by Kiss of Evil
“Come here.”
The children crowd around. She wraps her arms around them, holds them close. Her daughter, the tall, slender tomboy. Her son, the solid little man.
“Hey,” she says, breaking the huddle, wiping her tears with the back of her hand. “Who wants ice cream?”
The boy and the girl both raise their hands. She finds her purse in the dining room, hands them two dollars.
“Come right back,” Lydia says. “We’re leaving in an hour.”
“Okay, Mom,” her daughter says.
As the back door closes, Lydia walks to the front window. She looks out, watching her children walk down the steps, hand in hand, then down the sidewalk toward Dinardo’s Superette, two blocks away. In an hour, the three of them will head to Edgewater Park to stake their place on the beach in order to watch the big fireworks display later.
Lydia busies herself, retrieving the basket from the hall closet, counting out napkins, plastic forks, paper cups. They will have hot dogs, potato salad, and root beer, her children’s favorites. Hers too, if she had to confess. Of all her talents, the culinary arts were screamingly absent. Maybe one day.
Let’s see, she thinks, is that everything? No. They’d need mosquito spray, of course. On the windowsill over the sink. She closes the wicker picnic basket, lugs it to the kitchen. When she turns the corner, her heart leaps into her throat.
Anthony del Blanco is standing just inside the back door. He is older, heavier, clean-shaven, and well dressed, but the demon is still in his eyes. Cocaine is still his bottom bitch, as he used to be fond of saying. She could smell the Early Times bourbon from ten feet away.
“Hi, babe,” Anthony says, closing the door behind him.
“Please,” Lydia says, her voice sounding small and weak and nothing like it had sounded in her dreams for the past three years, that booming, powerful voice of vengeance she had used as she pummeled her ex-husband to a bloody pulp.
“I need a couple of bucks, Liddie. Can you help me out?” He begins to cross the kitchen.
“Anthony . . . please. The kids will be back any second.”
“The kids. How are they?”
“Anthony.”
“Kinda hard to find you guys, you know?”
“It’s over between us,” Lydia says, taking one step backward for every step forward her ex-husband takes. “Over.”
“I understand that, sweetheart. And I’m willing to work with you on it. I really, truly am. Today, though, I need a couple of bucks. Okay? Today it’s about finances. So, why don’t you, for the first time in your stupid fucking life, do the smart thing?”
“I don’t have any money, Anthony. Look around. Does it look like I have money? We’re eating hot dogs for God’s sake.”
“You save, Lydia. You always did. Don’t know how you did it, but you always managed to put a couple of bucks away.”
“Please. Can’t you just be a man and walk away?”
The fire spreads in her ex-husband’s eyes.
She’d said the wrong thing.
Anthony pins her to the wall, holding her by the neck with his powerful left hand, a hand that easily wraps all the way around her throat. “I’m the only fuckin’ man you’ve ever known, Lydia. The only man.” His right hand goes to his belt buckle. “Want me to fuck you right now on the goddamn kitchen floor? Want me to show you what a man I am?”
Before Lydia can stop it, the revulsion rises within her, then boils over. She spits in his face.
Anthony rears back, sets himself, and explodes her nose with a pile-driver right hand.
Lydia sags, her vision clouded by a thick, crimson fog. Anthony holds her up with his left hand, threatens her again with his right, the timbre of his voice rising with his rage, his breath a warm breeze over a landfill.
“You gonna tell me where it is? Because there’s plenty more. You know that, right? Plenty more. I got all fuckin’ day.”
Lydia, at the very brim of consciousness, cannot speak. But she can raise her eyes. And her eyes speak volumes to a man with whom she lived for four years.
Anthony steps to the side and smashes her in the kidney with his right fist. Once. Twice. Three times. Hard, leveraged punches, expertly thrown. Anthony del Blanco was once a promising amateur middleweight boxer. “I’m sorry, what did you say, Liddie? ’Cause I coulda swore I just saw the cunt look and I don’t remember asking you no questions like Are you a cunt? Please show me.” He tightens the grip on the bloodied bodice of her dress. “Now where’s . . . the fucking . . . money?”
