The Violet Hour

by Richard Montanari

  28

  COLDICOTT AND CROWE, Inc., was an antique jewelry emporium in the Old Arcade – the highly ornate, multistory arcade that spanned from Euclid Avenue to Superior Avenue, right around Fourth Street. The store was located on the first level, near the food court. Nicky sat at one of the miniature tables they put out into the arcade, the Barbie and Ken furniture that had chairs big enough for two thirds of the average ass.

  From his vantage he could see the entire showroom of Coldicott and Crowe – three women, one man. It was clear just who Geoffrey Coldicott was in that group, Nicky thought. Geoffrey was tall and spidery, about forty, gravedigger-pale, a perfect archetype of gothic jeweler. He had a long, soft-looking body and wore a dark suit that hung upon his shoulders like a prayer shawl. At the moment, Geoffrey was bent over the counter, poring over something with his jeweler’s loupe.

  Fortunately, Nicky had found two listings for Coldicott. One was Coldicott and Crowe at the Arcade. The other was listed as Coldicott, Geoffrey D., estate appraiser, same address in the Old Arcade.

  All things considered, even if he did write the story, Nicky knew he would have to go to the cops. People on a list seemed to be dying one by one, and the police had to be made aware of that fact, if they weren’t on it already. But before he made that move, he simply had to know what the hell was going on here. He had to know if any of these people knew any of the others. If they had all received this poem in the mail, if this poem meant anything to them. It was simply too good to give up.

  He downed his coffee, walked over to a pay phone, made the call.

  ‘Mr Coldicott?’ Nicky said. He was standing next to the food court at the Superior side of the Arcade. He could see Geoffrey Coldicott through a thin panel of glass in the store next to Coldicott and Crowe, some kind of new age boutique.

  ‘Yes, this is Geoffrey Coldicott. How may I help you?’

  ‘Mr Coldicott, my name is Nicholas Stella, and I’m a writer here in Cleveland, working on a story for Esquire magazine.’ A tiny lie, and no one had checked yet. Not once. ‘Are you familiar with that publication, Mr Coldicott?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘I was wondering if you might have a few minutes to talk to me today.’

  ‘Can I ask what this is about first?’

  ‘Well, it’s a matter of some importance, so I’d rather we did it face-to-face. When would be convenient for you? I’m right downtown now, so anytime would be good for me.’

  Nicky knew he was pushing. Geoffrey Coldicott pushed back. Nicky saw him straighten up through the windows, his praying-mantis body taking on a defensive posture.

  ‘I’ll have to know what this is about, Mr Stella. I’m a very busy man.’

  ‘It involves an e-mail message you recently received,’ Nicky said, wondering just how you were supposed to tell a total stranger that he might be in danger. ‘A graphic file that, I’m afraid, might be important.’

  Geoffrey Coldicott was silent for a few moments. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Would it be okay if I stopped by your house later and we talked?’ Nicky asked, reading a little anxiety in Coldicott’s voice. ‘Maybe this is nothing at all.’

  At that moment, Nicky saw four or five people walk into Coldicott and Crowe. Perfect timing.

  ‘Yes, yes, I don’t care,’ Coldicott said. ‘I have to go now.’

  ‘What’s your address, Mr Coldicott?’

  ‘I’m in the Golden Gate Villas,’ he said. ‘They’re at—’

  ‘I know where they are,’ Nicky said. ‘What time?’

  ‘Six o’clock,’ Geoffrey Coldicott said. ‘Now, good-bye, Mr Stella.’

  ‘Okay,’ Nicky said. ‘And I really do appreciate your—’

  But Geoffrey Coldicott had already hung up, which surprised Nicky. Businessmen, especially retail businessmen, didn’t usually hang up on people. Unless, of course, they had something to hide.

  Which opened up a whole new box of animal crackers, Nicky thought. Maybe the wacko here is one of the names on the list. Maybe Geoffrey Coldicott was the psycho in this equation and he had just made an appointment to meet him at the Bates Motel.

  29

  IT WAS THE end. Truly the end of it all.

