Kiss Of Evil

20

Paris is sitting in Fayette Martin’s kitchen. He is alone. Greg Ebersole is running down leads on Willis Walker’s girlfriends, interviewing the regulars at Vernelle’s Party Center, a few of whom were already in the unit’s Rolodex.

Evil is a breed, Fingers.

He had not been able to shake those words. What breed? Evil how? If Mike Ryan wrote those words, it couldn’t possibly have anything to do with something current, so what was the point? Besides, there was no case number on the photo, so it would be impossible to follow up, just a faded street address on the front.

But what if that dead body has something to do with Mike Ryan’s murder?

Could he possibly have been wrong about Sarah Weiss?

Is Mike Ryan reaching out to him from the grave?

Ancient history.

Focus, detective.

Unless he is mistaken, Fayette Martin’s apartment-a one-bedroom in Marsol Towers, furnished in Kronheim’s sale items-is exactly how Fayette left it the night she was murdered. She had, most likely, showered and dressed and hurried out the door, but surely not before making certain that all the cigarettes were out, that the coffeemaker was unplugged, that the deadbolt was turned, never for a moment realizing that none of these things would matter in the end. The shorted cord, the flaming ashtray, the mid-night intruder: specters of a different realm, now.

And then there are the plants. Every flat surface, every tabletop in Fayette Martin’s apartment is devoted to some kind of healthy, exotic houseplant. In the small pantry there are three dozen boxes of fertilizer and other plant-care products. Fir bark. Hydrolite. Epsom’s salts. Coltsfoot. Nettle.

It appears that Fayette had made a Swanson’s turkey dinner the night she was murdered. Paris immediately recognized the box, the familiar logo, peeking out of the Hefty bag plopped by the kitchen door. There are several of the same empty boxes in Paris’s kitchen wastebasket, too. Crazily, he wonders if Fayette liked the stuffing. To him it always tastes like wet stucco.

But there were probably many nights when, like him, she didn’t even notice.

Her computer is on the round Formica kitchen table in front of him; the monitor is black and cold, but the computer itself was on when the super had let him in. It is clear that Fayette Martin took many of her meals here, perhaps cruising the Internet as she ate. On the kitchen table there is also a mouse, manuals, a pair of flash drives.

Paris has found nothing to indicate the presence of a lover in Fayette’s life: no letters, no Hallmark cards, no photographs at Six Flags or Holden Arboretum held to the refrigerator with a magnet.

Paris thinks: I know the feeling, Fayette. Got a blank fridge myself.

Then, the dead woman speaks to him.

Out loud.

“Hello.”

Paris jumps nearly a foot. It sounds like it might be a recording of a phone conversation, but there is no tape recorder or answering machine in the kitchen. No radio, no TV either. So where was the It is then that Paris realizes that his hand is on the mouse. The voice must have something to do with a computer program he started by moving the mouse. The sound is coming from the computer speakers.

Fayette Martin? Paris wonders. Is that her voice? Is that the voice that belonged to the woman he had seen so torn apart in that building on East Fortieth Street?

“Hello,” a man answers.

“Are you the police officer?” she continues.

Police officer? A shiver runs through Paris. Please, he thinks. No cops.

“Yes,” the man says.

“Just home from a tough day at work?”

“Just walked through the door,” he says. “Just kicked off my shoes.”

“Shoot anyone today?”

“Not today.”

“Arrest anyone?”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“Just a girl. A very wicked girl.”

The woman laughs.

Paris thinks: It’s a sex tape. This is a recording of some sort of 900 call. Cops and maidens. Fayette Martin worked for a sex line?

The conversation continues.

“The woman you saw on the top floor. Did you like her?”

“Yes,” the man answers. “Very much.”

“Did it turn you on to watch her?”

“Yes.”

As the conversation proceeds, Paris presses the power button on the front of the computer monitor, an older model CRT, hoping there is some sort of video accompaniment to this. It appears to be broken.

“That was me, you know. I was the whore,” the woman says.

“I see,” the man says.

“Do you like to watch me do that to other men?”

“Yes. I love it.”

“Spread your legs.”

As Paris listens to this exchange, he has a hard time reconciling the supposedly shy young woman who worked at The Flower Shoppe with this sexual animal. The more he learned, it seemed, the less he knew about people.

Great trait for a detective.

“Like this?” the man suggests.

Maybe the world was full of Fayette Martins, Paris thinks. Maybe it is just naive, over-the-hill cops who “Meet me,” she says.

Paris sits upright in the chair. Yes. Talk to me. Talk about getting together.

