Authors: Richard Montanari
The Violet Hour (15 page)
But while the van was cool, the guy who got out of it and stepped in front of the store was another story altogether. Tall, dark coat, tinted glasses. He had his hands in his pockets and stood there looking at the window display for what had to be ten minutes. The only things in the display were some empty, sun-faded boxes of Halo and Grand Theft Auto, along with a couple of outdated video cards arranged on some cheesy red velvet. Yet the man stood there and stared at the stuff for the longest time.
Eddie was just about to go get his partner and get his take on the lurker when something totally unexpected happened. Davey and Clete stopped in. Davey and Clete Sutar were twins, both Ohio state troopers, both standing around six two, both weighing in around two ten of muscle, gristle, and attitude. They were Eddie’s first cousins and Eddie loved it when they stopped by. It always gave the place an air of security.
After the usual family small talk, Clete said they needed a couple of patch cords for the computer in their cruiser. Luckily, the X-650s were in stock. ‘You want the gold ends?’ Eddie asked, rhetorically.
Clete gave him his patented
Waddayathink
? look. Eddie smiled, stepped into the back to get their order. When he returned to the front of the store he was greeted with a flash of sunlight, sunlight thrown through the front window, the unobstructed front window, which meant—
Waddayathink
? look. Eddie smiled, stepped into the back to get their order. When he returned to the front of the store he was greeted with a flash of sunlight, sunlight thrown through the front window, the unobstructed front window, which meant—
Eddie looked.
The man in the overcoat was gone. So was the van.
Shit
, Eddie thought. Another potential love chariot gone down the road. He bagged the patch cords and tossed the bag to Davey, the slightly bigger of the two huge police officers.
, Eddie thought. Another potential love chariot gone down the road. He bagged the patch cords and tossed the bag to Davey, the slightly bigger of the two huge police officers.
‘On the house, gents,’ Eddie said. ‘Stop by anytime.’
Amelia sat at her kitchen table and looked at the printout of the email she had gotten from Eddie and Andy. In the message they said they would do a search for the lines of the poem, and call her as soon as they had something.
Five names and e-mail addresses.
Four of them were complete strangers.
| Benjamin Matthew Crane | [email protected] |
| John Angelino | [email protected] |
| Geoffrey Coldicott | [email protected] |
| Jennifer Schumann | [email protected] |
| Roger St John | [email protected] |
What did Roger have to do with these people? she wondered.
Was this some kind of computer mailing list he was on?
Why was it all so hush-hush secretive?
And who the
hell
was Jennifer Schumann?
hell
was Jennifer Schumann?
22
Benjamin Crane’s widow was a classic beauty: long-limbed and graceful, a former dancer with the Cleveland Ballet. She wore the standard uniform of the young, grieving rich. A Versace black dress, no jewelry.
The house, an imposing colonial in Wolf Run, near Erie, Pennsylvania, told more of the tale. Dr Benjamin Matthew Crane had had a very lucrative career as a plastic surgeon, reconstituting a fair number of the sagging rich and near rich between Cleveland and Buffalo, right up until his untimely death and subsequent mutilation at the age of forty-three.
Nicky knew that he couldn’t talk to the reporter who had written the original piece in the
Erie Times News
– a staff reporter named Timothy C. Galvin – without arousing suspicion. A city desk reporter at a fairly large daily newspaper was the kind of person who thought that the gas pump had a hidden agenda when it flashed Have a Nice Day! at the end of the transaction. For some reason, Galvin referred to the tigerlike stamp as a jaguar in his article, having gotten, Nicky figured, a look at the actual GemPac. But Galvin, too, referred to the animal on the other side as a plain old monkey. It seemed his zoological expertise ended with the big cats.
Erie Times News
– a staff reporter named Timothy C. Galvin – without arousing suspicion. A city desk reporter at a fairly large daily newspaper was the kind of person who thought that the gas pump had a hidden agenda when it flashed Have a Nice Day! at the end of the transaction. For some reason, Galvin referred to the tigerlike stamp as a jaguar in his article, having gotten, Nicky figured, a look at the actual GemPac. But Galvin, too, referred to the animal on the other side as a plain old monkey. It seemed his zoological expertise ended with the big cats.
