Don’t Look Now Page 6

  ‘Fucking rats are still winning, Jackie.’ Murdock slipped into the booth and tried, unsuccessfully, to get the waitress’s attention. ‘Congratulations on getting lead dog,’ Murdock said. ‘Is Dietricht gonna shit a potato or what?’

  Bobby Dietricht was the Homicide Unit comer. He had his gold shield before he was thirty and had designs on captain by forty. It was just this kind of task-force that would have saved Bobby Dietricht a year or two on the ladder. But Captain Elliott didn’t care too much for Bobby Dietricht, and Paris got the call.

  ‘Thanks, Timmy.’

  ‘Play this smart, Jack.’

  Paris smiled. ‘I got two till my twenty, man,’ he said. ‘After that, I’m out.’

  Murdock laughed and called for the waitress again. ‘What the hell are you gonna do off the force, Jack? Go security? Go PI? I don’t think so, buddy. You’re too much like me. Blue all through. Just another lifer.’ The waitress finally came over, took Murdock’s order, grabbed his menu and walked back to the kitchen. Murdock lowered his voice. ‘So what do you have?’

  Paris matched his volume. ‘I have shit,’ he said. ‘Not a print, not a partial, no blood from the killer, no semen. Not a fucking thing. Except three bodies.’

  ‘DNA?’

  ‘All three samples are out to the feds.’

  ‘What do you have on the asshole?’

  ‘I got a tall white male, thirties, glasses, mustache and a tweed hat. Maybe. And that’s probably a disguise. Could be you, even. If you had a mustache.’

  Murdock smiled. ‘And if I was tall and still in my thirties.’

  ‘We don’t even have this guy anywhere near the Milius murder. She leaves work one day, she shows up dead. Could have been someone else. Except—’

  ‘Except what?’

  ‘It doesn’t leave this booth?’

  ‘Hand to God, Jackie.’

  Paris took a moment, debating. ‘All three had patches of skin removed.’ He kept the information about the bodies being made up after they were killed to himself. He trusted Tim Murdock as much as any other cop, but some things were better kept inside the investigation for as long as possible. Murdock didn’t press Paris on any other details for the time being. He knew the routine.

  ‘How’s the hot shot?’

  ‘Tommy’s fine,’ Paris said. ‘He’s really going to be the lead sniffer on this one, though. Great instincts for a guy his age. He’s the real sleeper at the Unit. Everybody’s talking Bobby Dietricht, but Tommy might just smoke him.’

  ‘Kid’s that good?’

  ‘That good,’ Paris said. ‘I don’t know too much about him personally yet. Never been asked to his place.’

  The two caught up quickly on each other’s ex-wives and children and Paris rose to leave just as Murdock’s breakfast arrived. Paris, whose stomach was legendarily susceptible to any and all sick jokes, knew that Tim Murdock was just as bad, if not worse. As Reuben Ocasio couldn’t resist taunting him, Paris found that he couldn’t resist taunting Murdock. For the first time, Paris thought he understood Reuben.

  ‘I’m telling you, Timmy,’ Paris began, laying down a tip, ‘this guy sliced the skin off in a wide strip. And when you look at it like that, it’s almost transparent, you know?’

  Murdock – whose face was beginning to drain of color – looked down at his two pieces of slightly undercooked bacon and called for the waitress.

  Paris drove south on Coventry, noting that the dogwood trees that lined Fairmount Boulevard were straining at their buds once again. He had told Beth that he would stop by on his way to the office, knowing that she and Melissa would probably be going to ten o’clock mass. He needed a built-in excuse for leaving, in case his emotions got the best of him, as they seemed to be doing with unnerving regularity of late.

  He found a space right in front of Beth’s building, got out of the car, raised his collar against the wind.

  It may have been Easter Sunday, but it was still March in Cleveland.

  Beth wore a pale apricot dress and matching heels. Her hair was much shorter than Paris had ever seen it. Lighter too. She seemed to have taken on the look of a woman who was content to move among her new circle of friends: the movers and shakers of Cleveland society. Paris always scanned the society column in the Plain Dealer to see if Beth Shefler-Paris attended this society function or that hospital benefit. He saw her name once in a column about a recent chichi gourmet function called the Five Star Sensation, and it made him feel like shit for a week.

