Don’t Look Now

by Richard Montanari

  ‘But there isn’t—’

  ‘Everything.’

  Paris opened his mouth to speak but was met instead with a brief, antiseptic click.

  Then, the coldest silence he had ever heard in his life.

  How was he going to tell Beth? He decided he wouldn’t, he couldn’t. He decided he would call her, take the heat over being so late and tell her that Missy was going to stay at his place.

  He was lucky. Beth was either on the phone or not home when he called, and he got her voice mail. He left what he thought was a fairly convincing message.

  He turned his phone over and over in his hands. Who the hell was on his team? Tim Murdock was out of the question. Way too blue. Greg Ebersole would help him and keep his mouth shut, but Greg was probably two sheets to the wind by this time of night on a Saturday. Bobby Dietricht was far too ambitious to ask for this huge a favor. He would never be able to pay it off completely.

  No. Paris knew he couldn’t take a chance on another cop, not as long as this psycho had Missy.

  He flipped open his phone and called one of the few people on the planet he felt he could trust.

  * * *

  ‘I have to tell you how thrilled I am that you know I have absolutely nothing to do on a Saturday night,’ Rita said.

  ‘Actually—’

  ‘I’m usually working on Saturday, you know. It’s not like I can’t get a date or anything.’

  ‘I’ve got problems, Rita. Big-time. I could really use your help.’

  ‘On-the-phone help or in-person-and-I-might-have-to-leave-the-house help?’

  ‘Leave-the-house help,’ Paris replied.

  ‘Okay,’ Rita said. ‘But there’s no way I’m doing this with dirty hair. Give me twenty minutes. I’m at 2018 Fenton Place.’

  Rita Weisinger’s apartment was bohemian and funky. Inexpensive but functional furniture, with a few fairly interesting reproductions on the walls. On one wall was a bookshelf that held nearly as many romance paperbacks as Paris had found at Samantha Jaeger’s flat. Rita may have had the same tastes in literature but, thankfully, was a lot more in touch with terra firma than the very spooky Miss Jaeger turned out to be.

  ‘Before you fill me in, is this a drink-mission or a coffee-mission?’ Rita asked.

  ‘Coffee.’

  ‘Black, one sugar, right?’

  ‘You’re amazing.’

  ‘It’s a gift,’ Rita said. She poured him a cup, placed it on the coffee table and sat down. As she listened, she ran a wide-tooth comb through her slightly damp hair.

  Paris began the story by relating the events of 21 October of the previous year, the night he had gotten the call to investigate a suspicious death. A woman named Emily Reinhardt. He ended the story by placing a photograph of Missy on the table in front of Rita. He had told her everything.

  ‘Plus, I can’t get hold of Cyndy. I can’t get hold of Diana. I can’t even get hold of my ex-wife,’ Paris said.

  Rita put the comb down on the coffee table and stood up. She reached out her hand to Paris.

  ‘Let’s do it,’ she said.

  39

  EVERY LARGE CITY has its sexual underground, people who, for the most part, don’t function very well in the sunlight. Paris was well aware that Cleveland, even with its high-profile escort services and suburban sex clubs, was essentially a blue-collar town. And that meant that while some of the games played may have lacked the imagination, the élan of New York or Los Angeles, they seemed to make up for it with the sheer depth of their depravity.

  Paris stopped at his apartment and changed clothes while Rita waited in the idling car. As expected, every drawer and closet had been turned inside out, every bit of research he had done on the Pharaoh case was gone. Manny was fine, but seemed to be wandering around in a fog, wondering why every smell in his entire world had been relocated.

  When Paris saw the loop of twine wrapped around the legs of one of the wooden chairs pulled up to his dining-room table, his heart trip-hammered. Had Missy been tied up at his table? Would she, could she, ever get over something like that?

  He sponged himself off quickly and put on one of Tommy’s Armani blazers. He ran a comb through his hair.

  Rita, who was young-looking for her age anyway, had understood completely what they had to do, as well as the very nature of the danger they were about to court. She wore a short red-and-white-checked gingham dress and a matching ribbon in her hair. She wore white anklets and flat shoes. Considering the inevitably subdued lighting in the places they were heading, she could easily pass for sixteen.

