by Kiss of Evil
The booze, it appears, had finally kicked in, in spite of her halfhearted run around the block. Rachel Anne O’Malley is a little loaded after all.
He puts his foot on the decorative concrete bench and begins to stretch his leg muscles.
She has an insane thought: Maybe she’d take stud-boy upstairs. Maybe sleeping with a complete stranger will make the specter of Willis Walker go away.
Then, just as suddenly, she comes to her senses. She decides to run a little more, but alone. The last thing she needs is some cock she can’t get rid of, some pretty-boy lover to hang around just long enough to fuck up everything she’s worked for in the past two years.
But it seems that stud-boy, and his cock, are not quite finished with her.
“So, could I interest you in a late supper, maybe?” he asks. “A run and a shower won’t take me more than forty-five minutes.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Anywhere you’d like,” he continues. “Just paid off Visa. I’m golden again.”
“No thanks,” she says, the phrase late supper crazily making her mind return to the late-night breast-feedings in the darkness of her living room, the pleasure and pain of Isabella at her nipple. The sorrow ignites within her. “Some other time. For sure.”
“Okay,” he says, agreeably, adding to his charm. Not the pushy type. “I’ll leave it up to you. I jog around here all the time. Look for me one of these nights. Maybe we can run together.”
“Sure,” she replies. She pulls open the door to her apartment building. She’ll walk through the lobby, down the service hallway and exit on the parking lot side of the building. Maybe have a real run through Cain Park, hope she doesn’t embarrass herself by running into him. “Nice meeting you.”
“The pleasure was all mine, Rachel,” he says, and with that he takes off down the street in long, powerful strides.
She watches him disappear into the night and feels a strange nervousness building inside her. Not necessarily about what just happened. She had handled the advances of a thousand men in her time. But, rather, about what almost just happened.
She’d nearly let someone in.
And she hadn’t even asked his name.
12
I am carved of moonlight.
I follow the jogging figure at a distance of no more than one hundred feet, sliding from shadow to shadow, heading south on Lee Road, waiting for the long stretch of gloom we will both soon enter, the colonnade of darkness leading into Cain Park.
The jogger makes a left, past the squat stone columns, past the huge dedication rock, into the all-but-deserted park. I follow on the access path that winds down the hill.
To the casual observer we might look entirely unconnected, two hardy citizens of Cleveland Heights, Ohio, out for a late-night winter workout, one maintaining a slow jogger’s pace; the other—the one carrying the odd-looking device—an even slower, but still quite graceful, power walk.
And yet we are connected in a way that most casual observers—indeed, most people on the planet—could never imagine nor understand.
The noise flourishes the moment I move within range of the jogger. This time: fat claps of thunder on the inside of my skull, a desperate pummeling of bloodied hands in a sealed coffin.
The jogger stops at the shuttered kiosk near the Alma, the smaller of the park’s two theaters. I approach from the west. In my right hand is a small-caliber pistol, loaded with hollow-point rounds. In my left I carry a four-quart pail, bottomed with a three-inch layer of hard rubber and wire mesh, a handle on its side.
I step to within five feet of the jogger.
The jogger, a handsome young man clad in an expensive-looking olive and black Nike jogging suit and black wool gloves, doesn’t see me. The reflective stripes on the elbows of his jacket made it embarrassingly easy to follow him.
“Hey,” I say.
The man freezes in place. A veteran of the streets, it seems. He doesn’t turn around. “My wallet is in my waist pack,” he says. He spins the nylon belt around his waist, slowly, until the pack faces me.
I step closer, take the wallet, say: “I have a message for you.”
The man swallows hard but remains very still. “What are you talking about?”
I place the barrel of the gun near his left temple. “She’s mine.” I lift the pail by the handle—as if wielding a giant coffee mug—and position it on the other side of the man’s head. “Mío!”
I pull the trigger.
