Kiss Of Evil jp-2

by Richard Montanari

  Then there are the animal smells. The smells of cages.

  Evangelina Cruz steps to the right of the altar, reaches beneath the white cloth, presses a button. Within seconds, music begins to play, a vibrant African beat, mostly drums. She looks heavenward, then reaches into the pocket of her caftan and produces a cigar. She lights it slowly, methodically. When it is fully lighted she draws the smoke into her mouth, then exhales it over the altar. She then blows smoke at Paris and places the cigar onto a brass incense plate.

  “Donde esta tu fotografia?” Evangelina asks.

  “She needs the photographs now,” Mercedes whispers.

  Paris reaches into his pocket and produces photocopies of the photographs of the four victims. Fayette Martin, Willis Walker, Edith Levertov, and Isaac Levertov. He hands the paper to Evangelina Cruz. Without looking at the photographs, she drops them into a large terra-cotta bowl on the bottom step of the altar. She then leans over and picks up an earthen cruet and pours what appears to be water into the bowl, half-filling it. She places the pitcher back onto the altar, then dips her fingers into the liquid and flicks them over the altar.

  Before Paris can react, she turns and flicks the last few drops over him.

  “Maferefun ashelu!” she says.

  Then, without a word, she leaves the room, the glass beads clapping behind her. Paris hears a door open and close. Then again, fainter. After a few moments, Evangelina returns, carrying a chicken. A live chicken. She turns up the music.

  Paris looks at Mercedes and lets his right eyebrow do the talking.

  Mercedes leans close. “Don’t worry. She eats them after.”

  Up goes the remaining eyebrow. “She’s going to kill it?”

  Mercedes smirks. “And I suppose you send condolence cards to KFC when you’re done with a bucket?”

  She has a point, Paris thinks. He just wasn’t prepared for some kind of barnyard slaughter in the basement of a house on Babbitt Road. He directs his attention back to the altar.

  Evangelina Cruz puts the body of the chicken under her left arm, and with her right hand she reaches into the pocket of her caftan. This time she produces a pearl-handle switchblade, clicks it open, and cuts the chicken’s neck, deeply, taking the head nearly off. It flutters wildly under her arm, but Evangelina Cruz doesn’t even flinch. She holds the chicken’s exposed throat over the bowl containing the four photographs, and Paris watches as a series of bright scarlet spurts cloud the water, blurring the photographs completely.

  In the background, the tribal music plays.

  Evangelina chants. “Maferefun ashelu!”

  The chicken’s blood squirts into the bowl.

  “Maferefun ashelu!”

  Paris looks at Mercedes. “Do you know what that means?” he whispers.

  “Yes,” she says. “She is offering praise to the police.”

  Paris is shocked. “There’s a saying for that?”

  Mercedes smiles as the ceremony continues.

  Within three minutes, Evangelina has the chicken plucked and the white feathers scattered about the altar.

  Mercedes emerges from the house, walks over to the driver’s door of her car, gets in. Paris sits in the passenger seat, a little rattled by what he has just seen.

  As soon as the ceremony was over, Paris had thanked Evangelina Cruz and quickly made his way out the side door, the smell of sour smoke and chicken blood filling his sinuses. The cold air had done wonders. He had agreed to meet with the old woman at Mercedes’s request, hoping to further his knowledge of Santeria. And although he could honestly say that he knows more about it now than he did yesterday, he isn’t entirely certain how this newly acquired wisdom is going to help.

  Paris asks, “So… what did she say?”

  Mercedes buckles her seat belt, starts the car. “She said you seem like a very nice young man.”

  “Young?” Paris says. “I think your ’buela may need a new ’scrip for those glasses.”

  “She also said that the man you are looking for is not a real brujo. He is an impostor.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means he was not ordained into brujeria or Palo Mayombe or Santeria itself. He is just using these things to frighten people. He is like a pimp she says. A cardboard bully.”

  “Those dead bodies are not cardboard, Mercedes.”

