The Violet Hour (30 page)

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Authors: Richard Montanari

BOOK: The Violet Hour
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‘Funny,’ Amelia said. ‘Really hysterical.’
At that moment Maddie raced around the corner, into the living room, and came to a halt in front of Amelia, waiting for inspection. Everything was somewhat off center – her wig, her fringed skirt, her mask. Fine Maddie St John form.
Amelia and Garth looked at each other, laughed.
She was, of course, being silly. Paige was fine, Roger was fine. Her husband would be there any minute – delivered safely by a big yellow taxi – and life would mercifully get back to normal.
The foursome walked north on Edgefield Road, toward Huron Road, slowly, with Dag and Maddie on point about five houses ahead, Amelia and Garth bringing up the rear. Just about every house on the street was lit up, decorated with tree-swinging ghosts, bright jack-o’-lanterns, phony spider webs strung along night blue hedges. Maddie took full advantage of this bounty, shuttling up to the porches while Dag stood at the end of the driveways, inspecting his granddaughter’s take before dropping it into the bag.
Fortunately, after the yearly battle over the wearing of a coat over her costume, Maddie had given in and put on her Little Mermaid jacket. At least it was in the Pocahontas extended family of products, Amelia thought.
She located her father in this scene, halfway up the Maslars’ drive. He looked rather trim in his beige golf jacket, she thought. And because he was Dag Randolph, he was wearing a plastic hobo mask.
For a moment, Amelia froze this tableau in her mind. It didn’t get any more Norman Rockwell than this. And that was good. Except . . .
Except for the fact that Roger was late. So they had started without him.
‘Is that Garth Randolph?’ came a voice from a blue compact car trolling along the curb behind them.
Amelia recognized the nasal whine immediately. Debbie Panzarella. Technically, Debbie Jean Panzarella Martucci Lanzini. Twice married, twice divorced, much hennaed. Debbie had a voice like a Cuisinart full of shotgun pellets.
‘Who’s that?’ Garth asked, moving his eye patch over.
‘Debbie Lanzini, silly,’ Debbie answered.
As Garth swaggered over to the passenger window, Amelia saw Debbie conduct a lightning-quick inventory of her face in the visor mirror. She looked back out and smiled her big, phony smile.
‘And is that A-me-li-a?’ Debbie singsonged.
‘Yes it is,’ Amelia said. ‘How are you, Debbie?’
‘Goodnyou?’ she answered, her cashier charms rushing to the fore.
‘Still married,’ Amelia answered, hoping the sarcasm dripped through. Her petty feuds with Debbie Panzarella went back twenty-some years and showed no signs of ever abating. She pulled her brother closer, whispered, ‘You’re not seriously—’
‘Go ahead,’ Garth said. ‘I’ll catch up.’
Amelia made her best sour-lemon face.
‘Come on, Meelie. I spent fifty-six bucks on this freakin’ outfit. Let me get some value, eh?’ He smiled at her and the conversation was over.
‘Okay,’ Amelia said. ‘We’re going left on Huron, then over to Sunview.’
‘Right,’ Garth replied without a modicum of interest. ‘Okay.’
Amelia gave Debbie a half smile, then continued up Edgefield Road, scanning the horizon in front of her. At first she couldn’t see her father or her daughter, and a pang of fear caromed around her stomach. She looked at the next few houses, at the porches, driveways, tree lawns. No Maddie or Dag. She was just about to go back and get Garth when she saw her father and daughter rounding the corner onto Sunview Road, hand in hand.
Easy, Meelie, she thought. Don’t need to make Halloween any scarier than it already is.
Still, she doubled her pace.
When she turned the corner onto Sunview Road, she noticed that far fewer of the houses were lit up with Halloween decorations. She could see some kids scurrying along the sidewalks, but once again, she again could not see her father or Maddie. They couldn’t have gotten far, she thought. Eight of the first ten houses on this side of the street were lit up and had their front doors wide open. Surely Maddie had run up to them. Amelia looked at the porches.
No little Indian girls.
Why would they have passed them up? she wondered.
She looked at the other side of the street. Only two houses had their porch lights on. Maybe they had decided to get those out of the way and tackle the east side of the street all at once. It sounded like a Dag Randolph plan.
Amelia crossed to the dark side of the street, passing a stretch of five or six dimmed houses, stopping, once, when she heard a rustling in the hedges in front of a gray and white colonial, a rustling that turned out to be a beagle puppy, enthralled to suddenly be on the loose, following some primordial path of its own. When she reached 1749 Sunview Road – a house she knew as the Cameron house growing up, a house long since sold and resold – she caught a glimpse of something moving in the backyard. At first she thought it may have been a towel hanging on a line, or perhaps a T-shirt.
She stopped, looked up the driveway, tried to focus.
After a few moments, her eyes adjusted and she saw that it was her father’s jacket she had seen moving in the dark backyard. He was now standing next to a trellis and appeared to be examining a bulging burlap sack on the ground in front of him. It was too dark to tell much else, though, except that he was still wearing his hobo mask. He looked up, spotted Amelia, waved, beckoned her to come to the backyard.
‘What, Dad?’ she said in a gruff whisper, as loud as she dared between two dark houses. ‘What’s going on?’
Instead of answering, he waved her in again.
Now
what has he gone and done? Amelia wondered. Did he get himself invited to a party? As she walked up the driveway, she realized that it couldn’t be a party. At least, not an outdoor party, because there were no lights on in the backyard. Nor were there any lights on in the house, for that matter. The only illumination she could see were the interior lights of the van that was idling in the driveway.
She approached the trellis.
Her father waved again, his beige jacket and the white highlights in the mask catching the moonlight, creating a bizarre effect that gave the appearance of a floating head and torso in the darkness, an effect that—
Amelia stopped a few feet away. Something was wrong. It was her father’s jacket and mask, but somehow, it wasn’t her father. Dag Randolph was five nine on a good day.
The man who stood in front of her now was six feet tall.
She turned to run, but a hand shot out of the blackness, webbing her face with iron fingers. A strong arm encircled her waist. Then, in an instant, a thick brown fog enveloped her.
A mist that smelled like medicine.
49
 
