Kiss of Evil (34 page)

“Absolutely,” Furnell says.
“Absolutely
sure. He said, ‘Here, tonight,
live
, a police officer is going to commit suicide.’”

68

The house is dark.

Bobby Dietricht had rung the bell, knocked on the front door, knocked on the back door, listened for a dog, listened for footsteps, peered in the windows. He had even tossed a few pebbles at the upstairs windows before hiding behind the huge maple tree on the front lawn.

Nothing.

Then he had repeated everything, just to be sure.

The house is unoccupied, he concluded.

Or else someone inside sleeps the sleep of the dead.

Carla rolls up in front of Jeremiah Cross’s house, headlights off. She meets Bobby around back and apprises him of her meeting with Denny Sanchez. Together they climb the small back porch, position themselves on either side of the door. Bobby pulls open the storm door and knocks one last time. He presses the doorbell and, in the stillness of the night, they can both hear the bell, loud and clear.

No answer, no lights flipping on upstairs, no response at all. They draw their weapons.

Bobby holds open the storm door, tries the handle of the inner door, turns it. It is unlocked. He nods at Carla.

Weapons out front, the two police officers step inside, knowing that establishing probable cause to enter these premises, at this moment, is going to be uphill all the way if Jeremiah Cross has anything to do with these homicides.

But Jack Paris is in trouble, and thus there is no hesitation.

Silently, they agree to take their chances in court.

Five minutes later, at eleven-forty, the house has been searched, but not scoured. The first floor and basement contain nothing out of the ordinary, nothing any other upwardly mobile lawyer wouldn’t have in his house. They had found no bodies, no blood, no sacrificial altars, no body parts in the freezer. If Jeremiah Cross is a serial murderer, he is one of the tidiest ever.

As Bobby Dietricht and Carla Davis begin to mount the stairs to give the second floor a more thorough search—drawers, nightstands, some boxes they had seen in closets—Carla’s phone rings. “Hang on,” she says, but Bobby continues up the stairs.

Carla steps into the kitchen. The raid is coming down in twenty minutes and this is probably the call. Thankfully, she is still within five minutes or so of the Westwood Road address. She steps into the kitchen, pulls her phone from her pocket. “Davis.”

“Sergeant Davis, this is Dennis Sanchez.”

“Yes, Denny, thanks for calling me right back. I appreciate it.”

“Have you got a minute right now?”

“Absolutely.”

“I think we’ve got something,”
Bobby yells from upstairs.
“There’s a door at the back of the bedroom closet . . .”

“Wait for me, Bobby,” Carla says, then puts her finger in her other ear. “Go ahead. I’m sorry.”

Sanchez continues: “I talked to Chief Blake and he asked me to call you. Earlier, you made an inquiry about a man named Cross, yes?”

“That’s right.”

Bobby yells: “
It looks like . . . like some kind of altar. I think we’ve
got
this prick.”

Sanchez asks: “As in
Jeremiah
Cross of Powell Road, Cleveland Heights?”

“Yes,” Carla replies, trying to pay attention to two things at once. “Why?”

“Can I ask what your interest is in Mr. Cross?”

“We like him in a homicide,” Carla says. “That’s really all I can say at this point.”

Bobby says:
“Holy shit.”

Sanchez takes a deep breath and exhales slowly. “Bad news, then, I’m afraid. We just got the dental lab records an hour ago. Jeremiah Cross was shot to death in Cain Park a week ago. Had his hands cut off, too.”

Jesus
, Carla thinks.
Cross is not our actor
.

Sanchez adds: “As of an hour ago, my John Doe became a
good
lawyer. I’ve got a team on the way to his house right now.”

—setup
.

From upstairs:
“There’s some kind of . . . hel-lo . . . what the fuck is this?”

“Bobby,
no
!”

In the instant before the explosion, as Carla rounds the corner and mounts the steps, she feels the air being sucked out of her lungs, even before she feels the searing heat of the blast.

On the third step, something punches through the drywall, just over her head, showering her in blackened gypsum. Then, a streak of flames chases down the stairs to her left, followed by a dark shape.

Carla Davis falls to her knees, lungs full of smoke, eyes burning, and realizes that the smoldering shape is Bobby Dietricht.

