Kiss Of Evil

79

A week after Christian del Blanco’s sentencing, a January heat wave descends upon Cleveland. It is fifty degrees and portends an early spring, a lie that Clevelanders have bought into forever. It is Bobby Dietricht’s third day back on the job; Greg Ebersole’s first.

At noon, while looking out his window at the shirtsleeved men and the coatless women on the street, Paris hears Greg’s knock on his doorjamb.

“Hey, Greg.”

“Look at this. I can’t believe it,” Greg says, entering. “I was just going through the backlog of mail and I got this.”

He hands Paris a letter on a Mount Sinai Hospital letterhead.

“It’s gotta be a joke, right?” Greg asks. “It’s either a joke or a mistake, right?”

Paris reads:

Dear Mr. Ebersole: Please let the enclosed invoice serve as your paid-in-full statement regarding all medical bills for Maxim A. Ebersole, in the amount of forty-four thousand eight hundred sixty dollars, forwarded to us by The Becky’s Angel Foundation, a nonprofit organization.

“Wow,” Paris says, reading it a second time, then handing the letter back. “And you didn’t know anything about this?”

“Not a thing,” Greg says.

“Amazing.”

“Do you think I’ll be allowed to keep it? I mean, jobwise?”

“I’m not sure,” Paris says. “But if it’s a foundation, I’m pretty sure you can.”

Greg reads the letter again. “Have you ever heard of The Becky’s Angel Foundation?”

Paris has to smile.

Rebecca D’Angelo.

“I may have run across the name,” he says, his mind drifting to the old police report sitting on his dining room table, the one he had kept for so many years like a dirty secret, the one detailing how a then-assistant prosecutor was caught with a young girl in an alley behind the Hanna Theatre. An assistant prosecutor who now sits as a juvenile court judge.

Maybe I’ve found a use for that report after all, Paris thinks.

Greg shakes his head, smiles. “What a world, huh?”

“Yep,” Paris says, clapping his friend on the shoulder. “Crazier by the minute.”

“A fine specimen of dog,” Paris says. “Beautiful boy, Declan.” The Jack Russell terrier responds to Paris’s encomium, its muscular haunches propelling him from the ground up to Paris’s chest with one supple leap. “Is he a good ratter?”

“Oh yeah,” Mercedes replies. “He’s terrorized every squirrel for five blocks in every direction from my house. You’d think they’d have a contract out on him by now.”

They are standing under a red cedar gazebo, waiting out a drizzle that has slightly delayed this year’s Terrier Time Trials in Middlefield, a rural community near Cleveland. The time trials are a yearly event in which terriers of all types are tested in a wide variety of ways. The most popular, certainly among the dogs themselves, are the go-to-ground events, where a tunnel is buried in the ground, with a rat in a cage at the end, and the dogs are timed for how long it takes them to find and work their quarry. Dachshunds, Cairns, Westies, Dandie Dinmonts, and the undisputed king of the ratters, the Jack Russell, take part.

Manfred is a two-time champion.

Mercedes Cruz’s article for Mondo Latino has turned into a feature for Vanity Fair, where it is currently slated for August publication. She had spent twenty-four hours or so in the trunk of her car, parked on East Eighty-fifth Street, surviving on Girl Scout cookies and a frozen bottle of Evian water she had found in her gym bag. Aside from having to be restrained by no fewer than three bailiffs on the day Christian del Blanco was arraigned, she seems to be over it.

The good news is that she has promised Paris a steak dinner at Morton’s when the Vanity Fair check arrives. Manny and Declan have been promised the bones.

“Come on, Dad!” Melissa shouts. “They’re starting.”

Melissa stands at the edge of the split rail-fenced training field. Next to her stands her grandmother. Both are dressed in jeans and hooded parkas. Both are wearing rubber boots already caked with cold Ohio late-winter mud.

“Yeah, let’s go,” Gabriella says, echoing her granddaughter’s plea. “Come on, Jackie. Bring your friend.”

“Jackie?” Mercedes asks. She had lost a few pounds since her ordeal, had confessed to joining a karate class. Her braces are off, her hair is pony-tailed for the day. She looks fit and agile and lithely sexy.

Before heading off to the trial field, Paris turns his attention to the two dogs before him.

Manny and Declan sit at his feet, considering each other carefully, nose to nose, brothers at heart, competitors for the moment. Manny looks up at Paris, knowing it is time to go, surely wondering if, in Declan Cruz, he may have finally met his match.

Paris glances at Mercedes, catches her smiling at him.

And begins to wonder the same thing.