‘But who told you this?’
‘I spoke to our family doctor. He’s retired now, but he’d kept his records. He had them checked, and sent me copies of two blood tests from my father and my mother. That confirmed it for me. It’s possible that I’m my father’s son, but not my mother’s.’
‘This is madness,’ said Jimmy.
‘You were closer to my father than any of his other friends. If he had told anyone about it, he would have told you.’
‘Told me what? That there was a cuckoo in the nest?’ He stood up. ‘I can’t listen to this. I won’t listen to it. You’re mistaken. You must be.’
He picked up the coffee cups and emptied their contents into the sink, then left them there. His back was to me, but I could see that his hands were shaking.
‘I’m not,’ I said. ‘It’s the truth.’
Jimmy spun around and moved toward me. I felt sure that he was going to take a swing at me. I stood and kicked the chair away, tensing for the blow, waiting to block it if I had time to see it, but it did not come. Instead, Jimmy spoke calmly and deliberately.
‘Then it’s a truth that they didn’t want you to know, and one that can’t help you. They loved you, both of them. Whatever this is, whatever you think you’ve discovered, leave it alone. It’s only going to hurt you if you keep searching.’
‘You seem very sure of that, Jimmy.’
He swallowed hard.
‘Fuck you, Charlie. You need to go now. I have things to do.’
He waved a hand in dismissal and turned his back on me once more.
‘I’ll be seeing you, Jimmy,’ I said, and I knew that he heard the warning in my voice, but he said nothing. I let myself out and walked back to the subway.
Later I would learn that Jimmy Gallagher waited only until he was certain that I would not return before making the call. It was a number that he had not dialed in many years, not since the day after my father’s death. He was surprised when the man answered the phone himself, almost as surprised as he was to discover that he was still alive.
‘It’s Jimmy Gallagher.’
‘I remember,’ said the voice. ‘It’s been a long time.’
‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but not long enough.’
He thought he heard something that might have been a laugh. ‘Well, what can I do for you, Mr. Gallagher?’
‘Charlie Parker was just here. He’s asking questions about his parents. He said something about blood types. He knows about his mother.’
There was silence on the other end of the line, then: ‘It was always going to happen. Eventually he had to find out.’
‘I didn’t tell him anything.’
‘I’m sure that you didn’t, but he’ll come back. He’s too good at what he does not to discover that you’ve lied to him.’
‘And then?’
The answer, when it came, gave Jimmy his final surprise on a day already filled with unwanted surprises.
‘Then you might want to tell him the truth.’
10
I spent that night at the home of Walter Cole, the man after whom I’d named my dog and my former partner and mentor in the NYPD, and his wife, Lee. We ate dinner together, and talked of mutual friends, of books and movies and how Walter was spending his retirement, which seemed to consist of little more than napping a lot and getting under his wife’s feet. At 10 p.m. Lee, who was nobody’s idea of a night owl, kissed me on the cheek and went to bed, leaving Walter and me alone. He threw another log on the fire and filled his glass with the last of the wine, then asked me what I was doing in the city.
I told him of the Collector, a raggedy man who believed himself to be an instrument of justice, a foul individual who killed those whom he considered to have forfeited their souls due to their actions. I recalled the nicotine stink of his breath as he spoke of my parents, the satisfaction in his eyes as he spoke of blood types, of things that he could not have known but did, and of how all that I had believed about myself began to fall away at that moment. I told him of the medical records, my meeting earlier that day with Jimmy Gallagher, and of how I was convinced that he had knowledge he was not sharing with me. I also told him one thing that I had not discussed with Jimmy. When my mother died of cancer, the hospital had retained samples of her organs. Through my lawyer, I’d had a DNA test conducted, comparing a swab taken from my cheek with my mother’s tissue. There was no match. I had not been able to carry out a similar test on my father’s DNA. There were no samples available. It would require an exhumation order on his remains for such a test, and I was not yet willing to go that far. Perhaps I was frightened of what I might find. After discovering the truth about my mother, I had wept. I was not sure that I was ready to sacrifice my father on the same altar as the woman I had called my mother.
Walter sipped his wine and stared into the fire, not speaking until I was done.
‘Why did this man, this “Collector,” tell you all of this, all these truths and half-truths, to begin with?’ he asked. It was a typical cop move: don’t go straight to the main issue, but skirt it. Probe. Buy time in which to start connecting small details to larger ones.
‘Because it amused him,’ I replied. ‘Because he’s cruel in ways that we can’t even begin to imagine.’
‘He doesn’t sound like the kind of guy who drops hints lightly.’
‘No.’
‘Which means he was goading you into acting. He knew you couldn’t let this slide.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘I’m saying that, from what you’ve told me, he’s used people before to achieve his own ends. Hell, he’s even used you. Just be careful that he’s not using you again to flush someone out.’
Walter was right. The Collector had used me to establish the identities of the depraved men he was seeking so that he could punish them for their failings. He was cunning, and absolutely without mercy. Now he had hidden himself away again, and I had no desire to find him.
‘But if that’s true, then who is he looking for?’