  Because, Paris thought, if this psycho was planning a run around town, trying to pass a twelve-year-old girl off as eighteen, he knew there would be only so many places she could go. She had to be at one of only two or three kiddie bars around the city. As far as Paris knew, they were all within a few miles of Public Square, but they always kept moving, for obvious reasons.

  Paris phoned Dave Drotos in the vice unit. Drotos told him that there were two bars of this type operating somewhere between the Forties and Sixties off St Clair, but he wasn’t sure where exactly. Drotos of course asked if he could help, but when Paris declined, he asked for no further details.

  They started with the leather clubs, a series of blank-doored warehouses around the Fifties off St Clair and south toward Superior.

  The first few bars were just getting rolling, with a handful of desperadoes staking out their territories for the evening. It wasn’t yet eleven o’clock and the A-list players, it seemed, were still underground, still primping. Mostly they saw the younger hustlers, already pumped and primed and muscled up to the bar. The black-T-shirt boys.

  There were places they visited where Paris got all the looks – no doubt, he figured, because of Tommy’s $1,000-jacket, a dead man’s blazer he had so cavalierly thrown over his shoulders – and there were those where Rita drew all the attention.

  The fifth bar they hit was a place called Insatiable on East Fifty-seventh. It was mostly a transvestite hangout, but it had different specialty nights now and then, and it was more or less known to draw all sorts of people who could be loosely referred to as having an alternative lifestyle. The music was canned and loud and raunchy and seemed to Paris to be the same five notes repeated over and over and over again with somebody grunting in the background.

  At least three times, as they cruised the huge room Paris looked over at the U-shaped bar and caught a Hispanic kid watching his every move. The kid was maybe twenty-one or twenty-two, tough-posing, decked out in the standard barrio uniform. He sported a blue flannel shirt buttoned at the top, baggy chinos. Big arms.

  Had they crossed paths before? Paris wondered. Had he busted him, rousted him? He couldn’t remember. Real cholote, Paris thought. He kept one eye on him.

  Rita ran into some friends, hairdressers and manicurists mostly, plus a couple of people she knew from work. One, Paris overheard, was a tall blond kid named Vasily. They all disappeared for a few minutes, running up the steps to the upper level with a vigor Paris envied.

  He scanned the bar and caught one more glance from the kid in blue flannel, who looked away immediately.

  Paris decided that his proximity to the large, blaring speaker to his immediate left was merely compounding his already splitting headache. But before he could plot his course across the room to the stairs, he saw Rita weaving her way back through the crowd. She arrived nearly out of breath.

  ‘My friend Robin from Mark Drury’s Salon introduced me to this guy upstairs named Perko or Burko or something. Really freakin’ scary-looking, let me tell you. Big head, nose like a busted anchor.’ She was yelling into Paris’s ear now, inches away. ‘Anyway, we start talking and I ask him about after-hours-type specialty places, and at first he resists me, then he dials in on the way I’m dressed and he starts babbling on and on about these kiddie bars. I think he liked me, Jack. Or it might have had something to do with the two Johnny Walker Reds I had to buy him.’

  ‘I�
�ll take care of it.’

  ‘Anyway, he said the woman to talk to is named Alida Witherspoon. He told me that she kind of holds court at this diner around the corner. The Good Egg or something.’

  ‘I know the place.’

  ‘He said she’d probably be there now.’

  ‘Who’s she supposed to be?’

  ‘Some kind of pervert social director, I think. I guess she knows all, sees all.’ Rita reached into her purse, pulled out a powder compact, checked her face in the mirror. She put it away. ‘Anyway, this Burko guy said that if someone as young as Melissa showed up at the kiddie bars – even if it was just a couple of hours ago, even if it was across town – Alida Witherspoon would know about it.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Paris said. ‘Let’s go.’

  Alida Witherspoon was a good deal of woman, taking up about two thirds of her side of the booth at the Good Egg, a twenty-four-hour greasy spoon on St Clair and East Sixtieth. The way things were arranged around her, it was easy to tell that she fancied herself to be Queen Alida, a subterranean sex maven of sorts. Paris thought that, at some point, she may even have been an attractive woman, but years of cheap food and pills and booze had taken their toll. Her whiskey-stippled face, broad shoulders and brittle, straw-colored hair gave her the appearance of one of those women who play the hardened prison guards in the ‘chained heat’ movies.

