Kiss Of Evil jp-2

by Richard Montanari

  “I hope you realize it’s nothing personal,” Axel says.

  “Of course. Business is business. No offense taken.”

  Axel leans in, as if sharing a secret, even though we are alone in the coolly lit conference room at Cable99, the local access channel whose offices are located on Shaker Square. “It’s the fucking politicians that screwed it up for everyone. But what’s new, eh?”

  Axel is certainly referring to the fact that political types have a nasty habit of ordering air time, using it, losing the election, then refusing to pay. Nothing of the sort is going to happen here, I assure him. Especially at these prices.

  “Cash okay?” I ask.

  “Cash is fine,” Axel answers.

  “And you say the remote hookup won’t present any problems?”

  “None at all,” he replies. “Of course, you realize that the streaming video quality won’t be the greatest. We did a live streaming video with Pere Ubu recently and it was cybercast worldwide on the Net. Our only problem was that sometimes the video lagged slightly behind the audio. Other than that, everything went smoothly.”

  “And I’ll be able to feed from two locations?”

  “Absolutely. As long as the software is right on your end, whatever comes through will go right on the air.”

  “Outstanding,” I say, rising to my feet. “Where do we take care of this nasty money business?”

  “Money is never nasty around here,” Axel says with a huge grin.

  Ten minutes later I pay for thirty minutes of airtime on Cable99, buying the eleven-thirty-to-midnight slot on New Year’s Eve, paying a substantial premium for the short notice. The audience won’t be that large, of course, but neither are the demands regarding standards and practices. I can safely assume that what I have planned would never be suitable for broadcast on the network affiliates.

  Not until it becomes news, that is.

  45

  At first, he figures it is just an hallucination, just another by-product of middle-aged myopia mixed with extreme sexual deprivation. He had thought about her so much over the past few days that he had begun to berate himself each time she danced across his memory, which seemed to be every forty-five seconds or so. He had even said her name aloud on a few occasions.

  Why couldn’t he get her off his mind?

  He had no idea. But of all the places he might have expected to run into her, inside Pallucci’s had to be down there near the bottom of the list. Right around monster-truck show.

  Had he told her of his nearly twenty-year habit of stopping at Palucci’s on East Sixty-sixth Street every week at this time so he could get the fresh mozzarella with basil? He couldn’t remember. The conversation at Starbucks is a smudge. He may have.

  Regardless, this time, it is no hallucination. She is standing at the end of the aisle, posing, her right leg cocked, her dark hair swept back from her face, her lips a damp, glistening scarlet. She begins to walk slowly toward him, her eyes fixed on his. She is wearing a tight black skirt and a black leather jacket, the kind with a million zippers, a cream T-shirt beneath. She looks tough. And cocky. And very sexy.

  As she approaches, a tiny smile graces her lips, and Paris suddenly realizes that she is not going to speak to him. He also notices it is not a cream T-shirt at all, but rather creamy skin. The jacket is unzipped halfway. She is wearing nothing beneath.

  She walks past him, to the end of the aisle, turns, glances back.

  Sea of Love, Paris thinks. The grocery-store scene in Sea of Love. They had talked at length about this scene in the movie.

  This can’t be happening.

  And being the cynic that nearly twenty years on the force will make anybody, he begins to wonder what is wrong with this picture.

  Yet, when he walks down the aisle, turns the corner, and sees Rebecca D’Angelo standing by the small produce rack, when he sees the way the fluorescent light plays off her alabaster skin, something other than logic propels him. He sidles up next to her, giddy with her perfume. She unzips her jacket another inch, leans in front of him, taking a handful of fennel, sniffing it. She runs her other hand slowly up his thigh, back down. Paris can now see inside her jacket, her breasts against the black leather. She holds the pose for a moment, then puts the fennel back, strolls toward the small bakery counter-the sound of her heels clicking on the hard tile, along with Jimmy Roselli’s “Mala Femmena” playing on the store’s speakers, making the perfect surreal backdrop to the moment.

  Slowly, Paris follows. When Rebecca reaches the counter, she turns, leans against the glass. When Paris stops in front of her, she grabs the lapels of his coat, pulls him between her legs.

