Don't Look Now (20 page)

He just didn’t feel like opening the freezer yet.

WHEN THE BUZZER
rings at one o’clock in the morning at the Candace Apartments, it is never good news. Pick one: some crazyass, some
drunk
crazyass, or one of Jack Paris’s long list of junkie informants in need of a cure.

He was a third of the way inside his own evening’s whore, a fifth of Jameson, when he finally marched over to the intercom. He shushed Manny and pressed the button, expecting anything.

The last person he expected was Diana.

‘I heard, Jack,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’

She took off her coat. She was wearing an oversized white shirt and denim skirt.

Paris didn’t know what to say. He was so full of rage and sadness and impotence. He felt the same debilitating weariness he had felt the moment he knew his marriage was over.

Diana took the cue and pulled him to her. She grabbed the bottle from his hand, placed it on the end table and held him close.

Within a few moments, she kissed him for the very first time.

* * *

‘Cindy Crawford.’

‘Okay,’ Paris said. ‘Good one.’ He looked at the ceiling, lost in thought. ‘Okay, how about Dale Bozzio?’

‘Who?’

‘Dale Bozzio.’

Diana looked at him sceptically. ‘I thought we were just doing women.’

‘Dale Bozzio
is
a woman.’

‘Never heard of her.’

‘She’s real, I’m telling you,’ Paris said. ‘Hers is right where yours is.’

‘Sorry. I think you’re making it up.’

‘Are you challenging?’

Diana thought for a moment. If she challenged, and was wrong, she’d have to take a drink. ‘Yeah.’

‘Google her.’

‘How do you spell her last name?’

Paris told her. Diana entered the information on her Mac Book Pro. Seconds later she had a photograph of the former lead singer of Missing Persons on the screen. ‘Damn.’

‘Told you,’ Paris said. ‘Bottoms up.’

Diana obeyed, taking the bottle in hand, tilting her head back in deference to the smooth Irish whiskey.

They were sitting on the couch, facing each other, their hands from time to time finding each other’s knees and thighs and shoulders as they told their stories. They had talked for what seemed to be hours – about the case, about themselves, about the nature of life and death. Somehow, they had drifted into this drinking game. They were about two inches from the bottom of the bottle of Jameson, but that was okay. Paris had another.

The game was naming famous women with beauty marks.

‘Your turn,’ Paris said.

Okay. ‘Lil’ Kim.’

Paris hadn’t the slightest idea who Lil’ Kim was. ‘Okay,’ he said. How about—’

‘You don’t know who she is, do you? You’re just trying to get me drunk.’

‘What are you talking about? I’ve loved every single one of her movies.’

‘Albums.’

‘Albums.’

Diana laughed. She handed Paris the bottle. He swigged.

It was getting to be a very loopy game.

She waved it playfully in front of his eyes, then tossed it to him. A latex condom. ‘Don’t even
say
it,’ Diana warned, the color began to rise in her cheeks.

‘What was I going to say?’

‘Some kind of Girl Scout joke’ She stood up, unzipped her skirt, stepped out of it. ‘Something about being prepared.’

She sat on the coffee table in front of him, the tails of her big white shirt between her thighs. Paris looked down and saw that her toenails were painted a blood red. Diana reached into her shirt pocket and produced a perfectly rolled joint.

‘Ms
Bennett
…’ Paris said. Surprised but not shocked.

‘Yes, detective?’ She batted her eyes demurely, licked the end of the joint, lit it.

‘Are you aware of the fact that you are endeavoring to use a controlled substance in the presence of a police officer?’

‘Yes,’ she said, releasing the smoke slowly. ‘But it’s just that I’m trying to get control
of
the police officer.’

‘Is that right?’

‘It is.’

She leaned forward and put the joint to Paris’s lips. He drew on it deeply. Immediately the pot found the booze in his system and put an entirely new, euphoric perspective on the evening. He let the smoke leak out of the corners of his mouth in thin gray ribbons. It had been ages.

Diana sat back, unbuttoned two more buttons on her blouse, the tops of her breasts now visible through the folds of white cotton. She ran her hands slowly up his thighs, back down.

‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to place you under arrest,’ Paris said, slurring the word ‘place’ so that it sounded like ‘plaish’.

