Kiss of Evil

by Kiss of Evil

  Fifty thousand, not a penny less.

  Celeste’s knock on the door is, as always, a little too loud.

  “Hi, honey,” Celeste says, bounding into the apartment with a teenager’s enthusiasm, hugging her briefly. They had taken to hugging at some point recently. Celeste is tall and slender, smooth-complected, just this side of runway-model pretty. Today she is wearing red ski slacks, a black faux-fur bomber jacket, a red scarf. Her dark hair is loose, windblown. She wears a pair of long silver earrings shaped like icicles.

  “Is it cold?”

  “Freezing,” Celeste answers. “Coffee?”

  “Help yourself,” she says, bolting and chaining the door.

  “Thanks.”

  Celeste unwraps her thick red scarf, retrieves a cup from a cabinet. She pours herself coffee as Bird’s version of “Bloomdido” bops from the box. She sits down at the table.

  “How’s Jesse Ray?” She always asked, although Celeste had never really been all that forthcoming about Jesse Ray Carpenter, having only told her the man’s name after they had done more than ten thousand dollars in business. They look out the window in unison. A ribbon of silvery smoke winds its way skyward from Jesse Ray’s car window. Jesse Ray the control freak. Whenever she wants to see Celeste, it is Jesse Ray she pages.

  “He’s okay. Actually . . . he’s kind of pissed at me,” Celeste says.

  “Why? What happened?” She isn’t really sure what the nature of Celeste’s relationship with Jesse Ray is, except that she had seen Celeste moon a few times when she talked about the man. In Celeste’s opinion, Jesse Ray is the grifter’s grifter. A magician. “Oh, nothing. You know how he gets.”

  “Actually, I don’t know how he gets. Never met the man.”

  “Well, let’s just say I missed a cue in a very important situation.” Celeste falls silent, reddening slightly as if she had been scolded all over again, sipping her coffee with a somewhat unsteady hand.

  She regards Celeste for a few moments, then reaches into the kitchen drawer behind her, removes the paper bag, tosses it to Celeste, officially changing the subject, as she always does when their small talk turns to business.

  Celeste looks inside the bag, brightens. “So . . . who was it this time?”

  “Tina.”

  “The falcon,” Celeste says, ominously, forming her hands into talons.

  Tina Falcone is one of a dozen aliases she uses, each one corresponding to a different physical look, a different style. She is fairly good at accents, too. When she plays the Latina, she is flawlessly Hispanic. Her posh Brit isn’t half bad either. Her favorite alias, though, is Rachel Anne O’Malley. Sounds like a child film star from the twenties.

  But, of all her names, her real name is the simplest. Mary. Plain-old vanilla-flavored-nobody-notices Mary.

  Celeste asks, “Did the falcon swoop?”

  Mary laughs. “Yeah. Old Elton was dead in his tracks.”

  “Elton?”

  “Yep. That was a first.”

  Celeste shakes her head, smiling, taking it all in. “Elton,” she repeats, reverentially, as if a mark never sounded quite so ripe. She stands, finishes her coffee, wraps her scarf around her neck. “I’m gonna get going, hon. Jesse Ray’s got somewhere to be. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” she says, but her voice sounds distant and sad.

  “You all right, girl?” Celeste asks.

  “I’m gonna bring her home, you know. Soon.”

  “I know,” Celeste replies, her stock answer. “You will. It won’t be long.”

  “All I need is six thousand dollars. That’s all. A lousy six Gs. A little less, even.”

  Celeste lifts the jewelry bag into the air, shakes it, rattles the contents. “Cake.”

  Celeste is virtually the only person she can talk to about Isabella, and how much this money means to the two of them.

  Mary had never married Isabella’s father, Donny, a rock-drumming miscreant from Zanesville, Ohio. But she had lived the rock-and-roll life for two years with Donny Kilgore and his band, Android Beach, a motley assemblage of career potheads who played a nearly unlistenable mix of technodance music and seventies stadium rock. For almost two years she had toured with Donny and the boys, washing the band’s clothes, cooking a ton of pasta on a hot plate, bailing them out of the drunk tank more times than she could count, puking in her share of motel lobbies.

