Don’t Look Now

by Richard Montanari

  Again Paris complied, making sure the candles would fall as planned. He figured there was no point in trying to sabotage this. The last thing he wanted to do right now was disappoint this woman. He knew what this set-up was about: destroying the evidence, collecting the insurance and beating the arson investigators, who were some of the savviest people in all of law enforcement. She would say that she’d had a get-together, she left the house with the candles still lit, she got a fax while she was out and the next thing anybody knew—

  ‘Grunt if it’s done.’

  Paris grunted.

  ‘Now, you know and I know that we can’t have you walking out of there with anything, so what I want, right now, is for you to strip to the waist. Everything off. Do it.’

  Paris decided that he couldn’t take the chance that she was bluffing about being able to see him. He dropped the phone and pulled his shirt, jacket, tie and undershirt over his head as one unit. Unfortunately, his shoulder holster and weapon came with it. He picked up the phone again.

  ‘When I see you run out of the house I want to see your hands empty and your pockets turned inside out. Front and back. If you understand, say so.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘Where is your cell phone?’

  Paris nearly spoke.

  ‘You may answer.’

  ‘In the car.’

  ‘Good. I’m going to give you exactly ten seconds from the moment I say go to reach your car. I can see it very clearly and I have a very good watch. If it takes you one second longer, bad things happen. Once you get to your car, take your phone out, then go across the street and wait on the RTA platform under the lights. Understand?’

  Silence.

  ‘Saila says talk.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘Oh, and there are two things you should know about me, Jack. One, I don’t hurt children. And two, I’m no fanatic about that.’ She paused, with Paris stretched nearly halfway to the door, trying to get a jump on her command. ‘If I’m satisfied,’ she continued, ‘we’ll proceed to step two in our game. I will call you, but we will not talk very long. We’re not going to give anyone time to triangulate the call. Be sure you are somewhere there is a strong signal. Are you ready?’

  Paris said nothing.

  Saila laughed. ‘Oh, just go.’

  He made the trip in less than eight seconds.

  The cold night air braced Paris as he ran, sweating and shirtless, onto the porch. About halfway to his car, Paris panicked for a moment, thinking that he had left his keys in his jacket pocket, inside a house that was set, at any moment, to catch fire. Then he remembered that he had stashed them under the passenger seat. He hadn’t known what to expect when he went inside 15203 Tarleton Street, and because he had more than once physically engaged a criminal only to find that after the dust settled, things like keys and wallets and watches and rings and lighters had been flung into oblivion, he had decided to leave his keys in the car.

  He reached his car, well within the time limit the woman had given him.

  And that’s when he heard the voice.

  ‘Don’t move.’ It was a calm, confident request that came from behind Paris and to his left, just on the other side of the car.

  Paris froze.

  ‘Put your hands on top of your head and interlace your fingers.’

  Paris did as he was told, a feeling of relief instantly washing over him. It was a cop. He waited for the next instruction, even though he knew what it was going to be.

  ‘Now turn around, slowly, and face me.’

  Paris spun slowly to his right. About halfway, he knew.

  ‘Jack,’ Danny Lawrence said. ‘Jesus Christ, Jack.’

  Even though they knew each other, Paris kept his hands raised. Paris was pretty sure that Danny Lawrence, and all the other cops in the Fourth, patrolled in one-man units, but you never knew.

  It took Danny a moment to realize that he still had his weapon pointed at a CPD detective. ‘Jesus. Sorry. Put your hands down, Jack.’ He holstered his weapon.

  Paris took the opportunity to glance at the house. No flames yet.

  ‘Sorry, Danny,’ Paris said, trying to formulate his story on the fly. ‘I hope I didn’t, you know, get the adrenaline pumping too hard there.’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Actually, I was going to ask you the same thing,’ Paris said, smiling, hoping his gold shield would carry the moment. It did.

  ‘Well, what I’m doing here is that I caught a call on this street. Report of a burglary in progress – 15203 Tarleton.’

  Danny had given Paris his out. He went for it.

