Page 39 of A Talent for Murder

“Okay,” he said again, this time with some skepticism in his voice.

“Hear me out. He’s not picking them. Peralta goes on trips and cheats on Martha. With a woman he picks up at a bar, or a prostitute, or a stripper from a club. Peralta is picking the victims. This other man is killing them.”

“Because of Martha?”

“Because of Martha.”

“And now he’s killed her. Why didn’t he just start with that?”

“I have a sick feeling he did it because of me.”

“Because of you how?”

“I didn’t just spot him trailing Peralta, he spotted me as well. We spoke.”

“Jesus.”

“Right.”

“How was that?”

“It was awkward. Neither of us admitted why we were really there, but we both knew. He seemed amused, pleased almost. After our conversation he must have driven straight to Portsmouth and killed Martha. He did it as a challenge to me, I think.”

“Why wouldn’t he think you’d just turn him in?”

“I don’t know. Cockiness, I suppose. I have no proof. Plus, I think it’s possible that he’s no longer going by his old name, that maybe he’s disappeared.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because I was up all night trying to find him online. There’s stuff from fifteen years ago, but nothing new. That’s why I’m here talking with you.”

“You want me to find him?”

“Yes. I want you to find him, then I’ll do everything else.”

“What’s his name?”

Chapter21

Two days later I was standing outside the Fix and Finesse hair salon in Cresskill, New Jersey, trying to figure out the best way to approach Ethan Saltz’s sister.

After leaving Henry’s office, I’d driven back to Shepaug and spent a couple of hours listening to contradictory narratives of what had happened while I’d been away. My father claimed that he’d been fed nothing but salmon and kale salad for my entire absence, while my mother said that she’d gone to the diner twice to get my father double cheeseburgers. Neither account sounded remotely feasible to me. After my mother had retired for the night and after my father had fallen asleep in front of the television, I spoke with Henry on the phone to hear what he’d learned about Ethan Saltz. The man was a ghost. No current address. No arrest record. No car registration. There were a number of articles still available from when Ethan Saltz had been a journalist, mostly longer pieces with clickbait hooks. He’d profiled a woman who had married the drunken driver who had killed her first husband. There was an article about a group of pagan teenagers in Texas that had been anthologized in that year’s Best American Essays. He’d interviewed a Harvard student who claimed to have made over a million dollars running a sports betting operation from his dormitory room. But then, sometime around 2005, there were no more pieces. He’d stopped writing, or at the very least stopped publishing. And it seemed he’d changed his name.

Henry had found the same two photographs of Ethan Saltz that I had found online. One was a headshot that he used for his articles—Ethan looking very much the way I remembered him—and one was a group shot from his alumnae magazine, Vermont’s Camden College, Ethan in the back row of one of those wedding photographs that gathered all the alumnae of one college for a shot.

The most promising information that Henry had come up with were the names and locations of Ethan’s brother and sister. Scott Saltz taught literature arts at a community college on Cape Cod, and Victoria Andrucci, née Saltz, was a hairdresser in Cresskill, New Jersey. The Saltz parents were both dead, within a month of each other in 2012. Ethan had been mentioned as a survivor in both of their obituaries.

If anyone knew what Ethan was doing now, it would be his family. Henry had work numbers for each sibling, but we agreed that we’d have a much better chance of getting information if we saw them face-to-face. He was on the Cape now approaching the brother and I was in Cresskill outside Victoria Andrucci’s salon.

I’d already called and asked if she was working today and found out that she was. But simply entering the salon and asking her if she had time to talk—or time to give me a haircut—wasn’t going to work. Even if she did agree to talk, she might not open up inside the salon with other people around. I wanted to get her on her own. So I decided to wait.

It was just past three and the salon was open until six o’clock. But that didn’t mean Vicky would stay until closing time. If she didn’t have appointments, she’d probably leave early. Two storefronts down from Fix and Finesse was a bakery shop that looked as though it was also a café. Out front were two cast-iron tables, each with two chairs, all of them currently occupied. It was a beautiful day, the still-high sun bathing that side of the street in late afternoon light. I crossed over and went inside the bakery, buying a Earl Grey latte and a fresh cannoli. I sat just inside the plate-glass window that fronted the shop and kept an eye on the tables outside. I watched a pair of women talk away, empty plates and cups in front of them. One was wearing lots of makeup and a Burberry coat that probably cost more than two thousand dollars. The other was dressed in running clothes and doing most of the talking, while the Burberry lady tried to suppress yawns and kept surreptitiously checking her watch. Eventually the talker paused long enough for her friend to tell her that she had to get going. They stood up and finally left. I went outside and sat at their uncleared table.

It was a perfect spot. I could see the women that were coming and going from the salon. There had been a picture of Victoria on the website and, unless she’d changed her hairstyle, she had long blond streaky hair. Her face, wrinkled and overly tan, was unmistakably similar to Ethan’s. High cheekbones, light eyes, squared-off jaw. I thought I’d be able to recognize her.

I sipped my drink and picked at my cannoli. I wished I’d brought a book. But I did what everyone else in the world now did when they had time to kill and looked at my phone, googling random names from my past, and checking, as I sometimes did, if anything new was being written about my father. His name did show up in reviews of other books, and sometimes even academic studies, but these days it was more common to see his name prefaced by something along the lines of “literature’s oldest enfant terrible David Kintner.” Today I found a new piece, a top ten list on the Guardian website that called my father’s novel Left Over Right one of the top ten books about style. I made a mental note to mention it to him later, knowing that even though he’d pretend not to care, he would be pleased.

By five o’clock the sun had sunk below the old Sears building across the street and it was suddenly cold. I buttoned up my cardigan and stayed where I was, carefully watching the front entrance of the salon. It occurred to me that there might be a back entrance as well, but there was nothing I could do about that if there was. It was just past six when a woman with long blond hair exited onto the sidewalk, pausing to light a cigarette. I got up briskly from my chair and walked over to her. She was having trouble with her lighter but had finally lit her cigarette by the time I was within speaking distance.

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