Kiss of Evil (15 page)

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.

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?

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.

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 walked through the door
,” he says. “
Just kicked off my shoes.”

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.

“
Yes
,” the man answers. “
Very much.”

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.

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
.

The woman’s voice sounds pleading.

“
No
,” the man repeats.

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.

Pause.
“Obedience.”

Paris’s heart leaps, spins, settles. His stomach follows suit. Fayette Martin is talking to her killer. Fayette Martin is talking to the man who cut her in two.

“There is a doorway on the East Fortieth side,”
the man continues. “
I want you to stand there, facing the door. Understand?
”

“
Do you truly have the courage to go there? To
do
this
?”

The slightest hesitation, then: “
Yes
.”

Paris realizes, amid his revulsion, that it was indeed courageous for Fayette Martin to go there that night, to be so committed to her fantasy that she would risk it all. And all is exactly what she lost.

Paris closes his eyes. The scene begins to draw itself in his mind. Watercolors, this time. Blue and purple and gray. Weeza’s Corner Café. Neon in the distance. A woman in the doorway. Petite. Pretty.

“I
 . . . God.
Yes
.”

Paris sees the dead woman’s accordion-pleated skirt against the filth of the frigid concrete floor; the brown gouache of her blood.

Now, the curve of her buttocks. Pink, dimpled with the cold.

They had found no leather jacket. Paris dresses her in one.

He sees the bottom of her shoes. Blood-flecked, stiletto-heeled; the Payless price tag barely worn. Special-occasion shoes.

The conversation ends, the speakers fall silent, the hard drive of the computer turns twice, then stops. Paris finds himself staring at the speakers, waiting for more. An address, a name, a nickname, a background sound.

Nothing. He moves the mouse again. Still nothing.

Just the electric-clock silence of a dead woman’s kitchen.

Paris stands, looks into the living room. His gaze finds Fayette’s high-school picture propped on an end table. It is a soft-focus shot, head slightly back, eyes looking heavenward. Her lips are parted slightly, her sweater is burgundy, perhaps angora, and the color deepens the blush in her cheeks. Around her neck is a thin gold chain bearing a heart-shaped locket.

Paris wonders: What was the path that took her from that moment—sitting in an Olan Mills Studio, eighteen years old, her whole life an uncluttered horizon before her—to that doorway on East Fortieth Street? Through which of life’s portals did she need to pass to make that journey make sense?

And yet Paris believes that whoever she was in life, whatever she did, she had the right to be alive, and that a killer had butchered this woman and left her lying at his feet.

And thus, as she lay cold and blood-shorn and disassembled on a stainless-steel table at the morgue, he begins to feel that strange and special relationship with Fayette Marie Martin, as he had, at least to some degree, with every victim since his first homicide call.

Paris closes his eyes, conjures Fayette’s devastated body in the crime-scene photo, and asks of her murderer:
Which way did you like her better, you son of a bitch? Dead or alive?