Authors: Richard Montanari

The Violet Hour (34 page)

BOOK: The Violet Hour

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‘But . . . St Francis?’

‘Long story, Nick. I was going to follow Johnny into the seminary, wait awhile, kill him there. But for some reason I couldn’t. It wasn’t time, I guess. So I took the job at St Francis. It was supposed to be temporary, but it turned into a good thing. No one ever looks at the guy who sweeps the church.’

‘How did you—’

‘Of course, I had to take a lot of side jobs over the years. I had to pay for all this. Landscaping and such. Great work for a college graduate, huh? I even took a correspondence course in refrigerator repair. Got pretty good, too. Got to repair fridges all over the east side. And do you know what I saw when I stepped into all those kitchens, Nick?’

‘What?’

‘Drawings,’ he said, as if it made complete sense. ‘Crayon drawings on the refrigerators. Little drawings of trees and cows and turkeys and boats. Drawings of happy little bungalows with chimneys and curly black smoke. From Vanessa. From Kevin. From Carole and Jessica and Timmy and Gina.’

Amelia closed her eyes. She thought about Maddie’s drawings.

Maddie-bear. Gone.

The man became more animated. ‘All those drawings delivered to all those daddies as they sat in their dens with their feet up, smoking their pipes. And I knew, I
knew
, they would never be for me. No report cards, no field-trip notes to sign. That’s why this had to happen, Nick. Surely you can see that. These people took my drawings from me. From Julia.’ He sat down, the name somehow taking his thoughts for a moment.

‘But why now?’ Nicky asked. ‘Why me?’

‘Why now? Because it was time, Nicky. Because it took twenty years for everybody to have enough to lose. When Johnny moved to St Francis . . . let’s just say he would have recognized me eventually. Even with my pop-bottle glasses.’ He reached beneath the desk, took out a carousel of slides, put them in the projector on the shelf, hit the remote. Telephoto shots, night shots. Nicky and Amelia against the schoolhouse wall. Amelia’s breasts, Nicky’s hands, a freeze-frame of Amelia’s hand near Nicky’s zipper.

‘And you. You fell in love lost your fucking mind. Drugs, sex, murder, suicide. Just the kind of thing a hack freelancer would love to write about. Too bad you’ll be dead.’ He opened the desk drawer, pointed to a pistol. ‘You’re gonna blow your brains out in just a little while. Catholic guilt and all.’

‘Then why did you tell me to walk away?’

‘Because you’re a fucking journalist. I knew you’d do exactly the opposite.’

Nicky spread his feet slightly, struck a pose. ‘How do you know I don’t have a gun in my pocket, pointed right at you?’ he asked. He looked past the man, at the drawer. Besides the pistol there was also a pair of handcuffs, a set of keys, something red . . .

‘I know,’ he said.

‘You can’t be sure.’

‘Yes I can. The last door you passed through was a metal detector. But now that you mention it, I want you to take your jacket off, lay it on the bed.’ Nicky complied.

Amelia noticed that when the man in white took his eyes from Nicky, Nicky took a half step toward the desk.

‘But what about all the others?’ Nicky asked. ‘Surely you fucked up somewhere. Surely there’ll be evidence. You can’t tie me to all of this. You can’t possibly—’

At that moment Amelia summoned all her strength and grunted as loud as she could, hoping to draw the man’s attention momentarily. She did. Nicky took a full step toward the desk.

‘I’ll be with you shortly, Julia, my love. This is business, I’m afraid. Gil’s got to take care of business.’ He looked back at Nicky, taking an extra second to focus. He seemed not to notice the altered proximity. ‘There’s blood from each scene on the clothes in your closet. A fleck or two of Geoffrey, a spot of Johnny. I put them there when I picked up the canned goods. There’s no holes, Nicky. Quit looking.’

Nicky’s mind raced. He remembered Gil staying behind, drinking his Pepsi. Then it hit him. The semen. The semen in Geoffrey’s mouth. A DNA gold mine. ‘But you did fuck up, Gil. Big time.’

Gil looked up, interested, but clearly not concerned. ‘Did I, now?’

