The Charlie Parker Collection 1

by John Connolly

  ‘How can I help you, Mr. Blythe?’ I asked, my tone betraying the fact that right now helping him was pretty low down on my list of priorities.

  His hands were deep in the pockets of his trousers, his short-sleeved shirt tucked tightly into the elastic waistband. His pants were shucked up high over what remained of his paunch, making his legs look too long for his body. We had spoken little since I had agreed to look into the circumstances of his daughter’s disappearance. Instead, I dealt mostly with his wife. I had gone back over the police reports, begun to speak again to those who had seen Cassie in the days before she disappeared, and retraced her movements in those final days; but too much time had elapsed for those who recalled her to remember anything new. In some cases, they had trouble remembering anything at all. I had come up with nothing remarkable so far, but I had declined the offer of a retainer similar to that enjoyed for so long by Sundquist. I told the Blythes that I would bill them for my time, nothing more. Yet if Irv Blythe wasn’t openly hostile toward me, he still left me with the sense that he would have preferred it if I had not become involved in the investigation. I was not sure how the events of the previous day would affect our relationship. As it turned out, it was Blythe who brought them up.

  ‘Yesterday, at the house . . .,’ he began, then stopped.

  I waited.

  ‘My wife thinks I owe you an apology.’ His face was very red.

  ‘What do you think?’

  He was nothing if not blunt.

  ‘I think I wanted to believe Sundquist and that man he brought with him. I resented you for taking away the hope they brought with them.’

  ‘It was false hope, Mr. Blythe.’

  ‘Mr. Parker, until now we’ve had no hope at all.’

  He removed his hands from his pockets and started to dig at the skin in the center of his palms, hoping to locate the source of his pain there and remove it like a splinter. I noticed half-healed sores on the back of his hand and the exposed patches of his scalp, where he had torn at himself in his hurt and frustration.

  It was time to clear the air between us.

  ‘I get the sense that you don’t like me very much,’ I said.

  His right hand stopped digging and flailed loosely at the air, as if he were trying to grasp his feelings toward me, to snatch them from the air so he could display them on his wrinkled, gouged palm instead of being forced to put them into words.

  ‘It’s not that,’ he began. ‘I’m sure that you’re very good at what you do. It’s just that I know about you. I’ve read the newspaper reports. I know that you solve difficult cases, that you’ve found out the truth about people who’ve been missing for years, longer even than Cassie. The trouble is, Mr. Parker, that those people are usually dead when you find them.’ The final words came out in a rush, and left him with a tremble in his voice. ‘I want my daughter back alive.’

  ‘And you think that hiring me is like an admission that she’s gone forever?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  Irv Blythe’s words seemed to open wounds inside me that, like his own exposed sores, were only half healed. There were those whom I had failed to save, that was true, and there were others who were long gone before I had even begun to understand the nature of what had been visited upon them. But I had made an accommodation with my past, a recognition that although I had failed to protect individuals, had even failed to protect my own wife and child, I was not entirely responsible for what had happened to them. Susan and Jennifer had been taken by another, and even had I sat with them twenty-four hours a day for ninety-nine days, he would have waited until the hundredth day for me to turn my back briefly before he came for them at last. Now I spanned two worlds, the worlds of the living and the dead, and to both I tried to bring some measure of peace. It was all that I could do in reparation. But I would not have my failings judged by Irving Blythe, not now.

  I opened his car door for him. ‘It’s getting late, Mr. Blythe. I’m sorry that I can’t offer you the reassurance that you want. All I can say is that I’ll keep asking questions. I’ll keep trying.’

  He nodded and looked out over the marsh, but made no move to get into his car. The moonlight shone on the waters, and the sight of the gleaming channels seemed to jolt him into some final form of self-examination

  ‘I know she’s dead, Mr. Parker,’ he said softly. ‘I know that she’s not coming home to us alive. All I want is to put her to rest somewhere pretty and quiet where she can be at peace. I don’t believe in closure. I don’t believe that this thing will ever be closed to us. I just want to lay her down, and to be able to go to her with my wife and place flowers at her feet. You understand?’

  I almost reached out and touched him, but Irving Blythe was not a man for such gestures between men. Instead, I spoke to him as gently as I could.

  ‘I understand, Mr. Blythe. Drive carefully. I’ll be in touch.’

  He climbed into his car and didn’t look at me until he had turned it toward the road. Then I saw his eyes in the rearview, and caught the hatred in them for the words that I had somehow forced him to speak, the admission that I had drawn from deep inside him.

  I didn’t join Rachel, not for some time. I sat on my porch and watched the passing lights of solitary cars until the biting of the insects forced me inside. By then, Rachel was asleep, and yet she smiled as she felt me close beside her.

  Beside both of them.

  That night a car drew up outside Elliot Norton’s house on the outskirts of Grace Falls. Elliot heard the car door opening, then footsteps running across the grass of his yard. He was already reaching for the gun on his nightstand when the window of his bedroom exploded inward and the room erupted into flame. The burning gasoline splashed his arms and chest and set fire to his hair. He was still burning when he staggered down the stairs, through his front door, and onto his lawn, where he rolled in the damp grass to quench the fire.

