Kiss of Evil

by Kiss of Evil

  What the hell ties these three people together?

  Paris opens the Coke, sips, places the can between his legs. He grabs the hot dog, unwraps one end, lifts it to his lips, a third of his mind on Rebecca, a third of his mind on the road, the final third adrift on a stagnant sea of meaningless clues.

  It is the smell that brings him back to shore.

  The smell of death.

  Paris slams on his brakes and begins to slide, sideways, up Lorain Avenue. Luckily there is no oncoming traffic. After a few uneasy moments he rights the car, brings it to a halt, straddling the center of the road. He opens the driver’s door and all but dives onto the icy street.

  “God damn, man . . . shit!”

  Jack Paris begins to pace around in the middle of Lorain Avenue, fighting the nausea, holding his shield up to the car behind him, directing it around his car. He stops, rests his hands on his knees for a moment. He spits on the ground—once, twice.

  Fat snowflakes catch on Paris’s eyelashes. He brushes them aside, then dares to reach back into his car. He retrieves the blue light, puts it on the roof, and as he does he glances at the festive, brightly decorated wax paper, the beige-colored bun resting on the passenger seat.

  “You are going down, motherfucker,” Paris says as he takes out his cell phone, dials the Second District precinct house, his fury now a living thing within him. He spits into the gutter again. “You don’t see a fucking courtroom. I swear to Christ.”

  Paris listens to the phone ring, absolutely certain that the hot dog vendor is going to be nowhere in sight when the squad cars get to the corner of Newark Avenue and Fulton Road; absolutely livid that he had been taunted with that name, Will Graham, the tormented FBI agent in Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon; absolutely revolted by the knowledge that he had just come to within an inch or two of biting into Willis Walker’s penis.

  46

  I can hear the police sirens in the distance and know that they are coming for me; a sober, urgent aria, rising and falling.

  The old woman sits on the plastic-slipcovered dining room chair, her eyes a dead pool of defiance. I know that she has been through worse than whatever I can offer her now. Much worse. As a child she has survived the horrors of Buchenwald, has witnessed an encyclopedia of inhuman behavior.

  Initially, she had refused to tell me where the keys to the garage could be found. I needed them to get at her husband’s hot dog cart. She had lost the tip of the little finger on her right hand to this stubbornness, yet still refused. When I brought the steam iron to within an inch of her face she pointed to a drawer in an old desk, her frail shoulders sagging under the weight of her shame.

  She is very tough, clearly from another time, another era. Not soft and complacent like so many of my generation. She really has nothing to do with my plan, and my instincts are to just leave her apartment, take my chances. These are my instincts. And yet I know I cannot do this. I have no hatred for her, but I need until New Year’s Eve at the very least and she has seen my real face.

  My father’s face.

  I look out the window as two police cars converge on the corner of Trent Avenue and Fulton Road, their blue lights a sparkling, prismatic display on the ice-crystalled facade of St. Rocco’s church.

  The old woman struggles against the ropes. It appears that life, complete with all its horrors and barbarism and cruelty, is still precious to her. She tries to plead with me, but the tape over her mouth catches her fear, mutes it.

  When we met, I had told her and her husband Isaac that my name was Judah Cohen. I kneel in front of her and say, in very apologetic Hebrew, acquired just for this occasion:

  “Ani ve ata neshane et haolam.”

  You and I will change the world.

  Edith Levertov’s eyes open wide, wider.

  She screams.

  She has met the devil once before.

  47

  Paris mounts the steps to the Levertov apartment, his sidearm drawn. He is followed by Carla Davis and two uniformed officers from the Second District. Paris has not pulled his weapon in the line of duty for more than eight months, and although he had requalified at the range since, it suddenly feels foreign in his hand, heavy.

  Three scenarios are possible at the top of these stairs, Paris thinks, ten treads from the door. One. Nobody home. Isaac Levertov’s widow is staying with relatives, too grief-stricken to return to the apartment. Two. A dazed and confused and heavily medicated Mrs. Edith Levertov will come to the door, having never heard the doorbell or the ringing phone.