  “I know. I told her that. She says that the man you are looking for will crumble when you close your hands around him. Like paper. It’s kind of tough to translate, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “But she says that if you want to know him, if you want to catch him, you have to know what breaks his heart.”

  Paris’s mind races around the evidence, trying to plug all this into a reality socket. “She really thinks the Santeria angle is just window dressing?”

  “Yes.”

  “How can she be sure?”

  Mercedes looks out the side window for a moment, then back at Paris. “This is going to sound a lot worse than it is.”

  “It already does. Just spit it out.”

  Mercedes fumbles with the settings for the car’s heater, stalling. “She says that if he were the real thing, he would have sacrificed a child by now.”

  Paris goes cold for a moment, remembering Melissa in the hands of a psychopath. “Please. No. Don’t tell me that-”

  “No,” Mercedes says as she looks both ways, then backs out onto Babbitt Road. “She really doubts that he will do that. She thinks this guy is a player. A hustler. No more a brujo than you. She says he has an angle, a reason for doing this that is of this earth. Nothing more mystical than that.”

  Paris is silent for a few moments. “And what did she say about that spell she cast?”

  Mercedes smiles broadly as she puts the Saturn in gear and heads toward the Shoreway. “She said you will have your killer within twenty-four hours.”

  52

  The little girl tries to lift the ball of tightly packed snow; her short arms are wrapped only halfway around the circumference. It is the snowman’s head she hoists, the third and final level of the rather portly, misshapen fellow that is already taller than she is.

  She tightens her grip. Up, up, up, up… no. Not this time.

  The snowman’s head falls to the ground and rolls a few inches.

  The little girl circles the ball of snow, her face a twist of concentration. And it is such a beautiful face. Big eyes, raven hair, loose curls beneath her tam-o’-shanter-dark, springy ringlets that frame a face of such angelic power and purity and innocence.

  She will try again. But not before consulting her almost life-size playmate, the huge bundled-up doll that is sitting on a nearby snowbank, blankly observing. The little girl whispers into the big doll’s ear, sharing little-girl strategy, little-girl tactics. She then walks back over to the snowman’s head, bends over, wraps her arms as far around as she can.

  One, two, three.

  Boom.

  She falls facedown in the snow.

  I count the seconds until the first tear appears but am amazed that they don’t come. She gets up, brushes the snow from the front of her navy blue wool coat. She stamps her right foot in disgust and walks away for a few moments.

  But sheds no tears.

  I would love to jump in and help her, but that, of course, would make all hell break loose.

  An old woman sits on the porch, a cup of steaming coffee or tea in her hands. Quiet street, old ethnics. Nothing could possibly go wrong in bright daylight.

  I am fascinated by the false sense of security people have over their domain, with their deadbolts and lamp timers and Rottweilers and phony security company signs.

  I am more fascinated by the feeling I get when I watch the little girl romp in the snow-trying to dominate all within her little-girl horizon-and how very much like her mother she looks.

  Global Security Systems the sign on the side of the van proclaims in sleek euro-style letters. The two men working on the locks to the f
ront doors of the Cain Manor apartments hardly look like global systems analysts, but, nonetheless, I have to figure them capable at the very least.

  New locks. A problem. My key to Cain Manor came from a duplicate I had cut from a wax pressing, a pressing I made while helping an elderly lady with her groceries a year or so ago.

  But why new locks today?

  Might it have something to do with a body being discovered in Cain Park?

  Regardless, I do not have time to press a new key. I pull the Yellow Pages from the backseat. Cleveland Retail Supply on Chester Avenue. Problem solved.

  I will pay them a visit today on my way to Jack Paris’s apartment.

  Earlier this morning, before Paris had met up with the reporter and driven out to Babbitt Road, while I was well within range of his car and my wireless transmitter, he had been on the phone with his commanding officer and was kind enough to give me his precise itinerary for the day.

  It seems we both have much to do.

