Page 41 of A Talent for Murder

“Tell me more.”

“I went to the brother’s office at the college and asked him directly about Ethan. I told him I’d been hired by someone to locate him, but that I couldn’t disclose the name of the client. He didn’t seem surprised, exactly, definitely not surprised that I couldn’t find him, but he did seem rattled. Emotionally rattled. His office hours were starting, so we made plans to meet at his bar at four o’clock.”

“What do you mean, his bar?”

“The bar that Scott Saltz hangs out at. It’s a dive called the Bullpen. He’s an alcoholic, or else working real hard on becoming one. We actually had a lot in common. I’m not calling myself an alcoholic, but there were other things.”

“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.”

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