  He lay on his back in the moonlight and watched his house burn.

  And as Elliot Norton’s house flamed far to the south, I awoke to the sound of a car idling on Old County Road. Rachel was asleep beside me, something clicking inside her air passages as she breathed, a soft noise as regular as the ticking of a metronome. Gently, I slipped from beneath the covers and walked to the window.

  In the moonlight, an old black Cadillac Coupe de Ville stood on the bridge that crossed the marshes. Even from a distance, I could see the dents and scratches on the paintwork, the broken-limb curve of the damaged front bumper, and the spiderweb tracery of cracked glass in the corner of the windshield. I could hear its engine rumbling but no smoke came from the exhaust; and though the moon was bright that night I could not glimpse the interior of the car through the dark glass of the windows.

  I had seen such a car before. It had been driven by a being named Stritch, a foul creature, pale and deformed. But Stritch was dead, a hole torn in his chest, and the car had been destroyed.

  Then the rear door of the Cadillac opened. I waited for someone to emerge, but no one did. Instead the car just stood, its door wide open, for a minute or two until an unseen hand pulled the door closed, the coffin-lid thud coming to me across water and grass, and the car moved away, executing a U-turn to head northwest toward Oak Hill and Route 1.

  I heard movement from the bed.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Rachel.

  I turned to her and saw the shadows drifting across the room, clouds chased by moonlight, until they reached her and, slowly, began to devour her paleness.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Rachel.

  I was back in bed, except now I was sitting bolt upright and I had pushed the sheets away from me with my feet. Her hand was warm upon me, flat against my chest.

  ‘There was a car,’ I said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Outside. There was a car.’

  I stepped naked from the bed and walked to the window. I pulled back the curtain, but there was nothing there, only the road, quiet, and the silver threads of
the water on the marsh.

  ‘There was a car,’ I said, for the last time.

  And I saw the marks of my fingertips against the window, left there as I reached out to the car, just as they, reflected in the glass, now reached out for me.

  ‘Come back to bed,’ she said.

  I went to her and I held her, spoonlike, as she slipped softly into sleep.

  And I watched over her until morning came.

  3

  Elliot Norton called me again the morning after the arson attack. He had first-degree burns to his face and arms. He considered himself pretty lucky, all told. The fire had destroyed three rooms on the second floor of his house and left a big hole in his roof. No local contractor would touch the work and he’d engaged some guys from Martinez, just across the Georgia state line, to fix up the damage.

  ‘You talk to the cops?’ I asked him.

  ‘Yeah, they were out here first thing. They got no shortage of suspects, but if they can make a case I’ll retire from law and become a monk. They know it’s linked to the Larousse case and I know it’s linked to the Larousse case, so we’re all in agreement. Just lucky I’m not paying them for their opinion.’

  ‘Any suspects?’

  ‘They’ll round up some of the local assholes, but it won’t do much good, not unless someone saw or heard something and is willing to stand up and say it. A lot of folks will take the view that I shouldn’t have expected anything less for taking this on.’

  There was a pause. I could feel him waiting for me to fill the silence. In the end I did, and felt my feet start to slide as the inevitability of my involvement became clear.

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘What can I do? Cut the kid loose? He’s my client, Charlie. I can’t do that. I can’t let them intimidate me out of this case.’

  He was turning the guilt screws on me and he knew it. I didn’t like it, but maybe he felt that he had no other option.

  Yet it wasn’t only his willingness to use our friendship that made me uneasy. Elliot Norton was a very good lawyer, but I’d never before seen the milk of human kindness flow from him in his professional dealings. Now he had put his house and possibly his life on the line for a young man he couldn’t have known too well, and that didn’t sound like the Elliot Norton I knew. I wasn’t sure that I could turn my back on him any longer, even with my doubts, but the least I could do was to try and get some answers that satisfied me.

  ‘Why are you doing this, Elliot?’

  ‘Doing what, being a lawyer?’

  ‘No, being this kid’s lawyer.’

  I waited for the speech about a man sometimes having to do what a man has to do, about how nobody else would stand up for the kid and how Elliot had been unable to stand by and watch while he was strapped to a gurney and injected with poisons until his heart stopped. Instead, he surprised me. Perhaps it was tiredness, or the events of the previous night, but when he spoke there was a bitterness in his voice that I had not heard before.

  ‘You know, part of me always hated this place. I hated the attitudes, the small-town mentality. The guys I saw around me, they didn’t want to be princes of industry, or politicians, or judges. They didn’t want to change the world. They wanted to drink beer and screw women, and a thousand a month working in a gas station would allow them to do that. They were never going to leave, but if they weren’t, then I sure as hell was.’

  ‘So you became a lawyer.’

  ‘That’s right: a noble profession, whatever you might think.’

  ‘And you went to New York.’

  ‘I went to New York, but I hated New York even more than I hated here, and maybe I still had something to prove.’

  ‘So now you’re going to represent this kid as a way of getting back at them all?’

  ‘Something like that. I have a gut feeling, Charlie: this kid didn’t kill Marianne Larousse. He may be lacking in some of the social graces, but a rapist and a murderer he ain’t. There’s no way that I can stand by and watch them execute him for a crime he didn’t commit.’