  ‘Yeah. I caught it too. I was dropping someone off at the RTA and I heard the call. So I swung the car up here and took a look.’ Paris stole another glance at the house. He had to get rid of Danny. ‘Nothing. False alarm.’

  ‘You’re a detective, Jack,’ Danny said. ‘Why would you handle a burglary call?’

  ‘Reflex, I guess. I was here.’

  ‘Is there anybody in the house?’

  ‘No,’ Paris said. ‘I checked all the doors and windows. Looked in with the flashlight. Nothing. False alarm.’

  ‘Well, maybe I should—’

  ‘Danny. It’s handled. It’s done.’

  Danny looked at him, a little more skeptically than Paris would have liked. ‘You’ll call it in? You’ll clear it?’ he asked, turning his flashlight toward the house. He scanned the eaves, the porch, the bushes.

  ‘Absolutely,’ Paris said. He reached down and quickly turned his pockets back in.

  ‘Well …’ Danny began, now directing the flashlight toward Paris, ‘okay, I guess.’ He finally produced a smile and, with it, all the tension immediately dissolved. ‘You think you’ll ever tell me why you don’t have a fucking shirt on at this moment?’

  Paris thought about it. ‘Yes, Danny. I will. I promise. It’s a good story.’

  ‘Something to do with the friend you just dropped off?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  Danny Lawrence did a few more takes on Jack and the house. He clicked off his flashlight, turned toward his patrol car and said, ‘Have a good night, detective.’

  ‘You too, Danny. Thanks.’

  As Danny drove off, Paris wondered why he had thanked him. Perhaps it was rooted in the feeling all police officers have after having a gun pointed at them and not getting shot.

  37

  THE WOMAN WAS very sexy for an older gal. Kind of curvy but still muscular and fit. Jeff liked them fit. He also knew that a lot of the women that came into the Kinko’s on Mayfield Road didn’t give him a second look because of his complexion and all. This woman had actually smiled at him.

  She wanted to send a fax.

  ‘That’s a local phone number, right?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, handing him three pieces of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven paper. ‘The number’s at the top.’

  ‘Do you need a cover page?’

  ‘No thank you.’

  ‘Doesn’t cost any extra,’ Jeff said with his most winning eighteen-year-old smile. ‘And we’ve got lots of interesting designs.’

  ‘Just what I gave you is fine,’ she answered, sounding very authoritative, and suddenly very much like one of his teachers. He took the pages over to the fax machine, feeling like a kid being sent on an errand by a beautiful woman.

  So what was new?

  He loaded the pages, dialed the number.

  ‘Hi … If you’re sending a fax, send it now. If you’d like to leave a voice message, wait for the beep. Thanks …’

  Jeff Trimble pressed the send button with consummate skill. After the pages made their rotation, he turned back to the woman, hoping he had exhausted his cache of really stupid moves. He had not.

  ‘Will that be all?’

  She smiled. ‘Yes, that’s it. Jeff.’

  ‘That will be five-fifty-six,’ he said. The woman had seen his ID tag and called him by name. She handed him the correct chang
e. He rang it up, handed her the receipt. She stared deeply into his eyes, apparently waiting for something.

  ‘Is there something else I can do for you?’ he asked.

  ‘The original?’

  ‘Original?’

  ‘The three-page document. The one you just faxed for me?’

  ‘Oh, how stupid.’ Jeff Trimble turned a bright and remarkably even shade of crimson. It seemed to devour him. He handed the woman her papers. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s quite all right, young man. You have a nice evening.’

  She turned and left the store. As Jeff watched her walk to her car, a white BMW, he thought she was one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen in his life.

  He could tell that her daughter, sitting out in the car, was going to be a knockout one day too.

  38

  PARIS WAITED UNTIL he saw the fire before he dialed his cell phone. Danny Lawrence had barely turned the corner on to East 115th Street before the first flames began to appear. Paris knew that if he had called it in immediately after getting out of the house and the fire hadn’t broken out for another ten minutes, he would have had a very hard time explaining it. He imagined that the woman had gone somewhere where there was a fax machine – Kinko’s, OfficeMax, Staples – and called, sending a couple of pages down the wire and out of her machine, sending the tea candles onto the rug.

