by Kiss of Evil
“So,” he begins, trying, and failing, to sound conversational. “You guys got plans for New Year’s Eve?” He used the word guys, hoping Beth and Melissa were going to do something together, thereby indicating that Beth did not have a date.
“Missy is going over to Tina Manno’s house. I guess Jessica’s mother is putting on a pretty big spread for the kids. I heard she was even hiring a rock band.”
“Wow,” Paris says, stoking a tiny ember of hope in his heart. “That sounds like fun.”
“You can actually say that after watching that group the other night?”
Paris laughs as Beth places a plate of eggs, home fries, and toast in front of him. He takes a bite of toast, remains silent for the moment. But the next question is in his eyes. There is no need to say it out loud. Beth puts down the butter knife. “I have a date, Jack.”
The words ping around his heart for a moment or two, leaving welts. “Oh, okay. Anyone I know?” He tries to float it as a small joke, but it sinks.
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why do you torture yourself?”
“It’s not torture. It’s . . . conversation, that’s all.”
“Okay,” Beth says.
Paris furrows onward, heart first. “Somebody from work?”
“Nope. I met him on the Internet, actually.”
“What?” Paris drops his fork.
“You asked, right?”
“You’re kidding.”
“Jack, you want to know where I met him? I met him on eharmony, an online Christian dating service, okay? Is that safe enough?”
Paris throws his hands skyward. “Safe? Are you nuts? Do you want to know how many people I’ve locked up who’ve gone to church every Sunday of their lives?”
“How many?” Beth asks with a smile, one that Paris knows she uses when she is trying to break the tension in what will certainly become an argument. An argument they are no longer authorized to have. It works.
“A lot,” Paris says. “It’s just that—”
“It’s just that you love your daughter very much and you want the very best for her.”
Paris would add Beth to that list, but doesn’t. “Well, yeah. That. But I—”
“And that is why Melissa adores her father,” Beth says. “She knows.”
Knockout punch. Paris doesn’t even bother getting off the emotional canvas. “Okay. Just be careful, all right?”
Beth salutes him, then gives him a hug. “Missy loved her present from you, by the way. She thought it was cool.”
He had returned the perfume and gotten her a gift certificate to Abercrombie & Fitch, hoping it was still in the realm of cool for girls his daughter’s age.
Beth leaves the room for a moment, then returns, a gift-wrapped shirt box in hand. Missy’s gift to him. He takes the box, opens it. There, inside, is a white Calvin Klein dress shirt, spread collar. A very nice tie as well, clearly his weakest suit when picking out dress clothes.
But, also in the box, is a smaller box, something that looks like a jewelry case. Paris glances at Beth, knowing that she broke the rules. The shirt may be from Missy, but whatever is in the leatherette jewelry box is from Beth.
“No fair,” Paris says. “I thought we had an agreement.”
“Just open it, Jack. You’ll understand.”
“But we agreed,” Paris says, feeling like an idiot for not having the brains to have brought a contingency present for Beth in case this happened.
“I know,” Beth says. “But if you’d just open it, you’d understand.”
Paris opens the small, square jewelry box to find a pair of beautiful silver cuff links.
Beth says: “It’s a French cuff shirt. Completely useless without cuff links, right?”
After an early dinner at his mother’s—the usual belt-loosening holiday spread that includes a primi piatti of homemade gnocchi, followed by a main course of roast capon, followed by warm hazelnut biscotti—Paris spends the remainder of the day reading the Web Cam for Dummies book Carla had given him, addressing it in a manner in which he addresses most technical material, that being with one perfectly glazed eye. At eleven, with the book tented over his eyes, he falls asleep on the living room couch.
Usually, whenever he pays a visit to his ex-wife’s apartment, he has the standard dream about Beth, one where she spends a pleasant day with him, laughing and touching and hugging, only to say good-bye forever at the end, breaking his heart anew every morning. But this time he doesn’t dream about his ex-wife and their long-cooled love affair.
