“Hi,” Kamal says. “Are you a policeman?”
“I am.”
“Ever shoot anybody?”
“No sir,” Paris says. “Never have.”
Kamal thinks for a minute, apparently trying to reconcile all that gunplay he’s seen on TV. “Ever take someone t’jail?”
“Oh yes. Now
that
I’ve done. All the time. Every day if I can.”
“Were they bad guys?”
“
Very
bad guys,” Paris replies, lifting Kamal onto his knee. “Very, very bad guys. And now they’re all locked up.”
Kamal takes a deep lick on his cherry Tootsie Pop. “My daddy’s in jail.”
Ah
shit
, Paris thinks.
Now
what the hell do I say? “Well, see, sometimes really good guys do a bad thing. Just once. And sometimes they get caught and have to go to jail for a while. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re bad guys. They just did a bad
thing
.”
Kamal ponders the concept for a moment. “I do bad things.”
“You do? What kinds of bad things?”
Kamal looks at his boots, confesses. “I push my sister.”
Paris sees an opening. “Does your mom punish you for pushing your sister?”
“Yeah. I have to sit on the time-out step.”
Perfect
. The old time-out-step-as-juvenile-metaphor-for-jail argument. “Well, see, the time-out step is kind of like jail. Sometimes adults do bad things and they have to go sit on the time-out step.”
This seems to register with Kamal. As does the overwhelming question: “Then why can’t my daddy sit on the time-out step at
my
house?”
With this admittedly savvy question, Kamal throws his hands into the air to emphasize his point. As he does, the Tootsie Pop goes flying straight up in the air, twisting, end over end, like the bone that turns into a space station in
2001
.
For a moment, Paris and Kamal watch it rise, hover, then begin its descent.
Paris reaches out to grab the plummeting sucker before it hits the floor, but instead of wrapping his hand around something warm and sticky, he wraps his hand around something warm and
soft
.
Someone else’s hand.
He looks up to see who he is holding hands with. It is a very pretty young woman—lustrous brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, dark caramel eyes, twenties. She is holding a two-year-old blond girl dressed in a red velvet jumper.
“Ya gotta be quicker than that, officer,” she says with a smile, but makes no move to extract her hand from his. Paris lets go, a little embarrassed.
The woman is slender, shapely, wearing a black turtleneck sweater, tight denim jeans. Paris is accordingly tongue-tied. “I . . . uh . . . I guess we both—”
“Former first baseman,” she says, interrupting him. “We always put the worst kid in right field. Nothing ever got by me.”
“Yeah, well, I was always the kid in right,” Paris says.
Kamal looks back and forth, between the two adults, apparently wondering when the part about him getting his Tootsie Pop back was going to be brought up.
“I’ll get you a new one, sweetie,” the woman says. She puts the little girl down, who immediately toddles off toward Santa.
“Rebecca,” the woman says, holding out her hand to Paris. “Rebecca D’Angelo.”
“Jack Paris.”
They shake hands and immediately become glued together. Rebecca laughs, covers her mouth with her other hand, realizing what she’d done. She’d shaken hands with her Tootsie Pop hand. “I’m so
sorry
,” she says, unsticking herself, slowly, from Paris. “Let me go get some water and some napkins.”
“That’s okay.”
“I insist.”
“Really,” Paris says. “It’s—”
But the young woman is already on her way to the coffee stand. Paris watches her walk across the room, then sits back down, next to Kamal. His little inquisitor. “See that lady?” Paris asks, pointing toward Rebecca.
Kamal nods.
“Follow her, okay?”
“Okay.”
“She’ll get you a new Tootsie Roll.”
“Tootsie
Pop
,” Kamal says.
“Tootsie
Pop
,” Paris corrects.
With that, Kamal gives Paris a hug and runs off after the woman. And Paris has to laugh.
Kamal Dawkins, Esquire
. He could see the shingle now.
After a few moments, Mercedes sidles up next to Paris. “Pretty gal,” she says.
“Yes, she is.”
“Thinking of adopting?”
Paris notices a little jealousy in her voice. Or does he? “Smart-ass,” he says. “I just met her. She’s probably somebody’s daughter.”
“I’m an investigative reporter, detective. I’d be willing to go to print with the fact that she’s
somebody’s
daughter.”
“You know what I mean. The daughter of some cop I know. Guy about my age.”
