will always be, the smartest woman he has ever known.
She is content now, he thinks, nearly seventy-four years of age, still on her own, still a force at gin rummy. Still a force at gin gimlets, too. Two of them at lunch every day with her bingo cronies Millie and Claire. Followed by her nap.
He moves the space heater a safe distance from the couch and sits at the rolltop desk. The bills, as always, are neatly pigeonholed on the right side. He pays them. It is a monthly ritual for the two of them, one that has proceeded like clockwork for the past few years or so. At first, his mother would drift off to the bedroom when he paid her bills, ashamed that she could no longer work even part time. Sometimes, she would busy herself in the kitchen, and somehow, in the space of twenty minutes, produce a dish of baked ziti or linguine with calamari.
Now she just sleeps through it.
When he finishes, he closes the desk, then crosses the living room to the small Pullman kitchen. He takes the sandwich that is always on the top shelf of the fridge, wrapped in Saran Wrap, a pickle on the side.
Should he wake her? No, he decides. Let her sleep. She will know that he has been here.
She always does.
He puts on his coat, stands at the door, surveys the apartment: the old waterfall furniture; the shabby armchair that he had once, as a six-year-old, accidentally wet during an old horror movie on TV; the oval braided area rug she’d had for so many years that it was no longer possible to replace; his academy graduation photos on the mantel.
Jack Paris opens the door, steps through, closes it behind him, checks the lock.
Merry Christmas, Mom, he thinks as he wraps his scarf around his neck, a Casa di Gabriella hand-knitted special.
Merry Christmas.
The houses on this small section of Denison Avenue, near Brookside Park, are a collage of Eisenhower bungalows, paint-blistered pastels of powder blue, sea foam green, buttercup yellow, all washed gray by the impending dusk, the winter drizzle. Paris is parked at the curb, heater chugging, oldies station on low.
After leaving his mother’s apartment, he had spent the remainder of the afternoon canvassing a three-block circle around the Dream-A-Dream Motel. No one at any of the half-dozen bars had seen anyone running from the motel with a dripping butcher knife in the middle of the night, it seems. In the end Paris had interviewed three dozen bleary-eyed men and collected the expected: shrugs, urban apathy, temporary amnesia. Hear no evil, see even less.
He now sits in his car on Denison Avenue, the front seat covered in police reports, all from Michael Ryan’s murder book. He had signed them out, not really certain what he is looking for. An earlier connection between Sarah Weiss and Mike Ryan? A disgruntled cop on the inside who lost his cut of the ten grand?
A little yellow car?
Paris had taken Sarah Weiss’s acquittal much harder than usual. He had put so much of himself on the line during the investigation. No cop likes letting a killer off. But when it’s a cop-killer, there is a piece of every police officer that never forgets.
There was alcohol in Michael’s system that night, but it was nowhere near the limit. There was also trace evidence of an extremely powerful hallucinogen. Traces of the hallucinogen were also found in a flask that was inside the killer’s bag. The record shows that Michael was officially off-duty when he was murdered.
According to the defense, Michael was an alcoholic, drugged-up detective who sold confidential police files for ten thousand dollars to fuel his vile habits. According to the defense, Mike Ryan was a very bad cop who got precisely what he had coming.
To this day, Paris refuses to believe it.
Before leaving the Justice Center for the day, Paris had called Dolores Ryan and asked if she still had Michael’s papers: financial records, notebooks, and the like. She said everything was in storage. Dolores also said that Paris was welcome to all of it, without, mercifully, asking him why. Mercifully, because he couldn’t give her an answer if he tried.
Paris turns off the engine, but before he can exit the car, his cell phone rings. “Paris.”
Loud music. Ice cubes in glasses. The drone of roadhouse chatter. “Hi, it’s Mercedes, can you hear me okay?”
“Just fine.”
“Am I catching you at a bad time?”
“Not at all,” Paris says. “Where are you, Atlantic City?”
“I’m at Deadlines.”
Paris knows the place. A venerated old Cleveland tavern favored by journalists. “So what’s up?”
“Well, at the moment, there is a fabulously handsome, ethnically diverse male sitting right next to me, trying to ply me with fruity cocktails.”
Paris smiles. “How’s he doing?”
“Lemme look.” Mercedes is silent for a moment. “Still have my shoes on. Not that well, I guess.”
“It’s still early.”
“Es verdad.”
“So what can I do for you?”
“What do you mean?”
“As in, the reason you called?”
“Oh yeah. Right. Sorry. Listen. I’m going to need a photograph or two of you for the article, but the paper is too friggin’ cheap to hire a second photographer. At least for my stuff, anyway. I left a message for my brother Julian, who is a really good photographer, if he would just get off his ass and do something about it, but that’s another story, okay? Sorry. Anyway, it’s a million to one shot that he’ll show up, which means that me and my PowerShot might have to do, but if you see a cute guy with a camera hanging around, don’t get scared, okay?”
“Thanks for the heads-up.”
“No problem.”
Paris asks Mercedes if she needs a designated driver. She declines. Paris signs off, crosses Denison Avenue, considers walking up the long wheelchair ramp, the sturdy-looking U-shaped structure made out of two-by-sixes and rusting bolts.
Too icy, he thinks. For a man of my advanced years.
So, holding firmly onto the wrought-iron railing, Jack Paris climbs the narrow stone steps to Dolores Ryan’s house.
She looks thin and blanched, a breakable husk of the brunette bombshell to whom Michael Ryan had introduced him one night at the Caprice Lounge; a night now entombed almost twenty years in his memory. That night, Dusty Alessio had the attention of every man in the place, including a woefully young John Salvatore Paris.
Now her hazel eyes are cloudy, veined, tired. Her hair, touched with silver. She wears old denim jeans, threadbare espadrilles, a faded maroon Ohio State University sweatshirt.
They are sitting in the small tidy living room, across from each other, coffee between. In the corner, next to the muted TV, squats a large, artificial Christmas tree, its heirloom ornaments placed haphazardly, hurriedly.
Dolores points at his coffee, asks: “You want something else?”
“No. No thanks.”
“You want something in it?”
“I’m good, Dusty.”
The old nickname makes her smile, blush deeply, run a hand through her hair. “No one calls me that anymore.”
“That’s the first name I heard and I’m stickin’ with it,” Paris says.
“You know where that nickname came from?”
“No.”
“I got it from Michael, the day I met him. Michael was going to Padua High School. I was going to Nazareth. I was sixteen. Sixteen, can you imagine?”
Paris sees the color start to rise in Dolores’s cheeks, the flush of a woman recalling the day she met the love of her life. “I can,” he says.
