May 1980
They found Henry Willow in a quiet corner of Black Star Park; his body hung from a Silver Maple tree like a broken kite tossed up there by the wind. His arms threaded through the branches, his wrists and ankles were tethered to the boughs with long curls of ribbon, his body buckled forward slightly, his head hung down, as if he was ashamed to have found himself there. A group of cops stood around looking up at him, a ladder steadied against the unmoving tree, the tableau now set behind an uneven square barrier of yellow tape, temporary steel poles set at right angles. Red and blue light swam slowly against the glistening bark of the tree as Green stood among the men, voices coming through their walkie-talkies like the drone of distant bees. Green squinted up at the broken man and conceded that while he had briefly thought about strangling him the last time they’d sat across from one another, he couldn’t quite fathom who might want Henry Willow dead. Green thought about Henry cheating death by inches as Alejandro had come out of the sky that night and had almost pressed the life out of him the way the sole of a boot might extinguish a fly. The final thudding end that had snatched Alejandro away, reduced his features to indifference, and now, thought Green, it was like his sudden impact had somehow sent Willow up into the sky to snare him on this tree, like two acrobats at either end of a seesaw, one descending sharply with a thump, the other thrown into the air reaching for the dull gleam of the trapeze.
He stood back and let his men do their work, gingerly lowering Willow to the ground, his head stuck out a right angle once he reached the floor. Neck’s broken, thought Green as they stood over him almost as if they expected him to stir. It wasn’t the only thing: his nose lay hard against his face as if someone had leant against it until it gave in and his eyes were black and grey rings, one hand was a fist of broken fingers. ‘They beat him down before they hung him up,’ someone said in the quiet.
Green walked away from the shade and into the light, looking up at the tall buildings that made up the right angle of concrete and glass abutting the oblong of urban green that acted as the park’s main playing field. The Blue Lakes apartment building looked down onto the park; he was surprised to see it there. He’d once spent a New Year’s Eve in its upper reaches, invited there with a date whose name he now struggled to remember, and had ended up stepping in between some revellers whose mood had turned ugly. Drunks, he thought, God, how I hate them, how I hated myself when I was one.
*
From a distance the soft orange light made it look like a fire had raged earlier and was now dwindling in the burnt-out rooms and lighting up the Blue Lakes’ top floor. The shadow of a man set in its tall window was drunk and swayed slightly as he sang: ‘Should old acquaintance be forgot for the sake of old man’s eyes.
‘That’s what my sister used to sing,’ he grinned to no one in particular, but he was winking at Green. ‘Old man’s eyes,’ he hissed by way of explanation, just in case Green or anyone else might have missed it.
As one year ended and another began, the promise in the air was almost stifling, as thick as the reams of streamers caught around the legs of the chairs. They snaked like coloured cables across the floor and over the tables that had been pulled back as midnight had struck and people had reached out for each other across the thin divide between the disappointment of the last twelve listless months and the promise of the next three hundred and sixty-five days.
Green wasn’t thinking about the future: captivated by the reams of coloured paper at his feet, he was reliving a war movie from his youth where they had to cut the right wire to defuse the bomb and save the garrison. Which one was live and which was one was earth, he thought, as the streamers bunched up thickly, jettisoned endlessly in smoky plumes from tiny plastic cups, the popping accompanied by a softly unfurling curl of paper and a sudden tiny spark. The balloons ended his reverie as they bounced off the bridge of his nose just as the clock chimed midnight; moments later he could still feel it gently vibrating throughout the room. He watched the weaving drunk singing happily to himself as he tried to negotiate the party hat that kept slipping forward and covering his eyes. Then the city through the windows came alive with fireworks, the spray of light a fan suddenly framing its towers before falling silently towards the distant earth.
Before him, as Green’s date let her hand drift from his wrist to place her hand in his, just before the singing started in earnest, other couples began to linger, some in an awkward, unrequited embrace, like two people learning to dance together for the first time, he thought, while others stepped quickly apart as the last chime struck, leaving a vacuum of one-sided longing to fill up the space between them. The affable drunk was now silent – mesmerised by the colourful display that had long since faded outside, he held on to the window frame as if the spray of orange, red and gold were permanently imprinted on his retina, the dark sky filled with fireworks each time he closed his eyes. Others were drifting like unsteady satellites around the room, their moorings and then equilibrium lost to an evening of champagne and vodka cocktails; broken glass was tramped down deep into the carpet, shards of starlight winking up at him.
He never saw the argument start, but he felt it, the ions in the air changed, his skin prickled, he’d felt it a hundred times before, he wasn’t sure if it was intuition or an instinct to survive, but when it came to him it was as clear and distinct as a tolling bell. He had seen the group enter not long before midnight; they came into the room like sailors on shore leave looking for one last drink before final call. One of them had got into a spat at the temporary bar – it was set on wheels and went juddering sideways as the argument intensified and the pushing began – over some imagined slight and then suddenly they were all diving in, a collective howl of anger and hurt. One man fell back and Green stepped between him and the red-faced gang whose features were now pinched and drunk. Eyes half-open, but suddenly alert and baying for blood.
