“What is what?” Beth asks, sitting up.
“This.” Paris turns and points to the velvet wing chair on the screen. Except the chair is gone. It has been replaced by a picture of the space shuttle making a perfect three-point landing at Andrews Air Force Base.
“Uh…” Paris says. He looks at the top of the screen.
CNN. com
“That’s called the news, Jack,” Beth says, unzipping the back of her dress, as if they were still married and about to hit the sack. “The national news. Stuff that doesn’t happen in Cleveland. You may have heard of it.”
“But there was just some kind of, I don’t know, performance-art thing on for a minute or so. Nothing but a chair. The all-chair channel or something.”
“Right,” Beth says, rising from the bed, a little unsteadily, then kicking off her shoes. “Master Bedroom Theater.” She laughs at her joke, leans in front of Paris, grabs the mouse, and clicks on an icon. The iChat icon. “No peeking.”
It is a familiar, sexy taunt. An early marriage-game for the two of them that began on their wedding night. Paris, tipsy outside the window. Beth, a terry-cloth blur inside their motel room.
In a few seconds, the room behind Paris appears on the screen, courtesy of the small digital camera suction-cupped to the top of the monitor. The woman on the screen lets her velvet cocktail dress slip to the floor as she moves, in a series of still shots, to the closet.
At that moment, to Jack Paris, the woman on the screen is somebody else’s wife, somebody else’s girlfriend, somebody else’s mistress. A movie-sexy total stranger within his reach.
But… should he reach? Was Beth actually trying to seduce him? Was the moment he had longed for and dreamed about for years finally happening?
He is as unsure of the answers to those questions as he is unable to tear his eyes from the computer monitor. The stranger on the screen slips her bra over her shoulders, her back prudently to the camera.
And, in spite of his explicit instructions, Jack Paris peeks.
7
She is Ginger tonight; blond and demure. Grace Kelly with a leopard clutch purse.
The mark is black, in his late forties.
She has never gone out twice in one week. Far too risky, far too much wear and tear on her nerves. She usually prefers at least a one-month span between hits, preferably two, but something terrible happened when she watched Isabella from the phone booth that morning. For a few minutes, she had thought another child was her daughter, a little girl about the size Isabella had been six months earlier. When she realized her mistake she searched the playground, frantic for a few moments, then finally burst into tears when she saw Isabella, sitting on a bench, her shoes untied as always, waiting for someone to help. Isabella had been the girl in the navy blue coat and matching tam-o’-shanter. The first girl out of the building when the bell rang.
She had seen her daughter and not recognized her.
There was no longer any time to waste. Every day she doesn’t hold her daughter is a day she will never get back She is not going to live up to her father’s low expectations.
She closes her eyes, finds her center, finds Ginger, takes a deep breath, exhales.
When she opens her eyes, she glances over at the table in the corner and draws Willis Walker to the bar with a smile that yields the rumblings of his very first erection of the night.
“I’ve never seen you here before,” Willis says.
“Oh, but I’ve seen you,” Ginger answers.
“Is that right?”
“It is.”
Willis Walker leans against the bar, a huge slab of black man in a mauve three-piece suit, matching tie and socks. The president of Black Alley Records, a small hip-hop label run out of a warehouse on Kinsman Road, Willis smells of Lagerfeld cologne, dance-floor sweat, and Vidalia onions tonight, the lattermost courtesy of Vernelle’s special blend of barbecue sauce. The clientele at Vernelle’s Party Center on St. Clair Avenue is mostly black, mostly monied, mostly on the hustle in some manner or another. A beautiful young white woman, alone at the bar, usually means one of two things, both trouble. Everyone knows that.
But, this night, the woman is that fine, and Willis Walker is far too loaded to care.
Ginger lights a cigarette, moves a little to the music. She squares herself in front of Willis Walker, reels him gently in. “So… you gonna do a tequila kiss with me?”
“A tequila kiss?” Willis answers. “What’s that?”
“I’d prefer to show you,” Ginger says. “But it has something to do with an ounce or two of Cuervo.”
“Oh yeah?” Willis asks. “What else?”
