Mr. Paradise A Novel (13 page)

He had told his story over and over how he was confused.

The door opened and here was the brother in a striped shirt and gold cuff links, tiny knot in his tie up there tight, starch in the shirt, the one last night the tech called Richard,
Richard Harris sitting across from him at the table now and asking, “How long have you known Chloe Robinette?” Gonna ask him all this shit again, leading to why did he say it was Kelly with the man when he knew it was Chloe?

“I already told your boss and I told that woman they call Jackie? Man, ask them.”

Harris said, “Yeah, but what you told them’s all a fuckin lie. I want to know why you told Kelly she was Chloe.”

“I never told her that.”

“You knew she was Kelly.”

“I
didn’t
is the thing. I look at the girl dead, messed up, all the blood on her. Yeah, I know Chloe, but this dead girl don’t look any fuckin thing like her. Man, seeing them like that can fuck with your head. You understand? Once I decided this one in the chair’s Kelly, since it don’t look like Chloe, then the other one had to be Chloe, upstairs in the bedroom, dark in there. After while I become mixed up, this Chloe or Kelly? They look alike, they dressed alike, same hair. I breathed on the bong a few times to settle me. Know what I’m saying? Now it could been either one in the chair. I said fuck it.”

“We had a window in here,” Harris said, “I’d hang you out there, five floors to the concrete, till you told me the truth. Ask you the question—you’re hanging outside in the weather—I say, ‘What was that, motherfucker? I can’t hear you.’ The girl says to you, ‘I’m Kelly, you ignorant fuck.’ You say to her, ‘No, you not, you Chloe.’ “ Harris leaned over the table on his arms, close to Montez now. “Why’d you tell her she was Chloe?”

“She lied to you, man.”

“Why do you want her to be Chloe?”

“Ask the bitch why she lied.”

“What do you get out of her being Chloe?”

“I swear to God on my mother’s grave—”

“Where’d you pick that up, the movies? Your mama passed? Her ass rotting in a grave? Where’s this grave at? You swear to God, then gonna give me the same shit you been telling us.”

Montez held up his hands to show his palms. “Man, you got the advantage on me. What can I say?”

“What’s your phone number, your cell?”

“Why you want that?”

“Tell me right now or use it to call a lawyer.”

K
ELLY SAID,
“H
E’S IN
there? I thought it was a closet.”

She sat at the side of Delsa’s desk, turned in the chair to look over her shoulder.

“It’s our interview room,” Delsa said. “Richard Harris is with him. He was there last night. As we were leaving Harris was talking to the tall guy in the trench coat and beige cap? That was Wendell Robinson, our boss. He might want to talk to you when we finish with your statement.” Delsa watched her glance toward the back of the squad room again, not comfortable being near Montez. Delsa could understand why, but maybe there was more to it.

“What if he comes out and sees me?”

“He won’t.”

“If Harris leaves him alone?”

“He knows he has to stay in there, and he will, he’s trying to make a good impression, can’t believe we find fault with his story. I meant to ask you,” Delsa said, “he knew you were coming last night?”

“He picked us up. Chloe arranged the visit. She wanted me to go with her the night before but I had to take my dad to the airport. He said the reason he came up, he missed his little girl so much, but it was really to borrow money. My dad drinks.”

Delsa said, “Did you know that people who come from money call their dad ‘Dad,’ and people who don’t come from money call him ‘my dad’?”

Kelly said, “Can you prove it?”

“I feel it, I don’t know it.”

“Dad lives in West Palm Beach,” Kelly said. “He’s a semi-retired barber. Not a hair stylist, a barber. He drinks and chases women.”

“Your mother’s not with him?”

He was used to asking questions with obvious answers.

“She died just about the time I started modeling, I was sixteen. She pushed me into it but didn’t live to see it pay off. My dad says he drinks because he misses her, but you know he’s been drinking all his life.” She said, “He’s not a bad guy. I can take him for a couple of days.”

She had a soft, almost lazy way of speaking, and he said, “You’re not from Detroit.”

“Actually I am, I was born here, Harper Hospital. We moved to Miami when I was little. I was twenty, I came up to do an auto show, met a guy and decided to stay. The guy
turned out to be a mama’s boy, left his clothes lying around, but now I was
here
. . . I can live anywhere I want, really.”

“And you stay in Detroit.”

