The Charlie Parker Collection 1

by John Connolly

  I think now that I had always set out to kill him but I had hidden the knowledge of what I intended to do in some corner of my mind. I draped it with self-serving justifications and excuses, the sort I had used for so long each time I watched a shot of whiskey poured in front of me, or heard the gassy snap of a beer cap. Frozen by my own inability and the inability of others to find the killer of Susan and Jennifer, I saw a chance to strike out and I took it. From the moment I packed my gun and gloves and set out for the bus station, Johnny Friday was a dead man.

  Friday was a tall, thin black man who looked like a preacher in his trademark dark three-buttoned suits and his collarless shirts fastened to the neck. He would hand out small Bibles and religious pamplets to the new arrivals and offer them soup from a flask and, as the barbiturates it contained began to take effect, he would lead them from the station and into the back of a waiting van. Then they would disappear, as surely as if they had never arrived, until they turned up on the streets as beaten junkies, whoring for the fix that Johnny supplied at inflated prices while they pulled in the tricks that kept him rich.

  His was a ‘hands-on’ operation and, even in a business not noted for its humanity, Johnny Friday was beyond any kind of redemption. He supplied children to paedophiles, delivering them to the doors of selected safe-houses where they were raped and sodomised before being returned to their owner. If they were rich and depraved enough, Johnny would give them access to ‘The Basement’ in an abandoned warehouse in the garment district. There, for a cash payment of $10,000, they could take one of Johnny’s stable and, boy or girl, child or teen, they could torture, rape and, if they wished, kill, and Johnny would take care of the body. He was noted, in certain circles, for his discretion.

  In my search for the killer of my wife and child, I had learned of Johnny Friday. I had not intended to kill him, or at least I did not admit that intention to myself. From a former snitch I learned that Johnny sometimes dealt in pictures and videos of sexual torture, that he was a leading source of this material and that anyone whose tastes ran in that direction would, at some point, come into contact with Johnny Friday or one of his agents.

  And so I watched him for five hours from an Au Bon Pain in the station and when he went to the washroom I followed him. It was divided into sections, the first mirrored with sinks, the second lined with urinals along the end wall and two sets of stalls opposite, divided by a central aisle. An old man in a stained uniform sat in a small, glass-lined cubicle beside the sinks but he was engrossed in a magazine when I entered behind Johnny Friday. Two men were washing their hands at the sinks, two were standing at the urinals and three of the stalls were occupied, two in the section to the left, one in the section to the right. Piped music was playing, some unrecognisable tune.

  Johnny Friday walked, hips swinging, to the urinal at the far right of the wall. I stood two urinals away from him as I waited for the other men to finish. As soon as they had finished I moved behind Johnny Friday, clasping my hand on his mouth and pressing the Smith & Wesson into the soft skin beneath his chin as I pushed him into the end stall, the furthest away from the other occupied stall on that side.

  ‘Hey, don’t, man, don’t,’ he whispered, his eyes wide.

  I brought my knee up hard into his groin and he fell down heavily on his knees as I locked the door behind us. He tried weakly to rise and I hit him hard in the face. I brought the gun close to his head again. ‘Don’t say a word. Turn your back to me.’

  ‘Please, man, don’t.’

  ‘Shut up. Turn.’

  He inched slowly round on his knees. I pulled his jacket down over his arms and then cuffed him. From my other pocket I took a rag and a roll of duct tape. I stuffed the rag in his mouth and wrapped the tape around his head two or three times. Then I pulled him to his feet and pushed him down on to the toilet. His right foot came up and caught me hard on the shin and he tried to push himself up, but he was off balance and I hit him again. This time he stayed down. I held the gun on him and listened for a moment in case anyone came to see what the noise was. There was only the sound of a toilet flushing. No one came.

  I told Johnny Friday what I wanted. His eyes narrowed as he realised who I was. Sweat poured from his forehead and he tried to blink it from his eyes. His nose was bleeding slightly and a thin trickle of red ran from beneath the duct tape and rolled down his chin. His nostrils flared as he breathed heavily through them.

