The Violet Hour

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also available by Richard Montanari

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  One: Jaguar and Marmoset

  Chapter 1

  Two: This Slow-Gathering Storm

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Three: Crack Alley Blues

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Four: Subterranea

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Five: The AdVerse Society

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Six: Halloween

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Epilogue: Time Present, Time Past

  Chapter 63

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Johnny Angel is found brutally murdered with a dead prostitute in his bed and a needle full of heroin in his arm. It’s all the more shocking because he’s a priest. But when Dr Bennett Marc Crane, a prestigious plastic surgeon, is the next victim of a vicious attack of the same manner, it becomes clear that there is a serial killer on the loose ...

  And as this homicidal maniac exacts his vengeance upon more innocent victims, evidence of another long-buried crime is uncovered. One that starts with a Halloween celebration at an exclusive college party twenty years ago and ends with a murderous plan for delayed revenge.

  For Nicky Stella, a hungry journalist, this is just the sort of sordid story that could land him a cover article. But when he digs a bit too deep, the killer’s attention turns towards Nicky and he must find the killer before he becomes the next victim ...

  About the Author

  Richard Montanari is the Top Ten Sunday Times bestselling author of Play Dead, The Rosary Girls, The Skin Gods, Broken Angels and The Devil’s Garden, as well as the internationally acclaimed thrillers Kiss of Evil, The Violet Hour, and Deviant Way. He lives in Cleveland, Ohio.

  Also available by Richard Montanari

  Deviant Way

  Kiss of Evil

  The Rosary Girls

  The Skin Gods

  Broken Angels

  Play Dead

  The Devil’s Garden

  The Violet Hour

  Richard Montanari

  For Meg Ruley and Peggy Gordijn

  At the violet hour, when the eyes and back

  Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits

  Like a taxi throbbing waiting . . .

  The Wasteland – T.S. Eliot

  One

  Jaguar and Marmoset

  1

  THE AIR IN the closet was damp and oppressive, fat with female smells, smells that seemed to invade his skin, silently, deftly mingling with his own sharp odors, his own cloying musk of fear and excitement. Some of the dresses stank of cigarettes. Nighttime clothes, he thought, party-girl clothes. Others offered a thick mélange of deodorant, Dentyne, drugstore perfume. Good-girl clothes, these: school, work, church.

  But there was another fragrance beneath this wash of career-girl respectability, one that whispered of fornication, of animal secretions in the dead of night. The casually deployed bloodred teddy, he imagined, hanging by an eight-penny nail in the blackness. The maddening sachet of female sex on expensive silk.

  He singled out the aroma and breathed deeply.

  It stirred him.

  But even though it urged him in a way he knew was not unnatural, the feeling still unnerved him a little, still prodded a primal churning at the base of his belly that no amount of rational thought nor moral reckoning seemed to be able to soothe.

  He knew that he had to stay focused, though, and that the path that had brought him to this place, this moment, this act – the long road that had led him to this woman’s closet, a gram of pure heroin in one hand, a scalpel in the other – had to be followed, had to continue forward, onward; a sleek ball of mercury inexorably seeking its final level.

  For twenty years he had thought about these nights to come, enacting them over and over in his mind, his How-do-you-dos and Let-me-help-you-with-thats meticulously rehearsed, his workaday world a dull, perfunctory prelude to his nights; nights that had found him on their fire escapes and tree limbs and driveways and patios, observing them all from afar, waiting. He watched the suburbanites barbecue their steaks, mow their lawns, clean their gutters. Completely unaware. And the urban-dwellers, usually all too aware, had nonetheless done the most amazing things with the shades up. He had seen them eat and read and fuck and bathe and masturbate and cry, and he had even seen one of them kick a dog beneath its chin so hard that its yellowed teeth flew forth into the afternoon sunlight like wood chips from the blade of a circular saw. It was the cruelest thing he had ever seen in his life, the kicking of an old dog. Far more cruel, he believed, than anything he was about to undertake.

  In twenty years he had witnessed a thousand misdemeanors, heard a million lies. He knew where all of their skeletons dangled. And thus he knew which effluence, in the end, would compel them.

  Five friends, twenty years. How quickly the time had passed, he thought. How agonizingly slow the erosion of his grief . . .

  He regarded their adult lives not with envy, nor hatred, but rather with an overwhelming sense of sadness. Pity, at times. One of them had a pretty wife, a cute-as-a-button daughter. One, a retarded sister to whom none of this would mean a thing. So much to lose. They did not know it, but he had already integrated himself into their lives, had already staked a place on the outer rim of their daily routine. He might have been the man in the business suit, the man in the overalls, the man in the uniform. Who knew? He might even have been the man who stood at the altar, resplendent in white satin, holding the Holy Eucharist on high.

