“
Laissez les
bon
temps roulet
,” Ronnie replies, on cue.
Let the good times roll
, he says.
Paris drops a couple of dollars into the tip jar—he had stopped trying to pay for the coffee and doughnuts a long time ago—and steps out into the frigid morning. He opens the white bag, removes a warm beignet and sinks his teeth into it, eyes shut, chewing slowly, enraptured by the light dusting of powdered sugar, by the extraordinary little pockets of air. He pauses, lost in the present, until that sound destroys the moment again, as it always does. The sound of his pager.
The sound of another body falling to the earth.
There are a few things for which homicide detectives, even veteran homicide detectives, are never fully braced. One is dead children. Another—or perhaps it is a horror that dwells exclusively in the minds of
male
police officers—is castration. Paris had seen it only once before, a Mafia payback hit. That time, like this time, he was stupefied at the amount of blood.
The forensic activity in Room 116 of the Dream-A-Dream Motel on East Seventy-ninth Street, a stone’s throw from Rockefeller Park, moves along briskly, not necessarily because the victim, a small-time hustler named Willis Walker, is deserving of such rapid progress in the investigation of his death, but rather because there is not a man in the room who can bear to look at the corpse for too long. More than once, Paris had noticed someone from the Special Investigation Unit subconsciously shield his crotch as he moved swiftly past the body, as if the murderer might still be lurking behind the damp, nicotine-grimed curtains, teeth bared, razor poised.
The blood from Willis Walker’s groin had spread on the bathroom floor into a huge, tormented circle of blackish grue. The blood behind his head is another story—this, a dark-purple paste, flecked with bits of skull, rootlets of hair.
Next to the body is a .25 caliber pistol, recently discharged.
Paris snaps on a pair of gloves, crouches by the body. He carefully explores the man’s front pants pockets. Empty, save for a blood-soaked pack of matches from Vernelle’s Party Center, a cheat spot located a few blocks west of the motel on St. Clair.
Paris pokes about Willis Walker’s body, probing here and there, putting off the inevitable. Finally, he can avoid it no longer. He hears a brief salvo of stifled laughter from behind him and turns around to see Reuben Ocasio, one of Cuyahoga County’s deputy coroners, looking grim and serious and thoroughly guilty of the laughter.
“
You
want to do it?” Paris asks.
“Not a chance,” answers Reuben. “I’m confident in my sexuality and all. But you’re the fuckin’ detective.”
Paris takes a deep breath of air curiously redolent with cigar smoke. Curious, because there were no cigar ashes in either of the room’s two ashtrays, no cigar butts in or near Room 116. The other smell was more explainable—rum. It seemed to be everywhere. A tart, acidic scent that probes some catacomb of Paris’s memory, a place webbed in shadows at the moment, just beyond recall.
Shit
, Paris thinks.
It is time.
He reaches into Reuben’s black bag, removes a long, narrow tongue depressor. He then leans forward with supreme reluctance, glacial speed, and begins to separate the two sides of the unzipped fly on Willis Walker’s blood-drenched pants with the sole intention of verifying the obvious—that Willis Walker not only had his head bashed in but also had been violently separated from his penis and/or testicles sometime within the past twelve hours.
Paris grits his teeth, looks inside.
They are truly gone.
The whole set.
And they hadn’t been found in the motel room or, so far, on the grounds of the Dream-A-Dream Motel.
“Well,” Paris says, jumping to his feet, dropping the wooden stick into the wastebasket as if it were radioactive. “Nothing
there
. All yours, Reuben.”
Reuben shakes his head. “There goes that myth, eh?”
Paris laughs, but it is more from nervous relief than Reuben’s bon mot.
“Move aside, boot,” Reuben says. “Let a detached professional do his job.”
Paris steps into the December morning, grateful for the frigid air. He lights a cigarette and looks down the walk at the scarred and battered doors of the Dream-A-Dream Motel. All the same. A million mournful dramas behind each. A million more to come.
He flicks his cigarette onto the asphalt, disgusted with himself for lighting it, bone-weary from the previous night’s lack of rest. He hadn’t had the courage to stay and see if Beth’s intentions were romantic in nature, having all but sprinted from the apartment, knowing that his heart couldn’t have taken the disappointment if he had miscalculated the signals. He hadn’t slept more than twenty minutes since leaving Shaker Square.
