Kiss of Evil (27 page)

What was she doing? What was
he
doing?

It was very clever, very sexy, very
mature
for someone her age. Maybe she
is
thirty or so, he rationalizes. Which would give him a little hope. Which is probably what scares him so much. He knows that there is a big sign called Hurt at the end of this. Guaranteed. Perhaps that is why he is starting to feel like Emil Jannings in
The Blue Angel
, the middle-aged schoolteacher who literally makes a clown, as well as a complete asshole, out of himself for Marlene Dietrich.

Paris looks up at the bay window above La Botanica Macumba, the front window of the Levertov apartment. Shades still down, no lights.

Ivan Kral, the detective in charge of investigating the Isaac Levertov murder, had said that he had not been able to interview Levertov’s wife in person since the old man’s body had been found. He said that he had spoken to her at some length on the phone, and that she had come down to the morgue to make an official ID of the body, but that he has not been able to make contact with her since. It will take a search warrant to enter the premises and there wasn’t nearly enough credible evidence to support probable cause.

So they wait.

Paris repositions himself, brings his knees to his chin. He had learned how to wait the summer his father had died. Every morning that summer the sixteen-year-old Jack Paris would sit in the blue recliner at the foot of his father’s bed, cocooned in that thick, closed-window air of infirmity, his lap covered with his many books on magic:
Blackstone’s Modern Card Tricks, Keith Clark’s Encyclopedia of Cigarette Tricks, The New Modern Coin Magic
.

His father had been a six-footer at a time when the heavyweight champion of the world was five-eleven; a maker of things new in his basement workshop, a fixer of things broken in the garage. Frank Paris was a machinist all his working life, a self-sufficient man who checked the locks every night, changed the furnace filters every fall, shoveled the driveway with his huge coal shovel every winter.

But, in that darkest of summers, leukemia made Frank Paris small.

On those rare and precious days when his father sat up, took real food, smiled at him, Jack Paris had performed his magic tricks on an aluminum TV table at the foot of the bed. Cups and Balls. The Traveling Deuce. The Vanishing Glass and Handkerchief. Good sometimes, more often not, his father had nonetheless applauded each and every time, his thin, osseous hands meeting in an almost soundless smear.

Jack Paris sat in the blue chair for three months, standing guard over his father’s health, a bewildered, downhearted sentry. At the end of August the ambulance came in the night while Jack slept soundly. Three days later the call from the hospital came at six o’clock in the morning.

He’s dead, isn’t he
? his mother had said in the kitchen that fog-laden late-summer morning, her pink waitress uniform suddenly a widow’s mantle. Jack waited for her gentle tread on the stairs, for the news.

All that spring and summer, from the balmy April day his father had come home, grim-faced, from Dr. Jacob’s office, to the rainy funeral at Knollwood cemetery on Labor Day, Jack Paris had rolled a silver dollar through his fingers—palming, transferring, producing, vanishing, concealing.

His father’s unhurried death may have taught him patience, but it was magic, he would reaffirm every
good
day he spent as a police officer, that taught him how to look at the other hand, how to see through the shadows.

It was magic that taught him illusion.

Paris rubs his eyes. He glances up at the Levertov front window, wondering how long he’d been gone, realizing that an entire performance of
Guys and Dolls
could have taken place in that window and he would have missed it.

Paris straightens his legs, does a quick scan of the immediate area with his binoculars. Deserted, except for a lone hot dog vendor on the corner of Newark and Fulton. Paris gets out of his car, stretches his legs, does a few kneebends, allowing the frigid air to revive him, his stomach now rumbling at the sight of the vendor. He’d managed to miss dinner again. Before he can head over, his two-way blares: “Jack?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m on my way,” Carla Davis says, sounding agitated. “Five blocks out.”

“You’re
way
early. What’s up?”

“Big fight with Charlie
Davis
is what’s up.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Gonna bust a cap up his skinny black
ass
is what’s gonna
be
up.”

