Don’t Look Now

by Richard Montanari

  Soon a figure approached his car, but due to the distance and the darkness, Paris couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. The door swung open and the figure entered from the driver’s side. Paris moved to the edge of the sidewalk. He could see a flashlight moving around inside the car, its beam playing off the white interior ceiling. Paris stepped out on to Shaker Boulevard and waited for the traffic to pass, hoping he could take advantage of that small window of opportunity between the time his suspect saw the boxes were empty and the time his suspect turned to bolt.

  Paris drew his weapon and ran.

  Before he had taken three steps, the car door slammed hard and the figure ran through the breezeway between the shops, toward the parking-lot on Drexmore.

  Paris gave chase, racing across the square at full speed, nearly slipping twice on the rain-slicked RTA tracks in the process. By the time he reached the parking-lot it was dark and empty. Just a few cars scattered around. Nothing moving.

  He caught his breath slowly. When he was satisfied that he had fucked up the one and only lead he was ever going to get in this case – a case that was officially closed – he walked back to his car and looked inside. A few of the cardboard boxes were slashed, as was the upholstery on both the front and back seats. Paris got in and pounded his fists against the steering wheel.

  And that’s when he saw the third white envelope on the dash-board. He opened it. Inside was a picture, a photograph that told Jack Paris that nothing was closed.

  Nothing at all.

  33

  ‘HI, HOW WAS the show?’

  Beth found it hard to believe that she was sitting there chatting on the telephone with her husband’s new girlfriend. What a difference a few years can make, she thought. At one point in their relationship she and Jack had even resorted to eavesdropping on each other’s telephone conversations because of their petty jealousies, and here they were schmoozing with each other’s significant others. As soon as Beth heard the woman’s voice on the phone, with its take-charge aplomb, any and all doubts she’d had about the woman disappeared.

  ‘It was wonderful. I think Missy has permanently moved into the model home they’ve built down here. You should see the little-girls’ room.’

  ‘Justin Bieber posters and lots of ruffles?’ Beth asked.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Every entertainment device at the Apple store?’

  ‘You’ve got it.’

  Beth laughed. ‘Did she behave herself?’

  ‘Oh my, yes. You’re raising a very polite and intelligent little girl here.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you to say.’

  ‘Did you know she had an interest in pyramids? There’s a huge one here and Missy did five minutes on the history of the pyramid. I was very impressed.’

  ‘I had no idea,’ Beth said, not at all sure how she felt about her daughter moving from ‘Melissa’ to ‘Missy’ in two short afternoons. ‘But, I have to say, she’s been curious her whole life. Her father’s a detective, after all.’ Beth was so thrilled that she had brought Jack up at that moment. She flashed to the two of them in bed.

  ‘I’m afraid we’ve cooked up a few more outings in the near future. I hope I’m not overstepping any boundaries.’

  ‘No,’ Beth said, lying through her teeth. ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Well, the reason I’m calling is that I’m afraid I won’t be able to drop her off as planned. I just got paged and I have to rush back to work tonight. We’re just about finished eating and I was wondering if it would be okay if I dropped her off at Jack’s. I’m only a few blocks away.’

  ‘Sure,’ Beth said. ‘I do appreciate you calling, though. Just tell Jack to give me a ring when he’s ready to drop her off.’

  ‘Not a problem. I know how mothers can worry. I also wanted to say thanks for a lovely afternoon with Melissa.’

  ‘Anytime,’ Beth answered.

  Beth decided that she would sort out her feelings later For now, as she hung up the phone, she had to admit that she felt a little jealous and a lot surprised that Jack Paris – he of the endless litany of short con games – would end up with someone quite this nice.

  34

  PARIS’S HANDS TREMBLED as he turned the photograph over and over in the red light thrown from the traffic signal. The image was of a girl – bound with rope, hand and foot – lying in the trunk of a car. A white car, by the look of the trim.

