The Charlie Parker Collection 2

by John Connolly

  ‘Are you okay, Mr. Parker?’

  Durand touched my arm gently. I tried to speak, but I could not.

  ‘Why don’t we go downstairs? I’ll make you that cup of coffee.’

  And the figure in the mirror became the ghost of the boy that I once was, and I held his gaze until he slowly faded away and was gone.

  We sat in the kitchen, Asa Durand and I. Through the window, I could see a copse of silver birch where the garage used to be. Durand followed my gaze.

  ‘I heard about what happened,’ he said. ‘A terrible thing.’

  The room was filled with the aroma of Durand’s pot roast. It smelled good.

  ‘Yes, it was.’

  ‘They knocked it down, the garage.’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘The Harringtons. The neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Rosetti – they were probably after your time by a couple of years – told me about it.’

  ‘Why did they knock it down?’ But even as I asked the question, I already knew the answer. The only surprise was that it had stayed intact for as long as it had.

  ‘I guess there are those who feel that, when something bad happens in a place, the echo of it remains,’ said Durand. ‘I don’t know if that’s true. I’m not sensitive to such things myself. My wife believes in angels—’ He pointed at a wispily clothed winged figure hanging from a hook on the kitchen door ‘—except all her angels look like Tinkerbell to me. I don’t think she can tell the difference between angels and fairies.

  ‘Anyway, the Harrington kids didn’t like going into the garage. The youngest one, the little girl, she said it smelled bad. The mother, she told Mrs. Rosetti that sometimes it smelled—’

  He paused, and winced for a third time. It seemed to be an involuntary response when anything discomfited him.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘Go on, please.’

  ‘She told her that it smelled like a gun had gone off in there.’

  We were both silent for a time.

  ‘Why are you here, Mr. Parker?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I think I have some questions I need answered.’

  ‘You know, you get the urge, at a certain point in your life, to go digging around in the past,’ said Durand. ‘I sat my mother down before she died and made her go through our whole family history, everything that she could remember. I wanted to have that knowledge, I guess, to understand what I was part of before anyone who could clear that stuff up for me was gone forever. And that’s a good thing, to know where you came from. You pass it on to your children, and it makes everyone feel less adrift in life, less alone.

  ‘But some things, they’re better left in the past. Oh, I know that psychiatrists and therapists and Lord knows who else will tell you different, but they’re wrong. Not every wound needs to be poked and opened, and not every wrong needs to be reexamined, or dragged kicking and screaming into the light. Better just to let the wound heal, even if it doesn’t heal quite right, or to leave the wrongs in the dark, and remind yourself not to go stepping into the shadows if you can avoid it.’

  ‘Well, that’s the thing of it,’ I said. ‘Sometimes you can’t avoid those shadows.’

  Durand pulled at his lip. ‘No, I guess not. So, is this the beginning, or the end?’

  ‘The beginning.’

  ‘You got a long road ahead of you, then.’

  ‘I think so.’

  I heard the front door open. A small, slightly overweight woman with permed silver hair stepped into the hallway.

  ‘It’s me,’ she said. She didn’t look toward the kitchen. Instead, she first removed her coat, gloves, and scarf, and checked her hair and face in the mirror on the coat rack. ‘Smells fine,’ she said. She turned to the kitchen and saw me.

  ‘Goodness!’

  ‘We got company, Elizabeth,’ said Durand, and I stood as his wife entered the room.

  ‘This is Mr. Parker,’ said Durand. ‘He used to live here, when he was a boy.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Durand,’ I said.

  ‘Well, you’re—’

  She paused as she made the connection, and I watched the emotions play upon her face. Eventually, her features settled into what I suspected was their default mode: kindness, tinged with just the hint of sadness that comes with a lifetime of experience, and the knowledge that it was all coming to an end.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ she settled upon. ‘Sit, sit. You’ll stay for dinner?’

  ‘No, I can’t. I have to get going. I’ve taken up too much of your husband’s time as it is.’

