“Okay,” Bobby says, “here’s what we’re going to do, Ahmed. I’m going to ask you one question, you’re going to give me one answer. Okay? Not your usual six. Just one. Got it?”
Paris, sitting behind the desk, only half-listening, knows the case Dietricht is working on. Muslim woman raped and murdered at Lakeview Terrace.
“Here it comes, Ahmed. Simple question requiring a one-word answer. Ready? Did you, or did you not, see Terrance Muhammad in the lobby of 8160 that night?” With this, Bobby reaches over and hits the speakerphone button, making Paris privy to the conversation, and to what Bobby obviously believes will be a classic piece-of-shit answer.
He is right.
“It is not so simple,” Ahmed says. “As you know, the CMHA is way behind on their repairs. We have taken them to court many, many times over this. Leaking ceilings, peeling plaster, unsafe balcony railings. And not to mention the rats, the vermin. Add to this the low wattage of the singular lamp in the lobby of 8160 and the certainty of such an identification becomes suspect at best. I would like to say that I saw Mr. Muhammad with some degree of certitude, but I cannot. And to think, a few extra watts, a few extra pennies a year might have made all the difference in a criminal investigation.”
“Ahmed, I’ve got you on the speakerphone now. I’m sitting here with Special Agent Johnny Rivers of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Say hello to him.”
Paris buries his head in his hands. Johnny Rivers. Bobby Dietricht is famous for the pop culture mixed reference. Johnny Rivers recorded “Secret Agent Man,” not “Special Agent Man.” But it was close enough for Ahmed, and that’s all that matters.
“The FBI is there?” Ahmed asks, a little sheepishly. “I don’t… why is this, please?”
“Because the Justice Department is looking into the Nation of Islam and the contracts they have with Housing and Urban Development,” Bobby says. “Seems there’s been some allegations of corruption, extortion, things like that. Not to mention Homeland Security.”
Silence. Bobby has him.
“Could you take me off the speakerphone, please?” Ahmed asks.
Bobby and Paris touch a silent high five. Bobby picks up the hand-set. “Buy me coffee, Ahmed. When? No… how about now? Now is good for me. Twenty minutes. Hatton’s.”
Bobby hangs up the phone, stands, shoots his cuffs, turns to leave, then suddenly stops, sniffs the air. “Jack?”
“Yeah.”
“Question for you.”
“Yeah,” Paris answers, annoyed. He has just read the same sentence for the fifth time.
“Why do you smell like Jennifer Lopez?”
The phone. Of all the possibilities that exist when a homicide detective’s phone rings at work-from his long list of lowlife informants, to the coroner’s office calling with bad news, to the unit commander ringing with the cheery tidings that another body has been found and you get to go poke it with things-the one call that invariably changes his day completely is the one that begins:
“Hi, Daddy!”
It is always springtime in his daughter’s voice.
“Hi, Missy.”
“Merry Christmas!”
“Merry Christmas to you, honey, but it’s not for four more days!” Paris says. “How’s school?”
“Good. We got out last Friday for the holidays.”
Of course, Paris realizes. Why doesn’t he ever stop and think before asking questions like that? “So what’s cookin’?”
“Well,” she says, taking a big swallow. “You know that we haven’t seen each other in a week and a half, right?”
“Okay,” Paris says, his heart aching with love for this little girl. She is so much like her mother. The Setup. The Flattery. The Kill. He lets her play it out.
“And I miss you,” Melissa adds.
“I miss you, too.”
Swallow number two. “Did Mom tell you that she has her office Christmas party tonight?”
“She may have mentioned something about it.”
“And do you remember if she told you that I was thinking about having a few of my friends over tonight, too?”
“No, honey. But it sounds like fun.”
“Well… it turns out that Darla has a cold.”
“Is that right?”
“Uh-huh. She can’t baby-sit.”
“I see,” Paris says, thinking about what a brilliant tactic this is, having Melissa call.
“So, do you think you could do it?” Melissa asks, then outdoes even her mother in the charm department. “I really miss you, Daddy.”