  When Isabella was born, Donny had made her a solemn, tearful promise that the drinking and the drugs were a thing of his past. Donny told her it was all going to change, that he was hooked up with a new circle. Real record people who were going to make it happen for the band.

  What Donny had failed to mention was that these record people had certain needs, and that one morning, around five, the door would come crashing in and a German shepherd named Quincy would find 2.2 pounds of cocaine in the basement.

  She had suspected Donny of dealing for a while, had torn their small Bedford Heights house and garage apart a number of times looking for his stash, never finding it. But what she had found was a list of forty or so music-business bigwigs—addresses, phone numbers, cell phone numbers, e-mail addresses, wives’ names. Favorite cocktails, even. Donny’s schmooze list. Most were lawyers and accountants, pillars of their communities. A few owned record labels. But most were men in very conservative suits with second wives and no prenuptial agreements. She was absolutely certain that these were the people to whom Donny had been dealing in an attempt to launch Android Beach.

  From the day she had found it in Donny’s van, she had taken very good care of the list.

  After cooperating with the DEA, Donny had drawn a five-year sentence and she was given two years’ probation and two hundred hours of community service. She had known nothing about the coke, but she had known Donny Kilgore and that should have tipped her.

  But the worst was yet to come. Within three weeks of the hearing, her father had pulled every string he had—and he had many, reaching to the highest levels of the Cuyahoga County political machine—and taken Isabella away.

  That was two and a half years ago. She had already missed more than half of Isabella’s life so far. Her two legal attempts to get her daughter back had failed miserably, had cost her thousands of dollars, had created such acrimony in her family that it had now been more than ten months since she had spoken to her father.

  Two and a half years. Two and a half years of wigs and makeup and wandering hands and sour, boozy tongues. Two and a half years of working her way down a list of boring record-company men with their tales of cold wives and industry pressure.

  Two and a half years without Bella.

  She stands in the phone booth near the corner of Taylor Road and Fairmount Boulevard, her huge sunglasses in place, in deference to the sudden winter sun streaking through the clouds, in support of her disguise. Her hair is tucked up under a wool beret, her baggy ski parka conceals everything else. In spite of the restraining order, she still finds herself in this phone booth twice a week, struggling to catch a glimpse of Bella from afar—a fog-shrouded film of a boisterous playground, cast with women her age, hugging the children, drying their tears, herding them into groups, protecting them.

  She looks at her watch. Although she is late for one of her two legitimate part-time jobs, she can’t leave. Even though she needs to pick up spiral notepads, buy panty hose, fill the car with gas, and stop at the dry cleaner, she can’t walk away.

  She never can.

  The bell claps and clamors, calling the preschoolers from the Mayfair School outside.

  And the film, blurred by a mother’s tears, unspools anew.

  6

  “Homicide, detective Paris.”

  At first, the telephone line sounds dead, as if the caller had hung up while they were on hold. Which, if Paris is correct, had been no more than sixty seconds or so. Then, the troubled breath on the other end tells him that someone is indeed there. It also tells him that some sort of information—true, false, or,
most likely, a barely recognizable hybrid of the two—is coming his way. He had heard that deep breath a million and one times.

  A man says: “Detective, my name is Mr. Church.”

  Paris closes his eyes, as he often does when speaking to a total stranger on the phone for the first time. He tries to put a physical description to the voice. A little cop game of his. “What can I do for you, Mr. Church?”

  “I think I might have some information for you.”

  “Regarding?”

  “A woman.”

  What a shock, Paris thinks. “I’ll need a little more information, sir.”

  The man says: “She may be missing.”

  Cool. Handoff. “Ah. Okay,” Paris begins, making a mental note to talk to the dispatcher for the ten thousandth time. “That’s a completely different department altogether. If you’ll hang on, I can transfer you to—”

  “I fear for her. She may no longer be among the living.”

  “I’m sure she’s just fine, sir,” Paris says, wondering who uses a phrase like among the living. “But I’m afraid the Homicide Unit doesn’t get involved with missing persons.”

