Kiss of Evil (3 page)

God
she was vain.

It would be her downfall yet.

She checks her bag, making sure she has everything. The Rolex and the ring, along with the pair of diamond tennis bracelets she found in the upstairs bedroom. Expensive little baubles she is certain Elton is going to have a devil of a time replacing by the time Tiffany or Ashley or Courtney or whatever the hell her name is gets back.

Tina retrieves her champagne glass, dropping it in her bag, along with the crack pipe.

Number thirteen.

Done . . .
yes
?

She reaches into her shoulder bag, removes her small Pentax portable printer, prints off a copy of one of the photos. Handling it by the edges, she places the picture on Elton Merryweather’s lap, then makes another quick scan of the room.

Number thirteen. Yes.

3

It is just after midnight and I am standing in the shadows of a vacant lot on the west side of East Fortieth Street, my heart jackhammering in my chest. There are no streetlights for three blocks in each direction. There is no traffic, no commerce. Across from me sits the Reginald Building, a slanty, clapboard hovel that once housed Weeza’s Corner Café, a rib-and-shoulder-sandwich joint. Before that, the Shante House of Style.

Now it is long-forsaken, save for the woman standing in the deep violet darkness of the doorway, a little girl punished, her feet spread slightly apart, her shoulders hunched against the chill. In the moonlight that slices through the tortured trees along East Fortieth Street I can see the ivory glow of her calves, her thighs.

I am dressed in a black suede duster, black jeans, no shirt, boots.

I cross the street, silently, and step up behind her.

She is wearing a leather motorcycle jacket, studded and zippered, a short white cheerleader skirt with accordion pleats, high white heels. She is thirty, blond, petite, fit. Within moments I am fully erect again.

I pull down my zipper and free myself as I lift the back of her skirt and tuck it into her waistband. She is violently trembling with anticipation, softly crying with the deep degradation of this moment. But despite her penitence, despite the chill in the air, I can see the glistening rivulet of fluid trickling down her leg. Without a word I trace my finger up her inner thigh, taste her brine. I then take a fistful of her hair in my right hand and slip my left hand around her waist, under the front of her skirt, to the warm oasis of her abdomen. I step closer, and enter her slowly.

She bites her hand as I fill her, the tears flowing freely now. My face is inches away from hers. I can see her in profile: a child’s nose, a small cleft in her chin, long lashes.

She pushes against me, hard, increasing the rhythm, allowing me ever deeper, her descent now complete. I pull her jacket off roughly and put my full weight against her, pressing her smooth white breasts against the filth of decades of grime.

In my hand now: a single-edged razor blade. Without warning, I scratch a very shallow inch-long cut between her shoulders—quickly, sparing her any undue suffering. Her body becomes rigid for a moment as the tip of the razor slides across her flesh. But I can smell the alcohol on her vaporous breath and know that she has medicated herself against all manner of fear. She will accept
this
level of pain, it seems.

And so I continue, my much-practiced hand engaged, for the first time, in marking a human being.

I drop the blade, pull her close, blotting her blood with my chest. I bury myself deep inside her and, within moments, I feel the electricity building, and know that she is coming.

A soft snow begins to whisper down as she embraces the throes of her orgasm, submitting to the dirtiest realities of her darkest fantasy fulfilled. She plants her hands firmly on the door and pushes back into me with all her strength.

I reach over my left shoulder and remove the much bigger blade from the scabbard strapped to my back as the woman comes in a long steady flow, spiraling her warmth around her legs onto the frozen ground, shedding her final tears.

The machete flutters above us: a saber-sharp wing in the moonlight.

Then, like a sleek silver peregrine, it descends.

4

It is four days until Christmas, and Public Square is sparkling with displays, robust with early-morning commuters. This year, the city-center quadrant is decked with strands of silver garland, dotted with white and gold lights. The streetlamps have been refitted to look like gas lamps. This season’s theme: A Dickens Christmas in Cleveland.

