The Violet Hour Page 2

  And they say you need a degree to make it in journalism.

  Nicky banged the paper against the windowsill again, as the line rang. The birds immediately took raucous flight, cursing him in Sparrow. Nicky immediately felt like an asshole. Then the woman’s voice on the phone. ‘St Francis, how may I help you?’

  ‘Hi, may I speak to Father LaCazio, please?’ Nicky asked.

  ‘Just a moment. I’ll see if he’s up.’

  Up? Nicky thought. As long as he could remember, Joseph LaCazio – Father Giuseppe Danilo LaCazio of St Francis of Assisi parish on Highland Road, Nicky’s first cousin and the only white sheep of the family – had risen at five o’clock to either attend or say mass. Yet, in spite of the hundreds of marriages, masses, baptisms, and eulogies he had performed, in spite of the collar he seemed to wear 99 percent of the time, the notion of cousin Joey being a priest was still an elusive concept for Nicky. Because Joseph LaCazio was the quick-fisted kid who used to kick Irish and Puerto Rican ass up and down Clark Avenue when they were kids. It was Joseph LaCazio who handed Nicky his first, dizzying Lucky Strike, standing on the roof of Lujak’s Dairy on Fulton, tending to Joseph’s pigeons. Joseph knew his birds, loved birds in general. Right down to that very unpriestlike tattoo he had gotten in the navy.

  Gil Strauss, the rectory handyman at St Francis, had called and left a message the night before, reminding Nicky of the upcoming food drive. Nicky hadn’t talked to his cousin Joseph in a while, and figured to kill two birds here. No pun.

  Click. ‘This is Father LaCazio,’ the voice said weakly. Nicky put the gym sock over the phone and lowered his voice, wondering if this was the right time for a practical joke. He doubted it, but he plunged ahead anyway.

  ‘Yes, Father LaCazio, I was wondering if you could tell me how to make holy water.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I want to make my own holy water. Can you tell me how to do it?’

  Pause. ‘You want to make your own holy water,’ Joseph said, a fathomless well of patience when it came to his flock. ‘At home.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Nicky said. ‘I saw the recipe once. It said, “Put the water in a pan, put the pan on the stove, and boil the Hell out of it.”’

  There was a brief silence, then: ‘I’m going to kill you, Nicky.’

  ‘Boil the Hell out of it. C’mon. It was funny. Admit it.’

  ‘Not that funny,’ Joseph said, laughing anyway. Then, after the appropriate pause, ‘How’s your father?’

  The question reminded Nicky that they were all getting to be an age when a long-delayed phone call usually meant a death, a sickness, something bad. This time, everyone was okay. ‘He’s good, Joseph. The same. You know. Still chasing the waitresses around Fort Myers.’

  ‘God bless ’im,’ Joseph said. ‘He’s a good-looking man, your father.’

  ‘Gets it from me.’

  ‘You wish,’ Joseph said. ‘And how’s your sister?’

  ‘She’s fine. Everybody’s fine.’

  ‘So what’s up? You gonna make it to the food drive, help out on the dock?’

  ‘I’ll be there.’

  ‘Donating some canned goods too, right?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Good, good . . .’ Joseph said, drifting off.

  The two men fell silent for a few moments. Nicky sensed a weariness in his cousin, who was usually the one to cheer him up, clerical duty and all. He asked. ‘What’s the matter, cuz? You don’t sound too good. And what’s with you rolling out of bed at eight o’clock in the morning?’

  ‘Long story, Nicky. We’ve had kind of a tragedy around here over the last few days. I didn’t get to bed until four o’clock this morning.’ There was a slight pause; Nicky heard his cousin draw a troubled breath, release it slowly. ‘Johnny Angelino is dead.’

  ‘What?’ Nicky said. John Angelino was one of his cousin’s oldest friends. Joseph had been elated to learn recently that Father John was finally transferring to St Francis after fifteen or so years at other parishes in the diocese. And now this. ‘What happened?’

  ‘It’s not a pretty thing, Nicky. They say he overdosed on heroin. There’s an article in the paper this morning.’

  ‘Holy—’ Nicky began, then bit back his holy shit, considering the circumstances. He had met John Angelino once and remembered being impressed with the man’s striking looks and calm, affable manner. Father John could have been a recruitment poster for the priesthood.