  The kiss is long and slow and deep. Paris slides his hands between her short skirt and the warm glass of the bakery display case. She kisses him again, and this time Paris wraps his arms around her, the leather, warm and sensual in his hands; the aroma of freshly baked scallette filling his head. Rebecca runs her tongue gently along the tip of his earlobe, whispers:

  “Happy New Year, Jack.”

  Paris is speechless.

  They kiss one last time, a kiss that delicately, yet unquestionably, conveys the promise that the next time they meet they will make love.

  Rebecca slides from his arms, then turns and walks toward the register. She leans over, pecks Carmine Pallucci on his stubbly gray cheek, opens the door and is gone. One moment she is deep in Paris’s arms, and the next moment he is greeted by a cold blast of air and the sloppy sounds of traffic sloshing down East Sixty-sixth Street.

  Carmine, who had seen the whole thing from behind the register-who had in fact seen quite a bit from that perch in his seventy-one years-looks at Paris, the shape of Rebecca D’Angelo’s lips a neon sign on his right cheek. Then, with a big grin, and a whopper of a story to tell his grandsons in the morning, Carmine reaches under the counter and pulls out two small glasses and a bottle of his special-occasion grappa de Vin Santo.

  Three hours later Paris sits in the backseat of his car, across from La Botanica Macumba, his legs outstretched in front of him, his mind trying to rein in his thoughts about his erotic grocery encounter. He can still smell Rebecca on his hands, his collar.

  What was she doing? What was he doing?

  It was very clever, very sexy, very mature for someone her age. Maybe she is thirty or so, he rationalizes. Which would give him a little hope. Which is probably what scares him so much. He knows that there is a big sign called Hurt at the end of this. Guaranteed. Perhaps that is why he is starting to feel like Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel, the middle-aged schoolteacher who literally makes a clown, as well as a complete asshole, out of himself for Marlene Dietrich.

  Paris looks up at the bay window above La Botanica Macumba, the front window of the Levertov apartment. Shades still down, no lights.

  Ivan Kral, the detective in charge of investigating the Isaac Levertov murder, had said that he had not been able to interview Levertov’s wife in person since the old man’s body had been found. He said that he had spoken to her at some length on the phone, and that she had come down to the morgue to make an official ID of the body, but that he has not been able to make contact with her since. It will take a search warrant to enter the premises and there wasn’t nearly enough credible evidence to support probable cause.

  Yet.

  So they wait.

  Paris repositions himself, brings his knees to his chin. He had learned how to wait the summer his father had died. Every morning that summer the sixteen-year-old Jack Paris would sit in the blue recliner at the foot of his father’s bed, cocooned in that thick, closed-window air of infirmity, his lap covered with his many books on magic: Blackstone’s Modern Card Tricks, Keith Clark’s Encyclopedia of Cigarette Tricks, The New Modern Coin Magic.

  His father had been a six-footer at a time when the heavyweight champion of the world was five-eleven; a maker of things new in his basement workshop, a fixer of things broken in the garage. Frank Paris was a machinist all his working life, a s
elf-sufficient man who checked the locks every night, changed the furnace filters every fall, shoveled the driveway with his huge coal shovel every winter.

  But, in that darkest of summers, leukemia made Frank Paris small.

  On those rare and precious days when his father sat up, took real food, smiled at him, Jack Paris had performed his magic tricks on an aluminum TV table at the foot of the bed. Cups and Balls. The Traveling Deuce. The Vanishing Glass and Handkerchief. Good sometimes, more often not, his father had nonetheless applauded each and every time, his thin, osseous hands meeting in an almost soundless smear.

  Jack Paris sat in the blue chair for three months, standing guard over his father’s health, a bewildered, downhearted sentry. At the end of August the ambulance came in the night while Jack slept soundly. Three days later the call from the hospital came at six o’clock in the morning.

  He’s dead, isn’t he? his mother had said in the kitchen that fog-laden late-summer morning, her pink waitress uniform suddenly a widow’s mantle. Jack waited for her gentle tread on the stairs, for the news.

