The Charlie Parker Collection 1

by John Connolly

  When I got back to Scarborough, the right side of my face had swollen badly and there were small burn marks where the prod had touched my skin. There were also two or three gashes on my head, one of them deep. I reckoned that Harelip had kicked me a couple of times for good measure. I put ice on my head and spray on the burns, then swallowed some painkillers, pulled on a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt to guard against the cold, and tried to sleep.

  I don’t recall why I awoke, but when I opened my eyes the room seemed to hang between darkness and brightness, as if the universe had paused to draw a breath when the morning sun first sent shafts of light through the dark winter clouds.

  And from somewhere in the house came a sound like the scuffling of feet, as if small delicate steps were padding over the floorboards. I drew my gun and rose. The floor was cold and the windows rattled gently. I opened the door slowly and stepped into the hallway.

  To my right, a figure moved. I caught the motion out of the corner of my eye, so that I was not sure that I even saw a figure as such or merely a shifting of shadows in the kitchen. I turned and walked slowly to the back of the house, the boards creaking slightly beneath my feet.

  Then I heard it: a soft burst of childlike laughter, a giggle of amusement, and the padding of feet again, moving to my left. I reached the entrance to the kitchen, the gun half raised, and turned in time to see another flash of movement by the door frame connecting the kitchen to the living room, to hear another cry of childish delight at the game we were playing. And I felt certain that what I had seen was a child’s foot, its sole protected by the enclosures of purple rompers. And I knew too that I had seen that tiny foot before and the remembrance of it made my throat go dry.

  I entered the dining room. Something small waited for me beyond the far door. I could see its form in the shadows and the light in its eyes, but no more than that. As I moved in its direction, the form shifted and I heard the front door creak open on its hinges and impact against the wall, the wind now rushing through the house, pulling at the drapes, setting frames rattling and raising spirals of dust in the hallway.

  I walked faster now. As I reached the door, I caught another glimpse of the little figure, something dressed in purple that flitted between the trees, moving farther and farther into the darkness beyond. I stepped from the porch and into the yard, felt the grass beneath my feet, the small stones digging into the soles, and tensed as something tiny and multilegged scuttled across my toes. I stood at the verge of the woods, and I was afraid.

  She was waiting for me there. She stood unmoving, masked by bushes and trees that hid her body from me, her face now obscured by the shadows of branches, now clear again. Her eyes were full of blood and the thick black thread wove back and forth across her face like the crudely constructed mouth of an old cloth doll. She stood there unspeaking, watching me from the woods, and behind her the smaller figure danced and skipped in the undergrowth.

  I closed my eyes and concentrated, trying to wake myself, but the cold in my feet was real, and the throbbing pain in my head, and the sound of the child’s laughter carrying on the wind.

  I felt movement behind me and something touched me on the shoulder. I almost turned, but the pressure on my shoulder increased and I knew that I must not turn, that I was not meant to see what stood at my back. I looked to my left, to the point of pressure, and I could not restrain the shudder that ran through my body. I closed my eyes instantly but what I had seen was imprinted on my mind like an image seen against bright sunlight.

  The hand was soft and white and delicate, with long, tapering fingers. A wedding band gleamed in the strange, predawn light.

  bird

  How many times had I heard that voice whisper to me in the darkness, a prelude to the soft caress of a warm hand, the feel of her breath against my cheek, my lips, her small breasts hard against my body, her legs like ivy curling around me? I had heard it in times of love and passion when we were happy together, in moments of anger and rage and sadness as our marriage fell apart. And I had heard it since in the rustling of leaves on the grass and the sound of branches rubbing against one another in the autumn breezes, a voice that carried from far away and called to me from the shadows.

  Susan, my Susan.

  bird

  The voice was close now, almost beside my ear, but I could feel no breath on my skin.

  help her

  In the woods beyond, the woman watched me, her red eyes wide and unblinking.

  How?

  find him

  Find who? Billy?

