The Charlie Parker Collection 1

by John Connolly

  Chapter Ten

  I woke late and refreshed for the trip to Bangor. Angel and Louis were still in bed, so I drove to Oak Hill, intending to stop off at the bank to withdraw some cash for the trip north. But when I had finished, I headed on down Old County Road, then onto Black Point Road and past the White Caps Sandwich Shop until I reached Ferry Road. To my left was the golf course, to my right the summer homes, and ahead of me was the parking lot where the men had died. The rain had washed away the evidence, but lengths of tattered crime scene tape still fluttered on one of the barriers as the wind howled in off the sea.

  As I stood, taking in the scene, a car pulled up behind me, a cruiser driven by one of the Neck cops.

  ‘You okay, sir?’ he asked, as he stepped from the car.

  ‘Yeah, just looking,’ I replied. ‘I live up on Spring Street.’

  He sized me up, then nodded. ‘I recognise you now. Sorry, sir, but after what happened here, we have to be careful.’

  I waved a hand at him, but he seemed to be in the mood for conversation. He was young, certainly younger than I was, with straw-coloured hair and soft, serious eyes. ‘Strange business,’ he said. ‘It’s usually pretty quiet and peaceful here.’

  ‘You from around these parts?’ I asked.

  He shook his head. ‘No sir. Flint, Michigan. Moved east after GM screwed us over, and started again here. Best move I ever made.’

  ‘Yeah, well, this place hasn’t always been so peaceful.’ My grandfather could trace his family’s roots back to the mid seventeenth century, maybe two decades after Scarborough was first settled in 1632 or 1633. Back then, the whole area was called Black Point and the settlement was abandoned twice because of attacks by the natives. In 1677, the Wabanaki had attacked the English fort at Black Point on two occasions, killing over forty English soldiers and a dozen of their Indian allies from the Protestant mission village at Natick, near Boston. Maybe ten minutes by car from where we were standing was Massacre Pond, where Richard Hunnewell and nineteen others had died in an Indian attack in 1713.

  Now, with its summer homes and its yacht club, its bird sanctuary and its tennis courts, it was easy to forget that this was once a violent, troubled place. There was blood beneath the ground here, layer upon layer of it like the marks left in rock faces by seas that had ceased to exist hundreds of millions of years before. I sometimes felt that places retained memories – houses, lands, towns, mountains, all holding within themselves the ghosts of past experiences – and that history had a way of repeating itself that might lead a man to believe that sometimes these places acted just like magnets, attracting bad luck and violence to them like iron filings. In that way of thinking, once a lot of blood was spilled somewhere then there was a pretty good chance that it would be spilled there again.

  If that was true, then it wasn’t strange that eight men should have ended their lives so bloodily here. It wasn’t strange at all.

  When I returned to the house I toasted some English muffins, made some coffee to go with them and had a quiet breakfast in the kitchen while Louis and Angel showered and dressed.

  We had decided the night before that Louis would stay at the house, maybe take a look round Portland and see if he could find any signs of Abel and Stritch. Also, in the event that anything developed while we were away, he could call me on the cell phone and let me know.

  Portland to Bangor is one hundred and twenty five miles north on I-95. As we drove, Angel flipped through my cassette tape collection impatiently, listening to something for one or two songs then discarding it on the back seat. The Go-Betweens, The Triffids, The Gourds out of Austin, Jim White, Doc Watson, they all ended up in the pile, so that the car started to look like an A&R man’s nightmare. I put on a Lambchop cassette, and the gentle, sad chords of I Will Drive Slowly filled the car.

  ‘What’d you say this is?’ asked Angel.

  ‘Alternative country,’ I replied.

  ‘That’s when your truck starts, your wife comes back and your dog gets resurrected,’ he snickered.

  ‘Willie Nelson heard you talking like that, he’d whip your ass.’

  ‘This the same Willie Nelson whose wife once tied him up in a bedsheet and beat him unconscious with a broom handle? That pothead comes after me, I reckon I can handle myself.’

  Eventually, we settled for a discussion of local news on PBS. There was some talk of a timber company surveyor who might have gone missing up north, but I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to it.

