by Kiss of Evil
It is Mercedes Cruz. He had forgotten to call her. They were supposed to meet the previous afternoon and he had forgotten to call her.
Shit.
“Hi,” Paris says, his tone landing about three miles short of innocence. “I was just going to call you.”
Mercedes’s ever-sunny demeanor is now clouded with gray. Even her barrette is gray. “The Plain Dealer is working on a story about a ritual killer in Cleveland,” she says. “A ritual killer who carves up his victims with a Santerian symbol.”
Fucking leaks, Paris thinks. The department had not officially released the information that Willis Walker and Fayette Martin were mutilated. Nor anything about the Santerian angle. “Yeah. There’ve been a few calls from the paper.”
“So, let me get this straight. I ride around with the lead detective on this case and I have to overhear the details in a booth at Deadlines?”
“I’m sorry,” Paris says. And means it. Mercedes Cruz has been a trouper. “Things have been moving kind of quickly on this case.”
“I have a car. Two good legs. I move quickly, too.”
“I know. But that’s not it.”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s just that I’ve never done this before. Had someone watching me think, okay? In case you haven’t noticed, the department is always nervous as hell that some fact will leak out about a homicide and the suspect goes to ground for good.”
“Look, I didn’t tell you about this before, because I didn’t want to involve her, but my grandmother used to practice Santeria. Okay? I can help, detective. Let me do this. Let me write the biggest story of my life.”
Paris thinks about it. “Come on. Walk me out.” They descend the stairs.
Mercedes Cruz continues to plead her case. “You think I want to write for a friggin’ west-side Latino newspaper the rest of my life? You think this is some kind of dream job? I’m as good as any writer in this town. I can do this, detective.”
Paris caves in. “Okay,” he says. “Tell you what. There is a task force meeting coming up. I’ll let you sit in on it. But you have to swear to me that nothing you hear in there will see print until this is all over. I don’t want to read sources close to the investigation say and have to wonder if it’s you. Okay?”
“Okay.”
For some reason, Paris can never find the deceit in Mercedes Cruz’s eyes. “I’m not kidding about this. Not a word in print.”
They are now standing in the parking lot behind Paris’s apartment building. Mercedes smiles and holds up her hand in a Girl Scout salute. “Promise.”
“Man,” Paris says. “Girl Scouts, too?”
“Are you kidding? I’ve got three cases of cookies in the trunk.”
“Not Caramel deLites,” Paris says, glancing at the blue Saturn. “Please don’t tell me you have Caramel deLites in the trunk of your car right now.”
“And only three bucks a box. I’m helping my niece.”
“Caramel deLites are my personal demon, you know. Had to enter a twelve-step once.”
Mercedes Cruz takes her car keys from her pocket, and jangles them. “Welcome to the nightmare.”
At three o’clock Paris’s head begins to clear, though his hangover still feels like a cast-iron walnut at the base of his skull. He scans the now-dwindled number of yellow Post-it notes that are stuck onto his refrigerator. One of them leaps out. He had promised Beth that he would get her mother’s ring from the safety-deposit box.
It was pointless to put it off further.
He grabs his coat and his keys and begins the process of chiseling off the last piece of his marriage.
After retrieving the entire contents of his safety-deposit box at Republic Bank, and closing out the account, Paris looks at the pile on his dining room table, items no longer worth safekeeping.
Among them, he sees the yellowed old police report, and his shame returns. He had all but forgotten about it. The incident report, which had been in his safekeeping for more than seventeen years, brings him back to that night so long ago, the night he and Vince Stella had come upon a middle-aged man fondling a sixteen-year-old runaway in an alley behind the Hanna Theatre on East Fourteenth Street. It was the much older of the two police officers who took charge that evening, recognizing the assistant county prosecutor immediately. God only knew how often Vince Stella had traded on that night in his years on the beat.
Paris decides he will get rid of it. The man is now a municipal judge and the incident, albeit sleazy, is ancient history.
