A talent for murder, p.17
A Talent for Murder, page 17
“Like what?” I said.
“He’d wanted to be a writer, and at one point he was teaching high school English, but it was too hard and he felt as though he never had time to do his own work. So he got a job at a community college hoping he’d have more time to write there, but . . .”
“He’s filling his extra time with drinking.”
“He didn’t say that exactly, but that’s what’s happened. He was a sad guy.”
“When was the last time he’d seen Ethan?”
“He said it was about twelve years ago, that he just showed up randomly at Christmastime. This was in Cresskill when his parents were still alive. He said that the only person who was happy to see him was his mother.”
“What was he doing then, did he say?”
“For work? Scott didn’t know. He knew about Ethan’s journalism career, obviously, and said how jealous that had made him. Scott is Ethan’s older brother and he’d always talked about how he wanted to grow up to be a writer.”
“So it felt like a personal slight to Scott when his brother became a writer as well?”
“I guess that was what he was driving at. Or maybe just everything about his brother agitates him. He basically told me that he considers Ethan to be pure evil.”
“He used that word?”
“He did. Same as Vicky, right?”
“Yeah. Did he tell you why he thought he was evil?”
“He had a hard time describing it, but did say that even when Ethan was a toddler, sometimes he’d just stare at the rest of his family like they were exhibits in a zoo. Scott thinks he was born bad. I kept pushing him for specific examples of things he’d done, but he said that he would just quietly and subtly undermine everyone around him. He had one story, though. Scott’s senior year of high school he had a steady girlfriend. I wrote the name down. Here it is—Samantha Perry. Scott said he was in love with her, and it was pretty clear he’s actually still in love with her. During his senior year Scott went to California over spring break to visit cousins. Ethan had wanted to go as well, but his parents had told him that it was a special trip just for Scott. And while Scott was away on this trip apparently Samantha got really drunk at some house party and ended up having sex with two guys. It was huge gossip when he got back and he was crushed and he dumped Samantha, even though she claimed she didn’t really remember the party and she thought she’d been raped. He feels bad about it now, but at the time he was a teenager and his knee-jerk reaction was to blame his girlfriend.
“So the reason Scott told me this story was because months later he heard that Ethan had been at the same party where it had happened, which was strange because Ethan was younger and he wasn’t friends with seniors. And then he also heard that Ethan had been hanging out with Samantha while he had been in California. He said that when he’d heard that, he knew, without a shred of doubt, that Ethan had somehow arranged the whole thing. He didn’t know how he’d done it, but he knew. Maybe he’d been the one who drugged her and put her in that room. Maybe he’d told guys at the party that there was a passed-out girl they could go take advantage of. And Scott said something else. He said that when he got back from California he thought Ethan would still be pissed that he hadn’t been allowed to go, but Scott remembers that Ethan was in a great mood when he got back. At the time he didn’t think too much of it, but then he realized that his brother was happy that he’d found a way to wreck Scott’s life.”
“It sounds like he kind of did wreck his life.”
“Before I left I asked him if he wanted to try to find Samantha Perry, this old girlfriend. He told me she ODed years ago.”
“Sad,” I said as I walked across my room and shut the window against the cold.
“The only other useful thing I might have found out was that Ethan had been a writing major in college, or something like that, but that he’d minored in art history. Scott said that Ethan had always been fascinated with beauty, with looking at things. And not just looking but appraising. He remembers his brother talking about how the art world was this incredible grift, with art only being worth what people would be willing to pay for it. He said it wouldn’t surprise him if that was what his brother was doing now, something with art.”
“Huh,” I said. “That kind of chimes in with something I found out.”
I told him about my day, about my brief chat with Vicky, about breaking into their house. And then I pulled out the yearbook I’d stolen and opened it up to the page with the interesting inscription I’d found that had been written by an Alice Gilchrist. I read it aloud to him.