The puff of smoke is insignificant in the darkness, as is the popping noise, no louder than the sound of a child flicking his thumb out of an empty soda bottle. What is significant is that the pail catches not only the bullet—a feat accomplished without putting a hole in the bottom—but also a good portion of the man’s brain. The police will not find a slug nor a shell casing, nor more than a drop or two of vaporized membrane on the shrubbery.
I look at the figure on the ground, then into the pail, at the pink tissue, the off-white bone, warm and gaseous in the December night air.
For my cauldron, I think. My nganga.
For the spell.
13
His mother sleeps on the couch by the space heater, a Jetson-age-looking Norelco model. The heater, as always, is on full blast and leaning perilously close to the orange and brown Afghan—Cleveland Browns colors.
The small second-floor apartment on Baltic Road has a clock radio in every room, including an old Magnavox on the back of the toilet, just beneath the macramé ballerina toilet-paper cozy. Today, from the kitchen, comes an Italian-language news program.
He kneels next to his mother, brushes a soft strand of white hair from her forehead. She had been Gabriella Russo when his father swept her off her feet nearly fifty years ago, a raven-haired siren of a lounge singer who strung Frank Paris along for two years before giving in to his repeated proposals of marriage.
An only child, Paris had been sixteen when his father died. His mother had worked two jobs to help put him through college, sometimes three. She is an undereducated woman, having finished only high school, but she is, and will always be, the smartest woman he has ever known.
She is content now, he thinks, nearly seventy-four years of age, still on her own, still a force at gin rummy. Still a force at gin gimlets, too. Two of them at lunch every day with her bingo cronies Millie and Claire. Followed by her nap.
He moves the space heater a safe distance from the couch and sits at the rolltop desk. The bills, as always, are neatly pigeonholed on the right side. He pays them. It is a monthly ritual for the two of them, one that has proceeded like clockwork for the past few years or so. At first, his mother would drift off to the bedroom when he paid her bills, ashamed that she could no longer work even part time. Sometimes, she would busy herself in the kitchen, and somehow, in the space of twenty minutes, produce a dish of baked ziti or linguine with calamari.
Now she just sleeps through it.
When he finishes, he closes the desk, then crosses the living room to the small Pullman kitchen. He takes the sandwich that is always on the top shelf of the fridge, wrapped in Saran Wrap, a pickle on the side.
Should he wake her? No, he decides. Let her sleep. She will know that he has been here.
She always does.
He puts on his coat, stands at the door, surveys the apartment: the old waterfall furniture; the shabby armchair that he had once, as a six-year-old, accidentally wet during an old horror movie on TV; the oval braided area rug she’d had for so many years that it was no longer possible to replace; his academy graduation photos on the mantel.
Jack Paris opens the door, steps through, closes it behind him, checks the lock.
Merry Christmas, Mom, he thinks as he wraps his scarf around his neck, a Casa di Gabriella hand-knitted special.
Merry Christmas.
The houses on this small section of Denison Avenue, near Brookside Park, are a collage of Eisenhower bungalows, paint-blistered pastels of powder blue, sea foam green, b
uttercup yellow, all washed gray by the impending dusk, the winter drizzle. Paris is parked at the curb, heater chugging, oldies station on low.
After leaving his mother’s apartment, he had spent the remainder of the afternoon canvassing a three-block circle around the Dream-A-Dream Motel. No one at any of the half-dozen bars had seen anyone running from the motel with a dripping butcher knife in the middle of the night, it seems. In the end Paris had interviewed three dozen bleary-eyed men and collected the expected: shrugs, urban apathy, temporary amnesia. Hear no evil, see even less.
He now sits in his car on Denison Avenue, the front seat covered in police reports, all from Michael Ryan’s murder book. He had signed them out, not really certain what he is looking for. An earlier connection between Sarah Weiss and Mike Ryan? A disgruntled cop on the inside who lost his cut of the ten grand?
A little yellow car?
Paris had taken Sarah Weiss’s acquittal much harder than usual. He had put so much of himself on the line during the investigation. No cop likes letting a killer off. But when it’s a cop-killer, there is a piece of every police officer that never forgets.
