The Violet Hour

by Richard Montanari

  Robert Benchley said that? Dorothy Parker wrote that?

  He’d known at that moment that he would never forget her. Just as he knew that someone in that group had to have been head over heels in love with Julia Raines, as he had been himself, and that someone in that group, or near that group, had blamed the rest of them for what happened to her that night.

  Sebastian Keller picked up the phone on his desk, punched the number nine, waited, dialed the number, waited. When someone answered, he said: ‘May I have the homicide division, please?’

  ‘One moment.’

  More than a few moments later (Sebastian Keller was getting very precise with his time, even the indiscernible depth and breadth of a few moments), the phone was picked up.

  ‘Homicide, Detective Paris.’

  ‘Detective Paris, my name is Sebastian Keller, I’m the head of the English Department at Case Western Reserve University.’

  ‘What can I do for you, Mr Keller?’

  A bright red rope of pain snuck under the pain medication for a moment, encircling his bowels, knotting tightly, causing him to grip the arms of his chairs. After a moment, it submerged to its tolerable intolerable level.

  ‘I have some information for you.’

  36

  ON THE WAY out of the back door, the phone rang. Amelia picked up the cordless and continued out onto the deck, the seven or eight million leaves that needed to be raked denying her the luxury of a chair and a cup of coffee for this conversation, whoever it was.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Mrs St John?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Hi, it’s Eddie.’

  Eddie? Amelia wondered. Who’s Eddie? ‘I’m sorry. Who is this?’

  ‘Eddie. Eddie Pankow. From Cybernauts.’

  Cybernauts, Amelia thought. What the hell was a cyber—‘Oh, right, right, the computer guys.’

  ‘Yes, exactly.’

  ‘Eddie and . . .’

  ‘Andy,’ she heard, spoken in a different voice. They were both on the line.

  ‘Well, how are you guys?’ Amelia asked, smiling. They were, in their way, kind of cute. The fact that they got flustered around her made her feel good. Like she was still in there pitching.

  ‘Good,’ Eddie said.

  ‘Both of us,’ Andy added. ‘We’re both, you know, good.’

  ‘That’s great,’ Amelia said, eyeing the leaves. Maddie was home from school, and even with what little help she might provide, it was good to have some assistance. She was anxious to get to it. ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘Well,’ Eddie began, ‘the reason we’re calling is, you remember that file you brought in, the graphic file of that poem?’

  ‘Yes,’ Amelia said, a little more interested now. ‘Sure. What about it?’

  ‘Well,’ Andy said, taking the ball from Eddie. ‘We found out what it’s from. Or who it’s from. I mean, like, who wrote it and everything. The poem. Not the e-mail.’

  ‘I see,’ Amelia said. She stole a glance at Maddie, who was halfway to the back of the yard, already working on a small pile of leaves with her bright red plastic rake. Amelia climbed the steps onto the deck, then stepped through the sliding glass door and inside. The reception improved a little as she entered the computer room and clicked open her Word program.

  Handoff to Eddie. ‘Anyway, the lines are from a poem called “Preludes.”’

  Amelia typed it in.

  Andy said: ‘And it was written by T.S. Eliot.’

  ‘This is just great, guys,’ she said. ‘You’ve been very helpful.’

  ‘Right. No problem. Our pleasure. By the way, do you have a fax machine?’

  ‘No, sorry,’ Amelia said.

  ‘No prob. We could just attach it to an e-mail.’

  ‘Okay,’ Amelia said. ‘You still have my e-mail address?’

  ‘We do,’ Andy said. ‘We’ll get right on it.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Amelia answered.

  ‘Both of us,’ Eddie added.

  Amelia hung up the phone, walked to the window, checked on Maddie. Her daughter was now pinning leaves to the fence at the back of the yard with white pushpins. It looked like a heart pattern.

  It was then that she remembered that she hadn’t put the receipt for her new software into the proper pocket of the accordion file that Roger had made her set aside for her home-office expenditures. She took the receipt from the bag, walked into the kitchen, poured herself some juice. She opened the cardboard file envelope, dropped in the receipt, and noticed a half dozen bright blue invoices stuffed in the household section. She pulled them out. They were sales slips from an Elsner Hardware at 5600 Euclid.

