And somewhere, in a dark place, a clock began to tick, counting off the hours, the minutes, the seconds, before it would toll the end for the Travelling Man.
All things decay. All things must end.
And as I thought of what Walter had said, of his doubts about me, I thought too of my father and of the legacy he left me. I have only fragmented memories of my father. I remember a large, red-faced man carrying a Christmas tree into the house, his breath rising into the air like the puffs of steam from an old train. I remember walking into the kitchen one evening to find him caressing my mother and her laughter at their shared embarrassment. I remember him reading to me at night, his huge fingers following the words as he spoke them to me so that they might be familiar to me when I returned to them again. And I remember his death.
His uniform was always freshly pressed and he kept his gun oiled and cleaned. He loved being a policeman, or so it seemed. I did not know then what it was that drove him to do what he did. Maybe Walter Cole gained some knowledge of it when he looked upon the bodies of those dead children. Maybe I too have knowledge of it. Maybe I have become like my father.
What is clear is that something inside him died and the world appeared to him in different, darker colours. He had looked upon death’s heads for too long and became a reflection of what he saw.
The call had been a routine one: two kids fooling around in a car late at night on a patch of waste ground, flashing the lights and sounding the horn. My father had responded and found one of the local boys, a petty criminal well on the road to graduating into felonies, and his girlfriend, a middle-class girl who was flirting with danger and enjoying the sexual charge it brought.
My father couldn’t recall what the boy said to him as he tried to impress his girl. Words were exchanged and I can imagine my father’s voice deepening and hardening in warning. The boy made mocking movements towards the inside pocket of his jacket, enjoying the effect on my father’s nerves and bathing in the ripples of laughter from the young woman beside him.
Then my father drew his gun and the laughter stopped. I can see the boy raising his hands, shaking his head, explaining that there was no weapon there, that it was all just fun, that he was sorry. My father shot him in the face, blood streaking the interior of the car, the windows, the face of the girl in the passenger seat, his mouth wide in shock. I don’t think she even screamed before my father shot her too. Then he walked away.
Internal Affairs came for him as he stripped in the locker room. They took him before his brother officers, to make an example of him. No one got in their way. By then, they all knew, or thought they knew.
He admitted everything instantly but could not explain it. He simply shrugged his shoulders when they asked. They took his gun and his badge – his back-up, the one I now keep, remained back in his bedroom – and then they drove him home, under the NYPD rule that prevented a policeman being questioned about a crime until forty-eight hours had elapsed. He looked dazed when he returned and wouldn’t speak to my mother. The two Internal Affairs men sat outside in their car, smoking cigarettes, while I watched from my bedroom window. I think they knew what would happen next. When the gunshot sounded, they didn’t leave their car until the echoes of the shot had faded into the cool night air.
I am my father’s son, with all that entails.
The door of the interview room opened and Rachel Wolfe entered. She was dressed casually in blue jeans, hi-top sneakers and a black hooded cotton top by Calvin Klein. Her hair was loose, hanging over her ears and resting on her shoulders, and there was a sprinkling of freckles across her nose and at the base of her neck.
She took a seat across from me and gave me a look of concern and sympathy. ‘I heard about the death of Catherine Demeter. I’m sorry.’
I nodded and thought of Catherine Demeter and how she looked in the basement of the Dane house. They weren’t good thoughts.
‘How do you feel?’ she asked. There was curiosity in her voice, but tenderness too.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Do you regret killing Adelaide Modine?’
‘She called it. There was nothing else I could do.’ I felt numb about her death, about the killing of the lawyer, about the sight of Bobby Sciorra rising up on his toes as the blade entered the base of his skull. It was the numbness that scared me, the stillness inside me. I think that it might have scared me more, but for the fact that I felt something else too: a deep pain for the innocents who had been lost, and for those who had yet to be found.
‘I didn’t know you did house calls,’ I said. ‘Why did they call you in?’
‘They didn’t,’ she said simply.
