Текст книги "Kiss of Evil"

Автор книги: Richard Montanari

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

19

Mary says: “I have to meet someone.”

She thinks: What’s happening here? Two beauties in a row. First the jogger in front of my building. Now this guy. My knight in shining armor. I’m going to have to jump onto one of these boxcars soon. One of these days the train ain’t gonna run this way.

He is in his late twenties, early thirties maybe. When he had helped her to her feet she had supported herself against his right thigh and found it was rock hard.

The pain on the left side of her head, where the man had struck her, was minor compared to the wounding of her pride, the swelling of her embarrassment. To be lying facedown in the snow on a city street, humiliated and violated by a common thug, was far worse.

But the man standing in front of her didn’t seem to care.

“Well, at least let me take you to the hospital,” the man says. “I saw him hit you. You might have a concussion. We’ll stop at the police station. You can fill out a report.”

“No thanks,” she says. “I’m okay, really.”

He waits until her eyes meet his before he responds. His eyes are dark, expressive, the color of semisweet chocolate. “Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

The man lets go, and she finds that she is still a little wobbly.

“My name is Jean Luc Christiane,” he says.

“Tina Falcone,” she answers, before she can bottleneck the words in her throat.

“Nice to meet you, Tina.”

“You’re French?”

“No,” he says, smiling. “Born in the vieux carré in New Orleans. My family is in baking. I’m as American as beignets.”

“Well,” she says, rubbing the side of her face, thinking about how she had managed to go through most of her life without getting hit, only to be punched twice in one week. “All I can say is thanks. Who knows what that guy would have done.”

“It was both a duty and a pleasure,” he says. “Although I wouldn’t recommend this method of meeting to the rest of my unmarried friends.”

The word, unmarried, ripples between them for a moment. He is telling her he is unattached. If she is to play the mating game, this is where she lets him in on her marital status in some witty and urbane manner. Instead, she says: “No. I wouldn’t either.”

“So . . .” he begins, “. . . how do you want to pay me? The standard ‘I can call you in the middle of a snowstorm for a ride to the airport because I saved your life’ contract? Or do you have something else in mind? Because, clearly I cannot let you leave without settling this matter.”

He holds her gaze until she submits. She’s willing to bet that that stare has been awfully effective for him throughout his life.

“Well, what do you have in mind?” she asks.

“Seeing as I do this quite often—pulling pretty young women out of snowbanks—I do have a standard fee. If I’d had to run the perpetrator down, or produce some type of firearm, or even call the city crews to have you dug out of the snow, the remuneration would increase geometrically.”

“How fortunate I am.”

“Indeed,” he says, flicking the last snowflake from her shoulder.

“So . . . your standard fee is . . .”

“Dinner. Eight o’clock. Cognac at eleven. Home by twelve. Guaranteed.”

She considers his offer for a coquette’s moment. What the hell, she thinks. Maybe she’d get a hug or two out of it. She really needed a hug. Maybe even, God forbid, a long, dreamy kiss. It had been ages. “Yes. Okay. I’m game. Sure,” she says. “Why not?”

Jean Luc smiles. “Is that five dates, or just the one?” he asks. “I’ll have to check my calendar.”

Mary laughs.

It hurts her head.

But, for the first time in a long time, it’s a good hurt.

20

Paris is sitting in Fayette Martin’s kitchen. He is alone. Greg Ebersole is running down leads on Willis Walker’s girlfriends, interviewing the regulars at Vernelle’s Party Center, a few of whom were already in the unit’s Rolodex.

Evil is a breed, Fingers.

He had not been able to shake those words. What breed? Evil how? If Mike Ryan wrote those words, it couldn’t possibly have anything to do with something current, so what was the point? Besides, there was no case number on the photo, so it would be impossible to follow up, just a faded street address on the front.

But what if that dead body has something to do with Mike Ryan’s murder?

Could he possibly have been wrong about Sarah Weiss?

Is Mike Ryan reaching out to him from the grave?

Ancient history.

Focus, detective.

Unless he is mistaken, Fayette Martin’s apartment—a one-bedroom in Marsol Towers, furnished in Kronheim’s sale items—is exactly how Fayette left it the night she was murdered. She had, most likely, showered and dressed and hurried out the door, but surely not before making certain that all the cigarettes were out, that the coffeemaker was unplugged, that the deadbolt was turned, never for a moment realizing that none of these things would matter in the end. The shorted cord, the flaming ashtray, the mid-night intruder: specters of a different realm, now.

