Don't Look Now (21 page)

‘The stuff from his apartment too?’

Nick just nodded. The two of them were quiet for a while, the tick of the wall clock the only sound in the room. Finally, Nick spoke.

‘Tommy didn’t do it. You know that, don’t you?’

Paris didn’t know what to say. He said what he thought he should. ‘I know.’

‘I’m not going to tell you he was squeaky clean. I don’t have that sixty-inch TV in the basement or that big Buick in the drive because of my IRAs, eh? He took care of me, Jack. He took care of his sister.’

‘I know, Nick,’ Paris said. ‘But it’s—’

‘But what?’

Paris met Nick Raposo’s eyes and found a deeply wounded man there. ‘The case is closed, Nick. I’m afraid everybody wants it that way.’

‘Not everyone.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘But you can do something about it, no? You can still ask questions, can’t you? You can still ask around.’

Paris realized then that he was talking to a man who still believed in a fundamental order to things. A man who still clung to the notion that if you play fair you always win. But Paris also knew that the reason he was in Nick Raposo’s house in the first place was because he also knew something was wrong. He simply couldn’t shake the notion that the Pharaoh case – as it had come to be known – had closed a little too quickly with Tommy’s death.

‘Everything I do I gotta do on my own,’ Paris said. ‘After hours, off the meter. You know that, right? I push too hard somewhere, hit the wrong buttons, I’m back handing out parking-tickets in Hough.’

Nick nodded in understanding. Then he looked deeply into Paris’s eyes and said, softly: ‘Clear my son, Jack.’

The basement was cool and orderly. On one side was a large TV and sofa. On the other, a tradesman’s refuge. There was a wall of tools, along with a workbench, smooth and worn and black with years of spilled 3 in 1 oil.

The small room off the main reflected the systematic habits of the son. White boxes were stacked floor to ceiling, wall to wall. They were mostly the kind which store legal papers. All were all precisely labelled in green block letters. It did not take Paris long to find the box containing Tommy’s personal papers.

On top was a stack of Playbills, mostly from the Palace or State theaters, mostly musicals:
Les Misérables, Wicked, The Jersey Boys
. Beneath them were postcards from what had to be a hundred different women. Crystal and Denise, Jackie, Barbara, Peggy, Lydia, Sarah, Junie and Annette. At least a dozen were signed, simply, ‘me’.

He picked up a plain white business envelope, open at the top, jammed full of photographs of various sizes and vintages. There was a pair of Tommy and his sister in Atlantic City, a few with his mother and father at his police-academy graduation, Tommy with girl after girl after girl. There was Tommy with cops, Tommy with citizens, Tommy with crooks.

Next there was a layer of softbound books, textbooks from the feel of them. Paris lifted out three or four.
Leisures and Pleasures of Roman Egypt. A Handbook of the Ancients. Arabian Nights
. They looked like they had been opened, but not necessarily pored over for any great length of time.

At the very bottom of the box was a series of maps and travel brochures, along with a nine-by-twelve-inch brown kraft envelope that was clasped and sealed. Paris flipped it over and saw the familiar rooster scrawl of Tommy’s signature over the seal. It appeared that Tommy had signed the envelope in black ink, right over the flap, so that if anyone ever tried to steam it open and then reclose it he would know. It took Paris all of five seconds to decide to tear off the top. He coughed as he did it to mask the sound of ripping paper, lest Nick think he was doing exactly what he
was
doing: destroying evidence. If evidence is what it turned out to be. He folded the pieces of the envelope into quarters, placed the pieces in his pockets and looked at the contents.

The only thing in the large envelope was a banded stack of photographs. Both sides of the stack of photographs faced inward.

The appearance of the envelope and the feel of the photographs filled Paris with apprehension. What didn’t Tommy want him to see? What secrets? What was he going to find on the other side of these seemingly benign white cardboard rectangles?

And yet, Paris thought, if Tommy knew he was going to kill himself, why didn’t he just destroy them?

Paris glanced around the corner, up the yellow-and-gray-linoleum-clad steps. He could hear Nick making kitchen sounds, preparing another espresso for them.

‘You need any help up there, Nick?’

‘No,’ Nick said. ‘I’m okay.’

‘You sure?’

‘I can still make a cup of coffee, eh?’

