Kiss Of Evil jp-2

by Richard Montanari

  She is content now, he thinks, nearly seventy-four years of age, still on her own, still a force at gin rummy. Still a force at gin gimlets, too. Two of them at lunch every day with her bingo cronies Millie and Claire. Followed by her nap.

  He moves the space heater a safe distance from the couch and sits at the rolltop desk. The bills, as always, are neatly pigeonholed on the right side. He pays them. It is a monthly ritual for the two of them, one that has proceeded like clockwork for the past few years or so. At first, his mother would drift off to the bedroom when he paid her bills, ashamed that she could no longer work even part time. Sometimes, she would busy herself in the kitchen, and somehow, in the space of twenty minutes, produce a dish of baked ziti or linguine with calamari.

  Now she just sleeps through it.

  When he finishes, he closes the desk, then crosses the living room to the small Pullman kitchen. He takes the sandwich that is always on the top shelf of the fridge, wrapped in Saran Wrap, a pickle on the side.

  Should he wake her? No, he decides. Let her sleep. She will know that he has been here.

  She always does.

  He puts on his coat, stands at the door, surveys the apartment: the old waterfall furniture; the shabby armchair that he had once, as a six-year-old, accidentally wet during an old horror movie on TV; the oval braided area rug she’d had for so many years that it was no longer possible to replace; his academy graduation photos on the mantel.

  Jack Paris opens the door, steps through, closes it behind him, checks the lock.

  Merry Christmas, Mom, he thinks as he wraps his scarf around his neck, a Casa di Gabriella hand-knitted special.

  Merry Christmas.

  The houses on this small section of Denison Avenue, near Brookside Park, are a collage of Eisenhower bungalows, paint-blistered pastels of powder blue, sea foam green, buttercup yellow, all washed gray by the impending dusk, the winter drizzle. Paris is parked at the curb, heater chugging, oldies station on low.

  After leaving his mother’s apartment, he had spent the remainder of the afternoon canvassing a three-block circle around the Dream-A-Dream Motel. No one at any of the half-dozen bars had seen anyone running from the motel with a dripping butcher knife in the middle of the night, it seems. In the end Paris had interviewed three dozen bleary-eyed men and collected the expected: shrugs, urban apathy, temporary amnesia. Hear no evil, see even less.

  He now sits in his car on Denison Avenue, the front seat covered in police reports, all from Michael Ryan’s murder book. He had signed them out, not really certain what he is looking for. An earlier connection between Sarah Weiss and Mike Ryan? A disgruntled cop on the inside who lost his cut of the ten grand?

  A little yellow car?

  Paris had taken Sarah Weiss’s acquittal much harder than usual. He had put so much of himself on the line during the investigation. No cop likes letting a killer off. But when it’s a cop-killer, there is a piece of every police officer that never forgets.

  There was alcohol in Michael’s system that night, but it was nowhere near the limit. There was also trace evidence of an extremely powerful hallucinogen. Traces of the hallucinogen were also found in a flask that was inside the killer’s bag. The record shows that Michael was officially off-duty when he was murdered.

  According to the defense, Michael was an alcoholic, drugged-up detective who sold confidential police files for ten thousand dollars to fuel his vile habits. According to the defense, Mike Ryan was a very bad cop who got precisely what he had coming.

  To this day, Paris refuses to believe it.

  Before leaving the Justice Center for the day, Paris had called Dolores Ryan and asked if she still had Michael’s papers: financial records, notebooks, and the like. She said everything was in storage. Dolores also said that Paris was welcome to all of it, without, mercifully, asking him why. Mercifully, because he couldn’t give her an answer if he tried.

  Paris turns off the engine, but before he can exit the car, his cell phone rings. “Paris.”

  Loud music. Ice cubes in glasses. The drone of roadhouse chatter. “Hi, it’s Mercedes, can you hear me okay?”

  “Just fine.”

  “Am I catching you at a bad time?”

  “Not at all,” Paris says. “Where are you, Atlantic City?”

  “I’m at Deadlines.”

  Paris knows the place. A venerated old Cleveland tavern favored by journalists. “So what’s up?”

