The Violet Hour (23 page)

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Authors: Richard Montanari

BOOK: The Violet Hour
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Nicky remembered copying the e-mail addresses into his notebook – but now that was missing too.
Shit
.
Happy Hour at the Caprice Lounge was a jumble of eighties hard rock, shouted obscenities, and boisterous retellings of near-death encounters with the city’s vilest desperadoes.
Nicky and Gil slipped into a back booth, ordered two Michelobs. The bar was dark, half-full. The waitress arrived, served, left.
‘I appreciate you doing this,’ Nicky said. He hadn’t told Gil much, and to Gil’s credit, he hadn’t asked. All that was said was that Nicky had to meet a cop and give him something. ‘This shouldn’t take too long.’
‘This is police business, Nick. I respect the police.’
They went silent for a few minutes, listening to the music. Nicky looked at Gil – khaki chinos, Michelob in hand – and thought he looked rather at home in a blue-collar setting like this.
‘So you’re a beer drinker, eh?’ Nicky said with a smile.
Gil blushed a little, looked guilty. ‘I like it just fine, Nick. Needless to say, we don’t usually have it sitting around the rectory much.’
‘No keg parties with the St Francis nuns?’
‘Not too often,’ Gil replied, playing along, but reddening further.
‘Well, drink up,’ Nicky said, figuring Gil was probably not too comfortable with nun jokes. ‘Beers are on me.’
They clinked bottles, sipped. ‘Thanks, Nick.’
He took another sip of his beer, slipped out of the booth.
‘You can stay,’ Nicky said.
‘It’s okay,’ Gil replied, zipping his jacket. ‘I’m sure this is private. I’ll be in the car out front. Take as long as you need.’
Before Nicky could object, Gil turned on his heels and headed for the door.
Five minutes later there came a loud burst of laughter at the front of the bar. Nicky looked up and saw Kral standing by the front door with a stocky blond woman. He was telling her an animated story, one that ended with another thunderous cackle of boozy laughter. After a minute or two, the blonde hugged him, left. Kral wobbled a bit, then began glad-handing his way around the horseshoe-shaped bar.
Detective Ivan Kral was shit-face drunk.
‘Nicky. You good?’ Kral said, putting his jigger of bourbon carefully on the table. He slid clumsily into the booth opposite Nicky.
‘I’m okay,’ Nicky said, cautiously. ‘You look like you’re feeling no pain. Not on duty, are ya, Birdman?’
‘Never been better,’ Kral said. ‘Been off since six.’
Nicky glanced at the wall clock. It was six-ten. Nobody got this loaded that fast.
‘Well,’ Nicky began, ‘you’re not going to believe this, but—’
Kral held up his hand, interrupting him. ‘Whatever it is, I don’t want to hear it.’
‘Well, let me at least—’
‘What I’m saying is, I don’t want to fucking hear it.
Capeesh
?’
Nicky’s heart sank. Was he going to jail? ‘What are you talking about?’
‘I’m talking about how it isn’t my case anymore, see? The feds are treating this as a serial murder. We’ve got G-men up the fucking ass down at the Justice Center.’
Nicky figured it was now or never. ‘It’s gone. The memory stick is gone. Can’t find my notebook either.’
Kral looked at him for a few moments, focusing a bit drunkenly. He smirked. ‘Feds will want your laptop. Give them something to do. They’re really good at finding shit where shit don’t grow.’ Kral grabbed Nicky’s Michelob, took a long, hard swallow. ‘But we gave them the fact that all the victims went to CWRU. Right under their fuckin’ noses.’
He said it so casually. Nicky thought for a moment he had misunderstood. Geoffrey, too? Geoffrey went to CWRU, too? ‘
What
?’
‘Yeah. Angelino, Coldicott, Crane,’ Kral said, slurring his words a little now. ‘They all went to CWRU in the late eighties. It was the one thing that popped up on all their sheets. As soon as that surfaced, the feds pounced. It’s their case now. I’m out of it.’
‘No shit.’
‘None,’ Kral replied. ‘And what’s more, I don’t give a fuck.’ He threw back his shot, looked for the waitress.
‘Case Western Reserve,’ Nicky said, softly, new wheels beginning to spin. His cousin Joseph had gone to CWRU, too. ‘Well, would it be okay if I talked to people down at Case for background?’
Kral laughed, raised his hand, called the waitress. He looked at Nicky, his tinted glasses reflecting the neon beer signs scattered around the room. ‘As long as you keep it out of print until the feds close the case, I don’t care if you talk to the pope.’
‘Thanks,’ Nicky said with a smile, grateful for Kral’s inebriated mood, glad to be leaving the Caprice Lounge without handcuffs. Kral had given him inside cop stuff with the CWRU lead. He knew what was expected of him.
‘Are we square now, Birdman?’ Nicky asked, sliding his half of the hundred across the table.
This time Kral pocketed the bill without even looking at it. ‘Like Pat Fuckin’ Boone.’
Five
 