  Three?

  Well, three has too many variables, even for someone of Jack Paris’s experience.

  The top of the stairs brings a collective breath from the four police officers. Paris tries the knob and the old door opens, just a few inches, creaking in protest. Paris makes eye contact with Carla, who is standing directly behind him. Paris will open the door wide, go in high. Carla will go in low.

  After a silent count of three, Paris pushes open the door fully. The squeal of the hinge is louder this time, a shriek of rusty disapproval in the silence of the hallway.

  No movement. No voices inside. No TV nor radio.

  Paris waits a few heartbeats, peeks around the jamb. Small kitchen ahead, enameled yellow walls, a wrought-iron dinette table, plastic plants. He smells old frying oil, Lysol, cat litter. Whereas there had been no lights on when Paris had staked the apartment out earlier, now, it seems, every light in the small apartment is blazing.

  Paris rolls in high. Carla follows. Spotless kitchen floor, except for the two slightly sullied size-eleven footprints made of melted snow. Paris silently apprises Carla, who skirts them.

  To the left, an archway into the living and dining rooms. Paris sidles against the refrigerator, holds his position. Carla moves low, to the far side, glancing through the archway as she does. She stands on the opposite side of the arch, nods at Paris. Paris steps into the dining room, his 9 mm pistol at a forty-five degree angle to his body.

  The shadow appears first, then the outline, then the form.

  Someone is sitting at the dining room table.

  Paris raises his weapon, draws down on the shape in front of him, his heart flying. Shoot don’t shoot. It never changes.

  Shoot.

  Don’t shoot.

  Paris lowers his weapon slightly, the sweat now gathering at the nape of his neck, running down his back in a latticework of icy threads.

  There is no threat from the person at the table.

  Carla rolls the corner, weapon high, sees what Paris sees, hesitates—the macabre scene distracting her for a moment—then silently moves forward.

  Ahead, a small cluttered living room: an old twenty-five-inch rock maple TV, a tall étagère full of glassine objects, overstuffed chairs. Empty, silent, ominous. Carla nods toward the hallway that certainly leads to the bedrooms, bathroom. Paris moves to the hallway opening, Carla spins into the hall. The two other uniformed officers position themselves in the living room. Paris nods to one of them, who then skirts Paris, and moves down the hallway. Paris repeats the action with the second officer. He follows. They search the rest of the apartment.

  Bathroom. Empty.

  Bedroom One and closet. Empty.

  Bedroom Two and closet. Empty.

  Paris walks back to the dining room and looks at the figure seated at the table. He returns his weapon to his shoulder holster.

  “Clear!” Carla Davis yells from a bedroom.

  Carla emerges from the hallway, her pistol at her side. The two other police officers—rookie patrolmen from the looks of them, pumped and full of adrenaline from the search—follow her out. It is usually a moment, a very special moment for police officers, to decelerate, to slap each other on the back, to take that deep, nervous breath that says we went where the danger was and we didn’t flinch.

  But it is not a time for camaraderie.

  Not this time.

  “My God, Jack,” Carla says softly.

  The two other p
olice officers in the dining room holster their weapons, avert their eyes. They are both young enough to have living grandmothers and they are appalled at the sight in front of them. One of them leaves the room, ostensibly to cover the front door to the apartment. The other studies his shoes.

  The old woman, Edith Levertov, is sitting at her dining room table, as she most likely had for many years—partaking of her kreplach, playing mah-jongg, diapering the parade of Levertov babies and grandbabies, dispensing her years of wisdom.

  Except, this time, there is a difference.

  This time, her head is turned completely around, facing the flower-print wall of cabbage roses and olive green vines. This time, her exanimate eyes are wide open and she appears to be staring at a symbol, roughly slashed into the plaster on the dining room wall. An ancient emblem made of six lines, two of them curved into a gentle arc.

  Paris, suddenly the scholar in Santerian symbology, doesn’t bother to look.