“Get in here, Jack,” Reuben says, that all-business tone now in his voice.
Paris steps back into Room 116, across to the bathroom. Reuben is leaning over the body, his skin ashen, the good humor gone.
Reuben has seen a ghost.
“What do you have?” Paris asks.
Reuben looks at the floor, at the ceiling, at the walls, anywhere but at the corpse. He is Cuban American, a fairly big man at six feet, two-forty, but at the moment he looks small and troubled. He points to Willis Walker’s mouth, specifically, to the man’s tongue, which lolls to the side, lifeless and gray. He presses on the tip of the tongue with a depressor, flattening it out. “Look.”
Paris leans in. At first he cannot see anything, but, as he moves closer, it appears as if there is something drawn on Walker’s tongue. “What is it, a scar?”
“No scar, amigo. It’s fresh.”
Paris squints, and the shape comes into focus. “It’s a bow and arrow?” As odd as it sounds to Paris, the shallow carving on Willis Walker’s tongue
does
look like a small, stylized bow and arrow. Crosshatches, sharp angles, curved lines—all made of drying blood.
“I’m no expert, but it looks like some kind of voodoo symbol. Or something similar,” Reuben says. “Palo Mayombe, maybe.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Palo Mayombe is a very dark side of Santeria,” Reuben replies, making a quick sign of the cross with a not-so-steady hand. “I think this is one of their marks.”
“I’m lost, Reuben.”
“You’ve heard of Santeria?”
“Yes. But I’m not at all familiar with it.”
“Most of the people who follow Santeria are good people, Jack. Ordinary folks practicing a religion with some odd-seeming rituals attached. But Palo Mayombe? That kind of shit?” Reuben crosses himself again, touching his fingers to his lips. He finds Paris with wet, frightened eyes. “It’s about torture. Mutilation. Black ceremony.”
“You’re saying this was a religious sacrifice?”
“I don’t know,” Reuben says. “I’m just saying that there may be something worse coming,
padrone
. Something
very
bad.”
10
The snowstorm starts at noon. Five inches by rush hour, the radio says. More on the way. As always, whenever the city of Cleveland is pummeled for the first time of the season, a general traffic-psychosis descends upon the town and everyone seems to forget how to drive on ice. On his drive to the west side restaurant, Paris had seen a trio of rear-enders, had heard a half-dozen accident calls go out on the police radio.
He is sitting in a back booth at Mom’s Family Restaurant on Clark Avenue and West Sixty-fifth Street, waiting for Mercedes Cruz, whom he fully expects to be late.
On the table, next to his coffee cup, sits his leather handcuff case. He had never gotten used to sitting in a booth with it at the bottom of his spine. Next to the case: a small but daunting pile of material on the religion called Santeria, courtesy of a quick jaunt through Google.
He has learned that Santeria originated in the Caribbean and means, literally, “way of the saints.” It is a religion that combines the beliefs of the Yoruba and Bantu people in southern Nigeria, Senegal, and the Guinea coast with the god, saints, and beliefs of Roman Catholicism.
Paris is a long-lapsed Catholic, spiritually afloat between the Latin mass and the English mass, between the austere dictates of Vatican I and the somewhat looser views of Vatican II. It was a time when the church was beginning to get bombarded with issues it had not had to deal with in two thousand years: birth control, abortion, open homosexuality, women in the priesthood.
But long before the reforms of Vatican II, when Catholicism was forced on African slaves, native practices were suppressed. The slaves developed a unique way of keeping their old beliefs alive by equating the gods and goddesses of their traditional religions with the Christian saints. Slaves would pray openly to St. Lazarus over a suffering child, but the offering was really to Balbalz Ayi, the Bantu patron of the sick.
Since that time, the religion, and its many offshoots, has continued to flourish in a number of Latin countries. Mexican Santeria favors its Catholic beginnings; Cuban Santeria leans toward African origins. In Brazil, the followers of Candomblé and Macumba are said to number one million.
Like many Catholics, Paris was scared shitless by movies like
The Exorcist
. And his own mystic vision of hell. But the liturgy of
being
a Catholic—especially the rites of confession and communion—had long since dissolved into Jack Paris’s past. He has borne witness to too much inhumanity to bank on a benevolent God these days.