Ginger arches her back slightly. Willis’s eyes stray to her breasts, back up to her lips. She waits. “A lemon, of course.”
“Gotta have that lemon.” Another smile. Big, pearly shark. He moves a little closer. “Anything else?”
Ginger parts her lips slightly, her eyes roaming Willis Walker’s considerable bulk. She whispers, “My mouth.”
Willis’s eyes light up. “Your mouth?”
“Si.”
Willis calls the bartender.
“Not here,” Ginger says.
Willis looks dismayed for a moment. Then snaps the golden hook. “Okay,” he says. “Where?”
Ginger removes what looks like eight hundred dollars in cash from the inside of Willis’s suit coat, along with his watch, his rings, the sapphire stick-pin in his tie. There is no need for photo insurance this time. Willis Walker is not exactly the kind of man you threaten with blackmail.
Willis is spread out over one of the two beds in Room 116 of the Dream-A-Dream Motel on East Seventy-ninth Street. His shirt is unbuttoned, his pants unzipped. At the moment, he is snoring loudly, spreading a small pond of drool on the stained pillowcase.
Ginger shoves the cash into her oversized purse. An extraordinary haul for twenty-five minutes’ work, she thinks. As per her routine, she will now put on the dark knit cap she carries, along with the calf-length plastic raincoat that folds into a bundle no larger than a pack of Marlboros. At night, from even ten feet away, she would look like a bag lady. She would walk the five blocks back to Vernelle’s, and her car, pepper spray at the ready.
She peeks through the curtains as she slips on her raincoat. Dark parking lot. Fewer than five cars. Safe. She opens the door.
And knows that he is behind her, seconds before his fingers dig into her neck.
“Goddamn bitch,” Willis Walker screams, pulling her roughly back into the room. “Goddamn fuggin’ bitch!”
He bangs shut the door as Ginger crashes to the floor, rolls to her right, gets up, snaps off a heel. She stumbles into the wall, her heart racing. How had he survived that much Rohypnol? She had increased the dose because of his size, but here he was wide awake. How could he She does not finish the thought. Willis Walker interrupts the process with a right cross that smashes into her jaw, stunning her, showing her mind a galaxy of stars. Bile sours her throat as she hits the floor again-knees first, then hips, shoulders, head. The room tumbles like a crazy red clothes dryer.
“Fuggin’ kill you, bitch,” Willis chants, stumbling toward the nightstand between the beds, plowing into the table lamp, exploding the bulb against the wall.
Ginger finds her way to her feet, her head a shrieking carousel of noise and pain. She holds onto the wall, kicks off her shoes, finds her balance. For a moment, she thinks she is hallucinating. But there it is, rising into the shaft of moonlight streaming through the window, swinging her way.
A nickel-plated twenty-five.
Ginger dives into the bathroom, slams the door. She barely gets the knob on the lock turned before Willis pummels the door, rattling the hinges, splintering the jamb. “Biiiiiiiitch!”
She looks around, her mind reeling. No windows. Nothing even remotely resembling a weapon. She grabs the doorknob, attempting to help herself to her feet, but the lock explodes in her hand. Bits of hot metal and smoldering wood fly through the air as the bullet clinks
off the side of the toilet and falls to the floor, inches from her feet. The smell of gunpowder and burned sawdust fills her nostrils.
This is it, she thinks. My life is over. He is going to shoot me. I am going to die in a filthy inner-city motel room.
But it is Isabella who helps her to her feet, then guides her over to the toilet where she removes the heavy cover off the tank. It is her daughter’s tiny hand that closes the shower curtain behind her as she steps into the tub, waiting, her pulse pounding in her ears.
With a crack of thunder, Willis Walker kicks the door in with a size-thirteen shoe, then lurches into the bathroom. “Where y’at, bitch?” he screams. “You want some? I got some for ya. Willis Walker got some for ya.”
He raises the gun, fires it drunkenly into the mirror-shattering it into a dozen pieces-then stumbles back, his ears momentarily stuffed from the gun blast, his central nervous system besieged by the drug.