Lydia tries to lift her head, fails. Instead, she succumbs to the nausea. A foamy river of pinkish bile leaks out of her mouth, onto her ex-husband’s pantleg and shoes.
Anthony del Blanco now becomes the full animal, and the beating begins in earnest.
Primal. Methodical. Complete.
At the moment when Anthony begins to wonder if he has finally gone too far, he remembers. He walks into the living room, finds The Secret Garden on the bookshelf, removes it. He laughs, wipes his bloody, damaged hand across his mouth. “Shoulda known,” he says, extricating the stack of bills from the book. “Nothin’ ever changes around here.”
He stuffs the four hundred dollars in his pocket, already tasting that first line of coke rocketing up his right nostril. A sensation he will surely reward with a second line, this one up the left. Toot, toot, he thinks, and tosses the book onto the kitchen floor.
“The Secret Garden,” Anthony del Blanco says to no one in particular, stepping out into a dazzlingly bright July day in Lakewood, Ohio, dropping his mirrored aviator sunglasses in place. “Yeah. Right. Big fuckin’ secret, Liddie.”
Lydia del Blanco is prone on her kitchen floor. Her jaw is broken, her right cheekbone is shattered. The first punch had demolished her nose; the cartilage now hangs from her face in a corrupt red mass. Three ribs on her right side are broken, two on the left. The ulna of her right arm is fractured and there is a laceration that runs from the middle of her forehead to the left side of her mouth—the result of being thrown through the glass door of the dining room china cabinet—a deep cut that will require nine hours of surgery in order to repair the muscles, and more than two hundred stitches to close.
She is unconscious and bleeding heavily.
Her son and daughter stand in the doorway, holding each other, trembling in the suffocating summer air that is suddenly brassy with blood, their all-but-destroyed mother lying before them, a trio of melting Eskimo Pies at their feet.
But no tears.
The girl lets go of her brother for a moment, steps forward, kneels on the floor. She makes the sign of the cross, then places her right index finger into the pool of warm blood near her mother’s left ear. She returns to the doorway, considers her brother’s face, the way he stands, now, with his hands clamped tightly over his ears, as if to blot out the silence of this horror.
Without a word, she places her finger gently to her brother’s mouth, leaving a small slash of bright scarlet blood on his lips. It is how she would think of him for years—his dark, frightened eyes; his sweat-matted shock of russet hair; red lips giving him the appearance of a sad little girl. She glances down at her mother one last time, then kisses her brother delicately on the lips, their mother’s blood all that they would ever say of this day.
Nine years later, when Lydia del Blanco dies, a jaundiced stick figure in the charity ward at St. Vincent’s, it will finally free her two children of this moment, free them from all the responsibility of the coming horrors in their lives, free them from the life of an addict mother who will live with a half-dozen men, sleep with ten dozen more, eventually running from heroin fix to cocaine fix to alcohol fix, her face a twisted, scarred mess, never again to resemble the slender young flower in the one photograph her son would keep forever.
A moment, the boy and girl would come to agree, that would free them from fear.
19
Mary says: “I have to meet someone.”
She thinks
: What’s happening here? Two beauties in a row. First the jogger in front of my building. Now this guy. My knight in shining armor. I’m going to have to jump onto one of these boxcars soon. One of these days the train ain’t gonna run this way.
He is in his late twenties, early thirties maybe. When he had helped her to her feet she had supported herself against his right thigh and found it was rock hard.
The pain on the left side of her head, where the man had struck her, was minor compared to the wounding of her pride, the swelling of her embarrassment. To be lying facedown in the snow on a city street, humiliated and violated by a common thug, was far worse.
But the man standing in front of her didn’t seem to care.
“Well, at least let me take you to the hospital,” the man says. “I saw him hit you. You might have a concussion. We’ll stop at the police station. You can fill out a report.”