Walter shrugged. ‘From what you’ve told me, he’s always looking for somebody.’
Then we came to it.
‘As for this blood thing, well, I don’t know what to say. What are the options? Either you were adopted by Will and Elaine Parker, and they kept that from you for reasons of their own, or Will Parker fathered you by another woman, and he and Elaine raised you as their own child. That’s it. Those are the choices.’
I couldn’t disagree. The Collector had told me that I was not my father’s son, but the Collector, from my past experience of him, never told the truth, not entirely. It was all a game to him, a means of furthering his own ends, whatever they might be, but always leavened with a little cruelty. But it might also have been the case that he simply did not know the entire truth, only that something in my parentage did not add up. I still did not believe that I had no blood ties to my father. Everything in me rebelled against it. I had seen myself in him. I recalled how he had spoken to me, how he had looked at me. It was different from the woman I had known as my mother. Perhaps I simply did not want to admit the possibility that it was all a lie, but I would not accept such a thing until I had irrefutable proof.
Walter walked to the fire, then squatted to stab at it with the poker.
‘I’ve been married to Lee for thirty-nine years now. If I’d cheated on her, and the other woman became pregnant, I don’t think Lee would have taken kindly to a suggestion that we raise the child alongside our own daughters.’
‘Even if something had happened to the mother?’
Walter thought about it. ‘Again, I can only speak from my own experience, but the strain that would put on a marriage would be almost unendurable. You know, to be faced every day with the fruit of your husband’s infidelity, to have to pretend that this child was loved as much as the others, to treat it the same way as one’s own children.’ He shook his head. ‘No, it’s too difficult. I’m still inclined toward the first option:
adoption.’
But they had no other children, I thought. Would that have changed things?
‘But why keep it from me?’ I asked, putting that thought aside. ‘There’s no shame to it.’
‘I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t an official adoption, and they were frightened that you might be taken from them. In that case, it would have been better to keep it quiet until you were an adult.’
‘I was a student when my mother died. Enough time had passed by then for her to have told me.’
‘Yeah, but look at what she’d gone through. Her husband takes his own life, branded a killer. She leaves the state, takes her son back to Maine with her, then she contracts cancer. It could be that you were all she had left, and she didn’t want to lose you as her son, whatever the truth might have been.’
He rose from the fire and resumed his seat. Walter was older than me by almost twenty years and, in that moment, the relationship between us seemed more like that of a father and a son than two men who had served together.
‘Because here’s the thing of it, Charlie: no matter what you discover, they were your mother and your father. They were the ones who raised you, who sheltered you, who loved you. What you’re chasing is some kind of medical definition of a parent, and I understand that. It has meaning for you. In your shoes, I’d probably do the same. But don’t mistake this for the real thing: Will and Elaine Parker were your father and your mother, and don’t let anything that you discover obscure that fact.’
He gripped my arm once, tightly, before releasing me.
‘So what now?’
‘My lawyer has the papers prepared for an exhumation order,’ I said. ‘I could have my DNA checked against my father’s.’
‘You could, but you haven’t. Not ready for that yet, right?’
I nodded.
‘When do you go back to Maine?’
‘Tomorrow afternoon, after I speak to Eddie Grace.’
‘Who?’
‘Another of my father’s cop friends. He’s been ill, but his daughter says that he might be up to a few minutes with me now, if I don’t tax him.’
‘And if you don’t get anything from him?’
‘I put the squeeze on Jimmy.’
‘If Jimmy’s hidden something, then he’s hidden it well. Cops gossip. You know that. They’re like fishwives: hard to keep anything quiet once it gets out. Even now, I know who’s screwing around behind his wife’s back, who’s fallen off the wagon, who’s using blow or taking kickbacks from hookers and dealers. It’s the way of things. And after those two kids died, IAD went over your father’s life and career with a magnifying glass and tweezers in an effort to find out why it happened.’
‘The official investigation uncovered nothing.’
‘Screw the official investigation. You, more than anyone, should know how these things work. There would have been the official inquiry, and the shadow one: one that was recorded and open to examination, and one that was conducted quietly and then buried in a pit.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘I’m saying I’ll ask around. I still have favors owed. Let’s see if there was a loose thread anywhere that somebody pulled. In the meantime, you do what you have to do.’
He finished his wine.
‘Now, let’s call it a night. In the morning, I’ll give you a ride out to Pearl River. I always did like to see how the Micks live. Made me feel better about not being one.’
11
Eddie Grace had recently been released from the hospital into the care of his daughter, Amanda. Eddie had been ailing for a long time, and I’d been told he spent most of his time sleeping, but it seemed that he had rallied in recent weeks. He wanted to return home, and the hospital was content to let him leave, as there was nothing more that its staff could do for him. The medication to control his pain could just as easily be given to him in his own bed as in a hospital room, and he would be less anxious and troubled if surrounded by his family. Amanda had left a message on my phone in response to my earlier inquiries, informing me that Eddie was willing and, it appeared, able to meet with me at her home.