  All that spring and summer, from the balmy April day his father had come home, grim-faced, from Dr. Jacob’s office, to the rainy funeral at Knollwood cemetery on Labor Day, Jack Paris had rolled a silver dollar through his fingers-palming, transferring, producing, vanishing, concealing.

  His father’s unhurried death may have taught him patience, but it was magic, he would reaffirm every good day he spent as a police officer, that taught him how to look at the other hand, how to see through the shadows.

  It was magic that taught him illusion.

  Paris rubs his eyes. He glances up at the Levertov front window, wondering how long he’d been gone, realizing that an entire performance of Guys and Dolls could have taken place in that window and he would have missed it.

  You’re on the job, Fingers.

  Paris straightens his legs, does a quick scan of the immediate area with his binoculars. Deserted, except for a lone hot dog vendor on the corner of Newark and Fulton. Paris gets out of his car, stretches his legs, does a few kneebends, allowing the frigid air to revive him, his stomach now rumbling at the sight of the vendor. He’d managed to miss dinner again. Before he can head over, his two-way blares: “Jack?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m on my way,” Carla Davis says, sounding agitated. “Five blocks out.”

  “You’re way early. What’s up?”

  “Big fight with Charlie Davis is what’s up.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Gonna bust a cap up his skinny black ass is what’s gonna be up.”

  Paris knows enough to leave it alone. Especially on an open channel. “Got it.”

  “Where are you parked?”

  Paris tells her.

  “I’ll park closer to Trent, so we’re not in the same spot,” she says.

  “Okay,” Paris says, eyeing the vendor and his cart, two blocks away, famished now that he’s seen it. “Listen, there’s a vendor on Newark and Fulton. Grab me something, okay?”

  “No problem. What do you want?”

  “I don’t know. Dog with the works, I guess. Coke.”

  “You got it.”

  “And listen, I know it’s Ivan’s case, but why don’t you pump this guy a little about the old man. Isaac Levertov peddled his cart around here. Maybe he saw something.”

  “You got it.”

  Carla pulls very close with her car. She hands Paris the hot dog-wrapped in Christmas themed wax paper-and the freezing can of Coke.

  Paris asks: “Did he know the old man?”

  “No,” Carla says. She holds her notebook up to the streetlight. “Mr. William Graham of Memphis Avenue in Old Brooklyn has been at this job exactly two weeks. Said he heard about the old man getting killed, but that’s about it.” She closes her notebook.

  “What do I owe you?”

  “Nothing,” Carla says, yawning already. “Just bring coffee in the morning. And every damn McMuffin there is. Now get outta here. Go have a life.”

  The snow falls; hushed, relentless, orderly. The sparse traffic crawls up the center of Lorain Avenue, wisely making two lanes out of four.

  It just didn’t add up.

  Willis Walker. Fayette Martin. Isaac Levertov.

  What the hell ties these three people together?

  Paris opens the Coke, sips, places the can between his legs. He grabs the hot dog, unwraps one end, lifts it to his lips, a third of his mind on Rebecca, a third of his mind on the road, the final third adrift on a stagnant sea of meaningless clues.

  It is the smell that brings him back to shore.

  The smell of death.

  Paris slams on his brakes and begins to slide, sideways, up Lorain Avenue. Luckily there is no oncoming traffic. After a few uneasy moments he rights the car, brings it to a halt, straddling the center of the road. He opens the driver’s door and all but dives onto the icy street.

  “God damn, man… shit!”

  Jack Paris begins to pace around in the middle of Lorain Avenue, fighting the nausea, holding his shield up to the car behind him, directing it around his car. He stops, rests his hands on his knees for a moment. He spits on the ground-once, twice.

  Fat snowflakes catch on Paris’s eyelashes. He brushes them aside, then dares to reach back into his car. He retrieves the blue light, puts it on the roof, and as he does he glances at the festive, brightly decorated wax paper, the beige-colored bun resting on the passenger seat.

  “You are going down, motherfucker,” Paris says as he takes out his cell phone, dials the Second District precinct house, his fury now a living thing within him. He spits into the gutter again. “You don’t see a fucking courtroom. I swear to Christ.”

