New Jersey Noir--Cape May

by William Baer

  There were also a few with Tommy, standing between the indistinguishable twins.

  Innocent kids’ stuff.

  The father was sitting in a nearby chair, silent, waiting, watching, and his daughter was out in the kitchen talking on her cellphone to someone. Maybe Ronnie. The only words I overheard were “house arrest,” and I shot her a glance, and she smiled back, mouthing two words that looked like, “the warden.”

  I looked at the judge.

  “Could you tell them apart?”

  It was a pretty stupid question to ask a father: can you tell your children apart? But I often ask people stupid questions. You never know where they’ll lead.

  “No,” he said.

  That was it. Just “No.” It was just that simple, and I was very surprised. Since he’d already anticipated my next question, he decided to help me out.

  “When they were babies, Rikki wore a little gold ankle bracelet engraved with her name, and Nikki wore a silver one. When they got older, I got them gold and silver bracelets for their wrists, and I asked them to never take them off.”

  “Did they?”

  “I don’t think so. Ask Rikki.”

  I placed the photos on the coffee table in front of me.

  “I don’t see any photos of Kitty Walsh.”

  “I tossed them all when she left. It was foolish, and stupidly impulsive, and I’ve regretted it. Especially when the girls would ask what their mother looked like.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “A very pretty country girl, who crushed my heart the moment I saw her.”

  He caught himself. Richard O’Brien was a pleasant man, but a reserved one. The kind of guy who didn’t feel very comfortable revealing too much about himself.

  I couldn’t have cared less.

  “Tell me about the ‘moment.’”

  He thought it over. Weighing his personal reservations, his personal proprieties.

  “All right.”

  I waited.

  “I guess it was rather ordinary, but it seemed unique and special to me.”

  I waited some more.

  “I saw her on the Wildwood boardwalk one night. She was barefoot, wearing jeans and a red flannel shirt, and eating a strawberry ice cream cone. She looked like she was twelve, but she was seventeen. I stopped and stared at her, rather moronically, which is definitely not the kind of thing I’d usually do, and she looked back at me and she smiled and said, ‘Who wears a suit on the boardwalk?’ We were married two months later, she had the twins nine months later, and she left a week after the kids were born.”

  How does a man sum up the most important and consequential relationship in his life? Well, that’s how Richard O’Brien just did it.

  “That’s it,” he said, alerting me to the obvious fact that that was all that he wanted to remember.

  “Do you give her money?”

  He looked at me with interest, with curiosity.

  “I find your rudeness very interesting.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Because it’s somehow not as offensive as it should be.”

  “Maybe that’s because you think I’m the only guy on the planet who can figure out who killed your daughter.”

  “Can you?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded, then he answered my rude question.

  “Yes, I give her a stipend.”

  He didn’t wait for me to ask how much.

  “Five hundred dollars a month.”

  “Did she ask for it?”

  “No.”

  “Did she ever ask for more?”

  “No. As a matter of fact, I haven’t spoken with her—or communicated with her—since she walked out that door.”

  He looked over at the front door, as if he could still see her cute Piney ass exiting his life forever.

  Maybe I needed to change the subject.

  “I’d like to see Nikki’s room.”

  “It’s Rikki’s room.”

  “She moved in after the murder?”

  “No, they always lived in the same room. Always. They never wanted separate rooms.”

  I guess I understood.

  “We’ll have to check with Rikki first,” he said, respecting her privacy.

  “I already did.”

  He believed me, so we stood up and went upstairs.

  It was a handsome house, one of the oldest and largest on Ocean Avenue, right across from the north end of the Cape May beaches, not far from Helen Pavese’s house. Maybe it’s not fair to stereotype people, but we all do it, and I do it more than most. The place was exactly like what you’d expect from a respected judge of some local distinction. Traditional, comfortable, expensive in a completely unobtrusive way, and very livable. It was way too big for a man and his two twin daughters, let alone a man and his only daughter, but I had the feeling that it was always “homey” to all three of them.

  The Rikki/Nikki room was smaller than I expected, with little twin beds with matching pink comforters, with “Nikki” written in pink on the left bed’s headboard and “Rikki” written on the right one. Nearby, there were matching end tables and matching little wooden desks, one with an open laptop, and the other looking meticulously clean but unused and abandoned. Back then, the girls were sixteen, and there were still a few remnants of their teenage years in the room: several basketball trophies, high school pompoms, photos of Dwight Yoakam, Tim Duncan, and the Boss.

  There was also some Rutgers stuff, along with two small, hand-carved religious statues, one on each desk (Saint Anthony for Rikki, Saint Monica for Nikki). On the walls, there were various framed photographs of lighthouses at night, all very striking, and I recognized Old Barney and the Cape May Lighthouse. On the wall between the two beds, there was a small framed picture of a turn-of-the-twentieth-century nurse.

  Whom I recognized.

  There was also a white, fresh-and-ready, EMT uniform laying out, very neatly, across Rikki’s bed.

  “She sleeps in Nikki’s bed?” I wondered.

