A rinse and a facial.
Right, Meelie.
Just what a gal who had no intention of flirting would do.
Twenty minutes later she looked into the bathroom mirror. It was official. With the light green cast of her facial mask and the shocking hot orange of the combination Golden Sienna and Red Copper hair rinses, she looked like a kabuki zombie mutant from the planet Vanity.
Then, of course, the doorbell rang.
Domino’s.
Amelia turned off the ceiling fan and the faucet. ‘Sweetie?’ she called out.
‘What?’ Maddie answered.
‘Would you get the pizza? The money’s by the front door. On the table.’
‘’Kay . . .’
Amelia heard her daughter’s chair roll back on the hardwood floor, heard her cross the foyer, heard the front door open. She turned the ceiling fan back on, ran the water. Then . . . heard something else. A voice? Was it Maddie? Was Maddie calling her? She shut off the fan, stepped back into the hallway, listened.
Silence.
‘Maddie? Did you call me?’
‘Mom?’ Maddie said, soberly, from the foot of the steps. Her voice sounded tiny, uncertain. It was the voice she used when she was suddenly asked to conduct adult business.
‘Yes, honey . . . what is it?’
‘Um . . . somebody’s here to see you.’
Amelia stole a glance in the mirror. One of the extras in Dawn of the Dead stared back. Jesus Christ. Company. ‘Who is it, Maddie?’ she asked, barely managing to move her lips, now that the mask had hardened fully.
Maddie paused. ‘It’s somebody named Shelley Roth.’
26
FATHER JOHN ANGELINO’S sister, Carmen Ricci, was a widow with five children, and Father John, it appeared, had been devoted to her, spending two or three days a month at her house on Tillman Avenue, tending to its constant need for repairs. When Carmen had heard of her brother’s death she had fainted dead away. She was still in Mt. Sinai, under heavy sedation.
The phone call that had awakened Nicky from his nightmare was from his cousin Joseph, who said that as long as he didn’t take anything, he could look through the two boxes of goods shipped to the Ricci house.
As Nicky approached the house, he had a feeling that the inside was not going to be as surgically clean as the house in Erie. A half dozen riding toys littered the front yard, along with a full orchestra of plastic buckets, shovels, rakes, bats, balls, and trucks.
‘More coffee?’ the woman asked. Her name was Beth-Something and she worked for Catholic Family Services. She was fifty, plain and scrubbed, sandy-haired, there to take care of the Ricci brood until Carmen was well enough to return home. There were Good Housekeeping and Christian Family magazines on this coffee table, Nicky noticed. A huge contrast to Elizabeth Crane and her Architectural Digest aesthetic. The furniture was all old, not quite antique. Everywhere he looked was a crystal candy dish of some sort, brimming with Brach’s pinwheels.
‘No, thanks,’ Nicky said, rising to his feet.
‘The boxes are right through here,’ Beth said, leading him down a hallway to a small office, a converted first-floor bedroom cluttered with papers, Christian-product catalogs, dog-eared hymnals, boxes of church artifacts. In one corner was an oak laminated computer desk, one of those assemble-it-yourself cheapies that you can get for forty or fifty dollars on sale.
Nicky looked under the table and saw a large cardboard box filled with books and pamphlets. He began to remove items from the box.
At the bottom he found an old Toshiba laptop computer, cleverly disguised as a beat-up world atlas. Nicky figured that Father John had glued an old book cover to the outside to make it less of a target for theft when he rode the RTA. Very clever. Except, the computer probably was a dozen years old and probably not worth much anymore.
Nicky booted it up, checked the root directory. There were two files from the day before John Angelino’s murder, but nothing for three weeks prior. Nicky copied the files onto a memory stick. He knew he couldn’t read the spreadsheet stuff, wouldn’t know what he had if he could, so he didn’t even bother with that. He moved to the World Online directory and saw that there had been three pieces of e-mail and one attached file from the week prior to the murder. He downloaded those, then shut off the laptop.
The letters turned out to be parish business. One was to a cement contractor, requesting estimates to repave the church’s parking lot. The other letter was to the Ecumenical Council, requesting funding guidelines for the same project.