  48

  The Caprice Lounge is all but deserted and Carla Davis is about as looped as he had ever seen her. The fact that Carla had had their actor right in front of her both infuriated and, if the fact that she is on her third Cutty Sark is any indication, frightened her more than a little.

  Right around last call, after a long silence, Carla asks: “I’ve been wanting to ask you something.”

  “Okay.”

  “Nothin’ to do with the case.”

  “Good.”

  “You ever think about getting married again?”

  “Never,” Paris lies.

  “Really? How come?”

  “A million reasons, none of them good enough on their own. But collectively . . .”

  “I understand.”

  “Let me put it this way,” Paris says. “At this stage of my life, I like my women like I like my first pot of coffee of the day.”

  Carla plays along. “You mean, hot, black, and sweet?”

  “Nope,” Paris replies. “I mean gone by seven-thirty.”

  Carla laughs. “Okay, okay. I hear ya.”

  “Now I’ve got a question for you. It’s got everything to do with the case.” Paris reaches inside his suit coat pocket and retrieves an old newspaper photograph of Jeremiah Cross. “You know this guy?”

  Carla squints at the photo in the dim lights of the bar. “Not sure. Who is he?”

  “Defense attorney. He defended the woman who killed Mike Ryan.”

  Carla takes her glasses from her coat pocket, puts them on, holds the photo up for better light. “No,” she says. “But, on the other hand, pretty-boy lawyers all kind of blend together for me, you know what I mean?” She reads the caption. “Jer-e-mi-ah Cross. Nope. Doesn’t ring a bell. Why?”

  “This is gonna sound insane.”

  “It’s almost two-thirty, Jack,” she says, draining her drink, calling for the tab. “Believe me, it won’t.”

  “Is there any chance that he might have been our unsub?”

  Carla looks at Paris. Deep, cop-trance look. He has her attention now. “This guy? Our unknown subject?” She grabs the photo back. “Shit, I don’t know. Maybe yes, maybe no. My guy had a big beard, tinted shades, ball cap. Probably a wig. I think I saw his lips and his nose. How tall is this Jeremiah Cross?”

  “Six feet or so.”

  “That’s about right,” Carla says.

  “What about an accent? Did he sound southern at all?”

  “No. Sounded like a guy from Rocky River, actually.” Carla scrutinizes the photo again. “Why on earth would you like this guy as our actor?”

  Paris gives her a brief rundown.

  “That ain’t much,” Carla says.

  “I know.”

  “Just because you’d like to go upside on this guy doesn’t exactly make him our voodoo mass murderer.”

  “You’re right,” Paris says. “Forget I said anything.”

  They drop the money on the bar, sign off for what they know will only be a few hours. Paris walks Carla to her car. They assess each other’s ability to drive and give themselves a pass.

  Thirty minutes later, as Paris flops into his bed, chilled to the marrow, fully clothed, deprived of any direction in this brutal abattoir he calls a career, he falls instantly into a deep, troubled sleep.

  Evil is a breed, Fingers.

  An hour later, Paris does not hear the car pull into the parking lot across the street, nor does he see the glow of the cigar ember inside, phosphorescent in the blackness, strobing through the night like a rosary made of fire.

  Three

  ∼

  Brujo

  49

  NEW YEAR’S EVE

  CLEVELAND, OHIO

  The boy is a man. Thirty years of age this day. In his time, he has broken every law of God, almost every law of man. In his time he has taken the lives of eleven people, including a cholo who once approached him in a Sinaloa café, a foul-breathed wretch with a pedophile’s eyes over slick yellow teeth. He had been so revolted by this man’s repeated advances that he had paid for the man’s drinks well into the night, left with him, then lured him to a dark place and gutted him like a pescado. He had been fifteen. He had fed the man’s insides to some strays.

  Another life became his around the time his mother had been walking the streets near East Fifty-fifth Street in Cleveland. One night she had brought home a man who looked and smelled like a hobo, someone who rode the rails. In the morning the boy had seen the man searching the kitchen, looking for cash. The man found the cookie jar that held sixty-one dollars. The boy had dressed, followed the man to a vacant building on Prospect. He watched while the man made an elaborate job of hiding the money in a coffee can. He watched while the man curled up on a stinking mattress.

