When Jessica returned to the Roundhouse, she wrote up a request for a search warrant and faxed it to the DA's office. She didn't expect much, but it never hurt to ask. As to phone messages, there was only one. It was from Faith Chandler. It was marked URGENT.
Jessica dialed the number, got the woman's answering machine. She tried a second time, this time leaving a message, including her cell phone number.
She hung up the phone, wondering.
Urgent.
41
One of them there bis-cottis." Them there? I almost laugh. I don't, of course. I've never broken character and I'm not going to start now. "I'm new to this city," I add. "I haven't seen a friendly face in weeks."
She makes my coffee, bags the biscotti, caps my cup, taps the touch screen. "Where are you from?"
"West Texas," I say with a broad smile. "El Paso. Big Bend country."
"Wow," she replies, as if I had told her I was from Neptune. "You're a long way from home."
"Aren't we all?" I hand her a five.
She stops, frozen for a moment, as if I have said something profound. I step out onto Walnut Street, feeling tall and fit. Gary Cooper in The Fountainhead. Tall is a method, like weakness.
I finish my latte, breeze into a men's clothing store. I fashion up, vogue briefly near the door, gather my suitors. One of them steps forward.
"Hi," the salesman says. He is thirty. His hair is cropped short. He is suited and booted, wearing a wrinkled gray T-shirt beneath a navy-blue three-button number at least one size too small. This seems to be a fashion statement of some sort.
"Hello," I say. I wink at him and he colors slightly.
"What can I show you today?"
Your blood on my Bokhara? I think, channeling Patrick Bateman. I give him my toothy Christian Bale. "Just looking."
"Well, I'm here to offer assistance, and I hope you'll allow me the privilege of doing so. My name is Trinian."
Of course it is.
I think of those great St. Trinian's British comedies from the 1950s and '60s, and consider making a reference. I notice he has a bright orange Skechers watch on his wrist, and realize that I would be wasting my breath.
Instead, I frown-bored and beleaguered by my excessive wealth and station. He is even more interested now. In this setting, abuse and intrigue are lovers.
Twenty minutes later it hits me. Perhaps I have known it all along. It really is all about the skin. Skin is where you stop, and the world starts. Everything you are-your mind, your personality, your soul-is contained and constrained by your skin. In here, in my skin, I am God.
I slip into my car. I have just a few hours to get into character.
I'm thinking Gene Hackman in Extreme Measures.
Or maybe even Gregory Peck in The Boys from Brazil.
42
Mateo Fuentes freeze-framed the image at the point in the Fatal Attraction tape when the gun was fired. He toggled back, forward, back, forward. He ran the tape in slow motion, each field rolling top-to-bottom on the frame. On the screen, a hand came up on the right side of the frame and stopped. The shooter wore a surgical glove, but it wasn't his hand they were interested in, although they had already narrowed down the make and model of the pistol. The Firearms Unit was still working on it.
The star of the movie, at this point, was the jacket. It looked like a satin jacket, the type of jacket that baseball teams or roadies at rock concerts wear-dark, shiny, and with a ribbed band at the wrist.
Mateo printed off a hard copy of the image. It was impossible to tell what color the jacket was-black or navy blue. This jibed with Little Jake's recollection of a man in a dark blue jacket inquiring about the Los Angeles Times. It wasn't much. There had to be thousands of jackets like that in Philly. Still, they would have a composite suspect sketch that afternoon.
Eric Chavez entered the room, extremely animated, a computer printout in hand. "We've got a location on where the Fatal Attraction tape is from."
"Where?"
"It's a dump called Flickz on Frankford," Chavez said. "Independent store. Guess who owns it."
Jessica and Palladino said the name at the same time.
"Eugene Kilbane."
"One and the same."
"Son of a bitch." Jessica found herself subconsciously clenching her fists.
Jessica filled Buchanan in on their interview with Kilbane, leaving out the part about the assault and battery. If they brought Kilbane in, he was sure to bring it up anyway.
"You like him for this?" Buchanan asked.
"No," Jessica said. "But what are the chances that this is coincidence? He knows something."
Everyone looked at Buchanan with the anticipation of pit bulls circling the fight ring.
Buchanan said: "Bring him in."
"I didn't want to get involved," Kilbane said.
For the moment, Eugene Kilbane was sitting at one of the desks in the duty room of the Homicide Unit. If they didn't like any of his answers, he would soon be moving to one of the interrogation rooms.
Chavez and Palladino had found him at The White Bull Tavern.
"Did you think we wouldn't be able to trace the tape back to you?" Jessica asked.
Kilbane looked at the tape, which was on the desk in front of him in a clear evidence bag. It appeared as if he thought scraping the label off the side might have been enough to fool seven thousand cops. Not to mention the FBI.
"Come on. You know my record," he said. "Shit has a way of sticking to me."
Jessica and Palladino looked at each other as if to say: Don't give us this kind of opening, Eugene. The fucking jokes will start writing themselves and we'll be here all day. They restrained themselves. For the moment.
"Two tapes, both of them containing evidence in murder investigations, both rented at stores you own," Jessica said.
"I know," Kilbane said. "It looks bad."
"Gee, ya think?"
"I… I don't know what to say."
"How did the tape get here?" Jessica asked.
"I have no idea," Kilbane said.
Palladino held up the artist's sketch of the man who'd hired the bicycle messenger to deliver the tape. It was an extraordinarily good likeness of one Eugene Kilbane.
Kilbane hung his head for a few moments, then looked around the room, meeting the eyes of everyone there. "Do I need a lawyer here?"
"You tell us," Palladino said. "You got something to hide, Eugene?"
"Man," he said. "You try to do the right thing, see what it gets you."
"Why did you send the tape to us?"
"Hey," he said. "I got a conscience, you know."
This time, Palladino held up Kilbane's rap sheet, turned it to Kilbane's face. "Since when?" he asked.
"Since always. I was raised a Catholic."
"This from a pornographer," Jessica said. They all knew why Kilbane had come forward, and it had nothing to do with conscience. He had violated his parole by having an illegal weapon on him the day before, and he was trying to buy them off. With one phone call he could be back in prison tonight. "Spare us the homily."
"Yeah, okay. I'm in the adult entertainment business. So what? It's legal. Where's the harm?"
Jessica didn't know where to start. She started anyway. "Let's see. AIDS? Chlamydia? Gonorrhea? Syphilis? Herpes? HIV? Ruined lives? Destroyed families? Drugs? Violence? Let me know when you want me stop."
Kilbane just stared, a little overwhelmed. Jessica stared him down. She wanted to go on, but what was the point? She wasn't in the mood, and it wasn't the time or the place to debate the sociological ramifications of pornography with someone like Eugene Kilbane. There were two dead people to think about.