The Charlie Parker Collection 5-8: The Black Angel, The Unquiet, The Reapers, The Lovers

by John Connolly

  And he and his bodyguards departed, leaving me with the dark haired mute who smiled sadly before she began to extinguish the lights.

  A bell rang somewhere in the back of the diner, causing a red bulb to flash above the counter for the woman to see. She put a finger to her lips, telling me that I should remain quiet, then disappeared behind a curtain. Seconds later, she gestured with a finger, asking me to join her.

  A small video screen revealed a figure standing in the bay behind the store. It was Louis. I indicated to her that I knew him, and it was okay to let him in. She opened the door.

  ‘There’s a car out front,’ said Louis. ‘Looks like it followed Epstein here. Two men inside wearing suits. Figure feds more than cops.’

  ‘They could have taken me while I was talking to Epstein.’

  ‘Maybe they don’t want to take you. Maybe they just want to find out where you’re staying.’

  ‘My landlord wouldn’t like that.’

  ‘Which is why your landlord is standing here, freezing his ass off.’

  I thanked the woman and joined Louis. She closed the door behind us.

  ‘Doesn’t say much,’ said Louis.

  ‘She’s a deaf mute.’

  ‘That would explain it. Good-looking woman, though, if you like the quiet type.’

  ‘You ever think of taking sensitivity training?’ I said.

  ‘You think it would help?’

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘Well, there you go.’

  At the end of the street, Louis paused and glanced back at the next corner. A cab appeared. He hailed it, and we pulled away with no signs of pursuit. The cab driver seemed more concerned with his Bluetooth conversation than with us, but to be certain, we switched cabs before we returned to the safety of the apartment.

  30

  Wrongly, Jimmy Gallagher had never believed himself to be good at keeping secrets. It wasn’t in his nature. He was garrulous. He liked to drink, to tell stories. When he drank, his tongue ran away with itself and his filters disintegrated. He would say things and wonder where they came from, as though he were standing outside himself and watching a stranger speak. But he knew the importance of keeping quiet about the origins of Will Parker’s son, and even in his cups there were parts of his own life that had remained concealed. Still, he had kept his distance from the boy and his mother after Will killed himself. Better to stay away from them, he felt, than risk saying something in front of the boy that might cause him to suspect, or offend his mother by speaking of things that were better left hidden in cluttered, careworn hearts. And despite his many flaws, in all the years since Elaine Parker had left for Maine with her son he had never once spoken of what he knew.

  But he had always suspected that Charlie Parker would come looking for him. It was in his nature to question, to seek out truths. He was a hunter, and there was a tenacity to him that would ultimately, Jimmy believed, cost him his life. Sometime in the future, he would overstep the mark and look into matters that were best left unexamined, and something would reach out and destroy him. Jimmy was certain of it. Perhaps the nature of his own identity, and the secret of his parentage, might well prove to be that mistake.

  He sipped the last of his wine and toyed with the glass, causing candle-cast patterns to flicker upon the walls. There was still a half bottle left beside the sink. A week ago, he would have finished it off and maybe opened another one for good measure, but not now. Some of the urge to drink more than he should had fallen away. He understood that it was to do with the clearing of his conscience. He had told Charlie Parker all that he knew, and now he was absolved.

  And yet he also felt that, in confessing, some connection between them had been severed. It was not a bond of trust, exactly, for he and Charlie had never been close, and never would be. He had sensed that, from an early age, the boy had been uneasy around him. But then Jimmy had never really figured out how to relate to kids. His sister was more than fifteen years older than he was, and he had grown up feeling like an only child. Then, too, his parents had been old when he was born. Old. He chuckled. What had they been: thirty-eight, thirty-nine? Still, there had always been a lack of understanding between his parents and their son, even though he had loved them both dearly, and the chasm between them had only widened as he had grown older. They had never discussed his sexuality, although he had always understood that his mother, and perhaps his father too, realized that their son was never going to marry any of the girls who occasionally accompanied him to dance halls or to the movies.

