The Charlie Parker Collection 1

by John Connolly

  It was a little blonde girl. Her face was contorted in pain, her head shaking from side to side in a blur of movement, faster than was humanly possible, and he could hear the sound of her cries, a steady nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh filled with fear and agony and rage. Her clothes were shredded and she was naked from the waist down, her body torn and marked where she had been dragged along the road beneath the wheels of the car.

  Hubert knew who she was. Oh yes, Hubert knew. Ruby Blanton, that was her name. Pretty little Ruby Blanton, killed when a guy distracted by his pager hit her as she was crossing the street to her house and dragged her sixty feet beneath the wheels of his car. Hubert recalled her head turning at the last moment, the impact of the hood against her body, the final sight of her eyes before she disappeared under his wheels.

  Oh, Hubert knew who she was. He knew for sure.

  The man standing before her made no attempt to reach for her, or to console her. Instead, he hummed the song that Hubert had heard for the first time that day.

  Walk with me, brother.

  Come walk with me, sister.

  And we’ll walk, and we’ll walk—

  He turned, and something shone behind those blighted eyes as they regarded Hubert.

  ‘You on the White Road now, brother,’ he whispered. ‘You come see what’s been waiting for you on the White Road.’

  He moved aside, and the light advanced toward Hubert, the girl’s head shaking, her eyes closed and the sound pouring from her lips like the steady drip of water.

  Nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh.

  Her eyes opened and Hubert stared into them, his guilt reflected deep within, and he felt himself falling, falling to the clean tiles, falling toward his own reflection.

  Falling, falling, to the White Road.

  They found him there later, blood pooling from the wound he had opened in his head on impact. A doctor was called, and he asked Hubert about dizzy spells and alcohol consumption and suggested that Hubert should maybe take up the offer of a proper home. Hubert thanked him, then collected his things and left the shelter. The olive-skinned man was already gone and Hubert didn’t see him again, although he found himself looking over his shoulder, and for a time he didn’t sleep in Magnolia, preferring instead to sleep in streets and alleys, among the living.

  But now he has returned to the cemetery. It is his place, and the memory of the vision in the showers is almost forgotten, the stain of its recalling papered over with the excuse of alcohol and tiredness and the temperature he had been running since before that night at the shelter.

  Hubert sometimes sleeps close to the Stolle grave, marked by the figure of a woman weeping at the foot of a cross. It is sheltered by trees, and from here he can see the road and the lake. Nearby is a flat granite stone covering the resting place of a man named Bennet Spree, a comparatively recent addition to the old cemetery. The plot had been in the ownership of the Spree family for a very long time but Bennet Spree was the last of his line and he had finally claimed the plot as his own when he died in July 1981.

  There is a shape lying on Bennet Spree’s stone as Hubert approaches. For a moment he almost turns away, not wanting to argue with another wanderer over territory and not trusting a stranger enough to want to sleep beside him in the cemetery, but something about the form draws him closer. As he nears it a light breeze stirs the trees, dappling the figure with moonlight, and Hubert can see that it is naked and that the shadows that lie on the body are unaltered by the movement of the trees.

  There is a ragged wound at the man’s throat, a strange hole, as if something has been inserted into his mouth through the soft flesh beneath his chin. The torso and legs are almost black with blood.

  But there are two other things that Hubert notices before he turns and runs.

  The first is that the man has been castrated.

  The second is the implement that has been thrust into his chest. It is rusted and T-shaped and a note is impaled upon it, the blood from the man’s chest staining it slightly. There is something written on the note in neatly drawn letters.

  It reads: DIG HERE.

  And they will dig. A judge will be sought and an exhumation order signed, for Bennet Spree has no living relatives to give their consent to the further desecration of his resting place. It will be a day or two before the rotting coffin is lifted from the ground, carefully bound with ropes and plastic so that it does not fall apart and spill Bennet Spree’s mortal remains upon the dark, exposed earth.