God, she’s going to be a dangerous woman, Paris thinks. He had planned to rent Sea of Love again, toss a turkey dinner in the microwave, maybe do a few loads of laundry. Why on earth would he give all that up to spend a few hours with his daughter? “Sure.”
“Thanks, Daddy. Mom says eight o’clock.”
“Eight o’clock it is.”
“Oh! I almost forgot!”
“What, sweetie?”
“Did Mom tell you what she got for me as an early Christmas present?”
“No, she didn’t,” Paris says, fully prepared to have been outspent, out-hipped. What he is not prepared for is outhustled.
“It’s the coolest,” Melissa says. “The absolute coolest.”
“What’d you get?”
“JLO perfume.”
On the way back to the store to return the perfume-having already dumped the perfume sample card after Bobby Dietricht’s smart-ass comment-Paris finds his thoughts returning to Sarah Weiss, a name he had tried very hard to put out of his mind for the past eighteen months. Although he had never partnered with Mike Ryan, Paris had considered him a friend, had known him to be a solid, stand-up cop, a family man with a terrific wife and a little girl in a wheelchair whom he loved to the heavens.
It was Mike Ryan who had given Paris the station-house nickname of Fingers, referring to Paris’s penchant for the impromptu card trick, complete with scatalogical patter, a habit stemming from a lifelong interest in close-up magic. Paris could remember at least a dozen times when a grinning Mike Ryan had staggered across a crowded downtown bar on a Friday night, a quartet of people in tow, a deck of cards in hand, shouting: “Hey, Fingers! Show ’em the one where all the kings lose their nuts in a hunting accident.” Or, “Hey, Fingers! Do the one with the four jacks, the queen, and the circle jerk.”
Or, how about this, Paris thinks as he rounds the corner onto Ontario Street:
Hey, Fingers! I’m gonna get my fuckin’ brains blown out in a hotel room one of these days. Do me a favor, okay? Cop to cop. With my blessing, please return the favor to the bitch who pulled the trigger.
Sarah Lynn Weiss.
Dead.
Paris recalls Sarah Weiss’s willowy figure, her clear obsidian eyes. Sarah’s story was that she had found the leather satchel in the ladies’ room and was about to look inside for identification when the police searched the rest rooms. The only physical evidence tying her to the shooting had been traces of Michael Ryan’s blood on the big leather purse lying near her feet.
But Paris had seen it in her eyes. He had looked into her eyes not twenty minutes after she had killed a man and the madness still raged there.
He thinks about the drunken Sarah Weiss sitting in a burning car, her lungs filling with smoke, the heat blistering the skin from her flesh. He thinks about Mike Ryan’s lifeless body slumped in that hotel chair.
Detective John Salvatore Paris finds the symmetry he wants in this sad and violent diorama, the balance he needs, and thinks:
It’s finally over, Mikey.
We close the book today.
Paris steps onto Euclid Avenue, the aroma of diesel fumes and roasting cashews divining its very own recess of city smells in his memory, a scent that leads him down a long arcade of recollection to Higbee’s, Halle’s, and Sterling Lindner’s-the magnificent, glimmering department stores of his youth-and the deep promise of the Christmas season.
As he enters Tow
er City, a momentarily contented man, he has no way of knowing that within one hour his phone will ring again.
He will answer.
And, on the city of his birth, an ancient darkness will fall.
5
The twenty-suite Cain Manor apartment building is a blocky blond sandstone on Lee Road near Cain Park, always fully occupied due to its reasonable rents, always offering new faces due to the generally rapid turnover of rental property in Cleveland Heights. To the building’s right sits its identical twenty-suite twin, called Cain Towers, also a blocky blond sandstone.
In the two years she had called her one bedroom apartment on the fourth floor at the Cain Manor home, she had yet to determine exactly what it is that makes one characterless yellow building a manor, and the other a tower.
This morning she sits at the small dinette table overlooking Lee Road. The slushy hum of winter traffic is heard beneath WCPN’s morning show, floating up from the boom box on the floor. She is barefoot, bundled into a lavender silk robe, smoking a French cigarette, sipping coffee. Moses, her ancient Siamese, guards the sill.
