by Kiss of Evil
Paris lies: “I look forward to seeing them.” They are near the door to the parking garage. Paris points to the garage. “Can I give you a lift anywhere? I’m heading east.”
Julian holds up an RTA pass. “West. Thanks anyway. Nice meeting you.”
“My pleasure.” Paris pushes open the door, wondering—about twenty seconds too late—if his cowlick had been sticking up on the top of his head, a tonsorial battle against gravity he has waged with his hair, on a daily basis, since he was eight years old.
The Flower Shoppe is a tan, rough-cedar-and-glass building on Caves Road in semirural Chesterland, conveniently located across the street from the LaPuma-Gennaro Funeral Home.
The sky has brightened but the day is still cold enough to make the snow crunch beneath Paris’s feet as he approaches the garland-and-ribbon-bedecked building. His breath describes small cirrus clouds of vapor before him. He opens the door and is immediately enveloped by the humid fragrances of pine and spruce and balsam.
The interior of the store is packed with seasonal flora, every surface covered with snow-flocked wreaths or huge red and yellow poinsettias. Behind the counter stands a man wearing a green apron, starched white shirt, and raspberry red bow tie, just wrapping up a sale of two large wreaths to an even larger woman. When she leaves, he turns to Paris.
“Can I help you, sir?” the man asks.
Paris badges the man. Then he notices a name tag that identifies him as Gaston Burke.
“I’d like to ask you a few questions, Mr. Burke.”
“This is about Faye, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“I haven’t slept since I heard,” Gaston says. He is fifty, pear shaped and well tended. His hair is a dyed copper, slicked back like that of a barber from the 1930s.
Paris takes out his notebook. “How long did you work with her?”
“Twelve years or so, on and off. She came to work here right out of high school, I think. This was my parents’ store then. I worked here part time, off and on, until five years ago, when I took over the shop.”
“Was she a good employee?”
“The best,” Gaston says, his voice breaking a little. “In early, out late, always willing to come in on her day off when we were busy or if we had some kind of emergency. Three weeks after my parents died in a car accident, I had an appendectomy. Faye slept in the back room for five days in order to run the shop. Faye wasn’t just an employee, detective.”
“What else can you tell me about her, Mr. Burke?”
“I can tell you that she was a true artist. Had a real talent for floral design. Had a natural ability with orchids. These are Faye’s,” he says, gesturing to a tall, narrow glass case behind the counter. Inside are a dozen extraordinarily delicate flowers of rose, lilac, and yellow. “I can’t believe her Ladies Tresses are still alive and she is not.”
“What can you tell me about her personal life?”
Gaston thinks for a moment. He smiles ruefully. “Only that she didn’t have one. Faye was the kind of sad woman you see all the time now. Pretty woman beaten by life. Guess she got burned once, then it was check please as far as romance goes.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, she never really talked about it, but I always got the sense that she had had a pretty serious relationship once, and had been rather unceremoniously dumped. I guess she never got over it. Holidays would come around and I would see her usually pleasant demeanor start to slump and it would break my heart. Every year I invited her to spend Thanksgiving or Christmas with my family. Every year she begged off.”
Paris asks: “So no one ever came to pick her up after work some Friday or Saturday night?”
“No. Never.”
“She never came in on a Monday morning and talked about a date she might have had over the weekend?”
“Maybe once, years and years ago. But nothing in recent memory. She was a lonely young woman, detective. I am going to miss her terribly. I loved her very much.”
“You loved her.”
“Yes.”
“Was there ever a time that you two . . .”
“Dated?”
“Yes.”
“I’m gay, detective.”
“I see,” Paris says, choosing not to jot that bit of information in his notebook. “I hope you didn’t expect me to just know that.”
“No,” Gaston says. “I suppose not. But I trust it answers your question.”
“It does. But only one of them.”
“Touché.”
“Did Fayette work on the twentieth of this month?”
Gaston checks the calendar blotter on his desk. “No. She was off that day.”