On the way to meet Beth at Shaker Square at five o’clock, to give her back her mother’s ring, Paris makes every light on Belvoir Boulevard, every light on South Woodland. He arrives at the square ten minutes early. He trots across the parking lot and is just about to head through the stone breeze-way leading to the square when he spots Beth standing next to the ATM machine at the National City Bank. Paris is just about to raise his hand to draw her attention when he sees she is not alone. She is talking to a tall man in a tailored overcoat. Although the man has his back to Paris, Paris can see that he has dark, wavy hair. Certainly on the younger side of forty. Broad shoulders, gloved hands.
Paris is frozen for a few moments, watching his ex-wife talk to someone, as yet undetected. Should he stay? Go? Watch? Leave? Step in and make a fool of himself? He is enough of a voyeur to want to find a better vantage point from which to spy, to see how Beth acts when she’s not around him. But he is also enough of a sissy to not want to see Beth give this guy some kind of big sloppy soul kiss.
The sissy wins.
Paris walks to Yours Truly, grabs a booth, orders coffee. Five minutes later, Beth arrives, lipstick intact.
Jack Paris decides to take it as a positive sign.
44
His name is Axel Westropp. Nice suit, cheap tie, scuffed loafers.
“I hope you realize it’s nothing personal,” Axel says.
“Of course. Business is business. No offense taken.”
Axel leans in, as if sharing a secret, even though we are alone in the coolly lit conference room at Cable99, the local access channel whose offices are located on Shaker Square. “It’s the fucking politicians that screwed it up for everyone. But what’s new, eh?”
Axel is certainly referring to the fact that political types have a nasty habit of ordering air time, using it, losing the election, then refusing to pay. Nothing of the sort is going to happen here, I assure him. Especially at these prices.
“Cash okay?” I ask.
“Cash is fine,” Axel answers.
“And you say the remote hookup won’t present any problems?”
“None at all,” he replies. “Of course, you realize that the streaming video quality won’t be the greatest. We did a live streaming video with Pere Ubu recently and it was cybercast worldwide on the Net. Our only problem was that sometimes the video lagged slightly behind the audio. Other than that, everything went smoothly.”
“And I’ll be able to feed from two locations?”
“Absolutely. As long as the software is right on your end, whatever comes through will go right on the air.”
“Outstanding,” I say, rising to my feet. “Where do we take care of this nasty money business?”
“Money is never nasty around here,” Axel says with a huge grin.
Ten minutes later I pay for thirty minutes of airtime on Cable99, buying the eleven-thirty-to-midnight slot on New Year’s Eve, paying a substantial premium for the short notice. The audience won’t be that large, of course, but neither are the demands regarding standards and practices. I can safely assume that what I have planned would never be suitable for broadcast on the network affiliates.
Not until it becomes news, that is.
45
At first, he figures it is just an hallucination, just another by-product of middle-aged myopia mixed with extreme sexual deprivation. He had thought about her so much over the past few days that he had begun to berate himself each time she danced across h
is memory, which seemed to be every forty-five seconds or so. He had even said her name aloud on a few occasions.
Why couldn’t he get her off his mind?
He had no idea. But of all the places he might have expected to run into her, inside Pallucci’s had to be down there near the bottom of the list. Right around monster-truck show.
Had he told her of his nearly twenty-year habit of stopping at Palucci’s on East Sixty-sixth Street every week at this time so he could get the fresh mozzarella with basil? He couldn’t remember. The conversation at Starbucks is a smudge. He may have.
Regardless, this time, it is no hallucination. She is standing at the end of the aisle, posing, her right leg cocked, her dark hair swept back from her face, her lips a damp, glistening scarlet. She begins to walk slowly toward him, her eyes fixed on his. She is wearing a tight black skirt and a black leather jacket, the kind with a million zippers, a cream T-shirt beneath. She looks tough. And cocky. And very sexy.
As she approaches, a tiny smile graces her lips, and Paris suddenly realizes that she is not going to speak to him. He also notices it is not a cream T-shirt at all, but rather creamy skin. The jacket is unzipped halfway. She is wearing nothing beneath.
