Authors: Richard Montanari
The Violet Hour (12 page)
Dark, as always, except . . .
Except this morning there was a wedge of light from one of the vacant rooms, a room that was going to be Father Angelino’s when he arrived. Gil walked around the corner, pushed open the door, and saw a figure standing near the window.
‘Good morning, Gil,’ the figure said, without turning around.
‘Good morning, Father LaCazio. How come you’re—’
‘A priest doesn’t leave this earth with much, Gil.’
‘Excuse me, Father?’
Joseph turned toward him, slowly, a cigarette in hand. He gestured toward the two large cardboard boxes on the bed. They were unsealed, either just arrived and opened or ready to be taped and shipped.
Gil asked: ‘Are those Father Angelino’s belongings?’
‘Yes. They came from St Michael’s yesterday.’
‘Is that everything?’
‘Yes,’ Joseph said. ‘Two boxes. That’s what he accrued in this life. He lived forty-two years, helped thousands of people, and he got two boxes of junk for it.’
‘But a priest isn’t supposed to—’
‘Two boxes. You could fit his whole life into the trunk of a car.’ Joseph opened the window slightly. A frigid breeze stole across the room. ‘It all goes to his sister, Carmen.’
‘Do you want me to take them to UPS?’ Gil asked.
Joseph was silent for a few moments. He flicked his cigarette out the window, closed it. ‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘Or maybe I’ll go. Maybe I’ll take a drive after mass. I’ll let you know.’
‘You should let me do it, Father,’ Gil said. ‘Your bad back and all. You shouldn’t be—’
Gil made a move toward the boxes, but Joseph froze him with a glance. ‘I’ll let you know, Gil,’ he said softly. ‘After mass.’
‘Okay, Father,’ Gil said, stopping in his tracks. He tapped his watch. ‘Speaking of mass.’
Joseph waved, absently, in Gil’s direction. ‘I’ll be right up.’
Gil hesitated, then left the room. The last thing he heard as he ascended the steps to the sacristy was the low-volume hum of a spiritual, ‘Just a Closer Walk with Thee,’ one of Father LaCazio’s favorites.
At six-thirty Nicky looked up from his
Plain Dealer
and saw Beverly attempting to cross the street, lithely sidestepping traffic, almost balletic in her movements, waiting, now, for a bus to pass. Beverly was tall and arrogantly statuesque, and this morning wore a mauve satin bolero jacket, short white skirt, seamed stockings, and perilously high heels. Her thick black hair was swept dramatically back from her face and secured by a pair of huge African-ivory barrettes. Her makeup was gaudy and theatrical; her legs, perfect.
Plain Dealer
and saw Beverly attempting to cross the street, lithely sidestepping traffic, almost balletic in her movements, waiting, now, for a bus to pass. Beverly was tall and arrogantly statuesque, and this morning wore a mauve satin bolero jacket, short white skirt, seamed stockings, and perilously high heels. Her thick black hair was swept dramatically back from her face and secured by a pair of huge African-ivory barrettes. Her makeup was gaudy and theatrical; her legs, perfect.
Beverly Ahn was biracial, a stunning transvestite in her early thirties, one of the thousands of exotic Vietnam war hyphenates populating the large cities of the eastern United States. She had just come off duty as a hostess in a club called Shangri La on West Twenty-fifth Street, a mostly transvestite bar that served the city’s fairly active cross-dressing population, but also one that drew a large tourist clientele – gay, straight, and everything in between. Nicky had once done a series of ‘City Streets’ pieces on alternative bars, and Beverly had been his unofficial guide to subterannea. They’d been friends ever since, running into each other at concerts, film festivals, and the like.
Nicky watched Beverly click across Prospect, a sleek, polished illusion of womanly grace and confidence. For any number of reasons, not the least of which was simple respect, Nicky always thought of, and referred to, Beverly Ahn in the feminine.
‘Hi, gorgeous,’ Beverly said. ‘Sorry I’m late.’ She stepped onto the sidewalk, towering over Nicky by three or four inches.
Nicky felt himself color slightly at the compliment. He bullied it back. He was never quite sure how to react to compliments from men. Especially men who wore lace camisoles. ‘Good morning,
bella aura
,’ Nicky replied. He always countered Beverly in faux Italian because she loved things like that. And this morning Nicky needed all the flattery he could muster. It was a point that Beverly Ahn lost no time in acknowledging.
bella aura
,’ Nicky replied. He always countered Beverly in faux Italian because she loved things like that. And this morning Nicky needed all the flattery he could muster. It was a point that Beverly Ahn lost no time in acknowledging.