“I’m too lazy to move. No, it’s okay. A lot of music, not a lot of traffic, you can drive fast. I have a VW Jetta, black, always starts, easy to drive in snow and ice . . . What else do you want to know?”

“Montez picked you up . . .”

She hesitated. She said yeah. “But now that I think of it, he didn’t know we were coming. In the car he said no one told him. He made a call on his cell but didn’t speak to anyone.”

“He leave a message?”

“No, he was mad when no one answered and threw the phone down.” She said, “Have you talked to him?”

“This morning? Yeah, I was first, then Jackie Michaels—you met her last night.”

“She threatened me.”

“Woke you up. Now Harris is on him.”

“And Montez, what does he say about it?”

“You’re lying. You made it all up.”

“Does he know everything I’ve told you?”

“We’re giving him a little bit at a time and let him think about it. We haven’t mentioned the two guys,” Delsa said. “You’re sure he doesn’t know you saw them.”

“Almost positive.”

“They left and Montez came upstairs.”

“A few minutes later,” Kelly said, what she had told him in the loft, in the kitchen. “If he thought I saw them, wouldn’t he ask me? He said it was a black guy. He said, you know what
bullet holes look like. He said if I didn’t do what I was told the ugly motherfucker would shoot me in the head. You can understand why I’m a little freaked. Right?”

Delsa couldn’t keep his eyes off her.

Kelly asked if she could smoke and he brought his ashtray out of the desk drawer and watched her light one of her Virginia Slims 120’s and raise her perfect face to blow a stream of smoke into the fluorescent lights. She wore a sheepskin-lined coat with her jeans, an outdoor girl this morning, black cowboy boots, old and creased, but with a high shine.

“Did you hear Montez call nine-eleven?”

“He was downstairs.”

“What about Lloyd, was he around?”

“Not after.”

“Jackie’s gonna have a talk with him.”

“He seems harmless.”

“But he was there,” Delsa said.

“You know Montez is your guy. But it comes down to my word against his,” Kelly said. “Isn’t that right?”

“So far.”

“If he doesn’t admit being involved you’ll have to let him go?”

The way she said it Delsa wasn’t sure if she was hopeful or apprehensive. But if being near him freaked her, she wouldn’t want to meet him on the street. Would she?

Maybe get Jackie to have a word with her.

“If we keep talking to him,” Delsa said, “he’ll want a lawyer. And if we can’t arraign him on a warrant, he walks. We’re looking for a motive. Who stands to gain from the old man’s
death, other than family? We rule out robbery—nothing was taken but a bottle of vodka, an expensive brand, Christiania, but not worth a home invasion. So we focus on Montez, a guy with felony indictments on his sheet but clean for the past ten years. If he isn’t somehow involved, why is he lying to us?” Delsa threw in, “Assuming you’re telling us the truth,” and saw it give her a nudge.

Kelly, about to draw on her Slim, lowered it to the ashtray. “I told you who I am, I straightened that out.”

“Not right away.”

“No, and I explained why.”

“Afraid of being too talkative.”

“We got to the loft, I felt more secure. I told you everything I know.”

“The house full of cops, you didn’t feel safe?”

“Frank, I was semi-stoned, I wasn’t sure what I felt. I didn’t want to have to think and answer questions till I had a clear head.”

On the defensive but cool now, using his name, comfortable in the chair.

“Okay,” Delsa said, “we put the focus on Montez. If he’s not involved, why is he lying? Why does he want you to be Chloe? There has to be something in it for him, a payoff that’s worth becoming a suspect. He isn’t in the old man’s will. Neither is Chloe. So I wonder if Mr. Paradise had some other way of taking care of her, after his death. She ever mention anything like that?”

“He was giving her five thousand a week,” Kelly said.

“Very generous man, but made no attempt to put Chloe in his will.”

“Because of his son,” Kelly said, “Tony Jr.”

“So you did talk to her about it.”

Delsa watched her tap the cigarette in the ashtray, twice, three times.

“Yeah, well, for the reason you said, the guy was so generous, I thought she’d be in his will. She told me why she didn’t expect anything and really didn’t care. Even the five thousand a week, Chloe could make more than that turning tricks.”

Delsa said, “Amazing, isn’t it?”

Kelly seemed to shrug, smoking her Slim.

“In the meantime,” Delsa said, “we’re working to get a lead on the two guys. We have to believe they were hired to hit the old man. The flip of a coin put Chloe there instead of you and they had to take her out.”