At five minutes to eleven she straightens her hair, smoothes her cheeks, adjusts the front of her robe. These gestures are, of course, as automatic as they are unnecessary, because she had never come within a hundred yards of actually meeting Jesse Ray Carpenter, and doubted if she ever would. Still, the notion that this man of small mystery will be pulling into the parking lot across the street in a few minutes never fails to engage her basic vanities.
Jesse Ray is always prompt.
She stands, crosses the kitchen, retrieves the coffeepot from the counter. She returns, fills her cup, considers the sky over the city, the melancholy clouds, thick with snow. If life were perfect, at about eight o’clock that morning, she would be standing on the corner of Lee Road and East Overlook, waiting for the Mayfair preschool van with her daughter, Isabella. Bella, with cheeks the color of winter raspberries and Tiffany blue eyes to shame the December sky, would have been stuffed into her pink jacket and matching mittens. If life were perfect, Isabella’s mom would then have been off to some job-health club twice a week, happy hour Fridays, rent a couple of movies for Saturday night. One for Bella. One for her.
Instead, at eleven o’clock in the morning, on a weekday, she is waiting for a pair of criminals.
Glancing across the street, she sees the top of Jesse Ray’s black sedan as it pulls into the Dairy Barn lot and comes to a halt next to the drive-up phone booth. She sees the window roll down, sees his dark coat sleeve emerge, his bright white shirt cuff, his gold watch. It is practically all she has ever seen of him, although, once, she thought she had seen his car pulling out from behind the Borders at La Place and had followed him for ten minutes or so before losing him somewhere around Green Road and Shaker Boulevard.
Soon, she will see Celeste, tall and full of nervous energy, emerge from the passenger side.
She had met Celeste quite by accident one night, having idiotically stepped in when a rather inebriated man was threatening Celeste in the lobby of the Beachwood Marriott. Big guy, long hair, Harley T-shirt, a huge tattoo of an orange rattlesnake wrapped around his right forearm. A few sheets to the wind herself, she had gotten between them and flashed the man the Buck knife she carried. The man had mockingly skulked away. Celeste had thanked her with a round of cocktails and margarita led to margarita led to confession and Celeste had told her a few larcenous details regarding her life. A little grifting, a little insurance fraud, a little petty theft. Two weeks later they met for drinks again and she had asked Celeste if she knew anyone to whom she could sell some jewelry. Celeste had said yes.
That night was two years and nearly forty-five thousand dollars ago. The night she struck the devil’s deal with herself.
Fifty thousand, not a penny less.
Celeste’s knock on the door is, as always, a little too loud.
“Hi, honey,” Celeste says, bounding into the apartment with a teenager’s enthusiasm, hugging her briefly. They had taken to hugging at some point recently. Celeste is tall and slender, smooth-complected, just this side of runway-model pretty. Today she is wearing red ski slacks, a black faux-fur bomber jacket, a red scarf. Her dark hair is loose, windblown. She wears a pair of long silver earrings shaped like icicles.
“Is it cold?”
“Freezing,” Celeste answers. “Coffee?”
“Help yourself,” she says, bolting and chaining the door.
“Thanks.”
Celeste unwraps her thick red scarf, retrieves a cup from a cabinet. She pours herself coffee as Bird’s version of “Bloomdido” bops from the box. She sits down at the table.
“How’s Jesse Ray?” She always asked, although Celeste had never really been all that forthcoming about Jesse Ray Carpenter, having only told her the man’s name after they had done more than ten thousand dollars in business. They look out the window in unison. A ribbon of silvery smoke winds its way skyward from Jesse Ray’s car window. Jesse Ray the control freak. Whenever she wants to see Celeste, it is Jesse Ray she pages.
“He’s okay. Actually… he’s kind of pissed at me,” Celeste says.
