And, for the next few minutes, as nausea grows within her, she continues to wipe down the motel room—everything, whether she remembers touching it or not.

A short time later, as she stands on the berm of I-90 East, retching into the culvert, she is certain—as certain as she is that she will see the death mask of Willis Walker every night for the rest of her life—that she has left something behind.

8

The Dream-A-Dream Motel on East Seventy-ninth Street and St. Clair Avenue is a U-shaped, single story building, an inner-city cathouse patched with imitation-stucco board to cover the bullet holes, the graffiti, the long streaks of dried vomit under the windowsills.

I watched her enter Room 116 at about one o’clock. A blond this time. Not really her color. I like her best as a brunette. I always have, ever since the day I first followed her to see where she went so mysteriously incognito all the time, to see how she peddled her charms. Even then I could feel her pull, that raw dynamism that says you can’t have me unless you step into my world.

A short time after she entered the motel room I heard the gunshots, the whipcrack of a small-caliber weapon fired in a confined space. Within minutes she emerged, frantic, dressed in a dark cap, dark raincoat.

I ran off a full roll of film — I still prefer using 35mm film to digital when possible — my finger depressed on the shutter release as she sprinted from the room, across the lot, down St. Clair Avenue. I am sure I got her face. How recognizable it will be is yet to be determined, although my SP-7901 Starscope night-vision lens has yet to let me down.

I step inside Room 116, my sidearm drawn. The room is in disarray, but I immediately see the body on the floor, smell the metal of just-spent blood, the carbon of just-flashed powder.

The body is half in, half out of the bathroom.

I holster my weapon, place the shoulder bag on the bed, cock my head to the night. No sirens. I set about the tasks at hand. I place the knives on the floor at my feet, open the pint bottle of Matusalem rum laced with the magic mushroom, and swallow deeply. Then I slowly, carefully, light the cigar.

La madrina mia.

Why did she begin her own madness this night?

The man on the floor begins to move.

I think about her as I set about my business. It has been so long since I have said the words I love you to a woman that it seems I might hesitate when I tell her. This is a fear. Another fear is that she will resist me. And although romance is as important to me as it is to the next man, I do not have time to court her properly. Not now.

There will be time for romance.

The man on the floor groans.

Now I must gather.

Now I must take my hands from my ears and willfully let in the discord, the shrill fury of my father’s violence. Now I must be strong and urgent and bestial. Now I must go to work.

The volume in my head soars as the Amanita muscaria takes me in its dark embrace.

I select my sharpest knife.

And set upon the body.

9

“Where y’at, Jackie?” the man behind the counter asks. “Comment ça va?”

“I’m good, Ronnie,” Paris says. “As good as can be expected from a man my age, on a day such as this.”

The big man winks, hands Paris a red Thermos, takes the empty. “It is all bon, oui?”

It is a rhetorical question. An old, comfortable routine. Paris studies the man, again marveling at Ronnie Boudreaux’s grace at more than three hundred pounds. “You are definitely the hardest-working man in show business, Ronnie. When are you going to take a vacation?”

Ronnie Boudreaux laughs, pulls a rack from the glass display case. “I get a vacation when my two ex-wives get married or die, mec.” He bags a pair of beignets, hands the bag to Paris. “Or my chouchou love me six feet under.”

This draws a laugh from the regulars at the five-stool counter.

Paris had been in a zone car one sweltering night, years earlier, and had helped to foil an armed robbery at Ronnie’s Famous Louisiana Fry Cakes on Hough Avenue. Most likely a rape, too. When Paris and Vince Stella had answered the call they found Ronnie unconscious behind the counter. They also found the robber and Ronnie’s terrified, half-dressed daughter in the back room. Lucia Boudreaux was ten years old at the time.

Jack Paris and Vince Stella brought the suspect down that night. Hard.

Since then, there has been a Thermos of fresh coffee waiting for Paris at Ronnie’s Famous, right next to the register, no matter when he stops by. They are currently on a two-Thermos rotation since Paris decided to make a science out of obtaining Ronnie’s fresh beignets at precisely seven A.M. or seven P.M., the two times of day when you can get the delicately sweet, square little doughnuts right out of the oil.

It has been this way for many years.

“Gotta run,” Paris says, grabbing the bag and his freshly filled Thermos. “See you, Ronnie.”

“Laissez les bon temps roulet,” Ronnie replies, on cue.

Let the good times roll, he says.

Paris drops a couple of dollars into the tip jar—he had stopped trying to pay for the coffee and doughnuts a long time ago—and steps out into the frigid morning. He opens the white bag, removes a warm beignet and sinks his teeth into it, eyes shut, chewing slowly, enraptured by the light dusting of powdered sugar, by the extraordinary little pockets of air. He pauses, lost in the present, until that sound destroys the moment again, as it always does. The sound of his pager.

The sound of another body falling to the earth.

There are a few things for which homicide detectives, even veteran homicide detectives, are never fully braced. One is dead children. Another—or perhaps it is a horror that dwells exclusively in the minds of male police officers—is castration. Paris had seen it only once before, a Mafia payback hit. That time, like this time, he was stupefied at the amount of blood.

The forensic activity in Room 116 of the Dream-A-Dream Motel on East Seventy-ninth Street, a stone’s throw from Rockefeller Park, moves along briskly, not necessarily because the victim, a small-time hustler named Willis Walker, is deserving of such rapid progress in the investigation of his death, but rather because there is not a man in the room who can bear to look at the corpse for too long. More than once, Paris had noticed someone from the Special Investigation Unit subconsciously shield his crotch as he moved swiftly past the body, as if the murderer might still be lurking behind the damp, nicotine-grimed curtains, teeth bared, razor poised.

The blood from Willis Walker’s groin had spread on the bathroom floor into a huge, tormented circle of blackish grue. The blood behind his head is another story—this, a dark-purple paste, flecked with bits of skull, rootlets of hair.

Next to the body is a .25 caliber pistol, recently discharged.

Paris snaps on a pair of gloves, crouches by the body. He carefully explores the man’s front pants pockets. Empty, save for a blood-soaked pack of matches from Vernelle’s Party Center, a cheat spot located a few blocks west of the motel on St. Clair.

Paris pokes about Willis Walker’s body, probing here and there, putting off the inevitable. Finally, he can avoid it no longer. He hears a brief salvo of stifled laughter from behind him and turns around to see Reuben Ocasio, one of Cuyahoga County’s deputy coroners, looking grim and serious and thoroughly guilty of the laughter.

“You want to do it?” Paris asks.

“Not a chance,” answers Reuben. “I’m confident in my sexuality and all. But you’re the fuckin’ detective.”

Paris takes a deep breath of air curiously redolent with cigar smoke. Curious, because there were no cigar ashes in either of the room’s two ashtrays, no cigar butts in or near Room 116. The other smell was more explainable—rum. It seemed to be everywhere. A tart, acidic scent that probes some catacomb of Paris’s memory, a place webbed in shadows at the moment, just beyond recall.