nervous, fumbling, inept; she’d been the opposite – calm and self-assured, and guiding. He’d taken her for an accomplished lover. He was wrong; it was her first time. Yet making love, she explained afterwards, felt as natural to her as walking, eating or sleeping. She’d helped him unhook her bra and giggled when he’d been all fingers and thumbs with the buttons of his jeans. He’d never forgotten how ashamed he’d felt about his performance; even now he recalled his stumbling apologies and repeated reassurances that it had nothing to do with her.
Kelly had merely smiled in an enigmatic way and reminded him that everyone said the first time was often a disappointment, so it could only get better. She was right; their love-making had improved to the point of glory. Torrid romps in his jeep; outside in some remote spot; or in her room on campus; whenever they could steal a little time together … It always felt, for him at least, totally complete, and something he wanted to repeat again and again.
In the space of four months his love had blossomed to a point where he cherished her, desired her, wanted to possess her, to make her his wife.
That was how Jay had felt about Kelly Tyler, and how he’d believed she felt about him. Until Matthew’s death. It was then that Kelly changed. For as long as he lived he would never forget the indifferent voice of the judge passing sentence. The noise in the courtroom had faded to a dull drone, then pin-drop silence. A crushing pain in his head had followed, as if his skull was in a vice, the cool steel getting colder and colder as it clamped tighter and tighter against his temples. Kelly had stood in the aisle staring at him, her face framed by a waterfall of golden hair. Slightly parted lips, tears falling from big luminous eyes the colour of burnt almonds. To him she had never looked so beautiful as she had in that moment, the last time he’d seen her. Then her features, except for those eyes, had become fuzzy, and textured, like those in an old photograph.
In the first few years of captivity, it had been impossible to put Kelly out of his mind however hard he tried. A deep sense of betrayal had nagged his senses like a persistent dog with a bone. She never came to see him, nor did she write, not a single word. Every week for months he’d flicked through his mail, searching, longing, for a glimpse of her handwriting. Eventually, just staying alive, staying sane, came to demand all his wits and helped crowd out the memory of her. But the hunger to see her face, touch her soft skin just one more time, had never abated. And now, seeing her on screen had brought her back to life, renewing that hunger deep in his belly. It was like the ache that used to keep him awake as a young boy whenever he’d dared to answer his father back. In those days he would receive a beating and be sent to bed without food until forced to apologize.
‘I’m going to find out who killed Matthew and why, and then I’m going to write about it.’ Jay wasn’t shouting, yet his voice sounded too loud in his own ears. A title sprang instantly to mind.
Remission. He liked the sound of it, it had a good ring. He repeated it again and again. ‘Remission, Remission, Remission.’
He began to pace the void between the bed and the wall, a habit he’d developed in prison. It had helped him to shut out the noise of the zoo all around, and enabled him to concentrate. With a sense of dread, he acknowledged that to find out what had really happened on that awful night, he would have to go back to when it had all started.
For years he’d vowed he wouldn’t take that path, sworn he would go forward, opening only the doors that led ahead. But stronger still was his primeval urge for vengeance. Revenge was normally another luxury that prison squeezed out of you. Yet here he was, only hours on the outside and ready to hatch plots, schemes of retribution and pay-back. But it wasn’t just about revenge, Jay knew that. It was about knowing, finding out, making all the pieces fit.
During his imprisonment, his vengeful schemes had been the one thing that fed his fervent intellect – until the early eighties when Al Colacello had come into his life and his writing had begun. A vision of Al, the first time Jay had seen him, crossed his mind. That face would always live with him. A big cat face, sleek and malevolent. With eyes so dark, they were almost black; so shiny, they were almost inhuman. Al had eyes that stripped you naked in seconds, read your mind. And they had looked into the faces of more than twenty-eight men before he’d killed them. All hits, good clean eliminations. ‘The best cleaner in the business.’ That was how Al had referred to himself.
Al had boasted to Jay that he was so good he’d earned himself the nickname ‘Teach ‘n’ Reach’, or just ‘Teach’; there was nobody whom he couldn’t teach a lesson, nobody he couldn’t reach. Al Colacello had been Mario Petroni’s lieutenant for twelve years, and his best friend. Mario was known as the ‘Dapper Don’ after he’d been indicted on three charges of corruption and grand larceny and had appeared every day at his hearing immaculate in hand-stitched Savile Row suits, Hermès ties and cashmere overcoats. Al had been a key witness in his defence, his testimony crucial to Mario’s subsequent acquittal. Al and Mario: both born on the same day, within hours of each other, in the mean backstreets. Al in Naples; Mario in Sicily. Both emigrated to America in the late fifties; Al with his family, and Mario to stay with his uncle. Somehow innocence managed to bypass them both, they had no time to be kids – too busy finding food to put in their empty bellies, and organizing some new scam to finance the next few days of existence. Bosom buddies, kindred spirits, until Al had made a mistake, almost a fatal mistake. He’d screwed up big time.
Jay recalled Al’s voice the night he’d told him about Mario’s daughter Anna. ‘What would you have done?’ he’d asked Jay. ‘If this beautiful girl, like she’s sixteen, with huge tits, and an ass like a ripe peach, slips into bed next to you and begins going down on you. Only coming up for air and to beg you to fuck her. Like I’ve got the biggest fucking hard-on, and suddenly she’s pushing her tight little pussy down on my cock. She’s no virgin, and as I go inside she’s screaming to fuck her hard, cause that’s the way she likes it. Man, believe me I tried to stop! I tell you, I really tried. All the time, I’m telling myself she’s my best friend’s daughter. But Christ, she’s gagging for it and pumping me like crazy.
‘I stayed away from Anna after that, tried to avoid her, but she kept coming on to me. Until one night she warns me if I don’t fuck her she’s going to tell her father I raped her, took her virginity. I call her bluff. I knew it was a risk, but I’d no choice.’
At that point Jay had glimpsed a chink in Al’s armour of arrogance as he said, ‘One fuck, one simple fuck loused up everything. Mario didn’t believe me. I was lucky to hang on to my cock, and to this day he still thinks his fucking daughter is Mother Theresa.’
After this confession Al and Jay had struck up a rapport, and a friendship began to grow. Jay knew it was an incongruous pairing and one that would never have existed on the outside. Theirs was a meeting of opposites, but nevertheless he felt at ease in Al’s company as he knew Al did in his. Day after day, week after week, Al had poured his dark and innermost secrets into Jay’s greedy ears. He had kept diaries of his time with Mario, detailed and comprehensive memoirs of their twelve-year partnership. And night after night, while his cell-mate slept, Jay had stayed awake scribbling in his notebook, recording Al’s life – a life of organized crime, littered with dead bodies. It had fascinated Jay, gripped him from the first telling, and he’d listened avidly to how Al had met Mario Petroni when they were twenty-year-olds, young hell raisers with the smell of fresh blood on their hands. From the tenement basements of Hell’s Kitchen on Manhattan’s Westside they hatched ambitious schemes of how they were to become big Mafia dons, bigger and better than any before.
And during the three years he’d shared a cell with Al, Jay had also quietly observed his gradual decline into insanity. The end came when Teach was found dead in a pool of his own vomit, his face the same colour as the concrete floor of the prison cell. Al Colacello the invincible, the teacher, had done something really stupid – shot up on smack from a supplier who was known to cut his drugs with baking powder when he could get it, rat poison when he couldn’t.
In a strange way Jay had missed Teach; missed his crude street humour, his outrageous arrogance. Above all he’d missed the protection Al’s friendship had afforded him. The gangster’s life and death had inspired Killing Time, and he would always be grateful to him