I brought her to Portland Airport in time to catch her flight to New York, then drove back to the house. Angel and Louis were in the front room, watching a sleazy talk show marathon on cable.
‘It’s I Can’t Marry You, You’re Not A Virgin,’ said Angel. ‘At least they’re not claiming to be virgins, else it’d be I Can’t Marry You, You’re A Liar.’
‘Or I Can’t Marry You, You’re Ugly,’ offered Louis, sipping a bottle of Katahdin ale, his feet stretched out before him on a chair. ‘Man, how they get the audience for this show? They drag dollar bills through the trailer parks?’ He hit the remote, muting the sound on the TV.
‘How’s Lee doing?’ asked Angel, suddenly serious.
‘She’s holding together, but only just.’
‘So what’s the deal?’
‘I’ve got to head north again, and I think I’m going to need you two to come with me. Ellen Cole was last heard from on the way to Dark Hollow, the same place Billy Purdue grew up, for a time, and the place I think he’s heading back to now.’
Louis shrugged. ‘Then that’s where we going,’
I sat down in an easy chair beside him. ‘There may be a problem.’
‘Jeez, Bird,’ said Angel, ‘we’re not exactly starved for problems as it is.’
‘This problem have a name?’ asked Louis.
‘Rand Jennings.’
‘And he would be?’
‘Chief of police in Dark Hollow.’
‘And he doesn’t like you because?’ said Angel, taking up the baton from Louis.
‘I had an affair with his wife.’
‘You the man,’ said Louis. ‘You could fall over and make hitting the ground look complicated.’
‘It was a long time ago.’
‘Long enough for Rand Jennings to forgive and forget?’ asked Angel.
‘Probably not.’
‘Maybe you could write him a note,’ he suggested. ‘Or send him flowers.’
‘You’re not being helpful.’
‘I didn’t sleep with his wife. In the helpful stakes, that puts me a full length clear of you.’
‘You see him last time you were up there?’ asked Louis.
‘No.’
‘You see the woman?’
‘Yes.’
Angel laughed. ‘You’re some piece of work, Bird. Any chance you might keep the mouse in its hole while we’re up there, or you planning to renew old acquaintances?’
‘We met by accident. It wasn’t intentional.’
‘Uh-huh. Tell that to Rand Jennings. “Hi Rand, it was an accident. I tripped and fell into your wife”.’ I could still hear him laughing as he headed for his bedroom.
Louis finished his beer, then lifted his feet from the chair and prepared to follow Angel. ‘We screwed up tonight,’ he said.
‘Things got screwed up. We did what we could.’
‘Tony Celli ain’t gonna give up on this thing. Stritch neither.’
‘I know.’
‘You want to tell me what happened on the top floor?’
‘I felt him waiting, Louis. I felt him waiting and I knew for sure that if I went in after him, I’d die. Despite evidence to the contrary, I don’t have a death wish. I wasn’t going to die at his hands, not there, not anywhere.’
Louis remained at the door, considering what I had told him. ‘If you felt it, then that’s the way it was,’ he said at last. ‘Sometimes, that’s all the difference there is between living and dying. But if I see him again, I’m taking him down.’
‘Not if I see him first.’ I meant it, regardless of all that had taken place and the fear that I had felt.
His mouth twitched in one of his trademark semi-smiles.
‘Bet you a dollar you don’t.’
‘Fifty cents,’ I replied. ‘You’ve already earned half your fee.’
‘I guess I have,’ he said. ‘I guess I have.’
Louis and Angel left early the next morning, Louis for the airport and Angel to scout around Billy Purdue’s trailer to see if he could find anything that the cops might have missed. I was about to lock up the house when Ellis Howard’s car bumped into my drive and then Ellis himself stepped heavily from the car. He took a look at my bag and gestured at it with a thumb.
‘Going somewhere?’
‘Yep.’
‘You mind telling me where?’
‘Yep.’
He slapped his hand gently on the hood of the Mustang, as if to transfer his frustration into the metal of the car. ‘Where were you yesterday evening?’
‘On my way back from Greenville.’
‘What time’d you get back into town?’
‘About six. Should I call a lawyer?’
‘You come straight home?’
