The Killing Club Read online

  “Ah.Aha.Aha.” She tapped me with her pencil, on either shoulder as if knighting me.“This is the explanation.In Herb’s report, he says there was nothing in the stomach.Your friend wasn’t eating all day.So then it’s not his custom, he drinks a little bit, he’s blotted.”

  “Blotto.”

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  “Yes.Blotto.” Shawn Tarrini, she summarized, had been a healthy man, a little intoxicated, not wearing a seat belt, who’d died when his lightweight American SUV swerved into a head-on collision with a thick concrete guardrail at seventy miles an hour.

  “Things should be worse than that, Jamie? Why?” Gert frowned at me, her slightly freckled skin a little wrinkled around eyes that were so azure blue they startled you.“If everyone has to be always one of your homicides, what a sad world, ja ? Leave this alone.”

  I trusted Gert.And here she was, siding with Rod.

  Finally I stomped back to my cubicle and changed Beethoven’s Ninth to a phone ring choice titled “Cool Jazz.” The moment I did, my cell rang and it was Garth McBride in New York.

  “You just left! I thought you came to the station to thank me for that album.Believe me, it wasn’t easy to find a clean copy of Spectrum.And then, kazaam, you were gone!”

  “That was days ago.I’m busy, sorry.Thank you for returning Spectrum.And yes, I am accusing you, once again, of stealing it.I’ve gotta go.

  Good-bye.”

  “Hey, hey, Jamie, hang on.Oh, I get it.Amanda.Forget it! You got the wrong idea about Amanda.Wouldn’t be the first time, would it?” He laughed.Like he expected me to join in.“In all honesty, I think she’s got something serious going on the side with Barclay Ober.”

  “In all honesty, Garth, as you would say, it’s none of my business.” I repeated that I was too busy to talk further and I hung up.

  I canceled my Cobb salad for lunch, walked over to Dante’s and ordered a ham and cheese calzone with a side order of garlic bread, like half a loaf.Pudge brought it himself.“You don’t eat stuff like this.”

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  “Yeah, well, Pudge, you don’t smoke.At least as far as Eileen knows.”

  I gave a significant look toward his wife, Eileen, behind the cash register.

  She had a line of customers waiting to pay her for lunch.Dante’s is always jammed with the courthouse lunch-break crowd.

  “You’re in a mood.Is it about Ben?” Pudge sat down across from me.

  “I’ve been calling people.We’re going to get together tonight and talk about this.This Killing Club stuff.Before somebody else dies.”

  “What people? Everybody thinks it’s a stupid idea.”

  But to my surprise he said that Barclay, Debbie, Amanda and Connie had all four of them agreed to meet us at Dante’s Saturday night at ten thirty.(Dante’s closes at nine thirty on weekdays, ten on Saturdays.)

  “Us?”

  He’d promised I’d be here as well to talk “about the case.”

  “What did you tell them that for, Pudge? There is no case.As I keep being reminded.I’ve been told to drop it.”

  “Don’t.”

  “When you said Ben had fooled around before—you told me that, Pudge, remember?—was it with Amanda? Was it around the time Shawn died?”

  “Amanda? No way.Why would she get involved with Ben? He didn’t have a cent.”

  What was it with everybody? They all seemed to think Amanda, though a heartless gold-digger, was incapable of any other crime.

  “What about Amanda, Pudge? Ben and Amanda get rid of Shawn to collect on the big insurance.Then she dumps Ben.He gets sick and he wants to confess.So she gets rid of him and makes it look like the Killing Club murder.”

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  Pudge just stared at me.Finally he said, “Are you crazy? It’s not Amanda!”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s some psycho nut that found out about the club.”

  “Like who, Pudge? Who found out?”

  He rolled his eyes.“I don’t know! You’re the cop!”

  Eileen, a pleasant-faced plump woman with tight brown curls and a loud irresistible laugh, made a complicated series of gestures at Pudge, then pointed at a family waiting in the doorway.He signaled her back.

  The Salernos had a deaf child, and sometimes they used a version of sign language to talk to each other across the crowded restaurant.It was a godsend, they said, at times when even a shout wouldn’t carry.“I gotta help her out.She’s the best, isn’t she?” Pudge adored his wife, and his children, and he wanted the world to feel the same about them.