Nicky had circled his block three times before parking behind Sol’s Delicatessen near the corner of Avalon and Chagrin, then scooted once again through the backyards and up the back steps. There had been no sign of Frank Corso.
He sat at his computer, a lean corned beef with extra pickle spread out before him, and moved on to the e-mail files.
Of the handful of e-mail messages, the first two being correspondence that John Angelino had been carrying on with a Reverend Edmund Phillips of Tacoma, Washington, a spirited debate on the concept of immortality, only the last message held any intrigue. It was a message received two days before John Angelino was murdered.
Nicky clicked on the file, which automatically opened his graphics program. After a few moments he saw that the attached file was a graphic file, a replica of a single stanza of a poem, written on lined paper. Instinctively his eye went first to the sender’s address. He recognized it as a bullshit address, a forwarding service, a remailer. There were no clues there. Then his eyes moved to the ‘cc’ column of the screen. He saw:
Benjamin Matthew Crane [email protected]
John Angelino [email protected]
Geoffrey Coldicott [email protected]
Jennifer Schumann [email protected]
Roger St John [email protected]
His first reaction reminded him of the time his sister had thrown a surprise party for him to celebrate his first piece in a national magazine. He walked into her apartment and saw all these people from his various walks of life, people he knew did not know each other, yet there they were, talking and laughing and drinking and discussing the Nick Stella they knew. Considering the voluminous closet space he had already dedicated to the skeletons in his life, the notion of all those worlds colliding filled him with an overwhelming sense of dread.
It was that sense of panic that washed over him when the two names appeared on the screen, just a few pixels apart.
No, leapt off the screen.
Benjamin Matthew Crane.
John Angelino.
Two men, in two different cities, ninety miles apart, mutilated and poisoned with pure heroin. One man had his eyes gouged out with a scalpel, the other had his lips removed. Not to mention a working girl named Kathleen Holt, who picked the wrong guy on the wrong night, it seemed. Two men on the same e-mail list, both the recipient of an enigmatic verse of poetry about suffering.
Yet it wasn’t the fact that two homicide victims just showed up on the same roster that frightened him the most. What frightened him the most was the devil in that other mathematical detail.
There were three names to go.
27
THE FIRST TIME Amelia ever saw Shelley Roth was at a Cleveland Clinic Christmas party. It was out in the parking lot of the Richmond Road offices, site of the corporate learning center, and Shelley Roth was standing there, a damsel in the snow, with half of male middle management falling drunkenly over themselves trying to be the one to successfully give Ms. Roth’s car a jump. Although everyone involved knew that it was a jump in the sack that was being vied for here, it didn’t stop this Grecian Formula horde of suited, middle-aged men from getting their hands greasy or falling knees-down into freezing slush puddles; nor did it stop Shelley Roth from cooing about it, her platinum hair in shrill chorus with the overhead streetlamps.
‘Who’s the tart?’ Amelia had asked, only to be rewarded with one of Roger’s let’s be kind looks. Amelia read it for what it was, and that was
a look that said there but for the spousal proximity of my wife go I.
Little did she know.
But now, somehow, Shelley Roth was sitting on her couch, sipping tea that Amelia could not remember making. The only things that Amelia could think about, the only things that swirled behind her eyes in a dark tornado of broken logic, were those four words. Four English words that filled Amelia with a crimson rage and a pale blue calm that, in and of itself, was not all that unpleasant a feeling.
What the four words did to her heart was another matter.
‘What?’ Amelia asked, knowing that Shelly would say those words again, starting the cycle of pain a second time.
Shelley Roth crossed her long, shapely legs, sipped her tea, and said, ‘I think I’m pregnant.’
It wasn’t until eight o’clock that Dark Curls wandered into the classroom. He wore the same leather jacket, but this time his jeans were black, pegged. His entrance was so unexpected that when he walked in he caught Amelia in the middle of a huge Cowardly Lion-sized yawn.
