Kiss Of Evil

9

“Where y’at, Jackie?” the man behind the counter asks. “Comment ca va?”

“I’m good, Ronnie,” Paris says. “As good as can be expected from a man my age, on a day such as this.”

The big man winks, hands Paris a red Thermos, takes the empty. “It is all bon, oui?”

It is a rhetorical question. An old, comfortable routine. Paris studies the man, again marveling at Ronnie Boudreaux’s grace at more than three hundred pounds. “You are definitely the hardest-working man in show business, Ronnie. When are you going to take a vacation?”

Ronnie Boudreaux laughs, pulls a rack from the glass display case. “I get a vacation when my two ex-wives get married or die, mec.” He bags a pair of beignets, hands the bag to Paris. “Or my chouchou love me six feet under.”

This draws a laugh from the regulars at the five-stool counter.

Paris had been in a zone car one sweltering night, years earlier, and had helped to foil an armed robbery at Ronnie’s Famous Louisiana Fry Cakes on Hough Avenue. Most likely a rape, too. When Paris and Vince Stella had answered the call they found Ronnie unconscious behind the counter. They also found the robber and Ronnie’s terrified, half-dressed daughter in the back room. Lucia Boudreaux was ten years old at the time.

Jack Paris and Vince Stella brought the suspect down that night. Hard.

Since then, there has been a Thermos of fresh coffee waiting for Paris at Ronnie’s Famous, right next to the register, no matter when he stops by. They are currently on a two-Thermos rotation since Paris decided to make a science out of obtaining Ronnie’s fresh beignets at precisely seven A.M. or seven P.M., the two times of day when you can get the delicately sweet, square little doughnuts right out of the oil.

It has been this way for many years.

“Gotta run,” Paris says, grabbing the bag and his freshly filled Thermos. “See you, Ronnie.”

“Laissez les bon temps roulet,” Ronnie replies, on cue.

Let the good times roll, he says.

Paris drops a couple of dollars into the tip jar-he had stopped trying to pay for the coffee and doughnuts a long time ago-and steps out into the frigid morning. He opens the white bag, removes a warm beignet and sinks his teeth into it, eyes shut, chewing slowly, enraptured by the light dusting of powdered sugar, by the extraordinary little pockets of air. He pauses, lost in the present, until that sound destroys the moment again, as it always does. The sound of his pager.

The sound of another body falling to the earth.

There are a few things for which homicide detectives, even veteran homicide detectives, are never fully braced. One is dead children. Another-or perhaps it is a horror that dwells exclusively in the minds of male police officers-is castration. Paris had seen it only once before, a Mafia payback hit. That time, like this time, he was stupefied at the amount of blood.

The forensic activity in Room 116 of the Dream-A-Dream Motel on East Seventy-ninth Street, a stone’s throw from Rockefeller Park, moves along briskly, not necessarily because the victim, a small-time hustler named Willis Walker, is deserving of such rapid progress in the investigation of his death, but rather because there is not a man in the room who can bear to look at the corpse for too long. More than once, Paris had noticed someone from the Special Investigation Unit subconsciously shield his crotch as he moved swiftly past the body, as if the murderer might still be lurking behind the damp, nicotine-grimed curtains, teeth bared, razor poised.

The blood from Willis Walker’s groin had spread on the bathroom floor into a huge, tormented circle of blackish grue. The blood behind his head is another story-this, a dark-purple paste, flecked with bits of skull, rootlets of hair.

Next to the body is a. 25 caliber pistol, recently discharged.

Paris snaps on a pair of gloves, crouches by the body. He carefully explores the man’s front pants pockets. Empty, save for a blood-soaked pack of matches from Vernelle’s Party Center, a cheat spot located a few blocks west of the motel on St. Clair.

Paris pokes about Willis Walker’s body, probing here and there, putting off the inevitable. Finally, he can avoid it no longer. He hears a brief salvo of stifled laughter from behind him and turns around to see Reuben Ocasio, one of Cuyahoga County’s deputy coroners, looking grim and serious and thoroughly guilty of the laughter.