  Despite her inherent decency and good nature, I could see that she was relieved.

  ‘If you’re sure.’

  ‘I am. Thank you.’

  I stayed on my feet to put on my coat, and Durand showed me to the door.

  ‘I ought to tell you,’ he said, ‘that when I first saw you I thought that you were someone else, and I don’t mean one of the Harrington boys. Just for a second, mind.’

  ‘Who did you think I was?’

  ‘There was a man came here, couple of months back. It was evening, darker than it is now. He did what you did: stared at the house for a time, even went as far as to come onto the lawn so he could take a look at the back of the house, out where the garage used to be. I didn’t like it. I ventured out to ask him what he thought he was doing. Haven’t seen him since.’

  ‘You think he was casing the house for a robbery?’

  ‘At first, except that when I challenged him, that’s not what he said. Not that a burglar would tell you he was casing a place, not unless he was dumb as dirt.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘“Hunting.” That’s what he said. Just that one word: “Hunting.” Now what do you think that means?’

  ‘I don’t know, Mr. Durand,’ I said, and his eyes narrowed as he wondered if he was being lied to.

  ‘Then he asked me if I knew what had happened here, and I said I didn’t know what he was talking about, and he said that he thought I did. I didn’t care for his tone, and told him to be on his way.’

  ‘Do you remember what he looked like?’

  ‘Not so well. He was wearing a wool hat, pulled down over his hair, and he had a scarf around his neck and chin. It was a cold night, but not that cold. Younger than you. Late twenties, maybe older. A little taller, too. I’m nearsighted, and I didn’t have my spectacles. Keep leaving them places. I should buy a chain.’ He realized that he was drifting from the subject at hand, and returned to it. ‘Apart from that, I don’t recall much about him, except—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I was glad to see him leave, that’s all. He made me uneasy, and not just because he was on my lawn, snooping around on my property. There was a thing about him.’ Durand shook his head. ‘I can’t explain it right. I could say to you that he wasn’t from around here, and that would be as close as I could get. He wasn’t from anywhere like here, anywhere at all.’

  He looked out over the town, taking in the cars moving on the streets, the lights of the bars and stores near the train station, the dim shapes of people heading home to their families. It was normality, and the man who had stood on his lawn did not belong in it.

  Night had now come. The streetlights caught the patches of frozen snow, making them shine in the gloom. Durand shivered.

  ‘You be careful, Mr. Parker,’ he said. We shook hands. He stayed on the step until I reached the sidewalk, then he waved once and closed the door. I looked up at the window with the broken pane, but there was nobody there. That room was empty. Whatever remained there had no form; the ghost of the boy was inside me, where he had always been.

  4

  I met Angel and Louis for dinner that night at the Wildwood BBQ on Park Avenue, not far from Union Square. It was tough to make the call between Wildwood and Blue Smoke up on 27th, but novelty won out; novelty, and, for Louis, the prospect of beans that had pieces of steak added to them. When it came to rib joints, Louis liked extra meat with everything, probably including the
Jell-O. If he was going to die of a coronary, he was going to do it in style.

  These two men, both of whom had killed, yet only one of whom, Louis, could truly be called a natural killer, were now my closest friends. I hadn’t seen them since late the previous year, when they had managed to get themselves into some trouble in upstate New York and I’d followed their tracks to see if I could help. It hadn’t ended well, and we’d kept some distance from one another since then; not due to any ill will, but because Louis was concerned about the possible fallout from what had occurred, and didn’t want to see me contaminated by association. Now, though, he appeared content, figuring that the worst was over, or as content as Louis ever seemed to be. In truth, it was hard to tell. After all, it wasn’t that when Louis laughed, the world laughed with him. When Louis laughed, the world tended to look around to see who had fallen over and impaled himself on a spike.