  As Paris and Rita approached her, Alida Witherspoon somehow reckoned that they had business with her and raised a solitary index finger, freezing them in their tracks. She looked up. Her eyes were small and wizened, the color of wet sand. She pointed at Rita and beckoned her forward with one long red-and-white-enameled fingernail. Paris slid into a booth facing them.

  After a few moments Rita reached into her bag and produced Melissa’s picture, a photograph Paris had taken of his daughter in front of the Rainforest building at the MetroPark Zoo the previous summer. The two women talked for a while, and when they leaned forward to whisper, Paris knew they were digging in. He ordered coffee and something he theorized had passed for a plain doughnut at some point within the past seventy-two hours.

  Ten minutes later Alida Witherspoon extracted herself from the booth, with no small measure of difficulty, and began walking toward the front of the restaurant. Rita followed her. The big woman did not even glance at Paris as they passed his booth, but Rita leaned over and whispered, ‘Wait for me outside. I think she has something for us.’

  Paris waited until they were in the ladies’ room. He stood up, dropped a five-dollar bill on the counter. He walked out the door, hung a quick left, turned his collar to the night and marched a few feet up the alley.

  Jack Paris stood in the darkness, leaned against the mossy brick wall and listened to the night sounds: the traffic on St Clair, the heavy bass of a rap song coming from somewhere above him and to his left, a parking-lot argument under way within a block or two.

  Missy, he thought.

  Please God.

  No.

  He decided he would pray, formally, the first time in years, probably the first time since Melissa was born. He would pray with all the ‘thous’ and ‘thees’ intact, like a Catholic, like he was raised. He would make his deal with God and agree to whatever terms were necessary in a situation like this.

  He began with Hail Marys as he walked around the alley for warmth.

  Rita had been gone for nearly ten minutes and Paris was beginning to worry. What had he gotten her into? Sure she was pretty savvy for her age, but he was using her to bait a psychopath. What had he been thinking?

  Melissa, is what he’d been thinking.

  He peeked back into the Good Egg, but neither Rita nor the corpulent Ms Witherspoon were anywhere to be seen. He walked to the far end of the alleyway and found a tiny, pitted asphalt-and-gravel parking-lot stashed between the buildings. There were five or six cars. One of them, a white BMW. It looked like the car that had picked up Andrea Heller at Whitney’s.

  Paris moved quickly across the lot and put his ear to the trunk. He heard nothing. He looked at the back seat. There was a pile of papers, balanced somewhat precariously on the edge of the seat. On top was a copy of the Scene, Cleveland’s entertainment weekly newspaper. Beneath it Paris could see junk mail: catalogs, grocery-store fliers, insurance-company come-ons. He could also see the edge of a huge envelope, a clearinghouse sweepstakes package. The address was in gigantic letters but all he could read was the very end of the top line. The letter t but no more. The person’s last name on the big beige envelope ended in a t.

  Paris began to rock the left rear fender, jostling the papers and the envelopes around, sliding them toward the edge of the seat, revealing the address bit by bit. After a few moments, he bounced the fender a little too hard, and the pile of papers fell, facedown, on to the floor. ‘Goddamnit,’ he said in a loud whisper. He was just about to write down the license plate and call it in when a door opened behind him.

  Paris spun around quickly, his hand on his weapon, but the shadows were upon him in an instant.

  It was Blue Flannel, the cholote. And a big friend.

  The two surrounded him with such exactness, such mechanical ease that it appeared they knew he was going to be standing in that precise spot at that precise moment in history and they were just making their appointed rounds. Natural-born predators. The kid flashed a knife, and before Paris could react, the blade was at his stomach.

  ‘What d’fuck you doin’ here, man?’ the kid said, bringing his whiskey-sour breath within inches of Paris’s face. ‘You way d’fuck outside Pepper Pike, eh?’

  ‘What do you want?’ Paris asked.

  ‘I do the talking, homes.’

  ‘I’m a cop.’

  ‘Hah! I don’t give a fuck if you eff-bee-eye,’ Blue Flannel said. ‘Makes me wanna cut you even more.’