  Paris listens to the phone ring, absolutely certain that the hot dog vendor is going to be nowhere in sight when the squad cars get to the corner of Newark Avenue and Fulton Road; absolutely livid that he had been taunted with that name, Will Graham, the tormented FBI agent in Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon; absolutely revolted by the knowledge that he had just come to within an inch or two of biting into Willis Walker’s penis.

  46

  I can hear the police sirens in the distance and know that they are coming for me; a sober, urgent aria, rising and falling.

  The old woman sits on the plastic-slipcovered dining room chair, her eyes a dead pool of defiance. I know that she has been through worse than whatever I can offer her now. Much worse. As a child she has survived the horrors of Buchenwald, has witnessed an encyclopedia of inhuman behavior.

  Initially, she had refused to tell me where the keys to the garage could be found. I needed them to get at her husband’s hot dog cart. She had lost the tip of the little finger on her right hand to this stubbornness, yet still refused. When I brought the steam iron to within an inch of her face she pointed to a drawer in an old desk, her frail shoulders sagging under the weight of her shame.

  She is very tough, clearly from another time, another era. Not soft and complacent like so many of my generation. She really has nothing to do with my plan, and my instincts are to just leave her apartment, take my chances. These are my instincts. And yet I know I cannot do this. I have no hatred for her, but I need until New Year’s Eve at the very least and she has seen my real face.

  My father’s face.

  I look out the window as two police cars converge on the corner of Trent Avenue and Fulton Road, their blue lights a sparkling, prismatic display on the ice-crystalled facade of St. Rocco’s church.

  The old woman struggles against the ropes. It appears that life, complete with all its horrors and barbarism and cruelty, is still precious to her. She tries to plead with me, but the tape over her mouth catches her fear, mutes it.

  When we met, I had told her and her husband Isaac that my name was Judah Cohen. I kneel in front of her and say, in very apologetic Hebrew, acquired just for this occasion:

  “Ani ve ata neshane et haolam.”

  You and I will change the world.


  Edith Levertov’s eyes open wide, wider.

  She screams.

  She has met the devil once before.

  47

  Paris mounts the steps to the Levertov apartment, his sidearm drawn. He is followed by Carla Davis and two uniformed officers from the Second District. Paris has not pulled his weapon in the line of duty for more than eight months, and although he had requalified at the range since, it suddenly feels foreign in his hand, heavy.

  Three scenarios are possible at the top of these stairs, Paris thinks, ten treads from the door. One. Nobody home. Isaac Levertov’s widow is staying with relatives, too grief-stricken to return to the apartment. Two. A dazed and confused and heavily medicated Mrs. Edith Levertov will come to the door, having never heard the doorbell or the ringing phone.

  Three?

  Well, three has too many variables, even for someone of Jack Paris’s experience.

  The top of the stairs brings a collective breath from the four police officers. Paris tries the knob and the old door opens, just a few inches, creaking in protest. Paris makes eye contact with Carla, who is standing directly behind him. Paris will open the door wide, go in high. Carla will go in low.

  After a silent count of three, Paris pushes open the door fully. The squeal of the hinge is louder this time, a shriek of rusty disapproval in the silence of the hallway.

  No movement. No voices inside. No TV nor radio.

  Paris waits a few heartbeats, peeks around the jamb. Small kitchen ahead, enameled yellow walls, a wrought-iron dinette table, plastic plants. He smells old frying oil, Lysol, cat litter. Whereas there had been no lights on when Paris had staked the apartment out earlier, now, it seems, every light in the small apartment is blazing.

  Paris rolls in high. Carla follows. Spotless kitchen floor, except for the two slightly sullied size-eleven footprints made of melted snow. Paris silently apprises Carla, who skirts them.

  To the left, an archway into the living and dining rooms. Paris sidles against the refrigerator, holds his position. Carla moves low, to the far side, glancing through the archway as she does. She stands on the opposite side of the arch, nods at Paris. Paris steps into the dining room, his 9 mm pistol at a forty-five degree angle to his body.