She touched my hand, a strange, faltering gesture in which I felt – I hoped? – that there was something more than professional understanding. I gripped her hand tightly in mine and closed my eyes. I think it was a kind of first step, a faltering attempt to re-establish my place in the world. After all that had taken place over the previous two days, I wanted to touch, however briefly, something positive, to try to awaken something good within myself.
‘I couldn’t save Catherine Demeter,’ I said at last. ‘I tried and maybe something came out of that attempt. I’m still going to find the man who killed Susan and Jennifer.’
She nodded slowly and held my gaze. ‘I know you will.’
Rachel had been gone only a short time when the cellphone rang.
‘Yes?’
‘Mista Parker?’ It was a woman’s voice.
‘This is Charlie Parker.’
‘My name is Florence Aguillard, Mista Parker. My mother is Tante Marie Aguillard. You came to visit us.’
‘I remember. What can I do for you, Florence?’ I felt the tightening in my stomach but this time it was born of anticipation, born of the feeling that Tante Marie might have found something to identify the figure of the girl who was haunting us both.
In the background I could hear the music of a jazz piano and the laughter of men and women, thick and sensual as treacle.
‘I been tryin’ to get you all afternoon. My momma say to call you. She say you gotta come to her now.’ I could hear something in her voice, something that conspired to trip her words as they tumbled from her mouth. It was fear and it hung like a distorting fog around what she had to say.
‘Mista Parker, she say you gotta come now and you gotta tell no one you comin’. No one, Mista Parker.’
‘I don’t understand, Florence. What’s happening?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. She was crying now, her voice wracked by sobs. ‘But she say you gotta come, you gotta come now.’ She regained control of herself and I could hear her draw a deep breath before she spoke again.
‘Mista Parker, she say the Travellin’ Man comin’.’
There are no coincidences, only patterns we do not see. The call was part of a pattern, linked to the death of Adelaide Modine, which I did not yet understand. I said nothing about the call to anyone. I left the interrogation room, collected my gun from the desk, then headed for the street and took a cab back to my apartment. I booked a first-class ticket to Moisant Field, the only ticket left on any flight leaving for Louisiana that evening, and checked in shortly before departure, declaring my gun at the desk, my bag swallowed up in the general confusion. The plane was full, half of the passengers tourists who didn’t know better heading for the stifling August heat of New Orleans. The stewards served a ham roll with chips and a packet of dried raisins, all contained in the sort of carrier bag you got on school trips to the zoo.
There was darkness below us when the pressure began building in my nose. I was already reaching for a drinks napkin when the first drops came but then the pressure became pain, a ferocious, shooting pain that caused me to jerk back in my seat.
The passenger beside me, a businessman who had earlier been cautioned about using his laptop computer while the plane was still on the runway, stared at me in surprise and then shock as he saw the blood. I watched his finger pressing repeat
edly to summon the steward and then my head was thrown back, as if by the force of a blow. Blood spurted violently from my nose, drenching the back of the seat in front of me, and my hands shook uncontrollably.
Then, just as it seemed that my head was going to explode from the pain and the pressure, I heard a voice, the voice of an old, black woman in the Louisiana swamps.
‘Chile,’ said the voice. ‘Chile, he’s here.’
And then she was gone and my world turned black.
Part Three
The concavities of my body are like another hell for their capacity.
Sir Thomas Urquhart, ‘Rabelais’ “Gargantua”’
Chapter Thirty-One
There was a loud thud as the insect hit the windscreen. It was a large dragonfly, a ‘mosquito hawk’.
‘Shit, that thing must have been as big as a bird,’ said the driver, a young FBI agent named O’Neill Brouchard. Outside, it was probably in the nineties, but the Louisiana humidity made it seem much hotter. My shirt felt cold and uncomfortable where the air-conditioning had dried it against my body.
A smear of blood and wings lay across the glass and the wipers struggled to remove it. The blood matched the drops that still stained my shirt, an unnecessary reminder of what had happened on the plane since my head still ached and the bridge of my nose felt tender to the touch.
