Barbara Lambert’s death didn’t end the world or even get it down. A beautiful weekend began the next day, its flawless blue sky as jarring to me as a pink or green one would have been. I woke from an hour’s sleep with the worst hangover I’d had in years, a headache and an unsteadiness way out of proportion to the evening’s few beers. While this flashback to my youthful drinking dragged on, a phrase ran around and around in my head like a bit of a song or a jingle. The phrase lacked the rhythm of a jingle, but it did have alliteration going for it: “an awful accident.”
The little I’d learned over the phone from Kate Amato appeared in Saturday’s Post in a section reserved for late-breaking local news. The entire story wasn’t much longer than its headline: “Hit and Run Kills Woman in Absecon.” There were one or two additional details. The accident had been witnessed by Barbara’s cousin, Joan Noll, who had been seated in Barbara’s parked car. She’d watched Barbara start to cross busy Bannon Street in the middle of the block. Seconds later, she’d seen her cousin struck down by a large blue car that seemed to Noll to have come from nowhere. In place of useful facts, like the make and model of the car, the story gave the number of feet Barbara’s body had traveled through the air—twenty-five—and the dehumanizing detail that her shoes had remained at the spot where she’d originally been struck.
The little article had no byline, but I was fairly certain that it hadn’t been written by Amato. For one thing, it didn’t mention Barbara’s connection to the murders at Lake Trevlac. A subsequent article might, if Barbara rated a subsequent article. Nor did the Post speculate on Barbara’s reason for being on Bannon Street, which Amato had surely worked out. I had managed it even before I’d hung up on the reporter. Barbara had gone there after Grace Conti’s secret. Either she hadn’t trusted me to get it or she’d been too impatient to wait. Perhaps, in addition to sensing the presence of the Nameless, Barbara had foreseen that she was running out of time; perhaps sensing the Nameless was the same thing as running out of time.
My own time seemed limitless because I couldn’t think of a single useful thing to do. I tried calling Joan Noll in Ventnor City, but her line was steadily busy. Noll had surely sat outside my house during my last interview with Barbara, supporting her cousin as she had in the cemetery. That explained why Barbara hadn’t let me walk her to her car. She’d admitted to being frightened, but she hadn’t wanted me to know how true the charge had been.
In between calls to Noll, I made equally frustrating ones to Grace Conti. In place of busy signals, Conti’s phone gave me endless unanswered rings. I was soon tired of the phone and of my house. As on the evening before, too many women were coming and going, although now, like Marilyn, they only came and went in memory.
Joan Noll wasn’t listed in the phone book. Barbara had given me her cousin’s unlisted number, which might be worth having if Noll ever hung up her phone. In the meantime, it meant that I couldn’t even visit her. I drove instead to an address I knew— Grace Conti’s. I wasn’t discouraged by the widow’s failure to answer her phone. I saw that as a new tactic in her ongoing negotiations with the Post. Those negotiations were about to break wide open. I was going to do my own lying and promise Conti anything in exchange for her secret. It was too late for the secret to bring Barbara Lambert peace of mind, but I wanted it anyway. Perhaps for my own peace of mind.
Bannon Street had recovered from the accident. The traffic was heavy and schizophrenic: One lane was backed up from the Route 9 intersection and the other carried escapees from that highway still traveling at highway speed. I parked as Barbara and her cousin had done, on the opposite side of the road from the Conti house, and paced the shoulder looking for some trace of the accident. I found surprisingly little. An X was chalked on the pavement under the fast-moving lane of traffic. It was already well on its way to being erased. A few uncut diamonds of headlight glass lay in the gutter at my feet, but I couldn’t tell if they’d come from the car that struck Barbara. Broken headlights had to be common on a street that took so little notice of a death.
I’d intended to cross Bannon at the point marked by the chalk X, but somehow I’d drifted a little to the west by the time a break in the traffic came. That act of cowardice led to another discovery. In the road near the far curb I almost stepped on the remains of a highway flare. The bit of gutted tube was stuck into the pavement on a pointed metal tip like the business end of a nail, and it made me think of a spent votive candle. I pulled it out of the pavement before I stepped onto the safety of the curb. As physical evidence, the flare was perfectly useless. That might have been why I felt brave enough to pick it up.
I put the bit of flare into my pocket when I rounded the weeping willow trees and saw a stranger on the porch of Mrs. Conti’s house. He saw me at the same time and took his hand from the brass knocker. He also turned to face me, a move that forced me to finish my walk to the veranda.
I said hello when I was on the first flagstone step.
“Hello, Mr. Keane,” the stranger said.
I froze at the sound of my name, and the stranger smiled. He was well under six feet and stocky, except for his arms, which were as thin as they were hairy. They hung limply from the broad, short sleeves of his burgundy dress shirt. The shirt was open at the neck, displaying more black body hair. The man’s gray slacks were textured polyester and his black dress shoes had toes as pointy as cowboy boots. His head was slightly less pointy. It was the only part of him that wasn’t doing well in the hair department. The stubborn tuft centered above his heavy brows and dark eyes had all the earmarks of a last stand.
“Nervous?” the man asked.
I finished the climb to the veranda but stayed close to the top step. “This morning I am,” I said. “How is it you know my name?”
“Lucky guess. Mine’s Fruscione. I’m an investigator with the Atlantic County prosecutor’s office.”
It was the same job John Ruba and Patrick Derry had held in a different county and a different state and a very different time.
