Kiss Of Evil

53

In his career on the street, Arthur Galt was known as a man without fear. A cop who would push other cops out of the way to get to the door, a First District legend who never took a dime and, in spite of a dozen incidents in his twenty-odd years with the CPD, never had a bad shoot.

But now, over the phone at least, he sounds like a man who has settled quite comfortably into the baronial life of country constable. Arthur Galt is the very popular, very connected chief of police in Russell Township.

The two men get their pleasantries out of the way and get to business.

“This is ongoing, Jack,” Galt says, a chief’s cautionary tone lying right on the surface.

“I understand,” Paris says.

“We’ve got a couple of witnesses who now say they saw Sarah Weiss at the Gamekeeper’s Taverne earlier that evening.”

“Alone?”

“No. These two guys who work at the treatment plant in Chagrin Falls say that they both did their duty by hitting on Sarah Weiss early in the evening, but were shined on. They said later in the night, she gave some time to a corporate type in a dark business suit, who left after a half hour or so. But even later in the evening, they said, she spent at least a couple hours talking to a woman. A real looker they said. Redhead, although, according to these guys, it looked like a wig. She says the two women left together.”

“Who reported the yellow car on the hill?”

“A woman named Marilyn Prescott. Her house is about a hundred feet from a clearing that looks right onto the hill. She said it was a full moon that night and she could clearly see the two cars parked there around eleven-thirty. She said she then went to bed, woke up an hour later when she heard the gas tank explode. I’ve already checked to see if the moon really was full that night.”

“And?”

“It was.”

Paris processes the information. “Do you have a sketch of the business type or the redheaded woman?”

“Nothing yet. We’re still canvassing on this, Jack. It’s still officially a suicide.”

“They left the bar together…”

“Yeah,” Galt says. “These two guys wrote them off as gay, of course. They work at a fuckin’ sewage treatment plant and neither of ’em could figure out any other reason as to why they were shut down.”

St. John the Evangelist, the imposing cathedral on East Ninth Street and Superior Avenue, is nearly empty at this hour, with just a handful of widely spaced penitents in the afternoon gloom. Paris walks through the vestibule, steps inside. The echo of his footsteps in the enormous church recalls the other times of his life, the times that being a Catholic had been important to him, the times that seemed to elate and frighten and entrance him all at once, the times during which he had leaned on his faith for strength.

But that all changed on his third night as a police officer. All of that changed the night he saw three young children-ages four, five, and six-blasted apart with a shotgun in a stifling third-floor apartment on Sonora Avenue. Besides the torn flesh and the sea of gore, Paris’s lingering memory-the remembrance that has led him to deny a benevolent God for so many years-was the Etch-A-Sketch he had seen, still clutched in the hands of the four-year-old; the Etch-A-Sketch sheened with blood that had borne the half-drawn Happy Birthday Daddy!

It was the little girl’s father, insane with seventy-two hours of methamphetamine and fortified wine, who had placed the barrel against her head and pulled the trigger.

No. No God would allow this to happen, he had thought at the time, and it has been that conviction that has shielded his heart and mind and memory from the abundance of horrors he had witnessed since.

Until today. For some reason, the need has returned.

He selects an empty pew.

Mercedes Cruz, nearing her deadline, had gone home to write the first draft of her story, having argued with Paris for nearly an hour about the possibility of accompanying the task force on the raid later that night. It is, of course, entirely out of the question. But still she pressured him. In the end, Paris had said that he would call her later that night, regardless of the time, and give her an exclusive. It wasn’t what she was lobbying for, but it was the best he could do.

And then there is the image of Evangelina Cruz, covered in blood and feathers.

Paris thinks about the ceremony in Evangelina Cruz’s basement, how foreign and violent and pagan it seemed. But Catholicism certainly has its rituals, he concedes, looking around him. Odd-seeming ceremonies that people of other faiths might find bizarre.

Willis Walker. Fayette Martin. Isaac and Edith Levertov.

Mike Ryan.

Sarah Weiss.

What am I doing in St. John’s after all this time?

He leans forward, kneels. Automatically, his hands find each other, a loose tenting of fingers, a long unutilized mainstay of his Catholic upbringing.

Am I praying?

Yes, he thinks. I am. After all these years I am praying again. I am praying for every Fayette Martin out there. I am praying for Melissa. I am praying for all the little girls who will one day grow up, dress like a woman, and say yes to a man with sorcery in his smile.

Dolores Ryan’s outgoing phone message had stated that she and her daughter Carrie would be out of town for the New Year’s holiday, and to please call them at a Tampa, Florida, number. Not the smartest move, Paris had thought, considering the world as it is these days, but it was common knowledge that the patrols on this stretch of Denison Avenue were a little more frequent in the past few years. Widows of cops killed on the job rarely had to worry about break-ins.

