‘Never heard of her.’
‘She’s real, I’m telling you,’ Paris said. ‘Hers is right where yours is.’
‘Sorry. I think you’re making it up.’
‘Are you challenging?’
Diana thought for a moment. If she challenged, and was wrong, she’d have to take a drink. ‘Yeah.’
‘Google her.’
‘How do you spell her last name?’
Paris told her. Diana entered the information on her Mac Book Pro. Seconds later she had a photograph of the former lead singer of Missing Persons on the screen. ‘Damn.’
‘Told you,’ Paris said. ‘Bottoms up.’
Diana obeyed, taking the bottle in hand, tilting her head back in deference to the smooth Irish whiskey.
They were sitting on the couch, facing each other, their hands from time to time finding each other’s knees and thighs and shoulders as they told their stories. They had talked for what seemed to be hours – about the case, about themselves, about the nature of life and death. Somehow, they had drifted into this drinking game. They were about two inches from the bottom of the bottle of Jameson, but that was okay. Paris had another.
The game was naming famous women with beauty marks.
‘Your turn,’ Paris said.
Okay. ‘Lil’ Kim.’
Paris hadn’t the slightest idea who Lil’ Kim was. ‘Okay,’ he said. How about—’
‘You don’t know who she is, do you? You’re just trying to get me drunk.’
‘What are you talking about? I’ve loved every single one of her movies.’
‘Albums.’
‘Albums.’
Diana laughed. She handed Paris the bottle. He swigged.
It was getting to be a very loopy game.
She waved it playfully in front of his eyes, then tossed it to him. A latex condom. ‘Don’t even say it,’ Diana warned, the color began to rise in her cheeks.
‘What was I going to say?’
‘Some kind of Girl Scout joke’ She stood up, unzipped her skirt, stepped out of it. ‘Something about being prepared.’
She sat on the coffee table in front of him, the tails of her big white shirt between her thighs. Paris looked down and saw that her toenails were painted a blood red. Diana reached into her shirt pocket and produced a perfectly rolled joint.
‘Ms Bennett …’ Paris said. Surprised but not shocked.
‘Yes, detective?’ She batted her eyes demurely, licked the end of the joint, lit it.
‘Are you aware of the fact that you are endeavoring to use a controlled substance in the presence of a police officer?’
‘Yes,’ she said, releasing the smoke slowly. ‘But it’s just that I’m trying to get control of the police officer.’
‘Is that right?’
‘It is.’
She leaned forward and put the joint to Paris’s lips. He drew on it deeply. Immediately the pot found the booze in his system and put an entirely new, euphoric perspective on the evening. He let the smoke leak out of the corners of his mouth in thin gray ribbons. It had been ages.
Diana sat back, unbuttoned two more buttons on her blouse, the tops of her breasts now visible through the folds of white cotton. She ran her hands slowly up his thighs, back down.
‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to place you under arrest,’ Paris said, slurring the word ‘place’ so that it sounded like ‘plaish’.
‘I don’t see that you have any choice,’ Diana said, hitting the joint again, passing it back to Paris. ‘I’m completely incorrigible. Irredeemable in the eyes of this court.’
Paris took another hit, nearly coughing it out. ‘You have the right to remain sexy,’ he said.
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Anything you hold against me,’ Paris continued, ‘will be held against you.’
‘Fair enough.’ She finished unbuttoning her shirt and pulled it down over her shoulders, letting it drop to the floor as she worked her way between his legs.
‘You have the right to be an attorney.’
She unbuttoned his shirt and kissed her way down his face, his neck, his chest. She kissed his stomach and pulled open his belt.
‘And …’ Paris continued.
Finally she worked his pants open and started running her tongue around the tip of his penis. She sat back on her heels.
‘Jack.’
‘Hmm?’
‘Tell me about the first time you saw me.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The first time you saw me. What did you think? Did you want me?’
‘Oh yeah.’
‘When I questioned you on the stand. Were you thinking about it then?’
Paris didn’t have to think about it. ‘Yes.’
