I guessed that he was forty by now, certainly no more than that. He looked good. In fact, he looked like the sort of guy you could bring home to meet your mother, if you didn't think that he'd probably torture her, fuck her, then dump her remains in Boston harbor.
The nickname Tony Clean had stuck for a number of reasons: his appearance was part of it, but mainly it was because Tony never got his hands dirty. People had washed a lot of blood off their hands for Tony's sake, watching it spiral down into cracked porcelain bathtubs or stainless steel sinks, but Tony never got so much as a speck of it on his shirt.
I heard a story about him once, back in 1990 when he was still slashing up pimps who forgot how territorial Tony could be. A guy called Stan Goodman, a Boston real estate developer, owned a weekend house in Rockport, a big old gabled place with vast green lawns and an oak tree that was about two centuries old out by the boundary wall. Rockport's a pretty nice place, a fishing village north of Boston at Cape Ann where you can still park for a penny and the Salt Water trolley will haul you around town for four dollars a day.
Goodman had a wife and two teenage children, a boy and a girl, and they loved that house as well. Tony offered Stan Goodman a lot of money for the house, but he refused. It had belonged to his father, he said, and his father had bought it from the original owner back in the forties. He offered to find Tony Clean a similar property nearby, because Stan Goodman figured that if he kept on the good side of Tony Clean then everything would turn out okay. Except Tony Clean didn't have a good side.
One night in June, someone entered the Goodman house, shot their dog, bound and gagged the four members of the family and took them out to the old granite quarries at Halibut Point. My guess is that Stan Goodman died last, after they had killed his wife, his daughter and his son by placing their heads on a flat rock and cracking them open with a sledgehammer. There was a lot of blood on the ground when they were found the next morning, and I reckon it took the men who killed them a long time to wash it from their clothes. Tony Celli bought the house the following month. There were no other bidders.
The mere fact that Tony was here after what had taken place at Prouts Neck indicated that he wasn't screwing around. Tony wanted that money, and he wanted it bad, and he was willing to risk bringing down heat on himself to find it.
"You watch the news?" he said at last. He didn't look away from the screen, but I knew that the question was directed at me.
"Nope."
He looked at me for the first time.
"You don't watch any news?"
"Nope."
"Why not?"
"It depresses me."
"You must depress easy."
"I have a sensitive nature."
The financial report ended. He clicked off the TV using a manicured finger on the remote, then turned his full attention to me.
"You know who I am?" he said.
"Yeah, I know who you are."
"Good. Then, being an intelligent man, you probably know why I'm here."
"Christmas shopping? Looking to buy a house?"
He smiled coldly. "I know all about you, Parker. You're the one that took down the Ferreras." The Ferreras were a New York crime family, were being the operative word. I had become mixed up in their business, and it had ended badly for them.
"They took themselves down. I just watched."
"That's not what I heard. A lot of people in New York would be happier if you were dead. They think you lack respect."
"I'm sure."
"So why aren't you dead?"
"I brighten up a dull world?"
"They want to brighten up their world, they can turn on a light. Try again."
"Because they know I'll kill whoever comes after me, then I'll kill whoever sent them."
"I could kill you now. Unless you can come back from the dead, your threats aren't going to disturb my sleep."
"I have friends. I'd give you a week, maybe ten days. Then you'd die too."
He pulled a face, and a couple of the men around him snickered. "You play cards?" he asked, when they had finished laughing.
"Only solitaire. I like playing with someone I can trust."
"You know what 'fucking the deck' means?"
"Yeah, I know." Fucking the deck was something neophyte gamblers did: they screwed up the cards by making dumb calls. That was why experienced gamblers didn't play with amateurs, no matter how much money they had. There was always the chance that they'd fuck the deck so badly that the risk of losing increased to the extent that it wasn't worth gambling.
"Billy Purdue fucked my deck, and now I think you might be about to fuck my deck too. That's no good. I want you to stop. First I want you to tell me what you know about Purdue. Then I'll pay you to walk away."
"I don't need money."
"Everybody needs money. I can pay whatever debts you owe, maybe make some others disappear."
"I don't owe anybody."
"Everybody owes somebody."
"Not me. I'm free and clean."
"Or maybe you figure you got debts that money can't pay."
"That's very perceptive. What does it mean?"
"It means I am running out of reasonable ways to alter your current course of action, Bird-man." He made a little quotation marks sign with his fingers as he spoke the last syllable, then his voice lowered and he stood up. Even in his stocking feet, he was taller than I was.
"Now you listen to me, Birdman," he said, when he was only inches from me. "Don't make me tear your wings off. I hear you did some work for Billy Purdue's ex-wife. I hear also that he gave you money, my money, to give to her. That makes you a very interesting individual, because I figure you were one of the last people to talk to both of them before they went their separate ways. Now, do you want to tell me what you know so that you can go back to your little birdhouse and curl up for the night?"
I held his gaze. "If I knew anything useful and told you, my conscience wouldn't let me sleep," I said. "As it happens, I don't know anything, useful or otherwise."