She walks past him, to the end of the aisle, turns, glances back.
Sea of Love, Paris thinks. The grocery-store scene in Sea of Love. They had talked at length about this scene in the movie.
This can’t be happening.
And being the cynic that nearly twenty years on the force will make anybody, he begins to wonder what is wrong with this picture.
Yet, when he walks down the aisle, turns the corner, and sees Rebecca D’Angelo standing by the small produce rack, when he sees the way the fluorescent light plays off her alabaster skin, something other than logic propels him. He sidles up next to her, giddy with her perfume. She unzips her jacket another inch, leans in front of him, taking a handful of fennel, sniffing it. She runs her other hand slowly up his thigh, back down. Paris can now see inside her jacket, her breasts against the black leather. She holds the pose for a moment, then puts the fennel back, strolls toward the small bakery counter—the sound of her heels clicking on the hard tile, along with Jimmy Roselli’s “Mala Femmena” playing on the store’s speakers, making the perfect surreal backdrop to the moment.
Slowly, Paris follows. When Rebecca reaches the counter, she turns, leans against the glass. When Paris stops in front of her, she grabs the lapels of his coat, pulls him between her legs.
The kiss is long and slow and deep. Paris slides his hands between her short skirt and the warm glass of the bakery display case. She kisses him again, and this time Paris wraps his arms around her, the leather, warm and sensual in his hands; the aroma of freshly baked scallette filling his head. Rebecca runs her tongue gently along the tip of his earlobe, whispers:
“Happy New Year, Jack.”
Paris is speechless.
They kiss one last time, a kiss that delicately, yet unquestionably, conveys the promise that the next time they meet they will make love.
Rebecca slides from his arms, then turns and walks toward the register. She leans over, pecks Carmine Pallucci on his stubbly gray cheek, opens the door and is gone. One moment she is deep in Paris’s arms, and the next moment he is greeted by a cold blast of air and the sloppy sounds of traffic sloshing down East Sixty-sixth Street.
Carmine, who had seen the whole thing from behind the register—who had in fact seen quite a bit from that perch in his seventy-one years—looks at Paris, the shape of Rebecca D’Angelo’s lips a neon sign on his right cheek. Then, with a big grin, and a whopper of a story to tell his grandsons in the morning, Carmine reaches under the counter and pulls out two small glasses and a bottle of his special-occasion grappa de Vin Santo.
Three hours later Paris sits in the backseat of his car, across from La Botanica Macumba, his legs outstretched in front of him, his mind trying to rein in his thoughts about his erotic grocery encounter. He can still smell Rebecca on his hands, his collar.
What was she doing? What was he doing?
It was very clever, very sexy, very mature for someone her age. Maybe she is thirty or so, he rationalizes. Which would give him a little hope. Which is probably what scares him so much. He knows that there is a big sign called Hurt at the end of this. Guaranteed. Perhaps that is why he is starting to feel like Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel, the middle-aged schoolteacher who literally makes a clown, as well as a complete asshole, out of himself for Marlene Dietrich.
Paris looks up at the bay window above La Botanica Macumba, the front window of the Levertov apartment. Shades still down, no lights.
Ivan Kral, the detective in charge of investigating the Isaac Levertov murder, had said that he had not been able to interview Levertov’s wife in person since the old man’s body had been found. He said that he had spoken to her at some length on the phone, and that she had come down to the morgue to make an official ID of the body, but that he has not been able to make contact with her since. It will take a search warrant to enter the premises and there wasn’t nearly enough credible evidence to support probable cause.
Yet.
So they wait.
Paris repositions himself, brings his knees to his chin. He had learned how to wait the summer his father had died. Every morning that summer the sixteen-year-old Jack Paris would sit in the blue recliner at the foot of his father’s bed, cocooned in that thick, closed-window air of infirmity, his lap covered with his many books on magic: Blackstone’s Modern Card Tricks, Keith Clark’s Encyclopedia of Cigarette Tricks, The New Modern Coin Magic.