She leaned forward, this time taking him fully in her mouth, but only for a few seconds.
‘Tell me what you want, Jack,’ she whispered.
She flicked her tongue out once, twice.
Paris could not answer.
She gently pulled Paris to his feet and steadied him at the foot of the couch. She reached behind her and lifted the venetian blind to the top of the window, displaying the two of them dimly to the night, to the parking-lot that faced Eighty-fifth Street and the handful of cars that grew out of the darkness there.
‘Say my name,’ she said.
The next thing Paris knew he was on his back in bed, and Diana was on top of him. He was deep within her.
‘Jack.’
A whisper.
To Paris, her voice was floating somewhere between the smooth jazz coming from the radio and the traffic noise below. A voice from his past, it seemed. Patches of sound. The room decided to spin again.
Diana leaned forward, lips close to his ear.
‘Do you still think about her?’
Too much booze. Four-o-five, according to the bright green numbers of the clock radio. She was leaving.
‘Don’t go,’ Paris said.
He wanted her to stay, to be there in the morning. Because this time it felt different. Of the handful of times he had had sex in the past two years he had not wanted any of them to stay.
He tried to sit up, but his body deserted him. His mind was working overtime.
Tommy.
Diana stood at the foot of the bed for a while, darkly silhouetted against the now drawn blinds.
‘Lie back down.’ She prodded him gently, her voice calming, her hands now so familiar. She zipped her skirt, put on her shoes. ‘Come on. I’ll help you.’ She lifted the covers and pulled Paris’s feet toward the foot of the bed, covered him. ‘I have to go, baby.’
Paris rose unsteadily on to one elbow. He tried to put the day’s events in order. As much as he wanted to push the horror of what had happened earlier away, it kept rushing back with brutal, debilitating force.
Tommy Raposo was dead.
Moments later, when Diana closed the door behind her, Paris rolled on to his back, his body flat against a wall of fatigue, his mind a dark deadfall of questions.
Three
Furore
27
IN THE PHOTOGRAPH her mother was beautiful. Her complexion looked perfect in the early morning sunlight, her hair, a symphony of reds and browns and rusts and silvers. Hairdresser hair. But then again, she was only twenty-eight years old at the time the photograph was taken, brash and still defiant, her rose tattoo brazenly exposed on her stomach, just below her midriff shirt.
And why shouldn’t she look good?
Why shouldn’t she look like a movie star?
She was standing in the doorway to their apartment at Holly Knoll, the ever-present menthol cigarette growing out of the V between her painted fingernails, the ever-present purple bruises mottling her thighs and arms. She was off to work at some beauty parlor or another, the longest stint being the one she’d had at the Hair Force on Victorville Road, next to the Cork and Bottle.
And although she had long ago completed her two-year course in cosmetology and had the mo
st extraordinary cheekbones, she’d never quite gotten the hang of putting on make-up. At the distance from which the photo was taken, her cheeks appeared to be slashed with a thick streak of crimson, giving her the painted look of a warrior-squaw.
* * *
Lois Bentivegna liked to dance naked for her boyfriends, and she did so, with a remarkable amount of vigor, right up until the cancer stopped her at thirty-four. She never danced professionally in any sense – her Christian upbringing would have squarely prevented that – but once in a while, on a Friday or Saturday night, after she’d had a few tumblers of Southern Comfort, she would put on an old Kool & the Gang tape and strut around the apartment, Styrofoam cup in hand. She’d usually make a sexy outfit out of whatever she had available, whatever was clean and wasn’t too elastic-worn.
All the while she believed her daughter to be safely stashed away in her room with a pizza, along with her own TV and her very own Princess phone. Sometimes she’d let her daughter have a friend stay overnight and the two girls would covertly slip out of the bedroom window and sneak around the apartment, peeking through the living-room window, hiding in the hedges, at once repulsed and deliriously stirred by the acts unfolding in front of them.
Then, one day, came the blood.
And there was change.