Nicky looked at his now meager roll of cash. When he stepped into the Army Navy Store on Prospect he had every intention of buying a simple overcoat, maybe a pair of gloves. He had left the house wearing only his sweats the night before – a night that now seemed at least a month ago – and the temperature was dropping fast.
He was lucky that the store was open late, and after he had picked out a basic pea coat, he was caught by the selection of defensive sprays under glass by the front door. He pointed to the small can of pepper spray, with no idea how he would use it. It just seemed like the right thing to have in his pocket.
By the time Nicky stepped back out onto Prospect Avenue, Frank Corso’s fifteen-hundred-dollar roll had been reduced to eighty-eight dollars and twenty cents.
The corner of East Fifty-first Street and Euclid Avenue was deserted, a blasted landscape of rusting, blocked-up cars and empty stores with whitewashed windows. At night, nothing human stirred here. On the northwest corner stood a crumbling four-story redbrick building that at one time had housed the Acme Retail Supply company, long since defunct. The first-floor windows were covered with plywood, their surfaces coated three gangs deep in brightly hued graffiti.
The building on the northeast corner was imposing, monstrous. Ten stories high, a half block deep, a monolithic cube of soot-blackened stone and brick. The first few floors had tall, narrow windows, covered with decades of grime and exhaust, jailed by thick black bars. From there on up, at least as far as Nicky could see, the windows were bricked in, the color in those squares only slightly less gray than the older brick.
The top floor, the floor Taffy had told him about, was a mystery. Nicky would have to stand across the street, fully exposed, to see anything above the sixth or seventh floor. He decided to wait until Willie T arrived to check it out.
There was only one entrance on the west side of the building. The alcove was at least fifty feet from the nearest streetlamp, and the angle allowed a wedge of welcome darkness in the doorway. Nicky glanced at his watch. Nine-fifty. He had slept a few hours in Sandy’s car and awakened to two flat tires. Luckily, Sandy had had two bald but serviceable spares in the trunk. The delay had cost him nearly an hour.
At just after ten o’clock a car slowed down in front of the doorway where Nicky stood. It wasn’t Willie T’s car, at least not the car Nicky had seen at the Burger King. This was a late-model red Mazda. He couldn’t see inside, but he could hear the pulsing bass of the stereo.
Nicky flattened himself against the rusted steel door of the warehouse, trying to lose himself in the shadows, but knowing that the occupants of the car had probably seen him. Maybe Willie T had borrowed a car, he thought. Maybe some of his homeboys had come along to kick this crazy fucker’s ass. Bunch of drunk, off-duty cops with AK-47s.
But nobody made a move. For what seemed like an hour but was in reality no more than a few minutes, the car idled, Nicky idled. There was no sign of life or commerce for three full blocks in any direction. The occupants of the car weren’t there to pick up a forty-ounce. They were there for Nicky.
He was just about to run when, incredibly, the car started rolling again, slowly, toward the avenue. After a few seconds, Nicky leaned forward slightly, daring the light. The red Mazda made a right turn onto Euclid Avenue and disappeared into the night.
He leaned back and found that he had been holding his breath the whole time. And that his sweat-slicked hand was wrapped tightly, almost painfully, around the can of pepper spray in his pocket.
They had seen the power, he thought crazily. Wacko white boy waiting in an alcove. You never—
Suddenly the rusty hinge of the door behind him screeched like a wounded animal.
And Nicky fell, backwards, downwards, into the cold, lightless warehouse.
50
 
