Kiss Of Evil

41

Paris presses the button at 3204-A Fulton Road for the fifth time. He steps back onto the sidewalk, glances up. There are no lights on in the apartment. He looks into La Botanica Macumba. It is dark also, save for a small spotlight over the cash register, which sits with its empty drawer open.

Paris tries the door to the stairwell that leads to 3204-A. Locked. He had circled the building twice when he arrived, but the back and sides of the two-story structure offered no lighted windows, no open doors, no fire escape. He takes out his phone, dials the Levertov number. There is no answer, nor is there an answering machine.

Five cars are parked along the curb within a block of the doorway. Paris jots down the license plate numbers. He calls them in, and at the same time requests an address.

Fifteen minutes later, Edward Moriceau is in custody.

Moriceau sits in Interview One at the Justice Center. It is nearly eleven and this is Paris’s third run at the story.

“And you never saw anyone argue with him, threaten him?” Paris asks.

“No. Never.”

“And you’ve never had any business dealings or personal dealings with Mr. Levertov?”

“No.”

Moriceau is lying. Time to ratchet things up a bit. Paris drops a photograph in front of the man, a medium close-up of Willis Walker’s tongue. The Ochosi symbol is very clear. Moriceau brings his hand to his mouth.

“Look familiar to you?”

“Yes,” Moriceau replies, his voice a little thin. “As I said…”

“Oh yeah… that’s right,” Paris says, knowing it is time to toss out the first bomb, the last vestige of cordiality. “You said something about a disemboweled rooster, didn’t you? This look like a rooster?”

With this, Paris places a full body shot of Willis Walker onto the table. The impasto of thick maroon blood is spread on the white tiles, giving the dead man’s body a bloated, moth-like shape. A rose-colored sprout of viscera extends from where Willis Walker’s genitalia once grew.

Moriceau dry heaves, turns away. Then vomits on his feet.

Paris grimaces, looks at the two-way mirror, and can almost hear the buck being passed down the food chain among the police officers on the other side. Low man gets to fetch the bucket and mop.

Paris circles to Moriceau’s side of the table, carefully skirting the foul debris on the floor. In a moment, Greg Ebersole enters, mop in hand. He hands Moriceau a five-inch stack of napkins, runs the mop over the vomit and makes a lithe and rapid exit from the room.

“Mr. Moriceau,” Paris begins, “somebody is doing terrible things to the people of this city. Right now, nobody here thinks that person is necessarily you. Do you understand?”

Weakly, Moriceau nods, dabs his chin.

“Good. The problem is, as time goes on, and there are more and more connections to Santeria, or the address on Fulton Road, the more likely it is that our attitudes will begin to change. Do you understand this also?”

Again, Moriceau nods.

“I want you to think about something for a moment. Somebody killed the old man who lived over your store. There is a good chance that that person is into Santeria or Macumba or Candomble, or maybe he’s just a wanna-be asshole who gets his rocks off pretending to be some kind of witch. Either way, the link to your store, the link to the products you sell, is awfully compelling.”

Moriceau looks up, and Paris is nearly frightened by what he sees. The terror in the man’s eyes has no bottom. “They will know…”

“They?” Paris asks. “What are you talking about? Who is they?”

Moriceau gazes back at the floor. Paris is almost certain he is about to puke again, but instead Moriceau says, in his increasingly disjoined voice: “The seven powers.”

Paris had come across the term seven powers in his readings on Santeria. But it was all beginning to blend together in his mind. He imagines it would be like someone trying to learn all about Catholicism or Judaism in seventy-two hours or so. “I’m sorry?”

“Eleggua, Orula, Ogun…”

Paris could barely hear him now. “What are you talking about?”

“Obatala, Yemaya, Oshun, Shango…”

“Mr. Moriceau?”

Moriceau looks up, holds his gaze, his red eyes searching, his hands now trembling like those of a man in violent, freezing waters. “I… I…”

Paris remains silent for a few moments, waiting for the answer this man will almost certainly not supply. He is right. “You what, Mr. Moriceau?”

“I want a lawyer.”

Paris studies the shivering figure in front of him. This is no stone killer. Whatever legal horrors Moriceau might be facing, whatever apparitions of prison life eddy in his mind, they seem to be nothing compared to the flames of his personal hell.

The stench reaches Paris at that moment-sour and pervasive and cloying. He looks into the mirror, at himself, at the cops on the other side. They all know that there is no way they will be able to hold Edward Moriceau, just as they know that surveillance on La Botanica Macumba will begin within the hour.

The building has taken back its silence, reclaimed its mysteries. Paris is alone. He directs the beam of the flashlight along the cobwebbed wall, the skewed shelving, opaque with dust. Some of the hand-painted menus for Weeza’s cuisine are still visible beneath the layers of time.

Paris Is Burning.

He is unsure why he had come back. Boredom and loneliness certainly had something to do with it. The building had probably given up what it knew about the last moments of Fayette Marie Martin’s life, had most likely disclosed all its veiled wisdom.

But what the Reginald Building had not told him is why would someone like Fayette Martin come here in the first place. Why did she agree to meet with someone who, by all appearances, had been a total stranger, a man she had met online? Why didn’t she drive up to the building, take one look, then drive back home and lock her doors and ask herself what the hell she was doing?

How lonely had it gotten?

He stands in the doorway leading to what was once Weeza’s kitchen, listens to the night sounds, the constant bray of the wind. He wonders if Fayette knew. Did she scream when she saw the big knife? Did it come as a complete surprise? Did she have a second to reflect, or did the end of her life come as a brutal blindside, like a drunk driver running a red light at eighty miles an hour? Hadn’t she known it might happen?

Or was that the kick?

Paris decides to go home, to rest, to take the whole story apart and reassemble it from the bolts up. He plays the flashlight beam across the floor at his feet and heads for the door just as the wind picks up again, a doleful gust that rattles the glass panes of the building’s few remaining windows, loose in their mullions like rows of diseased teeth.