  ‘They say he was with a prostitute. They say she fell from a window,’ Joseph said, the anger in his voice now outpacing the grief. ‘Needless to say, it’s been pretty rough around here.’

  ‘Did you know he was . . . uh . . . you know . . .’

  ‘Not a clue,’ Joseph said, lowering his voice. ‘And that’s what pisses me off more than anything. I walk around thinking I have some sort of divine insight into the human condition.’

  ‘Don’t beat yourself up,’ Nicky said. ‘It can’t possibly be your fault.’

  ‘I don’t know . . .’ A few moments of silence, then, ‘Listen, Gil just walked in, and I gotta go. You guys work out a time. I’ll call you in the next few days, we’ll talk.’

  ‘Okay, cuz.’

  ‘God bless you,’ Joseph said.

  ‘Thanks,’ Nicky replied. He always said ‘thanks’ when Joseph blessed him. And he always felt better for at least a day.

  ‘Hi, Nick,’ Gil said, getting on the phone. ‘How ya doin’?’

  ‘I’m just fine,’ Nicky replied. Gil Strauss was the jack-of-all-trades at St Francis; the kind of guy who probably wanted to be a priest at one time, but couldn’t hack the rigors of the seminary. Nicky wasn’t sure if he lived at the rectory or not, but he always seemed to be there, fixing something, painting something, bringing a long-dead appliance back to life. Nicky had noticed immediately that the sun was now missing from Gil Strauss’s voice.

  ‘What’s your schedule?’

  ‘Busy as heck,’ Gil said. ‘We’re looking to collect a lot more food than last year. When can I come by?’

  ‘Any day this week after six is okay with me.’

  Nicky heard some scribbling, the rustle of paper. ‘Looks like tomorrow or the day after is good for me.’

  ‘No problem,’ Nicky said. And at that moment, for no discernible reason – or none that he would be able to determine later – he decided to write the story. ‘Terrible thing about Father Angelino, eh?’

  There was a pause of a few seconds. Nicky had only met Gil Strauss a few times, but knew him to be an emotional man. Gil was the guy who had to make funeral arrangements for the elderly nuns and priests at St Francis. Joseph once told him that Gil took their passings rather hard. ‘Yes. Priests shouldn’t die like that,’ he replied.

  ‘Did you know him well, Gil?’

  ‘Not really. Met him years ago. But Father LaCazio was so fond of him. So proud of him. I just don’t understand . . .’

  Nicky decided not to press the issue for the time being. Gil Strauss was probably not going to be the gateway to the story anyway. He exchanged a few more pleasantries and signed off, then wrote ‘John Angelino’ at the top of a fresh page of his notebook.

  Hector’s was a fifty-year-old diner on Murray Hill, near Mayfield, in Little Italy; a small, brick building with parking for ten or twelve cars, depending on what the winters did to the asphalt. Inside were a dozen tables draped with red gingham oilcloth, a fifteen-stool counter. On the walls, the perennials: Caruso, DiMaggio, Sinatra, De Niro. It was a place where Nicky found it easy to relax, to slip into his Italian-American rhythms. Especially with Paulina Catalano: the fastest, tallest, sexiest, leggiest waitress to ever serve a meal where Lou Groza once split the Lord’s blue sky with a tumbling pigskin.

  ‘When you gonna marry me, Paulina?’ Nicky asked, loosening his tie. Whenever he was working, whether he had an appointment or not, he always wore a suit. His grandmother had taught him that.

  ‘Sheee-it,’ Paulina said, meaning the en
tire word. She was standing at the stainless steel pass-through to the kitchen, waiting for an order, stealing a few hits on a cigarette. She wore a very tight black rayon uniform, white ruffled blouse. ‘Maybe when you get a respectable job, Nicky. Like a normal Italian.’

  ‘A respectable job. Like what?’

  ‘Like something in the trades. Cement. Carpentry. Something like that.’

  ‘Look at my hands, Paulina.’

  Paulina leaned against the counter, obliging him, feigning boredom, snapping her gum.

  ‘Mozart had hands like these,’ Nicky said. ‘Michelangelo had hands like these. You can’t put hands like these at risk.’

  ‘Risk? What are you talking about? You write articles about Amish dairy farmers.’

