The Violet Hour Read Free Page B

motel some afternoon, Nicky had the feeling he would probably faint with anticipation. It had been that long.
    ‘Would another reason be that you happen to be married to a very large, ugly Homo sapien named Mario?’
    ‘That too,’ Paulina said, stepping through the door. ‘And he’s not ugly.’
    Nicky looked down the counter, searching for corroboration. He found it in Flavio Bucci, a fixture at Hector’s since the Reagan administration. ‘Is he ugly?’
    ‘He’s ugly,’ Flavio said through a mouthful of baccalà.
    ‘All right,’ Nicky answered as he smoothed his hair, creased his pant legs, shot his monogrammed cuffs like a Jersey mobster, and stepped through the swinging doors into the dining room.
    He scanned the newspaper while he ate breakfast. He found the article tucked away in the ‘Metro’ section of the Plain Dealer . That was good. It meant that most of the other freelancers in town had probably missed it.
    Jesus, Nicky thought, reading the piece. Pure heroin. A Catholic priest.
    Nicholas Anthony Stella – having survived thirty-five years of living with both the curse and the blessing of his mother’s fine Abruzzese features, her smooth olive skin, her dark wavy hair – had grown up in a world where priests were either the kindly older types, always ruffling your hair and spouting Catholic witticisms, or the younger street-wise guys who provided a real dilemma for Nicky. If they were cool and priests, there had to be something about the God business after all.
    The death didn’t jibe with the world of his grandparents’ house on West Forty-seventh Street, a place embraced by the aromas of sweet basil and Roma tomatoes in the backyard, Louis Stella’s beloved, commemorative-stamp-sized parcel of urban green; the sounds of sentences begun in halting English, only to be finished in machine-gun Italian. A time when kids carried squirt guns, and priests all lived to be ninety, died in their sleep, and took the express train to heaven.
    Nicky tried to imagine a priest sitting on the edge of a bed, tying off his arm, mainlining heroin. He immediately banished the image from his mind, as if the act of thinking about it might tack on a few more years to his already epochal sentence in purgatory.
    The article also stated that the heroin packet found on the scene bore the mark of a red tiger-like animal on one side and the mark of a blue monkey on the other.
    But . . . was it an accident? Nicky wondered, sipping his coffee. His father had been a Cleveland cop for twenty-eight years, and Nicky had inherited the instincts, the innate skepticism. How does a Catholic priest – graduate of Case Western Reserve, graduate of Chicago University School of Divinity – get sucked down the heroin rabbit hole?
    Then came the next logical thought, as morbid as it might have been.
    This could be a cover story in the Cleveland Chronicle . Two thousand bucks.
    He did the math in his head. If he could get the paper to cough up a five-hundred-dollar advance, he could buy food for the week, and make a payment to the gypsy.
    He dropped a ten on the register, winked at Paulina. Paulina smiled back.
    And it was that piece of sunshine that Nicky Stella took with him as he stepped through the door, out into the October rain, five days before Halloween.

3
     
    Madeleine Catherine St John stood by herself, as usual, dwarfed by her name, dwarfed by the monolithic bell tower that had called every generation of Montgomery School girls to class since 1936. She was small, even for seven, but her face made up for it with huge inquisitive green eyes, framed by an electric shrubbery of pumpkin red hair. Sometimes, in her bicycle helmet and glasses, Maddie St John looked not unlike Marvin, the little Martian that used to zap Daffy Duck with his ray gun.
    Amelia smiled as she turned off Fairmount Boulevard and swung the Toyota around the U-shaped driveway of the school, noticing that her daughter was once again standing in the rain,