‘No, I parked up and met someone in Java Joe’s. Like I said: should I call a lawyer?’
‘Not unless you want to confess to something. I was going to tell you what happened out at the Portland Company complex last night, but maybe you already know, seeing as how your Mustang was down by the harbour yesterday evening.’
So that was it. Ellis was fishing. He had nothing, and I wasn’t about to break down and beg for mercy.
‘I told you. I was meeting someone.’
‘This person still in town?’
‘No.’
‘And you don’t know anything about what happened at the complex last night?’
‘I try to avoid the news. It affects my karma.’
‘If I thought it would help, your karma would be kicking its heels in a cell. We found four bodies in that complex, all of them associates of Tony Celli, plus two dead feds and a mystery caller.’
‘Mystery caller?’ I asked, but I was thinking of something else. There should have been five bodies in the complex: one of Tony’s men had survived and escaped, which meant there was a good chance that Tony Celli knew Louis and I had been in the building.
Ellis looked closely at me, trying to assess how much I knew. As he spoke, he waited for a reaction. He was disappointed.
‘We found the Toronto cop, Eldritch, dead. Three bullets, two different guns. The one to the head was an execution shot.’
‘I’m waiting for the “but”.’
‘The “but” is that this guy wasn’t Eldritch. His ID says he was, his prints and his face say he wasn’t. Now I’ve got the Toronto Police Department howling at me to find their missing man, I’ve got a bunch of feds who are very interested in the John Doe who killed two of their agents, and I have four members of Boston’s finest crew using up morgue space that I can’t afford to give them. The ME is considering relocating here permanently, seeing as how we’re such good customers and all. Plus Tony Celli hasn’t been seen since his night at the Regency.’
‘He stiff on the bill?’
‘Don’t, Bird. I’m not in the mood. Don’t forget that Willeford is still missing and, until you came along, he knew as much about Billy Purdue as anyone.’
I let it pass without comment. I didn’t want to think of what I might have brought down on Willeford. Instead, I said: ‘Bangor turn up anything on Cheryl Lansing?’
‘No, and we’re no further on the killing of Rita Ferris and her son. Which brings me to my second reason for calling. You want to tell me again what you were doing in Bangor? And then Greenville?’
‘Like I told Bangor, Billy Purdue hired someone to trace his parents. I thought that maybe he might try to follow that trail now that he’s in trouble.’
‘And is he following that trail?’
‘Someone is.’
Ellis moved towards me, his bulk menacing, his eyes more so. ‘You tell me where you’re going, Bird, or I swear to God I’ll arrest you here and now and take a close look at that gun of yours.’
I knew that Ellis wasn’t kidding. Even though the silenced guns now lay at the bottom of Casco Bay beside Mifflin, I couldn’t afford to delay the search for Ellen Cole. ‘I’m heading north to a place called Dark Hollow. The daughter of a friend of mine has
gone missing. I’m going to try to find her. Her mother was the person I met at Java Joe’s last night.’
Some of the anger went out of his face. ‘Is it a coincidence that Dark Hollow is Billy Purdue’s country?’
‘I don’t believe in coincidences.’
He patted the hood one more time, and seemed to reach a decision. ‘Neither do I. You stay in touch now, Bird, y’hear?’
He turned and walked back to his car.
‘Is that it?’ I said. I was surprised to see him let it go so easily.
‘No, I guess it isn’t, but I don’t see what more I can do.’ He stood at the open door of the car, and watched me. ‘Frankly, Bird, I’m balancing the benefits of hauling you in and grilling you, assuming you’d tell us anything, against the benefits of having you wandering around and looking under rocks. So far, the scales are tipping in favour of the second option, but only just. You remember that.’
I waited a heartbeat.
‘Does this mean you’ve decided against recruiting me, Ellis?’
He didn’t reply. Instead, he shook his head and drove away, leaving me to think about Tony Celli and Stritch and an old man in a harbour bar, drinking beers and waiting for the new world to sweep him away.