‘The semen in Geoffrey’s mouth, you sick fuck. They will find you.’

‘You think I put my cock in that man’s mouth without a rubber? Please. What era are you living in, Nick?’

There was only one other explanation, Nicky thought. And he was right.

‘The semen in Geoffrey’s mouth was his own,’ Gil said. ‘Don’t you love it? It’ll confuse the hell out of the FBI for years. Don’t ask me how I did it, though. Toughest part of this whole thing.’

Amelia found another breath somehow, made another noise, low and raspy. The man in white, the man who called himself Gil stood and, instead of looking at her, instead of being drawn by her ruse a second time, spun in place and stabbed Nicky with a syringe.

But Nicky was fast. He shifted his weight – the needle caught him high on his left shoulder – and before Gil could depress the plunger more than halfway, Nicky rolled with it and lashed out with a straight right hand, catching Gil on the point of his chin, driving him into the wall. Gil regained his footing, threw a right hand of his own, stunning Nicky, dropping him to one knee. Then, Gil picked up the desk chair, raised it over his head, and brought it down hard on the back of Nicky’s neck.

Stars. And pain. Golden Glove tryouts, 1990. Knocked out by a gorilla named Rocco. Never saw it coming, never heard the count.

But he wasn’t in the ring now. He was in the—

Gil Strauss. The warehouse. Amelia.

Nicky tried to push himself up with his arms, failed miserably. When he hit the ground his head split in agony. He tried again. And again.

Then, from behind him, he heard Gil take a step toward him.

The gun, Nicky thought. Jesus Christ, the gun. He was going to—

But instead of a loud bang, something warm and fuzzy and soft landed on the side of Nicky’s face. Something . . . familiar? Calling on every ounce of boxer’s discipline he had ever possessed, Nicky found the energy and the courage to roll onto his back, to sit up. The soft thing fell into his lap. He shook his head, tried to lose the cobwebs, the ringing in his ears. He reoriented himself in the room. Gil against the wall, opposite him. Amelia still tied on the bed. How long was he—?

He looked down at his lap and, for a moment, thought he was imagining things. Red. Raspberry red.

It was Meg’s beret.

‘She’s not coming back, Nick,’ Gil said, removing a loosened, bloody tooth, dropping it into the wastebasket. ‘They never do. Take it from an expert.’

The rage inside Nicky flared, cauterizing his pain.

Gil continued. ‘She really was beautiful, though. As beautiful as my Julia. It’s one of the reasons I figured you would understand all this. You understand loss.’

Somehow Nicky was on his feet. He lunged.

Gil dove for the gun.

But Nicky got there first. He bulled Gil against the wall, then set his weight and threw three left hooks in rapid succession, each one landing on Gil’s face, stunning him, splitting the flesh over his cheekbone, the final blow shattering two fingers on Nicky’s left hand. Nicky finished the flurry with a right cross that exploded Gillian Strauss’s nose.

Gil slumped to the floor: unconscious, still, silent.

Nicky turned to the desk, grabbed the gun, pulled back the hammer, and put it to the back of Gillian Strauss’s head. His hand began to shake.

But Strauss didn’t move.

And, in an instant, it was over.

Nicky took the gag out of Amelia’s mouth. The sudden rush of air into her lungs made her cough, made her gasp for a breath. ‘Thuh-thuh win-win,’ Amelia said. ‘Thuh-thuh win . . . dow . . .’ She nodded at the broken window. ‘Look . . .’

Nicky walked over to the broken window, looked out. He glanced back at Amelia, shrugged his shoulders.

‘Maddie!’

Nicky looked again, the hundred feet or so to the ground making things blend together. Willie’s car, Dumpsters, lots of garbage bags. ‘I can’t . . .’

Amelia got her wind back. ‘Go down there and see, Nicky. Please. Now. You have to go down there and see!’

Nicky crossed the room, stepped onto the bed, looked at the ropes around Amelia’s wrists. He would need a knife.

‘Go!’ Amelia shouted. ‘Don’t worry about us right now.
Go
!’