Nicky thought about calling the media relations officer at the Erie Police Department but ruled that out too. They didn’t know him, he wasn’t a local, so any inquiries from Cleveland would tip a hand somewhere, Nicky was sure of it. And he didn’t want any other writer anywhere to get even the faintest whiff of this story. So he decided to try to contact the deceased’s widow on his own. Surprisingly, she had agreed almost immediately to an interview.
He had only been able to con Erique Mars out of a three-hundred-dollar advance, and that, combined with the fact that his checking account balance was balanced precariously around the one-hundred-dollar mark, led Nicky to decide that breakfast would consist of a pair of yesterday’s crullers he’d picked up at Unger’s on Taylor before the trip, and a thermos full of homemade coffee, brewed with a double pass of yesterday’s grounds.
Elizabeth Crane seemed surprisingly calm for a woman who had lost her husband within the past few days, but Nicky figured that people grieve differently. Italians and blacks went nuts, lots of flailing and wailing, lots of swan-diving onto caskets. Irish got plastered. Jews turned their mirrors to the walls, sat shiva. Protestants, it seemed, got quiet.
She met him at the door, shook hands with her icy bone-china fingers, led him to the living room, poured coffee. White piano, white carpeting, white walls, white cups, saucers. Thank God the coffee was brown, Nicky thought. And dark brown at that. Certainly better than the hobo shit he had brewed that morning. The coffee warmed him, but he still got the feeling he had been sent to the waiting room outside George Orwell’s Room 101.
They sat on opposing white love seats, Nicky on the edge of his, separated by a white marble coffee table, a table bearing a fan of oversized European magazines and a vase full of huge red gladiolas, the only real color in the room. As Elizabeth Crane talked about her husband, and the brutal way he met his death, Nicky found his eyes returning to the bloodred flowers.
She gave him a brief history of her husband’s life, through his undergraduate work at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, his graduation from Harvard Medical School, fifth in his class, his residency at the University Hospitals in Cleveland. At thirty-five, Benjamin Crane moved back to his hometown of Erie and opened a private practice.
They had no children, she said, by choice. She said his only real diversions were golf, gourmet cooking, and his computer.
But for some reason, she said, he had erased his hard drive the day of his death. She noticed it when she turned on the computer to retrieve some financial information for their probate lawyer and found the hard drive empty. No programs, no directories, no files.
She refilled their coffee cups, pensively, obviously distracted. Nicky remained very still; the white room, for a few moments, stealing all sound, all thought. Eventually she spoke.
She said that she found her husband on the back patio, a packet of heroin and a disposable hypodermic needle at his side. And although it took her a while to get it out, she managed to tell Nicky what the papers meant by ‘stabbed.’
The Erie County coroner said that, although the official cause of death was heroin poisoning, the large amount of blood that was found was due to the fact that Benjamin Matthew Crane’s lips, upper and lower, were removed with a scalpel.
Neither were found at the scene.
23
The poetry section at Paige Turner Books was fairly extensive, at least by comparison to the Science Fiction and How-To sections of the store, each of those covering no more than three shelves.
As Amelia sat behind the counter, minding the store, she skimmed a dozen anthologies, read a score of indices to first lines, taking time out to ring up a few sales while Paige ran some errands. Nothing. No poem matched the one in the email.
Along the way she read a poem that made her cry – something called ‘Love Song: I and Thou,’ by Alan Dugan – and a few that made her laugh; more than a few that made her think, kindling an adult interest in a subject she had so violently resisted as a schoolgirl.
By noon, Amelia had skimmed her way through all the poetry books, including the Pelican Series Shakespeare. Paige returned at one o’clock, a half dozen huge boxes of used books in tow, none of it poetry.
On to the library.
The Collier Falls Neighborhood library was a three-room, ivy-laced brick building on Ludlow Circle, and it was known, locally, to have a fairly extensive audio book collection and a rather fancy schedule of hours. Amelia found the library open and all but deserted when she walked in at a few minutes after one.