  He picked up the little empty basket where, not that long ago, there’d been two pieces of toasted buttery garlic bread.“Forget this Amanda stuff.

  I told everybody that you’re sure Ben was murdered by some nut after the club for some reason, and you’re not going to let it go till you prove it.”

  “Oh, that’s great.”

  “So you be here, Jamie.If I talk about murder, it’s just old class-clown Pudge, but if you say it, it’s serious.”

  “You were the class clown? I didn’t know that.I never thought you were funny.”

  “Ha ha.I’ll bring you another order of garlic bread.”

  “Oh, okay, that’s funny.”

  “You’ll be here?” I nodded yes.“Good.I don’t want another one of us getting killed.” His large brown eyes were solemn. “Too much death.”

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  “ ‘Death has come to your little town, Sheriff,’ ” I quoted at him.“Man, when we used to say that line from the movie, it was supposed to be a joke.” Taking the folded copy of the second anonymous note from my purse, I showed it to him.

  “Holy shit.You got another one?” He ran his hand over the Xerox of the pasted letters. “Was that the bogeyman? As a matter of fact ...it was.”

  “Same movie.Same way.Somebody left the original on the front stoop.Dino found them both.”

  “Why the hell do this?”

  “I have no idea.But we all do need to be careful, Pudge.That’s what I’m going to say to the rest tonight.Be careful.” I took back the note.“Unless maybe one of them did it.”

  “That’s nuts.Don’t go there.It’s an outsider.”

  The truth is, I couldn’t see Amanda shoving Ben down those steps either.But I could see her talking some man into doing it for her.Some man she was sleeping with all of sudden, even though they were both married.

  Like Barclay.Barclay, who’d sat there parked outside Ben’s house after calling in the fire when it was too late to save Ben.

  Back at GPD, Rod was pleasant but professional when he told me that Ramon Hiago at Jonesy’s Marina had just filed charges against my brother Dino for taking multiple joyrides in Ramon’s Ford Ranger without asking his permission.I apologized when I called Ramon.He wouldn’t listen.In the end I was the one who had to (a) post bond, (b) drive Dino home and (c) despite his begging me, “Don’t tell Dad,” tell Dad.

  . . .

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  THE WAY MY WEEK HAD GONE, it was no surprise I ended up treating my so-called partner, Detective Danny Ventura, to buffalo wings and what he called a “brewski” at Deklerk’s on Saturday.

  Well, it was a surprise to Debbie, more like a shock, since she knew my opinion of Danny, and yet here I was in her bar, smiling at him, picking up the check.Debbie caught me on the way to the ladies’ room.

  “Jamie, first you’re here hanging with Garth, now it’s Danny.Aren’t you supposed to be engaged to Rod Wolenski?”

  “Give me a break, Debbie.I’ve had a rough day.See you at Dante’s at ten thirty.”

  “That’s all I need.Get off here and go play Sherlock Holmes with you guys.”

  “Did I just say, ‘Give me a break’?”

  Debbie pried a wet dollar bill up from the bar surface.She waved
it in my face.“This is the tip from a guy who sat on that stool there for two solid hours, telling me his life story, which didn’t even sound interesting to him.You want me to give you a break? Is Danny Ventura married?”

  “Not at the moment.You’re not that desperate, Debbie.Trust me on this.”

  I was treating Ventura because he’d helped me out with something I’d asked him to do, and in his world—not one I cared to live in—that meant I “owed” him, “big time.” Chicken wings were not what he’d asked me for, but they’re what he got.

  The worst thing about Danny is that there are two of him.Well, there’re not really two.But Danny has an identical twin whose name is Donny.Right.Danny and Donny.And their mother still thinks they’re cute.She told me they reminded her of when Elvis played “identicals” in a 1 2 1

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  movie called Kissin’ Cousins. I had no trouble with the analogy.The twin Venturas are good-looking, with rich black hair, fleshy faces and hip-thrusting swaggers.Plus, despite the fact that one is a cop (Danny) and the other one, Donny, owns the local bedding store and volunteers as a fireman, the Ventura boys had failed to mature.Like an Elvis movie, they are all about cars, buddies, girls and what they call “messin’ around,”

  which appears to mean anything from shooting rats at the dump to chugging beer till they vomit (often on the cars and girls).

