Charlie Parker Collection 1

by John Connolly

  I remembered the full story now. The deaths of the men at Prouts Neck had forced it from the forefront of my memory.

  ‘You think Billy Purdue went to see her?’

  ‘I don’t know, but something spooked her enough to make her run off into the woods and kill herself when they tried to take her back.’

  I stood and thanked him, then shrugged on my overcoat.

  ‘It was my pleasure, son. You know, you look something like your grandaddy. You act like him too and you’ll give no one cause to regret meeting you.’

  I felt another pang of guilt. ‘Thanks. You want me to give you a ride anywhere?’

  He shook his glass to order another beer, and called for a whiskey chaser as well. I put down ten bucks on the bar to cover it, and he raised the empty glass in salute.

  ‘Son,’ he said, ‘I ain’t goin’ nowhere.’

  It was already growing dark when I left the bar and I pulled my coat tightly round me to protect myself from the cold. From off the harbour a wind came, running icy hands through my hair and rubbing my skin with chill fingers. I had parked the Mustang in the lot at One India, a corner of Portland with a dark history. One India was the original site of Fort Loyal, erected by the colonists in 1680. It only survived for ten years, before the French and their native allies captured it and butchered the one hundred and ninety settlers who had surrendered. Eventually, the India Street Terminal was built on the same spot, marking milepost 0.0 for the Atlantic and St Lawrence Railroad, the Grand Trunk Railway of Canada and the Canadian National Railways, when Portland was still an important rail centre. At One India, now occupied by an insurance company, it was still possible to see the sign for the Grand Trunk and Steamship Offices over the door.

  The railroads had been gone for almost three decades now, although there was talk of rebuilding Union Station on St John and reopening the passenger railway from Boston. It was strange how things from the past, once thought lost and gone forever, should now be resurrected and made vivid once again in the present.

  The windows of the Mustang were already beginning to frost over as I approached it, and a mist which sharpened every sound hung over the warehouses and the boats on the water. I was almost at the car when I heard the footsteps behind me. I began to turn, my coat now open, my right hand making a leisurely movement towards my gun, but something jammed into the small of my back and a voice said:

  ‘Let it go. Keep them wide.’

  I kept my hands horizontally away from my sides. A second figure limped from my right, his left foot curved slightly inwards, distorting his walk, and took my gun from its holster. He was small, maybe five-four, and probably in his late forties. His hair was thick and black over brown eyes and his shoulders were wide beneath his overcoat, his stomach hard. He might even have been handsome, but for a harelip that slashed his soft cupid’s bow like a knife wound.

  The second man was taller and bulkier, with long dark hair that hung over the collar of a clean white shirt. He had hard eyes and an unsmiling mouth that contrasted with the bright Winnie the Pooh tie neatly knotted at his neck. His head was almost square, set on wide, rectangular shoulders, with a thick muscular neck intervening. He moved the way a kid moves an action figure, loping from side to side without bending his knees. Together, the two made quite a pair.

  ‘Jeez, fellas, I think you may be a little late for trick or treat.’ I leaned conspiratorially towards the shorter guy. ‘And you know,’ I whispered, ‘if the wind changes direction, you’ll be left that way.’ They were cheap shots, but I didn’t like people sneaking around in the mist poking guns in my back. As Billy Purdue might have said, it was kind of rude.

  The shorter guy turned my gun over in his hand, examining the third generation Smith & Wesson with an expert’s appreciation.

  ‘Nice piece,’ he said.

  ‘Give it back and I’ll show you how it works.’

  He smiled a strange, jagged smile.

  ‘You gotta come with us.’ He waved me in the direction of India Street, where a pair of headlights had just flashed on in the darkness.

  I looked back at the Mustang.

  ‘Shit,’ said Harelip, with a look of mock concern on his face. ‘You worried about your car?’

  He flicked the safety on my gun and fired at the Mustang, blowing out the front and rear tyres on the driver’s side. From somewhere close by, a car alarm began to sound.

  ‘There,’ he said. ‘Nobody’s gonna steal it now.’

  ‘I’ll remember you did that,’ I replied.

  ‘Uh-huh. You want me to spell my name for you, you let me know.’

  The taller guy gave me a shove in the direction of the car, a silver Seven Series BMW, which moved over to us and swung to the right, the rear door popping open. Inside sat another handsome devil with short brown hair and a gun resting on his thigh. The driver, younger than the rest, popped bubble gum and listened to an AOR station on the car stereo. Bryan Adams came on as I climbed into the car, singing the theme song from Don Juan de Marco.

  ‘Any possibility we could change the station?’ I asked, as we drove off.

  Beside me, Harelip prodded me hard with his gun.

  ‘I like this song,’ he said, humming along. ‘You got no soul.’

  I looked at him. I think he was serious.

  We drove to the Regency Hotel on Milk Street, the nicest hotel in Portland, which occupied the former site of an old red brick armory in the Old Port. The driver parked in back and we walked to the side entrance near the hotel gym, where another young guy in a neat black suit opened the door for us before speaking into a mike on his lapel to advise that we were on our way up. We took an elevator to the top floor, where Harelip knocked respectfully at the end door on the right. When it opened, I was led in and brought to meet Tony Celli.

  Tony sat in a big armchair with his shoeless feet on a matching footstool. His black stockings were silk and his grey trousers were immaculately pressed. He wore a blue-striped shirt with a white collar and a dark red tie marked with an intricate pattern of black spirals. Gold gleamed at his white cuffs. He was clean shaven and his black hair was neatly combed and parted to one side. His eyes were brown beneath thin, plucked eyebrows. His nose was long and unbroken, his mouth a little soft, his chin a little fat. There were no rings on his fingers, which lay clasped in his lap. In front of him, the TV was tuned to the nightly financial report. On a table beside him lay a pair of headphones and a bug detector, indicating that the room had already been searched for listening devices.

  I knew Tony Celli by reputation. He had worked his way up through the ranks, running porn shops and whores in Boston’s Combat Zone, paying his dues, gradually building up a power base. He took cash from the people below him and paid a lot of it to the people above him. He met his obligations and was now regarded as a hot tip for the future. I knew that he already had a certain amount of responsibility in money matters, based on a perception that he was gifted with financial acumen, a perception he now reinforced with his striped shirt and the attention he was paying to the stock prices that flashed past at the bottom of the screen.

  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 harbour.

  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 ini99o 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 Rock-port, a big old gabled place with vast green lawns and an oak tree which was about two centuries old ou
t 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.’

  He stayed quiet for a moment, returning his attention to the screen as the report detailed the collapse of some bank in Tokyo.

  ‘You don’t watch the news?’ he repeated, like I’d just told him I didn’t like sex or Chinese food. ‘Ever?’

  ‘Like you say, I depress easy. Even the weather forecast depresses me.’

  ‘That’s because you live here. Try living in California, then the forecast won’t depress you so much.’

  ‘I hear it’s sunny all year round.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s always sunny.’

  ‘Then I’d get depressed by the monotony.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound like you’re ever going to be truly happy.’

  ‘You may be right, but I try to stay cheerful.’

  ‘You’re so cheerful, I’m starting not to like you.’

  ‘That’s a real shame. I thought we could hang out together, maybe take in a movie.’

  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 some 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,’ 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, Birdman, 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 as a favour, 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 just 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 understa
nd 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 then secured with cuffs. I looked up to see Harelip limping towards me. In his hand, he held a black metal rod. Crackling blue lightning danced along its length.

  The first two shots from the cattle prod knocked me backwards 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 smelt 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 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 boards creaking slightly beneath my feet.