Richard Montanari: Kiss Of Evil

She looks at her watch. Although she is late for one of her two legitimate part-time jobs, she can’t leave. Even though she needs to pick up spiral notepads, buy panty hose, fill the car with gas, and stop at the dry cleaner, she can’t walk away.

She never can.

The bell claps and clamors, calling the preschoolers from the Mayfair School outside.

And the film, blurred by a mother’s tears, unspools anew.

“Homicide, detective Paris.”

At first, the telephone line sounds dead, as if the caller had hung up while they were on hold. Which, if Paris is correct, had been no more than sixty seconds or so. Then, the troubled breath on the other end tells him that someone is indeed there. It also tells him that some sort of information-true, false, or, most likely, a barely recognizable hybrid of the two-is coming his way. He had heard that deep breath a million and one times.

A man says: “Detective, my name is Mr. Church.”

Paris closes his eyes, as he often does when speaking to a total stranger on the phone for the first time. He tries to put a physical description to the voice. A little cop game of his. “What can I do for you, Mr. Church?”

“I think I might have some information for you.”

“Regarding?”

“A woman.”

What a shock, Paris thinks. “I’ll need a little more information, sir.”

The man says: “She may be missing.”

Cool. Handoff. “Ah. Okay,” Paris begins, making a mental note to talk to the dispatcher for the ten thousandth time. “That’s a completely different department altogether. If you’ll hang on, I can transfer you to-”

“I fear for her. She may no longer be among the living.”

“I’m sure she’s just fine, sir,” Paris says, wondering who uses a phrase like among the living. “But I’m afraid the Homicide Unit doesn’t get involved with missing persons.”

“Although it is necessary, I suppose,” the man continues. “Like deadheading a flower. Orchids, lilies, roses.”

Somehow, Paris had known this conversation was blasting off-planet. After nearly twenty years, you begin to hear the launch take place in real time. “Like deadheading a flower?”

“Yes. You know something about that, don’t you, officer?”

“I’m afraid not, sir. Look, if there is something the Homicide Unit can do for you, I’ll be more than happy to-”

“You will take her place in ofun.”

I will take her place in no fun? “I’m sorry?”

“White chalk, detective,” the man says. Almost a whisper now.

Right.

“Okay, Mr. Church. Thanks for calling. I’ll be on the lookout for a-”

But the line is dead. Seconds later comes the dial tone.

Like deadheading a flower…

For some reason, Paris keeps the phone to his ear for the moment.

“Jack?”

Orchids, lilies, roses…

“Jack?”

Paris suddenly realizes that the unit commander, Captain Randall Elliott, and a woman he does not recognize are standing in the doorway to his office.

Paris rises to his feet, sensing an introduction. He also senses a bullshit assignment coming down the pike. He is right on both counts.

“Got a minute, Jack?” Elliott asks.

“For you, captain?”

“This is Ms. Cruz. She’s with Mondo Latino,” Elliott says, his lips drawn into a tight, phony smile, the one that screams political pitchout. Elliott is in his early fifties, white-haired, bulky in his blues, ruddied by a half-century of Cleveland winters. “She’s going to be spending a week here, watching how the unit operates. I figured you’d be the most likely candidate to show her around. She said she wanted to work with the best.”

The look Paris gives Elliott at that moment could slice concrete. Thin.

Paris hates these my-week-with-the-cops things that local reporters do to demonstrate how gosh-awful tough it can be at times for the city’s finest, leaving them free to trash the department the other fifty-one weeks of the year. Mondo Latino is a small west-side newspaper serving the city’s Cuban, Mexican, and Puerto Rican communities. In spite of the fact that the paper always seems to be relatively fair with its coverage of the department, the last thing Paris really wants is to carry around a reporter for a week.

Ms. Cruz is afloat somewhere in her twenties, plain to an excruciating fault, wearing thick glasses, nylon hiking boots, a bulky burnt-orange sweater set. Her hair, the color of wet tobacco, hangs lifelessly to her shoulders. She seems to be a somewhat attractive young woman who goes way out of her way to subvert any chance of appearing so.

“Mercedes F. Cruz,” the woman says, almost grabbing Paris’s hand from his pocket and shaking it with royal enthusiasm. “Nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you,” Paris replies, noticing that Mercedes F. Cruz is wearing what looks like a temporary metal retainer on her teeth and a plastic barrette in the shape of a yawning kitten in her hair. “Victor Sandoval still the editor over there?”

“Oh yes,” she says.

“Still drink his Sambuca from a Mountain Dew can?”

“Is that what’s in there?” she asks, smiling.

“Just a rumor,” Paris says, winking at Elliott, resigning himself to the task at hand. “Welcome to the Homicide Unit.”

“Thank you.” She looks at her notebook. “You were involved in that incident next to The Good Egg Restaurant, weren’t you?”

“Yes,” Paris says, already impressed with Ms. Cruz and her homework, flattered, as always, to be the subject of a young woman’s scrutiny. Even a young woman wearing a bright yellow kitty-cat barrette.

“I followed the Pharaoh case pretty closely,” Mercedes says. “Young single woman alone and all.”

“Of course.”

The conversation stalls long enough for Elliott to make his move. “Well,” he says, “I’ll leave you two to iron out the details. Once again, nice to meet you, Ms. Cruz. Always a pleasure to work with our friends in the Hispanic community.”

Elliott departs, leaving Paris and Ms. Cruz awkwardly standing face-to-face.

“So,” Paris says, leading Mercedes Cruz into his office. “When would you like to get started?”

“How about right now?”

“Well, I’ve got a lot of reading to do at the moment. Nothing too exciting, I’m afraid.”

“That’s okay,” she says. “I’m interested in every aspect of a homicide investigation.”

Paris thinks: Is she going to watch me read?

It appears so.

Mercedes Cruz drops her bag on the floor, positions her chair in the corner of Paris’s paper-besieged office, and sits down, her spiral-bound stenographer’s notebook on her lap, her pen at the ready. Paris notices that the cover of the notebook is festooned with an elaborate rendering of blue and red concentric hearts drawn with a ballpoint pen. A schoolgirl’s day-dream.

And it’s only Day One, Paris thinks.

“Just go about your business, detective,” Mercedes says, adjusting the kitten on her head. “You won’t even know I’m here.”

The noise level is astonishing.

As a veteran of an urban police force, he has, of course, been privy to a great many scenarios of audio overload. From automatic weapon fire on the range, to the sound of a dozen crackheads in a two-bedroom house all yelling at the same time, to the tremendous thunder of a five-unit pursuit up an alley, code three. He had even chased a suspect through the crowd at a ZZ Top concert at Public Hall once. There were moments during that madhouse scene when it sounded like he was on a runway at Hopkins airport, standing under the wing of a 747.

But there is nothing, Paris has to admit as he steps into his ex-wife’s apartment on Shaker Square, nothing in the world quite as loud as the wall of noise produced by a half-dozen eleven-year-old girls at a pajama party.