And then there are the plants. Every flat surface, every tabletop in Fayette Martin’s apartment is devoted to some kind of healthy, exotic houseplant. In the small pantry there are three dozen boxes of fertilizer and other plant-care products. Fir bark. Hydrolite. Epsom’s salts. Coltsfoot. Nettle.

It appears that Fayette had made a Swanson’s turkey dinner the night she was murdered. Paris immediately recognized the box, the familiar logo, peeking out of the Hefty bag plopped by the kitchen door. There are several of the same empty boxes in Paris’s kitchen wastebasket, too. Crazily, he wonders if Fayette liked the stuffing. To him it always tastes like wet stucco.

But there were probably many nights when, like him, she didn’t even notice.

Her computer is on the round Formica kitchen table in front of him; the monitor is black and cold, but the computer itself was on when the super had let him in. It is clear that Fayette Martin took many of her meals here, perhaps cruising the Internet as she ate. On the kitchen table there is also a mouse, manuals, a pair of flash drives.

Paris has found nothing to indicate the presence of a lover in Fayette’s life: no letters, no Hallmark cards, no photographs at Six Flags or Holden Arboretum held to the refrigerator with a magnet.

Paris thinks: I know the feeling, Fayette. Got a blank fridge myself.

Then, the dead woman speaks to him.

Out loud.

“Hello.”

Paris jumps nearly a foot. It sounds like it might be a recording of a phone conversation, but there is no tape recorder or answering machine in the kitchen. No radio, no TV either. So where was the—

It is then that Paris realizes that his hand is on the mouse. The voice must have something to do with a computer program he started by moving the mouse. The sound is coming from the computer speakers.

Fayette Martin? Paris wonders. Is that her voice? Is that the voice that belonged to the woman he had seen so torn apart in that building on East Fortieth Street?

“Hello,” a man answers.

“Are you the police officer?” she continues.

Police officer? A shiver runs through Paris. Please, he thinks. No cops.

“Yes,” the man says.

“Just home from a tough day at work?”

“Just walked through the door,” he says. “Just kicked off my shoes.”

“Shoot anyone today?”

“Not today.”

“Arrest anyone?”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“Just a girl. A very wicked girl.”

The woman laughs.

Paris thinks: It’s a sex tape. This is a recording of some sort of 900 call. Cops and maidens. Fayette Martin worked for a sex line?

The conversation continues.

“The woman you saw on the top floor. Did you like her?”

“Yes,” the man answers. “Very much.”

“Did it turn you on to watch her?”

“Yes.”

As the conversation proceeds, Paris presses the power button on the front of the computer monitor, an older model CRT, hoping there is some sort of video accompaniment to this. It appears to be broken.

“That was me, you know. I was the whore,” the woman says.

“I see,” the man says.

“Do you like to watch me do that to other men?”

“Yes. I love it.”

“Spread your legs.”

As Paris listens to this exchange, he has a hard time reconciling the supposedly shy young woman who worked at The Flower Shoppe with this sexual animal. The more he learned, it seemed, the less he knew about people.

Great trait for a detective.

“Like this?” the man suggests.

Maybe the world was full of Fayette Martins, Paris thinks. Maybe it is just naive, over-the-hill cops who—

“Meet me,” she says.

Paris sits upright in the chair. Yes. Talk to me. Talk about getting together.

“No.”

“Meet me tonight.”

The woman’s voice sounds pleading.

“No,” the man repeats.

“Meet me and fuck me.”

A few seconds of silence. Paris holds his breath, hoping The Lead is about fall into his lap. He doubted that such synthesized versions of these voices would ever stand up in court as proof of anything, but you never knew.

Just say the words.

Say them.

“If I say yes, what will you do for me?” the man asks.

“I . . . I’ll pay you,” the woman says. “I have cash.”

Paris thinks: Fayette Martin didn’t work for a sex line.

Fayette Martin is the caller.

“I don’t want your money,” the man says.

“Then what do you want?”

Pause. “Obedience.”

“Obedience?”

“If we meet, you will do as I say?”

“Yes.”

“You will do exactly as I say?”

“I . . . yes . . . please.”

“Are you alone now?”

“Yes.”

“Then listen to me carefully, because I will tell you this once. There is an abandoned building on the southeast corner of East Fortieth and Central . . .”

Paris’s heart leaps, spins, settles. His stomach follows suit. Fayette Martin is talking to her killer. Fayette Martin is talking to the man who cut her in two.

“There is a doorway on the East Fortieth side,” the man continues. “I want you to stand there, facing the door. Understand?”

“Yes.”