  “Although it is necessary, I suppose,” the man continues. “Like deadheading a flower. Orchids, lilies, roses.”

  Somehow, Paris had known this conversation was blasting off-planet. After nearly twenty years, you begin to hear the launch take place in real time. “Like deadheading a flower?”

  “Yes. You know something about that, don’t you, officer?”

  “I’m afraid not, sir. Look, if there is something the Homicide Unit can do for you, I’ll be more than happy to—”

  “You will take her place in ofún.”

  I will take her place in no fun? “I’m sorry?”

  “White chalk, detective,” the man says. Almost a whisper now.

  Right.

  “Okay, Mr. Church. Thanks for calling. I’ll be on the lookout for a—”

  But the line is dead. Seconds later comes the dial tone.

  Like deadheading a flower . . .

  For some reason, Paris keeps the phone to his ear for the moment.

  “Jack?”

  Orchids, lilies, roses . . .

  “Jack?”

  Paris suddenly realizes that the unit commander, Captain Randall Elliott, and a woman he does not recognize are standing in the doorway to his office.

  Paris rises to his feet, sensing an introduction. He also senses a bullshit assignment coming down the pike. He is right on both counts.

  “Got a minute, Jack?” Elliott asks.

  “For you, captain?”

  “This is Ms. Cruz. She’s with Mondo Latino,” Elliott says, his lips drawn into a tight, phony smile, the one that screams political pitchout. Elliott is in his early fifties, white-haired, bulky in his blues, ruddied by a half-century of Cleveland winters. “She’s going to be spending a week here, watching how the unit operates. I figured you’d be the most likely candidate to show her around. She said she wanted to work with the best.”

  The look Paris gives Elliott at that moment could slice concrete. Thin.

  Paris hates these my-week-with-the-cops things that local reporters do to demonstrate how gosh-awful tough it can be at times for the city’s finest, leaving them free to trash the department the other fifty-one weeks of the year. Mondo Latino is a small west-side newspaper serving the city’s Cuban, Mexican, and Puerto Rican communities. In spite of the fact that the paper always seems to be relatively fair with its coverage of the department, the last thing Paris really wants is to carry around a reporter for a week.

  Ms. Cruz is afloat somewhere in her twenties, plain to an excruciating fault, wearing thick glasses, nylon hiking boots, a bulky burnt-orange sweater set. Her hair, the color of wet tobacco, hangs lifelessly to her shoulders. She seems to be a somewhat attractive young woman who goes way out of her way to subvert any chance of appearing so.

  “Mercedes F. Cruz,” the woman says, almost grabbing Paris’s hand from his pocket and shaking it with royal enthusiasm. “Nice to meet you.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Paris replies, noticing that Mercedes F. Cruz is wearing what looks like a temporary metal retainer on her teeth and a plastic barrette in the shape of a yawning kitten in her hair. “Victor Sandoval still the editor over there?”

  “Oh yes,” she says.

  “Still drink his Sambuca from a Mountain Dew can?”

  “Is that what’s in there?” she asks, smiling.

  “Just a rumor,” Paris says, winking at Elliott, resigning himself to the task at hand. “Welcome to the Homicide Unit.”

  “Thank you.” She looks at her notebook. “You were involved in that incident next to The Good Egg Restaurant, weren’t you?”

  “Yes,” Paris says, already impressed with Ms. Cruz and her homework, flattered, as always, to be the subject of a young woman’s scrutiny. Even a young woman wearing a bright yellow kitty-cat barrette.

  “I followed the Pharaoh case pretty closely,” Mercedes says. “Young single woman alone and all.”

  “Of course.”

  The conversation stalls long enough for Elliott to make his move. “Well,” he says, “I’ll leave you two to iron out the details. Once again, nice to meet you, Ms. Cruz. Always a pleasure to work with our friends in the Hispanic community.”

  Elliott departs, leaving Paris and Ms. Cruz awkwardly standing face-to-face.

  “So,” Paris says, leading Mercedes Cruz into his office. “When would you like to get started?”

  “How about right now?”

  “Well, I’ve got a lot of reading to do at the moment. Nothing too exciting, I’m afraid.”

