by Kiss of Evil
After a few moments, the door is answered by a short, heavyset white man in his early fifties. His hair, jet black and thinning, is swept into a dramatic comb-over, the individual strands making the top of his pasty head look like a UPC bar code label. He is wearing a green cardigan, the kind that were popular when Paris was in junior high school.
“Hi,” he says, very enthusiastically. “You must be Cleopatra.” He opens the storm door.
“Yes.” Carla extends her hand. The man takes it, kisses her on the fingers.
“Charmed, I’m sure,” he says.
They’re not even in the door and Paris is ready to puke.
“My name is Herb,” he says, finally releasing her hand. “But you can call me Dante, my dear. Please come in.” He steps to the side, letting Carla into the small vestibule, deliberately making her pass by him in the narrow doorway so he could achieve maximum friction.
“And let me guess,” he says, looking at Paris. “Marc Antony, right?” Herb laughs at this, as if it were the most extraordinarily clever thing ever thought of.
“You can call me John,” Paris says.
Paris extends his hand, but Herb looks away at the last second, into the kitchen, pretending he doesn’t see it. Clearly an attempt at belittling the new male arrival in front of the new female arrival. “Come on in,” he finally says to Paris, as if scolding him. “You’re letting all the heat out.”
“Whatever you say, Dante,” Paris replies, wanting to introduce Herb to the back of his hand before asking him about the heating bills here at the Inferno, but opting against it.
For the time being.
Perfectly ordinary kitchen, very tidy. White toaster, white can opener, something that looks like a bread machine, a small dinette table with a frosted glass top. The overhead lights are off, but there are a dozen candles distributed around the kitchen. Paris can hear electronic dance music coming from somewhere, but it is extremely faint.
Carla and Paris bunch together in the small kitchen and wait for Herb. He shuts the door, steps inside, climbs the three stairs to the kitchen, rubbing his hands together. “So, who was it that nominated you for memberships again?”
“Teddy and Sue,” Carla says.
“Oh that’s right,” he says. “Teddy and Sue. Have you swung with them before, Cleopatra?”
“No,” Carla says. “Only some cyber. They like to show, you know.”
“Do they ever,” Herb says. “And Sue is such a sub.”
“Really? Every time I cybered with them Teddy was the submissive. Not Sue. Sue was always the dom.”
Paris’s head is spinning with the terms, the Cleavers-in-bondage atmosphere of this kitchen. For a moment, he thinks they’ve been made.
“Is that a fact?” Herb says, staring intently at Carla, his neck craning upward at what looks like a painful angle. Then his resolve breaks. “Sorry. Just testing you a little. We’ve got to be careful, you know.”
“I understand.”
“Sue really is the beastmaster around here. There’s a half-dozen guys scared to death of her.”
“I’ll bet,” Carla says.
“But they like it that way,” Herb adds. “Here, let me take your coat.” He steps behind Carla, purposely in front of Paris. Paris can smell the scotch, the breath freshener. Herb also reeks of moth flakes and Obsession.
When Herb slips Carla’s coat from her shoulders, he gasps slightly, an involuntary heterosexual male reaction that Paris himself has to stifle. Carla is wearing a skintight white dress, cut nearly down to her waist in the back, the hem about halfway up her thigh. Her toned back muscles and narrow waist accentuate her hips, her long, sinewy legs; her skin looks smooth and radiant in the candlelight.
She turns to face the two men, taking her coat from Herb. “I’ll carry it, thanks,” she says.
If Herb has an objection, seeing Carla Davis from the front makes it jailbreak his brain. It is just chilly enough in the kitchen to clearly define the contours of Carla’s breasts, the outline of her nipples through her dress. She wears a dazzling silver cross on a delicate chain. Herb is nearly catatonic with lust. Paris isn’t too far behind him. He’d never seen Carla Davis in anything but business suits or blues.
“Oh my,” Herb says. “You are . . .”
“I am what, honey?” Carla says, flashing a smile, touching Herb’s cheek lightly.
“You are . . . . going to be very popular.”