  As Paris stared at the picture, even though the girl’s face was turned away from the lens, it didn’t take long for him to identify the red cardigan sweater and plaid kilt.

  It was Melissa.

  On the back was a message:

  ‘Saila does Chinatown.’

  Beneath that, an address he did not recognize.

  35

  SAILA CLICKED OFF her cell. It was a burner phone, untraceable. Jack Paris’s ex-wife was as gullible as she had hoped and it had given her more time with Melissa, more time to work Jack.

  Because, you see, Jack Paris had fucked her at Shaker Square. Jack Paris had bent her over and fucked her like a common harlot.

  And now it was time to pay the whore.

  The woman making the wounded-animal sounds from the trunk of the BMW was beginning to wear down. Thank God. The little girl was now sitting in the front seat of the car, perfectly calm, burning holes in her with her fiercely defiant brown eyes. What a beauty she was.

  Saila dialed another number.

  ‘Hello?’ the man’s voice answered.

  ‘Guess who?’

  ‘I know who.’

  ‘How is my Pharaoh?’ Saila asked.

  ‘I miss your cunt.’

  ‘Bad little tom,’ she replied. ‘My cunt misses you.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘My tail is so high.’

  ‘When and where?’

  ‘It’s why I called,’ Saila said. ‘Not tonight.’

  ‘But I—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  Saila closed her phone. There was something fundamentally wrong with the deductive processes of a certain type of man, she thought.

  She’d see about Paris.

  36

  THE HEADWAITER AT Kowloon Garden, a slight, nervous man named Anton Fong, said he had seated a girl and a woman matching Diana and Melissa’s general descriptions earlier in the evening, but he also remembered clearly that they weren’t alone, that he had seen a man and a woman sitting with them, but only from the back. Then, Fong said, he went into the kitchen. When he returned to the dining room, ten minutes later, they were all gone and a fifty-dollar bill tented on the table.

  ‘Fifty dollar,’ Fong said. ‘Can you imagine? Fifty dollar for water and tea.’

  None of the other five waiters were able to say for sure that they had seen the foursome actually leave the restaurant.

  Paris headed down Chester Avenue to East Fifty-fifth Street. Then he turned south, toward Carnegie and University Circle.

  Tarleton Street was an odd enclave of twenty or so small bungalows that sat atop University Hill, surrounded by scores of dormitories, classroom buildings and high-rise residences for the students and faculty of Case Western Reserve University. The houses were built in the early fifties to accommodate visiting faculty. Yet, despite the ethereal orange glow from the nearby RTA train stop, the street had a pretty active crime element, consisting mostly of burglaries and reports of radios being stolen from the cars that were forced to park on the street. There had once been a series of rapes in the long tunnel leading to the RTA stop. Paris had been in on that collar as a rookie.

  But this night, the incandescence from the train platforms didn’t even make it up the hill. At least half the lamps were out and the remainder of the light seemed to be swallowed by the hedges and trees. Tarleton Street was bathed in darkness.

  The address on the back of the photograph was 15203.

  Paris found the house, third from last on the dead end street, cut the headlights and the engine, then rolled q
uietly to a stop. He checked his weapon and got out of the car.

  The front door to the cottage was unlocked and slightly ajar. Paris pushed it open with the barrel of his weapon and felt along the wall for a light switch. Within moments he found one and flipped it on. A table lamp, set on the floor directly beneath the switch, blazed to life, showing him that the front room was empty. He stepped inside.

  The living room had a worn, shabby look to it. The furniture consisted of a stained maroon couch against one wall, a coffee table, a small desk with an all-in-one fax machine/phone/ copier, a crate with a TV. There was also a broken-down hutch at the other side of the L-shaped dining room.

  As Paris drew closer to the dining area, his weapon raised, he noticed that the coffee table was seventies vintage, covered with ash trays and magazines, a few condom wrappers, a tipped wineglass. He also noticed a pair of half-smoked joints sticking out of the forest of lipstick-stained filters in one tray. To the left of the living room was the kitchen, small and filthy, also empty. Straight ahead Paris could see what looked to be a bedroom. He sidled up to the doorway, reached around the jamb and found another switch.

