Authors: Richard Montanari

The Violet Hour (2 page)

BOOK: The Violet Hour

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But he already knew who she was, what she was. What she cost.

And to that end, without too much tango, they got down to business.

The first time she seduced Johnny Angel for him, it cost nearly two thousand dollars. Women who looked like Kiki didn’t come cheap, regardless of the relationship, and men in Johnny Angel’s line of work had long-entrenched defenses against them. But, eventually, the animal in the man surfaced, poking its wet nose through all the sediment of Roman Catholic guilt, through all those richly colored vestments in which Johnny had been so tightly bound in the prime of his sexual life.

Because, no matter what the constraints of this life, nor the perceived fires of the life hereafter, all men, all people, could be made to act like animals.

He was counting on it.

Kiki had followed up with a phone call, as per their agreement, and told him that Johnny Angel had fucked her and wept that night, fucked her and wept. A pathetic act of contrition, he had thought upon hearing this, the puny wail of a man who once thought himself divine, at least to some degree, only to find himself so sadly out of uniform, debauched with middle age, the stain of roadhouse whiskey on his breath, the briny scent of a common whore on his cock.

Yet that encounter, six months ago, had simply lit the lamps for this night, this gloriously luminous night. It had finally come after seven thousand dark others, a night during which Johnny Angel would meet both his God and his Devil, and discover, after so many years of unflagging self-denial, they were one and the same.

From the closet, he watched Kiki sort through the small stack of CDs on the dresser; pale, gently freckled breasts just inches away from his hands. She selected a disk, summoned forth the rack, and within a few seconds, sashayed back to the bed to the sounds of ‘Bad to the Bone’ by George Thorogood.

The music was very loud. That was good.

He watched her hips move, the half-moons of her breasts appearing briefly on either side of her torso as she danced to the music. Hypnotic, he thought, the female form in motion. He felt himself harden, then directed his attention to the bed, for it wasn’t Kathleen Holt he was there to see. Not right away, anyway. It was an old college friend with whom he had unfinished business.

Johnny Angel.

Johnny looked softer, older – as they all would beneath their clothes – but still seemed to have about him the innate grace of a dancer. Johnny Angel had always been the theatrical one. The irony of that nickname was not lost on anyone, though, considering what Johnny Angel did for a living now, considering the party animal he had been in college.

But college was a long, long time ago . . .

He straightened his hair, eased open the closet door, and stepped into the room.

‘Yesssss . . .’ said John Angelino, his mind, incredibly, on something other than the beautiful woman in front of him. Or, more accurately, on top of him.

And how could this be?

As the new associate pastor of St Francis of Assisi Church on Highland Road, one of the largest Catholic parishes on the east side of Cleveland, his list of distractions ran nearly as deep and wide as his dark chasms of guilt. Because, God forgive him, this was the second time he had shattered his vow of celibacy. Twice now. Could once be forgiven? He doubted even that. But twice meant that it would happen a third time, and then a fourth. It meant that once again he would leave his collar and cassock folded neatly in his closet at the rectory and visit this woman’s bed, only to suffer the yoke of penitence for months to come. He had resisted for so long, so very long. He had known so many other priests driven mad by the shackles of celibacy.

But when Kiki’s car had broken down in the church’s parking lot that day, more than six months ago now, everything changed. The scent of her perfume, the curve of her breasts as she leaned under the hood of her car. Yet even in the face of her beauty, her Salome charms, the seduction had taken a while. Crosses planted deeply fall hard. But eventually he realized he could not rid her from his mind, not even with prayer, and he had given in to his temptations.

And now it was happening again.

God forgive him.

Father John Angelino closed his eyes tightly, trying not to bear witness to his own failing and, in the instant before his world went dark, thought he saw a shadow dart across the wall, a quick, raptorlike slash of gray.

Or did he?

Maybe it was just a cat. Did Kiki have one?

Or maybe, John Angelino thought, the acid of his crimes eating at his stomach, it is just the Holy Spirit, finally come for him, its invisible sword keened to perfection, its target, the soul of a once obedient servant.

He stole to the foot of the bed, his presence masked by the blaring music, by the frenzied movements of the two bodies snarled on the sheets.

John Angelino was lying on his back, naked and hairless; his legs spread. His eyes were closed. The girl straddled him, preparing to take him into her body, looking slender and pallid and perfect in the light cast by the solitary votive candle on the nightstand.

The killer crept onto the bed.

Hands, knees, feet.

He knelt behind Kathleen Holt, rocking to her rhythms, to the rhythms of the music, naked now himself, his own full erection straining just inches away from the smooth, sweat-slicked planes of her back. He watched, for a moment, transfixed by the contractions of her back muscles, by the steady rotation of her hips, and felt the blood course through his veins heard the
creet-creet-creet
of the rusted joints of the bed smelled the raw redolence of sex saw the room fully illuminated by the carbon blue light of the stereo system . . .

‘Julia,’ he whispered. The woman sat upright.

And he attacked.

He wrapped his arm tightly around her neck and entered her at the same moment, the sensation at Kathleen Holt’s throat and the much harder, much larger presence in her vagina seeming to compete for her terror. He took the opportunity to avail himself of a few strong parries, before turning his attention to Johnny Angel.

Then the woman’s hands came to her neck, the instinct to preserve her life more important at that moment than the one to protect her womanhood. A thin shriek escaped her lips, and it was a sound he knew well, a plaintive cry that had stalked the maze of his memory for two decades.

The squeal of the maiden, taken.

The last notes of George Thorogood’s guitar crawled to silence as a three-inch hypodermic needle entered a vein in John Angelino’s right arm, releasing a fatal dose of heroin into his system. The GemPac – the four-by-four-inch folded square of glossy paper some drug dealers rely upon to market their wares – would be found on the nightstand, laden with the dead man’s fingerprints.