  And like an Elvis movie, they are keen on practical jokes.At twenty-eight years old, Detective Danny Ventura still thinks it is funny to blind-call locals and tell them they should yank on their phone cords because there’s some extra line inside their walls.

  One of their favorite jokes involved me.Donny, the bedding-store twin (who had his own ads on local TV, in which he jumped up and down on mattresses), would show up in the squad room and pretend that he was Danny the cop.The first time they did this, I fell for it.Donny ran to my cubicle, acting as if he were Danny, shouting for me to come quick down to the parking lot, there was a dead man in my Mustang.The dead man was Danny himself, draped over the steering wheel.That a cop would think this was funny taught me things.

  They swore I’d left my car door unlocked but I knew I hadn’t, that Danny had palmed the key, or had managed to pick the lock (with a ’68

  Shelby, you don’t get an alarm system), and the joke left me steamed.

  They’d tricked me twice more, though never as dramatically, before I figured out enough clues to tell them apart.(Danny had black flecks in his left eye, larger hands, a tiny mole near the part of his hair.) Danny still wasn’t sure if I knew who was who or not.

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  Like now, when he pretended to be his brother Donny as he spun my swivel chair out from my desk by splaying his hand over my knee and tugging at me.

  “Hey, Sweetmeat, you seen Dan around?” He always pretended to be Donny the bedding-store twin when he wanted to get gross with me.

  I shook his hand off by jerking my knee up, accidentally ramming it into his groin hard enough to make sweat pop out on his upper lip.“Gee, Donny, no, I haven’t seen him.But you know what a fuck-up Dan is.It’s all I can do to keep them from firing his ass.”

  “Just messin’ around,” he admitted.“It’s me.”

  “Really? I can never tell for sure.”

  He ran both hands through his hair to call attention to it.“So rack me up a collar.I just broke the perp on the Mobil thing.”

  “Hey, great.Was it Junior Overton?”

  “Yeah.Spotted his Cavalier at the pump.Ironworks Road.He was in there waving a .45 around. That bad boy’s going away for the grand sum of ninety-seven bucks and a big bag of Doritos.” Four convenience store/service stations had been robbed in the last month.Danny and I had narrowed down a list of suspects and he was tracking their cars.Anything about cars, he was on it.

  That’s why I’d asked him to help me follow up on Shawn Tarrini.

  That’s how he knew where the New Jersey Highway Patrol towed vehicles that had been totaled in highway crashes.And how to get to the car graveyard where an insurance company for a particular car had unloaded the wreck.And he was good at guy-talking the watchman at that graveyard.

  The watchman was watching a NASCAR race on his little TV, and Danny could talk car racing like he’d played Dale Earnhardt in an Elvis movie.

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  We spent an hour stumbling through a scary junk heap of mangled and rusted metal in which people’s lives had been changed forever.We were losing sunlight and just about to quit when Danny spotted what was left of Shawn Tarrini’s silver Chevy Tracker.

  For another hour I kept working using a two-hundred-watt Maglite, crawling all over that SUV, while Danny and the watchman sat in the little trailer near the entrance and watched NASCAR from Miami together.

  It was a lot warmer in Miami (and in that trailer) than it was in a junk-yard on a winter night in New Jersey.

  Long ago my dad gave up trying to punish me by making me sit on a chair in the kitchen.I’d just sit there.He gave up trying to get me to go to sleep before I’d finished all my homework.I’d just work under my coverlet with a flashlight.He gave up trying to lift me out of the YMCA pool before I’d swum the number of laps I needed to get promoted from “Fly-ing Fish” to “Shark,” even though I was convulsively shaking and turning blue.

  “Baby, goddamn you,” my father said, rubbing me with a towel.“You don’t quit.You just don’t quit.” Then he hugged me, rubbing harder.

  I paid the watchman twenty bucks for the flattened corroded remains of Shawn Tarrini’s right front tire.It had a bullet in it.

