Kiss of Evil (6 page)

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.

“What’s all this?” Paris asks. They are in one of Beth’s two spare bedrooms, thankfully past their small-talk threshold, having already fulfilled their conversational quota of job-related woes. For brief moments, at times like these, it was as if nothing ever happened to their marriage. Except that Beth is wearing a green velvet cocktail dress. And that she is going out without him.

“Wild, huh?” Beth answers, clipping an earring in place. Her hair is butterscotch, falling softly to her shoulders; her lips, tonight, a soft claret. Now in her mid-thirties, her figure had not changed from that of the young woman he had fallen in love with more than a dozen years earlier. For Jack Paris, Elizabeth Shefler was, and is, the very criterion of beauty.

He studies her for that moment, a little unstuck in time, knowing in his heart that he will never fall in love again. Not like he had with Beth.

“Welcome to command and control,” Beth adds with a smile, clearly recalling the years of cop-talk, mercifully derailing his train of thought.

On the corner desk sits an iMac, ringed with yellow Post-it notes.

“The company paid for it,” Beth continues. “I can do half my work from here now.”

“You’re that good with a computer?”

“They paid for the three-day training, too. I can get around.”

On top of the monitor is something that looks like a small plastic tennis ball with a shiny black dot in the middle. Paris walks over, fiddles with it. He notices that the object is stuck to the top of the monitor with a suction cup.

“Isn’t that neat?” Beth says. “It’s a video camera. We use it for conferencing.”

“Conferencing?”

“Videoconferencing.”

“Sorry,” Paris says. “You know what a Luddite I am.”

Beth joins him at the desk. She hits a few keys, starting a software program called iChat. Then, suddenly, the two of them appear on the monitor screen.

Crazily, Paris feels as if he is walking through Sears, on one of those forays through the electronics department where you stroll by the camcorder display and they let you see how shitty you really look. Except, this was in the privacy of your own, well, wherever you had your computer. Beth’s computer is in her spare bedroom. And thus a million prurient scenarios jog through Jack Paris’s mind. He banishes them. “Wow” is all he can manage.

For a moment, on the screen—a poorly lit shot of the two of them from the waist up—Paris sees his ex-wife as another woman for some peculiar reason, a very attractive stranger standing inches away. He is fascinated by the way the light plays over her breasts, her shoulders, her hair. But he cannot see her face.

And, for some equally peculiar reason, that fact stirs him even more.

“By the way,” Beth says, punching a few keys, killing the image on the screen. “Have you had a chance to get to the safety deposit box?”

Shit
, Paris thinks. He was hoping to milk this one for a while. If she hadn’t asked him this time, it would mean another between-visitation liaison. “This week. I promise.”

“I wouldn’t want anything to happen to it,” Beth adds, speaking of her mother’s wedding ring, a mostly sentimental piece of jewelry that was part of the ever-dwindling residue of their marriage. It had sat in a box at Republic Bank at Severance since the divorce.

“This week,” Paris repeats.

“Thanks.” Beth smiles a smile that reaches Paris’s knees, the one that won his heart. She kisses him on the cheek. “I’ll be back by one.”

A little late for an office Christmas party, isn’t it? Paris thinks. But he says nothing about it. “They’ll all be asleep by then, right?”

Beth laughs. “Sure, Jack.”

“How old are your friends, Missy?” They are in the kitchen, making what has to be their fifth pitcher of iced tea. The noise in the living room has abated for a while, save for the occasional barrage of laughter. Somehow, for Paris, as the father of a near-teenager, the silence was worse.

“My age,” Melissa says. “Jennifer’s twelve, Jessica’s eleven, Mindy’s twelve.”

Twelve
, Paris thinks, retrieving a not-quite-frozen tray of ice cubes from the freezer. One of them looked at least sixteen. Was this how teenage boys saw his daughter? “They’re all in your class at school?”

“Yep,” Melissa replies.

“Some of them look so . . . I don’t know . . .”

“Mature?”

“Yeah. I guess that’s what I mean. Mature.”

“I
know
,” Melissa says. “Jessica’s getting boobs.”

The word hangs in the air for a moment, immobilizing Jack Paris, freezing all ability to function, to think. Boobs. His daughter said
boobs
. What the hell was next? Paris attempts speech. “I hadn’t . . . I mean . . . I didn’t . . . y’know—”

“Can we get pizza?” Melissa asks, sparing him. “Mom says the new guy who delivers for Domino’s is really cute. Everybody wants to see him.”