  At Waterville, we took the off ramp and stopped for soup and coffee. Angel toyed with saltine crumbs as we waited for the check. He had something on his mind, and it didn’t take long for it to emerge.

  ‘Remember when I asked you about Rachel, back in New York?’ he said at last.

  ‘I remember,’ I replied.

  ‘You weren’t too keen on talking about it.’

  ‘I’m still not.’

  ‘Maybe you should.’

  There was a pause. I wondered when Louis and Angel had discussed Rachel and me, and guessed that it might have come up between them more than once. I relented a little.

  ‘She doesn’t want to see me,’ I said.

  He pursed his lips. ‘And how do you feel about that?’

  ‘You going to charge me by the hour for this?’

  He flicked a crumb at me. ‘Just answer the question.’

  ‘Not so good but, frankly, I’ve got other things on my mind.’

  Angel’s eyes flicked up at me, then back down again. ‘Y’know, she called once, to ask how you were.’

  ‘She called you’? How’d she get your number?’

  ‘We’re in the book.’

  ‘No, you’re not.’

  ‘Well, then, we must have given it to her.’

  ‘You’re so helpful.’ I sighed, and ran my hands over my face. ‘I don’t know, Angel. The whole thing is screwed up. I don’t know if I’m ready yet and, anyway, I frighten her. She’s the one who pushed me away, remember?’

  ‘You didn’t need a whole lot of pushing.’

  The check came, and I put down a ten and some ones on top of it. ‘Yeah, well . . . I had my reasons. Just like she did.’

  I stood, and Angel stood with me.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Pity neither of you could come up with one good reason between you.’

  As we drove back onto I-95, Angel stretched contentedly beside me and, as he did so, the sleeve of his oversized shirt fell down to his elbow. On his arm, a scar, white and ragged, ran from the hollow curve on his elbow to within an inch or two of his wrist. It was maybe six inches long in total and I couldn’t imagine why I hadn’t noticed it before but, as I thought about it, I realised it was a combination of factors: the fact that Angel rarely wore only a T-shirt or, if he did so, it was one with long sleeves; my own self-absorption while we were in Louisiana hunting the Travelling Man; and Angel’s basic lack of inclination to discuss anything about past pains.

  He caught me looking at the scar and reddened, but he did not try to hide it immediately. Instead, he looked at it himself and went quiet, as if recalling its making.

  ‘You want to know?’ he asked.

  ‘You want to tell?’

  ‘Not particularly.’

  ‘Then don’t.’

  He didn’t respond for a time, then: ‘It kind of concerns you, so maybe you got a right to know.’

  ‘If you tell me you’ve always been in love with me, I’m stopping the car and you can walk to Bangor.’

  Angel laughed. ‘You’re in denial.’

  ‘You have no idea how deep.’

  ‘Anyway, you ain’t that good lookin’.’ He touched the scar gently with the index finger of his right hand. ‘You been in Rikers, right?’

  I nodded. I’d been at Rikers Island in the course of investigations. I had also been there while Angel was a prisoner, when another inmate named William Vance had threatened to take Angel’s life and I had intervened. Vance was dead now. He had died, at las
t, in October from injuries received after persons unknown poured detergent down his throat, after they learned that he was a suspected sex killer who would never stand trial for his crimes because of a lack of evidence. I had provided the information on which his attackers had acted. I had done it to save Angel, and Vance was no loss to the world, but it still weighed on my conscience.

  ‘First time Vance came at me, I knocked out one of his teeth,’ Angel said quietly. ‘He’d been threatening it for days, saying how he was gonna fuck me up bad. Fucking guy just had it in for me, you know that. The blow wasn’t bad or nothing, but a corrections officer found him bleeding and me standing over him and I got twenty days in the bing.’

  The ‘bing’ was solitary confinement: twenty-three-hour lockdown, with one hour’s exercise permitted in the yard. The yard was basically a cage, not much bigger than a cell, and prisoners were kept handcuffed while they walked. The yard had basketball hoops but no basketballs, even assuming anyone could play basketball with cuffs on. The only thing the prisoners could do was fight, which is what they usually did when they were let out.

