The Violet Hour (8 page)

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Authors: Richard Montanari

BOOK: The Violet Hour
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It was Dark Curls.
‘I decided to keep the car warm while I was in class,’ she said. How had he managed to walk up to her so quietly?
‘And you don’t have a spare key . . .’
Amelia buried her head in her hands, her face beginning to redden. ‘No,’ she said. ‘That would make life far too easy.’
Dark Curls laughed. ‘Hey. Don’t be embarrassed,’ he said, circling the car, looking in the windows. ‘I was late for a class once. Parked my car quickly, locked it, ran off to class, even though the engine was doing that pre-ignition thing it was so fond of – popata-popata-popata-popata . . .’
‘You mean, like, where it won’t shut off for a while?’ Amelia asked. ‘Then it does a big wheeze when it’s finished?’
‘Yeah, that’s it. Forty-five minutes later I came back and the car was still at it – coughing and sputtering and belching exhaust. The parking lot attendant, who sat there the whole time, told me it sounded like a forty-five-minute drum solo. So you’re not the only one that stuff like this happens to.’
Amelia laughed. ‘Okay. I guess I’m not so embarrassed now. I think.’ She began to rummage through her purse. ‘But I also guess that it’s time to call Triple A.’
I also guess?
Amelia thought
. Who the hell says I also guess?
‘Hang on a sec.’ He walked around to the far side of Amelia’s car. In addition to his jeans and cowboy boots, he wore an Indiana Jones-type brown leather flight jacket; scuffed, of course, in all the right places. ‘Don’t waste the call. You’ve got the window down a little here. Let me go back inside the school and get a coat hanger. I’ll get you inside in no time.’
‘You can do that?’ Amelia asked.
‘Just anudder vestige of me misspent yoot,’ he said with a rakish smile, then turned and trotted back to the school.
Amelia glanced into the window of her car, at her fun-house reflection. She poked at her hair, smoothed her cheeks, thought about freshening her lipstick, but she didn’t think she would have enough time or light to do a proper job.
Wow, she thought. Am I flirting? Is this how it all started with Roger and Shelley Roth? Did Roger do something really gallant for Shelley Roth in a parking lot one night and then they talked for a while and then they laughed for a while and then they had a drink and then One Thing led to the proverbial Other? Is this how people who are allegedly happily married—
‘Nice sweater,’ Dark Curls said from behind her, nearly making her jump. Again.
‘Oh, uh . . . thanks,’ Amelia said, wondering: Did he see me primping?
Shit
.
He walked to the passenger side of her car and, within seconds, said: ‘Got it!’ He opened the passenger door, unlocked the driver door, got out. ‘Score one for the criminal mind.’
‘Wow,’ Amelia said. ‘I’m impressed.’
‘I draw the line at safes, though,’ he said, folding the coat hanger and dropping it into a nearby trash can. ‘Well, big safes, that is.’
‘Damn,’ Amelia said, playing along. ‘There goes the National City Bank job I was going to invite you on.’ Jesus. She
was
flirting.
Dark Curls laughed and walked around the back of the car. ‘There’ll be other burglaries,’ he said. ‘Just keep me in mind.’
‘I will,’ Amelia said, sliding into the driver’s seat. She had left the heat on and it felt like slipping into a toaster oven. Her glasses instantly fogged over and she whipped them off and dropped them on the passenger seat. ‘I guess I’ll see you at the next class then.’
‘Sure thing,’ he said. ‘Have a nice evening.’
‘You too,’ Amelia replied. As she reached for the door handle she looked up. The streetlamp behind him created a halo of light around his head.
He smiled.
A single butterfly loosed itself in Amelia’s stomach.
She slammed the door on her seat belt and drove off.
The weeknight crowd at Celine’s on Falls Road had been more local in flavor than it was on the weekends. Paige made up for it by dancing with every breathing male between the ages of twenty-two and sixty. Amelia nursed a single glass of wine for two hours, her mind returning over and over again to her rescuer.
Just keep me in mind.
She dropped a very giggly Paige Turner off at midnight and drove home.
After a quick look around the house, searching for signs of whether Becky’s boyfriend had paid a conjugal visit to the Hotel St John, and finding none, Amelia paid her and drove her home.
It wasn’t until one o’clock that Amelia’s head hit the pillow. Sleep came within minutes.
And, in its wake, a very erotic dream about a man in a soft leather jacket.
Seventy-five feet away, at the mouth of the driveway, a blue van cut its engine and rolled, silently, to a stop. For a brief moment the brake lights shone brightly; red knives slitting the darkness.
Then the night regained control, and the St John house, the lone structure at the end of Wyckamore Lane, was once again clothed in black.
Three
 