  The young woman whose salt now toyed with his senses had probably been no more than a toddler on that Halloween night twenty years ago, off to bed at eight, her aromas then so sweet and innocent. Now she was a woman. Now she covered her odors with roll-ons, lotions, perfumes, hygiene sprays. Now she fucked men for great sums of money, and the job demanded that she smell like a harlot.

  And from where he stood, she did.

  The young woman’s name was Kathleen Holt, but her professional name, her nom de boudoir, was Kiki. He had met her at the bar at Lola Bistro about a year earlier, and considering her profession, she had be
en easy enough to approach, if not extremely expensive to entertain. That night he played the slightly rumpled Ivy League academic, right down to the tweed blazer and boyish cascade of hastily trimmed hair over his forehead. During their twenty minutes together at the bar he had used words like egregious; phrases like mise-en-scène. She had nodded, baffled, yet seemingly comfortable in her puzzlement. In this setting, Kathleen Holt looked to be just another young professional in her conservative navy blue dress and matching pumps.

  But he already knew who she was, what she was. What she cost.

  And to that end, without too much tango, they got down to business.

  The first time she seduced Johnny Angel for him, it cost nearly two thousand dollars. Women who looked like Kiki didn’t come cheap, regardless of the relationship, and men in Johnny Angel’s line of work had long-entrenched defenses against them. But, eventually, the animal in the man surfaced, poking its wet nose through all the sediment of Roman Catholic guilt, through all those richly colored vestments in which Johnny had been so tightly bound in the prime of his sexual life.

  Because, no matter what the constraints of this life, nor the perceived fires of the life hereafter, all men, all people, could be made to act like animals.

  He was counting on it.

  Kiki had followed up with a phone call, as per their agreement, and told him that Johnny Angel had fucked her and wept that night, fucked her and wept. A pathetic act of contrition, he had thought upon hearing this, the puny wail of a man who once thought himself divine, at least to some degree, only to find himself so sadly out of uniform, debauched with middle age, the stain of roadhouse whiskey on his breath, the briny scent of a common whore on his cock.

  Yet that encounter, six months ago, had simply lit the lamps for this night, this gloriously luminous night. It had finally come after seven thousand dark others, a night during which Johnny Angel would meet both his God and his Devil, and discover, after so many years of unflagging self-denial, they were one and the same.

  From the closet, he watched Kiki sort through the small stack of CDs on the dresser; pale, gently freckled breasts just inches away from his hands. She selected a disk, summoned forth the rack, and within a few seconds, sashayed back to the bed to the sounds of ‘Bad to the Bone’ by George Thorogood.

  The music was very loud. That was good.

  He watched her hips move, the half-moons of her breasts appearing briefly on either side of her torso as she danced to the music. Hypnotic, he thought, the female form in motion. He felt himself harden, then directed his attention to the bed, for it wasn’t Kathleen Holt he was there to see. Not right away, anyway. It was an old college friend with whom he had unfinished business.

  Johnny Angel.

  Johnny looked softer, older – as they all would beneath their clothes – but still seemed to have about him the innate grace of a dancer. Johnny Angel had always been the theatrical one. The irony of that nickname was not lost on anyone, though, considering what Johnny Angel did for a living now, considering the party animal he had been in college.

  But college was a long, long time ago . . .

  He straightened his hair, eased open the closet door, and stepped into the room.

  ‘Yesssss . . .’ said John Angelino, his mind, incredibly, on something other than the beautiful woman in front of him. Or, more accurately, on top of him.

  And how could this be?

  As the new associate pastor of St Francis of Assisi Church on Highland Road, one of the largest Catholic parishes on the east side of Cleveland, his list of distractions ran nearly as deep and wide as his dark chasms of guilt. Because, God forgive him, this was the second time he had shattered his vow of celibacy. Twice now. Could once be forgiven? He doubted even that. But twice meant that it would happen a third time, and then a fourth. It meant that once again he would leave his collar and cassock folded neatly in his closet at the rectory and visit this woman’s bed, only to suffer the yoke of penitence for months to come. He had resisted for so long, so very long. He had known so many other priests driven mad by the shackles of celibacy.

  But when Kiki’s car had broken down in the church’s parking lot that day, more than six months ago now, everything changed. The scent of her perfume, the curve of her breasts as she leaned under the hood of her car. Yet even in the face of her beauty, her Salome charms, the seduction had taken a while. Crosses planted deeply fall hard. But eventually he realized he could not rid her from his mind, not even with prayer, and he had given in to his temptations.

  And now it was happening again.

  God forgive him.

  Father John Angelino closed his eyes tightly, trying not to bear witness to his own failing and, in the instant before his world went dark, thought he saw a shadow dart across the wall, a quick, raptorlike slash of gray.

  Or did he?

  Maybe it was just a cat. Did Kiki have one?

