The Violet Hour (14 page)

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Authors: Richard Montanari

BOOK: The Violet Hour
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‘I mean he didn’t just die from the smack. It was no accident. He was cut up. Mutilated.’
‘What?’
‘Ugly scene, man.’ Willie held up a color photograph that showed a man’s body: naked, shredded flesh, a huge sticky pool of brownish blood. The man was hardly recognizable as John Angelino.
Nicky felt the bile head north. ‘Wh-what happened to his eyes?’
‘Pulled out. Cut out, I should say. Somethin’ really sharp.’
Willie T took a bite of his Whopper. The reddish brown meat juice ran down his chin, onto his hand, onto the crime-scene photo. Nicky gagged, looked away, found his wind, continued. ‘Yeah, but there’s something . . .’
‘Somethin’ stuffed into the eye sockets? Man, you could be a detective.’
Willie T was clearly enjoying this, Nicky thought. There was some kind of street lesson in here somewhere. A
be careful what you ask for
kind of thing. Nicky looked back at the photo. There was something beige and wrinkled stuffed into the eye cavities. The texture and color reminded him of ginger root.
‘You ready for this?’ Willie T asked. ‘They’re daffodil bulbs.’
‘
What
?’ The word sounded so incongruous, so grotesque, next to the carnage of the crime scene that Nicky almost laughed. But he remained silent, stunned.
‘Daffodil bulbs,’ Willie T repeated, then let out a snort of dry laughter. ‘You gotta love this fuckin’ city, man.’
Nicky composed himself, somewhat. This was way beyond anything he had ever tackled before, but he could do it, right? He
should
do it, right? Nobody deserved to end up like that, especially not a priest. ‘I don’t care, man. This makes it a better story. Ten times better.’
‘Okay, Nicky,’ Willie T said, placing the photos on the seat. ‘But I can’t get you any closer to the investigation than this. You’re a smart boy. You’ll figure out where to go next.’
Nicky had no idea where to go next, but he didn’t want to tarnish his smart-boy image just yet. ‘So how come this information wasn’t in the paper?’
‘Nicky. Cops withhold shit from the public all the time. You know that. Your old man was a cop. Separates the real confessions from the professional assholes who call and confess to everything.’
Over the next few minutes, Nicky tried to make small talk, hoping to keep Willie T chatting, hoping some ideas would spill over. ‘So, how is the Birdman these days?’
‘The Birdman’s cool, Nicky,’ Willie T said as he started the Ford. ‘The Birdman just flies. He’s Homicide now.’
‘No shit?’
‘None,’ Willie T said. He crumpled the greasy waxed paper his Whopper had come in. ‘Me? I still like the dope, man. I still like ropin’ the cowboys.’
Nicky decided to ask. ‘Do I owe you that half of the C note for this little meeting?’
Willie T put his car in drive, his foot on the brake. ‘You do.’
Nicky reached into his pocket, retrieved the half bill, handed it to Willie T. ‘And what about the other—’
‘That’s between you and the Birdman,’ Willie T said of Nicky’s remaining voucher. ‘But I’d advise you to wait and use it on somethin’ else. Because this is some dangerous jelly, Nicky. The coroner said this guy used a scalpel. You wanna get close to that?’
‘No,’ Nicky said, the image of John Angelino’s eyeless horror mask seared into his memory. He wondered if his cousin Joseph knew.
‘You see the Birdman, you tell him I said hello,’ Willie T said.
Before Nicky could answer, Willie T swung out of his space and headed for the exit onto Euclid Avenue.
The thick, moist smell of fatty meat lingered behind him, and for the first time in Nicky’s life, it didn’t make him hungry. For the first time in his life, it smelled like what it was.
Dead flesh.