  Beth kissed him on the cheek, looking much younger than her thirty-six years. She took the dozen lilies Paris had grossly overpaid for at the last minute, knowing well enough to let him hand Melissa the huge Easter basket himself. ‘How are you, Jack?’ she asked, walking him into the kitchen. ‘You look good.’

  ‘Overpaid, underworked, overstaffed,’ he said. ‘The usual.’

  Beth found a vase for the lilies, cut them, filled the vase with water and arranged the flowers on the dining room table. ‘Read about you in the paper,’ she said as she poured him a cup of coffee. Just like old times. ‘Does one say “congratulations” at a moment like this?’

  Paris thought she would have known that. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘It’s a good move.’

  ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  She brought his coffee over to him, sat down. ‘Melissa said lunch was a lot of fun. She said you hardly ate a thing.’

  ‘I’ve never been a big lunch eater.’

  ‘I know. It hasn’t been that long.’

  Paris sipped his coffee, put his cup back into the saucer, realizing that he had never seen this china pattern before. Like half the things in the apartment, it looked brand new. And expensive. ‘Not for you, maybe,’ he said, then instantly regretted it.

  Shit.

  Beth reached forward, placed her hand on his. ‘Jack …’

  Melissa came racing around the corner. She wore a white dress, white shoes and a white ribbon in her hair. But, because she was Jack Paris’s daughter, her purse was a shocking lime green. ‘Happy Easter, Daddy!’ She flew across the kitchen and into his arms. Out of the corner of his eye, Paris saw his wife look away.

  ‘Hi punkin,’ Paris said. ‘Let me look at you.’

  Since she was five or six that had been her cue to walk around the room like a cat-walk model, spinning, hand on hip, flipping her hair. ‘Don’t we look pretty,’ Paris added.

  ‘Thanks, Daddy.’

  Paris retrieved the basket from behind the island.

  ‘Easter bunny left this for you at my … house.’ Paris felt strange, in the company of his wife and daughter, talking about his house. It had been a long time since they had all lived under one roof as a family, but he was still wrestling with geographic demons; those real, and those whose boundaries were etched only on the map of his heart. He was still madly in love with his wife.

  ‘Wow!’ Melissa exclaimed, looking through the purple cellophane for her favorite Easter candy, knowing, of course, it would be in there. She spotted them. ‘Cadbury Creme Eggs!’

  As anxious as she was to get at all that sugar, she slowly, methodically removed the cellophane and bows, folded them and stacked them on the kitchen counter. A cop’s kid at work.

  Melissa walked over to the dinette table and plucked a hard-boiled egg from the centerpiece: a two-foot-high bunny made out of accordion paper and surrounded by green cellulose and what looked like two dozen brightly painted eggs. She removed a strand of hay and handed Paris the egg. ‘Easter bunny left this for you,’ she said. The egg was light blue with dark-blue speckles. It had a bright red ‘Daddy’ across one side, and a decal of a duck with a policeman’s cap on the other.

  ‘It’s beautiful, sweetie,’ Paris said, ‘Thanks.’ He kissed her on the top of her head in the instant before she grabbed her basket and raced into the living room, leaving a trail of a dozen or so Jelly Bellies in her wake.

  ‘She worked really hard on that egg,’ Beth said, crossing the
kitchen with the coffeepot. She topped off Paris’s cup. ‘All I got was a plain white egg with a “Mom” sticker on it.’

  Paris crouched down and began to pick up the jelly beans. ‘She’s getting so big. I nearly walked right by her at the Olive Garden.’

  ‘Junior high next year.’

  The words filled Paris with disquiet. Junior high. His little angel. Paris stood up and dropped the jelly beans into his pocket. ‘Wasn’t it just a few weeks ago she went running up to the glass wall at Sea World yelling “Samoo, Samoo” and got splashed and screamed her brains out?’

  Beth smiled. ‘Or, remember the time – I think she was about two, maybe two and a half – when you told her that airplanes were exactly the same size as they looked in the sky, and that they could fly really low and get tangled up in her hair. And then she heard the plane that one day and—’

  ‘She ran out of the house with a saucepan on her head.’