Paris knows enough to leave it alone. Especially on an open channel. “Got it.”

“Where are you parked?”

Paris tells her.

“I’ll park closer to Trent, so we’re not in the same spot,” she says.

“Okay,” Paris says, eyeing the vendor and his cart, two blocks away, famished now that he’s seen it. “Listen, there’s a vendor on Newark and Fulton. Grab me something, okay?”

“No problem. What do you want?”

“I don’t know. Dog with the works, I guess. Coke.”

“You got it.”

“And listen, I know it’s Ivan’s case, but why don’t you pump this guy a little about the old man. Isaac Levertov peddled his cart around here. Maybe he saw something.”

“You got it.”

Carla pulls very close with her car. She hands Paris the hot dog—wrapped in Christmas themed wax paper—and the freezing can of Coke.

Paris asks: “Did he know the old man?”

“No,” Carla says. She holds her notebook up to the streetlight. “Mr. William Graham of Memphis Avenue in Old Brooklyn has been at this job exactly two weeks. Said he heard about the old man getting killed, but that’s about it.” She closes her notebook.

“What do I owe you?”

“Nothing,” Carla says, yawning already. “Just bring coffee in the morning. And every damn McMuffin there is. Now get
outta
here. Go have a life.”

The snow falls; hushed, relentless, orderly. The sparse traffic crawls up the center of Lorain Avenue, wisely making two lanes out of four.

It just didn’t add up.

Willis Walker. Fayette Martin. Isaac Levertov.

What the hell ties these three people together?

Paris opens the Coke, sips, places the can between his legs. He grabs the hot dog, unwraps one end, lifts it to his lips, a third of his mind on Rebecca, a third of his mind on the road, the final third adrift on a stagnant sea of meaningless clues.

It is the smell that brings him back to shore.

The smell of death.

Paris slams on his brakes and begins to slide, sideways, up Lorain Avenue. Luckily there is no oncoming traffic. After a few uneasy moments he rights the car, brings it to a halt, straddling the center of the road. He opens the driver’s door and all but dives onto the icy street.

“God
damn
, man . . .
shit
!”

Jack Paris begins to pace around in the middle of Lorain Avenue, fighting the nausea, holding his shield up to the car behind him, directing it around his car. He stops, rests his hands on his knees for a moment. He spits on the ground—once, twice.

Fat snowflakes catch on Paris’s eyelashes. He brushes them aside, then dares to reach back into his car. He retrieves the blue light, puts it on the roof, and as he does he glances at the festive, brightly decorated wax paper, the beige-colored bun resting on the passenger seat.

“You are going
down
, motherfucker,” Paris says as he takes out his cell phone, dials the Second District precinct house, his fury now a living thing within him. He spits into the gutter again. “You don’t
see
a fucking courtroom. I swear to Christ.”

Paris listens to the phone ring, absolutely certain that the hot dog vendor is going to be nowhere in sight when the squad cars get to the corner of Newark Avenue and Fulton Road; absolutely livid that he had been taunted with that name, Will Graham, the tormented FBI agent in Thomas Harris’s
Red Dragon
; absolutely revolted by the knowledge that he had just come to within an inch or two of biting into Willis Walker’s penis.

46

I can hear the police sirens in the distance and know that they are coming for me; a sober, urgent aria, rising and falling.

The old woman sits on the plastic-slipcovered dining room chair, her eyes a dead pool of defiance. I know that she has been through worse than whatever I can offer her now. Much worse. As a child she has survived the horrors of Buchenwald, has witnessed an encyclopedia of inhuman behavior.

Initially, she had refused to tell me where the keys to the garage could be found. I needed them to get at her husband’s hot dog cart. She had lost the tip of the little finger on her right hand to this stubbornness, yet still refused. When I brought the steam iron to within an inch of her face she pointed to a drawer in an old desk, her frail shoulders sagging under the weight of her shame.

