The Charlie Parker Collection 1

by John Connolly

  To Cecil’s right, as he stood at the gates, was the old paddy wagon known as Black Lucy. It had been many years since Lucy had thrown her arms open to receive a new guest, but as Cecil looked closer, he could see a shape standing against the bars at the rear of the wagon. For a moment, Cecil’s heart seemed to pause in its beats, and he leaned a hand against the gate to guard against collapse. Cecil had already suffered two minor heart attacks in the previous five years, and he did not particularly want to leave this world in the event of a third. But instead of holding his weight, the gate opened inward with a creak.

  ‘Hey,’ said Cecil. He coughed. His voice sounded like it was about to break. ‘Hey,’ he repeated. ‘You okay in there?’

  The figure did not move. Cecil entered the grounds of the jail and walked warily toward Black Lucy. Dawn was lighting the city, the walls glowing dimly in the first rays of the early morning sun, but the figure in the wagon was still cast in shadow.

  ‘Hey,’ said Cecil, but his voice was already fading, the single syllable transformed into a descending cadence by the realization of what he was seeing.

  Atys Jones had been tied to the bars of the wagon, his arms outstretched. His body was bruised, his face bloodied and almost unrecognizable, swollen by the blows. Blood had darkened and dried upon his chest. There was also blood – too much blood to have merely soaked down – on his white shorts, the only clothing that he retained. His chin rested on his chest, his knees bent, his feet curled slightly inward. The T-bar cross was missing from around his neck.

  The old jail had just added a new ghost to its legions.

  20

  It was Adams who broke the news to me. His eyes were even more bloodshot than before from lack of sleep when he met me in the lobby of my hotel, and he had built up a sprinkling of gray-black stubble that had already begun to itch. He scratched at it constantly as we spoke, with a noise like bacon sizzling in a pan. A smell rose from him, the smell of sweat and spilled coffee, of grass and rust and blood. There were grass stains too on his trousers and on the sides of his shoes. Around his wrists, I could see the circular marks left by the disposable gloves he had worn at the scene as they had struggled to contain the great bulk of his hands.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I got nothing good to say to you about what happened to that boy. He died hard.’

  I felt Atys’s death as a weight on my chest, as if we had both fallen at the same time and his body had come to rest across my own. I had failed to protect him. We had all failed to protect him and now he had died for a crime that he had not committed.

  ‘Do you have a time of death?’ I asked him, as he drowned a piece of toast in thick butter.

  ‘Coroner reckons he’d been dead for about two or three hours when he was found. Doesn’t look like he was killed at the jail, either. There wasn’t enough blood in the paddy wagon, and none that we’ve found so far on the walls or grounds of the jail itself, even under UV. The beating was systematic: started at his toes and fingers, then moved on to his vital organs. They castrated him before he died, but probably not too long before. Nobody saw a thing. My guess is they picked him up before he got too far from the house, then took him somewhere quiet to work on him.’

  I thought of Landron Mobley, the cruelties visited upon his body, and almost spoke, but to give Adams more than he already had would be to give him everything and I was not ready to do that. There was too much here that I did not yet understand.

  ‘You going to talk to the Larousses?’

  Adams finished off his toast. ‘My guess is they knew about it as soon as I did.’

  ‘Or maybe even sooner.’

  Adams waved a finger at me in warning. ‘That’s the kind of implication could get a man in trouble.’ He gestured to a waitress for more coffee. ‘But since you brought it up, why would the Larousses want Jones beaten in that way?’

  I stayed silent.

  ‘I mean,’ he continued, ‘the nature of the injuries he received seems to indicate that the people who killed him wanted him to reveal something before he died. You think they wanted him to confess?’

  I almost spat in contempt.

  ‘Why? For the good of his soul? I don’t think so. If these people went to the trouble of killing his guardians and then hunting him down, then it doesn’t seem to me like they were in any doubt about why they were doing it.’

  There was, though, the possibility that Adams was at least partly right in his suggestion that a final confession was the motive. Suppose the men who found Atys were almost certain that he had killed Marianne Larousse, but almost certain wasn’t good enough. They wanted it from his own lips because if he wasn’t responsible, then the consequences were even more serious, and not simply because the real culprit might evade detection. No, the actions that had been taken in the last twenty-four hours indicated that some people were very concerned indeed about the possibility that someone might have targeted Marianne Larousse for very particular reasons. It seemed to me that it was about time to ask some hard questions of Earl Larousse Jr., but I wasn’t about to do that alone. The Larousses were hosting their party the following day, and I was expecting some company to join me in Charleston. The Larousses would have two unwelcome guests crashing their big occasion.

  That afternoon, I did some research in the Charleston Public Library. I pulled up the newspaper reports of Grady Truett’s death, but there was little more than Adele Foster had already told me. Persons unknown had entered his house, tied him to a chair, and cut his throat. No prints had been lifted, but the crime scene squad had to have found something. No crime scene is entirely clean. I was tempted to call Adams, but, once again, to do so would be to risk blowing everything that I had. I also found out a little more about the plateye. According to a book called Blue Roots, the plateye was a permanent resident of the spirit world, the underworld, although it was capable of entering the mortal world to seek retribution. It also had the ability to alter its form. As Adams had said, the plateye was a changeling.

