The Charlie Parker Collection 2

by John Connolly

  Rachel walked me to the car.

  ‘I’m just curious,’ she said. ‘How come you’re away so much if your job is at the Bear?’

  ‘I’m looking into something,’ I replied.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘New York.’

  ‘You’re not supposed to be working. It could prevent you from getting your license back.’

  ‘It’s not business,’ I said. ‘It’s personal.’

  ‘It’s always personal with you.’

  ‘Hardly worth doing if it isn’t.’

  ‘Well, just be careful, that’s all.’

  ‘I will.’ I opened the car door. ‘I have to tell you something. I was in town earlier. I saw you.’

  Her face froze.

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘His name is Martin,’ she said, after a moment.

  ‘How long have you been seeing him?’

  ‘Not long. A month, maybe.’ She paused. ‘I don’t know how serious it is yet. I was going to tell you. I just hadn’t figured out how.’

  I nodded. ‘I’ll call next time,’ I said, then got into the car and drove away.

  I learned something that day: there may be worse things than arriving somewhere with your dog and leaving without him, but there aren’t many.

  It was a long, quiet ride home.

  II

  A false friend is more dangerous than an open enemy.

  Francis Bacon (1561–1626),

  ‘A Letter of Advice . . . to the Duke of Buckingham’

  9

  Nearly a week went by before I could make another trip to New York. Not that it mattered so much: the Bear was short-staffed again, and I ended up working extra days to take some of the load, so there was no way that I could have gone down there even if I had wanted to.

  I had been trying to contact Jimmy Gallagher for almost a month, leaving messages on the machine at his home, but there had been no reply until that week. I received a letter, not a phone call, informing me that he’d taken a long vacation to free himself from the New York winter, but now he was back in town and would be happy to meet with me. The letter was handwritten. That was very much Jimmy’s style: he wrote letters in perfect copperplate, shunned computers, and thought that telephones were for his convenience, not for other people’s. It was a miracle that he even had an answering machine, but Jimmy still liked to socialize, and the machine made sure that he didn’t miss anything important while enabling him to ignore anything that didn’t appeal. As for cell phones, I was pretty sure that he regarded them as the devil’s work, on a par with poisoned arrowheads and people who used salt on their food without tasting it first. His letter said that he would be free to meet me on Sunday at midday. Again, that precision was typical of Jimmy Gallagher. My father used to say that Jimmy’s police reports were works of art. They would show them to classes at the academy as perfect examples of paperwork, which was like showing the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to a bunch of trainee painters and explaining that this was what they should be aiming for when they were working on the walls of apartment blocks.

  I booked the cheapest flight that I could find, and got into JFK shortly before 9 a.m., then took a cab to Bensonhurst. Ever since I was a boy, I had struggled to associate Jimmy Gallagher with Bensonhurst. Of all the places that an Irish cop, and a closeted homosexual to boot, might have called home, Bensonhurst seemed about as likely a choice as Salt Lake City, or Kingston, Jamaica. True, there were now Koreans, and Poles, and Arabs, and Russians in the neighborhood, and even African Americans, but it was the Italians who had always owned Bensonhurst, figuratively if not literally. When Jimmy was growing up, each nationality had its own section, and if you wandered into the wrong ones you were likely to get a beating, but the Italians gave out more beatings than most. Now, even their age was passing. Bay Ridge Parkway was still pretty solidly Italian, and there was one mass said each day in Italian at St. Domenic’s at 20th Street, but the Russians, Chinese, and Arabs were slowly encroaching, taking over the side streets like ants advancing on a millipede. The Jews and Irish, meanwhile, had been decimated, and the blacks, whose roots in the area dated back to the Underground Railroad, had been reduced to a four-block enclave off Bath Avenue.