  The bedroom was long and narrow. It had obviously been two rooms at one time. At one end was a double mattress on the floor; next to it sat a camcorder on a tripod. At the foot of the bed was a small pile of women’s lingerie and nightclothes. The other side of the room looked like a smaller version of a Gold’s Gym: exercise bicycle, rower, lat machine, as well as a set of free weights.

  But the display in the bedroom didn’t come close to the display inside the crudely crafted walk-in closet. Inside was an extensive pegboard array of oils and perfumes, handcuffs and leather restraints, whips and dog collars, a wall of hoods and masks and leashes and head-pieces. One side held virtually every sex toy that Paris had ever encountered in his life, as well as a good many he had not. Another wall held an elaborate collection of wigs and leather clothing: skirts, vests, chaps, thigh-high boots.

  On the floor was a small cardboard box full of photos. Most were standard bondage fare, similar to the ‘Saila does Quality’ photo. Women in leather restraints. Men in rubber suits, clamped into a bizarre collection of devices. Most wore leather masks, and for that reason, no one was immediately identifiable. As Paris began to flip through the pile, he found the photos near the bottom to be increasingly more graphic and violent, more sadistic. Some were close-ups of lacerations and cuts; some, pictures of dark purple welts against soft white flesh, wounds most likely caused by a whip.

  But it was one of the last photos in his hand that stopped him cold. Suddenly, in the midst of all this madness, Paris saw a room he recognized. It was the bathroom of room 118 at the Radisson. The photograph showed Eleanor Burchfield curled up on the tile floor, fetal, her throat laid wide open, a shiny pool of blood gathering beneath her head.

  Although Paris had seen hundreds and hundreds of crime-scene photographs in his career, thousands of color and black-and-white images of carnage and violence and mayhem, the fact that Melissa was in the hands of a monster at that moment, a monster to which he could not put a face, made all the difference in the world.

  He barely made it to the sink.

  Three minutes later, the fax phone rang. The built in answering machine got to it before Paris did.

  ‘Hi … If you’re sending a fax, send it now. If you’d like to leave a voice message, wait for the beep. Thanks …’

  ‘Pick it up,’ came the voice from the speaker. Cold and sinister. Paris instantly recognized the sound of the voice scrambler. It was a woman, but Paris could not identify the voice. It sounded like computer speech.

  Paris lifted the phone in a blind fury. ‘Who the fuck is this?’

  ‘Are you on the fax phone?’

  ‘Diana?’

  Silence.

  ‘Saila?’

  Silence.

  ‘Answer me,’ Paris said. ‘Who is this?’

  After a few moments, the woman said, ‘I’m going to hang up.’

  ‘No!’

  He waited. The electronic hiss gave him hope that the caller was still on the line.

  ‘Is Melissa all right?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Put her on. Let me speak to her.’

  ‘Right away, detective. Listen—’

  ‘No, you listen. You’re going to tell me where my daughter is, and I’m going to come and get her. One scenario, that’s it.’

  The caller laughed. ‘I’m not going to hurt your daughter, detective. Not yet, anyway. Because there’s still a way out of this. It involves the destruction of evidence, though. I hope you don’t have a problem with that.’

  ‘Not when it comes to my daughter,’

  ‘Good. By the way, how did I look to you in those pictures?’

  Paris wanted to snap the phone in half. He remained silent.

  ‘I want an answer. I want the right answer.’

  Paris took a deep breath. ‘You looked good.’

  ‘Did you want to fuck me when you saw them?’

  He had to play the game. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you get hard?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Another fun house laugh. ‘You said the right thing, detective.’

  Paris heard a car pass loudly by the caller’s location.

  ‘Speaking of photographs, I’ll prove to you that Melissa is fine. You see that table by the front door?’