The offices of Morris, Goldberg and Dodge, Court Reporters, were located in the sixth floor of the Leader Building at East Sixth and Superior. A reporter for fourteen years, Nicky’s sister Maria was one of the firm’s real assets. Hence her office was up front, near the reception area. Hence Nicky found it relatively easy to sneak in there sometimes and search Lexis/Nexis, the huge database of news stories and company information available to corporate accounts.
He always dropped by at lunch.
Today, as he had hoped, the offices were essentially deserted and they managed to slip into Maria’s office unseen. He closed the door, sat down at his sister’s computer, and got online.
While he waited for the connection, he surveyed what he had.
He was pretty sure that he was the only writer in Cleveland who had the information that John Angelino was mutilated. But why? Why hadn’t that been in the papers? Why hadn’t it
leaked
to the papers? Did the families know? He had done a quick Google search, and found nothing about it. He knew he couldn’t use that information in print, but if he could find some connection to another crime, and that source gave him the information . . .
The initial Lexis/Nexis search screen appeared. Nicky navigated to the news story database, and requested all articles that contained the words
red
and
tiger
and
heroin
.
Nothing.
He figured he would start specific, then get general. Inputting a search for the word heroin would have given him thousands of references. Lexis/Nexis was huge.
Next he punched in
tiger
and
heroin
and got fifty-four references, including his own short piece in the
Chronicle
. He scanned them. Most were
Hollywood Reporter
and
Variety
stories on a movie called
White Tiger
. One story was about a member of the Detroit Tigers going through rehab. No murders.
He tried
monkey
and
heroin
.
Nothing.
He rummaged through Maria’s top drawer, found a half pack of stale Virginia Slims menthols and a fold-up ashtray. He wheeled over to the window, opened it, broke off the filter, fired up a Slim. It tasted like burning VapoRub.
Next search. He typed
priest
and
heroin
.
Eighty-eight hits. Mostly stories about inner-city rehab centers, DARE programs, and the like. Nothing local. Nothing about anyone overdosing on red-tiger brand smack.
He was just about to begin a new search when his eyes landed on the day’s
USA Today,
opened to the sports section. The articles were about a variety of teams – the Vikings, the Blackhawks, the Cardinals, the Cavaliers, the Panthers, the Buccaneers, the—
Wait a second.
Panthers
.
He reached for his shoulder bag, extracted the manila file envelope. He took out the original
Plain Dealer
article, scanned it, found the reference. The article said the heroin packet had been marked with a ‘tigerlike’ animal. Not tiger. Tiger
like.
Nicky began a new search. Over the next five minutes, he tried panther, leopard, cougar, ocelot, lynx, bobcat, lion. At one-thirty he keyed in jaguar and heroin.
There was one reference. A recent article from the
Erie Times News,
the daily paper in Erie, Pennsylvania, ninety miles away. The proximity sent a shiver through Nicky as he hit Enter, requesting the article.
The shiver became an icy hand around his heart when he saw the headline.
ERIE COUNTY DOCTOR FOUND STABBED TO DEATH; DRUGS INVOLVED
.
21
 
The drive south was exhilarating. Amelia knew that she should have called first, but the sky had cleared completely and it was a perfect day. She had Roger’s car, an apple red Lexus. On certain days, in certain moods, on certain streets, it made her feel like Audrey Hepburn in
Two for the Road
. She passed through Bath and Hinckley, through Massillon, Zoar, and New Philadelphia. The trees were aflame with color, the air held a hint of woodsmoke and apples. Fall was in full, glorious burn in northeastern Ohio.
By the time she arrived in Walden, just west of Sugarcreek, she was hungry. She found a spot on Route 36 called Emma’s. The waitress told her the lunch specials: country meat loaf, fried Lake Erie perch, and spaghetti with meat sauce. And that they were out of the perch. Amelia glanced around and saw absolutely none of the customers eating the meat loaf.
‘I’ll have the spaghetti,’ she said. ‘And coffee.’
The waitress retreated to the kitchen just as a blue van pulled into the parking lot across the street from the restaurant.
