9
AT ROUGHLY THIRTY-THREE THOUSAND FEET OVER ALTOONA, Pennsylvania, Seth Goldman finally began to unwind. For a man who had found himself inside an airplane an average of three days a week for the past four years— they had just taken off from Philadelphia, heading to Pittsburgh, they’d be returning in only a few hours— he was still a white-knuckle flier. Every bump of turbulence, every raised aileron, every air pocket filled him with dread.
But now, in the well-appointed Learjet 60, he began to unwind. If you had to fly, sitting in a rich butter-cream leather seat, with burl wood and brass appointments around you, and a fully stocked galley at your disposal, was definitely the way to go.
Ian Whitestone was sitting at the rear of the jet, shoes off, eyes closed, headphones on. It was at times like these— when Seth knew where his boss was, with the day’s activities planned and security in place— that he allowed himself to relax.
Seth Goldman was born thirty-seven years ago as Jerzy Andres Kiedrau, hardscrabble-poor in Muse, Florida. The only son of a sassy, opinionated woman and a black-hearted man, he had been an unplanned, unwanted late-life baby, and from the first days he could remember, his father had reminded him of this.
When Krystof Kiedrau wasn’t beating his wife, he was beating and berating his only son. Some nights the arguments got so loud, the bloodletting became so brutal, that young Jerzy had to flee the trailer, running far into the low scrub fields that bordered the trailer park, coming home at dawn covered with sand beetle bites and the welts of a hundred mosquito stings.
During those years, Jerzy had one solace: the movies. He had worked odd jobs, scrubbing down trailers, running errands, cleaning pools, and as soon as he had enough for a matinee, he would hitchhike to Palmdale and the Lyceum Theater.
He recalled many afternoons in the cool darkness of the theater, a place where he could lose himself in the world of fantasy. Early on he realized the power of the medium to transport, to exalt, to mystify, to terrify. It was a love affair that never ended.
When he returned home, if his mother was sober, he would discuss the film he had seen with her. His mother knew all about the movies. She had once been an actress, having appeared in more than a dozen films, making her debut as a teenager in the late 1940s under the stage name Lily Trieste.
She had worked with all the important directors of noir— Dmytryk, Siodmak, Dassin, Lang. The shining moment in her career— a career that mostly had her lurking in shadowed alleys, smoking unfiltered cigarettes with a slew of nearly handsome men sporting thin mustaches and double-breasted notch-lapel suits— had been a scene with Franchot Tone, a scene where she uttered one of Jerzy’s favorite lines of noir dialogue. Standing in the doorway to a cold-water walk-up, she had stopped brushing her hair, turned to the actor, who was being led away by the authorities, and said:
“I spent the morning washing you out of my hair, baby. Don’t make me give you the brush.”
By the time she reached her midthirties, the industry cast her aside. Not wanting to settle for the crazy-aunt roles, she moved to Florida to live with her sister, and it was there she met her future husband. Her career had long been over by the time she’d given birth to Jerzy at the age of forty-seven.
At fifty-six, Krystof Kiedrau was diagnosed with advanced cirrhosis of the liver, the result of drinking a fifth of bottom-shelf whiskey every day for thirty-five years. He was told that if he drank another drop of alcohol, he could fall into an alcohol-induced coma, which could ultimately prove fatal. For a few months, the warning had scared Krystof Kiedrau into abstinence. Then, after losing his part-time job, Krystof had tied one on and come home blind drunk.
He beat his wife mercilessly that night, the final blow, one that drove her head into a sharp cabinet handle, pierced her temple, causing a deep gash. By the time Jerzy got home from his job sweeping up the auto body shop in Moore Haven, his mother had bled to death in the corner of the kitchen, and his father was sitting in his chair, half a bottle of whiskey in his hand, three full bottles at his side, his grease-stained wedding album in his lap.
Fortunately for young Jerzy, Krystof Kiedrau was too far gone to stand up, let alone light into him.
Late into the night Jerzy poured his father glass after glass of whiskey, at times helping the man bring the filthy tumbler to his lips. By midnight, with two bottles left, Krystof began to drift in and out of a stupor, and could no longer hold the glass. Jerzy then began to pour the whiskey directly down his father’s throat. By four thirty, his father had consumed a total of four full fifths of alcohol, and at exactly five ten that morning he fell into an alcohol coma. A few minutes later he took his final foul breath.
A few hours later, with both his parents dead, the flies already seeking out their decaying flesh in the stifling confines of the trailer, Jerzy called the police.
After a brief investigation, during which Jerzy said barely a word, he was placed into a group home in Lee County where he learned the art of persuasion and social manipulation. At eighteen he went to Edison Community College. He was a quick study, a brilliant student, and he attacked his studies with a fervor for knowledge he had never known was within him. Two years later, his associate’s degree in hand, Jerzy moved to North Miami, where he sold cars by day and earned his bachelor’s degree at night at Florida International University. Eventually he worked his way to sales manager.
Then one day a man walked into the dealership. An extraordinary-looking man: slender, dark-eyed, bearded, brooding. He reminded Seth of a young Stanley Kubrick in his guise and carriage. The man was Ian Whitestone.