  “Well, at the moment, there is a fabulously handsome, ethnically diverse male sitting right next to me, trying to ply me with fruity cocktails.”

  Paris smiles. “How’s he doing?”

  “Lemme look.” Mercedes is silent for a moment. “Still have my shoes on. Not that well, I guess.”

  “It’s still early.”

  “Es verdad.”

  “So what can I do for you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “As in, the reason you called?”

  “Oh yeah. Right. Sorry. Listen. I’m going to need a photograph or two of you for the article, but the paper is too friggin’ cheap to hire a second photographer. At least for my stuff, anyway. I left a message for my brother Julian, who is a really good photographer, if he would just get off his ass and do something about it, but that’s another story, okay? Sorry. Anyway, it’s a million to one shot that he’ll show up, which means that me and my PowerShot might have to do, but if you see a cute guy with a camera hanging around, don’t get scared, okay?”

  “Thanks for the heads-up.”

  “No problem.”

  Paris asks Mercedes if she needs a designated driver. She declines. Paris signs off, crosses Denison Avenue, considers walking up the long wheelchair ramp, the sturdy-looking U-shaped structure made out of two-by-sixes and rusting bolts.

  Too icy, he thinks. For a man of my advanced years.

  So, holding firmly onto the wrought-iron railing, Jack Paris climbs the narrow stone steps to Dolores Ryan’s house.

  She looks thin and blanched, a breakable husk of the brunette bombshell to whom Michael Ryan had introduced him one night at the Caprice Lounge; a night now entombed almost twenty years in his memory. That night, Dusty Alessio had the attention of every man in the place, including a woefully young John Salvatore Paris.

  Now her hazel eyes are cloudy, veined, tired. Her hair, touched with silver. She wears old denim jeans, threadbare espadrilles, a faded maroon Ohio State University sweatshirt.

  They are sitting in the small tidy living room, across from each other, coffee between. In the corner, next to the muted TV, squats a large, artificial Christmas tree, its heirloom ornaments placed haphazardly, hurriedly.

  Dolores points at his coffee, asks: “You want something else?”

  “No. No thanks.”

  “You want something in it?”

  “I’m good, Dusty.”

  The old nickname makes her smile, blush deeply, run a hand through her hair. “No one calls me that anymore.”

  “That’s the first name I heard and I’m stickin’ with it,” Paris says.

  “You know where that nickname came from?”

  “No.”

  “I got it from Michael, the day I met him. Michael was going to Padua High School. I was going to Nazareth. I was sixteen. Sixteen, can you imagine?”

  Paris sees the color start to rise in Dolores’s cheeks, the flush of a woman recalling the day she met the love of her life. “I can,” he says.

  “I used to see Michael and his friends at the baseball diamond at State Road Park. I’d see him all the time there, but never had the guts to talk to him. Remember how we used to just die of embarrassment at that age?”

  “Oh yeah,” Paris says, thinking he hadn’t really progressed all that much in that department.

  “So one day my friend Barb and I are tooling around in her old Ford Fairlane convertible, top down. We hit the Manners, the Dairy Queen, the McDonald’s, the Red Barn, then the baseball field on State Road. And suddenly I see him.
>
  “‘There’s Michael!’ I yell. Barbara, of course, panics, swings into the parking lot, knocking her Dairy Queen cup on the floor, completely covering the brake pedal in chocolate milkshake. The car jumps the curb and heads right for the baseball game. Barbara is stamping and stomping and trying to hit the brake pedal, but it’s too slippery. We’re going, like, thirty miles an hour now, smacking into garbage cans, benches, lawn chairs. Finally, after making everyone scatter, she hits the brake pedal squarely and we fishtail around the middle of the diamond, coming to a stop right on the pitcher’s mound. And, because the top is down, there is now an inch of dust on everything-the car, the seats, the books, the burgers, me. Worse than that, ten boys our age are watching us in complete awe, knowing they had just seen what will probably be the story of the year at school.