  And while he himself recognized his urges, he had never acted upon them. It was partly out of fear, he thought. He did not want his fellow officers to know that he was gay. They were his family, his true family. He did not want to do anything to alienate them. Now, in retirement, he remained a virgin. Funny, but he found it hard to equate that word with a man who was in his late sixties. It was a description that should be applied to young men and women on the brink of new experiences, not older ones. Oh, he was still energetic, and he still sometimes thought that it might be – nice? interesting? – to start a relationship, but that was the problem: he wasn’t sure where to start. He wasn’t some blushing bride waiting to be deflowered. He was a man with a certain knowledge of life, both good and bad. It was too late, he thought, to surrender himself now to someone with a greater degree of experience in matters of sex and love.

  He carefully vacuum-sealed the bottle of red wine and placed it in the refrigerator. It was a hint that he’d picked up from the local liquor store, and it worked fine as long as he remembered to let the wine warm up for a time before he began drinking it again the next day. He turned off the lights, double locked the front and back doors, and went to bed.

  He managed to incorporate the noise into his dream at first, the way he sometimes did when the alarm went off and he was so deep in sleep that bells began ringing in his dreams in turn. In the dream, a wineglass fell from the table and shattered on the floor. It wasn’t his wineglass, though, and it wasn’t quite his kitchen, although it resembled it. It was now bigger, the dark corners stretching away into infinity. The tiles on the floor were the tiles from the house in which he had grown up, and his mother was nearby. He could hear her singing, even though he could not see her.

  He woke. There was silence for a time, then the faintest disturbance: a sliver of glass caught underfoot, scraping against a tile. He climbed silently from his bed and opened his bedside cabinet. The .38 lay on the shelf, cleaned and loaded. He padded across the room in his underwear, and the boards did not creak beneath his feet. He knew this place intimately, every crack and join of it. Even though it was an old house, he could move through it without making a sound.

  He stood at the top of the stairs and waited. All was silent again, but still he sensed the presence of another. The darkness became oppressive to him, and suddenly he was frightened. He debated calling out a warning, and by doing so cause whoever was below to flee, but he knew that if he did so his voice would tremble and he would reveal his fear. Better to keep going. He had a gun. He was an ex-cop. If he was forced to shoot, then his own people would look after him. Screw the other guy.

  He made his way down the stairs. The kitchen door was open. A single shard of glass shone in the moonlight. Jimmy’s hand was shaking, and he tried to still it by assuming a double-handed grip on the gun. There were only two rooms on the lower level: the living room and the kitchen, linked by a pair of interconnecting doors. He could see that those doors were still closed. He swallowed, and thought that he could taste some of that evening’s wine in his mouth. It had gone sour, like vinegar.

  His bare feet felt cold, and he realized that the basement door was open. That was how the intruder had entered, and maybe that was how he had left after the wineglass broke. Jimmy winced. He knew that was wishful thinking. Someone was there. He could feel him. The living room was closest. He should search it first, so that whoever was there could not come from behind him when he searched the kit
chen.

  He glanced through the crack in the door. The drapes were not drawn, but the streetlight outside was broken and only a thin stream of moonlight filtered through the drapes, so it was hard to make out anything at all. He stepped inside quickly, and immediately knew that he had made a mistake. The shadows altered, and then the door struck him hard, knocking him off balance. As he tried to adjust the position of his gun and fire, there was a burning at his wrists. Skin was opened, tendons severed. The gun fell to the floor, blood from his wounds sprinkling on it. Something hit him once on the crown of the head, then again, and as he lost consciousness he thought that he glimpsed a long, flat blade.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  When he came to he was lying on his belly in the kitchen, his hands tied behind his back, his feet bound and drawn up to his buttocks, then linked to the ropes on his hands so that he could not move. He felt cold air on his bare skin, but not as badly as before. The basement door had been closed again, and now only a slight draft came from the gap between the kitchen door and the floor. The tiles were freezing, though. He felt weak. His hands and face were slick with blood, and his head ached. He tried to cry for help until a blade touched his cheek. The figure beside him had been so quiet and still that he had not even sensed its presence until it moved.