  And where the coffin had rested for so long they will find a thin sprinkling of earth, and as they move it carefully away bones will be revealed: first the ribs, then the skull, its jawbone shattered, the cranium itself broken, cracks radiating from the ragged holes gouged in it by the blows that killed her.

  It is all that is left of a girl on the verge of becoming a woman.

  It is all that is left of Addy, the mother of Atys Jones.

  And her son will die without ever knowing the final resting place of the woman who brought him into this world.

  PART FOUR

  When [the angels] descend, they put on the

  garment of this world.

  If they did not put on a garment befitting this

  world

  they could not endure in this world

  and the world could not endure them.

  The Zohar

  17

  It was almost sunrise.

  Cyrus Nairn crouched naked in the dark womb of the hollow. Soon, he would have to leave this place. They would come looking for him, suspecting immediately some form of vendetta against the guard Anson and turning their attention toward those who had most recently been released from Thomaston. Cyrus would be sorry to go. He had spent so long dreaming of being back here, surrounded by the smell of damp earth, root ends caressing his bare back and shoulders. Still, there would be other rewards. He had been promised so much. In return, sacrifices were to be expected.

  From outside there came the calling of the first birds, the gentle lapping of the water upon the banks, the buzzing of the last night insects as they fled the approaching light, but Cyrus was deaf to the sounds of life beyond the hole. Instead he remained motionless, conscious only of the noises coming from the loose earth under his feet, both watching and feeling the slight shifting as Aileen Anson struggled beneath the dirt and, finally, grew still.

  I was woken up by the telephone ringing in my room. It was 8:15 A.M.

  ‘Charlie Parker?’ said a male voice that I didn’t recognize.

  ‘Yeah. Who is this?’

  ‘You got a breakfast appointment in ten minutes. You don’t want to keep Mr. Wyman waiting.’ He hung up.

  Mr. Wyman.

  Willie Wyman.

  The boss of the Dixie Mafia’s Charleston branch wanted to have breakfast with me.

  This was not a good way to start the day.

  The Dixie Mafia had existed, in one form or another, since Prohibition, a conglomeration of loosely associated criminals with bases in most of the big Southern cities but particularly Atlanta, Georgia, and Biloxi, Mississippi. They recruited one another for out-of-state jobs: an arson attack in Mississippi might be the work of a firefly from Georgia, or a hit in South Carolina could be farmed out to a contract killer from Maryland. The Dixies were pretty unsophisticated, dealing in drugs, gambling, murder, extortion, robbery, arson. The closest they ever got to white-collar crime was robbing a laundry, but that didn’t mean that they weren’t a force to be reckoned with. In September 1987, the Dixie Mafia had murdered a judge, Vincent Sherry, and his wife, Margaret, at their home in Biloxi. It was never made clear why Sherry and his wife had been shot – there were allegations that Vincent Sherry had been involved in criminal operations through the law offices of Halat and Sherry, and Sherry’s law partner, Peter Halat, was later convicted on charges of racketeering and murder connected to the deaths of the Sherrys – but the reasons behind the murders were largely inconsequential. Men who kill judges are dangerous because they will
act before they think. They don’t weigh up the consequence of their actions until after the fact.

  In 1983 Paul Mazzell, the then boss of the Charleston branch, was convicted with Eddie Merriman of the murder of Ricky Lee Seagreaves, who had robbed one of Mazzell’s drug deals. Since then, Willie Wyman had been the king in Charleston. He was five four in height and weighed about one hundred pounds in wet clothes, but he was mean and cunning and capable of doing just about anything to maintain his position. At 8:30 A.M., he was sitting at a table by the wall in Charleston Place’s main dining room, eating bacon and eggs. There was one other empty chair at the table. Nearby, four men sat in two pairs at separate tables, keeping watch over Willie, the door, and me.

  Willie had short, very dark hair, deeply tanned skin, and was wearing a bright blue shirt and blue chinos. The shirt was decorated with small white clouds. He looked up at me as I approached the table and waved his fork to indicate that I should join him. One of his men seemed about to frisk me but Willie, conscious of operating in a public place, waved him away.