  ‘I could’ve killed you for that,’ Beth said, laughing. ‘I think she got over that one about a week ago.’

  They went quiet for a few moments, Paris turning the handle of his coffee cup around and around. It had been so long since they’d laughed together the sound was foreign to him. Finally, he asked. ‘So how is she, Beth?’

  Beth shrugged. ‘She’s still adjusting. She doesn’t cry every day anymore and she’s doing better in school. Her friends are coming around more now. But she still talks about you all the time. Her daddy, the cop. Even with the karate lessons, it’s still her most effective playground threat.’

  ‘She isn’t … she doesn’t have a boyfriend or anything, does she? Like some kid who walks her home or something? Or some kid she goes to the library with or somewhere?’

  ‘Jack, she’s eleven. You think she’s dating?’

  ‘Well,’ Paris began, feeling a little stupid, ‘she’s going to be twelve and that’s one year away from being thirteen and that’s a teenager. And teenagers date.’

  ‘You are too much, John Paris. I’ll try to keep the little Lotharios in line for a few more weeks. Keep those raging hormones in check.’

  Paris tried to keep a straight face, but it was hopeless. They both laughed.

  It didn’t last long, though, and soon they were back to their awkward postures. Paris stood up. ‘Gotta run. Thanks for the coffee.’

  ‘You don’t have to …’

  They stood face to face for a few moments, clumsily out of love. ‘Happy Easter,’ Paris said. He leaned forward to kiss her. On the other side of the huge apartment a key turned noisily in the lock.

  ‘Bethy?’ It was a man’s voice.

  Paris made Dr Bill to be about forty, trim and tanned, collegiately handsome, perhaps an inch or two taller than himself. He wore a navy-blue suit with some kind of club tie, and the standard wing tips that befitted a man of his standing.

  ‘You must be Jack,’ William said, his hand leading him the entire twenty or so feet between the front door and the entrance to the kitchen. Paris waited until the man’s hand was in the same zip code as his own before reacting.

  ‘Someone has to be,’ Paris said with a smile. ‘I must have lost the coin toss.’ They shook hands. ‘And you have to be William, right?’

  ‘Yes … yes …’ He looked at Paris, at Beth, back again, not really sure how to react to this rumpled ex-husband-cop-daddy stranger. ‘Hi hon,’ he said to Beth, but didn’t dare lean across and kiss her.

  ‘Hate to just run off like this but duty calls, I’m afraid,’ Paris said, immediately thinking that he was starting to sound like a TV cop. ‘Nice to have met you, Bill,’ he added. ‘Take good care of my girls.’

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ William said. His frozen grin remained in place and unthawed.

  ‘Or I’ll arrest you,’ Paris added with a wink. He kissed Beth on the cheek, and once again shook the rather limp right hand of Dr William Abramson, pediatrician, surrogate daddy and brand-new boyfriend.

  Paris stopped at Arabica on the Square and picked up a pair of mega-muffins and two large coffees for Tommy and himself. The coffee at the Justice Center on Sundays was generally a lot worse than during the week, due to the fact that one of the detectives was responsible for brewing it. In line he heard two women discussing the morning’s Plain Dealer cover story about the killings. They seemed to think that the killer was a mother-hater, sadly deprived of affection when he was weaned, someone from whom the legal and psychiatric communities could learn a great deal if they would only see the poor man as a victim, not some sort of devil.

  Deprivation? The only thing Paris wanted to deprive this sick asshole of was air.

  He drove up Fairhill, cut across University Circle and got on Chester Avenue just as the churches let out their nine o’clock Easter masses. Paris noticed the families dressed in their finery: snug little units that sauntered up the avenue, renewed and renewing. They all looked so happy, so together, so cohesive.

  He pulled into the lot at the Justice Center just as Tommy was getting out of his car, a year old Camaro. Word had it that somehow Tommy had managed to buy a new Chevy every two years since high school and each one of them had been some combination of white, black and gray. It was only one of Tommy Raposo’s quirks, pulled from his bottomless bag of superstitions. ‘Hey Jack,’ Tommy said. He was dressed casually, much the same as Paris – jeans, polo shirt and deck shoes – but somehow it looked a lot better on him. ‘See the Plain Dealer yet?’