  ‘No,’ said a man’s voice, one that he did not recognize.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘To talk.’

  ‘Talk about what?’

  ‘Charlie Parker. His father. His mother.’

  Jimmy’s movement had caused the blood to flow once again from the wound on his head. It trickled into his eyes, stinging them.

  ‘Talk to him yourself, you want to know anything. I haven’t seen Charlie Parker in years, not since—’

  An apple was forced into his mouth, pushed in so hard and so far that he could not expel it or even sever it by biting down on it. He stared at his attacker’s face, and thought that he had never seen eyes so dark and so merciless. A piece of broken wineglass was held before his eyes. Jimmy’s gaze drifted from it to the symbol that seemed to be burned into the skin of the man’s forearm, then back to the glass again. He had seen that mark before, and he knew now what he was facing.

  Animal. Amale.

  Anmael.

  ‘You’re lying. I’m going to show you what happens to faggot cops who tell lies.’

  With one hand, Anmael gripped the back of Jimmy’s neck, holding his head down, while the other hand pushed the broken stem of the wineglass into the skin between his shoulder blades.

  Against the apple, Jimmy began to scream.

  31

  Jimmy Gallagher was discovered by Esmerelda, the El Salvadorean woman who came to his house twice every week to clean. When the police arrived, they found her weeping, but otherwise calm. It turned out that she’d seen a lot of dead men back home, and her capacity for shock was limited. Nevertheless, she could not stop crying for Jimmy, who had always been gentle and kind and funny with her, and had paid her more than was necessary, with a bonus at Christmas.

  It was Louis who told me. He came to the apartment shortly after 9 a.m. The story had already made the news shows on radio and TV, although the victim’s name had not been confirmed, but it hadn’t taken Louis long to find out that it was Jimmy Gallagher. I didn’t say anything for a time. I couldn’t. He had kept his secrets out of love for my father and mother and, I believe, out of a misplaced concern for me. Of all my father’s friends, it was Jimmy who had been the most loyal to him.

  I contacted Santos, the detective who had taken me to Hobart Street on the night that Mickey Wallace’s body had been discovered.

  ‘It was bad,’ he replied. ‘Someone took his time in killing him. I tried to call you, but your phone was out of service.’

  He told me that Jimmy’s body had been brought to the Brooklyn office of the chief medical examiner at Kings County Hospital on Clarkson Avenue, and I offered to meet him there.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Santos was smoking a cigarette outside when the cab pulled up to the mortuary.

  ‘You’re a hard man to find,’ he said. ‘You lose your cell phone?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘We need to talk when this is done.’

  He tossed the butt, and I followed him inside. He and a second detective named Travis stood at either side of the body while the attendant pulled back the sheet. I was beside Santos. He was watching the attendant. Travis was watching me.

  Jimmy had been cleaned up, but there were multiple cuts to his face and upper body. One of the incisions to his left cheek was so deep that I could see his teeth through the wound.

  ‘Turn him over,’ Travis said.

  ‘You want to help me?’ said the attendant. ‘He’s a heavy guy.’

  Travis was wearing blue plastic gloves, as was Santos. I was bare-handed. I watched as all three of them shifted Jimmy’s body, turning him first on his side and then onto his chest.

  The word ‘FAG’ had been carved into Jimmy’s back. Some of the cuts were more jagged than the rest, but all were deep. There must have been a lot of blood, and a lot of pain.

  ‘What was used?’

  It was Santos who replied. ‘The stem of a broken wineglass for the letters, and a blade of some kind for the rest. We didn’t find the weapon, but there were unusual wounds to the skull.’

  Gently, he moved Jimmy’s head, then parted the hair at the crown of his head to reveal a pair of overlapping, square-shaped contusions to the scalp. Santos made his right hand into a fist and brought it down twice through the air.