She is very tough, clearly from another time, another era. Not soft and complacent like so many of my generation. She really has nothing to do with my plan, and my instincts are to just leave her apartment, take my chances. These are my instincts. And yet I know I cannot do this. I have no hatred for her, but I need until New Year’s Eve at the very least and she has seen my real face.

My
father’s
face.

I look out the window as two police cars converge on the corner of Trent Avenue and Fulton Road, their blue lights a sparkling, prismatic display on the ice-crystalled facade of St. Rocco’s church.

The old woman struggles against the ropes. It appears that life, complete with all its horrors and barbarism and cruelty, is still precious to her. She tries to plead with me, but the tape over her mouth catches her fear, mutes it.

When we met, I had told her and her husband Isaac that my name was Judah Cohen. I kneel in front of her and say, in very apologetic Hebrew, acquired just for this occasion:

Edith Levertov’s eyes open wide, wider.

She screams.

She has met the devil once before.

47

Paris mounts the steps to the Levertov apartment, his sidearm drawn. He is followed by Carla Davis and two uniformed officers from the Second District. Paris has not pulled his weapon in the line of duty for more than eight months, and although he had requalified at the range since, it suddenly feels foreign in his hand, heavy.

Three scenarios are possible at the top of these stairs, Paris thinks, ten treads from the door. One. Nobody home. Isaac Levertov’s widow is staying with relatives, too grief-stricken to return to the apartment. Two. A dazed and confused and heavily medicated Mrs. Edith Levertov will come to the door, having never heard the doorbell or the ringing phone.

Three?

Well, three has too many variables, even for someone of Jack Paris’s experience.

The top of the stairs brings a collective breath from the four police officers. Paris tries the knob and the old door opens, just a few inches, creaking in protest. Paris makes eye contact with Carla, who is standing directly behind him. Paris will open the door wide, go in high. Carla will go in low.

After a silent count of three, Paris pushes open the door fully. The squeal of the hinge is louder this time, a shriek of rusty disapproval in the silence of the hallway.

No movement. No voices inside. No TV nor radio.

Paris waits a few heartbeats, peeks around the jamb. Small kitchen ahead, enameled yellow walls, a wrought-iron dinette table, plastic plants. He smells old frying oil, Lysol, cat litter. Whereas there had been no lights on when Paris had staked the apartment out earlier, now, it seems, every light in the small apartment is blazing.

Paris rolls in high. Carla follows. Spotless kitchen floor, except for the two slightly sullied size-eleven footprints made of melted snow. Paris silently apprises Carla, who skirts them.

To the left, an archway into the living and dining rooms. Paris sidles against the refrigerator, holds his position. Carla moves low, to the far side, glancing through the archway as she does. She stands on the opposite side of the arch, nods at Paris. Paris steps into the dining room, his 9 mm pistol at a forty-five degree angle to his body.

The shadow appears first, then the outline, then the form.

Someone is sitting at the dining room table.

Paris raises his weapon, draws down on the shape in front of him, his heart flying.
Shoot don’t shoot
. It never changes.

Shoot.

Paris lowers his weapon slightly, the sweat now gathering at the nape of his neck, running down his back in a latticework of icy threads.

There is no threat from the person at the table.

Carla rolls the corner, weapon high, sees what Paris sees, hesitates—the macabre scene distracting her for a moment—then silently moves forward.

Ahead, a small cluttered living room: an old twenty-five-inch rock maple TV, a tall étagère full of glassine objects, overstuffed chairs. Empty, silent, ominous. Carla nods toward the hallway that certainly leads to the bedrooms, bathroom. Paris moves to the hallway opening, Carla spins into the hall. The two other uniformed officers position themselves in the living room. Paris nods to one of them, who then skirts Paris, and moves down the hallway. Paris repeats the action with the second officer. He follows. They search the rest of the apartment.

Bathroom. Empty.

Bedroom One and closet. Empty.

Bedroom Two and closet. Empty.

Paris walks back to the dining room and looks at the figure seated at the table. He returns his weapon to his shoulder holster.

“Clear!” Carla Davis yells from a bedroom.