"You know that Purdue has my money?"
"Has he?"
He shook his head, almost in sorrow. "You're going to make me hurt you."
"Did you kill Rita Ferris and her son?"
Tony took a step back then punched me hard in the stomach. I saw it coming and braced myself for the blow, but the force was strong enough to send me to my knees. As I gasped for breath I heard a gun cock behind me and felt cold steel against my skull.
"I don't kill women and children," said Tony.
"Since when?" I replied. "New Year's?"
A clump of my hair was gripped in someone's hand and I was dragged to my feet, the gun still behind my ear.
"How stupid are you?" said Tony, rubbing the knuckles of his right hand. "You want to die?"
"I don't know anything," I repeated. "I did some work for his ex-wife, crossed swords with Billy Purdue and walked away. That's all."
Tony Clean nodded. "What were you talking to the rummy in the bar about?"
"Something else."
Tony drew his fist back again.
"It was something else," I said again, louder this time. "He was a friend of my grandfather's. I wanted to look him up, that's all. You're right, he's just a rummy. Leave him be."
Tony stepped back, still rubbing his knuckles.
"I find out you're lying to me, you'll die badly, you understand? And if you're a smart guy, and not just a guy with a smart mouth, you'll stay out of my affairs."
The tone of his voice grew gentler, but his face hardened as he spoke again: "I'm sorry we have to do this to you, but I need to be sure that you understand what we've discussed. If at any point you feel you have something to add to what you've told me, just moan louder."
He nodded at whoever was behind me and I was forced down to my knees again. A rag was stuffed in my mouth, and my arms were pulled back and secured with cuffs. I looked up to see Harelip limping toward me. In his hand, he held a short metal rod. Cr
ackling blue lightning danced along its length.
The first two shots from the cattle prod knocked me backward and sent me spasming to the ground, my teeth gritted in pain against the rag. After the third or fourth contact I lost control of myself and blue flashes moved through the blackness of my mind until, at last, the clouds took me and all went quiet.
When I came to, I was lying behind my Mustang, hidden from anyone walking on the street. The tips of my fingers were raw and my coat glittered with crystals of frost. My head ached badly, my body still trembled and there was dried blood and vomit on the side of my face and the front of my coat. I smelled bad. I got unsteadily to my feet and checked my coat pockets. My gun was in one, its clip gone, and my cell phone was in the other. I called a cab and, while I waited for it to arrive, made a call to a mechanic with a tow truck over by the Veteran's Memorial Bridge and asked him to take care of the car.
When I got back to Scarborough, the right side of my face had swollen badly and there were small burn marks where the prod had touched my skin. There were also two or three gashes on my head, one of them deep. I reckoned that Harelip had kicked me a couple of times for good measure. I put ice on my head and spray on the burns, then swallowed some painkillers, pulled on a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt to guard against the cold, and tried to sleep.
I don't recall why I awoke, but when I opened my eyes the room seemed to hang between darkness and brightness, as if the universe had paused to draw a breath when the morning sun first sent shafts of light through the dark winter clouds.
And from somewhere in the house came a sound like the scuffling of feet, as if small delicate steps were padding over the floorboards. I drew my gun and rose. The floor was cold and the windows rattled gently. I opened the door slowly and stepped into the hallway.
To my right, a figure moved. I caught the motion out of the corner of my eye, so that I was not sure that I even saw a figure as such or merely a shifting of shadows in the kitchen. I turned and walked slowly to the back of the house, the floor creaking slightly beneath my feet.
Then I heard it: a soft burst of childlike laughter, a giggle of amusement, and the padding of feet again, moving to my left. I reached the entrance to the kitchen, the gun half raised, and turned in time to see another flash of movement by the door frame that connected the kitchen to the living room, to hear another cry of childish delight at the game we were playing. And I felt certain that what I had seen was a child's foot, its sole protected by the enclosures of purple rompers. And I knew too that I had seen that tiny foot before and the remembrance of it made my throat go dry.
I entered the dining room. Something small waited for me beyond the far door. I could see its form in the shadows and the light in its eyes, but no more than that. As I moved in its direction, the form shifted and I heard the front door creak open on its hinges and impact against the wall, the wind now rushing through the house, pulling at the drapes, setting frames rattling, raising spirals of dust in the hallway.
I walked faster now. As I reached the door, I caught another glimpse of the little figure, a shape dressed in purple that flitted between the trees, moving farther and farther into the darkness beyond. I stepped from the porch and into the yard, felt the grass beneath my feet, the small stones digging into the soles, and tensed as something light and multilegged scuttled across my toes. I stood at the verge of the woods, and I was afraid.
She was waiting for me there. She stood unmoving, masked by bushes and trees that hid her body from me, her face now obscured by the shadows of branches, now clear again. Her eyes were full of blood and the thick black thread wove back and forth across her face like the crudely constructed mouth of an old cloth doll. She stood there unspeaking, watching me from the woods, and behind her the smaller figure danced and skipped in the undergrowth.
