He spent the next hour sorting through the correspondence that had accumulated on his desk. He’d asked the records clerk at the station house to do a background check of Vinny Acosta, the hood they’d seen with Micky Wright, and later with the Hirsch brothers. The clerk had done the check, and Valentine pulled a handful of stapled pages from an envelope, and read Vinny’s rap sheet.
Vinny hailed from the Bronx section of Brooklyn. His childhood highlights consisted of dropping out of the seventh grade, and robbing a grocery store a few weeks later. Since then, he’d been arrested for vagrancy, burglary, contributing to delinquency, assault, assault and battery, assault to kill, obstructing justice, larceny, running an illegal “book”, loan sharking, damage by violence, bombing, running a prostitution ring, attempted murder, and murder.
Two of his arrests had led to convictions, and attached to Vinny’s rap sheet was a psychological evaluation that he’d undergone while doing a stretch in Sing Sing prison in upstate New York. The evaluation showed him to have a general IQ of 72 and a nonverbal of 88. The prison doctors had also psychoanalyzed him, and they deemed Vinny “a constitutional psychopath with strong antisocial tendencies.”
Valentine returned the rap sheet back to its envelope while thinking about the hundred thousand dollars Vinny had been carrying around his waist. Was Vinny laundering money for the mob, or was he stealing it from the casino? The casino was so tightly run that neither scenario seemed plausible, yet his gut told him that one of these crimes had to be going on. Yet somehow, he wasn’t seeing it.
At noon, the phone on his desk lit up, and he answered it.
“Tony?” a woman’s voice said. “This is Sabina.”
In all the years he’d known Banko’s secretary, she’d never addressed him by his first name, preferring to use his particular rank at the time. She was easily the most unfriendly person he’d ever known.
“Yes, Sabina,” he said.
“I just got a phone call for you. A man said he saw your name on a flyer, and wanted to talk to you about the serial killer.”
He grabbed a pen off his desk. “What’s his name?”
“He wouldn’t give it to me.”
“How about a phone number?”
“Not that, either. He asked you to meet him at the old Underwood Exhibit on the Boardwalk. He said he knew you once worked there.”
Valentine had worked at the Underwood Exhibit one summer as a kid. Except for Lois and his father, he didn’t think there was another living person who knew that.
“Did the guy say anything else?”
“He just emphasized that you hurry,” Sabina said.
There was a tremor in her voice. The newspaper had run a story that morning with a headline that read SERIAL KILLER CASE GONE COLD, and Valentine guessed there wasn’t a woman on the island who hadn’t seen it.
“I’ll get right on it,” he said.
“Thank you, Tony.”
Valentine grabbed his overcoat and went to the door. His movements were quick, and he felt a hot wire igniting his blood. He liked catching cheaters, but there were times when he desperately missed the street. He found Doyle sitting in front of a monitor.
“I just got a lead on our killer. Want to go for a ride?”
Doyle jumped out of his chair. “In a New Jersey minute.”
Chapter 36
As a kid, Valentine had never had a problem getting a summer job. The Boardwalk always had plenty of openings. There were jobs hawking ice cream, working carnival games, or selling photographs of beautiful women on horseback jumping off the Steel Pier. But, the best jobs were at the amusements and exhibits.
The summer of his sixteenth birthday, he’d landed a job at the Underwood Exhibit. Underwood was the country’s biggest maker of typewriters. As a publicity gimmick, the company had built the world’s largest typewriter, and shipped it to Atlantic City. The typewriter was 1,728 the times the size of a normal typewriter, and weighed five tons. It typed on stationery measuring nine by twelve feet, with a ribbon over thirty yards long. Valentine’s job had been to jump on keys, and type out messages for tourists, a nickel a letter. His father had been working a construction job nearby, and when Valentine was ready to go home, he’d jump on the typewriter’s bell, which could be heard for blocks.
The exhibit had been housed in the Bijou Theater, where it still remained. The Bijou had been built during the Depression to capitalize on the country’s madness for movies, its owner spending a fortune on its terra-cotta facade, terrazzo floors, and twinkling lights embedded in the domed ceiling. These days, the theater sat vacant, its history forgotten.
Valentine pressed the front door buzzer. A sleep-walking guard opened the door, and gave him a curious stare. Valentine showed him his badge.
“I got a call that someone wanted to meet me here.”
“Wasn’t from me,” the guard said.
“Mind if we come inside, and have a look around?”
“Not at all. I could use the company.”
Valentine and Doyle followed the guard past the musty-smelling concession area into the darkened theater. The guard flicked on the overhead lights and the room came to life. “Ain’t nobody been here in a while,” he said.
The theater was as Valentine remembered it, vast and beautiful. The world’s largest typewriter sat on the stage, covered with a blanket of gray dust. Getting paid to jump on something had been fun, and he found himself remembering all the vacationing secretaries who’d paid him to type out barbs to the boss back home.
My typust is awa on vacarion
My nu secreary cant spel
Git yur own cofee
“Looks like someone got here before us,” Doyle said.
There were fresh footprints around the base of the machine. Valentine got up next to the stage, and saw a message on the stationery, the letters so faint that he had to squint.
Do yu knw why I hate yu?
Doyle edged up beside him. “Think your father is behind this?”
Valentine’s gut said no. His old man was a drunk. Drunks pissed in doorways, and picked fights in bars. They didn’t go into old buildings, and pull crazy stunts.
“No. I think it’s the Dresser.”
“How would he have known you worked here?”
“Because he’s a local. The FBI has thought that all along.”
“And he’s got a grudge against you.”
“It sure seems that way.”
Doyle decided he wanted to talk to the guard, who’d picked a seat in the theater to park himself in. As Doyle walked up the aisle, Valentine heard a man’s voice. It was so close, it sounded like someone whispering in his ear.
“ You like being the hero, don’t you, Tony?”
Valentine looked over his shoulder at his partner. “Did you hear that?”
Doyle turned around in the aisle. “Hear what?”
“That voice.”
“I didn’t hear anything, Tony. You must be imagining things.”
Valentine let his eyes canvas the stage. The typewriter was pushed right up against the wall, leaving nowhere to hide behind it. And the curtains had been removed long ago. There was no one there. So where had the voice come from?
“ Defender of the weak and the innocent. All the girls had a thing for you.”
Valentine stared up at the fresco in the dome. The voice seemed to be coming from the air, and he stared at the angels and demons carousing above his head.
“ Come on, Tony. I’ve given you enough clues. Don’t you know why I hate you?”