Page 42 of A Talent for Murder

“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?”

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