Kiss Of Evil

22

“What do you think, Bella?”

She pulls her Anna Sui from the closet, holds it up in front of her, glances at the cheval mirror. As always, Isabella’s picture, sitting atop the armoire, remains silent.

“Yeah, I think so, too. The little black dress. There’s simply no defense against it.” She laughs at her joke, then feels guilty, the way she always feels guilty having fun without her daughter.

As she steps into the shower she runs down her itinerary. She will meet Celeste on the way into town and get the money from the sale of Elton’s jewelry. Although she so desperately wants to tell Celeste about what happened at Dream-A-Dream Motel-as crazy as it sounded, Celeste is indeed the only person in the world she can trust-she has decided to wait.

She will tell her in due time.

And only if she needs to.

Jean Luc wears a Zegna wool suit, navy blue, and a subtly patterned dove gray tie. They dine at the Sans Souci restaurant at the Renaissance Hotel, the fare consisting of fusilli with roasted peppers and eggplant, sauteed scallops with fresh fennel and saffron broth, and a glorious, shared ice cream sundae topped with boysenberries and Grand Marnier.

The leisurely stroll around Public Square, watching the skaters twirl amid the Christmas lights, is even more glorious.

Jean Luc tells her about his job as the creative director for a major downtown ad agency. Jean Luc tells her that he finds her extremely attractive, in a very young Natalie Wood kind of way. Jean Luc tells her that Smart Money is his favorite magazine.

Incredibly, it is her favorite magazine, too. It is the only one to which she subscribes. The new issue is, at that moment, sitting in the lobby of her building.

Jean Luc asks her if she would like to have coffee, or if she would like to be taken home.

It was somewhere around the scallops that she had arrived at the answer to that one. She takes his hand in both of hers, squeezes gently, and says:

“Both.”

They are sitting on her couch, a single lamp lit behind them, the television on. They watch a few scenes from Anatomy of a Murder with Lee Remick on the AMC channel. They talk about dating, about travel, about movies, carefully skirting politics for this, their first date. By one o’clock, the coffee is gone. The film ends at one-fifteen.

Then comes the awkward silence. The first of the evening.

She decides to break it. “Well, in case I’ve forgotten to say it for the three-thousandth time, thanks for a wonderful evening,” she says, snapping on the table lamp next to the couch. She tries for levity. “I’m glad we, um, ran into each other today.”

“Uh oh,” Jean Luc replies. “Sounds like I’m leaving.”

“I have to get up, I’m afraid. Working gal.”

“Just one more cup?”

“Coffee’s gone.”

“Then so am I,” he says with a smile, rising, slipping on his charcoal gray coat. “But you’ve only begun to chip away at your debt to me. You do realize that, don’t you?”

“Of course,” she says, standing, trying to stretch her cramped legs without being obvious. “I intend to work it off at every Michelin-starred restaurant in a hundred mile radius of Cleveland. I pay my debts, no matter what the personal hardships.”

Jean Luc laughs. “Such nobility in the face of so many calories.”

“The food tonight was incredible. Thanks again.”

“Well… it was my pleasure,” he says, pulling on his leather gloves. “Beats the fare at Vernelle’s Party Center, I’ll bet.”

Suddenly, everything in the world is at a forty-five-degree angle to everything else. She is looking around her apartment, but nothing in it makes sense. The room is huge, ventless. The walls seem miles away.

She asks: “I’m sorry? Where?”

“Vernelle’s Party Center. On St. Clair Avenue. They serve chitterlings and ribs and collard greens there, if I’m not mistaken. Somehow, you don’t strike me as the soul food type.”

She can hear him speaking, but the words seem to rush by her ears, as if she is in motion. “I’ve never been there,” she says. “And you’re right. I’m not the soul food type. Way too fatty.”

“Oh, but I bet you were Willis Walker’s type,” he says. “I’d almost bet everything on that one.”

“Get out.”

“Please. Just listen to me.”

“Get out.”

“You’ll understand completely once I tell you the whole story.”

“Get out!”

“I’m afraid you have no choice but to listen,” he says, reaching slowly into the inside pocket of his coat.

“I have plenty of choices,” she answers. She squares herself in front of him, puts her hands on her hips. “I have every fucking choice there is.”

He removes his hand from the inside pocket of his coat and drops something on the coffee table in front of her. It is a three-by-five black-and-white photograph. At first, it looks like an abstract of some sort, the kind of optically challenging picture you might see in gaming magazines-Identify This! But when she looks at it more closely, she knows it is no game.

It is a picture of her running from Room 116 of the Dream-A-Dream Motel.

Her head swims. Tears begin to limn her eyes, despite of efforts to stop them.

How could she have been so stupid?

She tries to gather her thoughts, her breath. “What do you want?”

“I just need your help. No violence,” he says. “I’m just settling an old debt. And you can help me.”

“And this is how you ask me? By fucking blackmailing me?” She begins to pace around the apartment. Then, it hits her. “Wait a minute… you hired that guy to attack me, didn’t you?”

“He wasn’t supposed to lay a finger on you,” he says. “On the other hand, he wasn’t supposed to run away like a ten-year-old girl at the first sign of danger, either. Him coming back? That was all his idea. I guess you wounded his homeless-man pride. But, you have to admit, it made my rescue a lot more swashbuckling, don’t you agree?”

Everything that made this man attractive over dinner has now dissolved into a pool of disgust at the base of her stomach.

But, she had to confess, it’s not like she didn’t deserve having some con run on her. It’s not like she didn’t have it coming. She is, by anyone’s standards, at any time in the history of the world, a thief. And a murderer. Even if it was self-defense.

It’s just that she feels so violated.

“What do you want me to do?” she asks, sitting back down on the couch, her tears turning to sniffles, her mind turning to business.

“I want you to do what you do best,” he says, his face brightening, flashing the smile that got her into this mess. He sits down next to her. “Be yourself. Your charming, beautiful self.”

She draws a cigarette from the pack on the table, her hands no longer shaking.

He lights her cigarette, rests his hand on her knee, continues.

“Let me tell you a short story,” he says, offering her a starched white handkerchief. “Then I’ll go. I promise.”

For some reason, his soft, elegant voice is beginning to calm her. She is beginning to believe that he means her no physical harm, at least not at this moment. She takes the handkerchief and dabs her mascara-streaked eyes. “A story?”

“Yes. It takes place a few years ago. I was barely a teenager. If I remember correctly, the Indians beat the Minnesota Twins that day…”