“The young woman who was killed out there on Bannon last night,” Fruscione said. “Her cousin told me that she’d come here to talk with a Mrs. Conti. The cousin also told me about visiting you last night. I was going to stop by to talk to you. You saved me a drive.”
“Did the cousin also describe me?”
“She must have,” Fruscione said.
I was too polite to point out that Joan Noll and I had never met. I was more interested in the investigator’s reason for being there. Fruscione’s boss was the top law-enforcement officer in the county. The prosecutor’s office would take a leading role in any big case. A murder investigation, for example. But they wouldn’t bother with a hit-and-run.
A newspaper bound up with a rubber band lay at Fruscione’s feet. He rolled it over with the pointy toe of one of his shoes.
The paper was the latest edition of the Post, the one containing the description of Barbara’s accident. It didn’t hold the detective’s interest for long. He turned to rap the knocker again. “Mrs. Conti doesn’t seem to be home. What were you going to talk to her about?”
He had to know that answer already, so I improvised a substitute. “I was going to ask her if she drives a big blue car.”
That produced another lazy smile. “She doesn’t. Doesn’t drive at all—I checked. Must be the only adult in New Jersey without a license. It was a Lincoln Town Car, by the way. The Absecon cops showed Ms. Noll some pictures this morning, and she picked it out. So did another witness, a driver waiting to pull off of Nine. Probably an ’88 or an ’89 Town Car. It was a flashy shade of blue that Lincoln only offered those two years. Jersey plates, maybe.”
“Headed west,” I said.
“Right. You knew it had to be west because of the traffic pattern. Eastbound traffic gets too bogged down by the Route Nine light to hurt anybody.”
Actually, I’d known the car had been heading west because I’d wanted it to be heading east. Barbara had turned west onto Bannon herself. If the car that hit her had been eastbound—if it hadn’t been following her—it would have made it that much easier for me to believe in the “awful accident” mantra that was still running through my head.
I had the unsettling feeling that Investigator Fruscione could hear that mantra clearly. “Why would anyone want to kill her?” he asked.
“No one would.”
“Nothing in it for anybody. She wasn’t an heiress or anything.”
“No.”
“No. And there couldn’t be a connection to those murders in the Poconos all those years ago.”
“It doesn’t seem possible,” I said.
“I remember when they happened. I was ten. It stuck in my mind. A family being killed off like that.”
I waited for him to add that the case had inspired his career choice. To help him along, I said, “And you recognized Barbara Lambert’s name when you heard about the accident.”
“Nope.”
His tone said, “Guess again,” so I did. “Do you specialize in old, unsolved murders?”
“Someone seems to think I do. Walk with me a ways.”
He stepped past me off the porch and started up the drive. I fell into step beside him.
“What do you specialize in, Mr. Keane? You’re not a licensed private investigator. You’re not an investigative reporter or any other kind of reporter. Just what is it that makes you so fascinating?”
“Who finds me fascinating?” I asked. I was studying our feet, struggling to match his short, irregular strides. When I looked up, the detective was no longer smiling his lazy smile. I noted that he had a face made for not smiling. It was a heavy face, and it appeared to be slipping downward. The movement was led by his heavy eyelids, which had drooped noticeably. When we were abreast of the sheltering willows, he stopped walking and turned to face me.
“This Lambert woman must have seen something in you. She trusted you to solve her family’s murder. She didn’t go to a licensed PI, which would have been just a hair smarter. She didn’t go to the police.”
“She did try the police. The Atlantic City police. They turned her down.”
That seemed to be news to Fruscione. He thought about it and shrugged. “Twenty-year-old, unsolved case. What did she expect?”
“A little empathy?” I asked.
“Empathy? That’s like sympathy right? Only different.”
“It means understanding another person’s feelings.”
“Huh. Is that what she got from you—empathy? Were you two fucking kindred spirits? More to the point, what did you get from her? Did you take money from her?”
“She didn’t have any money.”
“You sure?”
“Ask her cousin.”
“Maybe you were after sex. Would her cousin know about that? A girl that young and vulnerable, she’d be an easy mark. You sleep with her?”
“No.”
“How about Kate Amato?”
“What?”
Fruscione didn’t answer me. His eyelids had slid down even more, so much so that he had to tilt his head backward slightly to see me.
“You didn’t get all this background from Joan Noll,” I said. “You got it from Kate. She called to tell you that this might be more than a standard hit-and-run. She’s the one who described me to you.”
“In pretty serious detail.”
I fought an urge to swallow and asked, “You and Kate are friends?” Even as my questions went, it was a stupid one.
Fruscione stopped short of hitting me for it. “We’re talking about you and Kate.”
“What about the woman who died here last night?”
“She died crossing the street. In the dark. In the middle of the block. Wearing black, for Christ’s sake. She was asking to get hit. It had nothing to do with any murders in Pennsylvania. It most especially had nothing to do with any article Kate wrote. Anyone who tries to fill her head full of that guilty shit is going to answer to me.”
“Where is Mrs. Conti?”
“How the hell should I know? She’s at the hairdresser maybe or sunning her old bones at the beach. Wherever she is, I’m going to find her. I’m going to prove to Kate that Conti’s deep, dark secret is no more than a lonely old woman’s sick imagination.”
“I’d like to know that for sure myself,” I said.
Fruscione didn’t believe me, which meant that Kate hadn’t told him everything about me. And probably not all that much about us. I decided to call his bluff.
“Let me know when you find Mrs. Conti,” I said as I started down the drive.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Fruscione demanded.
“To console a reporter.”