“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, sauteed 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…”
23
CLEVELAND,OHIO
SEVENTEEN YEARS EARLIER
Tony B’s emporium carries a little bit of everything-soda, chips, candy, cigarettes, condoms-but mostly it carries lottery tickets and fifteen different brands of fortified wine. Seventy percent of Tony B’s daily receipts are from one or the other. Twenty percent are from cigarettes. The other ten percent are from the idiots either too dumb or too lazy to walk the extra five blocks to buy their milk and eggs from the Kroger’s on East 105th Street.
It is late September, a steamy Indian summer day. The heat shrieks off the pavement in waves, punishing the water-starved trees in front of Tony B’s. From the apartment above the store comes the sounds of the Cleveland Indians playing the Minnesota Twins.
Tony B’s is empty, save for its proprietor, who is sitting high behind the counter, reading his paper, trying to keep absolutely still, trying to let the ancient, asthmatic air conditioner above the front door do its job.
Suddenly, something is wrong. He can feel it.
It is the same premonition he used to get in ’Nam, seconds before the first sniper round would crack out of the hills and send everyone at the base camp scrambling. The store is small, well lighted, and unless someone decides to lie on the floor and roll under a display, Tony B, with the aid of his three convex mirrors, can see every square inch. He knows when people are in the store. The bell on the door tells him when they come in. The bell on the door tells him when they leave. So why does he have the feeling that There. A shadow to his left. Next to the chip stand.
There are two people standing there. A boy and a girl.
How had they gotten in? Tony B wonders, his heart racing a little. Why hadn’t he heard them? Had they come in the back?
They are young-the girl is in her late teens, the boy even younger, maybe sixteen-and they are staring at him. The girl is one hot-looking little bitch, that’s for sure. Trim, brunette, athletic. She isn’t dressed sloppy like a lot of the other girls who come in the store and tease him; the black girls with their baggy jeans unbuttoned and their tube tops wrapped tightly around their budding breasts. This one is white, slender, seductive, wearing a short denim skirt and flowered blouse, the kind of girl who always went for a man like Tony B. Sure he was into his fifties now, but he was a young fifties. Still had most of his hair, all of his front teeth. And he still had all the charm in the world when he needed it.
“We know each other?” he asks, bending the top of his Racing Form to make eye contact with the girl. He reaches over and drags a Newport from his pack, lights it. “We been introduced?”
“No,” the girl says. “You just look like someone we know.”
The girl’s voice is deep, like a woman’s. Her blouse is sheer and Tony B can just about make out the shape of her right breast. “Oh yeah?” he answers, trying to float a smile. “Harrison Ford, maybe?”
“No,” the boy says. “Like an uncle or something.”
The boy’s age is less determinable after he speaks. The kid is on the tall side, dark hair, dark eyes. He now seems younger than sixteen. Like a big thirteen-year-old with a man’s hands. His voice hadn’t fully broken yet. Smart-ass punk, for sure.
“Well, I ain’t your uncle,” Tony B says, realizing he isn’t going to make any time with the girl if this little shit is hanging around. “So now that we’ve established that piece of business, you buyin’ something?”
“We’re just looking,” the girl says. “We’re allowed to look, aren’t we?”
Cocky little cunt, Tony B thinks. Reminds him of the first ex, the one he did the stretch for. Looks a little like her, too. He’d gone up for an eight-to-ten ride on an attempted murder charge for beating the shit out of Lydia that day, but less than a year into his sentence they found a mistake somewhere and had to spring him. “Who said this is America, girly-girl? This ain’t America in here. This is Tony B’s. Capeesh? Now, either you buy something, or you take it on the arches. Those are the rules.”
She turns to the side and Tony B can see her nipples poking up against the inside of her blouse. Goddamn she’s a sexy little thing. Tony doesn’t know whether to yell or get hard. She grabs a pack of Gillette single-edge razor blades off the rack.
“We’ll take these,” she says, gliding over, placing them on the counter.
As she walks, Tony B is mesmerized by the shift of her breasts beneath her blouse. Up close he can see that her eyes are almost black.
He rings up the razor blades, an item he keeps stocked for the cokeheads. Cokeheads prefer the single-edge blades to cut up their lines. It used to be his ax of choice, back in the day. “That’s three-sixty-two, miss,” Tony says, not taking his eyes from hers. “Including tax.”
The girl reaches into her pocket, produces a five-dollar bill. As she hands it to him, Tony B would swear that she intentionally lets her hand linger on his for a moment. When he hands her the change, he repays the flirtation in kind.
“Need a bag?” he asks.
“No,” she replies.
“Now, you be careful with those razor blades, miss,” he adds, shutting the cash drawer, sounding far more paternal than he wants to. “Wouldn’t want you to cut that pretty skin of yours.”
The girl turns to face him fully. She smiles a smile that sends shock waves through Tony B. But the sensation cannot compare with what he feels as she unbuttons her blouse and reveals most of her left breast to him. There, right above her pink nipple, is a small tattoo of a flower. “I can take the pain,” she says. “Can you?”
“I…” is all that Tony B can muster as she buttons her blouse, turns on her sandals, and sashays to the door, where the boy awaits her. Somehow, Tony B manages to tear his eyes from the girl. He looks at the boy, and immediately wishes he hadn’t.
The boy is smiling at him.
And he suddenly looks a lot more like a man.
>
Tony B is drunk. It is two in the morning, and he is leaning against the wall outside his store, in the alley, a cigarette dangling from his lower lip, searching the same pants pocket for the tenth time, hoping that a full pack of matches might have spontaneously generated there since his last visit. Nothing.
Fuck it, he thinks. I’ll wait until I get inside.
He slowly continues up the alley, toward the back parking lot.
He’d had an unbelievable night at Big Ray Amato’s poker game. Walked in with two hundred, walked out with six. Drank Ray’s booze all night, ate his food. It’s a good thing Ray’s house was only two blocks away, within walking distance of the store, which is precisely where Tony B has decided to sleep it off. No way is he going to drive all the way up to Collinwood. He steps into the small pitted gravel parking lot behind his store. There are two cars, including his own, along with a beat-up van. The lot is dark, empty, still; the day’s wet heat seems to radiate from the ground like a colossal steam iron buried in the earth, just inches beneath his feet.
Tony B begins the ritual of searching for his keys.
And, for the second time that day, finds that someone is standing right in front of him. Someone who does not make noise. Tony B looks up, takes a wobbly step backward, and sees that it is a woman. A beautiful young woman with pale skin and shiny hair.
Where had he seen her before?
Man the short-term memory is shot, he thinks, laughing to himself. Guess thirty-some years of drug and alcohol abuse will do that to you. It’s the brunette bitch from the store, of course. The cocky one. The little girl with the tattooed tit. But now she is made up like a woman. Tight leather pants, spike heels, hair piled high on her head.
“Hey, baby,” Tony B says.
“Hey yourself,” she answers.
Tony B thinks: She dumped her little turd friend and she came back for Tony Fuckin’ B. Before he can take a step in her direction, he hears a sniffle from nearby and sees the boy sitting on a packing crate next to the Dumpster in a dark corner of the lot. The pungent smell in the air tells Tony B that the kid is smoking a joint. Right out in the open.
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