At first, it appears as if Demetrius can’t focus his eyes at the distance at which Paris is holding the photo. But, soon, recognition ascends, like a violent sunrise.
And Demetrius Salters begins to scream.
29
Carla Davis sits at a desk in a small room on the ninth floor of the Justice Center, a pair of computer terminals before her, as Paris knocks on the door.
Paris, having felt like a pimp for showing the crime-scene photo to that harmless old man, made his apologies to the stern-faced nurse and made a quick exit. Michael Ryan’s case, although not officially closed, was dormant. If there is a fact to be had, if there is something lurking that will shake up the inactive investigation, it would have to come to him.
Fact: There is a fucking lunatic loose in his city. Now. Today. And it is his job to catch him. And that job does not include shocking old men to death.
Paris stands behind Carla, looking over her shoulder, trying his best to focus.
“I ran the file with the woman and man talking,” Carla says. In front of her sit two computers. One belongs to the department. One is Fayette Martin’s. “But there is no video portion. Just an audio capture.”
“So, I was listening to what might have been the audio portion of an audio/video session?”
“It seems like it. I’ve listened to it twice myself. Now, the woman could have been watching the video stream and not recording it. Most people do it that way. But there’s no question that the woman could see the man she is talking to. Unless these are extremely creative people.”
“How do you think they hooked up?”
“Most of the commercial, noncorporate usage of videoconferencing is devoted to sex, of course. Lots of pay sites. You can watch women strip, men strip, men and women having sex, men and men having sex, women and women having sex-”
“I get it,” Paris says.
“I was just getting started,” Carla says. “You didn’t even let me get to the barnyard.”
“Spare me the muskrat love, okay?”
Carla hits a button and, in one of the six frames on the screen, the two of them appear. Carla looks stunning, even in the shitty light. Paris looks like he needs a shave, a haircut, and two months’ sleep.
“Most pay sites let you watch, without having a camera of your own,” says Carla. “But most individuals who cruise the Net insist that you have your own web cam.”
“So, what you’re saying is that Fayette Martin perhaps subscribed to one of these pay-per-view sex lines?”
“Perhaps.”
“And that our actor perhaps worked for that sex line?”
“Perhaps.”
“How would we find out which one she may have used? Are these sessions set up over the phone like phone sex?”
“Know a lot about phone sex, do ya, Jack?”
“Not a thing,” Paris lies, knowing full well that he had once rung up a ninety-six-dollar call one Friday night when the Windsor Canadian had a choke hold on his libido. “I read a lot.”
“Well, Internet sex is a little different than phone sex. Most of it is set up online. You click onto a site, give them your Visa or MasterCard number, and they let you in for x amount of minutes, hours, whatever.”
“But there won’t be a phone record?”
“Afraid not. Every time you log on you are given something called an IP address, which is unique to your computer until you log off. So the Internet service provider might have a record of where Fayette Martin went online the night she was killed. I’ll look into it. Most of the pay-per-view male solo performance stuff is gay. But if there’s an adult site that offers solo male performances geared to the heterosexual female, I’ll find it.”
“When do you think that might be?” Paris asks, then immediately regrets it. Carla gives him the look that probably makes her husband Charles-all five-six and one hundred forty pounds of him-roll over, cut the grass, fix the sink, and take out the garbage. Before breakfast.
“When it is, detective.”
Luckily, for Paris, at that moment Matt Sullivan sticks his head in the room. Tall and fair-haired, Matt is the youngest detective in the Homicide Unit at twenty-nine. “You guys hear what happened in Cleveland Heights?”
“What happened?” Paris asks.
“They found a body in Cain Park. Male white. Shot in the head. Hands are gone. Some kids were sledding, saw a foot sticking out of the snow.”
Paris and Carla exchange a glance, the sage look of two veteran cops who know that when hands are missing, someone is serious about delaying identification. However, the challenge of solving this particular murder would never engage them officially. This body belongs to the Cleveland Heights PD.