“You want to do it?” Paris asks.

“Not a chance,” answers Reuben. “I’m confident in my sexuality and all. But you’re the fuckin’ detective.”

Paris takes a deep breath of air curiously redolent with cigar smoke. Curious, because there were no cigar ashes in either of the room’s two ashtrays, no cigar butts in or near Room 116. The other smell was more explainable-rum. It seemed to be everywhere. A tart, acidic scent that probes some catacomb of Paris’s memory, a place webbed in shadows at the moment, just beyond recall.

Shit, Paris thinks.

It is time.

He reaches into Reuben’s black bag, removes a long, narrow tongue depressor. He then leans forward with supreme reluctance, glacial speed, and begins to separate the two sides of the unzipped fly on Willis Walker’s blood-drenched pants with the sole intention of verifying the obvious-that Willis Walker not only had his head bashed in but also had been violently separated from his penis and/or testicles sometime within the past twelve hours.

Paris grits his teeth, looks inside.

They are truly gone.

The whole set.

And they hadn’t been found in the motel room or, so far, on the grounds of the Dream-A-Dream Motel.

“Well,” Paris says, jumping to his feet, dropping the wooden stick into the wastebasket as if it were radioactive. “Nothing there. All yours, Reuben.”

Reuben shakes his head. “There goes that myth, eh?”

Paris laughs, but it is more from nervous relief than Reuben’s bon mot.

“Move aside, boot,” Reuben says. “Let a detached professional do his job.”

Paris steps into the December morning, grateful for the frigid air. He lights a cigarette and looks down the walk at the scarred and battered doors of the Dream-A-Dream Motel. All the same. A million mournful dramas behind each. A million more to come.

He flicks his cigarette onto the asphalt, disgusted with himself for lighting it, bone-weary from the previous night’s lack of rest. He hadn’t had the courage to stay and see if Beth’s intentions were romantic in nature, having all but sprinted from the apartment, knowing that his heart couldn’t have taken the disappointment if he had miscalculated the signals. He hadn’t slept more than twenty minutes since leaving Shaker Square.

“Get in here, Jack,” Reuben says, that all-business tone now in his voice.

Paris steps back into Room 116, across to the bathroom. Reuben is leaning over the body, his skin ashen, the good humor gone.

Reuben has seen a ghost.

“What do you have?” Paris asks.

Reuben looks at the floor, at the ceiling, at the walls, anywhere but at the corpse. He is Cuban American, a fairly big man at six feet, two-forty, but at the moment he looks small and troubled. He points to Willis Walker’s mouth, specifically, to the man’s tongue, which lolls to the side, lifeless and gray. He presses on the tip of the tongue with a depressor, flattening it out. “Look.”

Paris leans in. At first he cannot see anything, but, as he moves closer, it appears as if there is something drawn on Walker’s tongue. “What is it, a scar?”

“No scar, amigo. It’s fresh.”

Paris squints, and the shape comes into focus. “It’s a bow and arrow?” As odd as it sounds to Paris, the shallow carving on Willis Walker’s tongue does look like a small, stylized bow and arrow. Crosshatches, sharp angles, curved lines-all made of drying blood.

“I’m no expert, but it looks like some kind of voodoo symbol. Or something similar,” Reuben says. “Palo Mayombe, maybe.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Palo Mayombe is a very dark side of Santeria,” Reuben replies, making a quick sign of the cross with a not-so-steady hand. “I think this is one of their marks.”

“I’m lost, Reuben.”

“You’ve heard of Santeria?”

“Yes. But I’m not at all familiar with it.”

“Most of the people who follow Santeria are good people, Jack. Ordinary folks practicing a religion with some odd-seeming rituals attached. But Palo Mayombe? That kind of shit?” Reuben crosses himself again, touching his fingers to his lips. He finds Paris with wet, frightened eyes. “It’s about torture. Mutilation. Black ceremony.”

“You’re saying this was a religious sacrifice?”

“I don’t know,” Reuben says. “I’m just saying that there may be something worse coming, padrone. Something very bad.”