His father had been a six-footer at a time when the heavyweight champion of the world was five-eleven; a maker of things new in his basement workshop, a fixer of things broken in the garage. Frank Paris was a machinist all his working life, a self-sufficient man who checked the locks every night, changed the furnace filters every fall, shoveled the driveway with his huge coal shovel every winter.
But, in that darkest of summers, leukemia made Frank Paris small.
On those rare and precious days when his father sat up, took real food, smiled at him, Jack Paris had performed his magic tricks on an aluminum TV table at the foot of the bed. Cups and Balls. The Traveling Deuce. The Vanishing Glass and Handkerchief. Good sometimes, more often not, his father had nonetheless applauded each and every time, his thin, osseous hands meeting in an almost soundless smear.
Jack Paris sat in the blue chair for three months, standing guard over his father’s health, a bewildered, downhearted sentry. At the end of August the ambulance came in the night while Jack slept soundly. Three days later the call from the hospital came at six o’clock in the morning.
He’s dead, isn’t he? his mother had said in the kitchen that fog-laden late-summer morning, her pink waitress uniform suddenly a widow’s mantle. Jack waited for her gentle tread on the stairs, for the news.
All that spring and summer, from the balmy April day his father had come home, grim-faced, from Dr. Jacob’s office, to the rainy funeral at Knollwood cemetery on Labor Day, Jack Paris had rolled a silver dollar through his fingers—palming, transferring, producing, vanishing, concealing.
His father’s unhurried death may have taught him patience, but it was magic, he would reaffirm every good day he spent as a police officer, that taught him how to look at the other hand, how to see through the shadows.
It was magic that taught him illusion.
Paris rubs his eyes. He glances up at the Levertov front window, wondering how long he’d been gone, realizing that an entire performance of Guys and Dolls could have taken place in that window and he would have missed it.
You’re on the job, Fingers.
Paris straightens his legs, does a quick scan of the immediate area with his binoculars. Deserted, except for a lone hot dog vendor on the corner of Newark and Fulton. Paris gets out of his car, stretches his legs, does a few kneebends, allowing the frigid air to revive him, his stomach now rumblin
g at the sight of the vendor. He’d managed to miss dinner again. Before he can head over, his two-way blares: “Jack?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m on my way,” Carla Davis says, sounding agitated. “Five blocks out.”
“You’re way early. What’s up?”
“Big fight with Charlie Davis is what’s up.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Gonna bust a cap up his skinny black ass is what’s gonna be up.”
Paris knows enough to leave it alone. Especially on an open channel. “Got it.”
“Where are you parked?”
Paris tells her.
“I’ll park closer to Trent, so we’re not in the same spot,” she says.
“Okay,” Paris says, eyeing the vendor and his cart, two blocks away, famished now that he’s seen it. “Listen, there’s a vendor on Newark and Fulton. Grab me something, okay?”
“No problem. What do you want?”
“I don’t know. Dog with the works, I guess. Coke.”
“You got it.”
“And listen, I know it’s Ivan’s case, but why don’t you pump this guy a little about the old man. Isaac Levertov peddled his cart around here. Maybe he saw something.”
“You got it.”
Carla pulls very close with her car. She hands Paris the hot dog—wrapped in Christmas themed wax paper—and the freezing can of Coke.
Paris asks: “Did he know the old man?”
“No,” Carla says. She holds her notebook up to the streetlight. “Mr. William Graham of Memphis Avenue in Old Brooklyn has been at this job exactly two weeks. Said he heard about the old man getting killed, but that’s about it.” She closes her notebook.
“What do I owe you?”
“Nothing,” Carla says, yawning already. “Just bring coffee in the morning. And every damn McMuffin there is. Now get outta here. Go have a life.”
The snow falls; hushed, relentless, orderly. The sparse traffic crawls up the center of Lorain Avenue, wisely making two lanes out of four.
It just didn’t add up.
Willis Walker. Fayette Martin. Isaac Levertov.