Beside Brouchard, Woolrich remained silent, intent upon loading a fresh clip into his SIG Sauer. The Assistant SAC was dressed in his usual garb of cheap tan suit and wrinkled tie. Beside me, a dark Windbreaker marked with the agency’s letters lay crumpled on the seat.
I had called Woolrich from the satellite phone on the plane but couldn’t get a connection. At Moisant Field, I left a number with his message service telling him to contact me immediately, then hired a car and set out towards Lafayette on I-10. Just outside Baton Rouge, the cellphone rang.
‘Bird?’ said Woolrich’s voice. ‘What the hell are you doing down here?’ There was concern in his voice. In the background, I could hear the sound of a car engine.
‘You get my message?’
‘I got it. Listen, we’re already on our way. Someone spotted Florence out by her house, with blood on her dress and a gun in her hand. We’re going to meet up with the local cops at Exit 121. Wait for us there.’
‘Woolrich, it may be too late—’
‘Just wait. No hotdogging on this one, Bird. I got a stake in this, too. I got Florence to think about.’
In front of us I could see the tail-lights of two other vehicles, patrol cars out of the St Martin Sheriff’s Office. Behind us, its headlights illuminating the inside of the FBI Chevy and the blood on the windscreen, was an old Buick driven by two St Martin detectives. I knew one of them, John Charles Morphy, vaguely, having met him once before with Woolrich in Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop on Bourbon, as he swayed quietly to the sound of Miss Lily Hood’s voice.
Morphy was a descendant of Paul Charles Morphy, the world chess champion from New Orleans who retired in 1859 at the grand old age of twenty-two. It was said that he could play three or four games simultaneously while blindfolded. By contrast, John Charles, with his hard body-builder’s frame, never struck me as a man much given to chess. Dead-lift competitions, maybe, but not chess. He was a man with a past, according to Woolrich, a former New Orleans cop who had left the NOPD for the St Martin’s Sheriff’s Office in the shadow of an investigation by the Public Integrity Division over the killing of a young black man named Luther Bordelon in a goods yard off Chartres two years earlier.
I looked over my shoulder and saw Morphy staring back at me, his shaven head glowing in the Buick’s interior light, his hands tight on the wheel as he negotiated the rutted track through the bayou. Beside him, his partner Touissant held the Winchester Model 12 pump upright between his legs. The stock was pitted and scratched, the barrel worn, and I guessed that it wasn’t regulation issue but Touissant’s own. It had smelt of oil when I spoke to Morphy through the window of the car back where the Bayou Courtableau intersected with I-10.
The lights of the car caught the branches of palmetto, tupelo and overhanging willows, huge cypress heavy with Spanish moss, and, occasionally, the stumps of ancient trees in the swamps beyond. We turned into a road that was dark as a tunnel, the branches of the cypress trees above us like a roof against the starlight, and then we were rattling over the bridge that led to the house of Tante Marie Aguillard.
Before us, the two sheriff’s office cars turned in opposing directions and parked diagonally, the lights of one shining out into the dark undergrowth, which led down to the swamp banks. The lights of the second hit the house, casting shadows over the tree trunks that raised it from the ground, the building’s overlapping boards, the steps leading up to the screen door, which now stood open on the porch, allowing the night creatures easy access to the interior of the house.
Woolrich turned around as we pulled up. ‘You ready for this?’
I nodded. I had my Smith & Wesson in my hand as we stepped from the car into the warm air. I could smell rotting vegetation and a faint trace of smoke. Something rustled through the undergrowth to my right and then splashed lightly into the water. Morphy and his partner came up beside us. I could hear the sound of a cartridge being jacked into the pump.
Two of the deputies stood uncertainly beside their car. The second pair advanced slowly across the neat garden, their guns drawn.
‘What’s the deal?’ said Morphy. He was six feet tall with the V-shape of a lifter, his head hairless and a circle of moustache and beard around his mouth.