  He didn’t know if the woman was still in the area, still watching him, so he remained on the RTA platform across the street, out of sight. Paris hoped that she hadn’t seen him talking to Danny Lawrence, or, if she had, that she had given him credit for enough sense to have kept his mouth shut around a cop.

  Besides, he wasn’t all that anxious to run into a burning building anyway. He would simply have to hope that the CFD would arrive in time to save some key piece of evidence to link her to the Pharaoh murders.

  But as he heard the muffled pop of the liquor bottles exploding he knew it would all go up by the time the first engine company arrived. Within minutes, the roof and eaves were shooting bright orange flames high into the night.

  Paris sprinted back to his car, opened the trunk, retrieved a damp, sweatshirt out of his gym bag, pulled it over his head. He also pulled out his backup weapon, along with a spare holster and a box of rounds. Although he had been forced to give up his revolver inside the cottage, he had, luckily, managed to get his shield and ID out of his pocket and down the front of his pants before running out of the house. He got in the car, turned over the engine, cranked the heat up to high and turned north on Murray Hill, not having the slightest clue as to why he was heading in that particular direction.

  The coffee at Bengal’s was rarely fresh, but it was always strong and hot. Bengal’s was a soul-food place on Carnegie, about halfway between his apartment and the Innerbelt. He didn’t know if he’d have to go east or west when he got the call, but he wanted to be ready when it came.

  He got out, checked his phone for the tenth time, making sure he had good signal strength. He paced for a few minutes, got back in his car, sipped from the Styrofoam cup, tried to put this nightmare in order.

  Who the fuck was doing this to him? Was it Diana? And if it was, how could he have been so wrong? Was it the Hellers? He still found that hard to believe.

  And where the hell was Cyndy?

  And where the hell was Beth?

  He fingered the weapon in his shoulder holster and watched the slow, sparkling parade of hookers as they walked up Carnegie, swinging their purses like world-weary schoolgirls.

  * * *

  Saila called at nine-fifteen.

  Paris looked at the LCD screen, at the caller ID and, for a moment, thought he was misreading the display. He turned on the interior light and found that he had been right in the first place.

  It was his home phone number.

  He flipped open his phone, but remained silent.

  ‘I feel as if someone has stolen all my dolls, Jack.’

  ‘Then just leave my apartment,’ Paris said, trying to build some momentum. ‘We’re even. Leave Melissa there, take off, and we never did this, okay?’

  The silence that greeted his seemingly reasonable suggestion was deafening.

  ‘You really are a shitty housekeeper.’

  The woman’s voice was still synthesized, but it sounded as if the batteries were fading.

  ‘I know, I know,’ Paris answered. ‘But let’s—’

  ‘I mean, you’re a very attractive man, but this place is not going to get the job done. You know what I mean?’

  ‘Saila.’

  ‘And what have we here?’

  Paris heard the sound of rustling papers and then, mercifully, a brief woof from Manny. At least he was okay and at the right place. The room then went quiet for what seemed to Paris like a full minute but in reality was no more than fifteen or twenty seconds.

  ‘Some interesting reading material here. Aileen Wuornos? That roadhouse pig? You were actually reading up on this? You actually thought that there were similarities in these cases? What an insult.’

  Paris could feel the conversation slipping away from him. He said nothing.

  ‘What else do you have on the case?’

  ‘Not a thing. I swear.’

  ‘You fucked me over at Shaker Square. Why should I believe you now?’

  ‘You think this job means more to me than my daughter? There was nothing in my car because there isn’t any evidence. The prosecutor’s happy with Tommy Raposo and that’s that. The case is closed.’

  ‘Then why won’t you give it up?’

  ‘I’m done,’ Paris said. ‘I’m off it.’

  The woman went silent for a few beats, the digital processor filling the void with a hissing sound.