“You’re a doll,” Carla says. “Now, do you have a little girls’ room where I can freshen up a bit?”
“Of course,” Herb says. “Right this way.”
Paris is left by himself in the kitchen for a minute. The desire to start opening cupboards and drawers and cabinets is almost overwhelming, the need to know what kind of cranberry sauce people who do this sort of thing prefer.
Herb returns, flushed from his interaction with such a new and delicious and by God black and gorgeous amazon female. He motions to Paris to sit at the dining room table, a thoroughly unused walnut French provincial set. Paris sits, knowing that Carla needs a few minutes to activate the small video surveillance camera she’s carrying in her clutch purse.
“So how long have you two been in the lifestyle, John?”
Paris hesitates for a moment before answering. “A year, maybe.”
“First party?”
“No,” Paris says, and leaves it at that, hoping Herb might get the point that he is the strong, silent type. Herb does not.
“Cleopatra is stunningly beautiful.”
“Yes,” Paris says.
“Are you two married?”
“Yes.”
Herb pauses for a moment. “How long?”
“Writing a book, Herb?”
“No . . . I . . .” Herb begins, starting to color. “We just like to know a little about the people we let into our homes, that’s all. Surely you can understand that in this day and age.”
Paris actually does understand. He sure as hell wouldn’t want Herb at his house. “Five years.”
Herb nods, silently absorbing the notion of five years with a woman like Cleopatra. “You are a very lucky man, John. A very lucky man.”
Paris leans forward and smiles at Herb in a man-to-man, swingin’-cat-to-swingin’-cat kind of way. He says, softly: “Luck has nothing to do with it, Herbie. Nothing at all.”
Herb, thoroughly outcocked, laughs, but it is a dry, mirthless sound, a sound born of intense envy and plain macho rivalry.
“Either of you boys wanna escort a lady to a party?” Carla says, inches behind Herb.
Herb nearly knocks his chair over as he stands up. “I know this boy would.”
Paris rises, buttons his blazer. He looks at Carla’s purse. Although he knows it is there, he cannot see the tiny lens of the hidden camera.
Perfect.
“Allow me,” Herb says, once again ignoring Paris, offering his arm to Carla. She takes it, but not before glancing at Paris with a look all police officers recognize.
The look that precedes the door.
Except, this time, the door is deceptively benign. It is a door that Paris had originally thought might lead to a closet or a pantry. A door behind which one might ordinarily find an ironing board, or a broom closet, or any other of a thousand kitchen adjuncts in this waxed and pine-scented version of suburbia.
Instead, Herb opens the door and Paris can see that it leads to a rather undistinguished stairwell. A stairwell leading downward. Paneled walls, soft lighting, a narrow wooden handrail. Paris can hear polite conversation, subdued music.
“Shall we?” Herb says.
Carla looks at Herb and offers a slight angling of her head, a very seductive half-smile. It is another look Paris has seen before, perhaps on the Discovery Channel, or maybe in an old episode of Wild Kingdom: the mien of the young jaguar in that airless instant before its legs uncoil.
Herb takes his arm from Carla’s, clasps his hands together, smiles at his two new recruits, then gestures for them to ente
r his carnivale—a grinning, false-toothed doorman to another kind of suburbia altogether.
38
Forty-eight thousand three hundred and fifteen dollars is not an easy thing to hide. Not if it is in small bills. And the biggest bill she has is a twenty. Plus, she has at least twelve thousand dollars in singles. Every time you think you have found a perfect place to hide it in your house or apartment—a place you are certain no burglar in the world would think of—you realize that it is the absolute first place any burglar with five functioning brain cells would think of.
So you move it.
Again. And again. And again.
She takes the cash from the plastic trash bag, stuffs it into a WVIZ tote bag, and covers it with a bath towel. She has decided to break down and finally rent a safe-deposit box somewhere with one of her myriad sets of ID. Tonight she will sleep with the bag’s canvas handle wrapped around her wrist; a butcher knife on the nightstand.