There was alcohol in Michael’s system that night, but it was nowhere near the limit. There was also trace evidence of an extremely powerful hallucinogen. Traces of the hallucinogen were also found in a flask that was inside the killer’s bag. The record shows that Michael was officially off-duty when he was murdered.
According to the defense, Michael was an alcoholic, drugged-up detective who sold confidential police files for ten thousand dollars to fuel his vile habits. According to the defense, Mike Ryan was a very bad cop who got precisely what he had coming.
To this day, Paris refuses to believe it.
Before leaving the Justice Center for the day, Paris had called Dolores Ryan and asked if she still had Michael’s papers: financial records, notebooks, and the like. She said everything was in storage. Dolores also said that Paris was welcome to all of it, without, mercifully, asking him why. Mercifully, because he couldn’t give her an answer if he tried.
Paris turns off the engine, but before he can exit the car, his cell phone rings. “Paris.”
Loud music. Ice cubes in glasses. The drone of roadhouse chatter. “Hi, it’s Mercedes, can you hear me okay?”
“Just fine.”
“Am I catching you at a bad time?”
“Not at all,” Paris says. “Where are you, Atlantic City?”
“I’m at Deadlines.”
Paris knows the place. A venerated old Cleveland tavern favored by journalists. “So what’s up?”
“Well, at the moment, there is a fabulously handsome, ethnically diverse male sitting right next to me, trying to ply me with fruity cocktails.”
Paris smiles. “How’s he doing?”
“Lemme look.” Mercedes is silent for a moment. “Still have my shoes on. Not that well, I guess.”
“It’s still early.”
“Es verdad.”
“So what can I do for you?”
“What do you mean?”
“As in, the reason you called?”
“Oh yeah. Right. Sorry. Listen. I’m going to need a photograph or two of you for the article, but the paper is too friggin’ cheap to hire a second photographer. At least for my stuff, anyway. I left a message for my brother Julian, who is a really good photographer, if he would just get off his ass and do something about it, but that’s another story, okay? Sorry. Anyway, it’s a million to one shot that he’ll show up, which means that me and my PowerShot might have to do, but if you see a cute guy with a camera hanging around, don’t get scared, okay?”
“Thanks for the heads-up.”
“No problem.”
Paris asks Mercedes if she needs a designated driver. She declines. Paris signs off, crosses Denison Avenue, considers walking up the long wheelchair ramp, the sturdy-looking U-shaped structure made out of two-by-sixes and rusting bolts.
Too icy, he thinks. For a man of my advanced years.
So, holding firmly onto the wrought-iron railing, Jack Paris climbs the narrow stone steps to Dolores Ryan’s house.
She looks thin and blanched, a breakable husk of the brunette bombshell to whom Michael Ryan had introduced him one night at the Caprice Lounge; a night now entombed almost twenty years in his memory. That night, Dusty Alessio had the attention of every man in the place, including a woefully young John Salvatore Paris.
Now her hazel eyes are cloudy, veined, tired. Her hair, touched with silver. She wears old denim jeans, threadbare espadrilles, a faded maroon Ohio State University sweatshirt.
They are sitting in the small tidy living room, across from each other, coffee between. In the corner, next to the muted TV, squats a large, artificial Christmas tree, its heirloom ornaments placed haphazardly, hurriedly.
Dolores points at his coffee, asks: “You want something else?”
“No. No thanks.”
“You want something in it?”
“I’m good, Dusty.”
The old nickname makes her smile, blush deeply, run a hand through her hair. “No one calls me that anymore.”
“That’s the first name I heard and I’m stickin’ with it,” Paris says.
“You know where that nickname came from?”
“No.”
“I got it from Michael, the day I met him. Michael was going to Padua High School. I was going to Nazareth. I was sixteen. Sixteen, can you imagine?”
Paris sees the color start to rise in Dolores’s cheeks, the flush of a woman recalling the day she met the love of her life. “I can,” he says.
“I used to see Michael and his friends at the baseball diamond at State Road Park. I’d see him all the time there, but never had the guts to talk to him. Remember how we used to just die of embarrassment at that age?”