“Do you truly have the courage to go there? To do this?”

The slightest hesitation, then: “Yes.”

Paris realizes, amid his revulsion, that it was indeed courageous for Fayette Martin to go there that night, to be so committed to her fantasy that she would risk it all. And all is exactly what she lost.

“Do you understand that I am going to fuck you in that doorway? Do you understand that I am going to walk up behind you and fuck you in that filthy doorway?”

Paris closes his eyes. The scene begins to draw itself in his mind. Watercolors, this time. Blue and purple and gray. Weeza’s Corner Café. Neon in the distance. A woman in the doorway. Petite. Pretty.

“I . . . God. Yes.”

“You will wear a short white skirt.”

Paris sees the dead woman’s accordion-pleated skirt against the filth of the frigid concrete floor; the brown gouache of her blood.

“Yes.”

“You will wear nothing underneath it.”

“Nothing.”

Now, the curve of her buttocks. Pink, dimpled with the cold.

“You will wear nothing on top either, just a short jacket of some sort. Leather. Do you have one?”

They had found no leather jacket. Paris dresses her in one.

“Yes.”

“And your highest heels.”

“I’m wearing them now.”

He sees the bottom of her shoes. Blood-flecked, stiletto-heeled; the Payless price tag barely worn. Special-occasion shoes.

“You will not turn around. You will not look at me. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Say it.”

“I will not look at you.”

“You will not speak.”

“I will not.”

“You will submit to me totally.”

“Yes.”

“Can you be there in one hour?”

“Yes.”

“If you are one minute late, I will leave.”

“I won’t be late.”

“Then go.”

The conversation ends, the speakers fall silent, the hard drive of the computer turns twice, then stops. Paris finds himself staring at the speakers, waiting for more. An address, a name, a nickname, a background sound.

Nothing. He moves the mouse again. Still nothing.

Just the electric-clock silence of a dead woman’s kitchen.

Paris stands, looks into the living room. His gaze finds Fayette’s high-school picture propped on an end table. It is a soft-focus shot, head slightly back, eyes looking heavenward. Her lips are parted slightly, her sweater is burgundy, perhaps angora, and the color deepens the blush in her cheeks. Around her neck is a thin gold chain bearing a heart-shaped locket.

Paris wonders: What was the path that took her from that moment—sitting in an Olan Mills Studio, eighteen years old, her whole life an uncluttered horizon before her—to that doorway on East Fortieth Street? Through which of life’s portals did she need to pass to make that journey make sense?

And yet Paris believes that whoever she was in life, whatever she did, she had the right to be alive, and that a killer had butchered this woman and left her lying at his feet.

And thus, as she lay cold and blood-shorn and disassembled on a stainless-steel table at the morgue, he begins to feel that strange and special relationship with Fayette Marie Martin, as he had, at least to some degree, with every victim since his first homicide call.

Paris closes his eyes, conjures Fayette’s devastated body in the crime-scene photo, and asks of her murderer: Which way did you like her better, you son of a bitch? Dead or alive?

Which way did you prefer her?

He glances one last time at her portrait, her eyes.

“You will not look at me,” Paris says, aloud, the sound of his voice a dagger through the stillness. Fayette Martin’s stillness.

He looks at her lips.

You will not speak.

21

Paris’s cell phone rings at Carnegie and East Ninety-third Street.

“Paris.”

“Jack, it’s Reuben.”

“What’s up, amigo?”

“I just got the full report on Fayette Martin,” Reuben says. “There’s something I think you should see.”

Paris is glad they are not meeting in the autopsy theater. The labs, although possessed of a full range of their own macabre sights and grotesque smells, at least had the occasional spider plant, the half-eaten peanut butter cup, the air of the living.

Reuben looks wiped out. He leans against a marble-topped table bearing a bank of three microscopes, listlessly drawing on a straw stuck into a beaker of flat Pepsi. On the table, to the left of the microscopes, are a pair of covered lab dishes.

“Hey, Reuben. You look like shit.”

“Just pulled a thirty-six,” Reuben says. “And, with all due respect, detective, you ain’t no centavo nuevo either.”

Paris has no idea what Reuben said, but figures he has it coming. “What do we have?”

Reuben considers Paris for a moment, blank-eyed, taking his time finishing his drink. He then puts the beaker of cola down, flips on the task light over the table, and says:

“We found something strange inside one of Fayette Martin’s shoes.”

“It was under the inside label in her left shoe,” Reuben says. “There was no reason to look under there so no one did. We almost missed it. Looked like an ordinary brand label you find in half the women’s shoes sold.”