I closed my eyes and concentrated, trying to wake myself, but the cold in my feet was real, and the throbbing pain in my head, and the sound of the child's laughter carrying on the wind.
I felt movement behind me and something touched me on the shoulder. I almost turned, but the pressure on my shoulder increased and I knew that I must not turn, that I was not meant to see what stood at my back. I looked to my left, to the point of pressure, and I could not restrain the shudder that ran through my body. I closed my eyes instantly but what I had seen was imprinted on my mind like an image seen against bright sunlight.
The hand was soft and white and delicate, with long, tapering fingers. A wedding band gleamed in the strange, predawn light.
bird
How many times had I heard that voice whisper to me in the darkness, a prelude to the soft caress of a warm hand, the feel of her breath against my cheek, my lips, her small breasts hard against my body, her legs like ivy curling around me? I had heard it in times of love and passion when we were happy together, in moments of anger and rage and sadness as our marriage fell apart. And I had heard it since in the rustling of leaves on the grass and the sound of branches rubbing against one another in the autumn breezes, a voice that carried from far away and called to me from the shadows.
Susan, my Susan.
bird
The voice was close now, almost beside my ear. It had the sound of earth in it, as if dirt had caught in her throat.
help her
In the woods beyond, the woman watched me, her red eyes wide and unblinking.
How?
find him
Find who? Billy?
The fingers tightened their grip.
yes
He's not my responsibility.
they are all your responsibility
And in the patches of moonlight beneath the trees, shapes twisted and turned, suspended above the earth, their feet not touching the ground, and their ruined stomachs shone dark and wet. All of them, my responsibility.
Then the pressure on my shoulder eased and I sensed her moving away. Ahead of me came a sound from the undergrowth and the woman who had been Rita Ferris receded into the trees. I caught a final glimpse of purple moving swiftly beyond the line of trees, laughter like music carrying back to me.
And I saw something else.
I saw a small girl with long blond hair who looked back at me with something like love before she followed her playmate into the darkness.
CHAPTER NINE
I woke to a bright room, winter sunlight spearing through a gap in the drapes. My head ached and my jaw felt stiff and sore where I had gritted my teeth as the shocks hit my body. It was only when I sat up and the pain in my head increased that I remembered my dream from the night before, if a dream was what it was.
There were leaves in my bed, and I had mud on my feet.
I had some homeopathic remedies that Louis had recommended to me, so I took them with a glass of water while I waited for the shower to heat up. I downed a combination of phosphorus, to combat nausea, and hypericum, which was supposed to act as a natural painkiller. Frankly, I felt like a flake taking the stuff but there was no one around to see me do it, so that made it okay.
I started a pot of coffee, poured a cup and watched it grow cold on the kitchen table. I felt pretty low and was considering taking up a different profession-gardening, maybe, or lobster fishing. After the coffee had developed a nice film, I called Ellis Howard. I figured that, in the absence of his lieutenant and given the federal angle, Ellis was taking a hands-on approach to the case. It took a while for him to come to the phone. He was probably still sore over the Biggs affair.
"You're awake early," were his first words when he got to the phone. I could hear him sigh as he eased his bulk into a chair. I could even hear the chair squeaking in protest. If Ellis had sat on me, I'd have squeaked too.
"I could say the same about you," I said. "You sound like you slept as well as I did."
"Yeah, like the bed was made of broken glass. You aware that Tony Celli turned up in town yesterday?"
"Yeah. Bad news travels fast." Particularly when it's being passed into your jaw in the
form of an electric current.
"He blew out again this morning. Looks like he's gone to ground."
"It's a shame. I thought he was going to move here and open a florist's."
At the other end of the phone there was the sound of the receiver being covered, a muffled exchange and then the rustling of papers. Then: "So what do you want, Bird?"
"I wanted to know if there was any movement on Rita Ferris, or Billy Purdue, or on that Coupe De Ville."
Ellis laughed dully. "Ixnay on the first two, but the third one is interesting. Turns out the Coupe De Ville is a company car, registered to one Leo Voss, a lawyer in Boston." There was a pause on the other end of the line. I waited until I realized that, once again, I was supposed to be playing the role of straight man in a conversation.
"But…?" I said at last.
"But," said Ellis, "Leo Voss is no longer with us. He's dead, died earlier this week."
"Damn, a dead lawyer. Only another million to go."
"We live in hope," said Ellis.
"Did he fall, or was he pushed?"
"That's the interesting part. His secretary found him and called the cops. He was sitting behind his desk still dressed in his running outfit-sneakers, socks, T-shirt, sweatpants-with an opened bottle of water in front of him. Their first impression was that he'd had a heart attack. According to the secretary, he'd been feeling ill for a couple of days. He thought it might be flu.
"But when he was autopsied, there was evidence of inflammation of the nerves in the hands and feet. He'd also lost some hair, probably only in the previous day or two. Tests on a hair sample turned up traces of thallium. You know what thallium is?"
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