Just as Paris is about to try and reconcile all of this with his strict Catholic upbringing for the millionth time, a shadow darkens his table.
It is Jeremiah Cross.
Again.
Behind Cross stands a woman—a brunette with a long, swanlike neck, round oversized sunglasses, short black jacket. Paris sees her only in profile for a moment before she proceeds to the register to pay the check. Cross, wearing a dark overcoat and paisley silk scarf, approaches. “We meet again, detective.”
“Lucky us,” Paris replies.
Cross deliberately puts on his leather gloves, stalling, clearly as misdirection, as prelude to something. After the ritual, he says, “I was wondering if you were aware of the fact that the Geauga County prosecutor’s office is looking into new evidence regarding the Sarah Weiss so-called suicide.”
Paris sips his coffee. “Well, as you know, counselor, Cleveland is in Cuyahoga County. I’m not at all certain why this would concern me.”
“It seems there may have been a second car on the hill where Sarah Weiss burned to death that night.”
“Is that right?”
“It is. A little
yellow
car. You don’t drive a little yellow car, do you, detective?”
“No, I’m afraid not. You?”
“No,” Cross replies. “I drive a black Lexus, as a matter of fact.”
“I’m stunned.”
Cross takes a step forward. “But it gets one to thinking, you know?”
“Thinking, too?” Paris asks. “Thinking’s extra in your line of work, isn’t it?”
Cross ignores the shot, places his hands, knuckles down, on Paris’s table. One glance from Paris apparently makes him rethink and withdraw.
“Consider this scenario,” Cross begins, lowering his voice. “A veteran cop eats a bullet doing a dirty deal. The innocent woman the cops try to hang the murder on is acquitted. A year and a half or so pass, the press and public move on. But not the cops. One Friday night, a couple of the boys from the unit start slamming the Buds back at the Caprice, then the Wild Turkey. Around midnight they decide to take a drive out to Russell Township—off a street called Hemlock Point no less—and pay back the woman who dusted their pal. What do you think?”
“I think it’d make a great movie of the week,” Paris says. “I’m seeing Judd Nelson in your part.”
“It is a compelling story, isn’t it?”
“I see it a little differently.”
“How’s that?”
“I see a peacock defense attorney who falls hard for his sexy client, gets her off by smearing the victim. After the trial, the sexy client rebuffs the advances of this perfumed rustic and, on the aforementioned Friday night, he downs a bottle of absinthe or Campari or aquavit or whatever perfumed rustics drink these days, drives out to Russell Township, flicks his Bic, et cetera, et cetera. Compelling, yes?”
Jeremiah Cross stares at Paris, trumped for the moment, then notices that Paris has begun to tap his coffee spoon on something sitting on the table. A police-issue handcuff case. Cross smiles, holding up his hands, wrists together, arrestee-style, revealing a gold Patek Philippe watch, white French cuffs. “I never mix stainless steel and gold, myself, detective.” He turns to leave, stops, adds: “Only a rustic would do that.”
With this, Cross lingers for the proper amount of time, exchanging resolve with Paris, then heads to the door. Without a final glance, he and the woman exit.
It takes Paris a few moments to return his blood pressure to normal. Why does this guy bug the
shit
out of him? But he knows the answer to that, a basic premise that has driven him for years. The belief—the conviction—that you do not have to destroy someone’s family to exact justice.
Jeremiah Cross had all but destroyed Michael Ryan’s family.
Paris tries to return to the information on Santeria but finds his mind drifting to a hill in Russell Township, to the image of a burning automobile carcass lighting the night sky. His cop-mind now adds a small yellow car to the scene—lights off, engine humming, two unseen eyes behind a dark windshield, watching the manic ballet of red and orange flames, the thick black smoke curling skyward.
Before he can let the scene take hold of his mood, Paris sees Mercedes Cruz loping toward the back of the restaurant, smiling broadly, dressed, it appears, for arctic exploration.
“Good
afternoon
, Detective Paris,” she says brightly, removing her huge parka, ski vest, wool cardigan, scarf, gloves, muffler, earmuffs, and hat. Today, Paris notices, the barrette keeping her sweat-dampened hair to the side is a red reindeer. Her dress is blue denim, shapeless. Her glasses are completely fogged over.