“Can I ask where you were on the twentieth?”
“I was here. I closed the shop at six-thirty, stopped at the CVS and bought every cold medication they had. I then went home, took said drugs, and curled up with The English Patient.”
Paris is going to assume he is talking about the book or the movie. “And you didn’t go out?”
“Ever take NyQuil, detective? No. I didn’t go out. I was comatose.”
Paris flips shut his notebook. “Anything else you can add, Mr. Burke?”
“Only that Faye was also very good with computers. She set up everything here. The accounting software, the database for our mailing lists.” Suddenly, Gaston brings his hand to his mouth. “I just realized something.”
“What’s that?”
Gaston Burke says: “I am absolutely dead without her.”
16
The dead live here.
The cauldron, the nganga, sits in the center of the room, a room decorated with black shag carpeting, black walls, black ceiling. Twelve feet by twelve feet. The sparse light from the half-dozen votive candles deployed in a loose six-foot circle seems to soak into the darkness like moon-silkened blood into virgin snow.
Outside, in the hallway, there are red and green lights strung along the crown molding; a pine-scented wreath between the elevators, just above the call buttons. In the lobby, there is a huge silver tree, ringed with multicolored lights and laden with dazzling ornaments.
In here, there are no lights. In here, it is always midnight. In here, it is a place called Matamoros, a place called El Mozote. In here it is My Lai. Srebenica. Amritsar. Phnom Penh. In here, in this undying darkness, the silence is interrupted only by the screams of the dead, cold and unavenged, their pleadings a brutal red sea at the bottom of my cauldron.
But the black room doesn’t hear them. The black room stores their pain, nurtures it.
I made the nganga, my first, from an old Charmglow gas grill I found on a tree lawn on Neff Road. I waited until the middle of the night to bring it up in the service elevator. If anyone had seen me, they most certainly would have wondered what I was going to do with a huge, dilapidated gas grill in an apartment building with no balconies.
No pets, no kids, no barbecues, the building super had told me when I scoped the Cain Towers apartments on Lee Road for the first time. Of the twenty or so apartments, it was hard to believe there wasn’t a cat, a kid, or an hibachi lurking in one of them, but these were the rules.
I sanded and painted the round, deep bowl, then emblazoned Ochosi onto its side. It now contains flesh. Flesh of this earth. Flesh that is rotting. It will only be a matter of time until the smells reach the hallway, the elevator.
I must act.
I squat next to the cauldron, sip the Metusalem rum laced with the very last of the Amanita muscaria, the rarest of magic mushroom. I will need more. I light the cigar and exhale smoke in a casual orbit around me. Smoke draws the gods. Smoke masks the overwhelming odors of human meat gone bad.
I inhale deeply, drawing strength from the ill-starred spirits in the nganga, filling my lungs, my being, with the power of such tormented flesh. The brain of a whore. The brain and hands of a seducer . . .
I close my eyes.
I am nkisi.
I begin to dream of Mexico as the amanit
a takes hold. I dream myself fourteen, standing nude, drenched in my own sweat, the sweat of others. I am in the room over Cedrica Malo’s bodega, waiting for the dry creak of the first step, the first of eighteen dry, wooden steps that will bring a watcher, a toucher, a torturer. The fan overhead turns slowly, barely molesting the air so thick with sour smells. There are soiled black silk sheets on the bed; gold-veined mirrors above.
Suddenly, the step cries out again, its aching back wondering how many more.
Yet I know that, outside, the hot Tijuana sun still sears the sidewalks, the streets, the very minds of the reprobates who come here. It is just afternoon. Hours to go.
So they come. Eighteen steps, turn to the left, one or two more steps. Push. There is no lock on the door to the room above Malo’s. One is not needed. The door opens and the noise intrudes quickly after, crashing inside me like a black gale; followed, always, by the hideous touching, by the fantasy of skulls caving in, razors carving flesh, throats, gurgling with contrition.
