Don't Look Now (14 page)

Tim Murdock, Paris thought. ‘What cop?’

‘Big guy? Smells like a warm day at the animal shelter?’

‘Murdock.’

‘Right. He asked me a lot of questions about you.’

‘Yeah, well, it’s just routine, Rita,’ Paris said. ‘There
was
a murder after all and I
was
there. He’s just doing his job.’

‘Well, I had to tell him the truth, you know? Like how you were in the bar with her, then she left, then you left for a while, then you came back, but she didn’t. Doesn’t
look
good for you. But I still don’t think you did it.’

‘Gee thanks,’ Paris said, hoping she was kidding.

‘But it freaks me completely the hell out. At the fucking
Radisson
.’ She brought her hand up to her mouth. ‘Sorry. I keep swearing around you. Not very ladylike.’

‘It’s okay. This is a police station, it’s mandatory to say that word a hundred times a day here or we all lose our jobs.’

‘I’ve never even seen a
fist-fight
at the place,’ she said with a nervous flip of her hair. ‘Cheese Louise. It could’ve been
me
.’

‘I don’t want to alarm you, but I would keep an extra cautious eye out until we catch this guy. If he saw me talking to her, he saw me talking to you. Now if you like, I can have a patrol car drive by your place every few hours.’

‘I’m on the twentieth floor at Fenton Place on Lakeshore. Unless they drove down the hallway, I don’t think it would help.’

Paris smiled. ‘Okay.’

‘I grew up with five brothers, Jack. I’ve kicked
much
ass in my life.’ She put on her jacket, rescued her hair from beneath the collar, opened the door and stepped into the hall. ‘I can take care of myself, eh?’ She blew him a kiss. ‘But thanks for worrying about me. It’s sweet, you know?’

‘No charge,’ Paris said. ‘Let me ask you one more thing.’

‘Sure.’

‘Have you ever heard of something called the Rose of Jericho?’

‘Rose of Jericho …’ she said, thinking. ‘Sounds like grandma perfume. Like Jungle Gardenia. Is it?’

‘I have no idea,’ Paris said, having run it through the police databases and come up empty.

‘Well, don’t be a stranger, okay?’ Rita said, shaking a finger at him. ‘Gotta run. See you.’ She turned on her heels and was gone.

And as Paris listened to her footsteps head down the hall – the unmistakable gait of a young woman – it touched him with sadness.

Or perhaps it was just nostalgia.

Rita sounded a lot like Beth had at her age, and it made Jack Paris miss his family all the more.

‘What can I tell you? It was a profoundly moving experience.’

‘For who?’ Paris replied into the phone.

‘For her,’ Tommy said. ‘For me it was just another mission, of course.’

‘Gonna give me details later?’

‘Only if you can stand them.’

Paris looked at the doodle he had unconsciously been drawing for the past ten minutes. Considering his lack of sleep and level of frustration, he was not at all surprised to see that he had rendered a fairly passable sketch of an Irish walking-hat on his paper blotter. ‘Where are you?’ Paris asked.

‘Across the bridge. West Side Market.’

‘Listen, two things. One, we’re probably going to have a better sketch by the end of the day. The barmaid from the Radisson just left.’

‘Weissman?’

‘Weisinger,’ Paris said. ‘Rita Weisinger.’

‘Weisinger,’ Tommy echoed. ‘What’d she say?’

‘Said she didn’t get that close to him, but maybe she was able to fill in a feature or two.’

‘Think she could ID him?’

‘Not sure,’ Paris said. ‘And there’s even better news from Reuben.’

‘What’s that?’

‘He found our boy’s phony mustache.’

‘What? The mustache is phony?’

‘Yeah. It was tangled up in Karen Schallert’s hair. Can you believe it? Reuben says there may be something we can work with on the mesh backing. The mustache was applied with spirit gum, and something like that yields trace evidence.’

‘Fuckin’ Reuben, huh?’

‘Why don’t you follow up the two west-side guys from Karen Schallert’s wallet,’ Paris said. ‘And I’ll take the guys in the Heights. The doctor and the other one.’

Silence.

‘Tommy?’

‘Okay …’

‘And if you want we can—’

‘… kick
yat
.’

‘What?’

Paris heard a bus pass Tommy’s location.

‘Said I’ll see you later,’ Tommy replied.

