The Violet Hour Read online

  The weeknight crowd at Celine’s on Falls Road had been more local in flavor than it was on the weekends. Paige made up for it by dancing with every breathing male between the ages of twenty-two and sixty. Amelia nursed a single glass of wine for two hours, her mind returning over and over again to her rescuer.

  Just keep me in mind.

  She dropped a very giggly Paige Turner off at midnight and drove home.

  After a quick look around the house, searching for signs of whether Becky’s boyfriend had paid a conjugal visit to the Hotel St John, and finding none, Amelia paid her and drove her home.

  It wasn’t until one o’clock that Amelia’s head hit the pillow. Sleep came within minutes.

  And, in its wake, a very erotic dream about a man in a soft leather jacket.

  Seventy-five feet away, at the mouth of the driveway, a blue van cut its engine and rolled, silently, to a stop. For a brief moment the brake lights shone brightly; red knives slitting the darkness.

  Then the night regained control, and the St John house, the lone structure at the end of Wyckamore Lane, was once again clothed in black.

  Three

  Crack Alley Blues

  11

  FROM THE WINDOWS of his office at Clark Hall, a suite of dark-paneled rooms he had occupied for twenty-three years as head of the English Department at Case Western Reserve University, Sebastian Keller looked out at the rich fall colors that blanketed University Circle: Severance Hall, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the lagoon.

  Sixty-one, he thought. Young, really. But it would be his final year of life.

  He turned back to his desk and looked again at the newspaper. John Angelino. The theatrical one. Mr Angelino, he recalled as if it were just yesterday, was the one who never missed an opportunity to burst into show tunes. Nice-looking, serious about his faith. A natural for the priesthood.

  They had called themselves the AdVerse Society, he remembered. Their main purpose in life – aside from the sampling of any alcoholic concoction that had ever dampened the cocktail napkins of Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table – had been the trashing of the allegedly overrated, the deconstruction of the so-called greats in modern poetry: Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound.

  John Angelino, dead at forty-two. The newspaper confirmed it.

  But it was the next day’s newspaper that Sebastian Keller dreaded, and then the one that would come the day after that. Because one day, and soon, a Plain Dealer would show up on his desk and let him know that another one had died. Another member of the AdVerse Society had died in the prime of life.

  Heroin indeed.

  He glanced at his watch, at the second hand, and moved slowly, painfully, toward his chair. The myriad pills he took every day barely assuaged the pain that racked his lungs, his lower back, his hips, his genitals. The cancer had drawn a deep red outline of his manhood and now it had begun to flame.

  He sat down, closed his eyes, conjured up the young woman’s body, the way it had moved beneath her simple cotton dresses; the unthinking, unspoiled way she would cross her legs beneath her desk.

  And then he recalled the way she had looked on that Halloween night, her perfect young breasts in the candle-light, the street-walker’s makeup.

  He downed his pills, sipped his water.

  He would watch the newspapers, he thought. He wasn’t sure whether he would have enough time or strength to do anything if it happened again, but he would watch the papers.

  Watch, and wait.

  12

  THE ARTICLE THAT Nicky Stella firmly believed was his best work, the one he figured he would eventually resell to GQ as his ticket to the big time, was entitled ‘Crack Alley Blues,’ a diary-style journal of three days inside the Cleveland Police Department’s Narcotics Unit. ‘Sensitive and riveting,’ one reader had written to the editor in a gushing encomium.

  Nicky had spent three nights with two undercover narcotics cops; cops who, to this day, Nicky knew only by their street names, Birdman and Willie T. The detectives always rode around in disguise: wigs, hats, tinted shades. Willie T was black, short, and powerfully built, given to tank tops and left hooks; Birdman was a lean, wise-cracking Anglo who seemed to have a thin veneer of procedure covering long-simmering sadism.

  They would pick Nicky up at the Burger King at East Eighty-fifth Street and Euclid Avenue every night about eleven, then head straight into the Third District, straight into hell. During the entire time Nicky was on the assignment, including a number of follow-up interviews, the two police officers never divulged their identities, never dropped the disguises. All Nicky knew was a phone number.