69

The gun is in his coat pocket. For the moment. He had stepped inside her apartment and shut off most of the lights. She looks at the bloody silver earring on the coffee table. Celeste’s earring. She chances another look out the window. Jesse Ray is still waiting in his car.

Her one thought is:
Can I throw something that far?

“I don’t care anymore,” she says, trying to stall. On the mantel is a heavy bronze bust of Beethoven, about the size of her fist. If she could just get the window open, or broken, she would have one shot at pitching as far as she could, hopefully hitting somewhere, anywhere, on Jesse Ray’s car. “I’m done. I’m not going to hurt anybody. My daughter will be cared for. Do what you have to do.”

“Do you know how much could happen to you by the time your friend makes it up here? A
lot
. All of it bad.”

“Take your best shot.”

“I want you to pick up the phone, call him, tell him everything is all right.”

“No.”

Jean Luc steps over to the window. Mary takes a step back, away from him. They look at the parking lot together, where the dark sedan idles next to the pay phone, at the cigarette smoke curling up into the night sky.

Jean Luc laughs. “That’s your savior?”

Mary is just about to pick up the bronze bust when a white van pulls into the Dairy Barn lot across the street, screeching to a halt. On its side is the NBC peacock logo. On the roof, a satellite rack.

What the hell’s going on here?
she thinks.
Why is a news crew setting up across the street from my apartment building?

When Jean Luc removes his coat and begins to roll up his shirtsleeves, she knows. But it is a wisdom she does not want, a keen palisade of memory that tells her that the horror of this night had been ordained a very long time ago.

Because, there, on Jean Luc’s forearm, is the tattoo of a bright orange rattlesnake.

This is the man who was fighting with Celeste in the hotel lobby two years ago
, she thinks.
My life has been on a collision course with this moment for two years
.

Her knees trick painfully, her mind reels out of control, her stomach revolts. She grabs onto the windowsill to steady herself and looks down to see the driver of the NBC van angling his vehicle toward Jesse Ray’s sedan.

The man puts the van in park, exits, crosses over to Jesse Ray’s car, stops. He turns to glance at his partner, a quizzical look on his face, then reaches for Jesse Ray’s arm and removes it from the car window. It is a mannequin arm clad in a black coat sleeve and a bright white cuff, the hand holding an all-but-burned-down cigarette.

The man from NBC scratches his head and smiles. The cigarette falls to the ground.

Four floors above, Christian del Blanco—known over the years as a hundred different men, including a
bon vivant
named Jean Luc Christiane and a shadowy grifter named Jesse Ray Carpenter—laughs as he closes the shutters and draws the blinds, sparing the night this tableau for the moment, denying those madmen, who can surely hear such things, the song of Mary’s scream.

70

Paris checks the door, the stench from the cauldron a thick, fetid fog that invades every cubic inch of air in the room. The door has an ordinary interior door lock, reversed. The door itself is solid core. The lock would go first. He feels along the ink black wall, finds the heavy plywood over the window, the black-painted heads of the lag bolts. Solid, too.

He surveys the small room, made smaller by the blackness. The cauldron, dead center. A sturdy wing chair. And, across from the chair, a small table with a computer and keyboard.

Not his father.

The computer is on, but the screen is deep blue, blank. Paris sits in the chair, tries to clear his head. He checks the magazine in his weapon. One bullet. The son of a bitch had left him with one bullet. He returns the magazine, jacks the round, clicks on the safety.

He checks his pockets. Right pocket. Twenty or thirty dollars in a paper clip. A packet of relish or ketchup from Subway. Left pocket. Empty.

One bullet, with condiments and hallucinations to go, Paris thinks.

Great.

71

The man is tall and thin, red-haired. He wears a cheap overcoat, sturdy black lace-up shoes. In the stale light thrown from the caged bulb on the wall in the underground service tunnel linking the Cain Manor and Cain Towers apartments, he looks tired and wan and deeply etched with worry. A man running on coffee, sugar, animal fat, liquor.

A cop.

“Evening,” I say, the barrel of the twenty-two up against Mary’s back. We stop walking. We are now about ten feet from the man.

“Evening,” the red-haired man replies.

I feel Mary tense, about to bolt. “What’s the weather like out there?”