‘I didn’t—’ Paris began, but he already had silence.

SAMANTHA HAD SEEN
the man in the store three or four times in the past year, but she had never had the courage to wait on him. Mr Hendershott had always taken care of him while she straightened merchandise on the other side of the room, peeking around the rows of aerosol cans and plastic tubs of blue and pink and yellow gel. She never seemed to be able to muster the necessary fortitude to walk across the store and actually speak to him.

Although she
had
wanted to.

Because he was one of the handsomest men she had ever seen.

Every other Wednesday Mr Hendershott took a three-hour lunch so he could see his acupuncturist about his back pains, and Samantha was left alone to hold the fort at Allied Salon Products on West Forty-fourth Street. This had been the routine for eleven years. So, on this particular Wednesday, when the bell on the door jingled and Samantha looked up, she nearly fainted.

‘Hello,’ the man said. He wore a dark overcoat and a tweed hat.

Samantha clutched the hem of her dress as the man smiled, doubling her anxiety, and walked to the other side of the store. He stopped by the color rinses. Samantha swallowed once, brushed her hair from her forehead and charged across the store.

‘However, if it’s important that it washes right out, you want the EZ Color line,’ Samantha said for what she was hoping was no more than the fifth or sixth time. ‘Otherwise it takes two or three weeks of washing your hair to get it out.’

‘This
is
a community theater group,’ the man said, holding a pair of EZ Color boxes with ‘deep chestnut’ written on the side. ‘Almost all of us have day jobs and it’s important that we all show up for work looking like we did the day before, if you know what I mean.’

‘What play are you putting on?’

‘We’re doing
Guys and Dolls
this year.’

‘That’s one of my
favorites
!’ Samantha said, a little too loudly. She had seen the revival twice when the touring company had stopped at the State Theater the previous winter. ‘Who do you play?’

‘Why, Sky Masterson, ma’am,’ he said with a slight New York accent, a touch of his brim and a smile.

‘I
knew
it,’ she said. An awkward silence passed. Samantha tried to fill it. ‘Well, will there be anything else today?’

‘Mr Hendershott showed me something once. I believe it was a display rack called the Penrod Collection.’

‘The Penrod Collection,’ Samantha mused, trying to put a product to the name.

‘Yes, it was in the men’s grooming section.’

‘Mustaches!’ Samantha said with the zeal of an amateur sleuth finding the key clue to an unsolved murder. ‘Of course. For the
play
!’ She walked behind the counter, through the curtains and into the back room. She soon emerged with a dusty two-foot-by-two-foot display card of real-hair mustaches on fine-mesh backing.

Samantha knew the mustaches were priced at fifty dollars, but they had been lying around the store for so long that she felt it would be ridiculous to charge such a sum. Impulsively, amazed at her temerity, she said, ‘Pick any one you want. On the house.’

‘Oh I couldn’t.’

‘I insist,’ Samantha said, not really knowing what had come over her, or what she’d tell Mr Hendershott if he ever found out. ‘Special for our good customers.’

After a little more prodding the man said he would take Samantha up on her most gracious offer. But only if she agreed to have lunch with him sometime in the near future.

After ringing up the purchase, Samantha scrawled her name, address and home phone number on the back of an Allied card. All she would remember later that night was the man’s smile.

And his movie-star eyes.

WHEN PARIS WALKED
into the Stone Oven café on Lee Road, and saw her sitting near the front windows with her legs crossed, her auburn hair down around her shoulders, he almost didn’t recognize her.

Those
legs
.

Cyndy Taggart’s dress was spectacularly short.

‘You look great,’ Paris said.

‘In this old thing?’ she replied, smiling. ‘I just throw this on when I couldn’t care less
what
I look like.’ Her dress was a black knit and she wore a small silver crucifix on a chain around her neck. She had on dark stockings.

Cyndy stood up and straightened her hem – which seemed determined to stay about mid-thigh no matter what she did – and in her high heels she was nearly as tall as Paris, who strained to make five eleven on a good day.

‘Where to first?’ she asked.

There were five hotels close to I-271 and the dozens of corporate headquarters that line Chagrin Boulevard. Four had lounges.

‘Let’s go to the Impulse,’ Paris said.