She walked the length of the building, toward the darker end of the large main room, away from the windows, looking for the eight hundred section. She found it, stepped down the row, ran her eyes over the hundreds of titles. It was at moments like these that she realized, with equal amounts of joy and sadness, that it was her limited education, and her almost slavish envy of those more schooled than she, that had driven her to Roger St John’s arms in the first place.
She had been twenty-three when they’d met, her love life consisting of a Saturday night dinner-and-a-movie relationship with Jimmy Barone, Jr., then twenty-six, he of the endless pyramid schemes, he of the spotless Ford Thunderbird and shag haircut. Life, at that time, was living at home, working downtown, and panting her way through a weekly, passionless hump at Jimmy Barone, Jr.’s, tiny apartment at Marsol Towers.
Then her brother Garth invited her to a party at University Circle and introduced her to an old CWRU classmate named Roger St John.
The first time she saw Roger he was leaning against a wall, a Rob Roy in hand, talking to a young woman who looked like a cross between Bizet’s Carmen and a South Dakota truck-stop hooker. Amelia immediately categorized this handsome stranger with the wavy hair, winning smile, and great shoulders. Here was a thirty-something man hitting on a child. Of course, the child was only a few years younger than Amelia, but Amelia felt so much more dignified and ladylike in her tartan-plaid skirt and turtleneck. And so much more, well . . .
unscrutinized
was probably the proper, unfortunate word, considering the attention that Miss Way to Go was generating by comparison.
unscrutinized
was probably the proper, unfortunate word, considering the attention that Miss Way to Go was generating by comparison.
Or perhaps it was because she was so instantly attracted to Roger that she felt that way.
Twenty minutes later, when she accidentally spilled a glass of Cabernet Sauvignon on his lap, she got the opportunity to find out. Amelia’s second image of Roger St John was of him standing in a roomful of people, a roomful of women, with a large round target that had, as its bull’s-eye, his crotch.
Maybe that should have told me something, Amelia thought. Maybe that first night should have been an indication of what was to come. Maybe it—
She sensed someone nearby. A flash of color in between the stacks of books.
Amelia drew a breath, bent her knees, looked over the jagged tops of the books, cocked her head,
there
– the sound of cotton on cotton. Someone kneeling down to peruse the bottom shelves. She looked through the openings again, didn’t see anyone, listened some more. Nothing.
there
– the sound of cotton on cotton. Someone kneeling down to peruse the bottom shelves. She looked through the openings again, didn’t see anyone, listened some more. Nothing.
But someone was near.
She could hear breathing . . .
She looked out into the aisle, around the main room, but the only other person she saw was Mary Ellen at the front desk, nibbling a brownie, reading a Dean Koontz novel.
Oh well, Amelia thought. Must have been my imagination.
Then the man in the dark coat grabbed her around the waist and pulled her into the shadows.
24
The interview with Elizabeth Crane had been a lot more draining than Nicky had realized. Talking to people who have just lost a loved one was hard work. Especially a loved one who got hacked up in such a horrible fashion. How the hell did cops do it?
Nicky remembered his father coming home many nights, pouring an inch of bourbon into a jelly glass and sitting in front of the television, still in uniform, his thousand-yard stare in place. His dinner would sit on a TV tray most nights as the inch turned into inches and the five-year-old Nicky would cry as his mother would have to help Officer Vincent Stella to bed. Big, tough guinea cop being helped up the stairs by the five-two Nicolette Stella, the frail, iron-willed woman he had married after two dates, the woman he would lose to breast cancer before her fiftieth birthday. His father was not a drinker, far from it, but sometimes the craziness got to him, sometimes he had to numb himself to the madness. Now that his father had retired, though, the stories were coming more frequently, with greater ease. And with far less booze.
But what would Vincent Stella do now? Nicky wondered. Call the police? Did he really want to get involved to that extent? Was this some kind of conspiracy? Did he have some sort of moral obligation here?
He realized that he was not prepared to answer a single one of those questions as he turned off Lee Road onto Chagrin Boulevard, and headed for Normandy. He could barely keep his eyes open.
But as soon as he saw his house, he knew something was wrong. For some reason, his landlord had installed a giant lawn jockey on the front walk. Then he realized it wasn’t a mammoth landscape ornament at all.
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