  “Well, it turns out that my history notebook had flown out of the backseat, landing God knows where. So, out of the cloud of dust, notebook in hand, comes Michael Patrick Ryan-black T-shirt, blue eyes, long eye-lashes, sweaty muscles. He says: ‘Hey, Dusty, this yours?’” Dolores looks at Paris with a half-smile that is somewhere adrift between inconceivable heartache and the joy of indelible memory. “Everybody laughed, but I didn’t really hear them, you know? All I saw were those Irish eyes. I was a goner.”

  Paris watches as Dolores absently fingers the ribbed cuff of the sweat-shirt, wandering through her reverie, and realizes it is Michael’s. She is still wearing his clothes.

  Dolores returns to the moment. She checks the grandfather clock in the hallway, pours more coffee, allows the levity of her story to come to a full rest. After a minute of silence, she says, “He was scared, you know.”

  “Michael?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Scared of what?”

  Dolores looks out the bay window, at the rain turning to snow, at the ice crystals starring the tips of the hedges in front of the house. “Everything.” She waves the back of her hand at the long-ago widened doorway leading to the first-floor bathroom; the gesture, a full explanation of life with a family member in a wheelchair. “He was scared all the time after we came back.”

  A decade or so earlier, Michael Ryan had pulled up stakes, moved west, taken a job with the San Diego PD. But after his daughter was injured by a hit-and-run driver, a driver never caught, as Paris understood it, he moved the family back to Cleveland to be near Dolores’s mother, a police widow herself.

  “He was a great cop, Dusty. An even better man.”

  Dolores considers Paris for a moment, then leans forward, as if to share a secret. With one carefully measured exhale, she concedes the real reason for Paris’s visit in the first place, saying: “I knew.”

  These are words that Paris does not want to hear. Michael Ryan is dead. As is his killer. Paris would just as soon hang on to the notion that Michael was on the job when he was murdered, was following up a lead, got ambushed. But, against his will, his mouth opens and forms the words. “What do you mean?”

  Dolores reaches for a tissue, dabs at her eyes. “That’s why I don’t look in the storage, in the boxes. I just can’t.”

  “You don’t have to tell me this.”

  “Michael and I had… had a deal, you see. We made it the day of Carrie’s accident. Michael told me that she would never, ever, want for anything, as long as he was alive.”

  Paris considers just standing, hugging her, leaving, letting all this go. Instead, he asks:

  “What was your end?”

  “My end?” She looks up at him, her eyes leaden with pain. “My end was never to ask where the money came from.”

  The tiny lock opens with a satisfying click. Paris is proud of himself. He hadn’t picked a desk lock in years but, for some reason, the touch seemed to be back. Maybe he’d start carrying his pick-set again. He is in bay number 202 at the My-Self Storage on Triskett Road. Dolores had given him the key, but asked if he would drop it back off as soon as possible. Dolores and Carrie Ryan are moving to Tampa, Florida, soon.

  The bay is large, perhaps ten by fifteen feet, and stacked ceiling to floor with the detritus a man acquires in forty-some years of life: a rusting band saw, mismatched golf clubs, a delaminated poker table. Along the back wall are Dolores’s things. Hatboxes, white-handled shopping bags stuffed with clothes, along with a few big boxes from a ladies’ retailer whose name Paris hadn’t heard in years.

  The space smells of mildew, mice; the damp ennui of shelved memory.

  Within ten minutes or so, by the light of the single forty-watt bulb in the ceiling, Paris had sifted through all the musty books and folders and papers on the desk. Nothing pertinent to any investigation Michael had been working on. Nothing that leapt out at him. He had tried, unsuccessfully, to pull open the small floor safe serving as a stand for Michael’s old Remington manual typewriter. The safe did not open, but, after a few long-unpracticed turns of a bent paper clip, the bottom right-hand drawer on the desk did.

  In the drawer is a solitary item: a nine-by-twelve envelope.

  Paris removes the envelope, opens it. Inside is a black-and-white photograph of a corpse, the mutilated, naked body of a man lying in a gravel parking lot. There is a white brick wall to the right, the wheels of a big Dumpster behind the man’s right shoulder. The man is horribly disfigured, slicked with blood nearly head to toe. With disgust, Paris can see that pieces-large pieces-of the man’s midsection are missing; chunks that appear to have been torn away, eaten, as if animals had been at the body.