  His partner, who wore a red bandanna and black wraparound sunglasses, found immense humor in the sentiment.

  ‘So what you lookin’ for, man? Maybe I can help, you know? You lookin’ for black girls? Is that it? Or maybe boys, eh? You like boys, man?’

  The kid rubbed his knee against Paris’s leg. He licked his lips.

  ‘Or maybe you lookin’ for a baby,’ he continued. ‘Maybe you like them real young, eh padrone?’

  More laughter from Sunglasses.

  ‘Because that girl you was with looked pretty young for you, man,’ the kid said, shaking a finger at Paris. ‘That your daughter?’

  Paris said nothing.

  ‘Niece?’

  Paris just glared at him.

  ‘So, where she at right now, man? I got somethin’ for her myself, I think.’ Blue Flannel reached down to his crotch and gave it a quick squeeze. ‘She look good.’

  ‘She went home,’ Paris said wistfully, watching a black-and-white patrol car cruise past the other end of the alley.

  ‘I don’t think so. I think she talkin’ to Alida, you know? I think you all gonna go somewhere and party and me and my homeboy Ottavio are gonna be left out. We don’t like that, man.’

  ‘Just take the money,’ Paris said. ‘I got two, three hundred dollars on me. It’s yours.’

  ‘I don’t need your permission, motherfucker.’ Blue Flannel leaned forward, putting a slight pressure on the knife tip.

  ‘Look,’ Paris said. ‘I’m on the job. We’re stinging this place around the corner and there’s maybe ten, twelve cops right around this area somewhere. Maybe there’s one on the rooftop right above us, right now, dialing you into the cross-hairs of his rifle. Do yourself a favor. Take the money and run or—’

  From over his left shoulder, Paris saw the nose of a .45 automatic suddenly, silently appear. The weapon was pointed directly at the kid’s head. He then heard the cold, measured voice of a man who had probably scared the crap out of a hell of a lot of people in his life. A voice Paris found familiar.

  ‘Get outta here, shitbag,’ the voice said. ‘Take your boyfriend with you.’

  Paris didn’t move. Blue Flanne
l eased the pressure on the knife, but didn’t give any indication that he was getting ready to move.

  ‘Looks like we got us a Messican stalemate here, eh, homes?’ he said with a nervous laugh. ‘Looks like we got us a wash.’

  ‘We don’t have shit,’ said the voice. ‘But I will tell you what happens next. I count to three, pull the trigger and detach you from your fucking head.’

  The kid got the message, withdrew the knife slowly and began to back down the alley, his hands out to his sides, his partner behind him. They both stared, unblinkingly, over Paris’s left shoulder.

  Paris heard the hammer being pulled back on the .45. The sound seemed to echo between the buildings before disappearing into the clear black sky.

  When the two men were near the mouth of the alley, Blue Flannel spoke. ‘You real lucky, man,’ he said, trying to wrest a modicum of machismo from this defeat. He spat on the ground directly in front of him. ‘Next time we meet, it’s gonna be a l’il dif’rent, you know?’

  ‘Yeah, and next time I pay your sister fifty cents for a blow job,’ came the voice from over Paris’s shoulder. ‘Now, get the fuck outta here.’

  Paris remained still until the two disadvantaged youths had turned the corner onto St Clair and disappeared. He spun around to meet his savior, his knight in shining armor, his cavalry, only to find that it wasn’t John Wayne or Dirty Harry after all.

  It was Nick Raposo.

  ‘One more time, Nick.’

  ‘Like I told you, I’ve been following you around, on and off, for three days,’ Nick said. ‘Almost lost you again tonight, though. Over at Fenton Place.’

  ‘You followed me last night, too?’

  ‘Yep. Except last night I lost you around South Russell or Bainbridge somewhere. Then I went home. I don’t think I’m cut out for this private-eye shit.’

  ‘How’d you get so good at sneaking up on people?’ Paris asked, feeling some measure of relief that Nick didn’t see him do the Peeping Tom bit at the Motel Riverview. He didn’t need an eye-witness putting him at the scene. The fact that Nick Raposo knew he was in Russellton at all that would probably burn him to the ground one day anyway.