  “That’s okay,” she says. “I’m interested in every aspect of a homicide investigation.”

  Paris thinks: Is she going to watch me read?

  It appears so.

  Mercedes Cruz drops her bag on the floor, positions her chair in the corner of Paris’s paper-besieged office, and sits down, her spiral-bound stenographer’s notebook on her lap, her pen at the ready. Paris notices that the cover of the notebook is festooned with an elaborate rendering of blue and red concentric hearts drawn with a ballpoint pen. A schoolgirl’s day-dream.

  And it’s only Day One, Paris thinks.

  “Just go about your business, detective,” Mercedes says, adjusting the kitten on her head. “You won’t even know I’m here.”

  The noise level is astonishing.

  As a veteran of an urban police force, he has, of course, been privy to a great many scenarios of audio overload. From automatic weapon fire on the range, to the sound of a dozen crackheads in a two-bedroom house all yelling at the same time, to the tremendous thunder of a five-unit pursuit up an alley, code three. He had even chased a suspect through the crowd at a ZZ Top concert at Public Hall once. There were moments during that madhouse scene when it sounded like he was on a runway at Hopkins airport, standing under the wing of a 747.

  But there is nothing, Paris has to admit as he steps into his ex-wife’s apartment on Shaker Square, nothing in the world quite as loud as the wall of noise produced by a half-dozen eleven-year-old girls at a pajama party.

  “What’s all this?” Paris asks. They are in one of Beth’s two spare bedrooms, thankfully past their small-talk threshold, having already fulfilled their conversational quota of job-related woes. For brief moments, at times like these, it was as if nothing ever happened to their marriage. Except that Beth is wearing a green velvet cocktail dress. And that she is going out without him.

  “Wild, huh?” Beth answers, clipping an earring in place. Her hair is butterscotch, falling softly to her shoulders; her lips, tonight, a soft claret. Now in her mid-thirties, her figure had not changed from that of the young woman he had fallen in love with more than a dozen years earlier. For Jack Paris, Elizabeth Shefler was, and is, the very criterion of beauty.

  He studies her for that moment, a little unstuck in time, knowing in his heart that he will never fall in love again. Not li
ke he had with Beth.

  “Welcome to command and control,” Beth adds with a smile, clearly recalling the years of cop-talk, mercifully derailing his train of thought.

  On the corner desk sits an iMac, ringed with yellow Post-it notes.

  “The company paid for it,” Beth continues. “I can do half my work from here now.”

  “You’re that good with a computer?”

  “They paid for the three-day training, too. I can get around.”

  On top of the monitor is something that looks like a small plastic tennis ball with a shiny black dot in the middle. Paris walks over, fiddles with it. He notices that the object is stuck to the top of the monitor with a suction cup.

  “Isn’t that neat?” Beth says. “It’s a video camera. We use it for conferencing.”

  “Conferencing?”

  “Videoconferencing.”

  “Sorry,” Paris says. “You know what a Luddite I am.”

  Beth joins him at the desk. She hits a few keys, starting a software program called iChat. Then, suddenly, the two of them appear on the monitor screen.

  Crazily, Paris feels as if he is walking through Sears, on one of those forays through the electronics department where you stroll by the camcorder display and they let you see how shitty you really look. Except, this was in the privacy of your own, well, wherever you had your computer. Beth’s computer is in her spare bedroom. And thus a million prurient scenarios jog through Jack Paris’s mind. He banishes them. “Wow” is all he can manage.

  For a moment, on the screen—a poorly lit shot of the two of them from the waist up—Paris sees his ex-wife as another woman for some peculiar reason, a very attractive stranger standing inches away. He is fascinated by the way the light plays over her breasts, her shoulders, her hair. But he cannot see her face.

  And, for some equally peculiar reason, that fact stirs him even more.

  “By the way,” Beth says, punching a few keys, killing the image on the screen. “Have you had a chance to get to the safety deposit box?”

  Shit, Paris thinks. He was hoping to milk this one for a while. If she hadn’t asked him this time, it would mean another between-visitation liaison. “This week. I promise.”