I had told Ellis some of the truth, but not all. I was going to Dark Hollow, and would be there by nightfall, but first Louis and I would pay a visit to Boston. There was a slight possibility that Tony Celli might have taken Ellen Cole, perhaps in the hope of using her as leverage if I found Billy Purdue before he did. Even if that was not the case, there were some things to be clarified before we went up against Celli again. Tony was a made guy. It was important that everybody knew where they stood on Tony’s future.
Before I left to meet Louis at the airport, I stopped off at the Kraft Mini-Storage. There, in three adjoining units, was what I had retained of my grandfather’s possessions: some furniture; a small library of books; some silver plates and a brass screen for a fireplace; and a series of boxes filled with old paperwork and files. It took me fifteen minutes to locate what I was looking for and take it back to the car: a manilla expanding file, held closed by a piece of red ribbon. On the index tab, written in my grandfather’s ornate script, were the words ‘Caleb Kyle’.
Chapter Sixteen
Al Z operated out of an office above a comic-book store on Newbury Street. It was an odd location, but it suited him to be in a place where tourists browsed among chichi clothes stores, sipped exotic teas or browsed in galleries. It was busy, there were too many people around for anyone to cause trouble and he could send out for flavoured coffees or scented candles any time he wanted.
Louis and I sat outside a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream parlour across from Al Z’s brownstone office, eating chocolate-chip-cookie-dough ice cream and drinking large coffees. We were the only people sitting outside, mainly because it was so cold that my ice cream hadn’t even begun to melt yet.
‘You think he’s noticed us?’ I asked, as my fingers gave up their efforts to hold the spoon without shaking.
Louis sipped thoughtfully at his coffee. ‘Tall, handsome black male and his white boy sittin’ outside eatin’ ice cream in the fuckin’ winter? I think someone must have noticed us by now.’
‘I’m not sure I like being called “boy”,’ I mused.
‘Get in line, whitey. We got a three-hundred year start on that particular grievance.’
At a window above the comic-book store, a shadow moved.
‘Let’s go,’ said Louis. ‘It wasn’t for the damn cold, brothers be running the world by now.’
At the top of a flight of steps, next to the window of the store, there was a buzzer beside a wooden, windowless door. I pressed the buzzer and a voice answered simply: ‘Yes?’
‘I’m looking for Al Z,’ I said.
‘No Al Z here,’ replied the voice, all in a fast flow of heavily accented English so that it came out as ‘Noalsee-her’. It was followed by a click and the intercom went silent.
Louis hit the buzzer again.
‘Yes,’ said the same voice.
‘Man, just open the damn door.’
The intercom clicked off, then buzzed, and we passed through, the reinforced door springing shut behind us. We walked up four flights of stairs to where a plain, unvarnished door stood open. A figure leaned against the window beyond, small and bulky, its hand resting midway between its neck and its belt, ready to move for the gun if necessary. The only ornamentation on the wall was a cheap-looking, black-and-white clock, which softly ticked away the seconds. I figured the surveillance camera was probably hidden behind it. When we entered the room and saw the television screen on Al Z’s desk showing only an empty stairwell, I realised I was right.
There were four men in the room. One was the short bulky guy, his skin yellow as a beeswax candle, who had watched us from the doorway. An older man, his flesh heavy at the jowls like a basset hound’s, sat on a worn leather sofa to the left of the doorway, his legs crossed, a white shirt and red silk tie beneath his black suit. His eyes were hidden by small, round-framed sunglasses. Against the wall, a young buck leaned with his thumbs hooked into the empty belt loops of his pants, holding his silver-grey jacket away from his sides to reveal the butt of a H & K semi-automatic at his waist. His grey suit pants were baggy, narrowing to pipecleaner thinness where they met his silver-tooled cowboy boots. The eighties revival was obviously still in full flow where he came from.
Louis was looking straight ahead, as if the room were empty apart from the fourth man who sat behind a teak desk topped with green leather, the desktop empty apart from a black telephone, a pen and notebook and the TV screen, which kept up its unceasing vigil on the stairs.