Crack Alley Blues
11
 
From the windows of his office at Clark Hall, a suite of dark-paneled rooms he had occupied for twenty-three years as head of the English Department at Case Western Reserve University, Sebastian Keller looked out at the rich fall colors that blanketed University Circle: Severance Hall, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the lagoon.
Sixty-one, he thought. Young, really. But it would be his final year of life.
He turned back to his desk and looked again at the newspaper. John Angelino. The theatrical one. Mr Angelino, he recalled as if it were just yesterday, was the one who never missed an opportunity to burst into show tunes. Nice-looking, serious about his faith. A natural for the priesthood.
They had called themselves the AdVerse Society, he remembered. Their main purpose in life – aside from the sampling of any alcoholic concoction that had ever dampened the cocktail napkins of Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table – had been the trashing of the allegedly overrated, the deconstruction of the so-called greats in modern poetry: Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound.
John Angelino, dead at forty-two. The newspaper confirmed it.
But it was the next day’s newspaper that Sebastian Keller dreaded, and then the one that would come the day after that. Because one day, and soon, a
Plain Dealer
would show up on his desk and let him know that another one had died. Another member of the AdVerse Society had died in the prime of life.
Heroin indeed.
He glanced at his watch, at the second hand, and moved slowly, painfully, toward his chair. The myriad pills he took every day barely assuaged the pain that racked his lungs, his lower back, his hips, his genitals. The cancer had drawn a deep red outline of his manhood and now it had begun to flame.
He sat down, closed his eyes, conjured up the young woman’s body, the way it had moved beneath her simple cotton dresses; the unthinking, unspoiled way she would cross her legs beneath her desk.
And then he recalled the way she had looked on that Halloween night, her perfect young breasts in the candle-light, the streetwalker’s makeup.
He downed his pills, sipped his water.
He would watch the newspapers, he thought. He wasn’t sure whether he would have enough time or strength to do anything if it happened again, but he would watch the papers.
Watch, and wait.
12
 