It is Ginger’s moment to act.
Before Willis can recover, she shoves open the shower curtain and, with all of her strength, brings the lid down on the back of his head, twice, the sickening thuds mingling with the smell of discharged gunpowder, converging with her revulsion. Willis Walker slumps to the tile, rolls onto his back. She drops the lid. It bounces off his huge stomach and slides to the floor.
And, suddenly, as quickly as it had begun, it is over.
A linen silence fills the room. She looks down. Willis Walker is lying on the bathroom floor, still and quiet, a small puddle of blood beneath his head. She takes a mildewed towel from the rack, replaces the lid on the back of the toilet, wiping the blood and her fingerprints from it.
And, for the next few minutes, as nausea grows within her, she continues to wipe down the motel room-everything, whether she remembers touching it or not.
A short time later, as she stands on the berm of I-90 East, retching into the culvert, she is certain-as certain as she is that she will see the death mask of Willis Walker every night for the rest of her life-that she has left something behind.
8
The Dream-A-Dream Motel on East Seventy-ninth Street and St. Clair Avenue is a U-shaped, single story building, an inner-city cathouse patched with imitation-stucco board to cover the bullet holes, the graffiti, the long streaks of dried vomit under the windowsills.
I watched her enter Room 116 at about one o’clock. A blond this time. Not really her color. I like her best as a brunette. I always have, ever since the day I first followed her to see where she went so mysteriously incognito all the time, to see how she peddled her charms. Even then I could feel her pull, that raw dynamism that says you can’t have me unless you step into my world.
A short time after she entered the motel room I heard the gunshots, the whipcrack of a small-caliber weapon fired in a confined space. Within minutes she emerged, frantic, dressed in a dark cap, dark raincoat.
I ran off a full roll of film — I still prefer using 35mm film to digital when possible — my finger depressed on the shutter release as she sprinted from the room, across the lot, down St. Clair Avenue. I am sure I got her face. How recognizable it will be is yet to be determined, although my SP-7901 Starscope night-vision lens has yet to let me down.
I step inside Room 116, my sidearm drawn. The room is in disarray, but I immediately see the body on the floor, smell the metal of just-spent blood, the carbon of just-flashed powder.
The body is half in, half out of the bathroom.
I holster my weapon, place the shoulder bag on the bed, cock my head to the night. No sirens. I set about the tasks at hand. I place the knives on the floor at my feet, open the pint bottle of Matusalem rum laced with the magic mushroom, and swallow deeply. Then I slowly, carefully, light the cigar.
La madrina mia.
Why did she begin her own madness this night?
The man on the floor begins to move.
I think about her as I set about my business. It has been so long since I have said the words I love you to a woman that it seems I might hesitate when I tell her. This is a fear. Another fear is that she will resist me. And although romance is as important to me as it is to the next man, I do not have time to court her properly. Not now.
There will be time for romance.
The man on the floor groans.
Now I must gather.
Now I must take my hands from my ears and willfully let in the discord, the shrill fury of my father’s violence. Now I must be strong and urgent and bestial. Now I must go to work.
The volume in my head soars as the Amanita muscaria takes me in its dark embrace.
I select my sharpest knife.
And set upon the body.
9
“Where y’at, Jackie?” the man behind the counter asks. “Comment ca va?”
“I’m good, Ronnie,” Paris says. “As good as can be expected from a man my age, on a day such as this.”
The big man winks, hands Paris a red Thermos, takes the empty. “It is all bon, oui?”
It is a rhetorical question. An old, comfortable routine. Paris studies the man, again marveling at Ronnie Boudreaux’s grace at more than three hundred pounds. “You are definitely the hardest-working man in show business, Ronnie. When are you going to take a vacation?”
Ronnie Boudreaux laughs, pulls a rack from the glass display case. “I get a vacation when my two ex-wives get married or die, mec.” He bags a pair of beignets, hands the bag to Paris. “Or my chouchou love me six feet under.”
This draws a laugh from the regulars at the five-stool counter.