  The fingers tightened their grip.

  yes

  He’s not my responsibility.

  they are all your responsibility

  And in the patches of moonlight beneath the trees, shapes twisted and turned, suspended above the earth, their feet not touching the ground, and their ruined stomachs shone dark and wet. All of them, my responsibility.

  Then the pressure on my shoulder eased and I sensed her moving away. Ahead of me came a sound from the undergrowth and the woman who had been Rita Ferris receded into the trees. I caught a final glimpse of purple moving swiftly beyond the line of trees, laughter like music carrying back to me.

  And I saw something else.

  I saw a small girl with long blonde hair who looked back at me with something like love before she followed her playmate into the darkness.

  Chapter Nine

  I woke to a bright room, winter sunlight spearing through a gap in the drapes. My head ached and my jaw felt stiff and sore where I had gritted my teeth as the shocks hit my body. It was only when I sat up and the pain in my head increased that I remembered my dream from the night before, if a dream were what it was.

  My bed was full of leaves and twigs, and there was mud on my feet.

  I had some homeopathic remedies which Louis had recommended to me, so I took them with a glass of water while I waited for the shower to heat up. I downed a combination of phosphorus, to combat nausea, and gelsemium, which Louis claimed countered feelings of shakiness. I also took some hypericum, which was supposed to act as a natural painkiller. Frankly, I felt like a flake taking the stuff but there was no one around to see me do it, so that made it all right.

  I started a pot of coffee, filled a mug and watched it grow cold on the kitchen table. I felt pretty low and was considering taking up a different – profession gardening, maybe, or lobster fishing. After the coffee had developed a nice film, I called Ellis Howard. I figured that, since he had turned up at Lester Biggs’s place, Ellis was taking a hands-on approach to the case. It took a while for him to come to the phone. He was probably still sore over the Biggs affair.

  ‘You’re awake early,’ were his first words when he got to the phone. I could hear him sigh as he eased his bulk into a chair. I could even hear the chair squeaking in protest. If Ellis had sat on me, I’d have squeaked too.

  ‘I could say the same about you,’ I said. ‘I trust you’ve had your coffee and doughnuts?’

  ‘Mine, and someone else’s. You aware that Tony Celli turned up in town yesterday?’

  ‘Yeah. Bad news travels fast.’ Particularly when it’s being passed into your jaw in the form of an electric current.

  ‘He blew out again this morning. Looks like he’s gone to ground.’

  ‘It’s a shame. I thought he was going to move here and open a florist’s.’

  At the other end of the phone there was the sound of the receiver being covered, a muffled exchange and then the rustling of papers. Then: ‘So what do you want, Bird?’

  ‘I wanted to know if there was any movement on Rita Ferris, or Billy Purdue, or on that Coupe de Ville.’

  Ellis laughed dully. ‘Ixnay on the first two, but the third one is interesting. Turns out the Coupe de Ville is a company car, registered to one Leo Voss, a lawyer in Boston.’ There was a pause on the other end of the line. I waited until I realised that, once again, I was supposed to be playing the role of straight man in a conversation.

&nbs
p; ‘But . . . ?’ I said at last.

  ‘But,’ said Ellis, ‘Leo Voss is no longer with us. He’s dead, died six days ago.’

  ‘Damn, a dead lawyer. Only another million to go.’

  ‘We live in hope,’ said Ellis.

  ‘Did he fall, or was he pushed?’

  ‘That’s the interesting part. His secretary found him and called the cops. He was sitting behind his desk still dressed in his running outfit – sneakers, socks, T-shirt, sweatpants – with an opened bottle of mineral water in front of him. Their first impression was that he’d had a heart attack. According to the secretary, he’d been feeling ill for a day or too. He thought it might be flu.

  ‘But when he was autopsied, there was evidence of inflammation of the nerves in the hands and feet. He’d also lost some hair, probably only in the previous day or two. Tests on a hair sample turned up traces of thallium. You know what thallium is?’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’ My grandfather had used it as ratbait, until its sale was restricted. It was a metallic element, similar to lead or mercury, but far more poisonous. Its salts were soluble in water, almost tasteless and produced symptoms similar to influenza, meningitis or encephalitis. A lethal dose of thallium sulphate, maybe eight hundred milligrams or more, could kill in anything from twenty-four to forty hours.