  I left the library and headed onto Meeting. Tereus had still not returned to his apartment, and he now hadn’t shown up for work in two days. Nobody would tell me anything about him, and the stripper who had taken the twenty and then sold me out to Handy Andy was nowhere to be seen.

  Finally, I called the public defender’s office and was told that Laird Rhine was defending a client over at the state courthouse that afternoon. I parked at my hotel and walked down to the Four Corners, where I found Rhine in court number three at the arraignment of a woman named Johanna Bell, who had been accused of stabbing her husband in the course of a domestic argument. Apparently, she and her husband had been separated for about three months when he had returned to the family home and a quarrel had broken out over the ownership of the couple’s VCR. The quarrel had ended abruptly when she stabbed him with a carving knife. Her husband sat two rows behind her, looking sorry for himself.

  Rhine handled himself pretty well as he asked the arraignment judge to convert her bail to O.R. release. He was probably in his early thirties but he put up a good argument, pointing out that Bell had never been in trouble before; that she had been forced to call the cops on a number of occasions during the dying months of her marriage following threats and actual physical assault by her husband; that she could not meet the bail set; and that no purpose could be served by keeping her in jail and away from her infant son. He made her husband sound like a creep who was lucky to get away with a punctured lung, and the judge agreed to her release on her own recognizance. Afterward, she hugged Rhine and took her son in her arms from an older woman who stood waiting for her at the back of the court.

  I intercepted Rhine on the courthouse steps.

  ‘Mr. Rhine?’

  He paused, and something like worry flashed across his face. As a PD, he encountered some of the lowest forms of life and was sometimes forced to try to defend the indefensible. I didn’t doubt that, on occasion, his clients’ victims took things personally.

&nbs
p; ‘Yes?’ Up close he looked even younger. He hadn’t started to gray yet and his blue eyes were shielded by long, soft lashes. I flashed him my license. He glanced at it and gave a nod.

  ‘What can I do for you, Mr. Parker? You mind if we talk while we walk? I promised my wife I’d take her out to dinner tonight.’

  I fell into step alongside him.

  ‘I’m working with Elliot Norton on the Atys Jones case, Mr. Rhine.’

  His steps faltered for a moment, as though he had briefly lost his bearings, then resumed at a slightly faster speed. I accelerated to keep up.

  ‘I’m no longer involved in that case, Mr. Parker.’

  ‘Since Atys is dead, there isn’t much of a case, period.’

  ‘I heard. I’m sorry.’

  ‘I’m sure. I have some questions for you.’

  ‘I’m not sure that I can answer any questions. Maybe you should ask Mr. Norton.’

  ‘You know, I would, except Elliot isn’t around, and my questions are kind of delicate.’

  He stopped at the corner of Broad as the light changed to red. He gave the offending signal a look that suggested he was taking its interference in the course of his life kind of personally.

  ‘Like I said, I don’t know that I can help you.’

  ‘I’d like to know why you gave up the case.’

  ‘I have a lot of cases.’

  ‘Not like this one.’

  ‘My caseload doesn’t allow me to pick and choose, Mr. Parker. I was handed the Jones case. It was going to take up a lot of my time. I could have cleared ten cases in the time it took me just to go through the files. I wasn’t sorry to see it go.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You’re a young public defender. You’re probably ambitious, and from what I saw of your work today you have good reason to be. A high-profile case like the murder of Marianne Larousse doesn’t come along every day. If you had acquitted yourself well, even if you had ultimately lost, it would have opened doors for you. I don’t think you wanted to give it up so easily.’

  The lights had changed again, and we were jostled slightly as people crossed ahead of us. Still, Rhine didn’t move.

  ‘Whose side are you on in this, Mr. Parker?’

  ‘I haven’t decided yet. In the end, though, I guess I’m on the side of a dead woman and a dead man, for what it’s worth.’

  ‘And Elliot Norton?’

  ‘A friend. He asked me to come down here. I came.’

  Rhine turned to face me.

  ‘I was asked to pass the case on to him,’ he said.

  ‘By Elliot?’

  ‘No. He never approached me. It was another man.’

  ‘You know who he was?’

  ‘He said his name was Kittim. He had something wrong with his face. He came to my office and told me that I should let Elliot Norton defend Atys Jones.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I told him that I couldn’t do that. There was no reason to. He made me an offer.’

  I waited.

  ‘We all have skeletons in our closet, Mr. Parker. Suffice it to say that he gave me a glimpse of mine. I have a wife and a young daughter. I made mistakes early in my marriage, but I haven’t repeated them. I wasn’t planning on having my family taken away from me for sins that I’ve tried to make up for. I told Jones that Elliot Norton would be better qualified to handle his case. He didn’t object. I walked away. I haven’t seen Kittim since then, and I hope I never see him again.’

  ‘When were you approached?’

  ‘Three weeks ago.’

  Three weeks ago: about the time that Grady Truett had been killed. By then, James Foster and Marianne Larousse were also dead. As Adele Foster had said, something was happening, and whatever it was, it had reached a new level with the death of Marianne Larousse.

