Kiss of Evil (2 page)

Michael Ryan glances up at the barrel of his own weapon, at the delicate white finger on the trigger, the bloodred fingernail. He closes his eyes one last time, thinking:

It was all for my girls.

All of it.

And no one will ever know.

One

∼

Altar

1

I step into the white room at precisely eleven o’clock. White walls, thick white carpeting, white stippled ceiling. The lights are on and it is very bright, very warm. Aside from the blue-screened LCD monitor on the desk in the corner, the only color in the room is the plum velvet wing chair, dead center, facing the computer’s small video camera, facing the lights.

I am dressed in charcoal trousers, pleated, and a powder blue shirt with French cuffs. I am also wearing a pair of black Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses. I am barefoot and the shirt is open at the top.

I received the e-mail from Dante at eight-thirty and that gave me just enough time to get to the dry cleaner, just enough time to flirt with a waitress and pick up some dinner at Guarino’s. I can still taste the garlic from the veal piccata and feel like I might be cheating this woman, even though she is going to be light-years away, figuratively speaking. But I understand what compels the person on the other side of the session to call, to arrange, to pay. I respect that.

So I take out my Binaca and freshen my breath.

I sit down.

At eleven-ten the computer speakers sizzle with static, the small window in the upper right of the monitor flickers once, twice, but does not yield an image. I do not expect it to. Although the connection allows for two-way video transmission, I have yet to see anyone appear in that frame. Watchers
watch
.

Soon, from the speakers, there comes a synthesized voice, robotic, yet unmistakably female.

“Hello,” the voice says.

“Hello,” I answer, knowing she can see me now.

“Are you the police officer?”

The game. Eternally the game. First the game, then the guilt. But always, in the middle, the come. “Yes.”

“Just home from a tough day at work?”

“Just walked through the door,” I say. “Just kicked off my shoes.”

“Shoot anyone today?”

“Not today.”

“Arrest anyone?”

“Yes.”

“Just a girl. A very wicked girl.”

She laughs, pauses for a few moments, then says: “Fix yourself a drink.”

I stand, walk out of the frame. There is no bar in this room, but there is a desk with some of the items I anticipated needing. She cannot see these things, these props I will use to produce this chimera for her. Nor, of course, can she see the cauldron, the long-rusted hooks.

Those are in the black room.

As I pick up the tumbler containing a few inches of rum, I hear an increase in the pace of the woman’s electronic breathing. Watchers like to anticipate, too. Watchers like it even when they can’t see.

I play her for a few moments, then reenter the frame and sit down.

“Drink,” she says, a little breathless now.

I drink. The liquid is pleasant amber fire in my stomach.

“Stand up.”

A strong, authoritative command. I obey.

“Now . . .” the voice continues, “I want you to take your shirt off. Slowly.”

I turn my right wrist, look again at my silver cuff links, at the ancient symbol engraved into the smooth matte surface. I take the cuff links out with great drama, then unbutton my shirt slowly, one mother-of-pearl button at a time, and let it slip over my shoulders to the floor.

“Good,” says the voice. “Very good. You are a
very
beautiful young man.”

“Thank you.”

“Now your trousers. Belt first, then the button, then the zipper.”

I do as I am told. Soon I am naked. I sit down on the chair. My penis looks thick and heavily veined against the purple velvet.

“Do you know who I am?” asks the voice.

I do not. I say so.

“Do you
want
to know who I am?”

I remain silent.

“I can’t tell you anyway,” the voice says. “But I do know what I want you to do now.”

“What is that?”

“I want you to think about the woman you saw today. At the whorehouse.”

“Okay.”

“Do you remember her?”

“Yes. I haven’t been able to forget her.”

The voice continues, a little faster. “The woman you saw on the top floor. Did you like her?”

“Yes,” I say, my erection growing. This was the easy part. “Very much.”

“Did it turn you on to watch her?”

“Yes.” Up a few more degrees. Then a few more.

“That was me, you know. I was the whore.”

“I see.”

“Do you like to watch me do that to other men?”

“Yes. I love it.”

“Spread your legs,” she says, the transmission breaking up a bit.

“Like this?”

A few more moments of static, then: “Meet me.”

“No.”

“Meet me tonight.”

It is a plea, now. The power has shifted, as it always does. “No,” I reply.

“Meet me and
fuck
me.”

I wait a few beats. My heart begins to race.
Is she going to be the one?
“If I say yes, what will you do for me?”

“I . . . I’ll
pay
you,” she says. “I have cash.”

“I don’t want your money.”

“Then what do you want?”

I pause. For effect. “Obedience.”

“Obedience?”

“If we meet, you will do as I say?”

“Yes.”

“You will do
exactly
as I say?”

“I . . .
yes . . . please
.”

“Are you alone now?”

“Yes.”

“Then listen to me carefully, because I will tell you this once.”

She remains silent. I shift in the chair, continue.

“There is an abandoned building on the southeast corner of East Fortieth and Central,” I say. “There is a doorway on the East Fortieth side. I want you to stand there, facing the door. Understand?”

“Yes.”

“Do you truly have the courage to go there? To
do
this?”

The slightest hesitation, then: “Yes.”

“Do you understand that I am going to fuck you in that doorway? Do you understand that I am going to walk up behind you and fuck you in that filthy doorway?”

“I . . .
God
. Yes.”

“You will wear a short white skirt.”

“Yes.”

“You will wear nothing underneath it.”

“Nothing.”