Yet homicide detective John Salvatore Paris knows that there is no amount of candlepower that can begin to illuminate the dark corners of his heart, the lightless chambers of his memory. It is the third Christmas since his divorce, the third time he has shopped alone, celebrated alone, wrapped his daughter’s gifts alone—absolutely certain he had purchased the queerest, goofiest,
hokiest
presents an eleven-year-old girl could imagine. Sure, the therapist said that the average healing time for these things is two years or so, but it was common knowledge that therapists don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. It was three full years and still his heart sank with every carol, every clang of the Salvation Army bell, every rum-pum-pum-pum.

How had it all slipped away? Hadn’t he been certain that all his Christmases and birthdays and Thanksgiving dinners, for the rest of his life, were guaranteed to be joyous?

As the light turns green at Euclid Avenue and East Fourth Street, Jack Paris edges forward, realizing the answer to that question is a heart-clamping
no
. Then, as always, the other realizations begin to scrimmage in his mind: he is on the Centrum Silver side of forty, he lives with a Jack Russell terrier named Manfred in a crumbling walk-up on Carnegie, and he cannot remember the last time he walked down the street without his 9 mm, without looking over his shoulder every ten seconds.

But still Paris knows exactly what it is that keeps him on the fifty-yard line of the zone, what has so far prevented him from quitting the force, taking a job in security somewhere, and moving to Lakewood or Lyndhurst or Linndale.

He likes the inner city.

No, God save him, he
loves
it.

For the past eighteen years he has climbed the city’s darkest stairways, descended into its dankest cellars, ventured down its most threatening alleyways, walked among its neediest denizens of the night. From Fairfax to Collinwood to Hough to Old Brooklyn. It had cost him his marriage and a few billion alcohol-sodden brain cells, but the rush was still there, his heart still leapt in his chest when the case-making piece of evidence presented itself to him. The body might not respond the way it did when he was a rookie, it might take a few extra steps to run down a suspect, but he still brought a young man’s fervor to this game of crime and punishment.

And thus—if for no other reason than to keep that body from collapsing with a myocardial infarction from climbing three flights of stairs every day—it is time for a change. At least in his living arrangements. He had appointments all over the east side during the week after New Year’s. He would find new digs. Maybe it would vanquish the malaise that had settled over him of late.

The last real advance in his career was the task force he had headed during the Pharaoh murders, a series of killings in Cleveland, courtesy of a pair of psychopaths named Saila and Pharaoh and their bloody game of voyeurism, seduction, and murder.

Since that time there had been scores of homicides in Cleveland. The figures were mercifully down from even a year earlier, but still the bloodshed continued. Bar shootings, armed carjackings, convenience-store holdups, the ever-escalating carnage of domestic disputes.

He is busy enough. Yet there is nothing on his plate that compares to that night when he had been run all over town in a maniacal race against time, back when his heart nearly broke forever in an alleyway off St. Clair Avenue.

Back when his daughter had been in the hands of a madwoman.

“She’ll be twelve in February,” Paris says. “Valentine’s Day.”

The woman at the perfume counter at Macy’s is wearing a long white coat and a name tag that identifies her as “Oksana.” Paris looks at the lab coat and wonders if Oksana is indeed the chemist responsible for the perfume she is selling and might be summoned back to the lab for some crucial research at any minute. He thinks about making a joke, but Oksana sounds Russian, and a lousy joke in English is probably a lot worse when translated into broken English.

Paris had gone through the women’s clothes sections, his mind dizzied, as always, by the categories: Missy, Teen, Junior, Petite, Plus Size. Eventually he got to what appeared to be the hip-hop section but, after looking at the mannequins in their baggy jeans and huge shirts, he decided that he didn’t want to be responsible for his daughter looking like a bag lady. If he bought Melissa perfume, she would only have to wear it when he was around, and it wouldn’t take up precious closet space.

“This is very popular with the younger girls,” Oksana says. She looks about forty or so and has on more makeup than the Joker. Paris wonders what “younger” means to her.

Oksana spritzes a little of the perfume onto a small white card bearing a JLO logo. She waves the card around a bit, then hands it to Paris.

