Don't Look Now
About the Book
Andrea Heller has been married for seven years, but still likes to pretend she’s single. She enjoys sitting on her own in bars, and watching what happens. But there’s another couple watching too. They call themselves Saila and Pharaoh, but only after sundown. And it is after sundown that some terrible things are happening in the singles clubs in Cleveland.
In six months, three women in their twenties have been brutally murdered. And each step that Homicide Detective Jack Paris takes to find their killer draws him closer to the heart of his own forbidden impulses.
As the stakes become increasingly personal, Jack knows only one thing for certain. To enter the minds of Saila and Pharaoh is to enter a world from which no one ever fully returns …
Richard Montanari is the Top Ten
Sunday Times
bestselling author of
The Echo Man
,
The Devil’s Garden, Play Dead, The Rosary Girls, The Skin Gods
and
Broken Angels
, as well as the internationally acclaimed thrillers
Kiss of Evil
,
The Violet Hour
and
Don’t Look Now
(previously published as
Deviant Way
). He lives in Cleveland, Ohio.
Also by Richard Montanari
The Violet Hour
Kiss of Evil
The Rosary Girls
The Skin Gods
Broken Angels
Play Dead
The Devil’s Garden
The Echo Man
For Dominic and Darla, who said I
could
I feel so good I’m gonna break somebody’s heart tonight
,
I feel so good I’m gonna take someone apart tonight
,
They put me in jail for my deviant ways
,
Two years, seven months and sixteen days
,
Now I’m back on the street in a purple haze
,
I feel so good, I feel so good
,
I feel so good I’m gonna break somebody’s heart tonight
.
– Richard Thompson, ‘I Feel So Good’
Delirium
1
SHE WAS A
redhead, tall and slender, a libertine in training if I ever saw one: Calvin Klein suit, twenty-three, Prius owner, loved her job, hated her boyfriend, never been properly fucked. Regard the redhead, she said from across the room. Regard the regal redhead who doesn’t just give it away.
Eyes like a cat.
We had watched her for the better part of an hour as she fielded the advances of the happy-hour boys, dancing the occasional dance with the ones who looked well-heeled, her expression alternating between the bored-and-too-beautiful-for-you look that women like her worked hard at in such a setting, and the working-girl ennui that inevitably made its way to the top.
There were thousands like her across the city that night, this night, every night. Budget microwave meals for dinner, a quick shower and meet the girls for a drink. To wear the good lingerie or not, that was the question. She was strangling her twenties and she wasn’t married and she had no children and she read a lot and she masturbated a lot and wondered what was wrong with the world that she didn’t yet have the American dream.
She was bored and beleaguered.
She was ready for the beast.
* * *
Saila leaned forward. ‘She wears a rose,’ she said, a hint of lace peeking around the bodice of her dress. ‘What do you think?’
‘I think I can smell her,’ I said. ‘It’s bohemian sex she’s wanting. Mr Goodbar.
Very
exciting.’
‘She looks so young. Like a child.’
The redhead glanced at me. Or did she? She gazed in my direction, then quickly looked away. She was talking to one of her suited throng, laughing at all the funny parts, trying to fill in the multitude of lulls. Sip, sip, sip. A chardonnay now. She looked at her watch until the suit got the message. The music changed into a slow song.
‘Do you think her legs are strong?’ Saila asked.
I really didn’t know the answer, but I knew my cue when I heard it. I turned my drink in its napkin, straightened my tie.
Saila put her finger into the middle of my back, stiffly, like a gun. ‘Bang-bang, kitty-cat,’ she said. ‘I want to know every detail when you get back.’
‘Bang-bang, dirty mother,’ I said.
And took my leave.
I made my way across the crowded bar, drawing admiring looks from the women, along with a medley of sneers from the men. I was used to it, though. This
envy
.
As I neared the redhead I noticed that her teeth were perfect, her breasts were small and firm, her legs shapely. She regarded me with a half-smile in the moment before I spoke to her.
‘Hello,’ I said.
‘You’ve been watching me.’
‘I have.’
She regarded me further. ‘And why
is
that?’
Chit-chat-chit-chat.
‘It’s purely physical, I assure you,’ I said.
She smiled. ‘I mean, let’s face it, you could have any woman in here. Why me?’
She was going to press me on this. I would break her with her own mindless cocktail chatter. I leaned very close and said: ‘Does the rose question the advance of the honey-bee?’ It was bad Broadway and the redhead lapped it, like the cat she was.
‘Who
are
you?’ she asked, looking me up and down.
‘I’ll show you.’ I extended my hands as another slow song began. ‘Dance with me.’
She looked into my eyes, then at my lips, then back into my eyes. She smiled fully and I knew then that I had her. Without a word she took my hand and led me to the dance-floor. I glanced at Saila. She was stirring her drink, looking at the floor, smiling.
We began to slow-dance, the redhead and I.
‘Are you with her?’ she asked, nodding in Saila’s direction.
I pulled back and looked into her eyes. She was beautiful. Her face was delicately featured, absolutely symmetrical. Her eyes were an emerald green. ‘Now, do you think I’d be up here dancing with you if I was on a date?’