  It was always an entertaining spectacle, seeing Angel and Louis eat ribs, because some kind of role reversal seemed to occur. Louis – tall, black, and dressed like a showroom dummy that has suddenly decided to take flight and seek better accommodations elsewhere – ate ribs in the manner of a man who fears that his plate could be whisked away at any point, and he should therefore consume as many as possible as quickly as possible. Angel, on the other hand, who was small and white (or, as he liked to put it, ‘white-ish’), and who not only looked like he’d slept in his clothes but like other people might have slept in them too, nibbled his food in an almost delicate manner, the way a small bird might if it could hold a short rib in its claws. They were drinking ale. I was sipping a glass of red wine.

  ‘Red wine,’ said Angel. ‘In a rib joint. You know, we’re gay, and even we don’t drink wine in a rib joint.’

  ‘Then I guess if I were gay, I’d just be a more sophisticated homosexual than you. In fact, regardless of my sexuality, I’m still more sophisticated than you.’

  ‘You not eating?’ asked Louis, pointing with the end of a mostly demolished rib at the small pile of bare bones on my plate.

  ‘I’m not so hungry,’ I said. ‘Anyway, after watching you two, I’m considering vegetarianism, or just never eating again. At least, not in public, and certainly not with you.’

  ‘What the hell is wrong with us?’ Angel sounded spectacularly aggrieved.

  ‘You eat like an old lady. He eats like they just thawed him out next to a mammoth.’

  ‘You want us to use a knife and fork?’

  ‘Do you know how to use a knife and fork?’

  ‘Don’t tempt me, Miss Manners. The knives are sharp here.’

  Louis finished his final rib, wiped his face with his napkin, and sat back with a sigh. If his heart could have sighed with relief, it would have echoed him.

  ‘Glad I wore my buffet pants tonight,’ he said.

  ‘Me too,’ I said. ‘You’d worn your regular pants, one of your buttons would have taken someone’s eye out by now.’

  He arched an eyebrow.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘You continue to be boyishly slim.’

  Angel signaled the server for another beer.

  ‘You want to tell us about it?’ he said.

  They knew most of it already. I had lost my Maine private investigator’s license, and my lawyer, Aimee Price, was still fighting to have it restored to me, hampered at every turn by the objections of the state police and, it appeared, a detective named Hansen in particular. From what Aimee could establish, the order to revoke my license had come from high up, and Hansen was just the messenger. A court challenge was still an option, but Aimee wasn’t sure that it would be useful. The state police were the final arbiters when it came to licensing, and any court in Maine would probably be guided by their decision.

  My firearms permit had also been revoked, although the precise nature of the revocation was still unclear to me and to my lawyer. I had initially been ordered to hand over every gun in my possession pending what was vaguely termed ‘an inquiry,’ and was told that it would be only a temporary matter.

  I had surrendered my licensed firearms (and hidden the unlicensed ones, after an anonymous tip that the cops were coming with a warrant), which had subsequently been returned to me when it became apparent that the surrender notice was of dubious legality, and possibly in breach of the Second Amendment. Less open to argument was the decision to rescind my permit to carry a concealed weapon in the state of Maine, on the grounds that my previous actions had revealed me as an ‘unsafe’ person. Aimee was working on that one too, but so far a brick wall would have been more yielding than the state police. I was being punished, but just how long that punishment would continue remained to be seen.

  Now I was working as bar manager at the Great Lost Bear in Portland, which wasn’t bad work and usually only took up four days each week, but it wasn’t what I was good at. There wasn’t a great deal of sympathy for my plight in the local law enforcement community. I couldn’t recall how I’d made so many enemies until Aimee took the trouble to explain, and then it all became a little clearer.

  Strangely, I didn’t care about what had occurred as much as Hansen and his superiors might have thought. It had dented my pride, and my lawyer was fighting in my name partly on principle and mostly because I didn’t want them to think that I would just roll over and die on their say-so, but in a sense I was satisfied that I couldn’t practice as a PI. It left me free, relieving me of the obligation to help others. If I were to take on a case, however informally, it would probably land me in jail. The state police’s actions had given me permission to be selfish, and to pursue my own aims. It had taken me some months to decide that that was what I was going to do.