‘I don’t see that you have any choice,’ Diana said, hitting the joint again, passing it back to Paris. ‘I’m completely incorrigible. Irredeemable in the eyes of this court.’

Paris took another hit, nearly coughing it out. ‘You have the right to remain sexy,’ he said.

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Anything you hold against me,’ Paris continued, ‘will be held against
you
.’

‘Fair enough.’ She finished unbuttoning her shirt and pulled it down over her shoulders, letting it drop to the floor as she worked her way between his legs.

‘You have the right to be an attorney.’

She unbuttoned his shirt and kissed her way down his face, his neck, his chest. She kissed his stomach and pulled open his belt.

‘And …’ Paris continued.

Finally she worked his pants open and started running her tongue around the tip of his penis. She sat back on her heels.

‘Jack.’

‘Hmm?’

‘Tell me about the first time you saw me.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The first time you saw me. What did you think? Did you want me?’

‘
Oh
yeah.’

‘When I questioned you on the stand. Were you thinking about it then?’

Paris didn’t have to think about it. ‘Yes.’

She leaned forward, this time taking him fully in her mouth, but only for a few seconds.

‘
Tell me what you want, Jack
,’ she whispered.

She flicked her tongue out once, twice.

Paris could not answer.

She gently pulled Paris to his feet and steadied him at the foot of the couch. She reached behind her and lifted the venetian blind to the top of the window, displaying the two of them dimly to the night, to the parking-lot that faced Eighty-fifth Street and the handful of cars that grew out of the darkness there.

‘
Say my name
,’ she said.

The next thing Paris knew he was on his back in bed, and Diana was on top of him. He was deep within her.

‘
Jack
.’

A whisper.

To Paris, her voice was floating somewhere between the smooth jazz coming from the radio and the traffic noise below. A voice from his past, it seemed. Patches of sound. The room decided to spin again.

Diana leaned forward, lips close to his ear.

‘
Do you still think about her
?’

Too much booze. Four-o-five, according to the bright green numbers of the clock radio. She was leaving.

‘Don’t go,’ Paris said.

He wanted her to stay, to be there in the morning. Because this time it felt different. Of the handful of times he had had sex in the past two years he had not wanted any of them to stay.

He tried to sit up, but his body deserted him. His mind was working overtime.

Tommy
.

Diana stood at the foot of the bed for a while, darkly silhouetted against the now drawn blinds.

‘Lie back down.’ She prodded him gently, her voice calming, her hands now so familiar. She zipped her skirt, put on her shoes. ‘Come on. I’ll help you.’ She lifted the covers and pulled Paris’s feet toward the foot of the bed, covered him. ‘I have to go, baby.’

Paris rose unsteadily on to one elbow. He tried to put the day’s events in order. As much as he wanted to push the horror of what had happened earlier away, it kept rushing back with brutal, debilitating force.

Tommy Raposo was dead.

Moments later, when Diana closed the door behind her, Paris rolled on to his back, his body flat against a wall of fatigue, his mind a dark deadfall of questions.

IN THE PHOTOGRAPH
her mother was beautiful. Her complexion looked perfect in the early morning sunlight, her hair, a symphony of reds and browns and rusts and silvers. Hairdresser hair. But then again, she was only twenty-eight years old at the time the photograph was taken, brash and still defiant, her rose tattoo brazenly exposed on her stomach, just below her midriff shirt.

And why shouldn’t she look good?

Why shouldn’t she look like a movie star?

She was standing in the doorway to their apartment at Holly Knoll, the ever-present menthol cigarette growing out of the V between her painted fingernails, the ever-present purple bruises mottling her thighs and arms. She was off to work at some beauty parlor or another, the longest stint being the one she’d had at the Hair Force on Victorville Road, next to the Cork and Bottle.

And although she had long ago completed her two-year course in cosmetology and had the most extraordinary cheekbones, she’d never quite gotten the hang of putting on make-up. At the distance from which the photo was taken, her cheeks appeared to be slashed with a thick streak of crimson, giving her the painted look of a warrior-squaw.