Like an idiot, she had downed three huge shots of schnapps after Shelley Roth left, trying to calm herself down, trying to talk herself out of driving to Elkhart and beating the living, screaming shit out of her husband. She had a brief, delicious fantasy of chasing him down the hallways of the Sheraton Elkhart, slamming his prized Phil Mickelson signature clubs into his head, his ass, his back.
But on the other hand, Shelley Roth had not made a very convincing case about being pregnant. Other than confirming what Amelia already knew to be true – that Roger and Shelley Roth had shacked up a grand total of three times – she hadn’t taken a pregnancy test, she was only four days late, and she said she had the father narrowed down to Roger or a guy named Milton Pettigrew in Accounting. She said she just wanted to make sure that everyone lived up to their responsibility.
After Amelia had gone through the roof about the notion of Roger having unprotected sex with her, Shelley Roth had said, yes, Roger had worn a condom. But, she added, condoms had been shown to not be a hundred percent reliable. That was why she wanted to have this talk, she’d said.
Thank you, Dr Phil, Amelia had replied as she escorted Shelley to the door with the instructions to call her the moment she could verify that she was bona fide, puke-in-the-Cheerios preggers.
Until then, Shelley baby, the operative words were fuck and off.
Amelia estimated that the damage in dinnerware alone, scattered about the kitchen, was in the three-hundred-dollar range. She had sent Maddie over to the MacGregors before her tantrum, and Polly’s mother, Karen, had said it would be no problem to watch Maddie for the whole evening, clearly sensing the domestic strife in Amelia’s voice. Amelia made a mental note that she owed Karen MacGregor a big one for this. Baby-sitting on New Year’s Eve or something.
After the ceramic carnage, she had decided to calm down, do a couple shots of peppermint schnapps, and plot this thing out like the woman God created.
By the time she reached her writer’s class, she discovered she had decided a number of things.
‘May I say how nice you look this evening?’
‘You may,’ Amelia replied, blushing a bit at the compliment, leaning against the brick wall behind the school. ‘And you may say it as often as you like. You don’t even have to raise your hand.’
Dark Curls smiled. ‘Well, we don’t want to give you a swelled head now, do we?’ Amelia, with a little help from the schnapps, thought of something extremely naughty and crude to say at that moment. She kept it to herself.
Like a gentleman, he had walked up to her after class and asked if he might escort her to her car. He had made a joke about bringing his own coat hanger this time so he would be prepared. They laughed. He had helped her with her coat.
They stood in the lot for a while, talking, watching as the handful of other students waved good-bye to them, started their cars, and pulled off into the clear, starry evening; heading, Amelia was certain, to their perfectly happy, perfectly nuclear families. After ten minutes or so, the lot was empty, save for their two cars.
‘So,’ Amelia said.
‘So,’ he replied.
After a few seconds, their eyes met and they both burst out laughing, both recognizing the sexual tension in the air. Emboldened by the liquor, Amelia decided to break it. She reached into her purse and retrieved the bottle of schnapps. ‘Buy you a drink?’
He looked around the parking lot. ‘Sure. Why not?’
Amelia tipped the bottle back, slightly, took a half sip. She may have been acting wild, she may have been the seductive Jezebel enchantress of the Adult Learning campus, but she had a daughter and a house and a car and a dog and a life to think about too. Even this slight amount of schnapps nearly made her gag. She passed the bottle over. He took it, sipped, looking into her eyes the whole time. Sipped again. Very practiced at this. And for some reason, that made him even more attractive.
‘By the way, my name—’ he began.
Amelia placed a finger to his lips. ‘Don’t care . . .’ She kissed him, softly, gently, only the slightest parting of lips, then pulled back and looked into his eyes. She was a little bit drunk, it was a brisk, exhilarating fall evening, and this wasn’t her husband.
Wow.
She let him take the lead then as he opened her coat, ran his hands over her hips, around her waist. Amelia closed her eyes for a moment, felt the strength in his arms, his wrists, his fingers. She kissed him again, this time more aggressively, the tips of their tongues touching now, exploring. Amelia let the moment take over and ran her hand down his leg, then slowly back up, the edge of her thumb-nail barely grazing the ridge of material over his zipper.