On the other hand, there is no need to advertise. After Paris had called in his location, then made his way around back, through calf-high drifts of snow, he noticed the note pinned to the doorjamb, a note from Dolores to her newspaper carrier, instructing the carrier to put the newspapers into the covered wooden box near the back door: a bright beacon of invitation to any burglar who happens to come by. Paris takes Dolores’s note down, shoves it in his pocket, makes a mental note to call the Plain Dealer circulation department and tell them to tell the carrier.

Then, not without a sliver of guilt, Paris acts like a burglar himself.

He looks three-sixty.

And knocks out a pane of glass.

The storage bay is an icebox. He had waited for the glass repair company to arrive and replace the pane, paying the man in cash, then had retrieved the key from the corkboard in Dolores’s kitchen. He is once again standing in front of Michael Ryan’s desk in bay number 202, not really certain as to why, not really comfortable with the desperation that had settled over him of late.

He finds a suitable rag and cleans off the dust-covered dial on the small floor safe.

Then, in the dim light of the single overhead bulb, he looks at Demetrius Salters’s scrawlings on the Time magazine, even though the page numbers had stalked the edge of his conscious thought for so long he knows them by heart.

15,28,35.

It had occurred to him somewhere in the middle of a daydream. Carla’s creepy crawler. The one who used to carve numbers into the foreheads of his victims.

Combinations are six numbers.

Before he can talk himself out of it, he hunkers down, spins the dial.

Fifteen, right.

Once around. Twenty-eight left.

Thirty-five right.

Paris takes a deep breath, grabs the cold iron handle on the door to the safe, absolutely certain the door will not open, thoroughly convinced that a sequence of numbers circled in a cable TV guide by a retired cop with Alzheimer’s could not possibly be the combination to a safe that has been sitting in The door swings open.

Paris’s stomach flutters as he looks inside and sees two dog-eared manila folders. He removes them. The first one contains an old charcoal police-artist sketch of a teenaged boy. High cheekbones, long dark hair, wraparound sunglasses. Paris flips it over. On the back is glued a one-paragraph newspaper article from the San Diego Union-Tribune: HILLSDALE GIRL, 4, VICTIM OF HIT-AND-RUN DRIVER. The article is about Carrie Ryan’s accident.

Paris looks at the sketch again.

The hit-and-run suspect?

He opens the other folder. This one contains an old police file. On top is an aggravated assault complaint by a woman named Lydia del Blanco sworn out against her former spouse, Anthony C. del Blanco. Paris notices that it is a photocopy, not the original.

But that’s not what makes his mind spin. That dizzying feeling is courtesy of the fact that Anthony del Blanco lived at 4008 Central Avenue. Anthony del Blanco lived in one of the rooms in the Reginald Building, not more than fifteen feet from where Fayette Martin’s body was found.

The arresting officer that day was Michael P. Ryan, then a rookie patrolman. And Paris sees the mistake right away. The wrong address is on the search warrant. Michael had typed in 4006 Central Avenue. The room next to Anthony del Blanco’s room. And it was in 4008 that the investigating officers found Anthony’s clothes, covered with his ex-wife’s blood, the evidence needed to prosecute him.

Also in the safe is a news clipping, a small Cleveland Press article about how Anthony del Blanco was released from prison after spending only ten months in jail on a ten-year stretch, having been sprung on a technicality.

The body in the parking lot, Paris thinks.

The mutilated man with the barbwire crown.

Paris looks again at the bottom of the arrest report. He is not surprised to find that Mike Ryan’s partner that day was Demetrius Salters.

He flips a page, reads on. Lydia del Blanco had two children: a boy and a girl. There are two photos. One, taken of the crime scene where Lydia del Blanco was beaten, tells one story. The woman is not in the photo, just the huge Rorschach of her blood. There is also a book lying on the kitchen floor, near the refrigerator.

The Secret Garden.

The old man’s mantra.

The other photo is one from happier times, a color-faded photo of the woman and her two children at Euclid Beach. Pretty woman, white-rimmed sunglasses, white dress. Her daughter, sitting on her lap, is maybe six or so; the little boy a toddler.

Is this little girl Sarah Weiss? Paris thinks.

And what about the little boy?

Evil is a breed, Fingers.

Paris is no linguist, but he knows enough German and Spanish to know that Weiss equals White. And that White equals Blanco.

Mike Ryan’s murder had nothing to do with a deal gone bad, Paris thinks, his hands trembling slightly with the knowledge. Nothing at all.

Mike Ryan was executed.