  ‘I’m guessing a big knife of some kind, maybe a machete or something similar. We figure the killer hit Jimmy a couple of times with the hilt to knock him out, then tied him up and went to work with the sharp edge. There were apples beside his head, with bite marks in them. That was why nobody heard him screaming.’

  He did not speak casually, or with a hint of callousness. Instead, he looked tired and sad. This was an ex-cop, and one who was remembered fondly by many. The details of the killing, the word cut into his back, would have circulated by now. The sadness and anger at his death would be tempered slightly by the circumstances. A fag killing: that was how some would speak of it. Who knew that Jimmy Gallagher was queer? they would ask. After all, they’d been drunk alongside him. They’d shared comments with him about passing women. Hell, he’d even dated some. And all that time, he was hiding the truth. And some would say that they had suspected all along, and wonder what he had done to bring this upon himself. There would be whispers: he made an advance to the wrong guy; he touched a kid . . .

  Ah, a kid.

  ‘Are you treating this as a hate crime?’ I asked.

  Travis shrugged and spoke for the first time. ‘It might come down to that. Either way, we have to ask questions that Jimmy wouldn’t have wanted asked. We’ll need to find out if there were lovers, or casual flings, or if he was into anything extreme.’

  ‘There won’t be any lovers,’ I said.

  ‘You seem pretty sure of that.’

  ‘I am. Jimmy was always kind of ashamed, and always frightened.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Of someone finding out. Of his friends knowing. They were all cops, and old school. I don’t think he trusted most of them to stand by him. He thought they’d laugh, or turn their backs on him. He didn’t want to be a joke. He preferred being alone to that.’

  ‘Well, if it’s not down to his lifestyle, then what is it?’

  I thought for a moment.

  ‘Apples,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ said Travis.

  ‘You said you found apples – more than one – beside him?’

  ‘Three. Maybe the killer thought that Jimmy might bite through after a while.’

  ‘Or maybe he stopped after each letter.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To ask questions.’

  ‘About what?’

  It was Santos who answered. ‘About him,’ he
said, pointing at me. ‘He thinks this is connected to the Wallace thing.’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘Wallace didn’t have “fag” cut into his flesh,’ said Santos, but I could tell that he was playing devil’s advocate.

  ‘They were both tortured to make them talk,’ I said.

  ‘And you knew them both,’ said Santos. ‘Why don’t you tell us again what you’re doing down here?’

  ‘I’m trying to find out why my father killed two teenagers in a car in 1982,’ I said.

  ‘And did Jimmy Gallagher have the answer?’

  I didn’t reply. I just shook my head.

  ‘What do you think he told his killer?’ asked Travis.

  I looked at the wounds that had been inflicted on him. I would have talked. It’s a myth that men can stand up to torture. Eventually, everybody breaks.

  ‘Whatever he could to make it stop,’ I said. ‘How did he die?’

  ‘He choked. A wine bottle was forced into his mouth, neck first. That’s going to hang weight on the hate crime side. It was, whatchacallit, phallic, or that’s how it will play.’

  It was vindictive, humiliating. An honorable man had been left, naked and bound, with a brand upon his back that would mark him among his fellow cops, casting shadows upon the memory of the individual they had known. I believed then that it wasn’t about what Jimmy Gallagher knew or did not know. He had been punished for remaining silent, and nothing that he could have said would have spared him from what was to come.

  Santos nodded at the attendant. Together, they moved Jimmy onto his back and covered his face once again, then restored him to his place among the numbered dead. The door was closed on him, and we left.

  Outside, Santos lit another cigarette. He offered one to Travis, who accepted.

  ‘You know,’ he said, ‘if you’re right, and this isn’t a hate deal, then he died because of you. What are you keeping back from us?’

  What did it matter now? It was all coming to a close.

  ‘Go back and look at the files on the Pearl River killings,’ I said. ‘The boy who died had a mark on his forearm. It looked like it had been burned into the skin. That mark is the same one that was found on the wall at Hobart Street, drawn in Wallace’s blood. My guess is that, somewhere in Jimmy’s house, you’ll find a similar mark.’