  Fifty-sixth and Euclid? Why would Roger go to a hardware store at Fifty-sixth and Euclid? Wasn’t it mostly warehouses around there?

  She looked at the invoices. Standard items – nails, screws, washers, masking tape. But there were also three invoices for space heaters. Four hundred dollars each! Cash! Were those the heaters Roger put in the garage last year, so he could work on the cars? Amelia wondered. She’d had no idea they were that expensive. Why hadn’t he charged them? She put it on the list of things to yell at him about.

  She returned to the computer room. No e-mail yet. She dialed Paige at the store and told her that she had left her leather coat behind when she had stopped by with Maddie’s sweater.

  She picked up the cordless, stuck it in her sweatshirt pocket, and stepped onto the deck, just as the wind flattened the three piles of leaves she had spent the last hour raking together.

  37

  IT SEEMED A bit incongruous – perhaps even illegal in some sense, although he was not a lawyer – to talk to a writer while a murder investigation was ongoing. But, he thought, all he was actually doing was providing background on people who were already dead, so on reflection, it probably was both legal and ethical. Morbid and exploitative perhaps, but not against the law. The young man – Nicholas Stella, his name – called and arranged to meet him in front of Thwing Hall.

  The voice came from behind him.

  ‘Dr Keller?’

  He spun around, startled. ‘Yes. Mr Stella?’

  ‘Yes.’

  They had met before, Keller was sure of it. ‘You frightened me.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Sebastian Keller,’ he finally said, extending his hand.

  ‘Nick Stella.’

  Keller held the young man’s grip for a few extra moments. ‘Have we met before, Mr Stella?’ he asked. ‘You look terribly familiar.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  They sat down on a bench, fell silent for a while. The younger man took out a pencil and pad, and Sebastian Keller knew he was finally going to tell the truth. A truth he had carried for twenty years like a deadweight. ‘You wouldn’t happen to have a cigarette, would you?’ Keller asked.

  ‘No. Sorry.’

  ‘Funny. I haven’t wanted one in nearly fifteen years. Now that I’m dying of cancer, it really doesn’t matter, does it? A little cancer here, a little cancer there . . .’ He looked at the ground, arranging his thoughts, his words, his courage.

  ‘Tell me what happened that night,’ the younger man said. ‘Tell me in your own words.’

  Keller knew it was time. He began.

  ‘It was Halloween night, 1988 . . .’

  38

  AMELIA WAS AT the back end of the yard, surrounded by a half dozen piles of brightly hued leaves. Beneath one of the piles lurked the allegedly invisible, yet still giggling, Madeleine St John.

  ‘Don’t get dirty,’ Amelia said to her daughter who wasn’t there.

  Maddie remained silent.

  ‘Oh . . .’ Amelia began, as she heaped more leaves on Maddie’s pile, ‘I guess Maddie already went back inside the house. I guess I can call city hall and tell them to bring that huge vacuum cleaner back here and have them vacuum up all these leaves.’

  Leaf Girl laughed.

  Amelia had the cordless telephone in the pocket of her hooded s
weatshirt and had been so far out on a daydreaming voyage as she raked leaves – a bizarre escapade that included Roger, Paige, Garth, Shelley Roth, Dag and Martha Randolph, her as-yet-unwritten antihero Gaspar Sencio, and the enigmatic Mr Curls – that the sound, emanating from somewhere on her body, nearly made her jump. It was almost an electronic whine instead of a ring, a sure sign that the batteries needed replacing. She removed the phone from the pocket, feeling a little silly, and answered. She was about a hundred feet from the house and the reception was terrible. ‘Hello?’

  Through a barrage of static, it sounded like: ‘Izz Miz Say John?’ The batteries, she could tell, were going and going fast. ‘. . . ’lo?’

  A man. Barely audible.

  ‘You’ll have to speak up’ Amelia said. ‘I’m on a cordless.’

  ‘Say John?’

  No better. It still sounded as if the man were speaking through a yard of cheesecloth. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t hear you.’