  I let it sink in. Maybe it wasn’t for me to question another’s crusade. After all, I’d been accused of being a crusader myself often enough in the past.

  ‘I’ll call you tomorrow,’ I said. ‘Try to stay out of trouble until then.’

  He breathed out deeply at what he saw as a crack of light in the darkness. ‘Thanks, I’d appreciate that.’

  When I hung up the phone, Rachel was leaning against the doorjamb watching me.

  ‘You’re going down there, aren’t you?’

  It wasn’t an accusation, just a question.

  I shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘You seem to feel some debt of loyalty to him.’

  ‘No, not to him in particular.’ I wasn’t sure that I could put my reasons into words, but I felt like I had to try, to explain it to myself as much as to Rachel.

  ‘When I’ve been in trouble, when I’ve taken on cases that were difficult, and worse than difficult, I’ve had people who were willing to stand alongside me: you, Angel, Louis, others too, and some of those people didn’t survive their involvement. Now I have someone asking me for help and I’m not sure that I can turn away so easily.’

  ‘“What goes around comes around?”’

  ‘I guess so. But if I go down, there are things that need to be taken care of first.’

  ‘Such as?’

  I didn’t reply.

  ‘You mean me.’ Invisible fingers traced thin lines of irritation on her forehead. ‘We’ve talked about this before.’

  ‘No, I’ve talked about it. You just block your ears.’

  I heard my voice rising, and took a deep breath before I spoke again.

  ‘Look, you won’t carry a gun, and—’

  ‘I’m not listening to this,’ she said. She stormed up the stairs. Seconds later, I heard the door to her office slam shut.

  I met Detective Sergeant Wallace MacArthur of the Scarborough PD in the Panera Bread Company over by the Maine Mall. I’d had a run-in with MacArthur during the events leading up to Faulkner’s capture but we’d settled our differences over a meal at the Back Bay Grill. Admittedly, the meal had cost me the best part of two hundred bucks, including the wine MacArthur drank, although it was worth it to have him back on my side.

  I ordered a coffee and joined him at a booth. He was tearing apart a warm cinnamon roll with his fingers, the frosting reduced to the consistency of melted butter, and leaving stains on the personal ads in the latest issue of the Casco Bay Weekly. The personals in the CBW tended to be pretty heavy on women who wanted to cuddle in front of fires, go hiking in the depths of winter, or join experimental dance classes. None of them seemed like candidates for MacArthur, who was about as cuddly as a holly bush and didn’t like any physical activity that involved getting out of bed. Aided by the metabolism of a greyhound and his bachelor lifestyle, he had reached his late forties without being forced into the potential pitfalls of good eating and regular exercise. MacArthur’s idea of exercise was using alternate fingers to push the remote.

  ‘Found anyone you like?’ I asked.

  MacArthur chewed reflectively on a chunk of roll.

  ‘How come all these women claim they’re “attractive” and “cute” and “easygoing”?’ he replied. ‘I mean, I’m single. I’m out there, looking around, and I never meet women like these. I meet unattractive. I meet noncute. I meet hard-going. If they’re so good looking and happy-go-lucky, how come they’re advertising at the back of the Casco Bay Weekly? I tell you, I think some of these women are telling lies.’

  ‘Maybe you should try the ads farther on.’

  MacArthur’s eyebrows gave a startled leap.

  ‘The freaks? Are you kidding? I don’t even know what some of that stuff means.’ He flicked discreetly to the back pages, then gave the tables nearby a quick scan to make sure no one was watching. His voice dropped to a whisper. ‘There’s a woman in here looking for “a male replacement for her show
er”. I mean, what the hell is that? I wouldn’t even know what she wanted me to do. Does she want me to fix her shower, or what?’

  I looked at him. He looked back. For a man who had been a cop for over twenty years, MacArthur could come across as a little sheltered.

  ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘No, say it.’

  ‘No, I just don’t think that woman’s for you, that’s all.’

  ‘You’re telling me. I don’t know what’s worse: understanding what these people are looking for, or not understanding. Jesus, all I want is a normal, straightforward relationship. That’s got to exist somewhere, right?’

  I wasn’t sure that there was such a thing as a normal, straightforward relationship, but I understood what he meant. He meant that Detective Wallace MacArthur wasn’t going to be anybody’s shower replacement.

  ‘Last I heard you were helping Al Buxton’s widow overcome her grief.’ Al Buxton had been a York County deputy until he contracted some weird degenerative disease that made him look like a mummy without its bandages. His passing was mourned by pretty much nobody. Al Buxton was so unpleasant he made shingles look good.

  ‘It didn’t last. I don’t think she had too much grief to overcome. Y’know, she told me once that she fucked his embalmer. I don’t think he even got to wash his hands, she was on him so fast.’

  ‘Maybe she was grateful for the nice job he’d done. Al looked a whole lot better dead than he did alive. Better company, too.’

  MacArthur laughed, but the action seemed to irritate his eyes. It was only then that I saw how red and swollen they were. He looked like he’d been crying. Maybe the whole single thing was getting to him more than I thought.