The AdVerse Society
35
 
Sebastian Keller stared at the newspaper, the type running together in a miasma of floating black and white dots: a pointillist response caused by the painkillers.
Two dead now. At least, two that he knew of. And how many more to go? Two? Three? Four? That is, if they weren’t already gone.
Geoffrey Coldicott, a victim of heroin.
He thought about the strange, spindly Mr Coldicott, his fey manners and lascivious leers. He had thought Mr Coldicott furtive and strange in those years, or at least that was how it seemed from the vantage point of his arm’s-length acquaintance with him.
Because the first thing Sebastian Keller had learned as an English teacher at Brush High School, in his mid-twenties, was that you cannot really become friends with your students. Especially at the high-school level.
But in college, everything changes. In college a young professor can score big with the undergraduate women.
Sebastian Keller really thought he had penetrated their little group, but on twenty years of reflection, he had concluded that he had not. Five or even ten years’ difference in age was probably surmountable at the college level, but twenty? He didn’t think so. He had certainly thought so then, but he had been wrong. He had just been a middle-aged guy with bridgework and a burgeoning paunch who had dressed and acted embarrassingly young.
He had taken them all to dinner one evening after a particularly lively afternoon session of his 300-level poetry class. There had been seven or eight of them, the AdVerse Society in its totality plus a few hangers-on, freshmen who got a literary contact high from being in the same room with people, like themselves, who had actually read books such as
Catcher in the Rye
or
Naked Lunch
or
Steppenwolf
.
One of the freshmen who tagged along to the Boarding House that night was a delicately beautiful girl named Julia Raines, a transfer student from Bowling Green who had transferred to CWRU mid-semester. Even though she was not all that far from her home in Haskins, Ohio, she said she felt quite liberated.
Julia was the archetypal waif, he had thought that night, provincial in manner, slender and pale in her peasant dresses and sandals. She was beautiful in the sense that a willow is beautiful; sky blue eyes that squinted at the slightest change in light, soft brown hair that seemed to always be fighting the thinnest of breezes.
By nine-thirty that night they had eaten dinner, and subsequently consumed a half dozen pitchers of beer, along with the ubiquitous Algonquin cocktails. Soon the conversation among the ten or so people at the table became both insufferably lofty and cacophonous; so much so that he remembered they had, at times, even drowned out the three-piece combo in the corner of the upstairs level at the Boarding House.
‘Emily Dickinson,’ John Angelino said, ‘is the only woman who could even hold a candle to her male contemporaries.’
There was a brief moment of silence before John Angelino was pelted with a hurricane of balled-up napkins, swizzle sticks, and bits of onion ring by the handful of women at the table.
‘Sylvia Plath,’ one of them hurled.
‘Gwendolyn Brooks,’ said another.
‘Sara Teasdale, Marianne Moore,’ said yet another.
Then, as if their heads were all tied together with string, they all looked to Julia to get in her lick, but instead, Julia smiled and blushed, a little off guard and, it appeared, woefully under read on the subject. She looked at her shoes.
A few more halfhearted projectiles came sailing John Angelino’s way as Julia excused herself from the table.
A few moments later, Sebastian Keller followed.