  ‘I want names, Johnny. Names of customers. You’re going to give them to me.’

  He snorted in disdain and blood bubbled from a nostril. His eyes were cold now. He looked like a long, black snake with his slicked-back hair and slitted, reptilian eyes. When I broke his nose they widened in shock and pain.

  I hit him again, once, twice, hard blows to the stomach and head. Then I pulled the tape down hard and dragged the bloodied rag from his mouth.

  ‘Give me names.’

  He spat a tooth from his mouth. ‘Fuck you,’ he said. ‘Fuck you and your dead bitches.’

  What happened after is still not clear to me. I remember hitting him again and again, feeling bone crunch and ribs break and watching my gloves darken with his blood. There was a black cloud in my mind and streaks of red ran through it like strange lightning.

  When I stopped, Johnny Friday’s features seemed to have melted into a bloody blur of what they had once been. I held his jaw in my hands as blood bubbled from his lips.

  ‘Tell me,’ I hissed. His eyes rolled towards me and, like a vision of some craggy entrance to Hell, his broken teeth showed behind his lips as he managed one last smile. His body arched and spasmed once, twice. Thick black blood rolled from his nose and mouth and ears and then he died.

  I stood back, breathing heavily. I wiped my blood-spattered face as best I could and cleaned some of the blood from the front of my jacket, although it hardly showed against the black leather and my black jeans. I took the gloves from my hands, stuffed them in my pocket and then flushed the toilet before peering carefully out and pulling the door closed behind me as I left. Blood was already seeping out of the stall and pooling in the cracks between the tiles.

  I realised that the noise of Johnny Friday’s dying must have echoed around the washroom but I didn’t care. As I left I passed only an elderly black man at the urinals and he, like a good citizen who knows when to mind his own business, didn’t even glance at me. There were other men at the sinks who gave me a cursory look in the mirror. But I noticed that the old man was gone from his glass cubicle and I ducked into an empty departure gate as two cops came running towards the washroom from the upper level. I made my way to the street through the ranks of buses beneath the station.

  Perhaps Johnny Friday deserved to die. Certainly, no one mourned his passing and the police made little more than a cursory effort to find his killer. But there were rumours, for Walter, I think, had heard them.

  But I live with the death of Johnny Friday as I live with the deaths of Susan and Jennifer. If he did deserve to die, if what he got was no more than he deserved, yet it was not for me to act as his judge and executioner. ‘In the next life we get justice’, someone once wrote. ‘In this one we have the law.’ In Johnny Friday’s last minutes there was no law and only a kind of vicious justice that was not for me to give.

  I did not believe that my wife and child were the first to die at the hands of the Travelling Man, if that was who he was. I still believed that somewhere in a Louisiana swamp lay another, and in her identity was the clue that would open up the identity of this man who believed he was more than a man. She was part of a grim tradition in human history, a parade of victims stretching back to ancient times, back to the time of Christ and before that, back to a time when men sacrificed those around them to placate gods who knew no mercy and whose natures they both created and imitated in their actions.

  The girl in Louisiana was part of a bloody succession, a modern-day Windeby Girl, a descendant of that anonymous woman found in the fifties in a shallow gra
ve in a peat bog in Denmark where she had been led nearly two thousand years before, naked and blindfolded, to be drowned in twenty inches of water. A path could be traced through history leading from her death to the death of another girl at the hands of a man who believed he could appease the demons within himself by taking her life but who, once blood had been spilled and flesh torn, wanted more and took my wife and child.

  We do not believe in evil any more, only evil acts, which can be explained away by the science of the mind. There is no evil and to believe in it is to fall prey to superstition, like checking beneath the bed at night or being afraid of the dark. But there are those for whom we have no easy answers, who do evil because that is their nature, because they are evil.