  ‘Most of the time, I didn’t leave my cell,’ said Angel. ‘Vance had been given ten days, just for getting his mouth cut, and I knew he was waiting for me out there.’ He went quiet, his teeth working at his bottom lip. ‘You think it’s going to be easy – you know, peace and quiet, sleep, safe most of the time – but it isn’t. You can’t bring nothing in with you. They take your clothes and give you three jumpsuits instead. You can’t smoke, but I boofed the best part of a pack of tobacco in three condoms, rolled it in toilet paper to smoke it.’ ‘Boofing’ meant taking contraband and inserting it in the anus in order to transport it.

  ‘The tobacco was gone in five days, and I never smoked again. After those five days in that cell, I couldn’t take it any more: the noise, the screams. It’s psychological torture. I went out into the yard for the first time and Vance came at me straight off, caught me on the side of the head with his balled fists, then started kicking me on the ground. He got five, maybe six good ones in before they hauled him off, but I knew then that I couldn’t take any more time in that place. There was no way I could do it.

  ‘I was taken to the infirmary after the beating. They looked me over, decided nothing was broken, then sent me back to the bing. I brought a screw back with me, maybe three inches long, that I’d worked out of the base of a medicine cabinet. And when they put me in the cell, and the lights went out, I tried to cut myself.’

  He shook his head and, for the first time since he started the story, he smiled. ‘You ever try to cut yourself with a screw?’

  ‘Can’t say that I have.’

  ‘Well, it’s kind a hard to do. Screws just weren’t designed with that particular purpose in mind. After a lot of effort, I managed to get some serious blood flowing, but if I was hoping to bleed to death I’d probably have finished my twenty days before it happened. Anyway, they found me hacking away at my arm and hauled me off to the infirmary again. That’s when I called you.

  ‘After some talk, and a psychological profile, and whatever you told them, they put me back in the general population. They figured I wasn’t going to harm no one, except maybe myself, and they needed the bing space for someone more deserving.’

  I had spoken to Vance shortly afterwards, before he was due to be released from solitary, and told him what I knew about him, and what I would tell the others if he made a move on Angel. It didn’t do any good, and Vance’s first act on release was to try to kill Angel in the showers. After that, he was a dead man.

  ‘If they’d put me back in the bing, I’d have found a way to kill myself,’ concluded Angel. ‘Maybe I’d have let Vance do it, just to get done with it. There are some debts that will never be paid, Bird, and that’s no bad thing sometimes. Louis knows, and I know. The fact that you do what you do because it’s right makes it easier to take your side, but you decide you want to take out Congress and Louis will find a way to light the fuse. And I’ll hold his coat while he does it.’

  Cheryl Lansing lived in a clean, white, two-storey house at the western edge of Bangor itself, surrounded by neat lawns and twenty-year-old pine trees. It was a quiet neighbourhood with prosperous-looking homes and new cars in the drives. Angel stayed in the Mustang while I tried the bell. No one answered. I cupped my hands and peered in through the glass, but the house was quiet.

  I walked around the side and into a long garden with a swimming pool at the end nearest the house. Angel joined me.

  ‘Baby-brokering business must pay good,’ he remarked. Smiling, he waved a black wallet, about six inches by two inches: the tools of his trade. ‘Just in case,’ he said.

  ‘Great. The local cops drop by and I’ll tell them I was making a citizen’s arrest.’

  The back of the house had a glass-walled extension that allowed Cheryl Lansing to look out on her green lawn in the summer and watch the snow fall on it in the winter. The pool hadn’t been cleaned in a while, and there was no cover over it. It didn’t look too deep, sloping from maybe three feet at one end to six or seven feet at the other, but it was full of leaves and dirt.

  ‘Bird.’

  I walked over to where Angel was looking into the house. There was a kitchen area to one side and a large oak table opposite surrounded by five chairs, with a doorway behind it leading into a living room. On the table stood cups, saucers, a coffee pot and an assortment of muffins and breads. A bowl of fruit stood in the centre. Even from here, I could see the mould on the food.