  ‘So what sort of work did this Leo Voss do?’ I asked.

  ‘Fairly straightforward stuff, mainly corporate, although what he did must have been pretty lucrative. He had a house in Beacon Hill, a summer place in the Vineyard, and still had some money in the bank, probably because he was single and there was no one putting fur coats on his credit card.’

  Doreen, I thought. If Ellis could have afforded it, he’d have pasted pictures of her outside churches as a warning to others.

  ‘They’re still going through his files, but he seems to have been squeaky clean,’ concluded Ellis.

  ‘Which probably means that he wasn’t.’

  Ellis tut-tutted. ‘Such cynicism in one so young. Now I’ve got something for you: I hear you were talking to Willeford.’

  ‘That’s right. Is that a problem?’

  ‘Could be. He’s gone, and I’m starting to resent arriving in places to find that you’ve already been there. It’s making me feel inadequate, and I get enough of that at home.’

  I felt my grip tighten on the phone. ‘Last I saw of him, he was sitting in the Sail Loft nursing a drink.’

  ‘Willeford never nursed a drink in his life. They don’t survive in the glass long enough to be nursed. He give any indication that he might be planning to go away somewhere?’

  ‘No, nothing.’ I recalled Tony’s Celli’s interest in Willeford and felt my mouth go dry.

  ‘What did you two talk about?’

  I paused before I spoke. ‘He did some work for Billy Purdue: tracing of birth parents.’

  ‘That it?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘He have any luck?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  Ellis went quiet, then said distinctly: ‘Don’t hold back on me, Bird. I don’t like it.’

  ‘I’m not.’ It wasn’t quite a lie, but I’m not sure that it qualified as the truth either. I waited for Ellis to say something more, but he didn’t push the issue.

  ‘Stay out of trouble, Bird,’ was all he said, before he hung up.

  I had just finished cleaning off the table and was in my bedroom slipping on my boots when I heard the sound of a car pulling up outside. Through the gap in the drapes I could see the rear of a gold Mercury Sable parked near the side of the house. I took my Smith & Wesson, wrapped it in a towel and walked onto the porch. And as I stepped into the cold morning sunlight, I heard a voice that I knew say:

  ‘Why would anybody plant so many trees? I mean, who has that kind of time? I can’t even find time to get my laundry done.’

  Angel stood with his back to me, staring out at the trees at the edge of my property. He wore a Timberland fleece top, a pair of brown corduroy pants and tan work boots. At his feet was a hard plastic suitcase that was so pitted and battered it looked like it had been dropped from an airplane. A piece of blue climbing rope and the whim of fortune held it closed.

  Angel breathed in deeply then bent over as his body was racked by a fit of coughing. He spat something large and unpleasant onto the ground before him.

  ‘That’s the clean air getting the shit out of your lungs,’ said a deep, drawling voice. From behind the raised trunk door of the car Louis appeared holding a matching Delsey case and suit carrier. He wore a black Boss overcoat beneath which a grey double-breasted suit shimmered. A black shirt was buttoned to the neck and his shaved head gleamed. In the open trunk, I could see a long, metal storage case. Louis never went anywhere without his toys.

  ‘I think that was my lung,’ said Angel, using the tip of his boot to poke with interest at whatever piece of matter had expelled itself from his body. As I looked at them both, my spirits lifted. I wasn’t sure why they were here instead of back in New York but, whatever the reason, I was glad. Louis glanced at me and nodded, which was usually as close as Louis ever came to looking pleased about anything.

  ‘You know, Angel,’ I said, ‘you make nature look untidy just by standing there.’

  Angel turned and raised an arm in a sweeping gesture.

  ‘Trees,’ he said, shaking his head in bafflement and smiling. ‘So many trees. I ain’t seen this many trees since I got thrown out of the Indian Scouts.’

  ‘You know, I don’t think I even want to know why,’ I said.

  Angel picked up his case. ‘Bastards. And I was just about to get my explorer’s badge too.’