“No thanks,” she says. “I’m okay, really.”
He waits until her eyes meet his before he responds. His eyes are dark, expressive, the color of semisweet chocolate. “Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
The man lets go, and she finds that she is still a little wobbly.
“My name is Jean Luc Christiane,” he says.
“Tina Falcone,” she answers, before she can bottleneck the words in her throat.
“Nice to meet you, Tina.”
“You’re French?”
“No,” he says, smiling. “Born in the vieux carré in New Orleans. My family is in baking. I’m as American as beignets.”
“Well,” she says, rubbing the side of her face, thinking about how she had managed to go through most of her life without getting hit, only to be punched twice in one week. “All I can say is thanks. Who knows what that guy would have done.”
“It was both a duty and a pleasure,” he says. “Although I wouldn’t recommend this method of meeting to the rest of my unmarried friends.”
The word, unmarried, ripples between them for a moment. He is telling her he is unattached. If she is to play the mating game, this is where she lets him in on her marital status in some witty and urbane manner. Instead, she says: “No. I wouldn’t either.”
“So . . .” he begins, “. . . how do you want to pay me? The standard ‘I can call you in the middle of a snowstorm for a ride to the airport because I saved your life’ contract? Or do you have something else in mind? Because, clearly I cannot let you leave without settling this matter.”
He holds her gaze until she submits. She’s willing to bet that that stare has been awfully effective for him throughout his life.
“Well, what do you have in mind?” she asks.
“Seeing as I do this quite often—pulling pretty young women out of snowbanks—I do have a standard fee. If I’d had to run the perpetrator down, or produce some type of firearm, or even call the city crews to have you dug out of the snow, the remuneration would increase geometrically.”
“How fortunate I am.”
“Indeed,” he says, flicking the last snowflake from her shoulder.
“So . . . your standard fee is . . .”
“Dinner. Eight o’clock. Cognac at eleven. Home by twelve. Guaranteed.”
She considers his offer for a coquette’s moment. What the hell, she thinks. Maybe she’d get a hug or two out of it. She really needed a hug. Maybe even, God forbid, a long, dreamy kiss. It had been ages. “Yes. Okay. I’m game. Sure,” she says. “Why not?”
Jean Luc smiles. “Is that five dates, or just the one?” he asks. “I’ll have to check my calendar.”
Mary laughs.
It hurts her head.
But, for the first time in a long time, it’s a good hurt.
20
Paris is sitting in Fayette Martin’s kitchen. He is alone. Greg Ebersole is running down leads on Willis Walker’s girlfriends, interviewing the regulars at Vernelle’s Party Center, a few of whom were already in the unit’s Rolodex.
Evil is a breed, Fingers.
He had not been able to shake those words. What breed? Evil how? If Mike Ryan wrote those words, it couldn’t possibly have anything to do with something current, so what was the point? Besides, there was no case number on the photo, so it would be impossible to follow up, just a faded street address on the front.
But what if that dead body has something to do with Mike Ryan’s murder?
Could he possibly have been wrong about Sarah Weiss?
Is Mike Ryan reaching out to him from the grave?
Ancient history.
Focus, detective.
Unless he is mistaken, Fayette Martin’s apartment—a one-bedroom in Marsol Towers, furnished in Kronheim’s sale items—is exactly how Fayette left it the night she was murdered. She had, most likely, showered and dressed and hurried out the door, but surely not before making certain that all the cigarettes were out, that the coffeemaker was unplugged, that the deadbolt was turned, never for a moment realizing that none of these things would matter in the end. The shorted cord, the flaming ashtray, the mid-night intruder: specters of a different realm, now.
And then there are the plants. Every flat surface, every tabletop in Fayette Martin’s apartment is devoted to some kind of healthy, exotic houseplant. In the small pantry there are three dozen boxes of fertilizer and other plant-care products. Fir bark. Hydrolite. Epsom’s salts. Coltsfoot. Nettle.