There was a pay phone at the dark end of the corridor in those days, directly across from the ladies’ room entrance. Sebastian picked up the phone but didn’t insert any coins, didn’t dial a number. He just stood there, silently, the cold, quiet plastic to his ear. He did this because he knew that, from that angle, one could see the slightest wedge of the anteroom to the ladies’ toilet, the room that held the couch and the stand-up ashtrays and one long wall with a succession of round, art deco mirrors. With the door propped open in the manner in which it was that night, he could covertly watch whoever was standing in front of the very last mirror by the door, could observe her from the cover of darkness.
A minute or two into his voyeuristic deception, Sebastian Keller was rewarded. Julia Raines stopped at the last mirror, and he watched her do something that he had thought about a thousand times since. Something that would make Julia Raines live in his mind for what he now knew to be the rest of his life.
He watched her speak to the mirror.
She seemed to be rehearsing what she was going to say when she returned to the table. She practiced her laugh, the brief, courteous laugh of the cognoscenti, the laugh that lets everyone at the table know that you’ve gotten the joke, or nailed down the reference. She flicked her hair over her shoulder, cocked her head at an angle, as if rapt, listening to a story. Then, quite dramatically, she had burst into laughter, covering her mouth in response to what quite possibly had been the funniest story she had ever heard.
Robert Benchley said
that
? Dorothy Parker wrote
that
?
He’d known at that moment that he would never forget her. Just as he knew that someone in that group had to have been head over heels in love with Julia Raines, as he had been himself, and that someone in that group, or near that group, had blamed the rest of them for what happened to her that night.
Sebastian Keller picked up the phone on his desk, punched the number nine, waited, dialed the number, waited. When someone answered, he said: ‘May I have the homicide division, please?’
‘One moment.’
More than a few moments later (Sebastian Keller was getting very precise with his time, even the indiscernible depth and breadth of a few moments), the phone was picked up.
‘Homicide, Detective Paris.’
‘Detective Paris, my name is Sebastian Keller, I’m the head of the English Department at Case Western Reserve University.’
‘What can I do for you, Mr Keller?’
A bright red rope of pain snuck under the pain medication for a moment, encircling his bowels, knotting tightly, causing him to grip the arms of his chairs. After a moment, it submerged to its tolerable intolerable level.
‘I have some information for you.’
36
 
On the way out of the back door, the phone rang. Amelia picked up the cordless and continued out onto the deck, the seven or eight million leaves that needed to be raked denying her the luxury of a chair and a cup of coffee for this conversation, whoever it was.
‘Hello?’
‘Mrs St John?’
‘Yes.’
‘Hi, it’s Eddie.’
Eddie? Amelia wondered. Who’s Eddie? ‘I’m sorry. Who is this?’
‘Eddie. Eddie Pankow. From Cybernauts.’
Cybernauts, Amelia thought. What the hell was a cyber— ‘Oh, right, right, the computer guys.’
‘Yes, exactly.’
‘Eddie and . . .’
‘Andy,’ she heard, spoken in a different voice. They were both on the line.
‘Well, how are you guys?’ Amelia asked, smiling. They were, in their way, kind of cute. The fact that they got flustered around her made her feel good. Like she was still in there pitching.
‘Good,’ Eddie said.
‘Both of us,’ Andy added. ‘We’re both, you know,
good
.’
‘That’s great,’ Amelia said, eyeing the leaves. Maddie was home from school, and even with what little help she might provide, it was good to have some assistance. She was anxious to get to it. ‘What can I do for you?’

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