  Angel pulled a pair of double-thick gloves from his pocket and tried the sliding door. It opened to his touch.

  ‘You want to take a look around?’

  ‘I guess.’

  Inside, I could smell sour milk and the lingering stench of food gone bad. We moved through the kitchen and into the living room, which was furnished with thick couches and armchairs with a pink floral motif. I searched downstairs while Angel went through the upper rooms. When he called me, I was already on the stairs to follow him up.

  He stood in what was obviously a small office, with a dark wood desk, a computer and a pair of filing cabinets. On the shelves along the wall sat a series of expanding files, each marked with a year. The files for 1965 and ‘66 had been removed from the shelves and their contents lay scattered on the floor.

  ‘Billy Purdue was born early in sixty-six,’ I said quietly.

  ‘You figure he came calling?’

  ‘Someone did.’

  How badly did Billy Purdue want to trace his roots, I wondered? Bad enough to come here and ransack an old woman’s office to find out what she knew?

  ‘Check the cabinets,’ I said to Angel. ‘Then see if there’s anything relating to Billy Purdue that we can salvage from those files. I’m going to have another run through the house, see if I can find anything that might have been discarded.’

  He nodded and I went through the house again, searching bedrooms, the bathroom and eventually ending up once again in the downstairs rooms. In the kitchen, the rotting fruit on the table was surrounded by the compass points of four settings, two with coffee cups, two with glasses of rancid milk.

  I went back out into the yard. At the far eastern side stood a toolshed, an open lock hanging below the bolt. I walked down, took a handkerchief from my pocket and slipped the bolt. Inside, there was only a gas-powered mower, flowerpots, seeding trays and an assortment of short-handled garden tools. Old paint cans sat on the shelves beside jars filled with old brushes and nails. An empty birdcage hung from a hook on the roof. I closed the shed and started back towards the house.

  As I walked, a breeze arose and pulled at the branches of the trees and the blades of the grass beneath my feet. It lifted the leaves in the unfilled pool, sending them tumbling softly over one another with a crisp, rustling sound. Amid the greens and browns and soft yellows at the deep end, something bright red showed.

  I squatted by the edge of the pool and looked at the shape. It was a doll’s he
ad, topped by a tuft of red hair. I could make out a glass eye and the edge of a set of ruby lips. The pool was wide and I thought for a moment of going back to the shed and trying to find a tool long enough to grip the doll, but I couldn’t remember seeing anything there that might serve my purpose. Of course, the doll might mean nothing. Kids lost things in the oddest places all of the time. But dolls . . . They tended to look after their dolls. Jennifer had one called Molly, with thick dark hair and a movie-star pout, that would sit beside her at the dinner table and stare emptily at the food. Molly and Jenny, friends forever.

  I moved to the end of the pool nearest the house, where a set of steps led into the shallow end, the bottom step obscured by leaves. I walked down and stepped carefully into the pool itself, anxious not to lose my footing on the slope. As I progressed, the depth of the leaves began to increase, covering first the toes of my shoes, then the cuffs of my pants, then rising almost to my knees. By the time I came close to the doll, they were halfway up my thighs and I was conscious of a sense of dampness from the rotting vegetation and the feel of water seeping into my shoes. I was walking with caution now, the tiles slick beneath my feet and the slope more pronounced.

  The glass eye looked to the heavens, a spread of brown leaves and dirt masking the other side of the doll’s face. I reached down carefully, dug into the leaves and lifted the doll’s head free from below. As it came away, the leaves fell and the doll’s right eye, which had been held closed by the pressure, clicked open gently. Its blouse, slowly revealed, was blue and its skirt green. Its chubby knees were filthy with mud and decaying vegetation.

  The entire body of the doll came away from the leaves with a soft sucking sound, and something else came with it. The hand clutching the doll’s legs was small, but decay had swollen it and mottled it with winter colours. Two nails had begun to come loose and there were tears in the skin exposing long striations of muscle. At the elbow, above a large gas blister, I could see the end of a rotting sleeve, its pretty pink colour now almost black with leaf mould, dirt and dried blood.