The Violet Hour (26 page)

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Authors: Richard Montanari

BOOK: The Violet Hour
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Amelia nodded.
A minute later, as Nicky turned onto Falls Road, a dark blue van made the turn behind him, then kept a safe distance as the two vehicles headed north, into the darkness of the MetroPark.
42
 
He couldn’t stop thinking about her.
Amelia
. He even liked her name. Sounded so . . . Jane Austen or something.
Nicky stood in his boxer shorts, looked out the front window of his apartment, through the small Palladian window right under the peak of the gable, and pondered the very strange scenario that was his life of late. In the past few days he had been punched out, threatened with a gun, suspected – albeit briefly – of the murder of a Chinese drug dealer. And he’d gotten a crush on a married woman whose husband was involved in a bizarre murder plot that seemed to stretch back twenty years, to the Case Western Reserve University campus of 1988, a plot that somehow included his cousin Joseph’s old friend Johnny Angel.
The strange, frightening part of it all, Nicky thought, was that the one thing that seemed to be at the center of it all, the one cog in the wheel that allowed this bizarre juggernaut to roll, was him.
Okay. How had he come to join the writer’s class where he met Amelia? When had he started getting those flyers for the class out in Collier Falls? Hadn’t he got a dozen or so in just a few months? Had somebody
wanted
him to join the class?
Nicky walked over to the TV, grabbed the remote, flipped it on, fell into his big recliner. He cruised the channels: exercise equipment, Anthony Bourdain, a southern preacher asking for money, Al Sharpton bitching about something, more exercise equipment, C-SPAN. He stopped at a local station. It was a news wrap-up.
‘ . . . of our top stories. Once again, NewsFinder Five has learned that the FBI may have uncovered new evidence in the recent death of Father John Angelino of the St Francis of Assisi parish on the city’s east side. You’ll recall that Father Angelino’s body was found in an apartment on Cedar Road, apparently the victim of an accidental heroin overdose, but police have since learned that there may have been foul play. Although FBI spokesmen would neither confirm or deny it, our sources tell us that they are now treating it as a homicide, and that this may not be an isolated incident. Stay tuned to Channel Five for more details as they develop . . .’
Nicky sprinted to the phone and put in a call to Kral, who was out. He left a message with the desk sergeant.
As he took off his shorts and started the shower, he found that he was shaking a bit. He was on the cutting edge of one of the biggest stories of the year. This could easily make the national magazines. Even a movie of the week. He had an in with the cops. He had an in with Amelia. Which he hoped would mean an in with her husband.
And the answer, he thought as he stepped into the hot, pulsating stream of water, was in that yearbook.
It had to be.
After his shower he dried himself, checked his messages, slipped into black sweatpants and sweatshirt. He sat at his desk, opened the CWRU yearbook, and was instantly dragged down a long corridor of memory, courtesy of the hairstyles, the clothing, the outlandish fads of the era. He riffled some more pages and came to a page devoted to something called
Poetica ’88
. It appeared to be a poetry festival that was held in Clark Hall, the building that housed the English Department. The photograph showed a group of maybe twenty students, standing on the steps of the building, loosely posed for the photograph. Nicky immediately recognized the tall, bony student in front, the guy with the barber-college haircut and protruding ears. It was Geoffrey Coldicott. His mind flashed on the skinless death mask he had seen in Geoffrey’s apartment. Next to Geoffrey – in fact, with his arm on Geoffrey’s shoulder – was John Angelino.
Nicky searched the sea of faces, looking for somebody, something. His eyes were soon drawn to the back row where he saw a dark-haired young man leaning against a sandstone pillar, smiling, his arm very tentatively around a beautiful young woman. Nicky thought he looked a little familiar, but couldn’t place him. Was it Benjamin Crane? He flipped through the seniors and found Crane, confirming the fact that he was not the man by the pillar.
Nicky was just about to give up when he spotted the young man from the steps. Page 154, lower right. G. Daniel Woltz. G. Daniel was slender, had dark eyes, dark hair swept over his forehead in the standard collegiate cut.
Nicky moved on, flipping the pages into the freshman section, and saw the young woman around whom G. Daniel had his arm; a beautiful girl who caught Nicky’s breath for a moment. Julia Ann Raines was her name. Soft hair, delicate features, innocent eyes. What struck him most, what drew his eye to the photo to begin with, besides the girl’s beauty, was the fact that Julia Ann Raines had signed her small picture in the freshman section. Beneath her photo, in a tiny but well-calligraphed hand, she had written a poem.
Nicky recognized it. T.S. Eliot.
He had an Eliot anthology somewhere, he’d have to find it. He then tried to remember the e-mail addresses from the stick. He could only recall one, probably because it just didn’t seem to fit the man. Geoffrey Coldicott:
[email protected]
.
Nicky got online. After checking his e-mail and finding nothing, he opened his UseNet program. UseNet was the Internet’s version of a worldwide collection of bulletin boards, with thousands of boards devoted to every imaginable subject. Most were rather benign, pruriently speaking, but with the advent of digitized graphics, it didn’t take the Net long to discover that one could post photographs and illustrations that could be downloaded and viewed on computers worldwide.
He started a keyword search of
[email protected]
and hit Enter. Theoretically, if Geoffrey Coldicott had recently posted something to a news group, under his own name, this search should yield the whereabouts of those files. Nicky knew it was a long shot, but within seconds, the search found something.
As he looked at the screen, Nicky’s heart stammered. He had to read it three times before it would sink in.
There was an upload from Geoffrey Coldicott.
The address of the uploader was
[email protected]
, and it was cross-posted to a few groups: alt.sex.male, alt.-binaries.exhibitionism, alt.binaries.voyeurism. Nicky looked at the time of the upload. Five thirty-four p.m. on the day of Geoffrey’s murder.
The file was uploaded at the moment of Geoffrey Coldicott’s death.
As he downloaded the photographs of Geoffrey Coldicott, as the graphics revealed themselves on his screen, slowly, from top to bottom, Nicky found that he was holding his breath. He could see that it was a number of pictures, a series of color shots arranged like a contact sheet. The five photographs were all of Geoffrey Coldicott sitting in a chair, his dinette chair – the chair Nicky had just occupied himself while being questioned by the cops. The main difference, of course, was that Geoffrey was naked. He remembered seeing Geoffrey’s face, briefly, through the storefront at the Arcade, but now his face was a tortured canvas of pain and humiliation.
The person who had taken these pictures was probably the person who had killed him, Nicky thought.
And that person, Nicky could see as he looked a little more closely at one of the photos, the one in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, was reflected in the mirror over Geoffrey’s mantel.
Nicky enlarged the section of the photograph that held the mirror, found that he was right. You could clearly see that it was a man, and that he was taking Geoffrey’s picture. He hit the Enter button again and doubled the size of the enlargement. Now he could see more of the man’s face and shoulders. The man had dark hair and wore a gold watch. But beyond that, he couldn’t make out much.
He closed his laptop, grabbed the yearbook and his keys, and headed for the back steps. On the way he stopped at his bookshelf and found the T.S. Eliot anthology, brought that, too.
There was no coffee or cigarettes in the house and there was no way he could do any of this without them. He would catch a pack and a few cups on the way down to the Justice Center, figuring that there would definitely be someone downtown who could improve the quality of the digital image of Geoffrey and his visitor.
This was no career-making article, Nicky thought, beside himself with excitement.
This was a career-making
book
.
It had started to rain, but Nicky couldn’t be bothered to run back upstairs for a raincoat. He sprinted to the car, started it, and drove to Denny’s.
On the inside back cover of Roger St John’s yearbook, on the fancy green endpaper, were a dozen or so signatures, accompanied by the standard yearbook repartee. There was an inscription from John Angelino. ‘May God smile on your every endeavor,’ it read, portending, perhaps, Father John’s life in the clergy. There were more than a few from women, mostly suggestive. At the bottom left, written in a precise block style, was an inscription from a ‘GD.’ G. Daniel? Nicky wondered.
The inscription. It was the poem Johnny Angelino was emailed.
He flipped through the pages of the book of poetry, and when he turned to the page bearing the poem ‘Preludes,’ he didn’t have to scan at all to find what he was looking for. The passage was right there, halfway down the page. But what was more remarkable than the fact that he had managed to find it so quickly was another, now indelible image.
The passage was circled.
What
?
When the hell had he done that? Hadn’t he bought the book new? He couldn’t recall the answer to either question, but the evidence was right in front of his eyes. The same four lines of poetry that had been sent to these people – these dead people, he reminded himself – was circled in a book he owned.
In the nick of time, he lowered the lid of his laptop as his waitress approached him with her coffee pot held high. That’s all I need, Nicky thought, to have some waitress catch me looking at naked guys on my laptop at Denny’s.
She poured, oblivious, smiled, left.
Nicky looked back at the photo, at the blurred face in the mirror. The man’s dark hair was parted on the left. He held up the various yearbook photos of the people involved. G. Daniel was almost a perfect match to the man in the mirror. The hairline had receded, but as he held the yearbook photo up to the laptop, as he placed the paper over the bright screen, he found that the images were about the same size, the basic shape of the two faces was identical.
Nicky shot to his feet, dropped a tip on the table, paid his tab at the register by the door. He decided to stop home and make a copy of the Geoffrey Coldicott photos on a memory stick. He didn’t want to risk a hard drive crash and lose everything. He also had a pretty good idea that the cops would want the whole laptop, anyway.
But for the second time in two days, when he turned onto Normandy Road he saw something odd – blue and red swirls, a gouache of violet in the crooked rain-rivers that streaked the windshield. He slammed on the brakes and counted.
There were a half dozen police cars around his house.
43
 