My God, Paris thinks.
Cute. Boobs. Guys
. One conversation. He feels as if the floor beneath him has suddenly spit out a few nails. He looks at his daughter, at her long mahogany hair, her bright eyes, her still-girlish figure, and wonders how the hell he is going to survive the next ten years of her life.

Luckily, at that moment, somebody’s favorite song comes on the radio in the living room, and Jessica/Jennifer/Mindy turns it up. It is one of the reasons Paris does not hear the phone ring.

The other reason is that the call is coming in on Beth’s second line, the one in the spare bedroom, the one dedicated to the computer’s DSL modem.

As Paris brings the pitcher of iced tea into the living room and looks up the number for Domino’s Pizza, the computer in the bedroom makes a noise, then settles back into a stillness marred only by the occasional
skrit-skrit-skrit
of the hard drive as it downloads a file: silent, dutiful, discreet.

Paris looks at the two words on the computer monitor’s screen, written in bold red letters drop-shadowed in gray. They are centered on a black background and seem to float in space.

He is in the spare bedroom, standing in front of the computer. He knows he is prying, of course, and he hates himself for it. But that doesn’t stop him. Beth is due any minute and still he can’t resist the temptation. Was it the detective in him? Or just the asshole?

Paris votes for the asshole.

Next to the words, just to the right, is the mouse cursor—a small white arrow angling inward, to the left. He sits in the office chair, distributes his weight, takes the mouse in hand. After circling
Start video
a few times, he manages to hover the white arrow over the second
c
in
Click
.

He presses the left mouse button.

And although he wasn’t sure
what
he expected to see when he clicked on the word (perhaps a spreadsheet of some sort, perhaps a database of Beth’s realty clients), what he actually sees confuses the hell out of him.

It is a chair.

A velvet wing chair.

The image is a little fuzzy, fading in and out a bit like bad TV reception. It is also black and white. But for some reason Paris can tell it is not a still photograph he is looking at, but rather a live shot of some sort. A live shot of a
chair
.

He squints, trying to see if there is an impression on the chair, trying to determine if someone had just recently been sitting there, but the angle is too head-on.

The image reverts back to its
Start video
screen.

Paris feels safe that he has not violated any trust here, although he knows he doesn’t have the right to start
anything
in Beth’s life anymore. It wasn’t his business what she had on her computer. What was he expecting to find? Love letters? Beth isn’t the kind of woman who would type a love letter anyway. Beth is the kind of woman who would find just the right stationery, just the right ink, just the right sentiment. In fact, Beth is—

Standing in the bedroom doorway.

Watching
him.

Somehow she had entered the apartment, no doubt checked on Melissa and her friends, and made it all the way up the hallway without making a sound.

What a cop
I
am, Paris thinks. Ever vigilant.

“I, uh . . .” Paris manages, rising to his feet. “I was just . . .”

She has seen him at the computer, of course. Paris looks at the floor, waits for the lecture that will surely include the f-word and end with something about him never being left alone in any dwelling of hers for the rest of everyone’s life.

But that doesn’t happen. Beth greets him instead with a huge, eggnog-sodden smile. And a
hug
. “Merry Christmas, Jack,” she says.

Paris can smell the booze. He hugs back, instantly aroused at her soft, perfumed nearness. “Merry Christmas. How was the party?”

“Same as always,” Beth says, flopping onto the bed. “But drunker. A little more obnoxious than usual.”

Seeing as she wasn’t going to yell at him, Paris decides to push his luck. Like always. “What is this?” He sits back down at the desk and positions the mouse cursor over the big red
Start video
. He clicks. After a few turns of the hard drive, the image appears.

“What is what?” Beth asks, sitting up.

“This.” Paris turns and points to the velvet wing chair on the screen. Except the chair is gone. It has been replaced by a picture of the space shuttle making a perfect three-point landing at Andrews Air Force Base.

“
Uh
 . . .” Paris says. He looks at the top of the screen.

“That’s called the news, Jack,” Beth says, unzipping the back of her dress, as if they were still married and about to hit the sack. “The national news. Stuff that doesn’t happen in Cleveland. You may have heard of it.”

“But there was just some kind of, I don’t know, performance-art thing on for a minute or so. Nothing but a chair. The all-chair channel or something.”

“Right,” Beth says, rising from the bed, a little unsteadily, then kicking off her shoes. “Master Bedroom Theater.” She laughs at her joke, leans in front of Paris, grabs the mouse, and clicks on an icon. The iChat icon. “No peeking.”

It is a familiar, sexy taunt. An early marriage-game for the two of them that began on their wedding night. Paris, tipsy outside the window. Beth, a terry-cloth blur inside their motel room.