Moriceau looks up, and Paris is nearly frightened by what he sees. The terror in the man’s eyes has no bottom. “They will know . . .”

“They?” Paris asks. “What are you talking about? Who is they?”

Moriceau gazes back at the floor. Paris is almost certain he is about to puke again, but instead Moriceau says, in his increasingly disjoined voice: “The seven powers.”

Paris had come across the term seven powers in his readings on Santeria. But it was all beginning to blend together in his mind. He imagines it would be like someone trying to learn all about Catholicism or Judaism in seventy-two hours or so. “I’m sorry?”

“Eleggua, Orula, Ogun . . .”

Paris could barely hear him now. “What are you talking about?”

“Obatala, Yemaya, Oshun, Shango . . .”

“Mr. Moriceau?”

Moriceau looks up, holds his gaze, his red eyes searching, his hands now trembling like those of a man in violent, freezing waters. “I . . . I . . .”

Paris remains silent for a few moments, waiting for the answer this man will almost certainly not supply. He is right. “You what, Mr. Moriceau?”

“I want a lawyer.”

Paris studies the shivering figure in front of him. This is no stone killer. Whatever legal horrors Moriceau might be facing, whatever apparitions of prison life eddy in his mind, they seem to be nothing compared to the flames of his personal hell.

The stench reaches Paris at that moment—sour and pervasive and cloying. He looks into the mirror, at himself, at the cops on the other side. They all know that there is no way they will be able to hold Edward Moriceau, just as they know that surveillance on La Botanica Macumba will begin within the hour.

The building has taken back its silence, reclaimed its mysteries. Paris is alone. He directs the beam of the flashlight along the cobwebbed wall, the skewed shelving, opaque with dust. Some of the hand-painted menus for Weeza’s cuisine are still visible beneath the layers of time.

Paris Is Burning.

He is unsure why he had come back. Boredom and loneliness certainly had something to do with it. The building had probably given up what it knew about the last moments of Fayette Marie Martin’s life, had most likely disclosed all its veiled wisdom.

But what the Reginald Building had not told him is why would someone like Fayette Martin come here in the first place. Why did she agree to meet with someone who, by all appearances, had been a total stranger, a man she had met online? Why didn’t she drive up to the building, take one look, then drive back home and lock her doors and ask herself what the hell she was doing?

How lonely had it gotten?

He stands in the doorway leading to what was once Weeza’s kitchen, listens to the night sounds, the constant bray of the wind. He wonders if Fayette knew. Did she scream when she saw the big knife? Did it come as a complete surprise? Did she have a second to reflect, or did the end of her life come as a brutal blindside, like a drunk driver running a red light at eighty miles an hour? Hadn’t she known it might happen?

Or was that the kick?

Paris decides to go home, to rest, to take the whole story apart and reassemble it from the bolts up. He plays the flashlight beam across the floor at his feet and heads for the door just as the wind picks up again, a doleful gust that rattles the glass panes of the building’s few remaining windows, loose in their mullions like rows of diseased teeth.

42

They had entered through the second door on the left. The room is searingly white. The one splash of brilliance is the velvet wing chair in the center of the room, a deep purple in color. Across from it, against the far wall, is a white table holding a computer and a monitor. Against the wall to the right is a white ultramodern desk, very slender, no chair.

That’s it. No other furniture, no paintings nor posters on the walls, no books nor magazines nor ashtrays nor table lamps. Just . . . white. And a hell of a lot of track lights hanging from the ceiling. There had to be twenty of them. And every one of them is blazing.

“Do you have anywhere to be tomorrow, early evening?” he asks.

She sits on the velvet wing chair. Whatever she had smelled in the kitchen is stronger here. Spoiled beef, maybe. But this room is almost sterile, and she finds it hard to imagine that Jean Luc would have another room in such disarray as to have rotting food strewn around. Perhaps it is coming from the next apartment.

“No,” she answers. One of her part-time jobs is secretarial work for a small company that writes grants for charities and foundations. They had closed the offices for the week. Besides, if she had said yes, she had the distinct feeling it wouldn’t really matter that much.

“Good,” Jean Luc says. He crosses the room, opens the closet door. Inside hangs a solitary item, a black leather jacket. He removes it from the hanger and walks over to the velvet wing chair. Without a word, she stands and he slips the jacket on her. It feels warm. She does not question what he is doing. There is no longer any point to that.

There are other ways to win.

Jean Luc reaches into his pocket, then holds up a small card. On it is the address of an Italian specialty market on East Sixty-sixth Street. “He’ll be there at six-thirty P.M. tomorrow. He goes there like clockwork, every week.”

“What do you want me to do?” she asks, standing closer, looking deeply into his eyes. She unzips the jacket halfway.

“I want you to take him on a little voyage.” He walks over to the desk, opens a drawer, removes a soft cloth. She looks into the drawer. No photos. Jean Luc returns, gently buffs everywhere on the jacket he has touched. “A little cruise, if you will.”

“A cruise?” she asks. “What kind of cruise?”

Jean Luc smiles. “A cruise I’m certain he will enjoy. A cruise on the Mare di Amore.”

43

The ice on the back of his head melts during his fourth cup of coffee, but the hangover does not. He had stayed up until almost dawn, finishing the final three inches of four different kinds of booze he had found lurking in his cupboards. Scotch, rye, schnapps, Cuervo. He had also found a pair of Lynchburg Lemonades loitering in the back of his fridge.

What had he been thinking?

He had been thinking about not thinking, that’s what he had been thinking.

Paris Is Burning is what he had been thinking.

He had watched old movies, he had smoked old cigarettes, he had poured his booze carefully, adding ice until every drop was gone, shooting for blotto.

He arrived.

He has most of the day off and has at least ten errands to run before his tour starts. He pours himself another cup of coffee, promising movement soon, and scans the Plain Dealer, pleased by not seeing a huge headline, above the fold, with the words voodoo and killer in it.

Paris inserts the VHS tape. It is a low-angle shot of himself standing in front of the Justice Center. He is younger in the shot, wearing a dark suit, burgundy tie. He looks heavier than he remembers being, which is one of the reasons he had not watched the tape for more than a year. The reason for the tape to begin with? Pure vanity. He had worn his best suit that day, in the hope he would be interviewed, in the hope that Beth would see it and it would impress the hell out of her. Only the interview part happened. He had caught it on the eleven o’clock news that night.

“This was a cold-blooded killing of a police officer in the line of duty. . . . I think the evidence will show that the defendant, Sarah Weiss, pulled the trigger.”

This statement is followed by a barrage of questions shouted from the dozen or so reporters in front of him. Although he doesn’t remember hearing it, one of the questions must have been about Mike Ryan’s own investigation, the Internal Affairs inquisition as to whether or not Mike had extorted protection money from a man who owned a chain of adult bookstores.