  ‘We don’t need to frisk you, do we?’

  ‘I’m not armed.’

  ‘Good. I don’t think the people at Charleston Place would appreciate their breakfast tables being all shot up. You want to order? It’s on you.’ He grinned humorlessly.

  I ordered coffee, juice, and toast from the waitress. Willie finished devouring his food and wiped his mouth on a napkin.

  ‘Now,’ he said, ‘to business. I hear you kicked Andy Dalitz’s nuts so far up his tubes that he can scratch them by sticking his fingers in his mouth.’

  He waited for a reply. Under the circumstances, it seemed wise to oblige.

  ‘LapLand’s your place?’ I said.

  ‘One of them. Look, I know Andy Dalitz is a moron. Hell, I’ve wanted to kick him in the nuts for as long as I’ve known him, but the guy’s got three fucking Adam’s apples now because of you. Maybe he had it coming, I don’t know. All I’m saying is that if you want to visit one of our clubs, then you should ask, and ask nice. Kicking the manager so hard that he can taste his balls in his mouth is not asking nice.

  ‘And I got to tell you: if you’d done that in public, in front of customers or the girls, then we’d be having a very different conversation now. Because if you make Andy look bad, then you make me look bad, and the next thing you know I have guys thinking maybe my time has come and I should make way for somebody new. Then I have two choices: I either convince them that they’re wrong, and then I got to find somewhere to put them and we waste a day driving around with them stinking up the trunk until we find a place, or else I’m the one stinking up the trunk and between you and me, that’s not gonna happen. We clear?’

  My coffee, OJ, and toast arrived. I poured the coffee and offered Willie the option of a fresh refill. He accepted, and thanked me. He was nothing if not polite.

  ‘We’re clear,’ I assured him.

  ‘I know all about you,’ he said. ‘You could screw up paradise. The only reason you’re still alive is that even God doesn’t want you near Him. I hear you’re working with Elliot Norton on the Jones case. Is there something I need to know here, because that case stinks like my kid’s diapers? Andy told me you wanted to speak to the half-breed, Tereus.’

  ‘Is that what he is?’

  ‘The fuck am I, his cousin?’ He relented a little. ‘His people came from Kentucky way back, is all I know. Who knows who they were fucking out there? There are people in those mountains who are maybe half fucking goat because their daddies got an itch at a bad time. Even the blacks don’t want nothing to do with Tereus or his kind. Lesson over. Give me something.’

  I didn’t have any choice but to tell him something of what I knew.

  ‘Tereus visited Atys Jones in jail. I wanted to know why.’

  ‘You find out?’

  ‘I think Tereus knew the family. Plus he’s found Jesus.’

  Willie looked unhappy, although not terminally so.

  ‘That’s what he told Andy. I figure Jesus should be more careful about who finds Him. I know you’re not telling me everything, but I’m not going to make an issue of it, not this time. I’d prefer it if you didn’t go back to the club, but if you do have to go, keep it discreet and don’t kick Andy Dalitz in the balls again. In return, I expect you to let me know if there’s anything that I should be worried about, you understand?’

  ‘I understand.’

  He nodded, seemingly content, then sipped his coffee.

  ‘You tracked down that preacher, right? Faulkner?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  He watched me carefully. He seemed amused.

  ‘I hear Roger Bowen is trying to get him out.’

  I hadn’t called Elliot since Atys Jones had told me of Mobley’s connection to Bowen. I wasn’t sure how it fitted into what I already knew. Now, as Willie Wyman mentioned Bowen’s name, I tried to block out the noise from the adjoining tables and listen only to him.

  ‘You curious about why that might be?’ Willie continued.

  ‘Very.’

  He leaned back and stretched, exposing the sprinkling of sweat under his arms.

  ‘Roger and me go way back, and not in a good way. He’s a fanatic and he has no respect. I’ve thought about maybe sending him away on a cruise: a long cruise, strictly one-way to the bottom, but then the crazies would come knocking on my door and it would be cruises for everyone. I don’t know what Bowen wants with the preacher: a figurehead, maybe, or could be the old man has something stashed away that Bowen wants to get hold of. Like I said, I don’t know, but you want to ask him, I can tell you where he’ll be later today.’