“Getting pretty bad,” the man says, turning his body slightly away from me, the sort of move a left-hander would make if he were going to unsnap the holster of a gun on his left hip, a weapon hiding beneath his coat. His voice echoes slightly in the concrete tunnel. Above us, a water pipe clangs.

“Looks like
we’re
in for the evening,” I say. “Wife’s a little under the weather. Had to leave the party next door. Thank God for this walk-through, eh?”

“
Oh
yeah.” The cop takes a step forward. “Are you all right, ma’am?”

“Like I said, she’s a little nauseous. Bad shrimp or something, you know? Can’t trust those bargain basement caterers.”

“If you don’t mind sir, I’d like to hear it from her. Now, ma’am, are you—”

Suddenly, the crackle of two-way radio traffic bursts from inside the red-haired man’s coat.

Our eyes meet again. And we are linked forever.

Before he can make his move I step behind Mary, lock an arm around her throat, put the barrel of the gun to her temple. The redheaded cop freezes.

I say: “Put your hands behind your head and interlace your fingers. Officer.”

Slowly, reluctantly, he does. But he does not take his eyes from mine. His eyes are a deep green, unreadable, stoic in their calm. I know that this man can do me great harm.

“You have your handcuffs with you?” I ask.

The cop just stares.

I say: “Cuff yourself to the drainpipe.”

“No.”

I cock my weapon. Mary goes rigid beneath my hand. “Beg your pardon?”

“I’m not going to do it.”

“And why is that?”

The cop looks at me with a weariness I have never before seen in a man his age. A resignation of
soul
. “Because I’m a beat-up cop, pal. You hear me? A used-up old flatfoot. Letting you handcuff me is a nightmare far worse than anything you could do with that gun. Believe this.”

“Do you think I won’t kill her?”

“Oh, don’t get me wrong,” the cop says. “I think you’re
going
to kill her. I think you’re going to kill me, too. You’re just not going to do it to me while I’m cuffed to a drainpipe. I’m leaving my son more than that. Sorry.”

I do not want to hear anymore of this.

I shoot him three times.

He stumbles backward and goes down, hard, flat on his back.

Mary shrieks. I cover her mouth. I put the gun to her head until the reality of her own death becomes apparent in her eyes. I lead her to the service elevator, then hit the button with my elbow. The car soon arrives.

I hear fire engines in the distance.

As we step inside I can also hear the traffic on the cop’s radio. The elevator doors close just as a woman’s voice says:

72

He looks so ordinary, Paris thinks. Better than average looks, he had thought when the man had played the part of Julian Cruz. Charming and easygoing.

He had shaken hands with a monster and not known it.

But now, seeing him sitting in a chair on the computer screen, in the upper-right-hand frame of four, he looks ordinary. In the upper-left-hand frame, Paris sees himself, sitting on the chair, live, courtesy of the small digital camera clipped to the monitor and the track lights overhead. In the lower right is the old video of himself on the steps of the Justice Center.

“Mr. del Blanco,” Paris says.

“Christian, please, detective,” the man says.

“Call this off.”

“Did you enjoy your hot dog? Tasty?”

“Call this off.”

“Too late for that.”

“Let me ask you something,” Paris says, trying to sound a lot more in control than he really is. The magic mushroom is still making his mind take wing in a thousand directions. “I understand why you’re after me. I even understand why you went after Mike Ryan. But why the Levertovs?”

Christian reaches off camera. He brings back a trio of photographs. To Paris, they look like pictures of Christian coming and going from La Botanica Macumba. “Can you believe these? Clandestine pictures of
me
.” He laughs, holds them closer to the camera. “Turns out old Ike wasn’t just selling kosher hot dogs on that corner, detective. He was one of these block-watch people. I’d seen him around the corner a few times, passed the time of day with him, even met his wife. But about the fifth time I visited the botanica, he started to become suspicious, it seems, began taking
pictures
. Guess I wasn’t the right breed. Believe me, the minute a voodoo murder and a sketch of the suspect showed up in the press he would have been on the phone. I needed time. Old Ike just meddled in the wrong man’s business. Edith made the mistake of loving him.” Christian puts the photos aside, leans forward, adds: “The important question is, how did
you
feel?”