‘Oooh, the
Impulse
,’ Cyndy said. ‘Just don’t know what a girl might do at a place like that. I may not be responsible for my actions, Detective Paris.’ She walked ahead of Paris, out the back door and across the parking-lot, purposefully swinging her hips in a wide arc, her spike heels clicking loudly on the asphalt. She stopped, opened Paris’s car door, turned and said, ‘Too much caboose?’

‘Not for me,’ Paris replied, laughing. ‘Not for me.’

The Impulse was the lounge in the Embassy Suites Hotel on Mission Parkway, one of the commercial-park ingress routes. It was decorated in an art deco style with a lot of banquette tables, stained glass, indirect pink and white lighting and an elevated dance-floor against the back wall of the huge rectangular room. There were two bars. The music was mostly techno-house, provided by a deejay who was ensconced in a raised smoked-glass cubicle behind the back bar.

According to the placard in the lobby, Wednesday night was Ladies’ Night at the Impulse and, at ten-thirty, the place was hopping.

Cyndy had gone in first, and as Paris leaned against one of the brass railings, next to a long line of banquettes, he scanned the room and found Cyndy sitting at the front bar, stirring what looked like a Screwdriver but was really just orange juice. They made eye contact, setting their positions.

Although Cyndy was an attractive woman, from that distance, Paris thought, in those clothes, she looked like a knockout. He tried to recall Cyndy Taggart’s marital status.

‘Can I get you something?’ one of the barmaids yelled to him over the music. She was tall and spidery and sported a white shirt and lemon-yellow bow tie.

Paris had to think about it. He had never had to come up with a non-alcoholic choice in a bar before. For a few moments, his mind went blank. He couldn’t even recall what he liked. ‘Do you have ice tea?’

‘Long Island ice tea?’

‘No, regular ice tea.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Let me have a Coke then. With a swizzle stick.’

‘Pepsi all right?’

‘Pepsi’s fine,’ Paris said.

She wrote down his order, and began to weave her way toward the bar.

Paris smoothed the sleeves of his blazer, a navy blue Armani he had borrowed from Tommy a few months earlier when they had hit the Warehouse District bars one night. Paris had never been one to spend a lot of money on clothes – he figured the jacket had cost northward of a thousand dollars – but standing here, feeling the luxurious texture of the fabric, he understood for the first time difference between buying cheap, and buying a designer label. He had to admit, he felt good.

‘Nice jacket.’

The woman’s voice came from his left. It didn’t sound like Cyndy. He turned around and found that it wasn’t. The compliment came from a shapely, well-dressed woman in her mid- to late-twenties. She had wild, curly blond hair, full red lips, and was leaning against a banquette, holding a drink that may have been a Brandy Alexander.

Her smile gave way to dimples at either side.

‘Thanks,’ Paris said. He glanced over at Cyndy. She was talking to a short black man in a three-piece suit. Paris turned his attention back to the blonde, already wishing he had a cold Budweiser in his hand at the very least. ‘But I must confess, I borrowed it for the evening.’

The blonde nodded in understanding and sipped her drink through the straw. ‘It looks good on you,’ she said. ‘You have nice friends.’

‘You really think so?’ Paris said, standing up a little straighter, throwing his shoulders back.

‘Oh absolutely. Turn around for me.’

Paris turned around slowly, feeling a little stupid. By the time he had turned 360, the woman was smiling broadly.

‘Definitely
L’Uomo
.’

Paris smiled, having no idea if that was a compliment or not. The deejay kicked into an upbeat song.

‘You dance?’ the woman asked, already swaying to the beat.

Paris’s heart immediately doubled its rate. ‘To this?’ He hadn’t been to a bar where there was dancing in so long that he had forgotten the abject horror lodged in the notion of fast-dancing in front of people. Sober, no less. In his time as a patrolman, he once stared down a gang-banger who was jacked up on PCP and twirling a Mauser .380 on his index finger. Didn’t bat an eye. Fast-dancing in front of total strangers scared the shit out of him ‘Maybe the next one.’

The blonde smiled and stepped closer. ‘Not a dancer?’

Her perfume was deliriously sexy. ‘I’m more of a slow dancer, I guess.’

‘My favorite kind.’ She stepped even closer, and as she did, she glanced to her left for what Paris imagined to be the third or fourth time. After a few moments, Paris looked in that direction and caught the glance of a man standing near one of the emergency exits. The man was in his thirties, brown hair, conservatively dressed.

When Paris made eye contact, the man looked away.