* * *

Lois Bentivegna liked to dance naked for her boyfriends, and she did so, with a remarkable amount of vigor, right up until the cancer stopped her at thirty-four. She never danced professionally in any sense – her Christian upbringing would have squarely prevented that – but once in a while, on a Friday or Saturday night, after she’d had a few tumblers of Southern Comfort, she would put on an old Kool & the Gang tape and strut around the apartment, Styrofoam cup in hand. She’d usually make a sexy outfit out of whatever she had available, whatever was clean and wasn’t too elastic-worn.

All the while she believed her daughter to be safely stashed away in her room with a pizza, along with her own TV and her very own Princess phone. Sometimes she’d let her daughter have a friend stay overnight and the two girls would covertly slip out of the bedroom window and sneak around the apartment, peeking through the living-room window, hiding in the hedges, at once repulsed and deliriously stirred by the acts unfolding in front of them.

Then, one day, came the blood.

And there was change.

Because it was Lois at the door to her daughter’s room that very first time, just a few years after the photograph was taken, the same year the cancer began to eat at her lungs. It was Lois, unexpectedly home early from her station at the second chair at René and Julian’s at Burton Center, stepping lightly, the sounds of sex drawing her silently toward the door, the unmaskable sighing of a young woman, inexperienced to the touch and rhythms of a man, drawing her closer, closer.

Lois Bentivegna didn’t throw a tantrum like other mothers might have. Lois didn’t burst into the bedroom that day, or any day thereafter, seething with righteous indignation, threatening years of groundings and the absolute denial of junior prom tickets.

Lois watched. Lois crept up to the slightly open bedroom door, her eye to the jamb, and watched her daughter take this young man into her hands, her mouth, her body. A fifteen-year-old girl and her sixteen-year-old lover.

Lois stood by, her own hand violently between her legs, a woman of barely thirty-one years herself, and thought of the afternoons, not all that long ago, when she had entertained a series of inexhaustible sixteen-year-olds of her own.

NICHOLAS RAPOSO LIVED
in a three-bedroom bungalow in Garwood Gardens, a pre-Second World War residential development in Garfield Heights, on Cleveland’s south-east side. There were no gardens to speak of, no greenery rimming the fifty-foot lots, as the northern end of the street, once a part of the MetroPark system, now gave way to I-480. It was a gray, working-class street on an even grayer day.

Paris had only met the man twice, once at the Justice Center and once at Tommy’s service, three weeks earlier. He knew that Nick Raposo had been a cement worker most of his life, and his hands proved it – rough planks of flesh that seemed to swallow Paris’s hand when they shook.

‘Nice to see you again,’ Nick said, a deep sorrow limning his eyes. Paris knew the man had lost his wife a dozen years earlier, and now his only son. The grief hung upon his shoulders like a tattered cardigan.

‘Nice to see you too, Nick.’

‘Come on in.’

Paris stepped into the small living room. The walls bore the odd grouping of religious pictures and gold-framed photographs of Tommy and his sister, Gina. The worn sofa boasted an orange and brown afghan – Cleveland Browns colors – and a disheveled pile of
Time
and
Sports Illustrated
magazines. Paris instantly smelled the aroma of Italian staples: Romano cheese, basil, garlic. Nick Raposo was making sauce.

‘Coffee, Jack?’

‘Only if it’s already on,’ Paris said. ‘Don’t go out of your way.’

‘I make the espresso,’ Nick answered. ‘It’s no problem?’

Paris held up his hands as if to say yes.

‘Come on in the kitchen.’

Paris followed him into the kitchen. Although he knew Nick Raposo was still a physically powerful man, he looked small at that moment, a sketch of the man he was before death stalked his family.

Paris sipped the hot, sweet coffee. It warmed him. The house, the kitchen, the way the small Formica table butted on the wall beneath the window, the way the dish towels cascaded over the handle on the oven door – these things warmed him even more. Unlike his apartment, with its smells of transience, this was a
home
. He noticed a row of plants sitting on the windowsill over the sink, patiently waiting for spring: parsley, oregano, tarragon, chive. Things move on, Paris thought. Things grow back.

‘You get Tommy’s belongings from the station all right?’ Paris asked, even though he knew the answer.

‘Oh yeah,’ Nick said.