  “I didn’t know.”

  The father didn’t seem surprised.

  “I need to snoop around.”

  I looked in the two closets, read the book titles in the two bookcases, and started opening the drawers in Nikki’s little desk.

  In the bottom drawer, there was a Beretta 92.

  I pulled out my handkerchief, secured the gun, and lay it carefully on top of the desk.

  The judge walked over.

  Confused, astonished, but silent.

  Then Rikki entered the room, just as confused and astonished as her father.

  “What’s that?”

  “It might be the gun that killed Edward Colt,” I explained.

  “I thought Eric killed Edward,” she said.

  “I never believed that.”

  “How did it get there?” she wondered.

  I ignored her.

  “Did you ever see it before?”

  “No, of course not.”

  Her father, nodding his agreement, stated the obvious.

  “Someone’s been in the house.”

  “When?” Rikki wondered.

  “Maybe when you were both at the wake,” I said. “Maybe earlier.”

  “What does it mean?” her father asked.

  “It means that someone is trying to implicate Rikki.”

  “Which means she’s still in danger,” her father said. “Correct?”

  “Correct.”

  He thought it over quickly.

  “I want you to take her with you.”

  “I was planning on it. I’ll be back tomorrow around noon.”

  I pulled my cell, took pictures of the Beretta, and texted the picture and the serial number to Nonna. Then I dialed for Daws
on.

  As I waited for Dawson to pick up, I looked at the worried father who put his arm around his daughter’s shoulders. Protectively.

  He had one daughter left, and he wasn’t asking much of me: just solve two murders (one ten years cold) and protect his only remaining child.

  23

  The Barrens

  Saturday, March 28th

  40°

  I was cruising through Kallikak country.

  Quite possibly the weirdest part of the weirdest state.

  Although some would argue with that.

  The Pine Barrens are a National Reserve (being the first one in the nation, I might add), covering over a million acres of rural, backwoods, mostly unpopulated pine (and cedar, laurel, dogwood, and oak) forests, occupying over twenty percent of the most densely populated state in the union. Larger than Yosemite. Larger than Grand Canyon National Park.

  It’s an ecological oddity, covering huge chunks of seven South Jersey counties, providing much of the water for the Cohansey-Kirkwood Aquifer, a fantastic underground reservoir of seventeen trillion gallons of the purest cleanest water in America.

  The Barrens are chock full of swamps, carnivorous plants, and Kallikaks.

  Not to mention the Jersey Devil.

  In 1920, the distinguished psychologist Henry H. Goddard published his famous study, The Kallikak Family, about a huge extended Piney family consisting of inbreds, bastards, imbeciles, prostitutes, illiterates, drunks, syphilitics, arsonists, paupers, and thieves. The book was universally praised in all the most important elite and academic circles, and it suggested that the Kallikaks, and everyone like them, should be immediately sterilized and institutionalized.

  But there were a few problems.

  Not the least of which was that H. H. Goddard was a quack. He was one of those self-important, racist, pseudo-science eugenicists, whom the Nazis would later come to admire so much. He not only cheated his “evidence,” but he even doctored his photographs. As for the so-called Kallikak family, that wasn’t even their real name, and they were apparently from distant Hunterdon County, not the Pine Barrens.

  But stuff like that feeds on itself.

  The following year, another influential “researcher,” Elizabeth Kite, published a report called “The Pineys,” castigating everybody in the Barrens as inbred, incestuous drunks. The governor got so spooked about the “race of imbeciles, criminals, and defectives” living within his garden state that he wanted the legislature to “isolate” the “menace,” although I’m not exactly sure how he intended to quarantine twenty-two percent of the state, thus creating a state-within-a-state for wild incestuous imbeciles.

  The truth is, most of the Pineys I’ve met are just like the rest of us Jerseyites, just much more rural, much more country.

  At the moment, my Caddie XTS was cruising through the deserted backwoods of Mullica Township within the heart of the Pines. I was searching for a street called Pine Ridge Lane. Street number unknown. Eventually, my GPS lady stopped talking, as if suddenly swallowed up by a clan of Kallikaks, so I reverted to my Rand McNally.

  I prefer maps anyway.

  After my fourth left turn on the fourth houseless and homeless dirt road, I noticed an old wooden sign that had “Piney Ridge Boulevard” scrawled across it.

  I guess everybody in New Jersey has to be a wiseass, even the inbreds.

  I drove up a winding dirt road, surrounded by pines and cedars, the only things hardy enough to grow in the acidic “sugar sand” of the Barrens. Around a narrow bend, I came upon a little shack, which might or might not have been somebody’s home, with a little log cabin further up the ridge. As I approached the cabin, a big ole boy came out of the shack and stepped in the middle of the dirt road, as if he’d been waiting to intercept me all day long. He had a Browning A-Bolt shotgun, which he was holding by the barrel, with the butt down in the dust, and an ugly four-legged creature that looked like a cross between a hound and a pit.

  I wondered if I’d have to kill the thing.