All the men who climb the stairs are big-fisted, like my dad.
All the women, rich and violent.
Because I am the grail. Fourteen years old, unlined, shoulders and hands like a man. I am the prize that Cedrica Malo offers in her lottery, the one it costs five hundred dollars to play, the one that will make us both rich.
Sometimes the lottery winners ask me to trade in pain. Sometimes, in sacrifice. But always I am bound to deal in pleasure, and to collect its many debts.
The black room swoons.
El brujo esta aquí.
The witch is here.
And I will look you in the eye and tell you I am an itinerant farm-worker from Culiacán, and you will believe me. I will tell you I operate a hot air balloon over Napa Valley, and you will believe me. I will tell you I am a baker from New Orleans, and you will believe me.
I will fuck you in your marriage bed, my workman’s fatigues around my ankles, while your husband fetches the mail.
The blood will flow, sweet and plenteous.
I will tell you that I love you.
The world will fall silent.
And you will believe me.
17
She scans the newspaper for details, but this day, there is no mention of the Willis Walker murder in the Plain Dealer. It had made the second section for one day, a small item that said a man named Willis James Walker, forty-eight, had been found dead in a room at the Dream-A-Dream Motel, and that cause of death had not been determined. Nor were there any suspects in custody.
She is sitting at a window table at a restaurant on the west bank of the Flats, watching the river flow, sunglasses down, an untouched plate of al pomodoro with angel hair pasta growing old in front of her.
She had managed to sleep through the night, which frightened her a little. Somehow, the image of Willis Walker on the floor of that filthy bathroom had not invaded her dreams. She had thought she would be haunted by the image for years to come—probably as she sat in a jail cell at the ORW—but, so far, it isn’t happening. And that is a little unnerving.
Perhaps it’s because she knows that she has a job to do. To get this money into a trust. To raise her daughter. Willis Walker was a big, violent man standing between her and that goal. Fuck him, she thinks. He took his chances and lost.
He hit on the wrong damn girl.
She pays the check, bundles up, and steps outside. She walks down Main Avenue for a few blocks, to Center Street, where her car is illegally parked. She turns onto the nearly deserted street and is happy not to see a bright orange ticket on her windshield, her mind already a deadfall of numbers, apprehension, sorrow, promise, fear.
And that’s when she notices the man breaking into her car.
“Hey!” she screams, before she can stop herself. She looks up and down the street. No one to hear her. Or help.
The man looks up, around, but not at her. He is fortyish, white, dressed shabbily in a hooded green sweatshirt and stained chinos. He has something that looks like a crowbar in his right hand. He looks a little too old to be doing what he was doing, but there he was, trying to jimmy the passenger door of her not-even-close-to-being-paid-off lemon-yellow Honda.
Her fear folds into anger. “Hey! Are you deaf? Get the fuck away from my car!”
At this, the man staggers back a few feet, finds her in the twisted landscape of his vision. He is clearly drunk. The f-word seemed to register something with him. As did her volume. “Wuss your prollem, bitch?” he says.
Bitch? She is incredulous. “That’s my car, bitch. You’re my problem.” What the hell had come over her? What was she doing? She should be keeping as low a profile as possible, and here she was threatening a car thief. On the other hand, she isn’t all that anxious to call a cop. She shoves her right hand into her coat pocket and takes a nervous step forward. “Now take a friggin’ hike. We’ll pretend this never happened.”
The man glares at her, obviously weighing the possibility that she might be some kind of militant career woman feminist type with a Mauser .380 in her pocket, just waiting for some fuckup to cross her path.
The ploy works. Without a word, the man slowly drops his hands to his sides and begins to back his way up the sidewalk, not taking his eyes from her. When he nears the corner, he shakes the crowbar at her in a final, pathetic attempt at caveman bravado, before disappearing down an alley.