  Danny said, “Okay.” From him it was the equivalent of handing me the Nobel Prize.He hadn’t expected anything.He’d come along to help out on a cold case—that had never been a case to begin with—mostly just because he was in a good mood after closing the armed robberies, and there was nothing else happening at GPD that afternoon, and also because he liked to do things he wasn’t supposed to do (and I’d told him not to tell Rod where we were going).And—while I don’t believe Danny 1 2 4

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  actually thinks that in a million years I might ever “come across” in exchange for a favor—he likes to pretend that we both think it’s possible.

  But now I’d gotten him interested.We took a lot of pictures before we pulled the tire.We threw it in the trunk of Danny’s Corvette and drove back to the accident site on the ACE where the highway forks and the alter-nate ramp curves near an overpass.There were no traces of Shawn’s accident still visible, except that the concrete embankment looked new.Danny had a range finder with him.(He’s a big deer hunter.) What looked like the most likely position for the shooter was a bridge on that overpass, about a hundred yards past the ramp if you were headed from A.C. to Gloria. We backtracked, parked on the bridge, looked around.There was nothing near the rail but crushed beer cans, a running shoe, a broken aluminum beach chair and an old, dirty, handmade red-white-and-blue banner made from a sheet and flung over the side of the bridge.It said, THESE COLORS DON’T

  RUN.Except they had run.And the sheet was rotted.

  The head of our forensics lab told me the bullet pulled from the tire was a Hornady A-Max 175-grain spire point fired from a 7mm Remington rifle.He said, no, it wasn’t possible to tell from what distance the bullet had been fired for sure, but, yes, it could be from a hundred yards, and, yes, it sure had blown out the right front tire, and, yes, that would have spun the SUV out of control, and startled the driver.He said, “Major freak, know what I mean?”

  The head of our forensics lab was pretty much our whole crime scene investigation team.His name was Abu Tomkins.He was African American, young, really smart and seriously skinny, as if he’d drawn himself back in first grade when he could do only stick figures, and had added a square head.His hair stuck up straight from his head in a box 1 2 5

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  shape, and his glasses had rectangular black plastic rims.He wore baggy khaki pants, a black long-sleeved T-shirt with Mickey Mouse as the sor-cerer’s apprentice on it, and he had a wispy goatee that he kept tugging on as if he wanted to make sure it was still there.

  I showed him the digital photos I’d taken from the overpass on the ACE.“Abu, could somebody see a particular car approaching, shoot at it from this bridge here and hit the tire right when the driver’s swinging onto the ramp?”

  Abu pulled up his pants, which always looked well on their way to sliding down his thin hips to his knees.“Sure.Rambo could.” He was un-failingly agreeable, even when he was going to have to tell you no.“Hey, know what I mean? Somebody could stand on this bridge here, drop a concrete block on a school bus, cause a ten-vehicle collision.You’ve seen that, right? It’s a weird world of wackos out there.” He pointed past the sealed windows of his clean, neat, sensible lab.

  “If we found you the rifle, Abu, could ballistics get us a match?”

  He took off his glasses and looked at them, like they might tell him the answer.It wasn’t a good one for me.“No.” He smiled apologetically.

  “Not gonna happen, Jamie.”

  “You’re sure? If I brought you a Remington seven-millimeter rifle in here, and I said I could connect this guy to the victim, you couldn’t do a match?”

  He rolled his eyes at Danny.“I could say I got a match.But that bullet’s like the Terminator chewed on it.I don’t think so.I wouldn’t be counting on that, Detectives.”

  I told him it was getting to the point where I didn’t count on anything anymore.

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  Abu gave me a wise look.“That’s a downer.Don’t get in that place.

  No reason for a white girl to go there.” He grinned. “Not yet.” He pushed up the sleeves on his shirt; they fell back down.“You still look pretty okay.

  Go for it.You got time.Little time.”

  Danny Ventura thought Abu was hilarious.“Yeah, Abu, if she hurried up, she could have me.’Magine that.”

  Abu said, “I don’t want to.”

  “She’s taking me out to dinner tonight.”

  “Didn’t I say it was a weird world?”