  I got out of my car, trying to ignore the dust at my feet.

  I tried to be civil.

  Why not?

  “I’m looking for Kitty Walsh,” I said, assuming she was in the log cabin on the ridge.

  “You need to go back where you came from.”

  He was firm, but oddly polite.

  When I walked up to him, his dog growled.

  I don’t own a dog, but I don’t actively dislike them. I realize that, for some people, they’re the only friends and companions they’ll ever have. But nasty growling dogs are a menace, and I have no problem with—what’s the euphemism?—“putting them down.”

  “Am I going to have to kill that thing?”

  The big boy understood.

  He tapped his best pal on the top of its head, and the growling stopped immediately. When the thing looked up at its lord and master, the big boy nodded towards home sweet home, and the thing, very reluctantly, strolled over to the shack, went inside, then turned around to look back at his boss.

  The big boy nodded his head, and the beast, using its ugly head, shut the front door. I was very impressed, but I didn’t drive out here in the middle of nowhere for a circus act.

  “Thanks,” I said, fully aware that we were both fully aware that I was being a hundred percent sarcastic.

  The big boy had definitely noticed the bulge under my Armani, and he seemed willing to be reasonable.

  I identified myself and my mission.

  “I’m a private detective, and I need to talk to Kitty Walsh about the death of her daughter.”

  “She’s already talked about it with that other cop.”

  Meaning Edward Colt.

  Which I already knew.

  It was why Edward had added Kitty’s name to Pavese’s suspect list.

  “I just need a few minutes,” I tried, trying not to lose my patience.

  “You know,” he said, almost philosophically, “I’m fully aware that to a slick-looking guido like yourself, I look very much like the Piney stereotype, but I’m a very reasonable man.”

  I was always grateful when I was misidentified as a paisan.

  It made my day.

  Now why in the world would I ever think this guy might fit some kind of stereotype? (Even though he’d just stereotyped me.) After all, he was almost six foot five, with worn flannels, worn dungarees, worn work boots, an ugly beard, a stupid tattoo, and a man-eating hound of the Baskervilles.

  He continued his moving soliloquy.

  “My sister’s put the past behind her, and she won’t want to talk to you or anyone else.”

  I guess he was really trying to be reasonable.

  Just with the wrong guy.

  “Why don’t you go back inside your Unabomber shack.”

  I couldn’t help adding:

  “Pardon the stereotype.”

  He’d had enough.

  He knew I was carrying a handgun, but he also figured that he could put an end to things pretty quickly. He dropped the barrel of his shotgun and grabbed for me with his right hand. Much quicker than I would have expected.

  To be honest about it, I would have preferred to tase the guy and watch him jerk around in the sugar sand. After all, the big ones are always the most fun, but there simply wasn’t enough time.

  There’s a myriad of methodologies to put an end to these kinds of confrontations, since there are so many, shall we say, human vulnerabilities. As for me, I’ve used them all, except for the “man area.”

  No thanks.

  I stepped to my right and struck him in the throat and crushed his windpipe. I used a more moderate “hand blow” rather than a “knuckle blow” because I didn’t want to kill the guy. Trachea strikes are extremely effective. The throat is pretty much all cartilage, and getting your Adam’s apple crushed bac
k into your esophagus hurts like hell.

  From what I understand, it’s a rather exquisite pain.

  The big boy gagged, rather disgustingly, then slumped forward, falling to his knees, clutching his throat. He made a futile effort to scream, but nothing much came out. It was like looking at Munch’s “Scream” in a silent Oslo Art Gallery.

  A few minutes later, I knocked on Kitty’s door. The little cabin was very neat, well kept, even “cute,” with bright colorful flowers in all the flower boxes.

  “Go away.”

  It came through the door.

  There was no chance of that.

  “Would you like your brother back?”

  The door opened a crack.

  “What does that mean?”

  She wasn’t happy about it.

  “Let me come inside.”

  She thought it over. Then she decided I was a serious man.

  Wisely.

  She opened the door. She was wearing a pretty green sundress, and she was obviously weaponless, although there was a fully loaded gun rack on the far wall. O’Brien might have burned all her pictures twenty-seven years ago, but Nonna had found one from about ten years back, when she looked a lot like the young Sissy Spacek, with light brown hair, freckled fair skin, with something both “little girlish” and, contradictorily, “sultryish” about her. These days, she looked a bit used and worn out, like heavy-duty smokers usually do, even though she was only thirty-four.

  “Where’s my brother?”

  “He’s in the trunk of my car.”

  She looked at me closely, wondering if I might be capable of such of thing. Not whether I might be capable of locking someone inside my trunk, but whether I might be capable of subduing her gargantuan brother one-on-one.

  I guess she decided I was.

  “Did you hurt him?”

  “No.”

  Which wasn’t exactly the truth since he’ll be sipping soup for the next month and a half.

  She seemed to read my mind, so I beat her to the punch.

  “Call him.”

  “I should call the police.”

  I wasn’t worried.

  She walked over to her sitting chair, picked up her cell, and called her brother.