  Men such as Johnny Friday and others like him prey on those who live on the periphery of society, on those who have lost their way. It is easy to stray in the darkness on the edge of modern life and, once lost and alone, there are things waiting for us there. Our ancestors were not wrong in their superstitions: there is reason to fear the dark.

  And just as a trail could be followed from a bog in Denmark to a swamp in the South, so I came to believe that evil, too, could be traced throughout the life of our race. There was a tradition of evil, which ran beneath all human existence like the sewers beneath a city, which continued on even after one of its constituent parts was destroyed because it was simply one small part of a greater, darker whole.

  Perhaps that was part of what made me want to find out the truth about Catherine Demeter; as I look back, I realise that evil had found its way to touch her life too and taint it beyond retrieval. If I could not fight evil as it came in the form of the Travelling Man, then I would find it in other forms. I believe what I say. I believe in evil because I have touched it, and it has touched me.

  Chapter Seventeen

  When I telephoned Rachel Wolfe’s private practice the following morning, the secretary told me that she was giving a seminar at a conference in Columbia University. I took the subway from the Village and arrived early at the main entrance to the campus. I wandered for a time around the Barnard Book Forum, students jostling me as I stood browsing in the literature section, before making my way to the main college entrance.

  I passed through the college’s large quadrangle, with the Butler library at one end, the administration building at the other and, like a mediator between learning and bureaucracy, the statue of Alma Mater in the grass centre. Like most city residents, I rarely came to Columbia and the sense of tranquillity and study only feet away from the busy streets outside was always surprising to me.

  Rachel Wolfe was just finishing her lecture as I arrived, so I waited for her outside the theatre until the session ended. She emerged talking to a young, earnest-looking man with curly hair and round spectacles, who hung on her every word like a devotee of a god. When she saw me she stopped and smiled a goodbye at him. He looked unhappy and seemed set to linger but then turned and walked away, his head low.

  ‘How can I help you, Mr Parker?’ she asked, with a puzzled but not uninterested look.

  ‘He’s back.’

  We walked over to the Hungarian Pastry Shop on Amsterdam Avenue, where intense young men and women sat reading textbooks and sipping coffee. Rachel Wolfe was wearing jeans and a chunky sweater with a heart-shaped design on the front.

  Despite all that had happened the previous night, I was curious about her. I had not been attracted to a woman since Susan’s death and my wife was the last woman with whom I had slept. Rachel Wolfe, her long, red hair brushed back over her ears, aroused a sense of longing in me that was more than sexual. I felt a deep loneliness within myself and an ache in my stomach. She looked at me curiously.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I was thinking of something.’

  She nodded and picked at a poppy-seed roll before pulling off a huge chunk and stuffing it in her mouth, sighing with satisfaction. I must have looked slightly shocked, because she covered her mouth with her hand and giggled softly. ‘Sorry, but I’m a sucker for these things. Daintiness and good table manners tend to go out the window when someone puts one in front of me.’

  ‘I know the feeling. I used to be like that with Ben and Jerry’s until I realised I was starting to look like one of the cartons.’

  She smiled again and pushed at a piece of roll, which was trying to make a break for freedom from the side of her mouth. The conversation sagged for a time.

  ‘I take it your parents were jazz fans,’ she said eventually.

  I was puzzled for a moment and she smiled in amusement as I tried to take in the question. I had been asked it many times before but I was grateful for the diversion, and I think she knew that.

  ‘No, my father and mother didn’t know the first thing about jazz,’ I replied. ‘My father just liked the name. The first time he heard about Bird Parker was at the baptismal font when the priest mentioned it to him. The priest was a big jazz fan, I was told. He couldn’t have been happier if my father had announced that he was naming all of his children after the members of the Count Basie Orchestra.

  ‘My father, by contrast, wasn’t too happy at the idea of naming his first-born after a black jazz musician but by then it was too late to think of another name.’

  ‘What did he call the rest of his children?’

  I shrugged. ‘He didn’t get the chance. My mother couldn’t have any more children after me.’

  ‘Maybe she thought she couldn’t do any better.’ She smiled.