She knows she has to end this. And that the best defense is a good offense. And that there are two things she must do if she has any chance of surviving.
One. She has to get the photographs and negatives of her running from the Dream-A-Dream Motel.
Two. She has to find a way to get Isabella back before the police kick her door in.
A pair of seemingly impossible tasks she knows she cannot accomplish alone. A pair of dangerous endeavors that will probably require the mind of a master thief, the hands of a magician. She knows of only one person with that reputation.
She stashes the tote bag back in the hatbox, puts the hatbox in her closet for the time being. She then picks up the phone and dials Jesse Ray Carpenter’s number.
It is time to meet in person.
39
Paris takes in the room. Twenty or so people, mostly white, a mix of men and women in their forties and fifties. They descend the steps into the recreation room. Herb elbows them to the center of the room, introducing them to the other guests. Peg and Chazz. Lisette and Wolfie. Barb and Tug a lesbian couple.
You are a very beautiful young man, Fayette Martin had said to her killer. No one here, as yet, seems to fit that bill. Nor does anyone resemble the sketch of the woman from Vernelle’s.
Except for Rebecca D’Angelo, Paris thinks, crazily. Then instantly boots the thought from his mind.
They reach the far end of the room, where there is a green leather pit couch. Sitting on the couch are three couples in their forties, chatting softly, drinks in hand. They glance up as Carla and Paris approach them.
“Everyone,” Herb says. “I’d like you to meet Cleopatra and John.”
Paris surveys the men. No one even promising.
“This is Maggie and Mort,” Herb says, gesturing to the couple on the left. They are a handsome couple—she is platinum blond, busty; he is tall, indoor tanned.
“This is Jake and Alicia.”
Jake is older than Paris thought initially. He looks closer to sixty at this range, wearing a very expensive rug and a tailored suit. Alicia, on the other hand, is a bombshell. Petite and Asian, toned, forties. She is wearing a tight fuchsia cocktail dress and the most painful-looking stiletto heels Paris has ever seen.
“And last but not least, Ed and Gilda.”
There clearly was a reason to leave Ed and Gilda to the end. Straight out of the late seventies, Ed wears a navy blue leisure suit; Gilda, a red-sequined tank top and hot pants. Paris isn’t sure if they are in costume, or simply unstuck in time.
“What can I get you to drink?” Herb asks Carla, rubbing his hands together like a Borgian alchemist.
“I’ll have a Pellegrino,” she says.
Herb appears crestfallen, as if just now realizing—and rightfully so—that the only way he would stand a snowball in a microwave’s chance of getting anywhere near Cleopatra is for her to be so shitface drunk she couldn’t see what he looked like. He asks: “Is Poland Spring okay? We, uh, ran out of Pellegrino.”
“That’s fine, Dante,” she says.
The saying of his nom de boudoir reenergizes Herb, who scoots off to the bar.
The next twenty minutes of conversation is a bizarre mix of politics, suburban woes, and thinly veiled sexual innuendo. Paris takes every opportunity to covertly examine rings and pendants and earrings and bracelets—anything that might bear a symbol remotely resembling the Ochosi sign. Or even anything looking vaguely Mexican in motif.
But he finds nothing.
The next hour and a half yields even less. Everyone seems to behave like people would behave at a regular cocktail party. No more sex talk than usual.
At ten o’clock, having gathered what Paris believes to have been zero evidence, they find themselves in the kitchen with Herb again.
“We want you to come back for our New Year’s Eve party,” Herb says.
“Both of us, right?” Carla asks, slipping on her coat, arching her back in such way as to bring her breasts to within inches of Herb’s face.
Herb zones for a moment, then, clearly meaning precisely the opposite, says: “Of course. I asked around. You were both a big hit tonight.”
“You noticed the door, too?” Carla asks. They are sitting at a red light on Silsby Road, having just gotten off the radio with the University Heights PD, standing down the operation.
“Yeah. I leaned against it for a minute while Gilda was telling me about her love for maraschino cherries and highballs mixed with Vernors, not regular ginger ale. It was locked.”