“Teeth intact?” Carla asks.
“No idea.”
“How long was the body there?” Paris asks.
“A couple days, I guess. Snowstorm covered it completely.”
“No ID at all, eh?”
“None,” Matt says. “John Doe, so far. Body’s on the table now.”
“Shit,” Paris says. “And here I was thinking of moving to Cleveland Heights.”
“The whole world’s a zone, Jack,” Matt replies. “See ya.”
Matt Sullivan moves down the hall as Paris absorbs the information for a moment, then looks back at the monitor screen. Mercifully, his hangdog video image is gone. “Is it possible to go to one of these sex sites now?”
Carla laughs. “I can do better than that,” she says, reaching under the desk and producing a rectangular, soft nylon shoulder bag. She puts the bag on her lap and unzips it. Inside is a laptop computer. Carla flips it open. “I loaded all the software you need, and the laptop has a built in camera. Sign it out and take it home, get familiar with it.”
“I have no idea how to use any of this, Carla.”
Carla reaches into another of the bag’s many pockets and produces a thin manual called Web Cam for Dummies. She hands it to him, along with a look that dares him to say he is incapable of learning from any book with the word dummies in the title.
The two of them stare at the Christmas tree.
“There’s no way that’s three feet,” Paris says. “Is it, Manny?”
Manny, at just under twelve inches tall, is an expert in only the first few feet of tree trunks. He cocks his head, glances back, as if to say that a scrawny tree like this isn’t even worthy of him lifting his leg.
Paris rummages in a kitchen drawer, finds his tape measure. He squats next to the tree and measures. Thirty-four inches. He knew it. Then he notices the snap-on plastic base in the box. He attaches it to the bottom of the tree and remeasures. Thirty-six on the button.
“Man oh man. Can’t even give you an extra freakin’ inch, can they? Some spirit of giving.”
Manny barks once, clearly in agreement.
The two of them set about the task of decorating the tree, with Manny shuttling individual ornaments from the box in the dining room, dropping them gently at his master’s feet, and Paris trying to find a spot for them. Small tree, big bulbs. In the end, Paris manages to fit only ten or twelve ornaments on the tree and, although the scale makes it look a little ridiculous, and the green of the branches is a shade not to be found anywhere in nature, when he plugs in the lights, it makes the corner of the apartment suddenly come aglow with a toasty radiance.
Not bad, Paris thinks. Not bad at all.
He puts the small star on the tree. Manny wags his stub of a tail.
And it is officially Christmas Eve.
30
It is Christmas Eve and I am in the white room. I have one session left, something set up weeks ago. A woman who, were I not so embroiled in my current activities, I would pursue mightily. She is divorced, in her mid-thirties. Or at least that is the role she is playing. We have had two sessions; both with her watching me.
Tonight, though, she has promised to appear on camera, to show herself to me.
I am in the white room early, nearly beside myself in anticipation.
When the video stream opens at eight o’clock I see her for the first time. She is sitting in a desk chair, wearing a dark scoop-neck dress. Behind her, a bedroom.
She leans forward, tilts the camera slightly upward so that I may see her pretty face. In doing so, I am privy to a maddening few inches of cleavage. It appears as if she is wearing a black lace push-up bra.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hello.”
She sits back, crosses her legs. I can now see the hem of her dress, a hint of her slip. “Merry Christmas.”
“And the same to you,” I say. Her hair is a light color, strawberry blond perhaps.
“Do you like what you see?” she asks.
“Very much.”
“Do you feel it was worth waiting for?”
“Yes.”
“If I can get away, I will be at Jayson’s on Chagrin Boulevard in one hour,” she says. “Do you know it?”
“Yes.”
“I will save the seat next to me until ten.”
“I understand.”
She stands, unzips her dress, slips out of it. She is wearing a black bra, matching slip. She turns to the side, places one of her spike-heeled shoes on the computer chair and adjusts what I can now see is a thigh-high nylon.
Then, incredibly, she turns off her camera and closes the session.