  ‘Maybe I’ll just walk into the kitchen, Jack. Maybe I’ll just stroll into the kitchen and carefully pick up one of your sharper knives – one just loaded with your fingerprints – and stick it into Melissa’s chest. How would that be? Leave her right in the middle of your living-room floor in a big, dark pool of blood. Then it’s bye-bye Daddy. Bye-bye anchor around my fucking neck.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Or maybe I’ll just take this straight razor and send it off to the authorities. Anonymously, of course. Because I’m pretty sure that the state police are going to be very interested in it, considering the fact that there’s the body of a Peeping Tom pushing up lilacs in the woods near the Motel Riverview.’

  Paris’s skin crawled. She was talking about Andrea Heller’s husband. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m not sure how it happened, but your fingerprints are on one end of the razor and this dead pervert’s blood is on the other. Can you believe it?’

  ‘You can’t possibly be serious.’

  ‘And if that wasn’t enough, detective,’ she continued, her voice dropping to a deep, almost manly whisper, ‘how do you intend to explain away the woman you barbecued tonight on Tarleton Street?’

  Paris felt his stomach turn. ‘What?’

  ‘The exhibitionist. The Peeper’s wife. She was alive, Jack. That’s what she was. Tied up and chloroformed, but alive. Up in the attic.’

  ‘You motherfucker!’

  ‘The heat might have brought her to before she went up in flames though, seeing as she was covered in kindling and newspapers. Some oily rags too. I really can’t see anyone sleeping through something like that, can you?’

  The horrors were piling up faster than Paris could sort through them. He had to think, had to find her weakness. He went for the obvious.

  ‘Look,’ Paris said, ‘I’ve got some cash, poker cash, it’s stashed in the basement of the building. It’s yours. Maybe five, six grand.’

  ‘Men are so predictable. You think everything in this world revolves around your cocks or your cash flow, don’t you. You amuse me so.’

  It sounded to Paris like she might be ready to hang up. ‘Don’t—’

  ‘But, on the other hand, I will take the money. Where is it?’

&
nbsp; Paris described the location in the basement.

  ‘Hang on.’

  Paris heard the phone strike something soft, then fall silent. He heard the door to his apartment open, its familiar creak filling him with a rush of fear. When he figured she had begun her way down the stairs, he spoke.

  ‘Missy. Can you hear me?’

  Silence.

  ‘Missy, if you can hear me, make some kind of sound.’

  Nothing. Paris looked out at the street, at Carnegie Avenue, and calculated that he was twenty blocks from his apartment. He’d never make it.

  Paris heard a quick snort of breath into the mouthpiece of the phone, then the rustling of material? Clothing? Paper? Was someone listening?

  He was just about to call out again when he realized that it was Manny, trying to figure out why his master was inside the telephone.

  ‘Manny.’

  The dog barked once, but the electronic voicebox changed it into something birdlike. Then Paris heard the door creak again. Then, quick footsteps toward the phone and Manny’s nails scampering away on the hard-wood floor.

  ‘I’ve decided that I don’t believe you about the evidence. And I’ve got to get going.’

  ‘Wait.’

  ‘I usually go out on Friday, but Saturday’s okay too, I suppose. Especially now that I have a new partner. Right, Melissa?’

  Paris’s heart all but stopped.

  ‘Oh, she’ll come around. But she has a hell of a lot to learn, I think. Who better to teach her than me?’

  ‘Just let me talk to Melissa for five seconds. Just let me know that she’s all right.’

  ‘I don’t think so. We’re leaving. Girls’ night out.’

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘I know you’re going to look for us. You could try looking in the backyard, next to the sandbox. Maybe we’ll call you later, or maybe not. Maybe we’ll hit the kiddie bars. Maybe we’ll pick up a couple of sailors and head off to Atlantic City.’

  The woman laughed and the sound frightened Paris to the bottom of his soul.

  ‘Don’t hang up.’

  ‘Use your head, Jack. I want everything you have on the Pharaoh case. And if you bring anyone in on this, if you talk to one other cop, I’ll hurt you for the rest of your life.’