  I swing the car onto Euclid Heights Boulevard and head for the city. Later, after making my purchase at the retail supply house, I believe I’ll make a brief stop at Ronnie’s Famous Louisiana Fry Cakes on Hough Avenue.

  I hear the beignets are very good.

  53

  In his career on the street, Arthur Galt was known as a man without fear. A cop who would push other cops out of the way to get to the door, a First District legend who never took a dime and, in spite of a dozen incidents in his twenty-odd years with the CPD, never had a bad shoot.

  But now, over the phone at least, he sounds like a man who has settled quite comfortably into the baronial life of country constable. Arthur Galt is the very popular, very connected chief of police in Russell Township.

  The two men get their pleasantries out of the way and get to business.

  “This is ongoing, Jack,” Galt says, a chief’s cautionary tone lying right on the surface.

  “I understand,” Paris says.

  “We’ve got a couple of witnesses who now say they saw Sarah Weiss at the Gamekeeper’s Taverne earlier that evening.”

  “Alone?”

  “No. These two guys who work at the treatment plant in Chagrin Falls say that they both did their duty by hitting on Sarah Weiss early in the evening, but were shined on. They said later in the night, she gave some time to a corporate type in a dark business suit, who left after a half hour or so. But even later in the evening, they said, she spent at least a couple hours talking to a woman. A real looker they said. Redhead, although, according to these guys, it looked like a wig. She says the two women left together.”

  “Who reported the yellow car on the hill?”

  “A woman named Marilyn Prescott. Her house is about a hundred feet from a clearing that looks right onto the hill. She said it was a full moon that night and she could clearly see the two cars parked there around eleven-thirty. She said she then went to bed, woke up an hour later when she heard the gas tank explode. I’ve already checked to see if the moon really was full that night.”

  “And?”

  “It was.”

  Paris processes the information. “Do you have a sketch of the business type or the redheaded woman?”

  “Nothing yet. We’re still canvassing on this, Jack. It’s still officially a suicide.”

  “They left the bar together…”

  “Yeah,” Galt says. “These two guys wrote them off as gay, of course. They work at a fuckin’ sewage treatment plant and neither of ’em could figure out any other reason as to why they were shut down.”

  St. John the Evangelist, the imposing cathedral on East Ninth Street and Superior Avenue, is nearly empty at this hour, with just a handful of widely spaced penitents in the afternoon gloom. Paris walks through the vestibule, steps inside. The echo of his footsteps in the enormous church recalls the other times of his life, the times that being a Catholic had been important to him, the times that seemed to elate and frighten and entrance him all at once, the times during which he had leaned on his faith for strength.

  But that all changed on his third night as a police officer. All of that changed the night he saw three young children-ages four, five, and six-blasted apart with a shotgun in a stifling third-floor apartment on Sonora Avenue. Besides the torn flesh and the sea of gore, Paris’s lingering memory-the remembrance that has led him to deny a benevolent God for so many years-was the Etch-A-Sketch he had seen, still clutched in the hands of the four-year-old; the Etch-A-Sketch sheened with blood that had borne the half-drawn Happy Birthday Daddy!

  It was the little girl’s father, insane with seventy-two hours of methamphetamine and fortified wine, who had placed the barrel against her head and pulled the trigger.

  No. No God would allow this to happen, he had thought at the time, and it has been that conviction that has shielded his heart and mind and memory from the abundance of horrors he had witnessed since.

  Until today. For some reason, the need has returned.

  He selects an empty pew.

  Mercedes Cruz, nearing her deadline, had gone home to write the first draft of her story, having argued with Paris for nearly an hour about the possibility of accompanying the task force on the raid later that night. It is, of course, entirely out of the question. But still she pressured him. In the end, Paris had said that he would call her later that night, regardless of the time, and give her an exclusive. It wasn’t what she was lobbying for, but it was the best he could do.

  And then there is the image of Evangelina Cruz, covered in blood and feathers.