He spun her around, her back against the school building, and stepped between her legs. He put some of his weight on her, pinning her gently to the bricks.
‘You know . . .’ he said, ‘you’re my kind of writer.’
‘Is that so,’ Amelia said, her breath coming in shorter waves, wondering if this was progressing too fast, too far. The hell with it, she thought. It felt good. She looked at his eyes, then at his lips. He was so cute.’ And what kind of writer . . . am I?’
‘Sexy,’ he said, running a finger along the front of her dress.
After the visit from Shelley Roth, Amelia had decided against the denim-skirt look. She had instead put on a sexy little black dress, cut just above the knee, spiky black heels, no bra. She figured that if anyone asked, she would say she was heading to some sort of reception after the class. The dress was cut rather low in the front, so she had pinned it.
But now she reached up and unpinned what she had so painstakingly pinned and repinned a dozen times before leaving the house. The stranger slid his hand inside, fondling her breasts as she leaned up against the rough bricks. He opened the front of her dress and leaned forward, running his tongue over her breasts, her nipples.
She kissed him again and ran her right leg up and down his, and was just about to drag him inside her car when she realized what she was doing.
She stopped. ‘Oh my God,’ she said.
‘What?’ he asked, but it sounded to Amelia as if he knew. He looked experienced enough to know when a housewife was on the prowl just because her husband had cheated on her or had called her fat or had blown the mortgage payment at the racetrack. In that one word Amelia could tell that he knew, in the end, he was going to be teased.
And he was right. Amelia opened her car door, dove behind the wheel.
‘Are you okay to drive?’ he asked.
‘Absolutely,’ Amelia said. And she meant it. It was only ten blocks to her house, and the realization that she was just now leaning up against a junior high school building, slightly looped, with her breasts exposed to the world, had sobered her up immensely.
‘Okay, then,’ he said. ‘Rain check?’
Amelia started her car, put it in reverse, backed out of the space. ‘Rain check,’ she said, not knowing if it meant a rain check for another drink sometime o
r a rain check to finish what they started one October night.
She hit the button marked PLAY MESSAGES.
‘Hi, honey . . . how’s my girls? . . . Missing you and Maddie much . . . Um . . . not a lot going on here . . . Just finished some road food . . . deep-fried something with a side of deep-fried something else . . . thimbleful of wilted coleslaw . . . a warm Dr Pepper, I think . . . Yuck . . . not sure why I bought it . . . I don’t like Dr Pepper, do I? . . . Maddie-bear? . . . Do I? . . .’
Amelia was standing in the kitchen, the only light the twenty-five-watter in the refrigerator door, a glass of 2 percent milk in her hand, the highest-percent anything she would drink for the rest of the evening. She leaned against the refrigerator, listened, thinking, once again, how close Roger sounded.
‘And I just wanted to say that when I get home I want to do something . . . you know . . . the three of us . . . maybe go get a couple of pumpkins or something . . . maybe go to a movie . . . okay? . . . Or maybe we could even go down to Legacy Village, do a little early Christmas shopping . . . what do you think? . . . So, uh, I guess I’ll try and call tomorrow sometime . . . let you know exactly when old Roger will be pullin’ into Dodge . . . and, uh . . . okay . . . I guess I’ve babbled enough . . . Sorry, I missed you. . . . Night, you two . . . love you and see you soon . . .’
There were a few seconds before the click, a few seconds during which Amelia held her breath for some reason, waiting for Roger to say one more thing before putting the phone down, a few seconds when all the sights and sounds and smells of their kitchen, their life together, invaded her senses, especially the autumnal drawings of Maddie’s that were deployed on the fridge (the Kelvinator Gallery of Fine Art, Roger would call it). The best of the one-girl showing was the traditional turkey made from an outline of Maddie’s tiny hand, and it was a solitary tear that struck the floor the moment Roger hung up without saying another word, a single glistening drop of salt water that would surely dry by morning.
The Violet Hour Page 12