  Five days before the article was published, Nicky met Willie T at a cop bar on Payne Avenue. He gave him an advance copy. Willie T took it into a booth, along with a tumbler of Jack Daniel’s, and read it. Twice. Forty minutes later he had come out and marched the length of the bar with what Nicky would swear under oath was a tear gathering at the corner of his eye. Willie T hugged him.

  Later that night the two police officers took him into the supply room at the back of the bar, reached into their respective pockets, and pulled out a stack of bills. In unison they each peeled off a single hundred-dollar-bill, then ripped the bill in half. They each handed a piece to Nicky, tokens of their appreciation. Birdman spoke first. ‘Your next two misdemeanors are on us, as long as you fuck up inside city limits. Cross the line, make it a felony, we don’t know you.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ Nicky replied, only marginally understanding what was going on.

  ‘Or maybe you’ll need a source,’ Birdman continued. ‘Either way, you ever meet with us in the future, you bring your half. Understand?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Nicky said. ‘I get it.’

  ‘But don’t you go walkin’ around cocky. Like you got license to do some shit,’ Willie T said. ‘This ticket will take you about as far as my mood on the day you fuck up. Ca-peesh?’

  Nicky understood, and for a long time the half bills had burned a hole in his end-table drawer, as did the image of Willie T’s misty eyes into his mind.

  He dialed the number, got voice mail, as always. ‘This is T . . . Leave a message at the beep.’

  ‘One-one-six,’ he said, as per instructions, and then hung up.

  He sat on the couch, found the remote, flipped on the television: CNN was in Iraq, Drew Carey was giving away a trip to Puerto Vallarta, some tropical paradise was bracing for a terrible storm. Round and around the cable wheel he went.

  It used to drive Meg crazy.

  Nicky glanced at the calendar. Could it really be five years?

  He had met Margaret Connelly one steamy August night at the bar at Holiday Inn Rockside, a night that found him in the right suit, the right cologne, and, somehow, in possession of the right words to say to the girl who would be the love of his life. Bouncing to the music, feigning disinterest, he walked by her table no fewer than five times that night, five separate passes before he was able to roust the courage to ask her to dance. When she accepted, Nicky prayed a quick novena for the wisdom to avoid saying anything stupid. Unfortunately, that particular prayer went unheard, but during their second slow dance, when he leaned back and looked at Meg closely – emerald eyes, the sexy crooked smile, the way she reddened, head to toe, a full Irish body blush, when he told her she was beautiful – he knew that this was the woman he was going to marry.

  Within three months he proposed to her. Meg Connelly said no. So Nicky Stella asked her again and again and again – fifty days in a row. Didn’t miss one. He’d show up at her desk at work, he’d leave balloons in her car, he’d send her telegrams. He even tried the corny old mariachi trio-under-the-window routine. Cost him two hundred sixty bucks to hire Luis, Carlos, and Little Diego for that hour, but still she resisted.

  On the fifty-first day he gave up, got plastered. And it was just before midnight that night that Margaret Connelly appeared at his front door and said yes.

  They had been in love, they had married at city hall
, and then one perfect spring day Meg went to the doctor’s office and never fully returned. She was twenty-five when they found the cancer, twenty-six when Nicky sat next to her bed, holding her frail hands as she slept, hands that once smoothed his hair when they kissed, hands that once electrified him with the slightest touch, hands that now lay still and empty. Dry, seasoned twigs stacked by a dying fire. She was one day shy of twenty-seven when they all stood in the cold rain at Holy Cross cemetery: steel gray silhouettes against a dirty scrape of winter sky.

  He kept her clothes for the longest time, along with a hundred slightly out-of-focus pictures. He wore her powder blue hospital bracelet for a year.

  The bill for losing Meg, the part not covered by insurance, had been $77,300, and Nicky paid every last cent, taking every job he could manage to fit into a twenty-hour day, reserving the final four hours of each day for his booze, his ventless corner of sorrow. He had not been out of the city in five years, had not purchased a new suit in six.

  Now, though, he had a solitary snapshot left. Meg, smiling, her face forever young; her eyes, evergreen. He had long since donated her clothes to Catholic charity.