‘I’m a cop,’ Green snapped, focusing on the man closest to him, waiting for the inevitable blow to his face or neck and calculating in that briefest of moments whether he could get someone up here on New Year’s Eve and process an assault. Or should he react quickly, pummel him until the man came to, suddenly sobered and bruised and set on one knee, one of New York’s finest flailing away at him, determined to tramp him down, set him on his ass among all that broken glass? He saw the man’s nostrils literally flare with anger as his friend quickly pulled him back, his fist coming within inches of Green’s face. Even the drunk at the window, his eyes no longer filled with rainbows, was straining to see what the furore was. It was quiet by then though, just the gentle lull of Christmas carols, as if everyone was hushed and still waiting for the main event.
*
As one of Green’s men had guessed, Henry Willow had been beaten down before he’d been hung up. As they peered more closely at his broken features, it became clear that there was something in his mouth. A pool ball, a red number three, sitting behind Willow’s shattered teeth; Green could imagine leaning forward and making it spin, the revolving digit a blur as it turned over and over in his mouth. One of his men did lean forward as if to touch it, but Green stopped him, he knew it’d be stuck fast. He’d once worked a mob hit where the victim – a chronic gambler who had run out of luck and credit – had been found slumped in a chair in his own kitchen with an eight-ball locked in hard inside his mouth, his throat cut and his head slung almost casually back as if he’d found something to admire about the light fitting on the ceiling.
‘You can get the ball in there, with a very firm nudge,’ one of his men had said as they stood over the dead man, indicating the eight-ball behind the row of gleaming, broken and bloody teeth, like a novelty glass eye that had found itself a strange new setting. ‘The teeth have some give going in, they lean back, but it’s not coming back out unless your teeth come with it.’ He looked at the exposed windpipe inside the bloody maw where the man’s throat had once been. ‘Though I’m guessing that was the least of his problems.’
The victim in the kitchen had his hands free, the marks on his body were consistent with his thrashing around, bouncing off the cabinets, running into the walls, trying desperately to shift the eight-ball from inside his head. They’d let him run around for a while in there if only to amuse themselves; it was hard to teach a lesson to a dying man. Green wondered how long they’d let him stumble around, pots and crockery crashing around him, clawing at his own features, their laughing finally stilled only to push him back into his chair, his head pulsing, his gums and teeth smeared with blood, his mouth thick with spit and panic and then his legs pumping and thrashing with fear as they brought the blade quickly across his throat and his very life shook from him in ever-receding palpitations, his body bucking and then tremulous and then still.
Green told his father as much as he could about Henry Willow and the pool ball when he called him that night. His father had moved upstate, nearer now to Boston than he was to New York. His last parish, as it would surely be, was sedate and small, a thank-you, Green thought, for all the joy and help he’d brought to this unflinching city. His father now moved among a small population of widows and retirees, people who golfed, who waited to see their grandchildren at the weekend, who sometimes wondered if their small town and lives might ever ignite again. Green counted on his father’s counsel too.
It was Green’s duty to collect the bodies and the broken bones and the deceit and the fury and the malice and the hatred and the lies from the last five days of work and then he’d sift through them with his father as they talked long distance at the weekend. Taking the bloody components that had made up his week, dismantling them one by one, breaking down the whole to help take away the power it held over Green, as if deconstructing the parts could help him resolve the unholy mess they made. Nicholas Green likened it to the giant jigsaws the pair of them would pore over together when Louis was a boy, expansive fields of corn, hills and valleys, Mount Rushmore, spaceships rocketing across the curve of the earth, Old Masters cut into hundreds of intricate, interlocking pieces. They’d spend days seated at their uneven dining table watching the sky reveal itself, the sun rising at the corner of the jigsaw so it might light the way to resolving the complete puzzle. These days he and his father would spend their time on the phone dismantling this sprawling imagined puzzle that looked like it might have been inspired by one of Bosch’s hellish scenarios, and they’d go back and forth and pull it apart piece by complex piece, as meticulously as they’d completed those great vistas when they were both younger men, until nothing remained and Green could see clearly again, before he had to bear witness to yet another tragedy.
‘That’s what happens when you stop going to church on Sunday,’ Green’s father would say, but he was teasing his son, not testing him. ‘You’re left with all those unresolved thoughts and questions floating around your head – I daren’t imagine your dreams.’ A pause, as Green fought to scramble the things he was seeing and had seen as his father tried to will his boy’s living nightmares away.
‘You can come up here, you know,’ Green’s dad said. ‘Ghosts rarely leave the city, they can’t bear to be out in the suburbs, let alone in the wilds of the country.’
Louis answered his father as he always did: ‘I’ll think about it, Dad, I will.’ He did too, though he knew that with every case left unresolved he was becoming more immersed in the city, part of its make-up. It was a question of making things balance. He felt that every death or act of violence left unanswered, that he couldn’t solve, distorted his view of the city’s streets somehow; a film of sin that muddied his original vision of the place he now called home. Smearing the view like a stain on a high window he couldn’t shift. He looked to the sky some mornings and found himself extending an arm as if to wipe away something hanging there on the air, like a cobweb just beyond his reach. One day he imagined a place uncluttered by crime, absolved somehow, clear-eyed and filled with resolution, completely cleansed. It was his dream.