  He caught his reflection in the cab window and shook a dangerous fist at the translucent half image he found there. Since childhood, it had always been his way of threatening himself with violent abuse if he didn’t carry out his own orders, saving the actual pain of self-flagellation for later, relegating the deep degradations to the wee hours of the morning.

  And Geoffrey Coldicott knew something about pain.

  He had told the reporter, or whatever he was, that he would be home by six. He looked at his watch. Five-ten. At least time was on his side.

  Because he had always wondered about two things his entire life, or at least that part of his life which began when, as a small child, after his father’s suicide, his mother moved him from Bristol, England, to Painesville, Ohio. Two questions he was certain he was going to live his entire adult life – the part that began five years ago when he had the nerve to move out of the house and into the big city – without ever having answered.

  One: What would he do if he met someone like himself, face to face?

  Two: What would he do if his collection was threatened?

  Somehow, through some strange jog of serendipity, through some violent rip in the fabric of his rather imaginative fantasy life, he had managed to answer both questions within the past twenty-four hours.

  When he had sat down at the bar at the Shenanigans nightclub on the west side the day before, deliberately far from his neighborhood, purposely out of his work environment, he hadn’t any real plan in mind. He’d heard they had recently revamped the club and he really did want to see what they’d done with the place, so he had frequented the establishment a few times in the previous weeks. But that, he knew, was only secondary to his underlying purpose. He was there to be someone else. Geoffrey Coldicott the swinger. Geoffrey Coldicott the libertine. Geoffrey Coldicott the brash hedonist.

  Just a few moments after he had entered and taken a stool at the far end of the enormous bar, a stranger had entered the nightclub and, it appeared, Geoffrey’s life. The man took a stool immediately to his left and ordered a Rob Roy.

  Ten minutes passed. Then the stranger turned and smiled at Geoffrey. ‘Not really my kind of music,’ he said. The DJ was spinning some sort of electronic dance/trance stuff. To Geoffrey it was all static.

  ‘Nor mine,’ Geoffrey replied.

  The man was handsome and athletic, well dressed in a casual, collegiate way. Witty in a deliciously sarcastic way. He said he was in Cleveland on business and was flying out in a few hours. He called himself Tom Macarty. Or McCartney. Or McIlvainey. Or something Irish like that. The music was loud and Geoffrey hadn’t heard him well, so he decided to just call him Tom. Tom was fine. He really didn’t need to know more.

  Yet there was something about Tom that was familiar, as if he had come into the store once, or they had met at a house sale or a liquidation sale. No. It went further back than that, much further. College? Geoffrey was usually good with faces, so the idea that he couldn’t place Tom gnawed at him.

  The conversation eventually flagged. Geoffrey sipped his drink, tried to think of something clever and urbane to say. Instead, he offered: ‘So what brings you to Cleveland, Tom?’

  ‘Business first, I suppose,’ Tom said, turning to face Geoffrey fully. ‘But I’m always open to pleasure.’

  Tom smiled when he said this, and it both chilled and warmed Geoffrey, who was already into his third gin and tonic, no longer feeling the barstool beneath him, no longer feeling the inhibitions of an overeducated rural kid gone to the city.

  Before Geoffrey could stop himself, the words came out.

  ‘What do you do for pleasure?’

  Tom turned slowly and fixed him in a knowing stare, one that loosed something in Geoffrey’s stomach. It was
the kind of feeling you get when you are in a foreign country and hear a voice spoken in the idiom and inflection of your native tongue, your region, your very hometown, a kinship that went beyond understanding. It was a citizenship of the soul.

  Tom remained silent.

  Two cocktails later Tom said he had to leave. Something about a meeting, a plane, something about returning a rental car. He asked Geoffrey if he might point out the nearest entry to the airport, and Geoffrey said that he would.

  Tom paid the check. The two men walked out of the bar, across the lobby, to the parking lot, then on to the far end, the dark end. Geoffrey was pleased they had to walk a bit. He felt it gave him time to . . . what? He was painfully unsure.

  But halfway across the deserted, moonlit parking lot, Tom supplied him with his answer. He stopped and placed a hand on Geoffrey’s chest, halting him just inches away, staring into his eyes.