“Who found it?”

“The lab was finishing up taking blood samples from the heel of the shoe and someone noticed the corner of the label turned up slightly. They peeled it up a little more and saw the edge of this sticking out. Then they called SIU.” Reuben takes a pair of evidence photos of Fayette Martin’s left shoe out of an envelope.

“Could it have gotten there at the factory by accident?”

“No,” Reuben says. “The label on the inside of that shoe was peeled back and reglued very recently.”

Paris looks at the evidence bag on the table, at the small item found in the murder victim’s shoe: a strip of purple cardboard, about two inches long by a quarter inch wide. On it are what appear to be the bottoms of red letters, as if someone had cut off the bottom quarter inch of some kind of packaging label. It looks like two, or possibly three, words. It looks like the first letter might be a T. Or an I. Or a P. Paris counts two letters that look like an S. Beyond that, to Paris, it might as well be Sanskrit. “Any fluids?” he asks.

“Just Fayette’s. We also found Fayette’s blood mixed in with the glue that secured the shoe company’s label, which means the glue was soluble at the time of her murder. This was done at the scene, Jack. And we were definitely supposed to find it.”

Paris thinks for a moment, asks: “Do you think we have enough of the label to get a lead on what it says? Is there software that can do that?”

“Not sure. But I know the man to call.”

“Fed?”

“Who else?”

Shit, Paris thinks. Should he clear this with Elliott? It is up to the unit commander to reach out to another agency, especially at the federal level. If this leads somewhere, Paris is going to have to explain why he broke procedure. On the other hand, if Reuben’s contact is willing to forget the paperwork, maybe the CPD can nail this psychopath without the almighty Justice Department taking all the credit, as it usually does. The Cleveland Police Department could use the shot in the arm.

Paris asks: “How well do you know this guy?”

Reuben smiles. “Hang on.”

Reuben crosses the lab, enters his office. Ten minutes later, he returns. “I sent it over to the Federal Building via secure courier. He called to confirm receipt and said it isn’t much, but he also said he sleeps an average of two hours a day. The rest of the time he sits in front of his computer. He said the strip of cardboard is definitely cut from a commercial consumer product of some sort. He thinks he has the font and point size already. He also has the poundage of the cardboard.”

“What about the original?”

“It’s on the way back already.”

“And you trust this guy?”

“Absolutely. Believe me, if anybody is going to tell us what we have it’s Clay Patterson. He said he’ll call when and if.”

“What about the paperwork?” Paris asks.

“He says the invoice will read DigiData, Inc.,” Reuben replies. “And that they take cash.”

22

“What do you think, Bella?”

She pulls her Anna Sui from the closet, holds it up in front of her, glances at the cheval mirror. As always, Isabella’s picture, sitting atop the armoire, remains silent.

“Yeah, I think so, too. The little black dress. There’s simply no defense against it.” She laughs at her joke, then feels guilty, the way she always feels guilty having fun without her daughter.

As she steps into the shower she runs down her itinerary. She will meet Celeste on the way into town and get the money from the sale of Elton’s jewelry. Although she so desperately wants to tell Celeste about what happened at Dream-A-Dream Motel—as crazy as it sounded, Celeste is indeed the only person in the world she can trust—she has decided to wait.

She will tell her in due time.

And only if she needs to.

Jean Luc wears a Zegna wool suit, navy blue, and a subtly patterned dove gray tie. They dine at the Sans Souci restaurant at the Renaissance Hotel, the fare consisting of fusilli with roasted peppers and eggplant, sautéed scallops with fresh fennel and saffron broth, and a glorious, shared ice cream sundae topped with boysenberries and Grand Marnier.

The leisurely stroll around Public Square, watching the skaters twirl amid the Christmas lights, is even more glorious.

Jean Luc tells her about his job as the creative director for a major downtown ad agency. Jean Luc tells her that he finds her extremely attractive, in a very young Natalie Wood kind of way. Jean Luc tells her that Smart Money is his favorite magazine.

Incredibly, it is her favorite magazine, too. It is the only one to which she subscribes. The new issue is, at that moment, sitting in the lobby of her building.

Jean Luc asks her if she would like to have coffee, or if she would like to be taken home.

It was somewhere around the scallops that she had arrived at the answer to that one. She takes his hand in both of hers, squeezes gently, and says:

“Both.”

They are sitting on her couch, a single lamp lit behind them, the television on. They watch a few scenes from Anatomy of a Murder with Lee Remick on the AMC channel. They talk about dating, about travel, about movies, carefully skirting politics for this, their first date. By one o’clock, the coffee is gone. The film ends at one-fifteen.

