Richard Montanari: Kiss Of Evil

“Hi, Daddy!”

It is always springtime in his daughter’s voice.

“Hi, Missy.”

“Merry Christmas!”

“Merry Christmas to you, honey, but it’s not for four more days!” Paris says. “How’s school?”

“Good. We got out last Friday for the holidays.”

Of course, Paris realizes. Why doesn’t he ever stop and think before asking questions like that? “So what’s cookin’?”

“Well,” she says, taking a big swallow. “You know that we haven’t seen each other in a week and a half, right?”

“Okay,” Paris says, his heart aching with love for this little girl. She is so much like her mother. The Setup. The Flattery. The Kill. He lets her play it out.

“And I miss you,” Melissa adds.

“I miss you, too.”

Swallow number two. “Did Mom tell you that she has her office Christmas party tonight?”

“She may have mentioned something about it.”

“And do you remember if she told you that I was thinking about having a few of my friends over tonight, too?”

“No, honey. But it sounds like fun.”

“Well… it turns out that Darla has a cold.”

“Is that right?”

“Uh-huh. She can’t baby-sit.”

“I see,” Paris says, thinking about what a brilliant tactic this is, having Melissa call.

“So, do you think you could do it?” Melissa asks, then outdoes even her mother in the charm department. “I really miss you, Daddy.”

God, she’s going to be a dangerous woman, Paris thinks. He had planned to rent Sea of Love again, toss a turkey dinner in the microwave, maybe do a few loads of laundry. Why on earth would he give all that up to spend a few hours with his daughter? “Sure.”

“Thanks, Daddy. Mom says eight o’clock.”

“Eight o’clock it is.”

“Oh! I almost forgot!”

“What, sweetie?”

“Did Mom tell you what she got for me as an early Christmas present?”

“No, she didn’t,” Paris says, fully prepared to have been outspent, out-hipped. What he is not prepared for is outhustled.

“It’s the coolest,” Melissa says. “The absolute coolest.”

“What’d you get?”

“JLO perfume.”

On the way back to the store to return the perfume-having already dumped the perfume sample card after Bobby Dietricht’s smart-ass comment-Paris finds his thoughts returning to Sarah Weiss, a name he had tried very hard to put out of his mind for the past eighteen months. Although he had never partnered with Mike Ryan, Paris had considered him a friend, had known him to be a solid, stand-up cop, a family man with a terrific wife and a little girl in a wheelchair whom he loved to the heavens.

It was Mike Ryan who had given Paris the station-house nickname of Fingers, referring to Paris’s penchant for the impromptu card trick, complete with scatalogical patter, a habit stemming from a lifelong interest in close-up magic. Paris could remember at least a dozen times when a grinning Mike Ryan had staggered across a crowded downtown bar on a Friday night, a quartet of people in tow, a deck of cards in hand, shouting: “Hey, Fingers! Show ’em the one where all the kings lose their nuts in a hunting accident.” Or, “Hey, Fingers! Do the one with the four jacks, the queen, and the circle jerk.”

Or, how about this, Paris thinks as he rounds the corner onto Ontario Street:

Hey, Fingers! I’m gonna get my fuckin’ brains blown out in a hotel room one of these days. Do me a favor, okay? Cop to cop. With my blessing, please return the favor to the bitch who pulled the trigger.

Sarah Lynn Weiss.

Dead.

Paris recalls Sarah Weiss’s willowy figure, her clear obsidian eyes. Sarah’s story was that she had found the leather satchel in the ladies’ room and was about to look inside for identification when the police searched the rest rooms. The only physical evidence tying her to the shooting had been traces of Michael Ryan’s blood on the big leather purse lying near her feet.

But Paris had seen it in her eyes. He had looked into her eyes not twenty minutes after she had killed a man and the madness still raged there.

He thinks about the drunken Sarah Weiss sitting in a burning car, her lungs filling with smoke, the heat blistering the skin from her flesh. He thinks about Mike Ryan’s lifeless body slumped in that hotel chair.

Detective John Salvatore Paris finds the symmetry he wants in this sad and violent diorama, the balance he needs, and thinks:

It’s finally over, Mikey.

We close the book today.

Paris steps onto Euclid Avenue, the aroma of diesel fumes and roasting cashews divining its very own recess of city smells in his memory, a scent that leads him down a long arcade of recollection to Higbee’s, Halle’s, and Sterling Lindner’s-the magnificent, glimmering department stores of his youth-and the deep promise of the Christmas season.

As he enters Tower City, a momentarily contented man, he has no way of knowing that within one hour his phone will ring again.

He will answer.

And, on the city of his birth, an ancient darkness will fall.

The twenty-suite Cain Manor apartment building is a blocky blond sandstone on Lee Road near Cain Park, always fully occupied due to its reasonable rents, always offering new faces due to the generally rapid turnover of rental property in Cleveland Heights. To the building’s right sits its identical twenty-suite twin, called Cain Towers, also a blocky blond sandstone.

In the two years she had called her one bedroom apartment on the fourth floor at the Cain Manor home, she had yet to determine exactly what it is that makes one characterless yellow building a manor, and the other a tower.

This morning she sits at the small dinette table overlooking Lee Road. The slushy hum of winter traffic is heard beneath WCPN’s morning show, floating up from the boom box on the floor. She is barefoot, bundled into a lavender silk robe, smoking a French cigarette, sipping coffee. Moses, her ancient Siamese, guards the sill.

At five minutes to eleven she straightens her hair, smoothes her cheeks, adjusts the front of her robe. These gestures are, of course, as automatic as they are unnecessary, because she had never come within a hundred yards of actually meeting Jesse Ray Carpenter, and doubted if she ever would. Still, the notion that this man of small mystery will be pulling into the parking lot across the street in a few minutes never fails to engage her basic vanities.

Jesse Ray is always prompt.

She stands, crosses the kitchen, retrieves the coffeepot from the counter. She returns, fills her cup, considers the sky over the city, the melancholy clouds, thick with snow. If life were perfect, at about eight o’clock that morning, she would be standing on the corner of Lee Road and East Overlook, waiting for the Mayfair preschool van with her daughter, Isabella. Bella, with cheeks the color of winter raspberries and Tiffany blue eyes to shame the December sky, would have been stuffed into her pink jacket and matching mittens. If life were perfect, Isabella’s mom would then have been off to some job-health club twice a week, happy hour Fridays, rent a couple of movies for Saturday night. One for Bella. One for her.

Instead, at eleven o’clock in the morning, on a weekday, she is waiting for a pair of criminals.

Glancing across the street, she sees the top of Jesse Ray’s black sedan as it pulls into the Dairy Barn lot and comes to a halt next to the drive-up phone booth. She sees the window roll down, sees his dark coat sleeve emerge, his bright white shirt cuff, his gold watch. It is practically all she has ever seen of him, although, once, she thought she had seen his car pulling out from behind the Borders at La Place and had followed him for ten minutes or so before losing him somewhere around Green Road and Shaker Boulevard.