“I think about that all the time,” Kelly said.

“And Montez is part of it.” He held her eyes for a few moments, looking to see what he might find in there. He said, “Give some thought to the two guys in the baseball caps. Tell me again what they looked like.”

FOURTEEN

CARL FONTANA AND ART KRUPA WERE AT
Nemo’s on Michigan Avenue at a table, half past five, the bar side packed. They felt at home here, a block from Tiger Stadium, where they used to stop for a couple before a game and both rooms in the place would be full of fans. Carl was showing Art the front page of the paper, the headline:

LAWYER GUNNED DOWN IN INDIAN VILLAGE

Art said, “It doesn’t look like him.”

“It’s an old picture,” Carl said. “Must’ve been taken when he was about fifty.”

Art read, “ ‘Paradiso Sr., unidentified woman found dead in his living room.’ “ And said, “Why don’t they know who she is? All they had to do was ask Montez.”

“He prob’ly left,” Carl said. “You know, so he can walk in
with all the cops there, dumb look on his face, ‘Hey shit, what’s going on?’ “

“Next thing,” Art said, “they’re checking his fuckin hands for gunshot residue.”

The bartender motioned to them. “Art, telephone.”

Art left the table and a minute later Avern Cohn came in the front looking around. Carl waved him over. Avern sat down saying, “How do you get a drink in this place?”

Carl said, “Fuck your drink. The guy was suppose to be alone. There’s a half-naked broad sitting in the chair with him.”

“The unexpected can happen,” Avern said. “You did what you had to do.”

“How come they don’t say who she is?”

“I guess the cops don’t want us to know.”

The waitress came along the aisle. Carl stopped her. He said, “Geeja, keep an eye on us, will you, for Christ sake?” She stood with the edge of her tray against her cocked hip, not saying a word. Avern ordered a Chivas with one cube of ice. Carl said, “The same way without the tequila.”

Picking up the empty beer bottles Geeja said, “Just the Coronas?”

“Isn’t that what I said?”

“I was making sure,” Geeja said. “What’s the matter, Connie giving you a hard time?”

She left. Carl said, “I met Connie here. She use to work at the ballpark, behind a counter, and I’d meet her here after. Geeja’s a friend of Connie’s.”

Avern was watching him, waiting and then saying, “I’m
gonna tell you something that strikes me as fascinating, mysterious, like a portent. You’re drinking Mexican beer, which I’ve never seen you do before, and I have a job prospect that comes out of the fatal shooting of three Mexicans, the night before last. It’s in today’s paper, page three. But the victims aren’t identified, not even as Mexican. Their bodies were burned, one of them dismembered.”

Carl said, “Why?”

Avern said, “Who knows. The house’s only three blocks from here, the other side of the ballpark. Empty, half burned, you can go in and look around.”

“For what?”

Art came back and sat down saying, “That fuckin smoke.”

Carl said, “How’d he know to call you here?”

Avern held up his hand to Art and said to Carl, “I told Montez I was meeting you. I told him any hitch in the program, he’d have to tell you about it himself. I’m out of it.” He said, “Unless, the way it’s going, I end up representing Montez. He hasn’t been arraigned, but it’s a possibility.”

Carl said, “They think he did it?”

“They’d like him as an accessory, at least. He falsely I.D.’s the girl you shot. But they can’t prove he did it with malice, so they have to cut him loose.”

Carl said, “Who’d he think she was?”

“Another girl was there and he made a mistake.”

“There’s nothing about that in the paper.”

“I got it from Lloyd, the houseman.”

Carl said, “You know the old guy, you know Montez, you know everybody in the house?”

“Hang out at Frank Murphy,” Avern said, “you get a line on all the players. I’ve known Lloyd since he was holding up grocery stores. I represented him a couple of times. We’d run into each other and have a drink, tell stories. We try to top each other on the dumbest criminals we’ve known.” Avern smiled, said, “That Lloyd,” and shook his head. “He could write a book on playing a house nigger—eyes and ears open, mouth shut. I asked Lloyd to watch Montez for me. This was even before Montez came with the contract. He’s working for old Tony all these years and has kept himself clean? It didn’t sound like Montez. I said to Lloyd, ‘He’s getting something out of his faithful service.’ And Lloyd said ‘Yeah, he’s getting the house when the man passes.’ “