“You will wear nothing on top either, just a short jacket of some sort. Leather. Do you have one?”

“Yes.”

“And your highest heels.”

“I’m wearing them now.”

“You will not turn around. You will not look at me. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“I will not look at you.”

“You will not speak.”

“I will not.”

“You will submit to me totally.”

“Can you be there in one hour?”

“Yes.”

“If you are one minute late, I will leave.”

“I won’t be late.”

“Then
go
.”

And so it begins, this casting of the spell. My very first. I had made a promise,
un beso sangre
, and now I must make good.

I cross the room, turn off the computer’s camera. But before I can shut down the speakers I hear the woman sigh, loud and long. It is an animal sound of base pleasure, a human sound of great pain.

Soon after, as I grab my keys and lock the door to the white room, I realize that for me it is the latter, not the former, that has now become the need.

2

Tina has him. He knows it, she knows it.

She produces a cigarette from her silver case with a flourish, pauses, waiting. He grabs a pack of matches off the bar, lights the cigarette, and, as she blows out the match, she holds his hand gently, looks into his eyes, and can almost see the shudder run through his body, down to his crotch, back up: a thick electrical charge that seems to backlight his eyes for a moment.

“Thanks,” she says.

And has him.

The Cobalt Club is mobbed; the scent of a hundred different perfumes languishes beneath the smoke and noise and perspiration like a gutter full of dying flowers, like the effluence of a hundred blind cats in season. The man slides onto the stool next to Tina, raises his hand to the bartender. Oyster Rolex, custom shirt. His suit—ventless, notched lapels—looks like an Armani. His shoulders say that he played contact sports in his younger days.

Tina is wearing her Michael Kors dress, Ferragamo heels, a thin strand of pearls.

“What’s a nice girl like you, blah, blah, blah,” the man says, smiling. Tina figures him to be in his late fifties, a prime candidate. He dresses well, she thinks, if not a little young for his age. He has an earring, for God’s sake. She glances at his hands. Manicured. A good sign.

“I got stood up,” Tina says. “Can you believe that?”

The man recoils in mock horror while Tina tries to see if he is wearing a rug. The light at this end of the bar is very subdued—mostly Christmas lights, some blues and reds and yellows from the dance floor—and it is hard to tell. She thinks his hair looks a little dark for a man pushing sixty, and there appears to be a slightly unnatural ridge over his ears, but, if it
is
a rug, at least it is a good one. It is not a place to skimp, she had always thought, and she had had a lot of interaction with men who wore toupees.

She is wearing a wig herself, one of a dozen she owns. Tonight, the red pageboy. She also has on green contact lenses, false eyelashes, fake nails, a ridiculous amount of makeup. Her own mother wouldn’t recognize her.

And that, after all, was the point.

“Someone stood
you
up?” the man asks, dramatically. “What is he, blind? Stupid? All of the above?”

Tina laughs, fawning at the compliment. The man raises his hand again, his sugar-daddy cool imperiled by a lack of bartender interest. Tina notices the ring, the discreet setting, the big diamond.

“My name’s Elton, by the way. Like the singer.” He deliberately drops his key chain on the bar, a set of three keys held together by a gold ring and a fob bearing the unmistakable Ferrari logo. Unmistakable, that is, to women like Tina. “What’s yours?”

“Tina,” she says, smiling, arching her back slightly. “Tina Falcone. Like the bird of prey.”

Tina props the digital camera on the bar, sets the timer for sixty seconds. They are in Elton Merryweather’s paneled recreation room, the lower level of his huge split-level house in Westlake, a house most assuredly decorated (in a faux-southwestern motif) by his trophy wife, who is curiously absent from the downstairs activities, which included a “tequila kiss,” one of Tina’s specialties. A tequila kiss heavily laced with Rohypnol, that is.

Elton, like the others, is a music-industry executive, specifically, an entertainment lawyer. He had wanted to go to a motel, even though his wife—whom he freely admitted existed, whom he freely confessed understood him not—was out of town. But Tina had insisted that they go to his house. By the time they were in the elevator, heading to the nightclub’s parking lot, and Tina had managed to unzip Elton’s fly and slip her hand inside for a quick
pas de deux
, Elton was convinced.

But now, in his well-appointed rec room, at just after midnight, Elton Merryweather is baby-naked, save for his knee-high executive black hose, and snoring like a Louisiana sawmill.

Tina steps over to the couch, slips out of her dress. She reaches behind her, unsnaps her bra, sits down on the couch next to Elton, crosses her legs. She puts Elton’s fleshy pink arm around her, looks away from the lens. Ten seconds go by. Twenty. Thirty. Elton stirs, Tina’s muscles go rigid. She is sure he has ingested enough of the drug to topple a moose. He raises his arm for a moment, as if to make a point, then drops it, his wrist brushing her right breast. Despite herself, her nipple stiffens. She looks at the top of his head and, in this light, sees the seam. It is a rug. Then she looks at the camera.

Come on, come
on
.

She is just about to get up when the flash pops. The burst of light rousts Elton, but before he can move, Tina slips out from under his arm, sets the timer again—this time for twenty seconds—and sits back down.

Whoosh
goes the flash, and Tina’s work is done.

Within moments she has her dress on. She checks the LCD screen on the camera. Perfect. In both photographs you can clearly see Elton’s naked body, his face. Her face is turned away from the lens, of course, but her breasts and legs are visible. As is the glass crack pipe she placed in Elton’s hand. She is tempted to turn on the lights over the bar and see how good her body really does look, but she resists.