One side of the GemPac would bear the rubber-stamped likeness of a red jaguar.

The other, a blue marmoset.

As the drug hurtled through his veins, and the lightless veil of death descended slowly upon him, Father John Angelino heard his murderer’s request, over and over and over, a monotone mantra recalling a hundred nightmares, a thousand sleepless nights. Julia. Julia Raines. And what the five of them did to her that Halloween night so many years ago.

‘Tell me what happened that night,’ the killer said. ‘Tell me in your own words.’

But for Johnny Angel, there would be no more words. No benedictions, no sermons, no homilies. Only the sea air in his face now, the sound of his mother’s voice. Only the silence of the seminary and the smooth flight of the white swan beneath him.

He injected Kathleen Holt with a proper dose of heroin, a street fix, just enough to allow her some pleasure from the last sexual encounter of her short life, just enough to experience none of the unpleasantness of what was to happen afterwards. He then propped her on the windowsill, her back against the glass, and took her as long and as hard as he could. When he was finished, he held the base of the condom with his left hand, lest she take it with her and spoil everything, and in his right hand he took her face, gently, almost paternally, and kissed her softly on the eyes, the lips, the forehead.

Then he leaned backward for leverage and pushed her headfirst through the glass.

He stood for a moment, watching her body falling to the night-blackened earth a hundred feet below him, her skin a soft white blush in the darkness, her life ending with a hollow slap of firm young flesh on cold asphalt.

A few minutes later, when he passed the body on the way to his van, he didn’t look at it. There was nothing there for him now. But there was a message in that mound of spilled woman, he thought, and the message was this:

It is reunion year, class of 1988, a time of remembrance. A time of celebration. A time of reckoning.

And the party, old friends, has just begun.

Two

This Slow-Gathering Storm

Right in front of him. They were copulating right in front of him.

It wasn’t the hour that bothered Nicholas Stella so much – although he had never been much of a morning lover, and 7:45 a.m. seemed either excessively early or excessively late. It wasn’t even the fact that they were doing it on the ledge outside his window. What bothered Nicky most was that a four-and-a-half-ounce sparrow was getting some and he was not.

Jesus Christ, Nicky thought.

Birds.

He opened the window, the phone loosely at his ear, and banged on the windowsill with a rolled-up issue of
Cleveland Business
. In doing so, he found that, although he contributed four or five freelance articles per year to the publication, using it to roust fornicating birds was probably the full measure of its worth. He hated the magazine’s style. He marveled at the way they took a piece of art, sucked out every ounce of creativity, then rushed it into production. Still, if it weren’t for magazines like
Cleveland Business
, he wouldn’t be able to keep himself in a two-room efficiency apartment, and behind the duct-taped wheel of a fourteen-year-old Chevy.

And they say you need a degree to make it in journalism.

Nicky banged the paper against the windowsill again, as the line rang. The birds immediately took raucous flight, cursing him in Sparrow. Nicky immediately felt like an asshole. Then the woman’s voice on the phone. ‘St Francis, how may I help you?’

‘Hi, may I speak to Father LaCazio, please?’ Nicky asked.

‘Just a moment. I’ll see if he’s up.’

Up? Nicky thought. As long as he could remember, Joseph LaCazio – Father Giuseppe Danilo LaCazio of St Francis of Assisi parish on Highland Road, Nicky’s first cousin and the only white sheep of the family – had risen at five o’clock to either attend or say mass. Yet, in spite of the hundreds of marriages, masses, baptisms, and eulogies he had performed, in spite of the collar he seemed to wear 99 percent of the time, the notion of cousin Joey being a priest was still an elusive concept for Nicky. Because Joseph LaCazio was the quick-fisted kid who used to kick Irish and Puerto Rican ass up and down Clark Avenue when they were kids. It was Joseph LaCazio who handed Nicky his first, dizzying Lucky Strike, standing on the roof of Lujak’s Dairy on Fulton, tending to Joseph’s pigeons. Joseph knew his birds, loved birds in general. Right down to that very unpriestlike tattoo he had gotten in the navy.

Gil Strauss, the rectory handyman at St Francis, had called and left a message the night before, reminding Nicky of the upcoming food drive. Nicky hadn’t talked to his cousin Joseph in a while, and figured to kill two birds here. No pun.

Click. ‘This is Father LaCazio,’ the voice said weakly. Nicky put the gym sock over the phone and lowered his voice, wondering if this was the right time for a practical joke. He doubted it, but he plunged ahead anyway.

‘Yes, Father LaCazio, I was wondering if you could tell me how to make holy water.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I want to make my own holy water. Can you tell me how to do it?’

Pause. ‘You want to make your own holy water,’ Joseph said, a fathomless well of patience when it came to his flock. ‘At home.’

‘Yeah,’ Nicky said. ‘I saw the recipe once. It said, “Put the water in a pan, put the pan on the stove, and boil the Hell out of it.”’

There was a brief silence, then: ‘I’m going to kill you, Nicky.’

‘Boil the Hell out of it. C’mon. It was funny. Admit it.’

‘Not that funny,’ Joseph said, laughing anyway. Then, after the appropriate pause, ‘How’s your father?’

The question reminded Nicky that they were all getting to be an age when a long-delayed phone call usually meant a death, a sickness, something bad. This time, everyone was okay. ‘He’s good, Joseph. The same. You know. Still chasing the waitresses around Fort Myers.’

‘God bless ’im,’ Joseph said. ‘He’s a good-looking man, your father.’

‘Gets it from me.’

‘You wish,’ Joseph said. ‘And how’s your sister?’

BOOK: The Violet Hour

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