  The moment drew uncomfortably long until Tom reached into his coat pocket and produced a small stack of photographs. He handed them to Geoffrey. Geoffrey took them, and found that his hands were shaking, his heart stuttering in his chest. Even before he began to flip through the pictures, he knew what they would be, that they were the answer to his question:

  What do you do for pleasure?

  There were only eight photographs in the stack, but to Geoffrey Coldicott they were a treasure beyond imagination. Each image plumbed a new depth to his sickness, scribed an as yet unwritten chapter of his hunger. By the time he looked at the last one he found that he had begun to weep.

  A few moments later, without a word, Tom took the photographs back, withdrew across the parking lot, toward his car. Soon he pulled onto the marginal road toward Hopkins airport and beyond.

  Geoffrey Coldicott had not slept since that moment.

  That was last night. And now, today, some reporter wanted to take a look at his computer.

  It was all too much.

  Because he was certain the man he had talked to on the telephone wasn’t a reporter at all. He was a cop of some sort. FBI or federal agent or Internet cop, something like that. Regardless, Geoffrey didn’t buy this business about a mysterious e-mail document. Not for a moment. He had always suspected that somebody, somewhere, knew the sorts of things he was downloading into his computer. He knew that one day they would catch him and there would be a half-hour special on CNN during which they would show his high-school photos next to the shot of him being dragged up Mayfield Road. They would display some of his naughtier computer graphics files (certain bits obscured, of course), and then they would—

  The cab turned off Mayfield Road onto Golden Gate, then pulled over to the curb.

  As Geoffrey scaled the steps, he knew that what he was about to do might be unnecessary – the erasure of his small but very specialized and expensive collection of digital porn – but he also knew that he couldn’t take the chance. If he were exposed, what would it do to his mother? It would kill Mina Coldicott, that’s what it would do. Mina Coldicott would curl up on her creaky bentwood rocker back there in Painesville, Ohio. Mina Coldicott would evaporate from shame. All eighty-one years and ninety-nine puritanical pounds of her.

  Geoffrey, a bit winded now, reached his door and inserted the key in the lock. But before the first tumbler fell, a shadow darkened the wall beside him.

  He spun around, more than a bit startled, and saw that it was Tom.

  ‘Oh. Um. Hi,’ Geoffrey managed.

  ‘Hello,’ Tom said softly, taking the key from Geoffrey’s hand. Tom reinserted the key and opened the door. He gestured to Geoffrey to enter the apartment. Tom wore a black wool crew neck, tan trousers, camel-hair blazer. Very smart, Geoffrey thought. Very Ralph Lauren. He seemed taller to Geoffrey than he had the day before, broader through the shoulders and chest.

  Tom closed the door, turned the dead bolt. ‘Here,’ he began, reaching out, ‘let me help you with your coat.’

  Geoffrey turned slowly around, unbuttoning his coat, and noticed that his pulse had begun to race. Geoffrey took a deep breath and let Tom peel the coat from his shoulders.

  ‘How did you know where I lived?’ Geoffrey asked, fumbling with his pack of Salems. He was blowing it. He wanted this man to stay, to leave, to get in and out of his life as soon as possible.

  ‘You told me last night, Geoffrey.’

  ‘I did?’

  Tom laughed and it ran a shiver down Geoffrey’s spine. ‘Somebody was into the Pimm’s before they went to the pub, eh?’ Tom walked over to the hall closet, seeming to know where that was located, as well. He hung up the raincoat and returned to the small front room. ‘You mean you really don’t remember telling me all about yourself last night, Geoffrey?’

  ‘Well, I—’

  ‘About how you really don’t read very much anymore and how you really don’t like going to the movies as much as you used to because the films are just so silly nowadays. Don’t you remember, Geoffrey?’

  Geoffrey tried to strike a calm, affable pose. He failed.

  ‘And how you really only care about one thing these days. Your computer.’

  Geoffrey glanced at his computer, which sat in an alcove off his living room. He looked back at Tom and the dominoes began to tumble. He remembered now. The graphic of the poem, the T.S. Eliot poem he had received on his secret e-mail account and had summarily erased as so much cyber junk mail. The image now drew itself in his mind, the fluid strokes, the jet black ink.