“To the Talented Mr. Saltz, I look forward to following your exploits on America’s Most Wanted and to seeing your face circled in that group shot of the art club on the glossy pages of a trashy true crime book. I’ll be the smudged face next to you that no one remembers. But no, really, I wish you a life of successful thievery and forgery. I wish we’d gotten to know each other just a little less. Love, the unnamed narrator. XO.”
“Wow,” Henry said. “Lots to unpack there.”
“I’ll take a picture of it and send it to you, but we obviously need to talk with her.”
“You think it’s a reference to The Talented Mr. Ripley?”
“I’m assuming it is. Even if they hadn’t read the book, there was a movie out around that time.”
“I remember it. And how did she sign it, the unnamed narrator? That’s interesting. By the way, how do you know who wrote the inscription if they didn’t sign it?”
“She drew one of those comic book bubbles coming from her picture. I’ll photograph it and send it to you. And then we need to find Alice Gilchrist. Let’s hope she’s still alive.”
After ending my call with Henry, I googled Alice Gilchrist and found her right away. She was a tattoo artist living in Queens, and also selling artwork on Etsy. She had her own website that confirmed she’d graduated from Cresskill High School the same year that Ethan Saltz had. I sent her an email asking if I could see her the following day, not specifying exactly why I wanted to meet. Then I went back downstairs and joined my father in the living room. I got us two tall, weak whiskey-and-waters, and settled in across from him on the less comfortable sofa. Something moved in the shadow cast by a tall bookshelf and startled me. It was April the cat darting out of the room.
“I didn’t know she came in here,” I said.
“Who?”
“The cat.”
“Was that a cat? I was betting on raccoon, and worried that Monk’s House had finally gone the way of Grey Gardens.”
“No, it’s a semi-feral cat I’ve called April. She comes and goes as she pleases, but mostly avoids Sharon.”
“Clever girl.”
“Dad,” I said
“Daughter,” he said back.
“If someone sent you a letter that began, To the Talented Mr. Kintner, what would you think?”
“I’d think they thought I was talented. And then I would read on with heightened interest.”
“But you wouldn’t think of any particular reference if someone addressed you as the talented Mr. Kintner?” I said.
My father raised his drink to his lips, then lowered it without taking a sip. “Oh, you mean Pat Highsmith.”
“That’s who I was thinking of.”
“It didn’t immediately jump into my mind, but now that you mention it . . . You always liked her books, didn’t you?”
“Some of them,” I said.
“Do we have any here?”
“Sure, probably.”
I got up and went to one of the built-in bookshelves that lined the south-facing wall of the room. We had two Highsmith firsts, The Cry of the Owl and The Talented Mr. Ripley, both British editions. I pulled out Ripley and looked at the frontispiece. Cresset Press, 1957. The dust jacket was a very nice drawing of the Italian seaside town where most of the story took place. I brought the book over to my father.
“Is this mine?” he said.
“I doubt it belonged to Mom,” I said.
My father started to flip through the book while I continued to think about the yearbook inscription from Ethan Saltz’s friend. As I’d said to Henry, it might have been a reference to either the book or the movie. Certainly the rest of Alice Gilchrist’s yearbook inscription to Ethan Saltz seemed to chime with the reference, mentioning that she looked forward to seeing him on America’s Most Wanted, and that she wished him a life of successful thievery and forgery. It was clear that she had a very good idea about what kind of person Saltz was.