It appears that Fayette had made a Swanson’s turkey dinner the night she was murdered. Paris immediately recognized the box, the familiar logo, peeking out of the Hefty bag plopped by the kitchen door. There are several of the same empty boxes in Paris’s kitchen wastebasket, too. Crazily, he wonders if Fayette liked the stuffing. To him it always tastes like wet stucco.
But there were probably many nights when, like him, she didn’t even notice.
Her computer is on the round Formica kitchen table in front of him; the monitor is black and cold, but the computer itself was on when the super had let him in. It is clear that Fayette Martin took many of her meals here, perhaps cruising the Internet as she ate. On the kitchen table there is also a mouse, manuals, a pair of flash drives.
Paris has found nothing to indicate the presence of a lover in Fayette’s life: no letters, no Hallmark cards, no photographs at Six Flags or Holden Arboretum held to the refrigerator with a magnet.
Paris thinks: I know the feeling, Fayette. Got a blank fridge myself.
Then, the dead woman speaks to him.
Out loud.
“Hello.”
Paris jumps nearly a foot. It sounds like it might be a recording of a phone conversation, but there is no tape recorder or answering machine in the kitchen. No radio, no TV either. So where was the—
It is then that Paris realizes that his hand is on the mouse. The voice must have something to do with a computer program he started by moving the mouse. The sound is coming from the computer speakers.
Fayette Martin? Paris wonders. Is that her voice? Is that the voice that belonged to the woman he had seen so torn apart in that building on East Fortieth Street?
“Hello,” a man answers.
“Are you the police officer?” she continues.
Police officer? A shiver runs through Paris. Please, he thinks. No cops.
“Yes,” the man says.
“Just home from a tough day at work?”
“Just walked through the door,” he says. “Just kicked off my shoes.”
“Shoot anyone today?”
“Not today.”
“Arrest anyone?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“Just a girl. A very wicked girl.”
The woman laughs.
Paris thinks: It’s a sex tape. This is a recording of some sort of 900 call. Cops and maidens. Fayette Martin worked for a sex line?
The conversation continues.
“The woman you saw on the top floor. Did you like her?”
“Yes,” the man answers. “Very much.”
�
��Did it turn you on to watch her?”
“Yes.”
As the conversation proceeds, Paris presses the power button on the front of the computer monitor, an older model CRT, hoping there is some sort of video accompaniment to this. It appears to be broken.
“That was me, you know. I was the whore,” the woman says.
“I see,” the man says.
“Do you like to watch me do that to other men?”
“Yes. I love it.”
“Spread your legs.”
As Paris listens to this exchange, he has a hard time reconciling the supposedly shy young woman who worked at The Flower Shoppe with this sexual animal. The more he learned, it seemed, the less he knew about people.
Great trait for a detective.
“Like this?” the man suggests.
Maybe the world was full of Fayette Martins, Paris thinks. Maybe it is just naive, over-the-hill cops who—
“Meet me,” she says.
Paris sits upright in the chair. Yes. Talk to me. Talk about getting together.
“No.”
“Meet me tonight.”
The woman’s voice sounds pleading.
“No,” the man repeats.
“Meet me and fuck me.”
A few seconds of silence. Paris holds his breath, hoping The Lead is about fall into his lap. He doubted that such synthesized versions of these voices would ever stand up in court as proof of anything, but you never knew.
Just say the words.
Say them.
“If I say yes, what will you do for me?” the man asks.
“I . . . I’ll pay you,” the woman says. “I have cash.”
Paris thinks: Fayette Martin didn’t work for a sex line.
Fayette Martin is the caller.
“I don’t want your money,” the man says.
“Then what do you want?”
Pause. “Obedience.”
“Obedience?”
“If we meet, you will do as I say?”
“Yes.”
“You will do exactly as I say?”
“I . . . yes . . . please.”
“Are you alone now?”
“Yes.”
“Then listen to me carefully, because I will tell you this once. There is an abandoned building on the southeast corner of East Fortieth and Central . . .”
