Charlie Parker Collection 1

by John Connolly

I took the bag and put my wallet back in my coat. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘You sell friendship here too?’

  ‘No, mister, I sure don’t,’ he said, and there was a finality in his tone. ‘But I don’t reckon you’d be buying any even if I did.’

  Chapter Twenty Four

  It was already dark when I began the journey back to Dark Hollow. Snow was drifting across the road to Beaver Cove and beyond, where the narrow, winding, tree-lined road led to the Hollow. The snow seemed to glow in the headlights, small golden fragments of light tumbling down, as if heaven itself was disintegrating and falling to earth. I tried to call Angel and Louis on the cellphone, but it was a useless effort. As it turned out, they were already at the motel when I got back. Louis answered the door dressed in black pants with a razor sharp crease and a cream-coloured shirt. I could never figure out how Louis kept his clothes so neat. I had shirts that had more creases than Louis’s while they were still in the box.

  ‘Angel’s in the shower,’ he said, as I stepped past him into their room. On the television screen, Wolf Blitzer mouthed silently on the White House lawn.

  ‘What’s seldom is wonderful.’

  ‘Amen to that. If it was summer, he’d be attracting flies.’

  It wasn’t true, of course. Angel may have looked like someone who was barely on nodding terms with soap and hot water, but he was, all things considered, remarkably clean. He just looked more crumpled than most people. In fact, he looked more crumpled than just about anyone I knew.

  ‘Any movement over at the Payne place?’

  ‘Nothing. The old man came out, went back in again. The boy came out, went back in again. After the fourth or fifth time, the novelty started to wear off. No sign of Billy Purdue, though, or anyone else.’

  ‘You think they knew you were out there?’

  ‘Maybe. Didn’t act like it, which could go either way. You got anything?’

  I showed him the boots and told him of my conversation with Stuckey. Angel came out of the shower at that moment, wrapped in four towels.

  ‘Shit, Angel,’ said Louis. ‘The fuck are you, Mahatma Gandhi? What you use all the towels for?’

  ‘It’s cold,’ he whined. ‘And I got marks on my ass from that car seat.’

  ‘You gonna get marks on your ass from the toe of my shoe, you don’t get me some towels. You just dry your scrawny white ass and haul it down to the desk, ask the lady for more towels. And you better make damn sure they fluffy, Angel. I ain’t rubbin’ my back with no sandpaper.’

  While Angel dried himself and dressed, muttering softly as he did so, I told them in detail about my encounters with Rachel, Sheriff Tannen and Erica Schneider, and what I had learned of Billy Purdue’s visit to St Martha’s.

  ‘Seems like we accumulatin’ a whole lot of information, but we don’t know what it means,’ remarked Louis, when I was done.

  ‘We know what some of it means,’ I said.

  ‘You think this guy Caleb really exists?’ he asked.

  ‘He was real enough to kill his mother, and maybe another local girl the best part of two decades later. Plus, those girls who died in sixty-five weren’t killed by a mentally handicapped man. The display of the bodies was a lot of things – a gesture of contempt, a means to shock – but it was also an attempt at an act of madness. I think it was designed to make people think that only a madman could have done it, and the planting of an item of clothing at Fletcher’s house gave them the madman they were looking for.’

  ‘So where did he go?’

  I sat down heavily on one of the beds. ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘but I think he went north, into the wilderness.’

  ‘And why didn’t he kill again?’ added Angel.

  ‘I don’t know that either. Maybe he did, and we just never found them.’ I knew that hikers had been murdered on the Appalachian Trail, and I’d heard that others had gone missing and never been found. I wondered if, somehow, they might have left the trail, hoping for a shortcut, and encountered something much worse than they could ever have imagined.

  ‘Or it could be he was killing before he ever arrived in Maine, but nobody ever traced the deaths back to him,’ I continued. ‘Rachel thought that he might have entered a period of dormancy, but recent events may have conspired to change that.’

  Angel took one of the Zamberlains and held it in his hands. ‘Well, we know what this means, assuming these once belonged to Ellen Cole’s boyfriend.’ He looked at me, and there was a sadness in his eyes. I didn’t want to answer him, or to acknowledge the possibility that if Ricky was dead, then Ellen could be dead too.

  ‘Any sign of Stritch?’ I asked.

  Louis bristled. ‘I can almost smell him,’ he said. ‘The woman at the desk is still pretty cut up about her cat, no pun intended. Cops are blaming it on kids.’

  ‘What now?’ said Angel.

  ‘I go see John Barley,’ I replied, but Louis shook his head.

  ‘That’s a bad idea, Bird,’ he said. ‘It’s dark, and he knows the woods better than you do. You could lose him, and then any way of finding out how he came by these boots. Plus, there’s his damn dog: it’ll warn the old man, and then he’ll start shooting, and could be you’ll have to shoot back. He’s no good to us dead.’

  He was right, of course, but it didn’t make me feel any better. ‘First light, then,’ I said, but reluctantly. Unspoken between us was the possibility that I had already encountered Caleb Kyle, and had turned away from him because he had threatened me with a gun.

  ‘First light,’ Louis agreed.