Since my father now seemed to be immersed in his book, I flipped through the Anne Sexton collection that was still hanging around on the coffee table. I found a poem called “It Is a Spring Afternoon,” and read its first few lines: “Everything here is yellow and green. Listen to its throat . . .” I put my finger on that line and thought some more. Even though people can talk, can actually tell you what they are thinking, I still have a hard time understanding them. When I look at an animal, even something as inscrutable as a cat, I feel as though I comprehend the basic way they see the world, a place that flickers between danger and comfort, a place of hunger. Humans, the humans of the world today, seem alien to me. But I did think I knew Ethan Saltz a little, that I’d comprehended him back when I first met him. He was driven by cruelty, but also desire. And even though I thought he worked very hard at hiding it, there was some rage there as well. I’d seen it in him the night that I pulled Martha Ratliff out of his reach. But if Ethan was really shadowing Peralta, and killing women he’d come in contact with, then he was patient, too, willing to play a long game to get his revenge. And that meant that he had control over his emotions, at least he did until we met up in Saratoga Springs. Because, as soon as that happened, he drove straight to Portsmouth and killed Martha. Was it rage that caused him to do that? I didn’t think so. I thought he’d lost interest in Martha, so when he saw me he discarded her, doing it in a way that would get my attention. He wanted to play. With me.
I considered what else I knew about Ethan. It wasn’t just killing he desired. It was killing someone and then getting away with it. His primary end goal was to fool people, to feel superior to them. And it made sense that his alter ago, the fake person he had become, was also someone who felt superior to those around him. Whatever name he was going by, whatever life he was pretending to live, it wouldn’t be a small life. He wasn’t some warehouse worker with a basement apartment in a small town. No, he’d probably be working in some kind of profession in the arts. Maybe someone who worked in the movie industry, or television. Maybe an artist, like Alice Gilchrist. Maybe he was still writing, but under a pseudonym. But whatever he was doing it would be important that he be successful at it.
Before getting into bed that night I spent some more time on my laptop, not really knowing what I was looking for, but trying out searches anyway. First I used an anagram generator on the name Ethan Saltz to see if it generated a possible fake name he might be using, but it turned out that Ethan Saltz is a poor name for anagrams. Then I did multiple searches such as “Hollywood screenwriter pseudonym” and “artist criminal” and “scandal art world,” and came up with a glut of stories, real and unreal, unspooling in front of me. I switched the stories over to images and looked for Ethan’s face, but there was nothing. He was in this strange machine somewhere, I knew that much, but didn’t know where to find him.
Just when I was going to give up, Henry called.
“A Globe article just appeared on Martha Ratliff,” he said.
“About her murder?”
“Yes, just a few hours ago. Apparently the manner of death is similar to an unsolved homicide in the Portsmouth area from over a year ago. A woman alone, her throat cut during a home invasion.”
“That tracks,” I said. “I’ve been doing nothing but thinking of Ethan Saltz. He likes to fool people. My guess is that as soon as he figured out that he wanted to kill Martha Ratliff he checked up to see if there were unsolved cases close to her. And he found one, and he copied it. He did all this in about four hours, of course. But I think that fooling people—manipulation in general—is more important to him than the killings.”
“I can see that,” Henry said. “Or maybe he was the person who killed that other woman.”
“It’s all possible, I suppose.”
While we were talking, I checked my emails and saw that Alice Gilchrist had gotten back to me, saying she’d be happy to meet the next day at eleven in the morning.
Chapter 23
I got to Queens at ten thirty and found a parking space half a block from the storefront where Alice Gilchrist worked. The studio was called Fledgling Ink, and I’d studied their website a little before leaving Shepaug that morning. I had no real interest in tattoos, but I’d scrolled through the designs and decided that I liked them.
Alice and I were meeting at a coffee shop just next door to the shop. We’d emailed a little bit back and forth and I’d told her that I wasn’t a client, that I was interested in learning about Ethan Saltz. She’d immediately emailed back, Jesus, that’s a name from the past. What did he do?
I told her I was just looking for information that might help me find him. She said she had no idea but that she’d be happy to meet up.
As I entered the small, packed coffee shop, I spotted Alice right away. She had white-dyed hair cut to shoulder-length, a nose ring, and was wearing baggy overalls. I was looking at the top of her head because she was bent over a sketchbook, but she must have sensed me looking, because she glanced up, her face a flat plane, wide, with smooth, shiny skin and pale brown eyes. I asked her if she needed another coffee and she said, “No, I’m good,” so I grabbed myself a tea and joined her.