“Hmmm. A guy your age. What age would that be?”
“Somewhere between Huggies and Depends,” Paris says. “Right about halfway.”
“I see,” she says, lifting her pen and notebook. “And can I—”
“Miss Cruz?”
Paris and Mercedes look over to see two young girls, around eleven or twelve years of age. Melissa’s age. Paris notices how similar they are to his daughter; trying to shed their girlish ways, bodies poised to become women, yet still a bit coltish and sharply angled, a bit clumsy. One of them whispers something into Mercedes’s ear. It seems that Mercedes Cruz has become an instant role model.
“I’ll be right back,” Mercedes says, and lets herself be led off. “Don’t leave the area.”
32
His car smells of old onions. I hadn’t expected showroom cleanliness from the man, yet I
had
expected a certain order, considering his profession. You would think as much.
And yet it is
good
news. A car in such a state is never scrutinized.
I clip the inexpensive wireless transmitter—one that allows me no more than a three-hundred-foot range, but operates well above the FM band—under the passenger seat, draw a deep breath, savoring his essence, and step back into the frozen night.
33
At nine-thirty the party begins to wind down, the dolls and race cars and action figures having been duly named, adopted, and secreted away. Rebecca had returned not with a handful of napkins and a paper cup of ice water as Paris expected, but rather a warm washcloth with which she gently washed his palm. They chatted as she did, and for Paris, so long out of a woman’s arms—any woman’s arms—the experience was highly erotic and ended way too soon.
Then, the requisite old-fart feelings return and he begins to feel silly.
“You’re sure you don’t mind?” Rebecca asks. “I can take a cab.”
“I won’t hear of it.”
“It’s not out of your way?”
“Not at all,” Paris says, wondering how he was going to clean the inside of his car in the next ten minutes.
“You’re sweet. Let me get my coat and say good-bye to some of the kids.”
“No problem,” Paris says. “I’ll meet you by the back door.”
Paris watches her walk away again, wondering, again, how he got to this age, this volatile state of his heart. When he cruised the nightclubs in his twenties, he would look at the guys in their forties—hanging around the bar, drinking their Scotch-and-somethings, surveying the human landscape like hairsprayed jackals—and laugh at their feeble attempts at picking up young women. Now he
is
that guy. When the hell did
that
happen?
The hall is just about emptied when Mercedes returns, her coat on, her shiny black boots in hand. “Where’s your little friend?”
“Don’t know,” Paris says. “Lost track of him when he went for his new Tootsie Pop.”
“I meant the one in the tight jeans.”
Paris laughs. “Off to say good-bye to the kids, I guess.”
“Ah . . .”
“She just needs a ride home, that’s all. Said her car broke down.”
“I guess they don’t make Big Wheels like they used to.”
“C’mon. She’s not
that
young. Is she?”
“No,” Mercedes says. “Just giving you a hard time.”
They stroll to the door. “So, what do you have planned for the rest of the evening?” Paris asks.
“Not much. Home. Bubble bath. Snuggle up with Declan and watch
It’s a Wonderful Life
for the thousandth time. Cry like always.”
“Uh . . . Declan?”
“Yeah. Dec’s my twenty-year-old houseboy from Dublin. Soccer legs, eyes like Colin Farrell.”
Paris isn’t going to fall for it. “I see.”
“Declan is my dog. He’s a Jack Russell terrier. Jack Russells are a smaller version of the English Fox terrier that a guy named Reverend John Russell . . .”
Mercedes keeps walking and talking, but Paris is frozen in his tracks.
Mercedes stops, turns. “What?”
“You have a
JR
?”
His car smells like Taco Bell. He had done a quick cleaning job, shoving everything into the back seat and covering it all with that quilted moving blanket he carries around just in case he sees a spinet piano on a tree lawn someday, all the while reprimanding himself for offering a ride to a pretty woman before thinking about this. He is now parked by the back door of the auditorium, both doors flung open, heater on.
Paris looks around the emptying lot. There are only a handful of cars left. Then, on the other side of the lot, next to the parking kiosk, he sees Mercedes’s brother, Julian, standing with some teenaged boys. Nearby, a fifty-gallon drum burns. Paris waves, but Julian doesn’t see him.