  Nicky grabbed his chest. ‘My God, that’s what you think I do? No wonder you never go out with me. I craft stories with these hands, Paulina. Parables of life.’

  ‘I don’t go out with you for a number of reasons, Nicky,’ Paulina said, filling her tray with the order and swinging toward the dining room. ‘That’s just one of them.’

  Nicky knew that all of this was harmless sparring. If, somehow, Paulina did call his bluff and arrange to meet him at a motel some afternoon, Nicky had the feeling he would probably faint with anticipation. It had been that long.

  ‘Would another reason be that you happen to be married to a very large, ugly Homo sapien named Mario?’

  ‘That too,’ Paulina said, stepping through the door. ‘And he’s not ugly.’

  Nicky looked down the counter, searching for corroboration. He found it in Flavio Bucci, a fixture at Hector’s since the Reagan administration. ‘Is he ugly?’

  ‘He’s ugly,’ Flavio said through a mouthful of baccalà.

  ‘All right,’ Nicky answered as he smoothed his hair, creased his pant legs, shot his monogrammed cuffs like a Jersey mobster, and stepped through the swinging doors into the dining room.

  He scanned the newspaper while he ate breakfast. He found the article tucked away in the ‘Metro’ section of the Plain Dealer. That was good. It meant that most of the other freelancers in town had probably missed it.

  Jesus, Nicky thought, reading the piece. Pure heroin. A Catholic priest.

  Nicholas Anthony Stella – having survived thirty-five years of living with both the curse and the blessing of his mother’s fine Abruzzese features, her smooth olive skin, her dark wavy hair – had grown up in a world where priests were either the kindly older types, always ruffling your hair and spouting Catholic witticisms, or the younger street-wise guys who provided a real dilemma for Nicky. If they were cool and priests, there had to be something about the God business after all.

  The death didn’t jibe with the world of his grandparents’ house on West Forty-seventh Street, a place embraced by the aromas of sweet basil and Roma tomatoes in the backyard, Louis Stella’s beloved, commemorative-stamp-sized parcel of urban green; the sounds of sentences begun in halting English, only to be finished in machine-gun Italian. A time when kids carried squirt guns, and priests all lived to be ninety, died in their sleep, and took the express train to heaven.

  Nicky tried to imagine a priest sitting on the edge of a bed, tying off his arm, mainlining heroin. He immediately banished the image from his mind, as if the act of thinking about it might tack on a few more years to his already epochal sentence in purgatory.

  The article also stated that the heroin packet found on the scene bore the mark of a red tiger-like animal on one side and the mark of a blue monkey on the other.

  But . . . was it an accident? Nicky wondered, sipping his coffee. His father had been a Cleveland cop for twenty-eight years, and Nicky had inherited the instincts, the innate skepticism. How does a Catholic priest – graduate of Case Western Reserve, graduate of Chicago University School of Divinity – get sucked down the heroin rabbit hole?

  Then came the next logical thought, as morbid as it might have been.

  This could be a cover story in the Cleveland Chronicle. Two thousand bucks.

  He did the math in his head. If he could get the paper to cough up a five-hundred-dollar advance, he could buy food for the week, and make a payment to the gypsy.

  He dropped a ten on the register, winked at Paulina. Paulina smiled back.

  And it was that piece of sunshine that Nicky Stella took with him as he stepped through the door, out into the October rain, five days before Halloween.

  3

  MADELEINE CATHERINE ST John stood by herself, as usual, dwarfed by her name, dwarfed by the monolithic bell tower that had called every generation of Montgomery School girls to class since 1936. She was small, even for seven, but her face made up for it with huge inquisitive green eyes, framed by an electric shrubbery of pumpkin red hair. Sometimes, in her bicycle helmet and glasses, Maddie St John looked not unlike Marvin, the little Martian that used to zap Daffy Duck with his ray gun.

  Amelia smiled as she turned off Fairmount Boulevard and swung the Toyota around the U-shaped driveway of the school, noticing that her daughter was once again standing in the rain, with her hand out into the rain.

  Her little alien.

  When Amelia had attended Sunview Elementary, a public school on Cleveland’s east side, she, like her friends, had generally looked upon private school girls with a combination of public disdain and private envy. Laurel girls, Hathaway Brown girls – they all seemed to have an attitude, as if to say they were just that little bit better than everyone else, even though everyone knew that it just meant that their fathers had better jobs.