Paris walked to the far end of the workshop and stood directly beneath the fluorescent swag lamp. He removed the rubber bands from the stack, and as soon as he flipped over the top photo, he realized that his vigilance had been warranted after all.

The top photograph was of a woman in S&M leather drag, her back to the camera, kneeling at the foot of a bed. It was taken in a standard motel room, with no regional clues in the decor. The bedspread looked to be dark green or dark blue. The woman’s body was perfect, her waist was thin, her hips rounded and smooth. Her leather bustier crossed her back in a spiderweb of thin lines that seemed to cut deeply into her flesh.

The second photograph showed a side shot of the woman from the waist up. She had the flushed look of a woman fresh from lovemaking, but her face was once again turned away. Of the ten photographs, only one showed any degree of the woman’s face, but even that shot was a profile, and she wore a thin, black-lace mask over her eyes.

There was one photograph taken outdoors, in a wooded area, a side shot of the woman with her white camisole pulled to her waist, her hands bound to a tree with what looked like electrical cord.

Tommy was not to be found in any of the pictures.

Paris turned the photographs over, one by one, looking for any writing that might have been on the backs. There was a faint pencil mark on one, something like a check mark, but nothing decipherable. He was about to flip two at a time when something caught his eye, and he had to go back a few. There, written in pencil at the bottom right-hand corner, printed in a rather childlike manner, were three words. It looked like: ‘Saila does qualify’.

Saila does qualify?

What the hell did
that
mean?

Paris looked around for some sort of magnifying glass and saw that Nick had a swing-arm magnifier attached to a small table against the wall. Paris switched on the light and ran the photograph beneath the glass.

‘Saila does
quality
,’ he corrected himself immediately. And who the hell is Saila? And quality what?

He turned over the photo with the writing and found that it was the one picture that didn’t seem to be of anyone or anything in particular. It was a photograph of a slightly opened closet door, with just the hint of something that looked like a white shoe – a white high-heeled shoe, maybe – visible at the bottom.

Paris placed the photos into his pocket, and searched the remaining boxes, finding little else of relevance, if any of this was indeed relevant. Certainly nothing to match the impact of the photographs. There were, to Paris’s surprise and dismay, no financial records of any kind.

‘You want this down there?’ Nick asked, calling from the top of the steps.

‘No, I’m coming up,’ Paris said. ‘I’m finished.’

‘Okay. Don’t forget to close the light.’

Close
the light, Paris thought, smiling. Was it just Italians, or did other people say
close
the light? His own grandfather, Angelo Parisi, who had somehow managed to lose the i on the end of his name in the noise and confusion of Ellis Island, had said
close the light
.

Although it was past the middle of April, winter still roamed the streets of Cleveland. When Paris had driven to Garfield Heights, the sky had dusted the city with a light powdering of snow. Now there was blinding sunlight. Paris headed into town up I-77, getting off at the Broadway exit. He came to a stop at a red light, directly in front of the entrance to the old McCrory’s five-and-dime.

Saila does quality
.

He held the photograph up to the sunlight. It had been perched on the front seat beside him since he left Nick’s house, taunting him, begging his glance at every stop light. This one was a low-angle, dominatrix-type shot of the woman.

Saila does quality
.

I’ll bet she does, thought Paris, wondering about the where, the who, the what, the why and the when of it all. Who
was
this woman? Where did she come from? Why did he have a nude photograph of her in his hand? When did she—

The man who suddenly appeared at his window and the sound of the car horn from behind him registered at the same instant.

It was the hulking gray shadow to his immediate left that unnerved him more.

Paris turned quickly and saw that it was a homeless man, part of the Broadway squeegee brigade. It looked as if the man had come over to approach Paris about a quick wipe job, but he must have seen the photograph in Paris’s hand decided to just enjoy the view. As Paris pulled away he looked in the side mirror and saw the man shake a finger at him and display a wide, toothless smile.

Quality
, he thought as he cut the engine.

How about ‘quality’ as in Quality
Inn
?

Emily Reinhardt had been killed at the Quality Inn.

‘Sorry about your friend,’ she said.

‘Thanks,’ Paris replied. ‘But it’s not like, I don’t know like I can say I
knew
him now, you know? It’s still pretty hard to believe.’ Paris sipped his coffee. ‘My
friend
.’