  I was still two hours early for my meeting with Jimmy. I knew that he went to church every Sunday, but even if he were home he would resent it if I arrived early. That was another thing about Jimmy. He believed in punctuality, and he didn’t care for people who erred on the side of early or late, so while I waited I took a walk along 18th Avenue to get breakfast at Stella’s Diner on 63rd, where my father and I had eaten with Jimmy on a couple of occasions because, even though it was nearly twenty blocks from where he lived, Jimmy was close to the owners, and they always made sure that he was taken care of.

  While 18th still bore the title of Cristoforo Colombo Boulevard, the Chinese had made their mark, and their restaurants, hair salons, lighting stores, and even aquarium suppliers now stood alongside Italian law firms, Gino’s Foccaceria, Queen Ann’s Gourmet Pasta, and the Arcobaleno Italiano music and DVD store, where old men sat on benches with their backs to the avenue, as though signaling their dissatisfaction with the changes that had occurred there. The old Cotillion Terrace was boarded up, twin pink cocktails on either side of the main marquee still bubbling sadly.

  When I got to Stella’s, it too was no more. The name remained, and I could see some of the stools were still in place in front of the counter, but otherwise the diner had been stripped bare. We had always sat at Stella’s counter when we ate there, Jimmy to the left, my father in the middle, and I at the end. For me, it was as close as I could get to sitting at a bar, and I would watch as the waitresses poured coffee and the plates moved back and forth between the kitchen and the diners, listening to snatches of conversation from all around while my father and Jimmy talked quietly of adult things. I tapped once upon the glass in farewell, then took my New York Times down to the corner of 64th and ate a slice at J & V’s pizzeria, which had been in existence for longer than I had. When my watch showed 11:45 a.m., I made my way to Jimmy’s house.

  Jimmy lived on 71st, between 16th and 17th, a block that consisted mostly of narrow row homes, in a small, one-family semi-detached stucco house with a wrought-iron fence surrounding the yard and a fig tree in the backyard, not far from the area still known as New Utrecht. This had been one of the six original towns of Brooklyn, but then it was annexed to the city in the 1890s and lost its identity. It had been mostly farmland until 1885, when the coming of the Brooklyn, Bath and West End Railroad opened it up to developers, one of whom, James Lynch, built a suburb, Bensonhurst-by-the-Sea, for a thousand families. With the railroad arrived Jimmy Gallagher’s grandfather, who had been a supervising engineer on the project, and his family. Eventually, after some shuffling around, the Gallaghers returned to Bensonhurst and settled in the house that Jimmy still occupied, not too far from the landmark New Utrecht Reformed Church at 18th and 83rd.

  In time, the subway came, and with it the middle classes, including Jews and Italians who were abandoning the Lower East Side for the comparatively wide open spaces of Brooklyn. Fred Trump, the Donald’s father, made his name by building the Shore Haven Apartments near the Belt Parkway, at five thousand units the largest private housing development in Brooklyn. Finally, the Southern Italian immigrants arrived in force in the 1950s, and Bensonhurst became eighty percent Italian by blood, and one hundred percent Italian by reputation.

  I had visited Jimmy’s house on only a couple occasions with my father, one of which was to pay our respects after Jimmy’s father died. All I could recall of that occasion was a wall of cops, some in uniform, some not, with red-eyed women passing around drinks and whispering memories of the departed. Shortly after, his mother had moved out to a place on Gerritsen Beach to be closer to her sister. Since then, Jimmy had always lived alone in Bensonhurst.

  The exterior of the house was much as I remembered it, the yard tidy, the paintwork recently refreshe
d. I was reaching for the bell when the door opened, saving me the trouble of ringing, and there was Jimmy Gallagher, older and grayer but still recognizably the same big man who had crushed my hand in his grip so that I might earn the dollar that was on offer. His face was more florid now and, although he had clearly had some sun while he was away, a roseate tinge to his nose suggested that he was hitting the booze more often than was wise.

  Otherwise, he was in good shape. He wore a freshly pressed white shirt, open at the collar, and gray trousers with a razor pleat. His black shoes were buffed and polished. He looked like a chauffeur who was enjoying his final moments of leisure before adding the finishing touches to his uniform.