‘No one enters before us,’ said Woolrich. ‘Send those two jokers around the back but tell them to stay out of the house. The other two stay at the front. You two back us up. Broussard, stay by the car and watch the bridge.’
We moved across the grass, stepping carefully around the discarded children’s toys on the lawn. There were no lights on in the house, no sign of any occupants. I could hear the blood pumping in my head and the palms of my hands were slick with sweat. We were ten feet from the porch steps when I heard a pistol cock and the voice of the deputy to our right.
‘Ah, sweet Jesus,’ he said, ‘sweet Jesus Lord, this can’t be . . .’
A dead tree, little more than an extended trunk, stood about ten yards from the water’s edge. Branches, some no more than twigs, others as thick as a man’s arm, commenced some three feet up the trunk and continued to a height of eight or nine feet.
Against the tree trunk stood Tee Jean Aguillard, the old woman’s youngest son, his naked body glistening in the torchlight. His left arm was hooked around a thick branch so that his forearm and empty hand hung vertically. His head rested in the crook of another branch, his ruined eyes like dark chasms against the exposed flesh and tendons of his flayed face.
Tee Jean’s right arm was also wrapped around a branch but this time his hand was not empty. In his fingers he grasped a flap of his own skin, a flap that hung like an opened veil and revealed the interior of his body from his exposed ribs to the area above his penis. His stomach and most of the organs in his abdomen had been removed. They lay on a stone by his left foot, a pile of white, blue and red body parts in which coils of intestine curled like snakes.
Beside me, I heard one of the deputies begin to retch. I turned to see Woolrich grabbing him by the collar and hauling him to the water’s edge some distance away. ‘Not here,’ he said. ‘Not here.’ He left the deputy on his knees by the water and turned towards the house.
‘We’ve got to find Florence,’ he said. His face looked sickly and pale. ‘We gotta find her.’
Florence Aguillard had been seen standing at the bridge to her house by the owner of a local bait shop. She had been covered in blood and held a Colt Service revolver in her hand. When the bait-shop owner stopped, Florence raised the gun and fired a single shot through the driver’s window, missing the bait-shop owner by a fraction of an inch. He had called the St Martin cops from a gas station and they, in turn, had c
alled Woolrich, acting on his notice to the local police that any incident involving Tante Marie should be notified immediately to him.
Woolrich took the steps up the porch at a run and was almost at the door when I reached him. I put my hand on his shoulder and he spun towards me, his eyes wide.
‘Easy,’ I said. The wild look disappeared from his eyes and he nodded slowly. I turned back to Morphy and motioned him to follow us into the house. Morphy took the Winchester pump from Touissant and indicated that he should hang back with the deputy, now that his partner was indisposed.
A long central hallway led, shotgun style, to a large kitchen at the rear of the house. Six rooms radiated off the central artery, three on either side. I knew that Tante Marie’s was the last door on the right and I was tempted to make straight for it. Instead we progressed carefully, taking a room at a time, the flashlights cutting a swathe through the darkness, dust motes and moths bobbing in the beams.
The first room on the right, a bedroom, was empty. There were two beds, one made and the second, a child’s bed, unmade, the blanket lying half on the floor. The living room opposite was also empty. Morphy and Woolrich each took a room as we progressed to the second set of doors. Both were bedrooms. Both were empty.
‘Where are all the children, the adults?’ I said to Woolrich.
‘Eighteenth birthday party at a house two miles away,’ he replied. ‘Only Tee Jean and the old lady supposed to be here. And Florence.’
The door opposite Tante Marie’s room stood wide open and I could see a jumble of furniture, boxes of clothes and piles of toys. A window was open and the curtains stirred slightly in the night air. We turned to face the door of Tante Marie’s bedroom. It was slightly ajar and I could see moonlight within, disturbed and distorted by the shadows of the trees. Behind me, Morphy had the shotgun raised and Woolrich had the SIG Sauer held double-handed close to his cheek. I put my finger on the trigger of the Smith & Wesson, flicked open the door with the side of my foot and dived low into the room.
The Charlie Parker Collection 1 Page 24