  Paris thinks about the ceremony in Evangelina Cruz’s basement, how foreign and violent and pagan it seemed. But Catholicism certainly has its rituals, he concedes, looking around him. Odd-seeming ceremonies that people of other faiths might find bizarre.

  Willis Walker. Fayette Martin. Isaac and Edith Levertov.

  Mike Ryan.

  Sarah Weiss.

  What am I doing in St. John’s after all this time?

  He leans forward, kneels. Automatically, his hands find each other, a loose tenting of fingers, a long unutilized mainstay of his Catholic upbringing.

  Am I praying?

  Yes, he thinks. I am. After all these years I am praying again. I am praying for every Fayette Martin out there. I am praying for Melissa. I am praying for all the little girls who will one day grow up, dress like a woman, and say yes to a man with sorcery in his smile.

  Dolores Ryan’s outgoing phone message had stated that she and her daughter Carrie would be out of town for the New Year’s holiday, and to please call them at a Tampa, Florida, number. Not the smartest move, Paris had thought, considering the world as it is these days, but it was common knowledge that the patrols on this stretch of Denison Avenue were a little more frequent in the past few years. Widows of cops killed on the job rarely had to worry about break-ins.

  On the other hand, there is no need to advertise. After Paris had called in his location, then made his way around back, through calf-high drifts of snow, he noticed the note pinned to the doorjamb, a note from Dolores to her newspaper carrier, instructing the carrier to put the newspapers into the covered wooden box near the back door: a bright beacon of invitation to any burglar who happens to come by. Paris takes Dolores’s note down, shoves it in his pocket, makes a mental note to call the Plain Dealer circulation department and tell them to tell the carrier.

  Then, not without a sliver of guilt, Paris acts like a burglar himself.

  He looks three-sixty.

  And knocks out a pane of glass.

  The storage bay is an icebox. He had waited for the glass repair company to arrive and replace the pane, paying the man in cash, then had retrieved the key from the corkboard in Dolores’s kitchen. He is once again standing in front of Michael Ryan’s desk in bay number 202, not really certain as to why, not really comfortable with the desperation that had settled over him of late.

  He finds a suitable rag and cleans off the dust-covered dial on the small floor safe.


  Then, in the dim light of the single overhead bulb, he looks at Demetrius Salters’s scrawlings on the Time magazine, even though the page numbers had stalked the edge of his conscious thought for so long he knows them by heart.

  15,28,35.

  It had occurred to him somewhere in the middle of a daydream. Carla’s creepy crawler. The one who used to carve numbers into the foreheads of his victims.

  Combinations are six numbers.

  Before he can talk himself out of it, he hunkers down, spins the dial.

  Fifteen, right.

  Once around. Twenty-eight left.

  Thirty-five right.

  Paris takes a deep breath, grabs the cold iron handle on the door to the safe, absolutely certain the door will not open, thoroughly convinced that a sequence of numbers circled in a cable TV guide by a retired cop with Alzheimer’s could not possibly be the combination to a safe that has been sitting in The door swings open.

  Paris’s stomach flutters as he looks inside and sees two dog-eared manila folders. He removes them. The first one contains an old charcoal police-artist sketch of a teenaged boy. High cheekbones, long dark hair, wraparound sunglasses. Paris flips it over. On the back is glued a one-paragraph newspaper article from the San Diego Union-Tribune: HILLSDALE GIRL, 4, VICTIM OF HIT-AND-RUN DRIVER. The article is about Carrie Ryan’s accident.

  Paris looks at the sketch again.

  The hit-and-run suspect?

  He opens the other folder. This one contains an old police file. On top is an aggravated assault complaint by a woman named Lydia del Blanco sworn out against her former spouse, Anthony C. del Blanco. Paris notices that it is a photocopy, not the original.

  But that’s not what makes his mind spin. That dizzying feeling is courtesy of the fact that Anthony del Blanco lived at 4008 Central Avenue. Anthony del Blanco lived in one of the rooms in the Reginald Building, not more than fifteen feet from where Fayette Martin’s body was found.