Is she baiting me?
I look at my image reflected in the now-black monitor. The reflection tells me the truth.
It is a mistake.
This is my chorus as I shower, shave, dress, and head for Jayson’s.
She is nowhere to be seen. The Christmas Eve crowd is thin, just a handful of couples scattered around the room, invisible in their sameness; just a pair of Asian businessmen at the far end. I sit at the bar, near the door, sip my Ron Rico, wonder. Perhaps she had car trouble. Perhaps she was in an accident. Perhaps her husband had intervened.
Perhaps I have no business doing this when I am so close to my goal.
I wait another ten minutes, drain my drink. I decide to pay the bill and leave. It was a mistake to come. I have appointments.
A few minutes later, waiting for my change-my mind adrift on the scent of a doorway on East Fortieth Street and Central Avenue, on bleached white skin, blued by moonlight-I hear, from just behind me, a man’s voice:
“Could you stand up please?”
The noise erupts. This time, a loud, discordant blood rush in my ears. The blaring brass of imminent violence.
Again: “Sir?”
My hand moves slowly toward the knife sheathed on my left hip. Heart slips into high. Exits mapped-front door to my right, back door through kitchen. I calm myself enough to speak. “I’m sorry?”
I turn around to see a graying, Asian businessman of sixty, pointing to my stool. His jacket is hanging from the back.
It is nothing.
I get up, blow past him, rage out of the bar.
The cacophony in my head begins to recede slightly as I walk to the parking lot, disgusted with myself for coming in the first place. I start the car, pull into westbound traffic, drive toward the auditorium, my fury, for the moment, turned inward, my heart beating in my ears like some ancient metronome counting down a coda of inescapable madness.
31
Madness: Two hundred children between the ages of one and twelve, all fully charged on cheap frosted cake, Tootsie Pops, and Faygo root beer. The cavernous Masonic Temple on Euclid Avenue and East Thirty-sixth Street is awash in brightly colored snowsuits, rubber galoshes, and neonhued knit caps.
Billy Coughlin, a lifer from the Second District, is Santa again this year, his decades of holding down the first stool at the Caprice Lounge and a back booth at Elby’s Big Boy Restaurant providing a bulbous red nose and a billowing gut that negated the need for makeup or pillows. Billy sits on his makeshift throne, once again bracing for the onslaught, once again looking as if he’s about to hit the door at a crack house.
Earlier in the day Mercedes insisted that she had no plans for the evening and would be delighted to show up and help out. Paris tried to talk her out of it, never having been one to foist his charity efforts on anyone, but she was adamant. At the moment, Mercedes E Cruz-aproned and adorned with a red satin bow in her hair-is behind a huge coffee urn, dispensing coffee with what Paris is beginning to believe is a perpetual good mood. Except, of course, for those few minutes that she wanted to kill that kid in the Plymouth.
Paris is sitting at the back of the auditorium, near a heat duct, trying to get the warmth into his hands. After a few moments, he looks up to see a very small person studying him.
Happy Holidays! My name is Kamal Dawkins! the young boy’s name tag declares. He is black, braided, no more than four years old.
“Hi,” Kamal says. “Are you a policeman?”
“I am.”
“Ever shoot anybody?”
“No sir,” Paris says. “Never have.”
Kamal thinks for a minute, apparently trying to reconcile all that gunplay he’s seen on TV. “Ever take someone t’jail?”
“Oh yes. Now that I’ve done. All the time. Every day if I can.”
“Were they bad guys?”
“Very bad guys,” Paris replies, lifting Kamal onto his knee. “Very, very bad guys. And now they’re all locked up.”
Kamal takes a deep lick on his cherry Tootsie Pop. “My daddy’s in jail.”
Ah shit, Paris thinks. Now what the hell do I say? “Well, see, sometimes really good guys do a bad thing. Just once. And sometimes they get caught and have to go to jail for a while. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re bad guys. They just did a bad thing.”
Kamal ponders the concept for a moment. “I do bad things.”