“No.”

“Meet me tonight.”

The woman’s voice sounds pleading.

“No,” the man repeats.

“Meet me and fuck me.”

A few seconds of silence. Paris holds his breath, hoping The Lead is about fall into his lap. He doubted that such synthesized versions of these voices would ever stand up in court as proof of anything, but you never knew.

Just say the words.

Say them.

“If I say yes, what will you do for me?” the man asks.

“I… I’ll pay you,” the woman says. “I have cash.”

Paris thinks: Fayette Martin didn’t work for a sex line.

Fayette Martin is the caller.

“I don’t want your money,” the man says.

“Then what do you want?”

Pause. “Obedience.”

“Obedience?”

“If we meet, you will do as I say?”

“Yes.”

“You will do exactly as I say?”

“I… yes… please.”

“Are you alone now?”

“Yes.”

“Then listen to me carefully, because I will tell you this once. There is an abandoned building on the southeast corner of East Fortieth and Central…”

Paris’s heart leaps, spins, settles. His stomach follows suit. Fayette Martin is talking to her killer. Fayette Martin is talking to the man who cut her in two.

“There is a doorway on the East Fortieth side,” the man continues. “I want you to stand there, facing the door. Understand?”

“Yes.”

“Do you truly have the courage to go there? To do this?”

The slightest hesitation, then: “Yes.”

Paris realizes, amid his revulsion, that it was indeed courageous for Fayette Martin to go there that night, to be so committed to her fantasy that she would risk it all. And all is exactly what she lost.

“Do you understand that I am going to fuck you in that doorway? Do you understand that I am going to walk up behind you and fuck you in that filthy doorway?”

Paris closes his eyes. The scene begins to draw itself in his mind. Watercolors, this time. Blue and purple and gray. Weeza’s Corner Cafe. Neon in the distance. A woman in the doorway. Petite. Pretty.

“I… God. Yes.”

“You will wear a short white skirt.”

Paris sees the dead woman’s accordion-pleated skirt against the filth of the frigid concrete floor; the brown gouache of her blood.

“Yes.”

“You will wear nothing underneath it.”

“Nothing.”

Now, the curve of her buttocks. Pink, dimpled with the cold.

“You will wear nothing on top either, just a short jacket of some sort. Leather. Do you have one?”

They had found no leather jacket. Paris dresses her in one.

“Yes.”

“And your highest heels.”

“I’m wearing them now.”

He sees the bottom of her shoes. Blood-flecked, stiletto-heeled; the Payless price tag barely worn. Special-occasion shoes.

“You will not turn around. You will not look at me. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Say it.”

“I will not look at you.”

“You will not speak.”

“I will not.”

“You will submit to me totally.”

“Yes.”

“Can you be there in one hour?”

“Yes.”

“If you are one minute late, I will leave.”

“I won’t be late.”

“Then go.”

The conversation ends, the speakers fall silent, the hard drive of the computer turns twice, then stops. Paris finds himself staring at the speakers, waiting for more. An address, a name, a nickname, a background sound.

Nothing. He moves the mouse again. Still nothing.

Just the electric-clock silence of a dead woman’s kitchen.

Paris stands, looks into the living room. His gaze finds Fayette’s high-school picture propped on an end table. It is a soft-focus shot, head slightly back, eyes looking heavenward. Her lips are parted slightly, her sweater is burgundy, perhaps angora, and the color deepens the blush in her cheeks. Around her neck is a thin gold chain bearing a heart-shaped locket.

Paris wonders: What was the path that took her from that moment-sitting in an Olan Mills Studio, eighteen years old, her whole life an uncluttered horizon before her-to that doorway on East Fortieth Street? Through which of life’s portals did she need to pass to make that journey make sense?

And yet Paris believes that whoever she was in life, whatever she did, she had the right to be alive, and that a killer had butchered this woman and left her lying at his feet.

And thus, as she lay cold and blood-shorn and disassembled on a stainless-steel table at the morgue, he begins to feel that strange and special relationship with Fayette Marie Martin, as he had, at least to some degree, with every victim since his first homicide call.

Paris closes his eyes, conjures Fayette’s devastated body in the crime-scene photo, and asks of her murderer: Which way did you like her better, you son of a bitch? Dead or alive?

Which way did you prefer her?

He glances one last time at her portrait, her eyes.

“You will not look at me,” Paris says, aloud, the sound of his voice a dagger through the stillness. Fayette Martin’s stillness.

He looks at her lips.

You will not speak.