  Everything, of course, but her beret. The raspberry-colored beret still hung on the rack by the front door, as if it had all been a cruel hoax, as if the strong young woman who could all but wrestle him into submission hadn’t become a ghost in front of his eyes, as if one day he would open the door and find the beret gone. And that would mean that Meg was at the store, that Meg was coming back.

  Every day, though, the raspberry beret remained where it was. A warm whisper of Margaret Jane Connelly at the bottom of the stairs.

  And despite a half dozen one-nighters – faceless bodies in his bed, always gone by morning – there had been no woman since Meg who had turned his head, his heart. Yet he knew it was time to move on.

  He was ready.

  The day after he had paid the last of the medical bills, the day after he had gotten deliriously drunk at the accomplishment, his ancient computer decided to commit the digital equivalent of suicide.

  On that day Nicky knew he had to act fast, for without a computer, he had no way to earn a living. He also knew that there wasn’t a bank or a finance company this side of Indonesia that would lend him a dime. So he did the next dumbest thing. He let his cousin Paulie talk him into seeing a ‘friend’ of his, a loan shark named Frank Corso, a six-three, three-hundred-pound blond gypsy miscreant who, as a ‘favor’ to cousin Paulie, gave Nicky a good rate and monthly payments.

  Paulie set up the meet, Nicky got his four thousand dollars and bought the best Apple laptop computer he could get, along with printer, scanner, digital camera, and back-up drives.

  For the past ten months Nicky managed to make the payments, never touching the principal. Except this month he was late. And so Frank Corso had shown up at Nicky’s door six days ago and informed him that he would return in one week and, at that time, would leave the premises with either the four large, or Nick Stella’s testicles in his hand. What Frank had failed to tell Nicky at their first meeting was that, if you miss a payment by more than two weeks, you suddenly owed the whole principal.

  It was a good thing he was Paulie’s friend.

  On the other hand, it was the first time in Nicky Stella’s life he found four thousand dollars to be a bargain for anything.

  The phone rang during General Hospital.

  ‘This is Nicholas Stella.’

  ‘This is T’ the voice said brightly, immediately recognizable as Willie T. He sounded playful, content. It probably meant he had recently chewed some gang-banger a new asshole or dropped a midlevel crack dealer with the fourteen-shot nine-millimeter pistol he carried under his arm. It was a perfect time to ask for a favor.

  ‘Willie T,’ Nicky exclaimed, trying to sound as street as possible. ‘Mah man.’

  ‘Where y’at?’

  Willie T sometimes drifted into a New Orleans kind of drawl, and Nicky wasn’t sure, at those times, if he was offering a how ya doin’ greeting by way of his where y’at, the way they did in Louisiana, or actually asking him where he was. Seeing as Willie T had just dialed his number, he chose the former.

  ‘I’m good, Willie. Taking care of business.’

  ‘Ain’t seen your name in the papers lately.’

  Tell me about it, Nicky thought. ‘Yeah, well, trying, you know? It’s one of the reasons I’m calling. I’m working on a cover story for the Chronicle. But I have bigger plans for it.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Willie T said, sounding genuinely impressed. ‘So what can I do for you?’

  ‘Well, were you by any chance in on this case about the priest who overdosed?’

  ‘Heard somethin’ about it.’

  ‘He was my cousin. . . .’ Nicky lied. ‘John Angelino was his name.’

  ‘Sorry, man.’

  ‘The paper said the junk had a red tiger and a blue monkey on it.’

  ‘Yeah, right. I didn’t catch the case, though. If there isn’t anybody buying or selling it, I don’t get the call.’

  ‘Have you run across the tiger and monkey marks before?’

  ‘No,’ Willie T said. ‘Don’t ring a bell. But these dealers change these marks all the time.’

  ‘Sounds Chinese though, right?’

  ‘Yeah. I would say. They’re really into that animal shit.’

  The first push. ‘Got any connections on the local Chinese chain?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Willie T said, a little skeptically, recognizing the pressure. ‘A few. Why?’