This night he dreams about a beautiful young woman with burnished bronze hair.
35
The day after Christmas in most major cities brings a brief respite in violent crimes. If people are going to kill each other around the holidays they seem to get their licks in on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. Or they wait until New Year’s Eve.
At noon, on December 26, the halls of the sixth floor at the Justice Center are quiet.
Paris and Carla Davis are meeting with Greg Ebersole in Greg’s office. Greg looks like a beaten man. The benefit for Max Ebersole had gone well, but not as well as Greg had hoped, Paris had learned. It is the holidays, they all said, a reassuring hand on Greg’s shoulder. A lot of people are out of town. A lot of people are simply tapped out. Paris considers the possibility that Greg had not been to sleep for more than an hour or two at a time since leaving the Caprice that night.
Greg says: “I’ve got a sketch coming this afternoon. Composite of a woman that Willis Walker was seen with at the bar at Vernelle’s on the night he was killed. White woman.”
Paris and Carla exchange a glance. “White woman? Anybody recognize her from before?” Carla asks.
“No,” Greg says. “And they all say that they would remember. The men anyway. They said she was all that and a bag of chips, you know?”
Carla laughs. “You say that pretty good for such a doughboy, Greg.”
Greg goes red.
“Get us copies the minute you see them,” Paris says.
“You got it.”
Greg stands, puts on his coat.
“Where are you off to?” Carla asks.
“Gonna interview the night clerk at the Dream-A-Dream again. He was three sheets to the wind the first time I talked to him. He’s on days now. Maybe he hasn’t started drinking yet and I’ll get a straight answer from him. If you see me back here in an hour dragging a screaming and kicking redneck by the hair, you’ll know it didn’t go well.”
“How’s Max?” Carla asks.
“Max is good, Carla. Max is tough.”
“If I don’t see you later, tell him I said hi.”
“I sure will. See you guys.”
“Careful,” Carla says.
“Always,” Greg replies and takes his leave.
Paris and Carla exchange a different kind of look now, one laden with concern for a fellow officer who might be on the very edge of the very edge, a precipice that can lead to many places, all bad. Paris asks: “What did you get this morning?”
Carla says: “I visited Fayette Martin’s Internet service provider. OhioNet Services on Buckeye. Got a fix on where she went online the day she was killed.”
“Where’d she go?”
“She logged on three times, went three different places on the Web,” Carla says. “But I think we need to be concerned with only one of them.”
“Which one?”
“The site is called CyberGents. I’ve traced the ownership to an address in University Heights. The website is run by a company called NeTrix, Inc.”
“What is CyberGents exactly?”
“Like I said, if there was a live, pay-per-view videoconferencing site devoted to straight females, I’d find it. This is one. And it’s local. As soon as the street address came I up, I knew I’d been right about these people.”
“What do you mean? What people?”
“I’ve been working this pleasant group of folks for six months. I kne
w there was something beyond the usual swapping. I think I can get us an invite.”
“An invite?”
“It’s a group of east-side swingers.”
“So, you’re saying that Fayette Martin may have called in online to this CyberGents in University Heights?”
“I know she did.”
“And that they have men there who do things online?”
“Yep.”
“In University Heights?”
“Well, they may not be right there at the house in University Heights. The men could be anywhere. But someone has to clear the credit-card transactions. Someone has to set up the session with the performers, either by phone or by e-mail. Unless they’re routing the calls elsewhere, I’d bet that they do it there.”
“So how do we get in?”
“Well, I know for a fact that they meet three times a month for parties. They’re having one tonight.”
“What kind of parties?”
“Hard to say exactly what goes on there,” Carla replies. “But I think I can get us in.”
“How are you going to do that?” Paris asks.
Carla lowers her head, then raises her eyes. “Are you serious?”
At two-thirty, Paris walks to the Cleveland Public Library at Superior Avenue and East Fourth Street. He had reserved another book about Santeria in the United States, as well as one about ritual murder in the inner city.