Amanda lived up on Summit Street, within praying distance of St. Margaret of Antioch Church and on the other side of the tracks from our old house on Franklin Street. Walter dropped me off at the church and went for a coffee. Amanda answered the door seconds after I rang the bell, as though she had been waiting in the hallway for me to arrive. Her hair was long and brown, with a hint of some tone from a bottle that was not so far from her natural color as to be jarring. She was small, a little over five-two, with freckled skin and very light brown eyes. Her lipstick looked freshly applied, and she smelled of some citrus fragrance that, like her, managed the trick of being both unassuming yet striking.
I’d had a crush on Amanda Grace while we were at Pearl River High School together. She was a year older than I was, and hung with a crowd that favored black nail polish and obscure English groups. She was the kind of girl jocks pretended to abhor but about whom they secretly fantasized when their perky blond girlfriends were performing acts that didn’t require their boyfriends to look them in the eyes. About a year before my father died, she began dating Michael Ryan, whose main aims in life were to fix cars and open a bowling alley, not worthless ends in themselves but not the level of ambition that was going to satisfy a girl like Amanda Grace. Mike Ryan wasn’t a bad guy, but his conversational skills were limited, and he wanted to live and die in Pearl River. Amanda used to talk about visiting Europe, and studying at the Sorbonne. It was hard to see where common ground could lie between her and Mike, unless it was somewhere on a rock in the mid-Atlantic.
Now here she was, and although there were lines where there had not been lines before, she was, like the town itself, largely unaltered. She smiled.
‘Charlie Parker,’ she said. ‘It’s good to see you.’
I wasn’t sure how to greet her. I reached out a hand, but she slipped by it and hugged me, shaking her head against me as she did so.
‘Still the same awkward boy,’ she said, not, I thought, without a hint of fondness. She released her hold, and looked at me with amusement.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘You visit a good-looking woman, and you offer to shake her hand.’
‘Well, it’s been a long time. I don’t like to make assumptions. How’s your husband? Still playing with bowling pins?’
She giggled. ‘You make it sound kind of gay.’
‘Big man, stroking hard phallic objects. Difficult not to draw those conclusions.’
‘You can tell him that when you see him. I’m sure he’ll take it under advisement.’
‘I’m sure; that, or try to kick my ass from here to Jersey.’
The look on her face changed. Something of the good humor vanished, and what replaced it was speculative.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t think he’d try that with you.’
She stepped back into the house and held the door open for me.
‘Come in. I’ve made lunch. Well, I bought some cold cuts and salads, and there’s fresh bread. That’ll have to do.’
‘It’s more than enough.’ I moved into the house, and she closed the door behind me, squeezing past me to lead me to the kitchen, her hands resting for a moment at my waist, her stomach brushing my groin. I let out a deep sigh.
‘What?’ she said, wide-eyed and radiating innocence.
‘Nothing.’
‘Go on, say it.’
‘I think you could still flirt for your country.’
‘As long as it’s in a good cause. Anyway, I’m not flirting with you, not much. You had your chance a long time ago.’
‘Really?’ I tried to remember any chance I’d had with Amanda Grace, but nothing came to me. I followed her into the kitchen and watched her fill a jug from a purified water faucet.
‘Yeah, really,’ she said, not turning. ‘You only had to ask me out. It wasn’t complicated.’
I sa
t down. ‘Everything seemed complicated back then.’
‘Not to Mike.’
‘Well, he wasn’t a complicated guy.’
‘No, he wasn’t.’ She turned off the faucet and placed the jug on the table. ‘He still isn’t. As time goes on, I’ve come to realize that’s no bad thing.’
‘What does he do?’
‘He runs an auto shop in Orangetown. Still bowls, but he’ll die before he ever owns an alley of his own.’
‘And you?’
‘I used to teach elementary school, but I gave it up when my second daughter was born. Now I do some part-time work for a company that publishes schoolbooks. I guess I’m a saleswoman, but I like it.’
‘You have kids?’ I hadn’t known.
‘Two girls. Kate and Annie. They’re at school today. They’re still adjusting to having my dad here, though.’
‘How is he?’
She grimaced. ‘Not good. It’s just a matter of time. The drugs make him sleepy, but he’s usually good for an hour or two in the afternoon. Soon, he’ll have to go to a hospice, but he’s not ready for that, not yet. For now, he’ll stay here with us.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. He’s not. He had a great life, and he’s ending it with his family. He’s looking forward to seeing you, though. He liked your father a lot. Liked you too. I think he’d have been happy if we’d ended up together, once.’
Her face clouded. I think she had made a series of unspoken connections, creating an alternative existence in which she might have been my wife.
But my wife was dead.
‘We read about all that happened,’ she said. ‘It was awful, all of it.’
She was silent for a time. She had felt obliged to raise the subject, and now she did not know what to do to dispel the effect it had had.
‘I have a daughter too,’ I told her.
‘Really? That’s great,’ she said, with a little too much enthusiasm. ‘How old is she?’
The Charlie Parker Collection 5-8: The Black Angel, The Unquiet, The Reapers, The Lovers Page 137