  I waited.

  ‘There’s a rally in Antioch. Rumor is that Bowen is going to talk at it. There’ll be press there, maybe some TV. Bowen didn’t use to make public appearances too often, but this Faulkner thing has brought him out from under his rock. You go along, you might get to say hi.’

  ‘Why are you telling me this?’

  He stood, and the other four men rose at the same time.

  ‘I figure why should it just be me who has his day fucked up by you, you know? If you’ve got shit on your shoe, you spread it around. And Bowen’s already having a bad day. I like the idea of you making it worse.’

  ‘What’s so bad about today for Bowen?’

  ‘You should watch the news. They found his pit bull Mobley up at Magnolia cemetery last night. He was castrated. I gotta go tell Andy Dalitz, maybe make him see how lucky he was just to get his nuts bruised instead of cut off completely. Thanks for breakfast.’

  He left me, his blue shirt billowing, his four goons in tow like big children following a little piece of fallen sky.

  Elliot did not turn up for our scheduled meeting that morning. The answering machine was picking up calls at his office and at his home. His cell phones – both his own and the clean one we were using for day-to-day contact – were off. Meanwhile, the papers were full of the discovery of Landron Mobley’s body at the Magnolia cemetery, but hard details were scarce. According to the reports, Elliot Norton had been uncontactable for comment on his client’s death.

  I spent the morning confirming the details of more witness statements, knocking on trailer doors and fighting off dogs in overgrown yards. By midday I was worried. I checked on Atys by phone, and the old man told me he was doing okay, although he was becoming a little stir-crazy. I spoke to Atys for a couple of minutes, but his replies were surly at best.

  ‘When can I leave here, man?’ he asked me.

  ‘Soon,’ I replied. It was only a half truth. If Elliot’s fears about his safety were real, my guess was that we’d be moving him soon enough, but only to another safe house. Until his trial, Atys was going to have to get used to staring at TVs in unfamiliar rooms. Pretty soon, though, he wouldn’t be my concern. I was getting nowhere fast with the witnesses.

  ‘You know Mobley’s dead?’

  ‘Yeah, I heard. I’m all cut up.’

 
‘Not as cut up as he is. You got any idea who might have done a thing like that to him?’

  ‘No I ain’t, but you find out, you let me know. I want to shake the man’s hand, m’sayin?’

  He hung up. I looked at my watch. It was just after twelve. It would take me more than an hour to get to Antioch. I tossed a mental coin and decided to go.

  The Carolina Klans, in common with klaverns across the country, had been in decline for the best part of twenty years. In the case of the Carolinas the decline could be dated back to November 1979, when five Communist Workers died in a shoot-out with Klansmen and neo-Nazis up in Greensboro, North Carolina. The anti-Klan movements assumed a new momentum in the aftermath while Klan membership continued to drop, and on those occasions when Klansmen took to the streets, they were vastly outnumbered by protesters. Most of the recent Klan rallies in South Carolina had been the work of the Indiana-based American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, since the local Carolina Knights had demonstrated a reluctance to become involved.

  But against their decline had to be set the fact that over thirty black churches had been burned in South Carolina since 1991 and Klansmen had been linked to at least two of those burnings, in Williamsburg and Clarendon counties. In other words, the Klan may have been dying on its feet, but the hatred that it represented was still alive and well. Now Bowen was trying to give that hatred a new momentum, and a new focus. If the news reports were to be believed, he was succeeding.

  Antioch didn’t look like it had too much to recommend it at the best of times. It resembled the suburb of a town that didn’t exist: there were houses, and streets that somebody had taken the trouble to name, but none of the larger malls or town centers that might have been expected to grow up alongside them. Instead, the section of 119 that passed through Antioch had sprouted small strip malls like clumps of mushrooms, boasting between them little more than a couple of gas stations, a video store, a pair of convenience stores, a bar and, a laundromat.