“But you heard the music, right?”
“Oh yeah. It was faint, but it was definitely coming from another room.”
At the Macy’s parking lot, Paris’s pager goes off. He holds it up to the streetlight. “It’s Reuben,” he says. “And he’s tagged it urgent.”
Paris looks at Carla; she at him.
He doesn’t have to ask.
Carla edges out into the intersection, looks both ways, throws a blue light onto the roof of her car, and heads west on Cedar Road at a high rate of speed, toward the morgue on Adelbert Road.
The old man is laid out on a table, naked, his genitals covered by a powder blue towel, his bony, hairless skull so flowered with liver spots that at first Paris thinks he is looking at mummified remains of some sort.
“Hey Jacquito,” Reuben says. Reuben is wearing a bloodied apron, no mask. “And hello Sergeant Davis. How ya doin’? You look great.”
Reuben Ocasio is middle-aged, overweight, and, by any community standard, has the face of a bulldog with mumps, yet he is still willing to tread where younger, fitter, better-looking men fear to go. Over a dead body, in the morgue, he is trying to sweet-talk Carla Davis.
“I’m well, Dr. Ocasio,” Carla replies, all business, wisely leaving her coat on. The white dress would all but incapacitate Reuben. “What do we have?”
“Call me Reuben. Please.”
“Reuben,” Carla says, getting it over with.
Reuben smiles at her, as if he had scored some kind of point, then looks at his clipboard. “We have Isaac Levertov, seventy-nine years of age. My preliminary findings are that Mr. Levertov died by strangulation.” Reuben points to the deep purple welt at the base of the old man’s neck. “His wife reported him missing a few days ago. Found him on the roof of his building. She said he ran a hot dog cart in the neighborhood. Right up until the day he turned up missing.”
“Why are we here, Reuben?” Paris asks. “Who’s the primary detective on this case?”
“Ivan Kral is the primary. But I found something I know you’ll be interested in.”
Reuben picks up a nine-by-twelve envelope, opens the clasp.
And Paris knows. “You found more of the purple cardboard.”
“Yep.”
“Damn it,” Paris shouts. He walks across the room, back, hands on hips. He calms. “How much?”
“Not much.” Reuben places five or six eight-by-ten black-and-white photos in front of Paris and Carla. The top photo is of the first strip of cardboard they had found in Fayette
Martin’s shoe. The second photo is of an almost identical strip, this time containing other parts of the letters.
“Where was it?” Paris asks.
“Underneath the old man’s upper plate. Not enough surface area for prints. Saliva belongs to only the deceased. SIU is going through all of Willis Walker’s effects now. If our boy is planting one puzzle piece per corpse, there might be something there.”
Paris looks at the final few photographs. Composites of the pieces of cardboard put together in a variety of ways.
“I still don’t see anything,” Paris says.
“The middle word is is, definitely,” Carla says. “And it looks like it ends in g.”
“Yeah,” Reuben says. “That’s about as far as I got.”
“Did you send it out?” Paris asks.
“Yeah. I brought it over myself about a half hour ago. Clay Patterson says it just might be enough to extrapolate the rest of the letters. Waiting for the fax right now.”
“Who is the guy on the table?” Carla asks. “Where did he live?”
Reuben looks at the chart again. “Let’s see . . . he lived at 3204-A Fulton Road.”
The address trips a switch in Paris. He removes his notebook from his pocket, flips back a number of pages. “Say that address again.”
Reuben does.
“Holy shit,” Paris says.
“What?”
“La Botanica Macumba is at 3204 Fulton,” he says. “This guy lived upstairs. What the hell is going on here, Reuben?”
“I don’t know, amigo. I just sort through blood and guts.”
“Have you found anything on him like the Ochosi symbol?”
“Nothing like that,” Reuben says. “But I haven’t been everywhere on him. I’m by myself here tonight. As soon as I get the fax I’ll—”
No sooner does Reuben say the words than the fax machine in his cubicle at the other side of the autopsy theater hums to life. The three of them cross the room, crowd around the fax machine.