Then comes the awkward silence. The first of the evening.

She decides to break it. “Well, in case I’ve forgotten to say it for the three-thousandth time, thanks for a wonderful evening,” she says, snapping on the table lamp next to the couch. She tries for levity. “I’m glad we, um, ran into each other today.”

“Uh oh,” Jean Luc replies. “Sounds like I’m leaving.”

“I have to get up, I’m afraid. Working gal.”

“Just one more cup?”

“Coffee’s gone.”

“Then so am I,” he says with a smile, rising, slipping on his charcoal gray coat. “But you’ve only begun to chip away at your debt to me. You do realize that, don’t you?”

“Of course,” she says, standing, trying to stretch her cramped legs without being obvious. “I intend to work it off at every Michelin-starred restaurant in a hundred mile radius of Cleveland. I pay my debts, no matter what the personal hardships.”

Jean Luc laughs. “Such nobility in the face of so many calories.”

“The food tonight was incredible. Thanks again.”

“Well . . . it was my pleasure,” he says, pulling on his leather gloves. “Beats the fare at Vernelle’s Party Center, I’ll bet.”

Suddenly, everything in the world is at a forty-five-degree angle to everything else. She is looking around her apartment, but nothing in it makes sense. The room is huge, ventless. The walls seem miles away.

She asks: “I’m sorry? Where?”

“Vernelle’s Party Center. On St. Clair Avenue. They serve chitterlings and ribs and collard greens there, if I’m not mistaken. Somehow, you don’t strike me as the soul food type.”

She can hear him speaking, but the words seem to rush by her ears, as if she is in motion. “I’ve never been there,” she says. “And you’re right. I’m not the soul food type. Way too fatty.”

“Oh, but I bet you were Willis Walker’s type,” he says. “I’d almost bet everything on that one.”

“Get out.”

“Please. Just listen to me.”

“Get out.”

“You’ll understand completely once I tell you the whole story.”

“Get out!”

“I’m afraid you have no choice but to listen,” he says, reaching slowly into the inside pocket of his coat.

“I have plenty of choices,” she answers. She squares herself in front of him, puts her hands on her hips. “I have every fucking choice there is.”

He removes his hand from the inside pocket of his coat and drops something on the coffee table in front of her. It is a three-by-five black-and-white photograph. At first, it looks like an abstract of some sort, the kind of optically challenging picture you might see in gaming magazines—Identify This! But when she looks at it more closely, she knows it is no game.

It is a picture of her running from Room 116 of the Dream-A-Dream Motel.

Her head swims. Tears begin to limn her eyes, despite of efforts to stop them.

How could she have been so stupid?

She tries to gather her thoughts, her breath. “What do you want?”

“I just need your help. No violence,” he says. “I’m just settling an old debt. And you can help me.”

“And this is how you ask me? By fucking blackmailing me?” She begins to pace around the apartment. Then, it hits her. “Wait a minute . . . you hired that guy to attack me, didn’t you?”

“He wasn’t supposed to lay a finger on you,” he says. “On the other hand, he wasn’t supposed to run away like a ten-year-old girl at the first sign of danger, either. Him coming back? That was all his idea. I guess you wounded his homeless-man pride. But, you have to admit, it made my rescue a lot more swashbuckling, don’t you agree?”

Everything that made this man attractive over dinner has now dissolved into a pool of disgust at the base of her stomach.

But, she had to confess, it’s not like she didn’t deserve having some con run on her. It’s not like she didn’t have it coming. She is, by anyone’s standards, at any time in the history of the world, a thief. And a murderer. Even if it was self-defense.

It’s just that she feels so violated.

“What do you want me to do?” she asks, sitting back down on the couch, her tears turning to sniffles, her mind turning to business.

“I want you to do what you do best,” he says, his face brightening, flashing the smile that got her into this mess. He sits down next to her. “Be yourself. Your charming, beautiful self.”

She draws a cigarette from the pack on the table, her hands no longer shaking.

He lights her cigarette, rests his hand on her knee, continues.

“Let me tell you a short story,” he says, offering her a starched white handkerchief. “Then I’ll go. I promise.”

For some reason, his soft, elegant voice is beginning to calm her. She is beginning to believe that he means her no physical harm, at least not at this moment. She takes the handkerchief and dabs her mascara-streaked eyes. “A story?”

“Yes. It takes place a few years ago. I was barely a teenager. If I remember correctly, the Indians beat the Minnesota Twins that day . . .”