  Paris gripped the phone a little more tightly. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Open the drawer.’

  Paris found that the phone cord nearly reached the table. He leaned over and opened the drawer. Inside was another photograph. It was a color picture of Melissa sitting on the couch, not five feet from where he stood. His daughter looked about eighteen in the photograph, make-up and teased hair having transformed her into a woman. She wore an oversized white terry-cloth robe.

  ‘You sick fuck.’

  ‘She looks really good there, doesn’t she?’

  ‘My hand to God, I will hunt you down. You touch her and you don’t see a fucking courtroom. You hear me?’

  ‘Like a little lady.’

  ‘She’s eleven years old!’

  ‘She told me that she’s nearly twelve. That’s almost a teenager. Something tells me that you’re not going to cope too well with the hormone years.’

  Paris took a deep, calming breath. It had absolutely no effect upon him whatsoever. ‘Do you have any idea what I’d like to do to you right now?’

  ‘Girls just wanna have fun, Jack.’

  ‘Who the fuck is this?’

  ‘Back to business. I am going to say these things once. I want you to listen, do precisely what I tell you to do, and not to speak, not even one word. Can you hear me, kitty cat?’

  Silence.

  ‘Good boy. But you may answer me this one time.’

  ‘Yes, I can hear you.’

  ‘Good. And please don’t think that I can’t see you. I can see everything you’re doing. Nod if you understand.’

  Paris scanned the night-black windows of the kitchen, living room and dining room, confirming that every light in the house was on and all the window shades were up. She could have been in any one of ten different buildings. He did as he was told.

  ‘I want you to hold up all the photographs and all the notes you’ve received this evening,’ the woman said. ‘I want to see them.’

  Paris reached into his pocket and retrieved the three-by-five cards and the photographs. He held them high in the air.

  ‘Tear them into very small pieces and drop the pieces on the table.’

  Paris obeyed.

  ‘Do the same thing with Melissa’s photo.’

  Paris had no problem destroying the picture. He let the jagged pieces fall to the table.

  ‘Now, obviously, I can never set foot in that house again. On the coffee table you’ll find two or three small tea candles. I want you to get them and bring them back to the phone. You have ten seconds. No tricks. Go now.’
r />   Paris put the phone down, crossed the living room and did as he was instructed to do, a million bytes of departmental procedure flashing through his mind, an avalanche of rage in his gut. He brought the tea candles back to the table, picked up the phone and listened for further instructions.

  ‘Light the candles and place them on the table in front of you, near the base of the fax machine, where the paper comes out.’

  Paris found a match in his pants pocket and lit the candles. Before he could stop himself, he said: ‘Done.’

  ‘I told you not to speak.’

  ‘I—’

  ‘You say one more word and I cut little angel here in half.’

  Paris shut his eyes tightly and bore the next fifteen seconds in complete silence, the image of Karen Schallert’s neck wound flooding his mind, the scent of burning wax filling his nostrils.

  ‘Now, go into the kitchen, under the table, and bring back the throw rug. Place it on the floor beneath the fax machine. Make it look like it belongs there. Ten seconds. Go now.’

  Paris sprinted to the kitchen. He peered under the table but there was no rug. He looked frantically around the kitchen and was just about to grab a dish towel and go back out and say that he had the rug, when he spotted it, bunched up against the baseboard near the sink. He ran back to the phone, picked it up and breathed heavily into the mouthpiece, announcing his return.

  ‘If everything is in place, say the word “yes”.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. Just one more thing to do. I want you to pull that bar cart next to the phone. Position it very close. Five seconds this time. Go.’

  Paris found the bar cart just around the corner in the living room and did as the woman had instructed. He could smell the sour, grainy scent of rum coming from one of the uncapped bottles.

  ‘Take the bottle of Ron Rico 151, open it, and spill half of it on the rug. Leave the open bottle on its side.’

  Paris did as he was told.

  ‘Now move the candles to the edge of the table. Like someone put them there at a party.’