Al Z looked like a well-groomed undertaker on vacation. His thin silver hair was swept back from the broad expanse of his forehead and slicked tightly to his skull. His face was craggy and wrinkled, the eyes dark like opals, the lips thin and dry, the nostrils on his long nose slim and strangely elongated, as if he had been bred specifically for his powers of smell. He wore a three-piece suit of autumn hues, the fabric a mix of reds and oranges and yellows, finely interwoven. His white shirt was open at the neck, the collars narrow pinpoint, and there was no tie. In his right hand he held a cigarette; his left lay flat on the desk, the nails short and clean, but not manicured. Al Z acted as the buffer between the upper reaches of the organisation and the lower. He solved problems, when they arose. It was his gift to be a problem solver, but there was no point in a manicure if your hands were always going to be dirty.
There were no chairs in front of his desk, and the man in the dark suit remained spread across the sofa, so we stayed standing. Al Z nodded at Louis, then looked long and appraisingly at me.
‘Well, well, the famous Charlie Parker,’ he said at last. ‘If I knew you were coming, I’d have worn a tie.’
‘Everybody knows you, how you gonna make any money as a private dick?’ muttered Louis. ‘Hiring you for undercover work be like hiring Jay Leno.’
Al Z waited for him to finish before turning his attention from me to Louis. ‘If I knew you were bringing equally distinguished company, Mr Parker, I’d have made everybody else wear a tie too.’
‘Long time no see,’ said Louis.
Al Z nodded. ‘I got bad lungs.’ He waved the cigarette gently as he spoke. ‘The New York air don’t agree with me. I prefer it up here.’
But there was more to it than that: the mob was no longer what it once had been. The world of The Godfather was history before the film ever hit the screen, the image of the Italians already sullied by their involvement in the heroin epidemic of the seventies, and since then walking disaster areas like John Gotti Jr had debased it even further. RICO – the racketeer-influenced and corrupt organisation laws – had put an end to the construction shakedowns, the garbage collection monopolies, and the mob control of the Fulton Street Fish Market in New York. The heroin-smuggling business that had operated out of pizza parlours was gone, busted by the FB
I in 1987. The old bosses were dead, or in jail.
Meanwhile, the Asians had spread from Chinatown, crossing the divide of Canal Street into Little Italy, and the blacks and the Latinos now controlled operations in Harlem. Al Z had smelt death in the air, and had receded even further into the background, eventually moving north. Now he sat in a bare office above a comic-book store in Boston, and tried to maintain some element of stability in what little remained. That was why Tony Clean was so dangerous: he believed the myths and still saw the potential for personal glory in the tattered remnants of the old order. His actions threatened to bring down heat on his associates at a time when the organisation was in a weakened position. His continued existence threatened the survival of everyone around him.
To our left, the young gun eased himself from the wall. ‘They’re carrying, Al,’ he said. ‘You want me to lighten their load?’
From the corner of my eye, I saw Louis’s eyebrow raise itself about a quarter of an inch. Al Z caught the gesture, and smiled gently.
‘I wish you luck,’ he said. ‘I don’t think either of our guests are the kind to give up their toys so easily.’
The young gun’s glow of confidence flickered, as if he were unsure whether or not he was being tested. ‘They don’t look so tough,’ he said.
‘Look harder,’ said Al Z.
The gunslinger looked but his powers of perception left a lot to be desired. He glanced once again at Al Z, then made a move towards Louis.
‘I wouldn’t, if I were you,’ said Louis softly.
‘You ain’t me,’ said the younger man, but there was a hint of wariness in his voice.
‘That’s true,’ said Louis. ‘I was you, I wouldn’t be dressed like no crack pimp.’
A bright light flashed in the young man’s eyes. ‘You talk to me like that, you fuckin’ nig . . .’ The word died in a kind of gasp in his throat as Louis’s body twisted, his left hand closing tightly on the man’s neck and propelling him backwards, his right quickly slipping the gun from the Italian’s belt holster and tossing it to the floor. The young man gurgled once as he hit the wall, spittle flying from his lips as the air was forced from his body. Then slowly, his feet began to lift from the floor; first his heels, then his toes, until the only thing holding him upright was Louis’s unyielding left hand. His face turned pink, then deep red. Louis did not release his grip until a hint of blue began creeping into his lips and ears, then the fingers of his hand opened suddenly and the gunman sank to the ground, his hands fumbling at the collar of his shirt as he struggled to draw painful, choking breaths into his parched lungs.
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