  T.S. Eliot. Julia Raines.

  My God, Geoffrey thought.

  All these years.

  Geoffrey thought of the stack of photographs Tom had shown him. How the man fucking knew. He felt a black gorge rise within him.

  ‘We have business to do, and we have pleasure to do,’ Tom said, reaching into his coat pocket, retrieving a pair of thin rubber gloves.

  Geoffrey stared at the gloves, his eyes widening. ‘We do?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Tom said, his voice affecting a British accent. ‘Which do you fancy first, love?’

  30

  THE GOLDEN GATE Villas were directly across Mayfield Road from Golden Gate Shopping Center, a strip center anchored by an OfficeMax and a Friday’s.

  Nicky arrived in the Heights at five-thirty, a half hour early, so he stopped at Ferrara’s Imported Foods. It was physically impossible to drive past the Italian food store without grabbing a few slices of prosciutto and a warm bread. As Louie Stella always said, if you can’t read a newspaper through it, the prosciutto’s too thick. Ferrara’s always did it right.

  Nicky continued up Mayfield Road, pulled into the lot at Golden Gate, looked at his watch. Five-forty.

  Okay, he said to himself, in solemn, almost liturgical tones, ten minutes, that’s it. Or ten bucks. Ten minutes or ten bucks. That was his credo, although he had never been able to uphold either of those commandments in the past.

  He parked the car and stepped into Half Price Books.

  31

  GEOFFREY SAT VERY still, his trousers around his ankles, his penis in his right hand, but for some reason, he could not seem to achieve an erection. Perhaps, more than the debilitating fear itself, it was the humiliation of having to go through his computer files, photo by photo, with another human being in the room, looking over his shoulder. Tom, who seemed to be extremely knowledgeable about computers, had set the software to run them automatically, in succession, like a slide show at a degenerate convention.

  Geoffrey stared at the screen and wondered how he ever found them so thoroughly arousing. Photographs depicting acts in which he would never dare partake. Now they were making him ill.

  Another photo appeared. This one a trio of Asian girls, urinating onto a very thin, very erect black man.

  ‘Tell me what happened that night,’ Tom said softly. ‘Tell me in your own words.’

  Geoffrey said it again. It seemed as if he’d said it a thousand times already. He was nearing his ballast of tears. ‘I swear to God I can’t remember. I can’t remember twenty minutes ago. W
hy won’t you believe me?’

  Tom stepped around front and snapped another photograph with the digital camera. Snick! went the flash. ‘Tell me what happened that night. Tell me in your own words.’

  ‘I don’t know . . .’ Geoffrey replied wearily. ‘I don’t know . . .’

  Tom stepped behind Geoffrey and stood there for a few moments, watching the slide show on the computer monitor. Geoffrey felt his presence, but he could not turn around in the chair.

  The monitor now showed a blond girl in pigtails fellating a man in a sailor suit, a man with amputated legs.

  Next a young white man in a penis clamp and a leather mask.

  Tom had been very clear about what he intended to do with the digital photographs of the naked, masturbating Geoffrey if Geoffrey didn’t tell him what he wanted to hear. He said he was going to take the photographs and upload them onto the Internet. The Internet, where they would be available to the whole world.

  It was unthinkable.

  Tom snapped the shutter once again, the flash blinding Geoffrey momentarily. Five pictures now.

  Tom hunkered down on one knee, just to Geoffrey’s right, and looked through the viewfinder. ‘Tell me what happened that night,’ he said. ‘Tell me in your own words.’

  ‘I don’t—’

  Snick.

  The computer screen now showed a tangle of naked bodies on red satin sheets.

  Tom stepped back, looking at the monitor once again. He leaned in front of Geoffrey, hit a few keys. Within moments they were connected to the Net.

  ‘Wait!’ Geoffrey shouted. ‘Okay . . . uh . . . I remember something . . .’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘It was Halloween and we were all hanging out at Ben Crane’s apartment on Bellflower and—’

  ‘Wrong.’ Tom connected the digital camera to a USB port. In an instant the photographs he had taken of Geoffrey Coldicott’s twig-thin, incandescently white body were displayed on the monitor.