‘You don’t know what I’m going to have to go through to talk him into this,’ Beverly said, stepping into the doorway. ‘The man’s a beast.’
‘Well,’ Nicky began, trying to think of some charming way to placate her, ‘they don’t call me the Beastmaster of Euclid Avenue for nothing, you know.’
Beverly just glared at him. ‘And why am I doing this again?’
‘Because you like me. Because I’m the coolest white boy you know. And because I’ll take you to dinner anywhere you want. But not for a week or two.’
‘Anywhere?’
‘Yep.’
‘You’d walk into Giovanni’s with me dressed like this?’
The funny thing was, Nicky would. Wouldn’t even think twice about it. Ever since his early rock-band days – Nicky Starr and the Constellation – it seemed as if he was born to shock. ‘Beverly. It would be my pleasure.’
Beverly laughed. ‘You do go on, Nicholas.’ She reached into her bag and retrieved a compact. She opened it, did some maintenance on her face, then added, ‘Just keep an eye on this fucking creep for me, okay, hon?’
The creep in question was a hood named Ronnie ‘Rat Boy’ Choi. Willie T had pointed him out to Nicky one night at Lancers on Carnegie, and the first thing Nicky had noticed was that the man looked every bit of his name. Willie had also told him about Choi’s thing for cross-dressers. Nicky figured that Choi probably liked his transvestites a lot younger than Beverly, but Nicky also figured that Beverly had something pretty special going for her. Something she had long ago stopped offering to Nicky. ‘You don’t have anything to worry about,’ Nicky said.
‘No?’ Beverly replied, raising a solitary, sculpted eyebrow. She grabbed Nicky’s coffee cup and sipped.
‘Of course not,’ Nicky said. ‘I’ll be right there. All you have to do is talk him into an anonymous interview with me. One hour, anywhere he wants. No cops. No tape.’
Beverly pouted for a moment, letting Nicky know that she was fully aware of the fact that nobody could protect her from a butcher like Rat Boy Choi. In one drug-crazed moment he could, and would, slit her throat for no reason at all.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Let’s go.’
Nicky produced his most charming smile, looked skyward, put his hand through a crook in Beverly’s arm, and hailed a cab.
Elegant Linda’s was an opium house that operated out of the basement of a warehouse on East Thirtieth Street, near Superior Avenue. After passing muster with a pair of gargantuan Anglo thugs at the unremarkable front door, and paying in advance, Nicky and Beverly descended a long narrow staircase, passed through two more doors, then entered a dimly lit womb of damp red carpeting – floor, walls, and ceiling. The lounge at the back of the room, where one could sip tea or cocktails while waiting, was a haphazard jumble of mismatched red vinyl furniture, maroon draperies, and filigreed gold fixtures.
Two men sat at the back, one black, one white. They wore matching motorcycle jackets, mirrored sunglasses, leather chaps.
In contrast, the two hostesses were garbed in virginal white cheongsams, slit provocatively up to the thigh. They were white, around twenty, and made up like extras in a David Lynch version of the Peking Opera – high black hair, pasty white faces, red bows. They seemed to be in constant motion, designating the opium girls to customers, dispatching the twosomes to their private rooms with even, quiet authority. Above them, from cheap speakers buried somewhere in the thickness of the carpeting, a pan flute played.
Beverly talked to the prettier of the two hostesses, the one with a small butterfly tattoo by her right eye, and found out rather easily which den was occupied by Rat Boy. Nicky hoped there would not be any repercussions. Within moments, he and Beverly found themselves being led through the elaborate web of rooms, rooms closed off from the narrow paneled hallways by thick velvet drapes. The girl who led them was Chinese, about twelve years old, dressed in the traditional samfoo, the black pajamalike clothing of north China. She took them nearly a full city block into the basement, carrying with her a long bamboo pipe and a small leather pouch. Along the way, Nicky could hear the sounds of the trade, the wet and raspy coughing, the incoherent babbling, low and hypnotic.