“Thank you for meeting me,” I said.
“My shop is right next door, so it wasn’t too much trouble. I know I asked you on email, but what did he do?”
“Ethan?”
“Yes.” She smiled, revealing perfectly straight teeth. There was something disconcerting about her appearance, but I couldn’t quite put a finger on it.
“I don’t know what he did. All I know is that he’s very hard to find.” I’d identified myself to Alice as Addie Logan, journalist, having sent my email through my alternative Gmail account. I’d also told her that a friend of mine had asked me to find Ethan as a favor.
“I just assumed he was in some kind of trouble. Legally,” Alice said.
“He might be, for all I know. When was the last time you saw him?”
“About five years after high school, and it was by accident. We were at the same gallery in New York. I don’t even remember where it was, but he was there, and he looked exactly like he did in school. A preppy serial killer.”
“You were friends in high school?”
“We were. Kind of. I thought he was funny.”
“How did you two meet?”
She thought for a moment, taking a sip of her cappuccino. “We were in Art Club together, but that’s not where we met. It’s where we became friends, though. It turned out that the teacher who started Art Club would basically leave us alone in the room and let us do whatever we wanted. There were no activities or anything, except for the one time we all went into New York to go to MoMA. I think that’s why most of us signed up in the first place, because of that trip, and because Art Club was something to put on our college applications. We kind of bonded on the trip to New York, I guess. I mean, we didn’t bond, but we talked. We were looking at all these modern pieces of art and he was going on about how brilliant they were, how the art world was the greatest scam in the whole world, and that his dream was to make a fortune selling fake art. And I was like, good luck with that. I mean, he was full of shit, but he was very entertaining. He told me once that he was a sociopath.”
“He did?”
“Yeah, but not on that trip, I think. It was when we knew each other better. There were two weeks in there when we were kind of best friends, inseparable, and then it just kind of ended. Or faded away. Or whatever you want to call it.”
“Which one of you ended the friendship?”
“I think it was him, to be honest. One day he just seemed to lose interest in me. I was hurt, I guess, but it was fucking high school. We weren’t married or anything.”
“Do you remember what you wrote in his yearbook?”
“Oh,” she said, looking surprised.
“That’s how I knew you were friends with him, your inscription in his yearbook.”
Her eyebrows rose a fraction as she tried to remember, and then I saw the memory pass across her features. “I kind of remember,” she said. “Only because it was a joke that I was signing it in the first place. I mean, Ethan wasn’t the type to go around getting his friends to sign his yearbook. He didn’t really have friends. And even when I signed it, we weren’t super-close. I think I ran into him after we’d all gotten our yearbooks and he was carrying his and I insisted that I get to sign it. I think I wrote something about how I’d one day see him on television when he was the subject of a manhunt. Something like that.”
I hadn’t brought the yearbook with me, but I’d photocopied the inscription, and I handed her a copy now. She laughed while she read it.
“I was a pretentious little shit.”
“Why did you call him the Talented Mr. Saltz?”
“Oh, from that Matt Damon movie about the guy who kills his friend and takes over his life. We’d both seen it—not together, I think—but Ethan told me how much he loved it, and how it was probably something he’d do himself one day. He was always saying things like that. In a jokey way. Like, ‘If I haven’t buried someone alive by the age of thirty, then I’ll be incredibly disappointed.’ That kind of thing.” She was still looking at the photocopy. “That’s why I made that joke here about the Art Club picture. After it was taken, he said that in fifty years the picture would be in the middle of some book about his life of horrible crime, his face circled, and I would just be some anonymous student next to him. I thought it was funny, clearly, because I remembered him saying that. But you’re here now, probably because he is some genuine psychopath and he wasn’t actually making jokes at the time.”