Nicky reached into the drawer, took out the handcuffs, and cuffed Strauss’s hands behind his back. He held up Strauss’s head by the hair. ‘Amelia, this is Gillian Strauss. Also known as Gillian Daniel Woltz. Also known as Mac.’ He let Gil’s head drop into the small but growing pool of blood coming from his mouth.

Nicky found the hypodermic needle, the one that had been in his shoulder, looked at it, then at Amelia. ‘Do you know what this is?’

‘No.’

Nicky thought for a second, then reached over and injected the remainder of the contents into Strauss’s leg. ‘Hack freelancer? Fuck you.’

He then rummaged through Gil’s pockets, found a set of keys. He also found some change. ‘I’ll be right back,’ he said. ‘But I’ll need this.’ He reached out and pulled hard on one of the canvas walls. After three attempts it came down, bringing with it the slide-projected image of a young retarded girl on a carousel at Cedar Point.

Nicky left the room.

Amelia cried.

And waited.

It took five tries, but the sheet of canvas finally provided him with enough purchase to get up the oil-slicked ramp. He had tried every key on Gil’s ring before finding the master key to the doors in the stairwell. Every single move he made seemed to delay him, seemed to seal the fate of the little girl.
Had Amelia been right about this?
he wondered.

Had Gil Strauss gone that far?

He really didn’t relish looking into the back alley, but he had to.

When he got to the top of the ramp, he was just about to fall backward when his hand closed around the knob. He closed his eyes, waiting for resistance, and pulled on the huge steel door.

It opened.

The rush of night air, the streetlamps on East Fifty-first Street, filled him with a great sense of relief. The sickness at the top of the warehouse seemed a million miles away now. But it wasn’t. If Amelia was right, it was just around the corner, in the alley.

He looked both ways up the street, found it deserted, stepped out onto the sidewalk and turned right, toward the alley behind the building. He stood at the mouth of the alley and began to visually sort through the debris. Willie’s car was parked halfway to the rear. To the left, a Dumpster, overflowing with garbage.

And then he saw it. The burlap bag.

The bag had split open when it hit the ground; the deep red contents were splayed onto the crumbling asphalt, wet and warm and steaming in the night air. Nicky steeled himself, knelt down, peeled back the edge of the bag, saw the orange hair, the splintered bone, the gobbets of flesh. The bottom of the bag was soaked with blood, thick with viscera. He turned away, stood up, tried to walk off the overwhelming nausea.

How could someone do this? He looked skyward, saw the window. It was at least a hundred feet or so. He walked back to the bag, knelt once more, shifted his position to allow for more light, and saw that it wasn’t orange hair at all. It was orange . . . fur?

My God, Nicky thought, his heart soaring, his eyes welling with tears.

It wasn’t the little girl. It was the dog. The big golden retriever.

Gil had thrown the dog out of the window.

And maybe – maybe – that meant that the girl was still alive, still upstairs somewhere.

Nicky couldn’t imagine the agony that Amelia was experiencing. He had to get back upstairs and tell her. But first he had to phone the police, before whatever had been in the hypodermic needle kicked in. He sprinted back to Euclid Avenue and the phone booth on the corner. His vision was starting to cloud now, to soften his periphery. He fought the drowsiness and dropped the quarter into the phone.

His knees gave a quick trick, buckling momentarily. He held onto the side of the phone booth, dialed 911, waited, his mind misting up by the second. ‘Come on . . . come on . . .’ he said. ‘Answer the fuggin’ . . .’

Nicky glanced at his watch. Hard to focus. Looked like nearly midnight. Midnight on Halloween, he thought. The cops had to be busier than hell. But why doesn’t the—

‘Nine-one-one emergency’ the voice said.

‘Hi,’ Nicky began, but he knew his words were coming out flat and unintelligible. His tongue felt a foot wide. ‘I’d . . . uh . . . I’d lige do wee-pord a . . . a . . .’

‘A what, sir? You’ll have to speak up.’

Nicky’s mind was deserting him. He took a deep breath, tried again. ‘I . . .’

But that was all that he would say. He slumped to the ground, his mind and body a slave to the drug now. And then his world went dark.

BOOK: The Violet Hour

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