What a night, Amelia thought. What a crazy, scary night. And it wasn’t even Halloween yet. Although a quick glance at the bedside clock proved her wrong. It was now twelve-thirty.
Regardless, she hadn’t been able to sleep a wink.
Roger had called back and put her mind somewhat at ease. He recalled all the people on the list, made a few excuses for their lifestyle, but also added that he was not surprised that they were still doing hard drugs. He also said he’d be home in time to trick-or-treat with Maddie, and that he’d meet them at Dag and Martha’s. That, Amelia thought, in light of the evening’s rather spooky turn, was the best news of all.
She got up, checked on Maddie for what had to have been the twentieth time, found her sleeping, dreaming, perhaps, of Snickers bars and Reese cups and Twizzler strawberry licorice.
She sat down at her computer and dialed into World Online. And, for the second time in her life, she heard the cheerful cyber-voice say: ‘You’ve got mail!’
This time she didn’t jump. She was getting good at this. She clicked the appropriate buttons and found that it was mail from the Cybernauts, Eddie and Andy. She had forgotten that they had promised to send her the poem they had found.
What they hadn’t told her was that they were going to send her the complete poetical works of T.S. Eliot.
The file was huge and took a few minutes to download, but once it arrived and Amelia began to read the poetry, she found herself moved, astounded, confused. She read ‘The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock,’ something she had heard about for years, but never had actually read. She read the poems about cats.
But the poem that frightened her was one called ‘Whispers of Immortality.’ There were lines about mutilation, it seemed. Something about replacing someone’s eyes with daffodil bulbs, something about lipless grins. She didn’t finish that one. She didn’t need to be any more spooked than she was.
She printed out some of the file, made a pot of tea, took them both to the bedroom, got under the comforter, and began to read.

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