“Why? What happened?” She isn’t really sure what the nature of Celeste’s relationship with Jesse Ray is, except that she had seen Celeste moon a few times when she talked about the man. In Celeste’s opinion, Jesse Ray is the grifter’s grifter. A magician. “Oh, nothing. You know how he gets.”
“Actually, I don’t know how he gets. Never met the man.”
“Well, let’s just say I missed a cue in a very important situation.” Celeste falls silent, reddening slightly as if she had been scolded all over again, sipping her coffee with a somewhat unsteady hand.
She regards Celeste for a few moments, then reaches into the kitchen drawer behind her, removes the paper bag, tosses it to Celeste, officially changing the subject, as she always does when their small talk turns to business.
Celeste looks inside the bag, brightens. “So… who was it this time?”
“Tina.”
“The falcon,” Celeste says, ominously, forming her hands into talons.
Tina Falcone is one of a dozen aliases she uses, each one corresponding to a different physical look, a different style. She is fairly good at accents, too. When she plays the Latina, she is flawlessly Hispanic. Her posh Brit isn’t half bad either. Her favorite alias, though, is Rachel Anne O’Malley. Sounds like a child film star from the twenties.
But, of all her names, her real name is the simplest. Mary. Plain-old vanilla-flavored-nobody-notices Mary.
Celeste asks, “Did the falcon swoop?”
Mary laughs. “Yeah. Old Elton was dead in his tracks.”
“Elton?”
“Yep. That was a first.”
Celeste shakes her head, smiling, taking it all in. “Elton,” she repeats, reverentially, as if a mark never sounded quite so ripe. She stands, finishes her coffee, wraps her scarf around her neck. “I’m gonna get going, hon. Jesse Ray’s got somewhere to be. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Okay,” she says, but her voice sounds distant and sad.
“You all right, girl?” Celeste asks.
“I’m gonna bring her home, you know. Soon.”
“I know,” Celeste replies, her stock answer. “You will. It won’t be long.”
“All I need is six thousand dollars. That’s all. A lousy six Gs. A little less, even.”
Celeste lifts the jewelry bag into the air, shakes it, rattles the contents. “Cake.”
Celeste is virtually the only person she can talk to about Isabella, and how much this money means to the two of them.
Mary had never married Isabella’s father, Donny, a rock-drumming miscreant from Zanesville, Ohio. But she had lived the rock-and-roll life for two years with Donny Kilgore and his band, Android Beach, a motley assemblage of career potheads who played a nearly unlistenable mix of technodance music and seventies stadium rock. For almost two years she had toured with Donny
and the boys, washing the band’s clothes, cooking a ton of pasta on a hot plate, bailing them out of the drunk tank more times than she could count, puking in her share of motel lobbies.
When Isabella was born, Donny had made her a solemn, tearful promise that the drinking and the drugs were a thing of his past. Donny told her it was all going to change, that he was hooked up with a new circle. Real record people who were going to make it happen for the band.
What Donny had failed to mention was that these record people had certain needs, and that one morning, around five, the door would come crashing in and a German shepherd named Quincy would find 2.2 pounds of cocaine in the basement.
She had suspected Donny of dealing for a while, had torn their small Bedford Heights house and garage apart a number of times looking for his stash, never finding it. But what she had found was a list of forty or so music-business bigwigs-addresses, phone numbers, cell phone numbers, e-mail addresses, wives’ names. Favorite cocktails, even. Donny’s schmooze list. Most were lawyers and accountants, pillars of their communities. A few owned record labels. But most were men in very conservative suits with second wives and no prenuptial agreements. She was absolutely certain that these were the people to whom Donny had been dealing in an attempt to launch Android Beach.
From the day she had found it in Donny’s van, she had taken very good care of the list.
After cooperating with the DEA, Donny had drawn a five-year sentence and she was given two years’ probation and two hundred hours of community service. She had known nothing about the coke, but she had known Donny Kilgore and that should have tipped her.
But the worst was yet to come. Within three weeks of the hearing, her father had pulled every string he had-and he had many, reaching to the highest levels of the Cuyahoga County political machine-and taken Isabella away.
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