  ‘Charlie,’ he said. ‘It’s been a long time.’ We shook hands and he grinned warmly, patting me on the shoulder with a meaty left paw. He was still four or five inches taller than me, and I instantly felt as if I was twelve years old again.

  ‘Do I get a dollar now?’ I asked as he released his grip.

  ‘You’d only spend it on booze,’ he said, inviting me inside. The hallway boasted a huge coat rack, and a grandmother clock that still appeared to be keeping perfect time. Its loud ticking probably echoed through the house. I wondered how Jimmy could sleep with the sound of it in his head, but I supposed that he had been listening to it for so long he hardly noticed it anymore. A flight of carved mahogany stairs led up to the second floor, and to the right was the living room, furnished entirely with antiques. There were photographs on the mantel and on the walls, some of them featuring men in uniform. Among them I saw my father, but I did not ask Jimmy if I might look more closely at them. The wallpaper in the hallway was a red and white print that seemed new, but had a turn-of-the-century look that fit in with the rest of the decor.

  There were two cups on the kitchen table, along with a plate of pastries, and a coffeepot was brewing on the stove. Jimmy poured the coffee, and we took seats at opposite ends of the small kitchen table.

  ‘Have a pastry,’ said Jimmy. ‘They’re from Villabate. Best in town.’

  I broke one apart and tasted it. It was good.

  ‘You know, your old man and I used to laugh about that booze you bought with the money I gave you. He’d never have told you, because your mother thought it was the end of the world when she found that bottle, but he saw that you were growing up, and he got a kick out of it. Mind you, he used to say that I’d put the idea in your head to begin with, but he could never be angry at anyone for long, and especially not you. You were his golden boy. He was a good man, God rest him. God rest them both.’

  He nibbled thoughtfully at his pastry, and we were quiet for a time. Then Jimmy glanced at his watch. It wasn’t a casual gesture. He wanted me to see him do it, and a warning noise went off in my brain. Jimmy was uneasy. It wasn’t simply that the son of his old friend, a man who had killed two others and then himself, was here in his kitchen clearly seeking to rake over the ashes of long-dead fires. There was more to it than that. Jimmy didn’t want me here at all. He wanted me gone, and the sooner the better.

  ‘I got a thing,’ he said, as he saw me take in the movement. ‘Some old friends getting together. You know how it is.’

  ‘Any names I might recognize?’

  ‘No, none. They’re all after your father’s time.’ He leaned back in his seat. ‘So, this isn’t a casual call, is it, Charlie?’

  ‘I have some questions,’ I said. ‘About my father, and about what happened on the night those kids died.’

  ‘Well, I can’t help you much with the killings. I wasn’t there. I didn’t even see your father that day.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No, it was my birthday. I wasn’t working. I made a good collar for some grass and got my reward. Your old man was supposed to join me after his tour finished, the way he always did, but he never made it.’ He twisted his cup in his hands, watching the patterns that resulted on the surface of the liquid. ‘I never celebrated my birthday the same way after that. Too many associations, all of them bad.’

  I wasn’t letting him off the hook that easily. ‘But your nephew was the one who came to the house that night.’

  ‘Yeah, Francis. Your father called me at Cal’s, told me that he was worried. He thought somebody might be trying to hurt you and your mother. He didn’t say why he believed that.’

  Cal’s was the bar that used to stand next door to the Ninth’s precinct house. It was gone now, like so much else from my father’s time.

  ‘And you didn’t ask?’

  Jimmy puffed out his cheeks. ‘I might have asked. Yeah, I’m sure I did. It was out of character for Will. He didn’t go jumping at shadows, and he didn’t have any enemies. I mean, there were guys he might have crossed, and he put some bad ones away, but we all did. That was business, not personal. They knew the difference back then. Most of them, anyway.’

  ‘Do you remember what he said?’