Because it was Lois at the door to her daughter’s room that very first time, just a few years after the photograph was taken, the same year the cancer began to eat at her lungs. It was Lois, unexpectedly home early from her station at the second chair at René and Julian’s at Burton Center, stepping lightly, the sounds of sex drawing her silently toward the door, the unmaskable sighing of a young woman, inexperienced to the touch and rhythms of a man, drawing her closer, closer.
Lois Bentivegna didn’t throw a tantrum like other mothers might have. Lois didn’t burst into the bedroom that day, or any day thereafter, seething with righteous indignation, threatening years of groundings and the absolute denial of junior prom tickets.
Lois watched. Lois crept up to the slightly open bedroom door, her eye to the jamb, and watched her daughter take this young man into her hands, her mouth, her body. A fifteen-year-old girl and her sixteen-year-old lover.
Lois stood by, her own hand violently between her legs, a woman of barely thirty-one years herself, and thought of the afternoons, not all that long ago, when she had entertained a series of inexhaustible sixteen-year-olds of her own.
28
NICHOLAS RAPOSO LIVED in a three-bedroom bungalow in Garwood Gardens, a pre-Second World War residential development in Garfield Heights, on Cleveland’s south-east side. There were no gardens to speak of, no greenery rimming the fifty-foot lots, as the northern end of the street, once a part of the MetroPark system, now gave way to I-480. It was a gray, working-class street on an even grayer day.
Paris had only met the man twice, once at the Justice Center and once at Tommy’s service, three weeks earlier. He knew that Nick Raposo had been a cement worker most of his life, and his hands proved it – rough planks of flesh that seemed to swallow Paris’s hand when they shook.
‘Nice to see you again,’ Nick said, a deep sorrow limning his eyes. Paris knew the man had lost his wife a dozen years earlier, and now his only son. The grief hung upon his shoulders like a tattered cardigan.
‘Nice to see you too, Nick.’
‘Come on in.’
Paris stepped into the small living room. The walls bore the odd grouping of religious pictures and gold-framed photographs of Tommy and his sister, Gina. The worn sofa boasted an orange and brown afghan – Cleveland Browns colors – and a disheveled pile of Time and Sports Illustrated magazines. Paris instantly smelled the aroma of Italian staples: Romano cheese, basil, garlic. Nick Raposo was making sauce.
‘Coffee, Jack?’
‘Only if it’s already on,’ Paris said. ‘Don’t go out of your way.’
‘I make the espresso,’ Nick answered. ‘It’s no problem?’
Paris held up his hands as if to say yes.
‘Come on in the kitchen.’
Paris followed him into the kitchen. Although he knew Nick Raposo was still a physically powerful man, he looked small at that moment, a sketch of the man he was before death stalked his family.
Paris sipped the hot, sweet coffee. It warmed him. The house, the kitchen, the way the small Formica table butted on the wall beneath the window, the way the dish towels cascaded over the handle on the oven door – these things warmed him even more. Unlike his apartment, with its smells of transience, this was a home. He noticed a row of plants sitting on the windowsill over the sink, patiently waiting for spring: parsley, oregano, tarragon, chive. Things move on, Paris thought. Things grow back.
‘You get Tommy’s belongings from the station all right?’ Paris asked, even though he knew the answer.
‘Oh yeah,’ Nick said.
‘The stuff from his apartment too?’
Nick just nodded. The two of them were quiet for a while, the tick of the wall clock the only sound in the room. Finally, Nick spoke.
‘Tommy didn’t do it. You know that, don’t you?’
Paris didn’t know what to say. He said what he thought he should. ‘I know.’
‘I’m not going to tell you he was squeaky clean. I don’t have that sixty-inch TV in the basement or that big Buick in the drive because of my IRAs, eh? He took care of me, Jack. He took care of his sister.’
‘I know, Nick,’ Paris said. ‘But it’s—’
‘But what?’
Paris met Nick Raposo’s eyes and found a deeply wounded man there. ‘The case is closed, Nick. I’m afraid everybody wants it that way.’
‘Not everyone.’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘But you can do something about it, no? You can still ask questions, can’t you? You can still ask around.’