  And now, Amelia thought, nearly three decades later, her daughter was a Montgomery girl.

  Where had she gone wrong?

  ‘Hi, Mob,’ Maddie said, climbing into the car, hopelessly stuffed up again. ‘What’s for subber?’ The brim of her oversized floral rain hat tipped, depositing a splash of water onto the car seat.

  Amelia reached over and straightened it. ‘Seat belt,’ she said.

  ‘Seat belt,’ Maddie echoed on cue, pulling on her belt, clicking it home.

  ‘I have no idea about supper, sweetie,’ Amelia said, blotting the water on the seat with the unread ‘Life’ section of USA Today. ‘It’s still sitting at the grocery store, waiting for us.’

  ‘Can we have pizza?’

  The head cold turned ‘pizza’ into ‘beetsa.’ Amelia felt her daughter’s forehead, found nothing out of the ordinary, and said, ‘We’ll see.’

  The streets of Collier Falls were black and slicked with a full day’s drizzle; the traffic, such as it was on the half-mile strip of shops that bordered the Falls, was light. But then again, it was a weekday, and most of the people in greater Cleveland didn’t fall victim to the town’s quaintness until the weekends.

  A tidy bedroom community, Collier Falls, twenty miles south-east of Cleveland, was surrounded by enough greenery to feel rural, yet still plugged into the arteries leading to town and beyond. A couple of twists of the MetroPark system were all that separated the town’s five thousand or so residents from the freeways, and within fifty minutes, on a good day, you could be standing on Public Square. There was a first-run duplex theater and two or three chichi eateries, a video store with a fairly extensive foreign film rack. Collier Falls, Ohio, was a snoozing upper-middle-class hamlet, mostly hidden from view and quietly delirious about that fact.

  But it was grocery-shopping day, and that meant it wasn’t toward the St John home on Wyckamore Lane, a quiet cul-de-sac at the northern end of town, that Amelia pointed the Toyota. Instead she headed west, first to the MicroCenter Store at Eastgate, and then to the Food Fair on Bellingham Road, which was certain to be a zoo.

  ‘How is Molson?’ Maddie asked.

  ‘He’s fine.’

  ‘Did you get his poop?’ Maddie looked at Amelia, her nose wrinkled into a small pink fig.

  ‘Not yet, honey. Mommy will.’

  Molson was their ten-month-old retriever (full name, Molson Golden Retriever, courtesy of Maddie, Roger, and ESPN),
which had recently been phone-diagnosed as potentially having worms. The assignment Amelia was dreading with every olfactory synapse in her body was the task of collecting a fresh stool specimen to shuttle down to Dr Weiss’s office so that he could look for the alleged offending worms.

  ‘Don’t forget to check for the truck, too,’ Maddie added. ‘We don’t want to forget about the truck.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  The prevailing theory was that one of the miniature yellow dump trucks that belonged in Maddie’s Tiny Town set had somehow catapulted itself out of Maddie’s bedroom window and into Molson’s outside water dish. And, considering the very limited cranial capacity of even the brightest golden retriever, an elite subspecies into which Molson was clearly not born, it was not surprising that the dog had immediately lapped it up. That was the last anyone had seen of it. Amelia had already decided that if Dr Weiss was going to be looking for worms anyway, he could just as easily look for a dump truck.

  It was bright yellow, for God’s sake, Amelia thought as she pulled into a parking space at MicroCenter and cut the engine.

  How hard could it be to spot?

  ‘What sort of software are you interested in?’ the salesman asked.

  He was twenty-five, and far too short to be her main character Gaspar. He had the skewed, oversized features of a Slavic fisherman and wore too much cologne for daytime, but had a pleasant smile, dressed well, and sported no pinkie rings.

  One of Gaspar’s cousins perhaps, Amelia thought, hoping she would remember his face and manner long enough to get to the car and her journal. She simply had to get one of those little digital recorders. ‘I’m writing a novel,’ she said.

  ‘Isn’t that interesting?’ he fawned, gesturing to the three-hundred-dollar-software-for-the-Ohio-housewife-who-thinks-she-can-write department.