John Q’s was jammed with the lunch crowd, the impending spring giving license to everyone to speak a little more loudly, a little more animatedly than they had all winter. On this day, for Jack Paris, it was just an annoying wall of noise.

But Rita the Barmaid had left a rather urgent-sounding message on his voice mail and said that she would be at
this
table, at
this
restaurant, at
this
time, and if he wanted to talk …

He knew exactly what was on her mind.

‘I’m afraid I was as fooled as everyone else,’ he said.

‘You don’t sound too convinced, if you ask me.’ Rita gave her hair a quick toss over her shoulder and bit into her sandwich. As she continued to speak, Paris noticed a drop of mayonnaise that had made its way on to her chin. He was going to point it out to her but he already knew enough about Rita Weisinger to wait until she had made her point. ‘I guess what I’m trying to say is, that’s not the guy. The guy in the picture that was in the newspaper and on TV? The cop they say did it? Tommy …’

‘Raposo.’

‘Raposo,’ she said, rolling the r. ‘Anyway, I don’t know how to put this. It’s just not the guy I saw with the Burchfield woman. Definitely not.’ She paused, placing her sandwich on her plate, waiting for Paris’s reaction to this case-breaking bit of evidence.

‘I know,’ Paris said. He absently waved his finger near his mouth, hoping Rita would catch the vibe and wipe her chin. After a few beats of silence, she did.

‘You
know
?’

‘Yes.’

‘How?’

‘Well, number one, why else would you ask an old flatfoot like me out to lunch unless you had something you wanted to add to the Pharaoh case? And two, if you look at it with any objectivity, the sketch doesn’t look like Tommy. It could be him, but it could also be a hundred thousand other guys in this city.’

‘Exactly.’

‘But the bad news is that all the evidence was there, Rita. It was way too pat for me but it was still a grand jury’s wet dream. The hat had bloodstains tied to two of the victims. The make-up kit was found in the trunk of his car. And the patches of skin, for God’s sake.’

‘I don’t know. It just isn’t in your friend’s
eyes
, you know? I mean, I can tell a lot from looking into a man’s eyes. And even in that shitty photo they published in the newspaper, I could tell.’

‘Well, the case is frozen shut. Captain Elliott is happy, the prosecutor’s office is happy. Tommy Raposo was this unknown, up from Summit County four months ago, nobody really knew him well. A real department outsider.’

Rita shook her head, new to the machinations of institutional politics. She asked a few more why-not-and how-come-there-isn’t-type questions as they finished their lunch. Halfway through coffee, Rita waved for the check.

‘So, what are you going to do?’ she asked.

‘Now? Well, I’m going to go back to work, Rita. I’ve got three unsolveds on my plate and I have no partner,’ Paris said. ‘Anything I do about the Pharaoh case is going to be off the meter. And probably very stupid. Not to mention a huge waste of time.’

Rita looked at her watch, stood up to leave. ‘Well, if you need any help with any after-hours sleuthing, you let me know. I’m really good when it comes to these sorts of things.’ She reached into her purse and dropped a pair of twenties on the table. Then, anticipating his reaction, held up a hand to deflect Paris’s protest about her paying the check. ‘By the way, this is the last time I’m going to fling myself at you like a wanton woman. Ball’s in your court, officer.’ She swung her bag over her shoulder, the early afternoon sunlight rushing through the windows, painting her hair with highlights of gold.

‘And me with this wicked forehand,’ Paris said, surprised at his burst of wit, his sports reference. He had never played a game of tennis in his life.

Rita leaned forward, kissed him on the cheek, then smiled as she thumbed away the lipstick. ‘Call me.’

She turned, left the restaurant, trailing a long wake of rubber-necking men – young, old, and those of Jack Paris’s rather ill-defined vintage: somewhere in between.

The Homicide Unit was beginning to recover from the media blitz that began about twenty minutes after Tommy’s body hit the freezer and didn’t even begin to abate until two weeks later. But now, despite the best efforts of the tabloids, the cop-haters and the loyal political opposition, the story was being eclipsed by other, more pressing problems facing the Best Location in the Nation. The Unit averaged about eighteen homicides per month and usually maintained no more than twenty detectives at any given time. So, given the average daily shitfall in a city like Cleveland, the shitstorm eventually passed.