As he rounds the corner of the BP Building he stops. Rebecca D’Angelo is standing right in front of him, looking into the window at a holiday display. She has her back to him, but she looks just as he remembers. She is wearing a navy blue wool coat, knee-high boots. Paris is just about to tap her on the shoulder when it appears as if she sees him reflected in the window. She turns abruptly around.
It is not Rebecca.
“Sorry,” Paris says. “I thought you were a friend of mine.”
The woman glares at him, then makes a rather quick retreat down Superior Avenue, toward Public Square, turning twice more to look at him.
Paris shakes his head. He jaywalks to the library entrance.
Why can’t I stop thinking about her?
He is halfway across the underground lot at the Justice Center when he hears a man call his name from the shadows. It is Hank Szabo, the front-desk attendant from the VA nursing home on East Twenty-third Street.
“Mr. Szabo,” Paris says. “What brings you down to the Justice Center?”
“Not sure, really.” Hank steps forward, into the fluorescent light. He is wearing a beat-up old pea coat, a nubby watch cap. “I was just coming up to see you.”
“What about?”
Hank lowers his voice. “I’m not sure if this means anything at all. But Demetrius did something.”
“Did something?”
“Yeah. Well, something kind of out of the ordinary for him.”
“And what was that, Mr. Szabo?”
“He did this right after you left. And call me Hank, okay?”
Hank shows Paris a two-year-old copy of Time magazine.
“And what is this exactly?”
“Magazine, of course. It’s what Demetrius did inside I’m talking about. Something he did all on his own.” Hank opens the magazine to page 15 and points to the bottom. “See there? See how that’s circled?” The number 15, in the lower right, is circled in a shaky red ink.
“Yeah,” Paris says. “Okay.”
“And look here.” Hank now flips to page 28. Same thing. Then he flips to page 35, where the page number is once again circled very carefully in red. A quick scan of the magazine shows that these are the only pages with circled page numbers.
“Mr. Salters did this, you say?”
“Absolutely. I watched him do it.”
“And it was right after I left?”
“Well, it was right after he was sedated,” Hank says. “Don’t know what you did, but you scared the fuckin’ shit out of him. Literally.”
“Sorry about that.”
“No big deal. We usually have one or two of the boys go nuclear by lunchtime every day.”
“And what do you think it means?”
“No idea. I looked at the pages, at the articles, but they didn’t seem to be about anything, so as I can figure. One is a story about Edie Falco. She was that lady on—”
“The Sopranos. Right, Hank. I’m just not sure why you think this has something to do with me.”
“Can’t say, for sure,” Hank says. “But Demetrius doesn’t hardly ever do anything. Ever. So, for him to pick up a pen is pretty weird. This took him almost an hour, you know.”
“Did he say anything?”
“Yeah. Well, kind of. Up until the drugs kicked in, he kept mumbling something under his breath. I got close, but not too close, if you know what I mean.” Hank taps the side of his nose. “But I could hear him saying something over and over again. Like a prayer, almost.”
“What was he saying?”
“Well, I’m not totally sure about this. But it sounded like—you’re gonna think this is crazy.”
Paris almost smiles. “Trust me on this one, Hank. Crazy is what I do for a living. What did Mr. Salters say?”
“Once again, I wouldn’t swear to this,” Hank says, looking around the underground lot, as if the very act of entering the Justice Center parking garage had automatically put him under oath. “It sounded like he was saying ‘secret garden.’”
36
Randi Burstein had never seen the man at the counter before, but she seemed to recall hearing the name somewhere. On the younger side of thirty-five, she thinks. Too well dressed to be a cop. Too handsome to be a civil servant.
Lawyer. Definitely.
Who else ever comes in here?
“I can get that file for you right away,” Randi says. “Going to need some ID of course. Social security number at the very least.”
“Of course,” he says, handing her a social security card. “May I ask you something . . .”