*
Robert Walker didn’t dream, he inhabited a whole other world to Detective Green, he had ground bones to dust, worshipped false idols, lain with other men’s wives. He took the commandments as some kind of challenge, a list to be ticked off; he wished he were Catholic sometimes, so that he could attend confession and talk and talk until he felt the priest gag through the thin curtain that divided them, hear him brim and overflow with Walker’s sins, gorged and unwillingly sated, delirious with the crimes of mankind, sodden with life’s riches, dank from his misdeeds. Walker made do, however, by feasting on the misery of others.
His father had sent him away when he was a young man; Walker had tied up their housekeeper at their Long Island home and spent the day putting in every window he could reach in their grand house with a selection of his father’s golf clubs. At twelve years old, he couldn’t quite reach the upper panes of glass and was having something far too much like fun to drag a ladder out of the garage to ensure the front of their home was a fully fractured mosaic of violence and rage. He’d tried hitting golf balls into the house at first, but his swing was indifferent and unpractised and the balls kept spinning away from him at obtuse angles and landing far off in the grass. He took a generous swig of his father’s Famous Grouse and wrinkled his face in exaggerated distaste; it didn’t matter, it was the fuel to his fire. He enjoyed the dreamlike state it was inducing, the soft outline of his thoughts intermingling with the sharp crack and jangle of the breaking glass. The wooden clubs took extra effort to make any real impact, so he finally settled on a Wilson five iron that he’d seen his father carry around as if it were the last line of defence between him and the rest of the world. As if Death might one day come creeping out of the trees as his father stood in the rough trying to secure a spot on the fairway and drag him noisily away to his fate, his dad trying to bash the ghoul’s head in with his club as he bumped along the ground. Walker giggled at the idea and dropped the bottle from his hand, which splintered as soon as it hit the paving slabs on which he was standing. ‘Fuck it,’ he murmured, kicking the broken bottle among the other shards that surrounded him; the sun was shining and the pieces gleamed as he stood among them swinging his father’s club around.
Later, when he was grown, when Walker’s father had finally given in and ceded him control of his company, he’d try to put his father’s windows in once again. Metaphorically this time, as his father had built his empire on the treacherous ground of business and battlefields, so he tried to make it live by nurturing it, using his family’s extraordinary gift to spread love, make happiness a building block in people’s lives. But it was never for the greater good of others, it wasn’t something he was doing out of the goodness of his heart – in reality, if his father had made his fortune from doing positive deeds then Walker would have wanted his to be wholly negative; the complete opposite.
When it came to his dad he was contrary, he wanted to turn the old man’s world upside down. Walker didn’t care if he succeeded: for him success was his father realising that he’d raised a failure and others seeing his failings too. This was something his father might have guessed at as he pulled up and into the long driveway of their house and saw the light rising up from the grounds now filled with broken glass and thought his house on fire and his son stood among the gentle lick of flames, spinning around and around, his expression exultant. And no one was more surprised than he when his son came rushing towards his car with his five iron (he recognised it instantly, it was his favourite) high i
n the air, screaming as if hell were opening up behind him, a tear in the earth bringing all his bad dreams to light, and then Walker struck the car’s bonnet hard, one, two, three times, the sound glorious and unsettling all at once. The metal made a pinging sound and gave quickly in. Robert Walker looked squarely at his father through the windscreen and placed his favourite club carefully on the dashed paintwork, the head pointing straight at him, and then he took off running for the woods that surrounded the quiet lawns, he was vomiting up his father’s Famous Grouse whisky before he’d even reached the perimeter.
The school his father sent Robert Walker to in the Tennessee countryside wasn’t dissimilar to his dad’s aspiring pile – cornices, faux turrets (he was surprised they hadn’t fitted a portcullis and dug a moat and had done with it), endless lawns, and an unyielding wall of trees that felt like the edge of the world – but whereas his father’s home was a procession of ghostly rooms mostly un-entered and unloved, the wide halls here were filled with bustle and noise. The clattering of idiots, Walker thought, as they filed past him, the regimented tattoo of feet punctuated with a bell that went right through him. His father insisted this place was for his own good, but he couldn’t begin to fathom how. The days were long, the sunshine ceaseless, and the nights thrummed with the low hum of cicadas somewhere beyond the trees, the dull heat was stifling, he’d lie there in his room and kick the sheets off only to wake again with his midriff exposed and cold and cocoon himself in the sheets once more until he overheated and threw them to the floor. It became the template for those long nights. He was one of the few boys who didn’t have to double up and share a room, his father having paid extra fees to keep him isolated. He had no desire, as he put it, ‘to blunt the keenness of others or ruin some other young mind with your deathly, perishing presence’. His father’s sense of humour was the thing he liked about him best. It might have been the only thing.
The Death & Life of Red Henley Page 8