  Then there came another burst of static, a crack of electronic thunder beneath which Amelia could hear the man talking.

  ‘Hang on . . . let me go inside,’ Amelia said as she walked toward the house and closer to the telephone’s base station. Another burst of static, then she heard the line begin to clear.

  ‘. . . e-mail . . .’

  ‘Just a minute.’ Amelia was halfway to the house now and she began to pick up bits and pieces of what the man was saying, but the phone bouncing at her ear didn’t help in assessing the who and what of it all.

  ‘. . . of the police . . .’ the man said.

  Amelia stopped in her tracks. ‘What? What’s this about the police?’ The word had come in loud and clear and it frightened her. ‘Hello?’

  Silence.

  ‘Hello?’

  Nothing.

  The batteries were dead.

  When she stepped into the house and picked up the telephone in the kitchen, all she heard was the steady drone of a dial tone.

  The doorbell rang.

  Or did it? Amelia shut off the vacuum cleaner. She hit the switch on the side of the upright, listened for a few moments as the motor ground to silence. Molson was out back, so she didn’t have the dog to tip her off as to whether or not someone had rung the bell. Ever since the phone call, the call that had mentioned the word police, she had been edgy, vigilant. This was the third time she had shut off the vacuum cleaner. The first two times she thought she heard the phone. She was just about to continue when the doorbell clanged, loud and resonant. She looked out the front window, at the driveway, her hand over her heart, but whoever it was must’ve pulled up tight against the garage. She could only see the rear bumper. She couldn’t tell if it was a car, a van, a truck.

  As she moved to the front door she found that her heart was beginning to race, her mind was beginning to fill with a million dark vignettes: Roger’s plane had crashed, something had happened to Dag or Martha or both. Fire. Plague. Pestilence. Murder. She expected to open the door and be confronted with a grim-faced man in a policeman’s uniform, there to roughly remove her heart and soul, her very life.

  But she opened the front door anyway, and came face-to-face with the last person on earth she would’ve expected to be standing on her front porch at that moment.

  It was Dark Curls.

  39

  ‘HI,’ HE SAID, his face seeming to register as much shock as her own.

  ‘Hi,’ Amelia replied, but made no immediate effort to open the door. Roger usually left the screen in the front storm door until after Halloween, so she and Mr Curls weren’t shouting at each other through glass. Still, their postures were about as awkward as possible, considering what they had done the last time they had been together. What was he doing here? Amelia wondered. How did he know where she lived? Had he followed her?

  Did he have something to do with the phone call?

  Immediately her mind went to Maddie and her whereabouts. Maddie was bundled off to Karen MacGregor’s. Everything was fine.

  ‘Mrs St John?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Amelia said before she could stop herself, although she wasn’t sure why. They had made out in a parking lot already; why couldn’t he know her name? This was very bizarre, she thought. Very unnerving. For a few moments she felt every bit the penitent adulterer.

  ‘Mrs Roger St John?’

  ‘Yes. But how did you . . . what are you . . .’

  Dark Curls held up his hand, stopping her. He looked at the ground for a moment, as if he were processing a great deal of data at once, bringing together a few thousand pieces of a jigsaw puzzle in just a few seconds. When he looked up, fixing her with his soulful brown eyes, he told her a story. A chilling story that seemed to have, at its center, the destruction of everything on earth she cherished.

  When he was finished, when she was once again able to move, Amelia opened the front door to her home.

  And Nicholas Stella stepped inside.

  40

  SAPPHO NOVA WAS a drag. But it was packed and, as lesbian nightclubs go – at least the downtown clubs – the clientele was, for the most part, well dressed and generally civilized. Jennifer Schumann sat at the bar, ordered her usual. The music raged, thunderous and unrelenting. She scanned the corners of the room, saw all the usual suspects.

  Jennifer had been twenty-seven years old before she had mustered the emotional courage to come out, although all of that seemed like another era altogether. With all the experimenting she had done in college, with all the flirtations during her sham live-in relationship with a man in her mid-twenties, she never really came to terms with the fact that she was gay. Unfortunately, she had no gay friends at the time, or anyone else to talk to about it. All of her friends thought she was straight in those days, as did all of her co-workers at Blue Cross. Although it didn’t surprise her that they had their suspicions. The one person she could confide in was her younger sister Greta.