Catholics
, Paris thinks with a smile. Mercedes must have told him about the party and he had volunteered, too. He looks for Mercedes but doesn’t see her. A few minutes later he notices Rebecca approaching from the auditorium wearing a long dark coat and matching beret, compounding Paris’s schoolboy dread. He has always been a sucker for women in berets.
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” she says.
“No problem,” Paris says. “You all set?”
“Yep.”
They both get in the car, buckle up. Paris pulls out of the parking lot, heads east, absolutely dispossessed of clever conversation. Rebecca breaks the silence first.
“So, how long have you been doing the Cleveland League party?”
“Let’s see,” Paris says. “This was my fourth.”
“Wow. You’re a real vet.”
“I’ve got the broken eardrums to prove it, too. How about you?”
“Just my first. There was a little article in last Sunday’s
Plain Dealer
. Some of the kids were quoted in there about what they wanted for Christmas. Some said they wanted a family. Some said they just wanted a friend. It broke my heart and here I am.”
“They appreciate it,” Paris says. “They really do. And they won’t forget you.”
“I hope not. But you. Four
years
. You must really love kids.”
Paris thinks about it for a moment. It was true. “I do. The part that hurts, though, is that some of those kids are going into the system one day. Some of them soon. Guaranteed. And there isn’t anything we can do about it.”
“I know,” she says. “It’s sad.”
Rebecca turns her back to her door, crosses her legs, smoothes her coat. Paris can feel her eyes on him, but does not have the courage to look over. The silence lasts for four or five stoplights. Paris fills it by turning on the radio, finding a station with Christmas music. Finally, at University Circle, Rebecca asks, her tongue firmly in cheek: “By the way, can I chip in for gas?”
“Sure,” Paris says, deadly serious. “I was just going to bring that up, in fact. I think it comes to twenty-six cents. But don’t sweat the penny. A quarter’s cool.”
Rebecca laughs. “Okay, then. But at least let me buy you a cup of coffee.”
Paris almost blurts out: “Sure. That would be great.”
The Starbucks at Cedar-Center is busy with Christmas Eve revelers, mostly kids in their late teens and twenties. Paris takes a corner table. Rebecca soon joins him bearing espresso. She places the cups on the table and removes her coat, reminding Paris what a great body she has.
“Gosh I’m getting old,” she says, sitting across from Paris. “It used to be that everyone behind the counter here was my age or older. Now I feel like somebody’s mother.”
Right, Paris thinks. What a hag. “I wouldn’t worry too much about that for a while,” Paris says. “Take it from someone who knows.”
Rebecca smiles. “So
you’re
Father Time then, huh?”
“Sometimes I feel a thousand years old. And those are my ginkgoba days.”
“Well, as a semi-young single woman, all I can say is you look pretty good for a thousand.” She sips her espresso. “Besides, like Groucho said: You’re only as old as the woman you feel. Or something like that.”
Wow, Paris thinks. She even quotes the Marx Brothers.
I’m in love
.
Over the next ten minutes or so they discuss their lives, their respective romantic pasts. Paris, divorced, one daughter. Rebecca, divorced, no kids. The conversation flows freely and comfortably.
“So, can I ask an unbelievably personal question, considering the time we’ve known each other?” Paris asks.
Rebecca examines every square inch of his face before answering. “Okay.”
“What happened? In your marriage, I mean. That is, if you don’t mind telling me.”
“I don’t mind telling you. What happened was I was married to a man who thought he was going to hit me and screw me in the same twenty-four-hour period. Took me a whole year to figure it out. I was young. That’s my only defense. One day I woke up, looked at the newest bruises, grabbed a few dresses, and walked. Never looked back.”
“Good for you,” Paris says. “What happened to your husband?”
“Long gone. Texas, I hear. Although I do expect him to turn up someday. Most likely in a post-office photo.” Rebecca sips her espresso. “What about you?”
Paris thinks for a moment. He hadn’t had to encapsulate his marriage and divorce in a long time. He finds that the pain hasn’t receded a bit. “The day I joined the Homicide Unit is the day my marriage began to crack, I think. The hours, the things I see every day. The fact that I couldn’t seem to leave the job at the office like I had before. Add to that too much booze, an average of four hours’ sleep every night, along with the attitude of a macho shithead cop trying to be protector to the world while ignoring his family, and you have the story. Old story at that. One day I awoke in a stupor, asked for a second chance, sobered up, and realized she’d already given me ten.”