“You do? What kinds of bad things?”
Kamal looks at his boots, confesses. “I push my sister.”
Paris sees an opening. “Does your mom punish you for pushing your sister?”
“Yeah. I have to sit on the time-out step.”
Perfect. The old time-out-step-as-juvenile-metaphor-for-jail argument. “Well, see, the time-out step is kind of like jail. Sometimes adults do bad things and they have to go sit on the time-out step.”
This seems to register with Kamal. As does the overwhelming question: “Then why can’t my daddy sit on the time-out step at my house?”
With this admittedly savvy question, Kamal throws his hands into the air to emphasize his point. As he does, the Tootsie Pop goes flying straight up in the air, twisting, end over end, like the bone that turns into a space station in 2001.
For a moment, Paris and Kamal watch it rise, hover, then begin its descent.
Paris reaches out to grab the plummeting sucker before it hits the floor, but instead of wrapping his hand around something warm and sticky, he wraps his hand around something warm and soft.
Someone else’s hand.
He looks up to see who he is holding hands with. It is a very pretty young woman-lustrous brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, dark caramel eyes, twenties. She is holding a two-year-old blond girl dressed in a red velvet jumper.
“Ya gotta be quicker than that, officer,” she says with a smile, but makes no move to extract her hand from his. Paris lets go, a little embarrassed.
The woman is slender, shapely, wearing a black turtleneck sweater, tight denim jeans. Paris is accordingly tongue-tied. “I… uh… I guess we both-”
“Former first baseman,” she says, interrupting him. “We always put the worst kid in right field. Nothing ever got by me.”
“Yeah, well, I was always the kid in right,” Paris says.
Kamal looks back and forth, between the two adults, apparently wondering when the part about him getting his Tootsie Pop back was going to be brought up.
“I’ll get you a new one, sweetie,” the woman says. She puts the little girl down, who immediately toddles off toward Santa.
“Rebecca,” the woman says, holding out her hand to Paris. “Rebecca D’Angelo.”
�
�Jack Paris.”
They shake hands and immediately become glued together. Rebecca laughs, covers her mouth with her other hand, realizing what she’d done. She’d shaken hands with her Tootsie Pop hand. “I’m so sorry,” she says, unsticking herself, slowly, from Paris. “Let me go get some water and some napkins.”
“That’s okay.”
“I insist.”
“Really,” Paris says. “It’s-”
But the young woman is already on her way to the coffee stand. Paris watches her walk across the room, then sits back down, next to Kamal. His little inquisitor. “See that lady?” Paris asks, pointing toward Rebecca.
Kamal nods.
“Follow her, okay?”
“Okay.”
“She’ll get you a new Tootsie Roll.”
“Tootsie Pop,” Kamal says.
“Tootsie Pop,” Paris corrects.
With that, Kamal gives Paris a hug and runs off after the woman. And Paris has to laugh. Kamal Dawkins, Esquire. He could see the shingle now.
After a few moments, Mercedes sidles up next to Paris. “Pretty gal,” she says.
“Yes, she is.”
“Thinking of adopting?”
Paris notices a little jealousy in her voice. Or does he? “Smart-ass,” he says. “I just met her. She’s probably somebody’s daughter.”
“I’m an investigative reporter, detective. I’d be willing to go to print with the fact that she’s somebody’s daughter.”
“You know what I mean. The daughter of some cop I know. Guy about my age.”
“Hmmm. A guy your age. What age would that be?”
“Somewhere between Huggies and Depends,” Paris says. “Right about halfway.”
“I see,” she says, lifting her pen and notebook. “And can I-”
“Miss Cruz?”
Paris and Mercedes look over to see two young girls, around eleven or twelve years of age. Melissa’s age. Paris notices how similar they are to his daughter; trying to shed their girlish ways, bodies poised to become women, yet still a bit coltish and sharply angled, a bit clumsy. One of them whispers something into Mercedes’s ear. It seems that Mercedes Cruz has become an instant role model.
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