“Oh yeah,” Paris says, thinking he hadn’t really progressed all that much in that department.
“So one day my friend Barb and I are tooling around in her old Ford Fairlane convertible, top down. We hit the Manners, the Dairy Queen, the McDonald’s, the Red Barn, then the baseball field on State Road. And suddenly I see him.
“‘There’s Michael!’ I yell. Barbara, of course, panics, swings into the parking lot, knocking her Dairy Queen cup on the floor, completely covering the brake pedal in chocolate milkshake. The car jumps the curb and heads right for the baseball game. Barbara is stamping and stomping and trying to hit the brake pedal, but it’s too slippery. We’re going, like, thirty miles an hour now, smacking into garbage cans, benches, lawn chairs. Finally, after making everyone scatter, she hits the brake pedal squarely and we fishtail around the middle of the diamond, coming to a stop right on the pitcher’s mound. And, because the top is down, there is now an inch of dust on everything—the car, the seats, the books, the burgers, me. Worse than that, ten boys our age are watching us in complete awe, knowing they had just seen what will probably be the story of the year at school.
“Well, it turns out that my history notebook had flown out of the backseat, landing God knows where. So, out of the cloud of dust, notebook in hand, comes Michael Patrick Ryan—black T-shirt, blue eyes, long eye-lashes, sweaty muscles. He says: ‘Hey, Dusty, this yours?’” Dolores looks at Paris with a half-smile that is somewhere adrift between inconceivable heartache and the joy of indelible memory. “Everybody laughed, but I didn’t really hear them, you know? All I saw were those Irish eyes. I was a goner.”
Paris watches as Dolores absently fingers the ribbed cuff of the sweat-shirt, wandering through her reverie, and realizes it is Michael’s. She is still wearing his clothes.
Dolores returns to the moment. She checks the grandfather clock in the hallway, pours more coffee, allows the levity of her story to come to a full rest. After a minute of silence, she says, “He was scared, you know.”
“Michael?”
“Yeah.”
“Scared of what?”
Dolores looks out the bay window, at the rain turning to snow, at
the ice crystals starring the tips of the hedges in front of the house. “Everything.” She waves the back of her hand at the long-ago widened doorway leading to the first-floor bathroom; the gesture, a full explanation of life with a family member in a wheelchair. “He was scared all the time after we came back.”
A decade or so earlier, Michael Ryan had pulled up stakes, moved west, taken a job with the San Diego PD. But after his daughter was injured by a hit-and-run driver, a driver never caught, as Paris understood it, he moved the family back to Cleveland to be near Dolores’s mother, a police widow herself.
“He was a great cop, Dusty. An even better man.”
Dolores considers Paris for a moment, then leans forward, as if to share a secret. With one carefully measured exhale, she concedes the real reason for Paris’s visit in the first place, saying: “I knew.”
These are words that Paris does not want to hear. Michael Ryan is dead. As is his killer. Paris would just as soon hang on to the notion that Michael was on the job when he was murdered, was following up a lead, got ambushed. But, against his will, his mouth opens and forms the words. “What do you mean?”
Dolores reaches for a tissue, dabs at her eyes. “That’s why I don’t look in the storage, in the boxes. I just can’t.”
“You don’t have to tell me this.”
“Michael and I had . . . had a deal, you see. We made it the day of Carrie’s accident. Michael told me that she would never, ever, want for anything, as long as he was alive.”
Paris considers just standing, hugging her, leaving, letting all this go. Instead, he asks:
“What was your end?”
“My end?” She looks up at him, her eyes leaden with pain. “My end was never to ask where the money came from.”
The tiny lock opens with a satisfying click. Paris is proud of himself. He hadn’t picked a desk lock in years but, for some reason, the touch seemed to be back. Maybe he’d start carrying his pick-set again. He is in bay number 202 at the My-Self Storage on Triskett Road. Dolores had given him the key, but asked if he would drop it back off as soon as possible. Dolores and Carrie Ryan are moving to Tampa, Florida, soon.