Seth had seen Whitestone’s lone low-budget feature film and, although it had been a commercial flop, Seth had known that Whitestone would move on to bigger and better things.
As it turned out, Ian Whitestone was a huge fan of noir. He knew Lily Trieste’s work. Over a few bottles of wine they had discussed the genre. By morning’s light, Whitestone hired him as a production assistant.
Seth knew that a name like Jerzy Andres Kiedrau wouldn’t get him too far in show business, so he decided to change it. The last name was easy. He had long considered William Goldman one of the screenwriting gods, had admired his work for many years. And if anyone made the connection, assuming that Seth was in some way related to the writer of
Marathon Man, Magic,
and
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,
he would not go out of his way to disabuse them of the notion.
Hollywood, after all, turned on illusion.
Goldman was easy. The first name was a little harder. He decided to take a biblical name to make the Jewish illusion complete. Although he was about as Jewish as Pat Robertson, the deception didn’t hurt. One day, he took out a Bible, closed his eyes, opened it at random, and stabbed a page. He would take the first name he came across. Unfortunately, he didn’t really look like a Ruth Goldman. Nor did he favor Methuselah Goldman. His third stab was the winner. Seth. Seth Goldman.
Seth Goldman would get a table at L’Orangerie.
In the past five years he had risen quickly at White Light Pictures. He had begun as a production assistant, doing everything from setting up craft service, to shuttling extras, to picking up Ian’s dry cleaning. Then he helped Ian develop a script that was to change everything, a supernatural thriller called
Dimensions.
Ian Whitestone’s screenplay made the rounds, but because of his less-than-stellar box-office record, everyone turned it down. Then Will Parrish read it. The superstar actor who had made his name in the action genre had been looking for a change. The sensitive role of the blind professor appealed to him, and within a week the film was green-lighted.
Dimensions
became a worldwide sensation, grossing more than six hundred million dollars. It put Ian Whitestone instantly onto the A-list. It turned Seth Goldman from a lowly PA to Ian’s executive assistant.
Not bad for a trailer rat from Glades County.
Seth flipped through his binder of DVDs. What to watch? He wouldn’t be able to see all of the film before they landed, whatever he chose, but whenever he had even a few minutes of downtime, he liked to fill it with a movie.
He decided on
Les Diaboliques,
the 1955 film with Simone Signoret; a film about betrayal, murder, and above all secrets— something Seth knew all about.
For Seth Goldman, the city of Philadelphia was full of secrets. He knew where blood had stained the earth, where the bones were buried. He knew where evil walked.
Sometimes, he walked with it.
10
FOR ALL THAT VINCENT BALZANO WAS NOT, HE
WAS
A DAMN good cop. In his ten years as an undercover narcotics officer, he had put together some of the biggest busts in Philadelphia’s recent history. Vincent was already an undercover legend due to his chameleon-like ability to move through drug circles on all sides of the table— cop, junkie, dealer, snitch.
His Rolodex of informants and garden-variety skeeves was as thick as anyone’s. Right now, there was one particular skeeve Jessica and Byrne were interested in. She hadn’t wanted to call Vincent— their relationship teetered on the wrong word, the casual reference, the misplaced emphasis— and the marriage counselor’s office was probably the best place for them to interact at this point.
Still, there was a case on the wheel, and sometimes you had to overlook personal issues for the job.
As she waited for her husband to come back to the phone, Jessica thought about where they were in this strange case— no body, no suspect, and no motive. Terry Cahill had run a VICAP search, which yielded nothing similar to the MO of the
Psycho
tape. The FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program was a nationwide data center designed to collect, collate, and analyze crimes of violence, specifically murder. The closest hits on Cahill’s search were videotapes made by street gangs that recorded initiation rites of new recruits making their bones.
Jessica and Byrne had interviewed Emily Trager and Isaiah Crandall, the two people besides Adam Kaslov who had rented
Psycho
from The Reel Deal. Neither interview yielded much. Emily Trager was
well
over seventy and walked with an aluminum walker— a little detail Lenny Puskas had neglected to tell them. Isaiah Crandall was in his late fifties, short, and Chihuahua-jumpy. He worked as a short-order cook at a diner on Frankford Avenue. He nearly fainted when they showed him their badges. He didn’t strike either detective as the type with the kind of stomach needed to do what was done on that tape. He certainly wasn’t the body type.
Both had said that they watched the movie, start to finish, and there was nothing out of the ordinary. A call back to the video store revealed that both had returned the film well within the rental period.
The detectives ran both names through NCIC and PCIC, retrieving nothing. Both were clean. Ditto on Adam Kaslov, Lenny Puskas, and Juliet Rausch.
Somewhere between the time Isaiah Crandall had returned the film and the time Adam Kaslov took it home, someone had gotten the tape and replaced the famous shower scene with one of their own.
The detectives did not have a lead— without a body, a lead was not likely to fall into their laps— but they did have a direction. A little digging revealed that The Reel Deal was owned by a man named Eugene Kilbane.