Paris had been in a zone car one sweltering night, years earlier, and had helped to foil an armed robbery at Ronnie’s Famous Louisiana Fry Cakes on Hough Avenue. Most likely a rape, too. When Paris and Vince Stella had answered the call they found Ronnie unconscious behind the counter. They also found the robber and Ronnie’s terrified, half-dressed daughter in the back room. Lucia Boudreaux was ten years old at the time.
Jack Paris and Vince Stella brought the suspect down that night. Hard.
Since then, there has been a Thermos of fresh coffee waiting for Paris at Ronnie’s Famous, right next to the register, no matter when he stops by. They are currently on a two-Thermos rotation since Paris decided to make a science out of obtaining Ronnie’s fresh beignets at precisely seven A.M. or seven P.M., the two times of day when you can get the delicately sweet, square little doughnuts right out of the oil.
It has been this way for many years.
“Gotta run,” Paris says, grabbing the bag and his freshly filled Thermos. “See you, Ronnie.”
“Laissez les bon temps roulet,” Ronnie replies, on cue.
Let the good times roll, he says.
Paris drops a couple of dollars into the tip jar-he had stopped trying to pay for the coffee and doughnuts a long time ago-and steps out into the frigid morning. He opens the white bag, removes a warm beignet and sinks his teeth into it, eyes shut, chewing slowly, enraptured by the light dusting of powdered sugar, by the extraordinary little pockets of air. He pauses, lost in the present, until that sound destroys the moment again, as it always does. The sound of his pager.
The sound of another body falling to the earth.
There are a few things for which homicide detectives, even veteran homicide detectives, are never fully braced. One is dead children. Another-or perhaps it is a horror that dwells exclusively in the minds of male police officers-is castration. Paris had seen it only once before, a Mafia payback hit. That time, like this time, he was stupefied at the amount of blood.
The forensic activity in Room 116 of the Dream-A-Dream Motel on East Seventy-ninth Street, a stone’s throw from Rockefeller Park, moves along briskly, not necessarily because the victim, a small-time hustler named Willis Walker, is deserving of such rapid progress in the investigation of his death, but rather because there is not a man in the room who can bear to look at the corpse for too long. More than once, Paris had noticed someone from the Special Investigation Unit subconsciously shie
ld his crotch as he moved swiftly past the body, as if the murderer might still be lurking behind the damp, nicotine-grimed curtains, teeth bared, razor poised.
The blood from Willis Walker’s groin had spread on the bathroom floor into a huge, tormented circle of blackish grue. The blood behind his head is another story-this, a dark-purple paste, flecked with bits of skull, rootlets of hair.
Next to the body is a. 25 caliber pistol, recently discharged.
Paris snaps on a pair of gloves, crouches by the body. He carefully explores the man’s front pants pockets. Empty, save for a blood-soaked pack of matches from Vernelle’s Party Center, a cheat spot located a few blocks west of the motel on St. Clair.
Paris pokes about Willis Walker’s body, probing here and there, putting off the inevitable. Finally, he can avoid it no longer. He hears a brief salvo of stifled laughter from behind him and turns around to see Reuben Ocasio, one of Cuyahoga County’s deputy coroners, looking grim and serious and thoroughly guilty of the laughter.
“You want to do it?” Paris asks.
“Not a chance,” answers Reuben. “I’m confident in my sexuality and all. But you’re the fuckin’ detective.”
Paris takes a deep breath of air curiously redolent with cigar smoke. Curious, because there were no cigar ashes in either of the room’s two ashtrays, no cigar butts in or near Room 116. The other smell was more explainable-rum. It seemed to be everywhere. A tart, acidic scent that probes some catacomb of Paris’s memory, a place webbed in shadows at the moment, just beyond recall.
Shit, Paris thinks.
It is time.
He reaches into Reuben’s black bag, removes a long, narrow tongue depressor. He then leans forward with supreme reluctance, glacial speed, and begins to separate the two sides of the unzipped fly on Willis Walker’s blood-drenched pants with the sole intention of verifying the obvious-that Willis Walker not only had his head bashed in but also had been violently separated from his penis and/or testicles sometime within the past twelve hours.
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