Despite a half dozen years in rock and roll, despite five years in college and an association with some of the more bohemian types in the city throughout his life, this was an extreme end of the drug lifestyle that Nicky knew absolutely nothing about. More than once he had to remind himself that he was in Cleveland, it was the middle of the week, and that it was still twenty minutes until the start of the
Today
show.
Today
show.
When the girl got to Rat Boy’s cubicle she stopped and cast her eyes to the ground.
Nicky peeked through the curtains and saw Choi, supine on a jute mat, his huge belly and wattled thighs mercifully covered by a white towel, a young girl refilling his pipe. Rat Boy’s pipe was a showpiece, very ornate, with an ivory mouthpiece and delicate carvings along the shaft. The deep metal bowl was etched with Chinese characters.
Rat Boy’s eyes were closed, but in the candlelight Nicky could see that his face bore the vacuous half smile that came from years of indulging in the brown, sticky paste; the stone-set features of the opium habitué. Nicky relaxed a little, realizing Rat Boy’s reflexes were probably slowed to the point of rigor mortis.
Beverly stepped inside and spoke softly to Rat Boy’s girl. The girl finally understood, reluctantly handed Beverly the pipe, and retreated to a corner of the small room, where she sat, cross-legged, on the floor, waiting for something to go wrong. Within moments, Choi slitted his eyes, sensing another presence in the room. He smiled when he saw Beverly standing over him, offering up a thick row of uneven yellow and silver teeth. Rat Boy pulled off his towel. He pointed to his lips, then gently tapped his shriveled penis.
When Beverly straddled Rat Boy, placing the pipe once again to his mouth, touching a long wooden match to the candle’s flame, Nicky retreated to an empty room. His opium girl stood in the doorway, pipe in hand, a little nervous about not being able to fulfill her duty, a little confused as to what Nicky wanted her to do. He walked her inside and gestured for her to sit on the edge of the mat. He offered her a cigarette. She refused, blushed, looked at the floor.
Nicky put his ear to the thin paneled wall.
He smoked.
And waited.
Twenty minutes later, Beverly stuck her head into Nicky’s den and beckoned him with one long, enameled fingernail, the color of ripe strawberries. Within moments they made their way hurriedly through the narrow corridors, across the lounge, up the stairwell, and out onto East Thirtieth Street.
After the dank claustrophobia of Elegant Linda’s den, Nicky welcomed the now-teeming workaday crowd, the diesel fumes, the noise.
As they walked toward Euclid Avenue, Beverly told him the bad news. Ronnie Choi wasn’t dealing heroin that bore the marks of either a tiger or a monkey.
The marks, he had told her, were Anglo marks.
‘When are you going to settle down, Beverly?’
They were standing at the corner of East Twenty-fourth and Euclid Avenue.
‘When men like you stop looking at my legs, I guess. You know what I mean? Straight guys?’ She flipped her cigarette into the gutter, lifted her short skirt a little higher, drawing the attention of a pack of young schoolboys on a bus stopped at the light. ‘You look at my legs when you see me, don’t you?’
Nicky found no reason to lie. ‘Sure I do, Beverly. You’ve got great legs.’
She smiled wanly. ‘For a boy, you mean. Right?’
‘No,’ Nicky said. ‘I mean, for anybody. Honest to God.’ Nicky pointed at the boys on the bus. ‘They seem to think so.’
Beverly glanced up and shook an accusatory, maternal finger at the boys, who immediately took a collective nosedive onto their respective seats in a flurry of long-sleeved white shirts and thin black neckties. She looked back at Nicky. ‘You’re a doll,’ she said, noticing a cab, raising her hand. ‘But I know you’re full of shit, too.’
She stepped into the cab, shut the door, smiled again at Nicky. In the morning light Nicky observed that her makeup had begun to crack a little; the lines around her eyes and lips were a lot more visible than they were in the provocative illumination of Elegant Linda’s.
But before he could discern any other of the new day’s realities, the cab jerked into the vortex of rush-hour traffic on Euclid Avenue, preserving, for the moment, the illusion that was Beverly Ahn, lead hostess at the Shangri La Club on West Twenty-fifth Street. Preserving, for the moment, her
bella aura.
bella aura.
18
Taffy called at noon.
He dropped the man at the door with his Taser unit, a brief blue and yellow shock to the side of the neck that sent an immediate message to the man’s extremities that services were no longer required. He heaped the bodyguard at the bottom of the stairs, away from the windows, relieving him of his firearm in the process.
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