Kiss Of Evil

5

The twenty-suite Cain Manor apartment building is a blocky blond sandstone on Lee Road near Cain Park, always fully occupied due to its reasonable rents, always offering new faces due to the generally rapid turnover of rental property in Cleveland Heights. To the building’s right sits its identical twenty-suite twin, called Cain Towers, also a blocky blond sandstone.

In the two years she had called her one bedroom apartment on the fourth floor at the Cain Manor home, she had yet to determine exactly what it is that makes one characterless yellow building a manor, and the other a tower.

This morning she sits at the small dinette table overlooking Lee Road. The slushy hum of winter traffic is heard beneath WCPN’s morning show, floating up from the boom box on the floor. She is barefoot, bundled into a lavender silk robe, smoking a French cigarette, sipping coffee. Moses, her ancient Siamese, guards the sill.

At five minutes to eleven she straightens her hair, smoothes her cheeks, adjusts the front of her robe. These gestures are, of course, as automatic as they are unnecessary, because she had never come within a hundred yards of actually meeting Jesse Ray Carpenter, and doubted if she ever would. Still, the notion that this man of small mystery will be pulling into the parking lot across the street in a few minutes never fails to engage her basic vanities.

Jesse Ray is always prompt.

She stands, crosses the kitchen, retrieves the coffeepot from the counter. She returns, fills her cup, considers the sky over the city, the melancholy clouds, thick with snow. If life were perfect, at about eight o’clock that morning, she would be standing on the corner of Lee Road and East Overlook, waiting for the Mayfair preschool van with her daughter, Isabella. Bella, with cheeks the color of winter raspberries and Tiffany blue eyes to shame the December sky, would have been stuffed into her pink jacket and matching mittens. If life were perfect, Isabella’s mom would then have been off to some job-health club twice a week, happy hour Fridays, rent a couple of movies for Saturday night. One for Bella. One for her.

Instead, at eleven o’clock in the morning, on a weekday, she is waiting for a pair of criminals.

Glancing across the street, she sees the top of Jesse Ray’s black sedan as it pulls into the Dairy Barn lot and comes to a halt next to the drive-up phone booth. She sees the window roll down, sees his dark coat sleeve emerge, his bright white shirt cuff, his gold watch. It is practically all she has ever seen of him, although, once, she thought she had seen his car pulling out from behind the Borders at La Place and had followed him for ten minutes or so before losing him somewhere around Green Road and Shaker Boulevard.

Soon, she will see Celeste, tall and full of nervous energy, emerge from the passenger side.

She had met Celeste quite by accident one night, having idiotically stepped in when a rather inebriated man was threatening Celeste in the lobby of the Beachwood Marriott. Big guy, long hair, Harley T-shirt, a huge tattoo of an orange rattlesnake wrapped around his right forearm. A few sheets to the wind herself, she had gotten between them and flashed the man the Buck knife she carried. The man had mockingly skulked away. Celeste had thanked her with a round of cocktails and margarita led to margarita led to confession and Celeste had told her a few larcenous details regarding her life. A little grifting, a little insurance fraud, a little petty theft. Two weeks later they met for drinks again and she had asked Celeste if she knew anyone to whom she could sell some jewelry. Celeste had said yes.

That night was two years and nearly forty-five thousand dollars ago. The night she struck the devil’s deal with herself.

Fifty thousand, not a penny less.

Celeste’s knock on the door is, as always, a little too loud.

“Hi, honey,” Celeste says, bounding into the apartment with a teenager’s enthusiasm, hugging her briefly. They had taken to hugging at some point recently. Celeste is tall and slender, smooth-complected, just this side of runway-model pretty. Today she is wearing red ski slacks, a black faux-fur bomber jacket, a red scarf. Her dark hair is loose, windblown. She wears a pair of long silver earrings shaped like icicles.

“Is it cold?”

“Freezing,” Celeste answers. “Coffee?”

“Help yourself,” she says, bolting and chaining the door.

“Thanks.”

Celeste unwraps her thick red scarf, retrieves a cup from a cabinet. She pours herself coffee as Bird’s version of “Bloomdido” bops from the box. She sits down at the table.

“How’s Jesse Ray?” She always asked, although Celeste had never really been all that forthcoming about Jesse Ray Carpenter, having only told her the man’s name after they had done more than ten thousand dollars in business. They look out the window in unison. A ribbon of silvery smoke winds its way skyward from Jesse Ray’s car window. Jesse Ray the control freak. Whenever she wants to see Celeste, it is Jesse Ray she pages.

“He’s okay. Actually… he’s kind of pissed at me,” Celeste says.

“Why? What happened?” She isn’t really sure what the nature of Celeste’s relationship with Jesse Ray is, except that she had seen Celeste moon a few times when she talked about the man. In Celeste’s opinion, Jesse Ray is the grifter’s grifter. A magician. “Oh, nothing. You know how he gets.”

“Actually, I don’t know how he gets. Never met the man.”