  When the boy was certain the man was sound asleep, he sneaked up on him and, with one powerful blow, pounded a rusty wood chisel into the man’s left ear, deep into his brain, killing him instantly. The boy had been twelve at the time. He and his sister had then dug a hole in the lot behind the building and buried the man. Two weeks later, they stood across the street as the building was torn down, filled in, leveled. A month later it was paved over.

  The sixty-one dollars was replaced in the cookie jar before their mother even knew it was gone, as was an additional four dollars and ten cents the boy had found in the dead man’s pockets.

  As the clock winds down to a new day, a new year, the man knows his future is uncertain, as unpredictable as death itself. And yet, as he showers and shaves and readies himself for the day, he knows one thing with certainty.

  He knows that Detective John Salvatore Paris will die, by his own hand, before this day is out.

  50

  Mercedes Cruz has taken on the waxy pallor of the newly deceased. All the ghastly visual details of the murders of Fayette Martin, Willis Walker, Isaac Levertov, and Edith Levertov are displayed in front of her in brilliant, living color. Forty-eight photographs in all.

  Paris feels for Mercedes. He knows her well enough to know she has a good heart and this is something she had not anticipated.

  The task force meeting begins promptly at eight o’clock with every available detective in the Homicide Unit sitting in the room. Four of the eight unit commanders are also in attendance, as are the coroner and deputy coroner.

  In addition to the crime-scene photographs of the victims, there are two photographs of the cardboard strips found on Isaac Levertov and Fayette Martin, as well as two photographs of the shoeprints found in the Levertov apartment. Also, a pair of computer-generated composites are tacked on the board. One is of a young blond woman, the woman last seen with Willis Walker. The other is really two composites side by side. The bearded, bespectacled young man at the hot dog cart on the left; and a clean shaven, glassless version of the suspect on the right.

  During the past twenty-four hours, the net had widened to include law-enforcement agencies at the county and state levels. Images of the hot dog vendor had been distributed to police and sheriff’s departments
all over northeastern Ohio, some already to Pennsylvania, Indiana, Kentucky, and West Virginia. The image had also been uploaded to a dozen law-enforcement websites.

  The task force had also rerun the digital file taken from Carla’s hidden camera at the party. Poor quality, terrible lighting, absolutely unusable.

  In the past few days, the buzz that had flowed through the department regarding the Paris Is Burning evidence had taken on a far more serious tone than if the rumor that a police officer might be targeted by a killer had not been prematurely floated. There are about eighteen hundred men and women on the force and more than once, over the past days, a few more vests than usual had been quietly removed from lockers and strapped into place.

  The investigation had also confirmed what they already knew; that DVD rental businesses, including the big ones like Blockbuster, do not rent the original plastic packaging with the movie. In the past forty-eight hours, the factory packaging of all thirty-one rental DVD copies of Paris Is Burning in the greater Cleveland area had been examined and cleared. Not one of them had a missing label.

  Greg Ebersole begins. “There were no usable prints from the motel room. Most of the surfaces were wiped down rather thoroughly, but there were traces of Willis Walker’s blood found on the nightstand and the inside door-knob, indicating that the killer wiped the bludgeoning weapon first, which was most likely the toilet tank cover, then proceeded to wipe down the room with the same cloth. A towel with what looks like blood on it was found in a culvert along I-90 last night. Lab’s got it now.

  “SIU has also lifted no fewer than fifty prints and partials at the Fayette Martin crime scene. Of the twenty on file, eleven were incarcerated at the time of the murder, three no longer live in the area and have provided work alibis. Two are over seventy, being a pair of pensioners who routinely visit the building looking for aluminum cans. That brings us to one Jaybert Louis Williams, thirty-four, whose sheet begins and ends with a pair of shoplifting charges in North Randall, and one Antoinette Viera, thirteen years of age.”