Another smile.
‘You never know,’ she said. ‘There’s all kinds of people.’
She really had no idea. ‘Well, if she
was
my girlfriend and she saw me up here dancing with a beautiful woman such as yourself, I think she’d be rather upset, don’t you?’
The redhead blushed. I loved it when they blushed, it meant there was still some girl left. She pulled me closer and I started to get hard, the warmth of her body and the tease of her perfume running roughshod over my senses.
‘I think you’re full of shit,’ she said. ‘But don’t stop, okay?’
A few moments later this woman – this beautiful young woman who had not laid eyes on me one hour earlier – put her head on my shoulder and kissed me on the side of my neck.
Softly, like a lover.
And thus she was ours.
I fucked her in the back seat of my car, in a dark corner of the parking-lot, while Saila drove to the motel and waited. I pushed her skirt up around her waist and brought her to just this side of orgasm, promising her the rest and more if she’d only come to the motel with me for an hour. Just an hour.
She came with me. They always did when they let me inside their minds, even for a few moments.
By the time I got the redhead to the motel, Saila was ready for her: wet and flushed and violent, her eyes blazing with the thrill of the game.
Out came the cameras, the make-up, the steel.
Out came the animal.
And the redhead – she of the pale complexion and wild auburn mane, she of the promising career and Nordstrom charge-card – died screaming.
And coming.
Just like the others.
‘AND SO YOU
chased him?’ the woman asked.
‘Yep,’ Paris replied.
‘And you were …’ She waved her hand in front of his face as if saying the word out loud might cause him to lose control and sexually assault her right there in the bar.
‘Naked,’ he said.
The woman covered her mouth with her heavily jeweled hand. ‘You’re
kidding
.’
‘Nope,’ Paris said. ‘Buck-shriveled-naked, running down the middle of Carnegie Avenue at two in the morning.’
The woman threw her head back and laughed. For the moment it erased a few of the hard years she’d spent holding down bar-stools. Jack Paris had seen her up and down the avenues for at least a decade – on the job, off the job, sometimes doing the job. She had this style that was right out of the eighties: leg-warmers, stirrup pants, oversized tops, Ocean Pacific T-shirts. Paris was sure that over the years she’d slept with a lot of cops, been abused by a lot of cops. She was sweet, but she was used up in a way that only the corner-tavern life could impose upon a woman. It was a shame.
But she still hung out where the cops hung out. Because sometimes they drank free and, if the lighting was right, so did she.
Her name was Nedra.
‘So, did you get him?’ she asked, posing with an unlit cigarette.
Paris grabbed a pack of matches off the bar, struck one and lit her cigarette. He took one for himself, hesitated, put it in his mouth, then returned it to the pack. ‘No,’ he said, blowing out the match. ‘But I got three offers of marriage.’
Nedra laughed again.
The Caprice Lounge was starting to fill up with second-shift cops from the Third District. They all looked tired to Paris, browned around the cuffs. Cleveland had been averaging a homicide every five days for three years, and although it was only mid-March, it looked like they were going to beat the quarterly stats by a half-dozen. At least, that’s the way it looked from Paris’s perch at the Homicide Unit. Drive-bys were up, robbery homicides too. The Brick City Lords – a drug gang that Paris had battled for almost five years in a zone car – had recently declared war on a Jamaican posse, part of Cleveland’s Caribbean crimewave. And then there was the other shit: the car-jackings in broad daylight, the stabbings over who spilled what drink on whose fucking pant-leg, people getting shot because they looked at somebody wrong or because somebody bitch-slapped somebody else five years ago. Lucasville and Mansfield were busting at the seams and there seemed to be a never-ending train that kept dropping the new criminals on Public Square.
But even though the Caprice was located at Fifty-fifth and Superior, ground zero in the combat zone, it remained a virtually crimeless area. No cars were ever stolen from its unprotected, poorly lit parking-lot. There were no drug sales for at least three blocks in every direction. At times, it was even considered to be a rap-free zone, with boom boxes and car stereos being dutifully dimmed out of respect for the aesthetic sensibilities of the dozen or two law enforcement types who seemed to be permanently rooted inside.
In the thirty or so years the Caprice Lounge had been a cop bar, it had only been robbed once. Needless to say, that incident didn’t end well for the guy with the mask and the gun.
Danny Lawrence, a patrolman from the Fourth District, stopped by and shook Paris’s hand. Paris motioned to Victor to set them up again.
‘What’s doin’, Danny?’ Paris asked.
Lawrence was knee-walking drunk. ‘Fuckin’ McGuinn, man,’ he said. He tried to light a cigarette, but it fell out of his mouth, on to the floor. He kept talking anyway. ‘Upstairs is up my ass about these smash-and-grab punks at the Galleria. Three
months
they’re in my face. If I see ’em I’m gonna fucking
cap
’em. Swear to God.’ Danny turned to Nedra, tried to focus his eyes, unsuccessfully, and slurred, ‘If you’ll ’scuse my French, ma’am.’ Danny Lawrence was twenty-six and fair, ocean-blue eyes, lean and handsome. Nedra blushed like a schoolgirl.