The article that Nicky Stella firmly believed was his best work, the one he figured he would eventually resell to
GQ
as his ticket to the big time, was entitled ‘Crack Alley Blues,’ a diary-style journal of three days inside the Cleveland Police Department’s Narcotics Unit. ‘Sensitive and riveting,’ one reader had written to the editor in a gushing encomium.
Nicky had spent three nights with two undercover narcotics cops; cops who, to this day, Nicky knew only by their street names, Birdman and Willie T. The detectives always rode around in disguise: wigs, hats, tinted shades. Willie T was black, short, and powerfully built, given to tank tops and left hooks; Birdman was a lean, wise-cracking Anglo who seemed to have a thin veneer of procedure covering long-simmering sadism.
They would pick Nicky up at the Burger King at East Eighty-fifth Street and Euclid Avenue every night about eleven, then head straight into the Third District, straight into hell. During the entire time Nicky was on the assignment, including a number of follow-up interviews, the two police officers never divulged their identities, never dropped the disguises. All Nicky knew was a phone number.
Five days before the article was published, Nicky met Willie T at a cop bar on Payne Avenue. He gave him an advance copy. Willie T took it into a booth, along with a tumbler of Jack Daniel’s, and read it. Twice. Forty minutes later he had come out and marched the length of the bar with what Nicky would swear under oath was a tear gathering at the corner of his eye. Willie T hugged him.
Later that night the two police officers took him into the supply room at the back of the bar, reached into their respective pockets, and pulled out a stack of bills. In unison they each peeled off a single hundred-dollar-bill, then ripped the bill in half. They each handed a piece to Nicky, tokens of their appreciation. Birdman spoke first. ‘Your next two misdemeanors are on us, as long as you fuck up inside city limits. Cross the line, make it a felony, we don’t know you.’
‘Uh-huh,’ Nicky replied, only marginally understanding what was going on.
‘Or maybe you’ll need a source,’ Birdman continued. ‘Either way, you ever meet with us in the future, you bring your half. Understand?’
‘Yeah,’ Nicky said. ‘I get it.’
‘But don’t you go walkin’ around cocky. Like you got license to do some shit,’ Willie T said. ‘This ticket will take you about as far as my mood on the day you fuck up. Ca-peesh?’
Nicky understood, and for a long time the half bills had burned a hole in his end-table drawer, as did the image of Willie T’s misty eyes into his mind.
He dialed the number, got voice mail, as always. ‘This is T . . . Leave a message at the beep.’
‘One-one-six,’ he said, as per instructions, and then hung up.
He sat on the couch, found the remote, flipped on the television: CNN was in Iraq, Drew Carey was giving away a trip to Puerto Vallarta, some tropical paradise was bracing for a terrible storm. Round and around the cable wheel he went.
It used to drive Meg crazy.
Nicky glanced at the calendar. Could it really be five years?
He had met Margaret Connelly one steamy August night at the bar at Holiday Inn Rockside, a night that found him in the right suit, the right cologne, and, somehow, in possession of the right words to say to the girl who would be the love of his life. Bouncing to the music, feigning disinterest, he walked by her table no fewer than five times that night, five separate passes before he was able to roust the courage to ask her to dance. When she accepted, Nicky prayed a quick novena for the wisdom to avoid saying anything stupid. Unfortunately, that particular prayer went unheard, but during their second slow dance, when he leaned back and looked at Meg closely – emerald eyes, the sexy crooked smile, the way she reddened, head to toe, a full Irish body blush, when he told her she was beautiful – he knew that this was the woman he was going to marry.
Within three months he proposed to her. Meg Connelly said no. So Nicky Stella asked her again and again and again – fifty days in a row. Didn’t miss one. He’d show up at her desk at work, he’d leave balloons in her car, he’d send her telegrams. He even tried the corny old mariachi trio-under-the-window routine. Cost him two hundred sixty bucks to hire Luis, Carlos, and Little Diego for that hour, but still she resisted.
On the fifty-first day he gave up, got plastered. And it was just before midnight that night that Margaret Connelly appeared at his front door and said yes.
They had been in love, they had married at city hall, and then one perfect spring day Meg went to the doctor’s office and never fully returned. She was twenty-five when they found the cancer, twenty-six when Nicky sat next to her bed, holding her frail hands as she slept, hands that once smoothed his hair when they kissed, hands that once electrified him with the slightest touch, hands that now lay still and empty. Dry, seasoned twigs stacked by a dying fire. She was one day shy of twenty-seven when they all stood in the cold rain at Holy Cross cemetery: steel gray silhouettes against a dirty scrape of winter sky.
He kept her clothes for the longest time, along with a hundred slightly out-of-focus pictures. He wore her powder blue hospital bracelet for a year.
The bill for losing Meg, the part not covered by insurance, had been $77,300, and Nicky paid every last cent, taking every job he could manage to fit into a twenty-hour day, reserving the final four hours of each day for his booze, his ventless corner of sorrow. He had not been out of the city in five years, had not purchased a new suit in six.

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