Mac rewound all three tapes on all three VCRs. They were the big, old three-fourths-inch U-Matic tapes that universities and electronic news-gathering organizations swore by in the early days of video, even long after the VHS revolution had begun. He had taped so much junk when he ran the Audiovisual Department at Case Western Reserve, yet so much of it had served to keep that time alive for him. Just to see the faces on the news programs reassured him that it was still 1988, that the door might open any minute and Julia would drift into the room, take his hand, laugh at one of his terrible jokes.
He had once offered a research assistant at NBC a thousand dollars for the original broadcast tape of the nightly news from October 31, 1988. A thousand dollars. And that was back when a thousand dollars could buy a pretty good used car, or about the best stereo there was. But the young man had refused. He’d refused and one day met an untimely death when his car accidentally backed off the Ninth Street pier after dinner and drinks at Captain Frank’s.
When the tapes were fully rewound, he hit the Play button on all three machines, starting the evening’s television schedule, sending the signals through the coax cable to the TVs in the dorm rooms.
Everything was coming together nicely, he thought, although he hadn’t anticipated Amelia’s friend Paige cutting and dying her hair. Or Johnny Angel’s laptop. He had erased the desktop at St Michael’s – no doubt sending the parish finances into a vortex of confusion – but he had missed Johnny’s laptop. The two mistakes had nearly cost him everything. He would not make another.
He took out the small vial of PCP, prepared a syringe.
He cooked a few hits of heroin, too.
Now that all of his friends had arrived, he could change his clothes, start the festivities.
51
 
She was in Donna Turley’s bedroom. Donna was playing
Like a Virgin
for the eight millionth time and was probably dancing like a spastic chicken around the room.
She couldn’t open her eyes for some reason, but for some reason, that was okay. She felt good, warm.
Young
. Warm and cozy and . . . well . . . sexy, kind of.
But why can’t I move? How come I can’t—
Maddie, she thought. Her body was suddenly wracked by a wave of fear and guilt. I’m drunk and I don’t know where Maddie is.
Not drunk but . . .

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