  But it is the appearance of the man’s head that runs a cold finger up Paris’s spine.

  The man’s head is completely wrapped in barbed wire.

  The photograph looks like a standard police crime-scene photo but is not marked in any official way. The yellowing edges and slightly sienna whites tell him the picture is old. Fifteen, twenty years maybe. In the upper-right-hand corner is an address, handwritten in faded blue ink. An address on East Twenty-third Street.

  Paris flips the picture over and what he sees on the back tricks his eyes for a moment, then comes swimming back into focus.

  It is a sentence. A simple, handwritten, five-word sentence that should not be written on the back of a picture in a dead man’s desk, a man who had not drawn breath in two years.

  Scrawled in red, from the coldness of his grave, Michael Ryan says:

  Evil is a breed, Fingers.

  Two

  Spell

  14

  BELMONT CORNERS,OHIO

  THIRTY YEARS EARLIER

  The woman waits in the emergency room at Our Lady of Mercy Hospital on Greenville Road, her face a mass of swollen tissue, her womb a capacious medicine ball beneath her dress. It is New Year’s Eve and the woman’s ex-husband had stopped by the trailer at around five-thirty that evening, supposedly to drop off a late Christmas present for his daughter, but what he really wanted was what he always wanted. Drug money. The scene had escalated so quickly that the woman had not even had time to lock her daughter in the bedroom for her own protection, although the man had never once laid a finger on the little girl.

  The little girl’s mother was far too satisfying a target.

  Lydia del Blanco is twenty-seven years old, an unlicensed hairdresser of moderate skill, a folk singer of unexplored talent, a slender young woman with clear amber eyes. But today her eyes are a muddied rust; her skin, a rough topography of distended, yellowing welts. Anthony del Blanco had taken a belt to her, one of his favorite weapons of intimidation.

  To Lydia’s left sits her four-year-old daughter Fina, a slight, dark-haired bundle of worry who seems, for the moment at least, to have abandoned her circuitous route around the waiting room, her sobbing and her flopping-around in oversized blue rubber galoshes. Since she had been a toddler, Lydia had not been able to fool her daughter about the beatings, although they had come in decreasing frequency since Anthony had left the trailer and moved in with one of his never-ending parade of whores.

  But Fina knows who her father is, and what he so
metimes does to her mother. Still, she is far too young to hate him. She just wants the yelling to stop and her mom to be happy.

  And so she cries…

  When her name is called, Lydia rises slowly to her feet and approaches the frosted glass window. Amid the usual details, the usual lies, she tells the woman that her ex-husband is dead; which, in Lydia’s mind and heart, he is. But it is Anthony del Blanco’s violent act of rape eight months earlier that gave seed to this formerly restless child in her womb, this child Lydia del Blanco had alternately hated and loved, this child who had not kicked her for more than three hours.

  As Lydia is helped to a wheelchair, her daughter begins to cry again, her tears now thin, meandering streams down her cheeks. She dutifully walks alongside her mother’s chair until they reach Examining Room One. Then, without tantrum, her utter exhaustion preventing such a display, she stops as they lift her mother onto a gurney and wheel her away.

  A pleasant young candy striper named Constance Aguillar takes Fina’s hand and leads her over to the vending machines, where she buys her a Snickers and a Coke.

  But before the little girl can take a single bite, she crawls onto one of the padded chairs and, within moments, falls fast asleep.

  At the stroke of midnight, the moment when just about everyone living in the eastern standard time zone of the United States is popping champagne corks in celebration; the moment when Anthony del Blanco is taking carnal pleasure with a prostitute named Vickie Pomeroy in Room 511 of the TraveLodge on Cannon Road; the moment when four-year-old Fina is asleep and dreaming of a place where her father doesn’t raise his voice or his hand, Lydia screams in agony, just once, a long, solitary call of admonition to all those who would harm her or her family in the future.

  And Lydia del Blanco has a baby boy. A healthy, seven-pound-five-ounce boy born of a brand new day, a brand new year.