“Randi.”
“May I ask you something, Randi?”
“Sure,” she says, hopes awakening. In the fifteen years she had worked in the records office of the Veterans Administration, she had yet to meet a man she had seen, socially, more than twice. Now that she was over forty, and a few pounds south of svelte, the opportunities seem to be diminishing every day. But, still, hope springs and all. “What would you like to know?”
“Have there been other folks requesting these files lately?”
“Now, now,” she says, a little disappointed, but still happy to engage in banter with someone so handsome, someone so much younger than the usual fossils with whom she deals. “You know I am not permitted to tell you that.”
“Well, I believe that rule exists because no one ever asks as nicely as I just have.”
“That may be true,” she says, crossing the room, pulling out the file drawer marked Saar-Salz. She finds the file, then closes the drawer with a slightly exaggerated bump of her ample hip. She makes a quick photocopy of the requested file. “I am still not allowed to break it.” She lays the form on the counter, slashes an X with her pen. “Sign for me there, please.”
The man scribbles a signature with his own pen.
“Any special plans for New Year’s Eve?” she asks, retrieving an envelope from beneath the counter, hoping to keep the conversation going.
“Oh yes,” the man answers. “I’m going to have a party.”
“Well, that sounds like fun,” Randi says as she slips the photocopy into a manila envelope, seals it. “Big or small?”
“Huge,” he says. “In fact, I’m thinking of inviting the whole world.”
“That would include me, of course,” she replies, amazed at her boldness. Maybe it’s just the holidays, she thinks. Or maybe the two eggnogs at lunch. She lays her left hand atop the counter with great deliberateness. The hand that sports no wedding or engagement ring whatsoever. “What should I wear?”
The man pauses for a moment, dram
atically lost in thought. “A black leather jacket,” he says with a smile. “I think you would look very sexy in a black leather jacket and a little white skirt.”
Two full minutes later, long after the man with the dark eyes and the darker lashes had left without a further word, Randi Burstein finds herself still standing at the counter, a little flushed, a lot intrigued, her mind giddily rummaging through her closets.
37
Detective John Salvatore Paris—whose brain had already formed an exasperating Möbius strip of the numbers 152835, all wrapped around the words secret garden—meets Sergeant Carla Davis in the parking lot at Macy’s in University Heights.
Greg Ebersole and a team of six officers from the University Heights PD stand by in two locations, less than a block from the Westwood address.
The swingers party is a long shot, there had been unanimous task force consent on that point, but, for the moment, it is all they have. The neighborhoods around the two murder scenes had been canvassed and recanvassed. Forensics had uncovered nothing useful so far.
Carla drives the rest of the way to the house on Westwood Road, where she finds a spot on the street that is ten houses east of their destination. The number of cars on the street indicate that this is a rather large gathering.
As they approach the house at the crest of the hill—a stately gray colonial—there is only a dim light on in the curtained picture window; there is no loud music. Nor is there a light on over the side door, where Carla was instructed to go.
From his vantage, at the foot of the drive, Paris stops for a moment, conducts a quick inventory of the house, the neighborhood. Sleepy, bucolic, suburban; mostly brick houses with occasional lavish Christmas displays, surgically plowed driveways. A place where dogs don’t bark after ten and nobody needs a new muffler.
Yet, Paris thinks as he makes his way up the drive, it is also a place that might be plugged directly into a pair of unspeakable crimes.
Carla rings the doorbell, steps between Paris and the door. She had said on the way over that getting in was still a fifty-fifty proposition, even though they had been invited to the party on a probationary basis. But Carla Davis knows what she has and figures, rightly, that if she is the first thing that whoever opens the door sees, they’ll get in. She is wearing a bulky wool coat; her long hair is down around her shoulders and her perfume is driving Paris around the bend. In contrast, Paris is wearing a black blazer, black T-shirt, black slacks, no overcoat. He looks like a gay Johnny Cash.