Paris realized then that he was talking to a man who still believed in a fundamental order to things. A man who still clung to the notion that if you play fair you always win. But Paris also knew that the reason he was in Nick Raposo’s house in the first place was because he also knew something was wrong. He simply couldn’t shake the notion that the Pharaoh case – as it had come to be known – had closed a little too quickly with Tommy’s death.
‘Everything I do I gotta do on my own,’ Paris said. ‘After hours, off the meter. You know that, right? I push too hard somewhere, hit the wrong buttons, I’m back handing out parking-tickets in Hough.’
Nick nodded in understanding. Then he looked deeply into Paris’s eyes and said, softly: ‘Clear my son, Jack.’
The basement was cool and orderly. On one side was a large TV and sofa. On the other, a tradesman’s refuge. There was a wall of tools, along with a workbench, smooth and worn and black with years of spilled 3 in 1 oil.
The small room off the main reflected the systematic habits of the son. White boxes were stacked floor to ceiling, wall to wall. They were mostly the kind which store legal papers. All were all precisely labelled in green block letters. It did not take Paris long to find the box containing Tommy’s personal papers.
On top was a stack of Playbills, mostly from the Palace or State theaters, mostly musicals: Les Misérables, Wicked, The Jersey Boys. Beneath them were postcards from what had to be a hundred different women. Crystal and Denise, Jackie, Barbara, Peggy, Lydia, Sarah, Junie and Annette. At least a dozen were signed, simply, ‘me’.
He picked up a plain white business envelope, open at the top, jammed full of photographs of various sizes and vintages. There was a pair of Tommy and his sister in Atlantic City, a few with his mother and father at his police-academy graduation, Tommy with girl after girl after girl. There was Tommy with cops, Tommy with citizens, Tommy with crooks.
Next there was a layer of softbound books, textbooks from the feel of them. Paris lifted out three or four. Leisures and Pleasures of Roman Egypt. A Handbook of the Ancients. Arabian Nights. They looked like they had been opened, but not necessarily
pored over for any great length of time.
At the very bottom of the box was a series of maps and travel brochures, along with a nine-by-twelve-inch brown kraft envelope that was clasped and sealed. Paris flipped it over and saw the familiar rooster scrawl of Tommy’s signature over the seal. It appeared that Tommy had signed the envelope in black ink, right over the flap, so that if anyone ever tried to steam it open and then reclose it he would know. It took Paris all of five seconds to decide to tear off the top. He coughed as he did it to mask the sound of ripping paper, lest Nick think he was doing exactly what he was doing: destroying evidence. If evidence is what it turned out to be. He folded the pieces of the envelope into quarters, placed the pieces in his pockets and looked at the contents.
The only thing in the large envelope was a banded stack of photographs. Both sides of the stack of photographs faced inward.
The appearance of the envelope and the feel of the photographs filled Paris with apprehension. What didn’t Tommy want him to see? What secrets? What was he going to find on the other side of these seemingly benign white cardboard rectangles?
And yet, Paris thought, if Tommy knew he was going to kill himself, why didn’t he just destroy them?
Paris glanced around the corner, up the yellow-and-gray-linoleum-clad steps. He could hear Nick making kitchen sounds, preparing another espresso for them.
‘You need any help up there, Nick?’
‘No,’ Nick said. ‘I’m okay.’
‘You sure?’
‘I can still make a cup of coffee, eh?’
Paris walked to the far end of the workshop and stood directly beneath the fluorescent swag lamp. He removed the rubber bands from the stack, and as soon as he flipped over the top photo, he realized that his vigilance had been warranted after all.
The top photograph was of a woman in S&M leather drag, her back to the camera, kneeling at the foot of a bed. It was taken in a standard motel room, with no regional clues in the decor. The bedspread looked to be dark green or dark blue. The woman’s body was perfect, her waist was thin, her hips rounded and smooth. Her leather bustier crossed her back in a spiderweb of thin lines that seemed to cut deeply into her flesh.
Don’t Look Now Page 16