  Or maybe, John Angelino thought, the acid of his crimes eating at his stomach, it is just the Holy Spirit, finally come for him, its invisible sword keened to perfection, its target, the soul of a once obedient servant.

  He stole to the foot of the bed, his presence masked by the blaring music, by the frenzied movements of the two bodies snarled on the sheets.

  John Angelino was lying on his back, naked and hairless; his legs spread. His eyes were closed. The girl straddled him, preparing to take him into her body, looking slender and pallid and perfect in the light cast by the solitary votive candle on the nightstand.

  The killer crept onto the bed.

  Hands, knees, feet.

  He knelt behind Kathleen Holt, rocking to her rhythms, to the rhythms of the music, naked now himself, his own full erection straining just inches away from the smooth, sweat-slicked planes of her back. He watched, for a moment, transfixed by the contractions of her back muscles, by the steady rotation of her hips, and felt the blood course through his veins heard the creet-creet-creet of the rusted joints of the bed smelled the raw redolence of sex saw the room fully illuminated by the carbon blue light of the stereo system . . .

  ‘Julia,’ he whispered. The woman sat upright.

  And he attacked.

  He wrapped his arm tightly around her neck and entered her at the same moment, the sensation at Kathleen Holt’s throat and the much harder, much larger presence in her vagina seeming to compete for her terror. He took the opportunity to avail himself of a few strong parries, before turning his attention to Johnny Angel.

  Then the woman’s hands came to her neck, the instinct to preserve her life more important at that moment than the one to protect her womanhood. A thin shriek escaped her lips, and it was a sound he knew well, a plaintive cry that had stalked the maze of his memory for two decades.

  The squeal of the maiden, taken.

  The last notes of George Thorogood’s guitar crawled to silence as a three-inch hypodermic needle entered a vein in John Angelino’s right arm, releasing a fatal dose of heroin into his system. The GemPac – the four-by-four-inch folded square of glossy paper some drug dealers rely upon to market their wares – would be found on the nightstand, laden with the dead man’s fingerprints.

  One side of the GemPac would bear the rubber-stamped likeness of a red jaguar.

  The other, a blue marmoset.

  As the drug hurtled through his veins, and the lightless veil of death descended slowly upon him, Father John Angelino heard his murderer’s request, over and over and over, a monotone mantra recalling a hundred nightmares, a thousand sleepless nights. Julia. Julia Raines. And what the five of them did to her that Halloween night so many years ago.

  ‘Tell me what happened that night,’ the killer said. ‘Tell me in your own words.’

  But for Johnny Angel, there would be no more words. No benedictions, no sermons, no homilies. Only the sea air in his face now, the sound of his mother’s voice. Only the silence of the seminary and the smooth flight of the white swan beneath him.

  He injected Kathleen Holt with a pr
oper dose of heroin, a street fix, just enough to allow her some pleasure from the last sexual encounter of her short life, just enough to experience none of the unpleasantness of what was to happen afterwards. He then propped her on the windowsill, her back against the glass, and took her as long and as hard as he could. When he was finished, he held the base of the condom with his left hand, lest she take it with her and spoil everything, and in his right hand he took her face, gently, almost paternally, and kissed her softly on the eyes, the lips, the forehead.

  Then he leaned backward for leverage and pushed her headfirst through the glass.

  He stood for a moment, watching her body falling to the night-blackened earth a hundred feet below him, her skin a soft white blush in the darkness, her life ending with a hollow slap of firm young flesh on cold asphalt.

  A few minutes later, when he passed the body on the way to his van, he didn’t look at it. There was nothing there for him now. But there was a message in that mound of spilled woman, he thought, and the message was this:

  It is reunion year, class of 1988, a time of remembrance. A time of celebration. A time of reckoning.

  And the party, old friends, has just begun.

  Two

  This Slow-Gathering Storm

  2

  RIGHT IN FRONT of him. They were copulating right in front of him.

  It wasn’t the hour that bothered Nicholas Stella so much – although he had never been much of a morning lover, and 7:45 a.m. seemed either excessively early or excessively late. It wasn’t even the fact that they were doing it on the ledge outside his window. What bothered Nicky most was that a four-and-a-half-ounce sparrow was getting some and he was not.

  Jesus Christ, Nicky thought.

  Birds.

  He opened the window, the phone loosely at his ear, and banged on the windowsill with a rolled-up issue of Cleveland Business. In doing so, he found that, although he contributed four or five freelance articles per year to the publication, using it to roust fornicating birds was probably the full measure of its worth. He hated the magazine’s style. He marveled at the way they took a piece of art, sucked out every ounce of creativity, then rushed it into production. Still, if it weren’t for magazines like Cleveland Business, he wouldn’t be able to keep himself in a two-room efficiency apartment, and behind the duct-taped wheel of a fourteen-year-old Chevy.