  ‘Is that all, Mr. Parker?’ asked Rhine. ‘I’m not happy about what I did. I don’t really want to go over it again.’

  ‘That’s pretty much it,’ I said.

  ‘I really am sorry about Atys,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sure that’s a great comfort to him,’ I replied.

  I returned to my hotel. There was a message from Louis, confirming that he would be arriving the next morning, a little later than expected. My spirits lifted slightly.

  That night, I stood at the window of my hotel, drawn by the steady, repeated hooting of a car horn. Across the street, in front of the cash machine, the black Coupe de Ville with the shattered windshield idled by the curb. As I watched, the rear driver’s side door opened, and the child emerged. She stood by the open door and beckoned to me, her lips moving soundlessly.

  I got a place we can go

  Her hips moved, shimmying to music only she could hear. She lifted her skirt, and she was naked yet sexless beneath, the skin smooth as a child’s doll. Her tongue moved over her lips.

  Come down

  Her hand moved over the smoothness of herself.

  I got a place

  She thrust herself at me once more before she climbed back into the car and it began to pull slowly away, spiders spilling from its half-closed door. I awoke rubbing gossamer from my face and hair and had to shower to banish the sensation of creatures moving across my body.

  21

  I was awakened by a knock at my door shortly after 9 A.M. Instinctively, I felt myself reaching for a gun that was no longer there. I wrapped a towel around my waist, then padded softly to the door and peered through the peephole.

  Six feet six inches of attitude, razor-sharp dress sense, and gay Republican pride looked me square in the eye.

  ‘I could see you looking out,’ said Louis as I opened the door. ‘Shit, don’t you ever go to the movies? Guy knocks, skinny-ass character actor looks out, guy puts barrel of gun to glass and shoots skinny-ass in the eye.’ He was dressed in a black linen suit, offset with a white collarless shirt. A wave of expensive eau de cologne followed him into the room.

  ‘You smell like a French whore,’ I told him.

  ‘I was a French whore, you couldn’t afford me. By the way, you maybe could use a little makeup yourself.’

  I paused, saw myself in the mirror by the door, and looked away again. He was right. I was pale, and there were dark smudges under my eyes. My lips were cracked and dry, and I could taste something metallic in my mouth.

  ‘I picked up something,’ I said.

  ‘No shit. The fuck you pick up, the plague? They bury people look better than you.’

  ‘What have you got, Tourette’s? You have to swear all the time?’

  He raised his hands in a backing-off gesture. ‘Hey, glad I came. Nice to be appreciated.’

  I apologized. ‘You checked in?’

  ‘Uh-huh, ’cept some motherfucker – sorry, but, shit, he was a motherfucker – try to hand me his bags at the door.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Took them, put them in the trunk of a cab, gave the guy fifty bucks, and told him to take them to the charity store.’

  ‘Classy.’

  ‘I like to think so.’

  I left him watching television while I showered and dressed, then we headed down to Diana’s on Meeting for coffee and a bite to eat. I ate half a bagel, then pushed it away.

  ‘You got to eat.’

  I shook my head. ‘It’ll pass.’

  ‘It’ll pass and you’ll be dead. So how we doin’?’

  ‘Same as usual: dead people, a mystery, more dead people.’

  ‘Who we lost?’

  ‘The boy. His guardians. Maybe Elliot Norton.’

  ‘Shit, don’t sound like we got anybody left. Anyone hires you better leave you your fee in their will.’

  I filled him in on all that had occurred, leaving out only the black car. That I didn’t need to burden him with.

  ‘So what you gonna do?’

  ‘Push a stick into the beehive and rustle up some bees. The Larousses are hosting a party today. I think we sh
ould avail ourselves of their hospitality.’

  ‘We got an invite?’

  ‘Has not having one ever stopped us before?’

  ‘No, but sometimes I just like to be invited to shit, you know what I’m sayin’, instead of having to bust in, get threatened, irritate the nice white folks, put the fear of the black man on them.’

  He paused, seemed to think for a while about what he had just said, then brightened.

  ‘Sounds good, doesn’t it?’ I said.

  ‘Real good,’ he agreed.

  We drove most of the way to the old Larousse plantation in separate vehicles, Louis parking his car about half a mile from the gates before joining me for the rest of the journey. I asked him about Angel.

  ‘He workin’ on a job.’

  ‘Anything I should know about?’

  He looked at me for a long time.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe, but not now.’

  ‘Uh-huh. I see you made the news.’

  He didn’t reply for a couple of seconds. ‘Angel tell you somethin’?’

  ‘Just gave me the name of the town. You waited a long time to settle that score.’

  He shrugged. ‘They was worth killin’, they just wasn’t worth travelin’ too far to kill.’

  ‘And since you were on your way down here anyway . . .’

  ‘I figured I’d stop by,’ he finished. ‘Can I go now, Officer?’

  I let it drop. At the entrance to the Larousse estate, a tall man in a flunky’s suit waved us down.

  ‘Can I see your invitations, gentlemen?’

  ‘We didn’t get invitations,’ I said, ‘but I’m pretty sure somebody is expecting us.’