  ‘I don’t think so. I was nothing but trouble for her as a child. It used to drive my father crazy.’

  I could see in her eyes that she was about to ask me about my father but something in my face stopped her. She pursed her lips, pushed away her empty plate and settled herself back in her chair.

  ‘Can you tell me what happened?’

  I went through the events of the night before, leaving nothing out. The words of the Travelling Man were burned into my mind.

  ‘Why do you call him that?’

  ‘A friend of mine led me to a woman who said that she was receiving, uh, messages from a dead girl. The girl had died in the same way as Susan and Jennifer.’

  ‘Was the girl found?’

  ‘No one looked. An old woman’s psychic messages aren’t enough to launch an investigation.’

  ‘Even if she exists, are you sure it’s the same guy?’

  ‘I believe it is, yes.’

  Wolfe looked like she wanted to ask more, but she let it go. ‘Go back over what this caller, this “Travelling Man”, said again, slowly this time.’

  I did until she lifted her hand to stop me. ‘That’s a quote from Joyce: “mouth to mouth’s kiss”. It’s the description of the “pale vampire” in Ulysses. This is an educated man we’re dealing with. The stuff about “our kind” sounds Biblical, but I’m not sure of it. I’ll have to check it. Give them to me again.’ I spoke the words slowly as she took them down in a wire-bound notebook. ‘I have a friend who teaches theology and Biblical studies. He might be able to identify a source for these.’

  She closed the notebook. ‘You know that I’m not supposed to get involved in this case?’

  I told her that I hadn’t known.

  ‘Following our earlier discussions, someone got in touch with the Commissioner. He wasn’t best pleased at the snub to his relative.’

  ‘I need help with this. I need to know all I can.’ Suddenly I felt nauseous and, when I swallowed, my throat hurt.

  ‘I’m not sure that’s wise. You should probably leave this to the police. I know that’s not what you want to hear but, after all that’s happened, you risk damaging yourself. Do you understand what I mean?’

  I nodded slowly. She was right. Part of me wanted to draw back, to immerse myself once again in the ebb and flow of ordinary life. I wanted to unburden myself of what I felt, to restore myself to some semblance of a normal existence. I wanted to rebuild but I felt frozen, suspended, by what had happened. And now the Travellin
g Man had returned, snatching any possibility of that normality from me and, simultaneously, leaving me as powerless to act as I had been before.

  I think Rachel Wolfe understood that. Maybe that was why I had come to her, in the hope that she might understand.

  ‘Are you all right?’ She reached over and touched my hand and I almost cried. I nodded again.

  ‘You’re in a terribly difficult situation. If he has decided to contact you, then he wants you to be involved and there may be a link that can be exploited. From an investigative point of view, you probably shouldn’t deviate from your routine in case he contacts you again, but from the point of view of your own well-being . . .’ She let the unstated hang in the air. ‘You might even want to consider some professional help. I’m sorry for being so blunt about it, but it has to be said.’

  ‘I know, and I appreciate the advice.’ It was strange to find myself attracted to someone after all this time and then have her advise me to see a psychiatrist. It didn’t hold out the promise of any relationship that wasn’t conducted on an hourly basis. ‘I think the investigators want me to stay.’

  ‘I get the feeling you’re not going to do it.’

  ‘I’m trying to find someone. It’s a different case, but I think this person may be in trouble. If I stay here, there’s no one to help her if she is.’

  ‘It may be a good idea to get away from this for a time but from what you’re saying, well . . .’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘It sounds like you’re trying to save this person but you’re not even sure if she needs saving.’

  ‘Maybe I need to save her.’

  ‘Maybe you do.’

  I told Walter Cole later that morning that I would continue looking for Catherine Demeter and that I would be leaving the city to do so. We were sitting in the quietness of Chumley’s, the Village’s old speakeasy at Bedford. When Walter called, I had surprised myself by nominating it for our meeting, but as I sat sipping a coffee I realised why I had chosen it.