‘Well, first of all, this is encrypted. See all this information at the top?’
Amelia nodded. She had handed the memory stick to the taller of the two young men she had found huddling over a computer terminal at Cybernauts, Inc., a disheveled storefront computer store on Gulliver Street, next to the one and only barber shop in downtown Walden, Ohio. The librarian at the Walden Community Library had told her that Edward Pankow had not worked there in a few months, that he had struck out on his own and started a telecommunications company.
Amelia, for some reason, had expected a high-tech office with a dozen employees scurrying about on expensive carpeting. When she stepped through the door and saw that the ‘cybernauts’ were really a couple of grunge rockers in their early twenties, she relaxed. She’d find out what she wanted to know.
‘This is the routing information,’ Eddie continued, clearing his long, dirty-blond hair from his eyes, pointing to his twenty-one-inch monitor. ‘As in, these are the locations of all the computers this had to go through to get to yours. I can tell you right now, this did not come from someone on World Online.’
‘
We
can tell you that,’ Andy Bencek said. He was the shorter one, the dark-haired one, the one standing inches away from Amelia.
‘Okay,’ Amelia said, barely hanging on to the thread. ‘But is there any way you can tell me what it says? Is there any way to, well, decode it?’
‘Dr Bencek here is our resident encryption expert,’ Eddie said, standing up, gesturing toward Andy, giving up the chair.
‘Is that right?’ Amelia said with a smile.
Andy sat down, hit a few keys, and brought the encoded message onto the screen in what may have been twenty-four-point type. ‘Initial analysis, Dr Pankow?’ he asked.
Eddie leaned in, looking over Andy’s shoulder. ‘I’d say it was a jpeg, Dr Bencek.’
‘Watch and learn.’ Andy tapped a few keys.
Amelia looked at the screen and saw it slowly reveal, from top to bottom, a photograph of a piece of paper – specifically, the bottom half of a torn sheet of paper from a legal pad. On it was a poem written in a pretty handwriting, a woman’s handwriting, that was for sure. For a moment it looked like calligraphy, but Amelia looked more closely and saw that it was just that the woman’s writing was nearly perfect – fluid, delicate, yet still confident and forthright. A young woman’s handwriting, Amelia thought.
She did not recognize the poem, but then again, her knowledge of poetry was limited to what she had been made to sit through in high school English. But there was something about the tone of the brief verse, something so sad, it filled her for the moment with a liquid sorrow. She thought of how Maddie dealt with the world, her daughter’s quiet, gentle nature.
On the other hand, if this was a love poem from Shelley Roth to her husband . . .
‘Mystery solved,’ Andy said as he turned to his partner and high-fived him.
‘The doctor is in,’ Eddie replied, fiving him back.
‘Well,’ Amelia began, ‘do either of you recognize this poem?’
The two young men looked at each other, then at the screen, then at the floor, then out the windows, as if they had just been cornered by a hostile English teacher. ‘No.’
‘Okay,’ Amelia said. ‘No problem.’
Eddie looked at his watch. ‘Look, we have to do a setup over the board of elections, but we can Google this for you when you get back.’
‘How long will that be?’
‘Maybe an hour or so.’
Amelia didn’t want to wait. ‘Can you call me with that information later?’
‘Sure,’ Eddie said. ‘If you give us your email addy, we can also get you the names of the other people who received this email if you like.’
‘You’d do that for me?’
The co-owners of Cybernauts, Inc., Edward James Pankow and Andrew Martin Bencek, looked at each other, at the computer screen, then at Amelia.
They nodded solemnly.
The only reason Eddie Pankow noticed the blue van was because he was trying to buy one. Cheap. And this one had potential. It looked around ten years old, clean but not perfect. When it rolled to a stop out front, about five minutes after the lady with the poetic e-mail had left the store, he could see a few fair-sized rust spots, and that meant if the van was for sale, there was bargaining room.

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