  Paris shut off the engine of his car and listened to the post-ignition do its drum solo for about twenty seconds. ‘You believe it?’ he finally said, stepping out of the car.

  ‘You earned it.’

  ‘I need you big-time on this one, paesan.’

  ‘You own me, Jack,’ Tommy said. ‘I don’t eat, I don’t sleep. I’m yours twenty-four, seven, three-sixty-five till this fucker’s in jail or dead or both.’

  ‘Let’s hope it ain’t three-sixty-five.’

  The two men stepped inside the Justice Center and were met with total chaos.

  Sunday morning is the time of the week, especially in law enforcement and emergency-room care, when the brilliant ideas of the previous Saturday night cash in their vouchers. Drunk tanks are always full, assault and drug charges always lead the way among complaints. Everybody is bitchy and sleepy and strung out and hung over and not about to recover anytime soon.

  ‘Hey Serpico …’ someone yelled in Paris’s direction. ‘When’s the movie coming out?’ Paris heard some greasy laughter from the other side of the room. The noise had come from a junkie named Scotty Delfs, whom Paris had used as an informant while working Narcotics.

  Paris just nodded his head at Delfs as he and Tommy quickly wound their way through the crowded booking area, holding their coffee cups high.

  On the way up, Paris caught a glimpse of something even more ominous than the milling dregs of Cleveland’s underworld. Even though the press conference wasn’t scheduled for another six hours, Paris could see the media already setting up.

  The sixth floor was a lot quieter, with only two secretaries on duty and a handful of detectives. Paris looked into the common room and saw Greg Ebersole and Bobby Dietricht talking animatedly about something. It was probably Dietricht bitching about the politics of interdepartmental cocksucking that resulted in him – King Collar – not getting this cherry of an assignment. Paris was going to enjoy running Dietricht ragged.

  Paris checked the messages on his desk. Nothing pressing. He started to gather the files when Miriam Bostwick, the secretary whose services he shared with Tommy and Greg Ebersole, poked her head into his office.

  ‘Congratulations,’ she said in a loud whisper. She made a fist and shook it in the direction of Bobby Dietricht’s office. ‘Go get him.’

  ‘Thanks, Miriam.’

  Miriam Bostwick, an old navy pilot’s wife, gave him a quick thumbs-up. ‘I’ve made five sets of copies of the important files,’ she said, pointing toward the copier table. ‘They’re ready whenever you are.’ She
winked, walked down the hall.

  ‘I think she digs you, Jack,’ Tommy said.

  ‘I’m too old for older women, Tommy. You add up the numbers, it’s frightening.’ He put the files under his arm, grabbed his coffee and exchanged a woeful glance with his partner.

  ‘This is it, boss,’ Tommy said. ‘Start of something big, eh?’

  ‘Start of something.’

  The commanding officer of the Homicide Unit was Captain Randall Elliott, but everyone in the department referred to him as Oscar Meyer. Behind his back, that is. It seems that one night Elliott, in the throes of passion with his wife, in flagrante delicto, heard a noise in the kitchen, threw on a pair of pants, surprised the perpetrator and chased him out the back door. After some hand-to-hand combat Elliott collared the man and took him into custody as three patrol cars arrived at the scene.

  Elliott, fired up from the chase, emboldened by the act of besting the intruder, had no idea that a certain part of his anatomy was swinging in the breeze as he dragged the suspect to the patrol car – in plain view of at least thirty neighbors and six cops – his little back-up unit dangling freely from his unzipped station door.

  The nickname never went away.

  But you never said it to his face. Especially on a day like today. This day, Captain Randall Elliott had the look of a man with a ten-ton mayor on his back.

  The task-force was made up of five detectives, including Paris and Tommy Raposo. There was also Greg Ebersole and Cynthia Taggart, on loan from the Fourth. Last, last but not least – certainly not in his own opinion – there was Robert Dietricht, who seemed to be taking the news with a surprising amount of tact and team spirit. Paris wondered what he was up to.

  Five big-city detectives, combining their respective Rolodexes of informants, stool pigeons, crackheads, their networks of fringe players, cast a rather wide net, reaching far beyond the city or even the county’s borders. In all, it amounted to a few thousand people who, when push came to shove, could be pressed into action.