  ‘Didn’t think they had badges for the shit you was exploring,’ said Louis, from behind. ‘Badge like that could get a man thrown in jail in Georgia.’

  ‘Funny,’ barked Angel. ‘It’s just a myth that you can’t be gay and do macho things.’

  ‘Uh-huh. Just like it’s a myth that all homosexuals wear nice clothes and take care of their skin.’

  ‘That better not be aimed at me.’

  It was nice to see that some things hadn’t changed.

  ‘How you doin’ today?’ said Angel, as he pushed past me. ‘And lose the gun. We’re staying, like it or not. You look like shit, by the way.’

  ‘Nice suit,’ I remarked to Louis, as he followed Angel.

  ‘Thanks,’ he replied. ‘Never forget: no such thing as a brother with no taste, just a brother with no money.’

  I stood on the porch for a moment, feeling a little stupid holding the towel-wrapped gun. Then, figuring that the matter had obviously been decided long before they got to Maine, I followed them into the house.

  I showed them to the spare bedroom, where the furniture consisted only of a mattress on the floor and an old closet.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Angel. ‘It’s the Hanoi Hilton. If we knock on the pipes, someone better answer.’

  ‘You gonna supply sheets, or we have to roll some drunks and steal their coats?’ asked Louis.

  ‘I can’t sleep here,’ said Angel, with an air of finality. ‘If the rats want to feed on me, fuckers should at least have to go to the trouble of climbing up a bedframe.’

  He brushed past me again and, seconds later, I heard his voice call:

  ‘Hey, this one’s much nicer. We’ll take this.’

  There came the unmistakable sound of someone bouncing up and down on my bed. Louis looked at me.

  ‘Might need that gun after all,’ he said. Then he shrugged and followed the sound of the springs.

  When I eventually got them out of my bedroom and had arranged to have some extra furniture, including a bed, taken out of the Kraft Mini-Storage on Gorham Road and delivered to the house, we sat around the kitchen table and I waited for them to tell me why they were here. It had begun to rain: hard, cold drops that spoke of the coming of snow.

  ‘We’re your fairy godparents,’ said Angel.

  ‘I’m not sure that was m
eant to be taken quite so literally,’ I replied.

  ‘Maybe we just heard that this is the place to be,’ continued Angel. ‘Anybody who’s anybody is here right now. You got your Tony Celli, you got your feds, you got your local shit-kickers, you got your dead Asians. Shit, this place is like the UN with guns.’

  ‘What do you know?’ I asked.

  ‘We know that you’ve been pissing people off already,’ he replied. ‘What happened to your face?’

  ‘Guy with a harelip tried to educate me with a cattle-prod, then rearranged my hair-line with his shoe.’

  Angel grimaced in sympathy. ‘Guys with harelips, they just want to share their physical defects with everybody.’

  ‘That’s Mifflin,’ said Louis. ‘He have another guy with him, looked like someone dropped a safe on his head and the safe lost?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘He didn’t kick me, though.’

  ‘That’s ‘cause the message probably got halfway from his brain to his foot then forgot where it was going. His name’s Berendt. He’s so dumb he makes dirt look smart. Tony Clean was with them?’ While he spoke, he balanced one of my carving knives on the tip of his index finger and amused himself by tossing it in the air and catching it by the handle. It was a pretty neat trick. If the circus came to town, he was a shoo-in.

  ‘They were staying at the Regency,’ I said. ‘I got to visit Tony’s room.’

  ‘Was it nice?’ said Angel, pointedly running a hand along the underside of the table and examining the accumulated dust on the tips of his fingers.

  ‘Yeah, pretty nice, apart from the kicks in the head and the electric shocks.’

  ‘Fuck him. We should make him stay here. A bit of squalor would put him back in touch with his roots.’

  ‘You criticize my house again, you can sleep in the yard.’

  ‘Probably be cleaner,’ he muttered. ‘And warmer.’

  Louis tapped a long, slim finger gently on the tabletop. ‘Hear there’s a lot of money got misdirected around these parts. A lot of money.’