within her little-girl horizon-and how very much like her mother she looks.
Global Security Systems the sign on the side of the van proclaims in sleek euro-style letters. The two men working on the locks to the front doors of the Cain Manor apartments hardly look like global systems analysts, but, nonetheless, I have to figure them capable at the very least.
New locks. A problem. My key to Cain Manor came from a duplicate I had cut from a wax pressing, a pressing I made while helping an elderly lady with her groceries a year or so ago.
But why new locks today?
Might it have something to do with a body being discovered in Cain Park?
Regardless, I do not have time to press a new key. I pull the Yellow Pages from the backseat. Cleveland Retail Supply on Chester Avenue. Problem solved.
I will pay them a visit today on my way to Jack Paris’s apartment.
Earlier this morning, before Paris had met up with the reporter and driven out to Babbitt Road, while I was well within range of his car and my wireless transmitter, he had been on the phone with his commanding officer and was kind enough to give me his precise itinerary for the day.
It seems we both have much to do.
I swing the car onto Euclid Heights Boulevard and head for the city. Later, after making my purchase at the retail supply house, I believe I’ll make a brief stop at Ronnie’s Famous Louisiana Fry Cakes on Hough Avenue.
I hear the beignets are very good.
53
In his career on the street, Arthur Galt was known as a man without fear. A cop who would push other cops out of the way to get to the door, a First District legend who never took a dime and, in spite of a dozen incidents in his twenty-odd years with the CPD, never had a bad shoot.
But now, over the phone at least, he sounds like a man who has settled quite comfortably into the baronial life of country constable. Arthur Galt is the very popular, very connected chief of police in Russell Township.
The two men get their pleasantries out of the way and get to business.
“This is ongoing, Jack,” Galt says, a chief’s cautionary tone lying right on the surface.
“I understand,” Paris says.
“We’ve got a couple of witnesses who now say they saw Sarah Weiss at the Gamekeeper’s Taverne earlier that evening.”
“Alone?”
“No. These two guys who work at the treatment plant in Chagrin Falls say that they both did their duty by hitting on Sarah Weiss early in the evening, but were shined on. They said later in the night, she gave some time to a corporate type in a dark business suit, who left after a half hour or so. But even later in the evening, they said, she spent at least a couple hours talking to a woman. A real looker they said. Redhead, although, according to these guys, it looked like a wig. She says the two women left together.”
“Who reported the yellow car on the hill?”
“A woman named Marilyn Prescott. Her house is about a hundred feet from a clearing that looks right onto the hill. She said it was a full moon that night and she could clearly see the two cars parked there around eleven- thirty. She said she then went to bed, woke up an hour later when she heard the gas tank explode. I’ve already checked to see if the moon really was full that night.”
“And?”
“It was.”
Paris processes the information. “Do you have a sketch of the business type or the redheaded woman?”
“Nothing yet. We’re still canvassing on this, Jack. It’s still officially a suicide.”
“They left the bar together…”
“Yeah,” Galt says. “These two guys wrote them off as gay, of course. They work at a fuckin’ sewage treatment plant and neither of ’em could figure out any other reason as to why they were shut down.”
St. John the Evangelist, the imposing cathedral on East Ninth Street and Superior Avenue, is nearly empty at this hour, with just a handful of widely spaced penitents in the afternoon gloom. Paris walks through the vestibule, steps inside. The echo of his footsteps in the enormous church recalls the other times of his life, the times that being a Catholic had been important to him, the times that seemed to elate and frighten and entrance him all at once, the times during which he had leaned on his faith for strength.
But that all changed on his third night as a police officer. All of that changed the night he saw three young children-ages four, five, and six-blasted apart with a shotgun in a stifling third-floor apartment on Sonora Avenue. Besides the torn flesh and the sea of gore, Paris’s lingering memory-the remembrance that has led him to deny a benevolent God for so many years-was the Etch-A-Sketch he had seen, still clutched in the hands of the four-year- old; the Etch-A-Sketch sheened with blood that had borne the half-drawn Happy Birthday Daddy!
It was the little girl’s father, insane with seventy-two hours of methamphetamine and fortified wine, who had placed the barrel against her head and pulled the trigger.
No. No God would allow this to happen, he had thought at the time, and it has been that conviction that has shielded his heart and mind and memory from the abundance of horrors he had witnessed since.
Until today. For some reason, the need has returned.
He selects an empty pew.
Mercedes Cruz, nearing her deadline, had gone home to write the first draft of her story, having argued with Paris for nearly an hour about the possibility of accompanying the task force on the raid later that night. It is, of course, entirely out of the question. But still she pressured him. In the end, Paris had said that he would call her later that night, regardless of the time, and give her an exclusive. It wasn’t what she was lobbying for, but it was the best he could do.
And then there is the image of Evangelina Cruz, covered in blood and feathers.
Paris thinks about the ceremony in Evangelina Cruz’s basement, how foreign and violent and pagan it seemed. But Catholicism certainly has its rituals, he concedes, looking around him. Odd-seeming ceremonies that people of other faiths might find bizarre.
Willis Walker. Fayette Martin. Isaac and Edith Levertov.
Mike Ryan.
Sarah Weiss.
What am I doing in St. John’s after all this time?
He leans forward, kneels. Automatically, his hands find each other, a loose tenting of fingers, a long unutilized mainstay of his Catholic upbringing.
Am I praying?
Yes, he thinks. I am. After all these years I am praying again. I am praying for every Fayette Martin out there. I am praying for Melissa. I am praying for all the little girls who will one day grow up, dress like a woman, and say yes to a man with sorcery in his smile.
Dolores Ryan’s outgoing phone message had stated that she and her daughter Carrie would be out of town for the New Year’s holiday, and to please call them at a Tampa, Florida, number. Not the smartest move, Paris had thought, considering the world as it is these days, but it was common knowledge that the patrols on this stretch of Denison Avenue were a little more frequent in the past few years. Widows of cops killed on the job rarely had to worry about break-ins.
On the other hand, there is no need to advertise. After Paris had called in his location, then made his way around back, through calf-high drifts of snow, he noticed the note pinned to the doorjamb, a note from Dolores to her newspaper carrier, instructing the carrier to put the newspapers into the covered wooden box near the back door: a bright beacon of invitation to any burglar who happens to come by. Paris takes Dolores’s note down, shoves it in his pocket, makes a mental note to call the Plain Dealer circulation department and tell them to tell the carrier.
Then, not without a sliver of guilt, Paris acts like a burglar himself.
He looks three-sixty.
