need a case, Jack.”
He was right.
Then Luca got called away by the ME, and I stood within the Paterson darkness and permitted myself to think about “her.”
I pulled out my cell and read today’s text. Then I reread her text from a month ago:
Today I stopped at Niagara, stood at the falls, and thought about Sam Patch of Passaic Falls, New Jersey.
I smiled. What else could I do? A month ago, she was making her first “detour,” as she headed back to California with Jersey still on her mind.
Back in 1827, some idiot named Sam Patch jumped off the Paterson Falls, also known as the Passaic Falls, and survived. When he discovered the next morning that he was instantly famous, he went up to Niagara, waved to all his “fans,” kissed an American flag, and jumped 130 feet into the whirlpool below, surviving again. Then he went over to Rochester to jump the Genesee Falls. Which he did a second time, but this time, as the crowd stared ever so silently at the undisturbed surface of the river, there was no sign of Samuel Patch. Four months later, the illustrious “daredevil” was discovered frozen in the river-ice six miles from the falls.
Some people were saddened, of course, but most thought he was an idiot. Even Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a piece about the “poor fellow” who’d thrown his life away “in pursuit of empty fame.”
They put a makeshift wooden marker over his grave:
Here lies Sam Patch. Such is Fame.
Six months ago, when I told Roxanne (who was a committed Jerseyphile) the Sam Patch story, I managed to conjure up and recite one of the many old ditties about the Jersey daredevil.
She liked it a lot.
Poor Samuel Patch, a man once world renowned,
Much loved the water, and by it was drowned.
He sought for fame, and as he reached to pluck it,
He lost his ballast, then kicked the buck-it.
4
Stone Tower
Tuesday, March 24th
36°
What happened?
She woke up.
Were you wearing the stupid mask?
Yes.
A ski mask?
Yes.
Is that why you haven’t been coming around lately?
Yes.
[Pause]
So what happened?
I took off the mask and told her everything.
Everything?
Yes.
That you’d been deceiving her, that you’d been stalking her, that you’d been coming into her house in the middle of the night just to be close to her?
Yes.
That you loved her?
Yes.
What happened?
She left.
Left?
Yeah, she left for California.
In the middle of the night?
The next day.
What did she say?
When?
When she was still in the bed.
She said, “What’s the matter with you?” And I said, “You.” And she said, “Do you love me?” And I said, “Yes.” And she said, “Do you want to marry me?” And I said, “Whatever you want.”
Which was a pretty wimpy response.
If you weren’t so blind, you could see me shrugging.
Keep going.
So she said, “When?” And I said, “Pick a day.” And she thought about it for a moment.
A “moment”?
Yeah, she’s the queen of snap judgments, and, oddly enough, most of them are good ones. Smart ones.
So what was her “judgment”?
Pretty much a “no.”
Tell me.
She shook her head and said, “You’re too messed up.”
What did you say?
I agreed. Then she said, “I’d like a year to think about it.”
No snap judgment there.
Nope.
Then she leaves the next day?
Yep.
Incommunicado for a year?
Not exactly. She came up with some guidelines
.
Fill me in.
She said that we’re each allowed one text, every day, one sentence long, and no “lovey” stuff.
She used the word “lovey”?
Yeah.
I’ve never sent a text.
Of course, you haven’t. You’re a billion years old, and you’re blind as a bat.
Describe it.
It’s like a short email, with a limit of 160 characters.
Including the spaces, I assume.
Including the spaces.
That’s quite a romance you’ve got going there.
You got that right.
5
18 Marshall Street
Wednesday, March 25th
48°
The speaker came on.
“Am I interrupting the cannoli scene?”
It was Mrs. Doris Salerno, Luca’s grandmother, who’d once run the office for my now-deceased uncle, who’d been, ever since Roxs took off for California, filling in at the reception desk.
I answered her question with a question.
“How do you know I’m not watching GF II?”
She didn’t miss a beat. She never did.
“Am I interrupting the ‘we wuz like the Romans’ scene?”
I refused to respond.
It might seem strange to anyone living outside the boundaries of the beautiful Garden State, that such a loving self-sacrificing grandmother could also be such a perfect wiseass.
Welcome to New Jersey.
“You’ve got a potential client waiting in your luxurious waiting room. Mr. Richard O’Brien. Maybe he can get you up off your ass.”
Mrs. S., Nonna, had once been a librarian. She’d also mothered and grandmothered the entire extended Salerno brood, and she always treated me and Luca like idiots. Like children. Even now.