  Nicky decided to just say it out loud. He closed his eyes, spoke clearly. ‘I want to talk to the dealer, Willie. Some midlevel guy. You know what I mean? No holds barred, completely anonymous interview. We’ll get some really arty shots of him in shadow. I’ll quote him in dialect, even. Real street-theater piece. He’ll be a fuckin’ star. It’ll get him laid for years.’

  Willie T laughed, a little more patronizingly than Nicky would have liked.

  ‘I’m serious,’ Nicky said.

  ‘Number one, drug dealers need absolutely no help gettin’ pussy. None. Drug dealers got pussy like you and me got gas. Like all the motherfuckin’ time. Okay? And two, this is some dangerous shit you’re talkin’ about, man. I mean, do you know who these people are?’

  ‘Hey . . . did I not ride around with you and see first-hand?’

  ‘You think that’s it? Man . . .’

  Up came the Italian. ‘I know what I’m talking about. I know who I’m talking about. You think I discovered drugs when I met you? Gimme some fuckin’ credit, Willie.’

  Willie T remained silent.

  Nicky continued. ‘Look . . . I want to know if he has any more conscience about selling killer shit than he does about the other shit. I mean, I’m not on some crazy crusade because this guy was my cousin,’ he said. ‘I just want to know. It’ll be a great story.’

  ‘You got brass, Nicky. I will give you that.’

  Second push. ‘All I need you to do is find out who’s dealing it. Get me an intro. I’ll do the rest.’

  ‘Where you gonna be?’

  ‘Around,’ Nicky said. ‘You tell me where and when.’

  Nicky heard Willie T cover the phone with his hand. After a few seconds, Willie T said, ‘I’ll call you back.’

  Later, while Nicky was at a Fellini double feature at the Cinematheque, hoping to avoid Frank Corso at the door to his apartment – Satyricon and Roma, as if his life wasn’t bizarre enough – Willie T left a message. Willie T said that there was only one man to see about the red-tiger heroin.

  The good news? The good news was that Willie T told him where he could find the guy, and how to get on the drug dealer’s good side.

  The bad news?

  The man’s name was Rat Boy Choi.

  13

  DR BENJAMIN MATTHEW Crane, one of the most highly respected plastic surgeons in all of western Pennsylvania, graduate of Case Western Reserve University and Harvard Medical School, sat on a lounge chair
, in the shadows behind his house. He was twenty feet from the sliding glass doors that led to his dining room, and the expensive track lighting that looked, from Dr Crane’s somewhat inebriated and aroused perspective, like black cocks dangling over his wife’s head, spewing thin streams of sperm-light.

  Elizabeth Crane walked out of the room, down the hallway, toward their bedroom. Benjamin Crane hoped she was off slipping into a new outfit. He was ready for a new outfit.

  Behind him, the trees shimmered in a late October breeze. Above him the clouds lashed a thin veil of purple over a bone-colored moon. Midnight. Next to him, on a wrought-iron end table, sat a large pitcher of vodka martinis, now half-empty. Next to that, a compact Sony video camera, top of the line.

  Dr Crane – forty-three and balding, tanned year-round, always in Milano high fashion – wore a powder blue scrub set from the hospital, no shoes. He had had so much lightning-quick sex in hospital settings over the years that he almost needed the feel of the soft cotton against his skin to get a hard-on these days. The Grey Goose helped sometimes. It helped soften the edges of his fantasy, helped to putty in the imperfections that had begun to erode his wife.

  But Elizabeth always knew what to do, knew all the moves. And in the proper light, in the proper mood, she still looked very good. The teak-colored hair, long and thick and luminescent. The eggshell skin.

  He poured himself another martini as Robert Palmer’s ‘Addicted to Love’ came thundering forth from the house. The sliding glass door was closed, but the music was loud. This fed his fantasy, of course, and Elizabeth knew it. It meant she trusted him completely tonight. He wondered what she would be wearing when she came around the corner, into the dining room, and was instantly gratified when she stepped into sight wearing a very short red cocktail dress, red elbow-length gloves.

  The phone game.

  She answered the phone that wasn’t ringing, spoke animatedly into it, a game they often played: she the fiery film actress; he, the debauched producer, watching her talk dirty to an ex-lover.