  ‘I think he told me just to trust him. He knew that Francis lived in Orangetown. He asked if maybe I could get him to look out for you and your mother, just until he had a chance to get back to the house. Everything happened pretty fast after that.’

  ‘Where did my father call you from?’

  ‘Jeez.’ He appeared to be trying to remember. ‘I don’t know. Not the precinct, that’s for sure. There was noise in the background, so I guess he was using the phone at a bar. It was a long time ago. I don’t recall everything about it.’

  I drank some coffee, and spoke carefully. ‘But it wasn’t a typical night, Jimmy. People got killed, and then my father took his own life. Things like that, they’re hard to forget.’

  I saw Jimmy tense, and I felt his hostility rise to the surface. He had been good with his fists, I knew; good, and quick to use them. He and my father balanced each other well. My father kept Jimmy in check, and he in turn honed an edge in my father that might otherwise have remained blunted.

  ‘What is this, Charlie? You calling me a liar?’

  What is it, Jimmy? What are you hiding?

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I just don’t want you to keep anything from me because, say, you’re trying to spare my feelings.’

  He relaxed a little. ‘Well, it was hard. I don’t like thinking about that time. He was my friend, the best of them.’

  ‘I know that, Jimmy.’

  He nodded. ‘Your father asked for help, and I made a call in return. Francis stayed with you and your mother. I was in the city, but I thought, you know, I can’t stay here when something bad might be happening. By the time I got to Pearl River, those two kids were dead and your father was already being questioned. They wouldn’t let me talk to him. I tried, but Internal Affairs, they were tight around him. I went to the house and talked to your mother. You were asleep, I think. After that, I only saw him alive one other time. I picked him up after they’d finished the interview. We went for breakfast, but he didn’t talk much. He just wanted to collect himself before he went home.’

  ‘And he didn’t tell you why he’d just killed two people? Come on, Jimmy. You were close. If he was going to talk to anyone, it would have been you.’

  ‘He told me what he told IAD, and whoever else was in that room with him. The kid kept pretending to reach inside his jacket, taunting Will, as if he had a gun there. He’d go so far, then pull back. Will said that, the final time, he went for it. His hand disappeared, and Will fired. The girl screamed and started pulling at the body. Will warned her before he shot her too. He said something snapped inside him when that kid started yanking his chain. Maybe it did. Those were different times, violent times. It never paid to take chances. We’d all known guys who’d taken one on the streets.

  ‘The next time I saw Will, he was under a sheet, and there was a hole in the back of his head that they were going to have to pack before the funeral. Is that what you wanted to know, Charlie? Do you want to hear how I cried over him, about how I felt because I wasn’t there for him, about how I’ve felt all these years? Is that what you’re looking for: someo
ne to blame for what happened that night?’

  His voice was raised. I could see the anger in him, but I couldn’t understand its source. It seemed manufactured. No, that wasn’t true. His sadness and rage were genuine, but they were being used as a smokescreen, a means of hiding something from both me, and himself.

  ‘No, that’s not what I’m looking for, Jimmy.’

  There was a weariness, and a kind of desperation, to what he said next.

  ‘Then what do you want?’

  ‘I want to know why.’

  ‘There is no “why.” Can’t you get that into your head? People have been asking “why?” for twenty-five years. I’ve been asking why, and there’s no answer. Whatever the reason was, it died when your father died.’

  ‘I don’t believe that.’

  ‘You’ve got to let it go, Charlie. No good can come of this. Let them rest in peace, both of them, your father and your mother. This is all over.’

  ‘You see, that’s the problem. I can’t let them rest.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because one, or both, of them was not related by blood to me.’

  It was as if someone had taken a pin and punctured Jimmy Gallagher from behind. His back arched, and some of his bulk seemed to dissipate. He slumped back in the chair.

  ‘What?’ he whispered. ‘What kind of talk is that?’

  ‘It’s the blood types: they don’t match. I’m type B. My father was type A, my mother type O. There’s no way that parents with those two blood types could produce a child with type B blood.’

  ‘But who told you this?’