That is it, she thinks. One hundred percent friggin’ it. Doesn’t matter what it takes, how it happens. Even if she does it with less than fifty thousand dollars. Even if she has to disobey a court order and live with Isabella on the run for the rest of their lives. She was outta here.
Fuck this place.
She walks over to the passenger door. No damage. Well, no damage that wasn’t already there. All she can think about now is sinking into a hot bubble bath, a glass of herbal tea at her side, Andre Previn on the stereo, something in the oven on slow. Nearly heaven. Only Isabella frolicking amid the bubbles, her laughter echoing off the old fixtures, would make it so.
She brushes the snow off the door key, inserts it into the lock, turns it, and—
The first thing she smells, as the man’s hand closes around her mouth, is DL Hand Cleaner. Her father had been a tinkerer when she was very small, fixing the family cars himself, rebuilding lawn mower engines, and when he would hoist her upon his lap before dinner she would smell the rich, petroleum-based cleaner mixed in with his cigar smoke.
But this time, the smell does not make her feel warm and protected.
This time it is making her sick.
“Who the fuck you think you’re talking to, bitch?”
It is her car thief, back to assert himself for real.
She tries to scream but the sound is muffled by his grimy half-glove. She struggles, and, for her trouble, she is clubbed to the ground with a heavy forearm. The earth reaches up to her—icy and hard and unforgiving. She lands on her left shoulder, rolls to her right; dazed and disbelieving, thoroughly demeaned.
Then, she hears shouting.
Hey, someone yells.
HEY!
Footsteps approaching. She sees a pair of brown hiking boots, the cuffs of denim jeans. She hears more shouting, but the words are unintelligible, considering the steam shovel that had just begun work inside her brain.
Then, footsteps crunching the snow, staggering away.
Then, silence. God her head hurt. Am I alone? she wonders.
No.
Strong hands grab her by the arms; strong arms lift her to her feet.
A moment of vertigo, then everything comes swimming back. Center Street, in front of her. Her car, roughly where she’d left it before her quick trip to the ground. A total stranger beside her, holding her up.
“Are you okay?” the owner of the strong hands asks.
The words echo in her head for a few moments before registering. She takes a deep breath, and looks. It is a man. A nice-looking young man.
A very nice-looking young man.
<
br /> And, it appears, he has just saved her life.
18
LAKEWOOD, OHIO
TWENTY-SIX YEARS EARLIER . . .
Lydia del Blanco sits on a thirdhand rattan love seat, by the front window of her small apartment on Lake Avenue, a glass of warming lemonade in her hand. It is just after noon on the Fourth of July and the sheers are blowing in the windows on gentle waves of sweet alyssum, followed by a lush duet of just-mowed grass and smoldering briquettes.
Fina is on the living room floor, teaching her little brother how to fold paper napkins for the picnic they will have later. A car cruises slowly up Lake Avenue and Lydia can hear the strains of a Def Leppard song float up from the car’s stereo. She begins to cry, softly, a strange habit of hers of late.
She cries because she has survived a brutal marriage.
She cries because her two children are healthy and bright and curious and beautiful.
She cries because they are safe here. It has been three years since she has seen her ex-husband. Two years since she’s had to hang up on him in the middle of the night and park herself by the front door, dozing off with a baseball bat in her lap.
She cries because, at long last, she and her children have a real life. Sure, the clothes are from Value City, not Higbee’s, and, true, she herded her little brood into McDonald’s more often than she liked, but they were making ends meet.
Plus, for the first time in her life, she has four hundred dollars saved. Four hundred. A miracle. It is stashed in the living room inside her favorite book of all time: The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett.
The dream house with a yard? Now that is a still a few years away, she thinks.
She senses a presence, looks around to see that Fina is standing in front of her. A very concerned Fina.
“Mom?”
“Yeah, honey?”
“You okay, Mom?”
Am I okay? Lydia thinks. What does she mean? Lydia looks behind her daughter. Her son is standing there, grave apprehension narrowing his small face. Then it hits her. The tears. They think she is crying because she hurts.