He now sits in his car on Denison Avenue, the front seat covered in police reports, all from Michael Ryan’s murder book. He had signed them out, not really certain what he is looking for. An earlier connection between Sarah Weiss and Mike Ryan? A disgruntled cop on the inside who lost his cut of the ten grand?
A little yellow car?
Paris had taken Sarah Weiss’s acquittal much harder than usual. He had put so much of himself on the line during the investigation. No cop likes letting a killer off. But when it’s a cop-killer, there is a piece of every police officer that never forgets.
There was alcohol in Michael’s system that night, but it was nowhere near the limit. There was also trace evidence of an extremely powerful hallucinogen. Traces of the hallucinogen were also found in a flask that was inside the killer’s bag. The record shows that Michael was officially off-duty when he was murdered.
According to the defense, Michael was an alcoholic, drugged-up detective who sold confidential police files for ten thousand dollars to fuel his vile habits. According to the defense, Mike Ryan was a very bad cop who got precisely what he had coming.
To this day, Paris refuses to believe it.
Before leaving the Justice Center for the day, Paris had called Dolores Ryan and asked if she still had Michael’s papers: financial records, notebooks, and the like. She said everything was in storage. Dolores also said that Paris was welcome to all of it, without, mercifully, asking him why. Mercifully, because he couldn’t give her an answer if he tried.
Paris turns off the engine, but before he can exit the car, his cell phone rings. “Paris.”
Loud music. Ice cubes in glasses. The drone of roadhouse chatter. “Hi, it’s Mercedes, can you hear me okay?”
“Just fine.”
“Am I catching you at a bad time?”
“Not at all,” Paris says. “Where are you, Atlantic City?”
“I’m at Deadlines.”
Paris knows the place. A venerated old Cleveland tavern favored by journalists. “So what’s up?”
“Well, at the moment, there is a fabulously handsome, ethnically diverse male sitting right next to me, trying to ply me with fruity cocktails.”
Paris smiles. “How’s he doing?”
“Lemme look.” Mercedes is silent for a moment. “Still have my shoes on. Not that well, I guess.”
“It’s still early.”
“Es verdad.”
“So what can I do for you?”
“What do you mean?”
“As in, the reason you called?”
“Oh yeah. Right. Sorry. Listen. I’m going to need a photograph or two of you for the article, but the paper is too friggin’ cheap to hire a second photographer. At least for my stuff, anyway. I left a message for my brother Julian, who is a really good photographer, if he would just get off his ass and do something about it, but that’s another story, okay? Sorry. Anyway, it’s a million to one shot that he’ll show up, which means that me and my PowerShot might have to do, but if you see a cute guy with a camera hanging around, don’t get scared, okay?”
“Thanks for the heads-up.”
“No problem.”
Paris asks Mercedes if she needs a designated driver. She declines. Paris signs off, crosses Denison Avenue, considers walking up the long wheelchair ramp, the sturdy-looking U-shaped structure made out of two-by-sixes and rusting bolts.
Too icy, he thinks. For a man of my advanced years.
So, holding firmly onto the wrought-iron railing, Jack Paris climbs the narrow stone steps to Dolores Ryan’s house.
She looks thin and blanched, a breakable husk of the brunette bombshell to whom Michael Ryan had introduced him one night at the Caprice Lounge; a night now entombed almost twenty years in his memory. That night, Dusty Alessio had the attention of every man in the place, including a woefully young John Salvatore Paris.
Now her hazel eyes are cloudy, veined, tired. Her hair, touched with silver. She wears old denim jeans, threadbare espadrilles, a faded maroon Ohio State University sweatshirt.
They are sitting in the small tidy living room, across from each other, coffee between. In the corner, next to the muted TV, squats a large, artificial Christmas tree, its heirloom ornaments placed haphazardly, hurriedly.
Dolores points at his coffee, asks: “You want something else?”
“No. No thanks.”
“You want something in it?”
“I’m good, Dusty.”
The old nickname makes her smile, blush deeply, run a hand through her hair. “No one calls me that anymore.”
“That’s the first name I heard and I’m stickin’ with it,” Paris says.
“You know where that nickname came from?”
“No.”
“I got it from Michael, the day I met him. Michael was going to Padua High School. I was going to Nazareth. I was sixteen. Sixteen, can you imagine?”
Paris sees the color start to rise in Dolores’s cheeks, the flush of a woman recalling the day she met the love of her life. “I can,” he says.
“I used to see Michael and his friends at the baseball diamond at State Road Park. I’d see him all the time there, but never had the guts to talk to him. Remember how we used to just die of embarrassment at that age?”
“Oh yeah,” Paris says, thinking he hadn’t really progressed all that much in that department.
“So one day my friend Barb and I are tooling around in her old Ford Fairlane convertible, top down. We hit the Manners, the Dairy Queen, the McDonald’s, the Red Barn, then the baseball field on State Road. And suddenly I see him.
“‘There’s Michael!’ I yell. Barbara, of course, panics, swings into the parking lot, knocking her Dairy Queen cup on the floor, completely covering the brake pedal in chocolate milkshake. The car jumps the curb and heads right for the baseball game. Barbara is stamping and stomping and trying to hit the brake pedal, but it’s too slippery. We’re going, like, thirty miles an hour now, smacking into garbage cans, benches, lawn chairs. Finally, after making everyone scatter, she hits the brake pedal squarely and we fishtail around the middle of the diamond, coming to a stop right on the pitcher’s mound. And, because the top is down, there is now an inch of dust on everything—the car, the seats, the books, the burgers, me. Worse than that, ten boys our age are watching us in complete awe, knowing they had just seen what will probably be the story of the year at school.
“Well, it turns out that my history notebook had flown out of the backseat, landing God knows where. So, out of the cloud of dust, notebook in hand, comes Michael Patrick Ryan—black T-shirt, blue eyes, long eye-lashes, sweaty muscles. He says: ‘Hey, Dusty, this yours?’” Dolores looks at Paris with a half-smile that is somewhere adrift between inconceivable heartache and the joy of indelible memory. “Everybody laughed, but I didn’t really hear them, you know? All I saw were those Irish eyes. I was a goner.”
Paris watches as Dolores absently fingers the ribbed cuff of the sweat-shirt, wandering through her reverie, and realizes it is Michael’s. She is still wearing his clothes.
Dolores returns to the moment. She checks the grandfather clock in the hallway, pours more coffee, allows the levity of her story to come to a full rest. After a minute of silence, she says, “He was scared, you know.”
“Michael?”
“Yeah.”
“Scared of what?”
Dolores looks out the bay window, at the rain turning to snow, at the ice crystals starring the tips of the hedges in front of the house. “Everything.” She waves the back of her hand at the long-ago widened doorway leading to the first-floor bathroom; the gesture, a full explanation of life with a family member in a wheelchair. “He was scared all the time after we came back.”
A decade or so earlier, Michael Ryan had pulled up stakes, moved west, taken a job with the San Diego PD. But after his daughter was injured by a hit-and-run driver, a driver never caught, as Paris understood it, he moved the family back to Cleveland to be near Dolores’s mother, a police widow herself.