  Despite what the old man, Durand, might have thought earlier that day, I hadn’t chosen lightly to delve into my past and to question the circumstances of my father’s death. A man, a foul man who used the name Kushiel but was better known as the Collector, had whispered to me that my family had secrets, that my blood group could not have been the result of my assumed parentage. For a time, I tried to hide from myself what he had said. I did not want to believe it. I think that I took the job in the bar as a form of escape. I replaced my obligations to clients with my obligations to Dave Evans, one of the owners of the Bear and the man who had offered me the job. But as time passed, and winter came again, I made a decision.

  Because the Collector had not been lying, not entirely. The blood groups did not match.

  When the new year dawned, I started asking questions. I began trying to contact those who had known my father, and especially the cops who had worked alongside him. Some were dead. Others had fallen off the radar after retirement, as sometimes happens with those who have served their time and desire only to collect their pensions and walk away from it all. But I knew the names of the two men to whom my father had been particularly close, beat cops who had graduated from the academy alongside him: Eddie Grace, who was a couple of years older than my father, and Jimmy Gallagher, my father’s old partner and closest friend. My mother had sometimes referred semifondly to my father and Jimmy as the ‘Birthday Boys,’ a reference to their twice yearly nights on the town. Those were the only times when my father would stay out all night, eventually reappearing shortly before noon the following day, when he would return quietly, almost apologetically, slightly the worse for wear but never sick or stumbling, and sleep until the evening. My mother never commented on it. It was an indulgence that she permitted him, and he was a man of few indulgences, or so it seemed to me.

  And then there was Jimmy Gallagher himself. I hadn’t seen him since shortly after the funeral, when he had come to the house to ask how my mother and I were doing, and she had told him that she intended to leave Pearl River and return to Maine. My mother had sent me to bed, but what teenager would not have listened at the top of the stairs, seeking some of the information that he was certain was being withheld from him? And I heard my mother say: ‘How much did you know, Jimmy?’

  ‘About what?’

&nbs
p; ‘About all of it: the girl, the people who came. How much did you know?’

  ‘I knew about the girl. The others . . .’

  I could almost see him shrugging.

  ‘Will said they were the same people.’

  Jimmy did not answer for a time. Then: ‘That’s not possible. You know it’s not. I killed one of them, and the other died months before. The dead don’t return, not like that.’

  ‘He whispered it to me, Jimmy.’ The tears were being held back, but only barely. ‘It was one of the last things he said to me. He said it was them.’

  ‘He was frightened, Elaine, frightened for you and the boy.’

  ‘But he killed them, Jimmy. He killed them, and they weren’t even armed.’

  ‘I don’t know why—’

  ‘I know why: he wanted to stop them. He knew that they would come back in the end. They wouldn’t need guns. They’d use their bare hands if they had to. Maybe—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Maybe they’d even have preferred it that way,’ she concluded.

  Now she began to cry. I heard Jimmy stand, and I knew that he was putting his arms around her, consoling her.

  ‘This I do know: he loved you. He loved you both, and he was sorry for all that he did to hurt you. I think he spent sixteen years trying to make it up to you, but he never could. It wasn’t your fault. He couldn’t forgive himself, that’s all. He just couldn’t do it . . .’

  My mother’s sobbing increased in intensity, and I turned away and went as quietly as I could to my room, where I watched the moon from my window and stared out at Franklin Avenue, and the paths that my father would never walk again.

  The server came to take away our plates. He seemed impressed with Angel and Louis’s demolition of their food, and commensurately disappointed in me. We ordered coffee, and watched the place begin to empty.

  ‘Is there anything we can do?’ asked Angel.

  ‘No. I think this one is mine.’

  He must have spotted something playing on my mind, its movements replicated on my face.