  Unfortunately, Greta had cerebral palsy and, because the insurance had finally run out, now lived in Jennifer’s tiny house now. Jennifer wasn’t sure that Greta had understood much of anything she had told her for years.

  Still, contrary to the image the straight world had of homosexuals, Jennifer was anything but promiscuous. The fact was, at least romance-wise, that she had yet to have a relationship with a woman that lasted more than six weeks, and it had now been more than three years since she had even had a one-nighter.

  Maybe that’ll change tonight, she thought as she spun on her barstool, checking out the new arrivals near the door.

  And that was when she saw her. Out on the dance floor. She wore very tight black jeans and a thin yellow tank top. Her hair was pinned up in the back and as she moved to the music, her earrings, in the shape of small silver lightning bolts, slashed about her face and neck.

  She had a small butterfly tattoo near her right eye.

  Her name was Taffy and she had flirted with Jennifer mercilessly a few nights earlier. In the back of Jennifer’s mind, she supposed there lurked the notion, the hope, that Taffy might be at Sappho Nova tonight. And there she was. Jennifer had written the previous flirtation off as the exuberance of a pretty young woman who simply didn’t realize what simple conversation and the occasional touch on the leg might mean to a woman of Jennifer’s age and position.

  But tonight, Jennifer thought, ordering the drink she knew would put her over the edge of inebriated false confidence, if she comes over and talks to me tonight . . .

  Jennifer knew it was stupid to be playing a game like this at her age, but she just couldn’t stop herself. She was over forty now, more than a few pounds overweight. But she was a little drunk, she was horny as hell, and the game seemed to have taken over her body, her mind, her will.

  Cat and mouse.

  Kitty, kitty, kitty.

  Taffy had left the club, making her departure extremely obvious to Jennifer, lingering at the door, lingering in the lobby, lingering on the street corner at West Third. She walked slowly up the now-deserted str
eet, toward Lakeside, swinging her hips a bit drunkenly, driving Jennifer a bit mad with desire.

  Then she turned down the alley, opened a rusted steel door, and stepped inside one of the warehouses. The fluorescent lights from inside the building painted a wedge of white onto the dark alleyway, and after a few moments, Jennifer followed. But by the time she did, by the time she opened the door and looked down the long, narrow paneled hallway, the girl was gone.

  A little spooked, a lot aroused, Jennifer stepped inside the building, closed the door behind her, and inched forward.

  She found Taffy behind the last door on the left, in an abandoned office. There was a large wooden desk in the center of the room, a few fifty-gallon drums, and a small table lamp on the floor in one corner that provided perhaps twenty-five watts of light. The girl had taken her coat off and was sitting on the desk. Her feet were up on a dusty but rather substantial-looking oak executive chair, and from the index finger of her right hand dangled a gleaming pair of handcuffs.

  Without saying a word, Jennifer looked back down the hallway, toward the alley, then stepped into the room. She removed her coat, letting it slip to the floor, and crossed the office. She sat in the chair and, for a moment, scrutinized the girl’s face in the dim orange light from the lamp. She was so pretty, so fresh.

  Did I ever look that young? Jennifer wondered.

  The girl wound the cuffs through the spokes of the chair, then clicked them closed over Jennifer’s wrists. She stepped back, spun Jennifer around so that she was facing the door. She unplugged the lamp. The only illumination in the office now was the slanted column of light from the hallway. ‘What?’ Jennifer said. ‘What’s wrong?’

  The girl grabbed her coat and stepped toward the door, then waited.

  After a few moments, the silhouette of a man filled the doorway, a man in a dark overcoat. He stepped inside the room, into the shadows. The young girl walked up to him, kissed him lightly on the cheek, glanced back in Jennifer’s direction, then walked down the hallway, her heels clicking hard on the grimy linoleum. A few seconds later, Jennifer heard the door to the alley open and close.