“Well, let’s just say I missed a cue in a very important situation.” Celeste falls silent, reddening slightly as if she had been scolded all over again, sipping her coffee with a somewhat unsteady hand.

She regards Celeste for a few moments, then reaches into the kitchen drawer behind her, removes the paper bag, tosses it to Celeste, officially changing the subject, as she always does when their small talk turns to business.

Celeste looks inside the bag, brightens. “So… who was it this time?”

“Tina.”

“The falcon,” Celeste says, ominously, forming her hands into talons.

Tina Falcone is one of a dozen aliases she uses, each one corresponding to a different physical look, a different style. She is fairly good at accents, too. When she plays the Latina, she is flawlessly Hispanic. Her posh Brit isn’t half bad either. Her favorite alias, though, is Rachel Anne O’Malley. Sounds like a child film star from the twenties.

But, of all her names, her real name is the simplest. Mary. Plain-old vanilla-flavored-nobody-notices Mary.

Celeste asks, “Did the falcon swoop?”

Mary laughs. “Yeah. Old Elton was dead in his tracks.”

“Elton?”

“Yep. That was a first.”

Celeste shakes her head, smiling, taking it all in. “Elton,” she repeats, reverentially, as if a mark never sounded quite so ripe. She stands, finishes her coffee, wraps her scarf around her neck. “I’m gonna get going, hon. Jesse Ray’s got somewhere to be. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“Okay,” she says, but her voice sounds distant and sad.

“You all right, girl?” Celeste asks.

“I’m gonna bring her home, you know. Soon.”

“I know,” Celeste replies, her stock answer. “You will. It won’t be long.”

“All I need is six thousand dollars. That’s all. A lousy six Gs. A little less, even.”

Celeste lifts the jewelry bag into the air, shakes it, rattles the contents. “Cake.”

Celeste is virtually the only person she can talk to about Isabella, and how much this money means to the two of them.

Mary had never married Isabella’s father, Donny, a rock-drumming miscreant from Zanesville, Ohio. But she had lived the rock-and-roll life for two years with Donny Kilgore and his band, Android Beach, a motley assemblage of career potheads who played a nearly unlistenable mix of technodance music and seventies stadium rock. For almost two years she had toured with Donny and the boys, washing the band’s clothes, cooking a ton of pasta on a hot plate, bailing them out of the drunk tank more times than she could count, puking in her share of motel lobbies.

When Isabella was born, Donny had made her a solemn, tearful promise that the drinking and the drugs were a thing of his past. Donny told her it was all going to change, that he was hooked up with a new circle. Real record people who were going to make it happen for the band.

What Donny had failed to mention was that these record people had certain needs, and that one morning, around five, the door would come crashing in and a German shepherd named Quincy would find 2.2 pounds of cocaine in the basement.

She had suspected Donny of dealing for a while, had torn their small Bedford Heights house and garage apart a number of times looking for his stash, never finding it. But what she had found was a list of forty or so music-business bigwigs-addresses, phone numbers, cell phone numbers, e-mail addresses, wives’ names. Favorite cocktails, even. Donny’s schmooze list. Most were lawyers and accountants, pillars of their communities. A few owned record labels. But most were men in very conservative suits with second wives and no prenuptial agreements. She was absolutely certain that these were the people to whom Donny had been dealing in an attempt to launch Android Beach.

From the day she had found it in Donny’s van, she had taken very good care of the list.

After cooperating with the DEA, Donny had drawn a five-year sentence and she was given two years’ probation and two hundred hours of community service. She had known nothing about the coke, but she had known Donny Kilgore and that should have tipped her.

But the worst was yet to come. Within three weeks of the hearing, her father had pulled every string he had-and he had many, reaching to the highest levels of the Cuyahoga County political machine-and taken Isabella away.

That was two and a half years ago. She had already missed more than half of Isabella’s life so far. Her two legal attempts to get her daughter back had failed miserably, had cost her thousands of dollars, had created such acrimony in her family that it had now been more than ten months since she had spoken to her father.

Two and a half years. Two and a half years of wigs and makeup and wandering hands and sour, boozy tongues. Two and a half years of working her way down a list of boring record-company men with their tales of cold wives and industry pressure.

Two and a half years without Bella.

She stands in the phone booth near the corner of Taylor Road and Fairmount Boulevard, her huge sunglasses in place, in deference to the sudden winter sun streaking through the clouds, in support of her disguise. Her hair is tucked up under a wool beret, her baggy ski parka conceals everything else. In spite of the restraining order, she still finds herself in this phone booth twice a week, struggling to catch a glimpse of Bella from afar-a fog-shrouded film of a boisterous playground, cast with women her age, hugging the children, drying their tears, herding them into groups, protecting them.

She looks at her watch. Although she is late for one of her two legitimate part-time jobs, she can’t leave. Even though she needs to pick up spiral notepads, buy panty hose, fill the car with gas, and stop at the dry cleaner, she can’t walk away.

She never can.

The bell claps and clamors, calling the preschoolers from the Mayfair School outside.

And the film, blurred by a mother’s tears, unspools anew.