Paris sniffs the card, but, in such close proximity to all the other fragrances in the air, can’t really tell too much. It all smells good to him, because Jack Paris is, and always has been, a sucker for women’s perfume.

“I’ll take it,” he says.

The Homicide Unit of the Cleveland Police Department occupies part of the sixth floor of the Justice Center in the heart of downtown Cleveland. On the twelfth floor is the Grand Jury; on the ninth, the communications center and the chief’s office. The building might not look as daunting as it did when it was built in the seventies, back when the glass and steel facade made it an imposing watchdog over the city’s criminal element, but it is still functional, and the self-contained, bag-’em-book-’em-and-bolt-’em method of justice still maintains a certain efficient symbiosis.

At just after ten
A
.
M
. Paris crosses the underground garage, punches the button, steps into the elevator car. But before the doors can close fully, they open again.

A shadow appears. A deep male voice says:

“Well, well. Detective John S. Paris.”

The voice has a Texas seasoning, an arrogant southern cadence that Paris had come to abhor over a recent five-week period. The owner, the man entering the elevator, is in his late twenties or early thirties, dressed in a well-tailored pinstriped suit. Dark-haired, impeccably groomed and accessorized, he carries both the de rigeur Louis Vuitton leather briefcase and the vainglorious bearing of a young criminal defense attorney.

“Counselor,” Paris replies curtly.

Although Paris knows many of the defense attorneys in Cleveland fairly well, he had never heard of Jeremiah Cross, Esq., before the Sarah Lynn Weiss trial a year and a half or so earlier, nor had anyone else in the prosecutor’s office for that matter. Sarah Weiss was a former fashion model who stood accused of shooting a cop named Michael Ryan to death.

Paris had been at the Hard Rock Café, within a block of the Renaissance Hotel, when the call of shots fired on the twelfth floor came in. Within minutes, the hotel was sealed, and within minutes of
that
Sarah Weiss had been found alone in the ladies’ room on the mezzanine level, a bloodied bag of money—just under ten thousand in small bills—at her feet, although technically in the next stall.

Other things were detected, too. Michael Ryan’s brains, for instance. They were discovered on the brocade curtains in room 1206. The investigation also found a small pile of ashes in the bathroom sink, ashes that were thought to be, although never proven to be, the remnants of an official city document. There were also fibers from a burned twenty-dollar bill. The murder weapon, Mike Ryan’s Glock, had been found, wiped clean, beneath the hotel bed.

The homicide was Paris’s case and he had pushed hard for first-degree murder, even for the death penalty, but he knew it would never fly, knew it was rooted more in emotion and anger than anything resembling clear thinking. The idea didn’t even make it out of the prosecutor’s office. No one could put Sarah Weiss in the room at the time of the shooting, or even on the twelfth floor.

Sarah had scrubbed her hands and forearms with soap and hot water in the ladies’ room, so there was no trace evidence of gunpowder to be found, no blowback of blood or tissue from the force of the point-blank impact. Not enough to stand up to a savvy defense expert witness, that is.

The defense painted Michael Ryan as a rogue cop, a man with no shortage of violent acquaintances who may have wanted him dead. Michael was not officially on duty at the time of his killing. Plus, he had been under investigation by Internal Affairs for alleged strong-arm extortion—none of which was ever proven.

The jury deliberated for three days.

Without testifying, without ever saying a single word, Sarah Lynn Weiss was acquitted.

Paris hits the button for six; Jeremiah Cross, the lobby. The doors take their sweet time closing. Paris extracts the
USA Today
from under his arm and very deliberately opens it, halves it, and begins reading, hoping that the word
counselor
would be the breadth and depth of this conversation.

No such luck.

“I’m assuming you’ve heard the news, detective?” asks Cross.

Paris looks up. “Trying to
read
the news.”

“Oh, you won’t find it in there. Not the news I’m talking about. The news I’m talking about doesn’t make national headlines. In fact, it’s already ancient history as far as the real world is concerned.”