  I left them and went back to my own room, where I dialled Walter and Lee Cole’s house in Queen’s. Lee picked up on the third ring, and in her voice was that mixture of hope and fear that I had heard in the voice of hundreds of parents, friends and relatives, all waiting for word of a missing person.

  ‘Lee, it’s Bird.’

  She said nothing for a moment but I could hear her footsteps, as if she was moving the phone out of earshot of someone. I guessed it was Lauren. ‘Bird? Have you found her?’

  ‘No. We’re in Dark Hollow, and we’re looking, but there’s nothing yet.’ I didn’t tell her about Ricky’s boots. If I was wrong about what might have happened to him, or mistaken about the ownership of the boots, it would only be worrying her unnecessarily. If I was right, then we would know the rest soon enough.

  ‘Have you seen Walter?’

  I told her I hadn’t. I figured he was probably in Greenville by now, but I didn’t want to see him. He would only complicate matters, and I was finding it hard enough to keep my emotions in check as it was.

  ‘Bird, he was so angry when he found out what I’d done.’ Lee started to cry, her voice breaking as she spoke. ‘He said that people get hurt when you get involved. They get killed. Please, Bird, please don’t let anything happen to her. Please.’

  ‘I won’t, Lee. I’ll be in touch. Goodbye.’

  I hung up and ran my hands over my face and through my hair, letting them come to rest eventually at the knots in my shoulders. Walter was right. People had been hurt in the past when I became involved in situations, but they got hurt mainly because those people also chose to involve themselves. Sometimes you can push folks one way or the other, but they take the most important steps on their own initiative.

  Walter had principles, but he had never been put in a position where those principles might have to be compromised to safeguard those he loved, or to avenge them when they were taken from him. And now he was close to Dark Hollow, and a situation that was already difficult and complicated was likely to get worse. I sat with my face in my hands for a time, then undressed and showered, my head down and my shoulders exposed to allow the water to work like fingers on my tired, tense muscles.

  The phone rang as I was drying myself. It was Angel. They were waiting for me so that we could head off and eat together. I wasn’t hungry, and my concerns for Ellen were muddling my thought processes, but I agreed to join them. When we arrived at the diner, there was
a sign on the door announcing that it had closed early. There was some kind of charity event in the Roadside Bar that night to raise funds for the high school band and everyone and anyone was going to be in attendance. Angel and Louis exchanged a look of profound unhappiness.

  ‘We got to help the band if we want to eat?’ asked Louis. ‘What kind of peckerwood town is this? Who we got to pay off if we want to buy a beer? The PTA?’ He examined the sign a little more closely. ‘Hey, a country band: “Larry Fulcher and the Gamblers”. Maybe this town ain’t such a dump after all.’

  ‘Lord, no,’ said Angel, ‘not more shit-kicker music. Why can’t you listen to soul music like anyone else of your particular ethnic persuasion? You know, Curtis Mayfield, maybe a little Wilson Pickett. They’re your people, man, not the Louvin Brothers and Kathy Mattea. Besides, not so long ago people used that country shit as background music when they were hanging your people.’

  ‘Angel,’ said Louis patiently, ‘nobody ever hung no brother to a Johnny Cash record.’

  There was nothing for it but to head down to the Roadside. We went back to the motel and I got my car keys. When I came out of my room, Louis had added a black cowboy hat with a band of silver suns to his ensemble. Angel put his hands on his head and swore loudly.

  ‘You got the rest of the Village People in there too?’ I asked. I couldn’t help but smile. ‘You know, you and Charley Pride are ploughing a pretty lonely furrow with that black country and western act. The brothers see you dressed like that and they may have words to say.’

  ‘Brothers helped to build this great country, and that “shit-kicker music”, as our resident cultural theorist put it, was the sound-track to generations of workers. Wasn’t all Negro spirituals and Paul Robeson, y’know. Plus, I like this hat.’ He gave the brim a little flick with his fingers.

  ‘I was kind of hoping you two could maintain a low profile while we were here, unless it’s absolutely necessary that you do otherwise,’ I said, as we got into the Mustang.

  Louis sighed loudly. ‘Bird, I’m the only brother from here to Toronto. ‘Less I contract vitiligo between this motel and the high-school band scam, ain’t no way that I can be low profile. So shut up and drive.’

  ‘Yeah, Bird, drive,’ said Angel from the backseat, “else Cleavon Little here will get his posse on your ass. The Cowpokes with Attitude, maybe, or Prairie Enemy . . .’

  ‘Angel,’ came the voice from the passenger seat. ‘Shut up.’

  The Roadside was a big old place done in dark wood. It was long, windowed and single storeyed at the front with a gabled entrance in the centre which rose up above the rest like the steeple of a church. There were plenty of cars parked in the lot, with more around the sides stacked up almost to the treeline. The Roadside was at the western edge of town; beyond it was dark forest.

  We paid our five-dollar cover charge at the door – ‘Five dollars!’ hissed Angel. ‘This a mob place?’ – and made our way into the bar itself. It was a long cavernous room, almost as dark inside as it was outside. Dim lights hung on the walls and the bar was lit sufficiently so that drinkers could see the labels on the bottles, but not the sell-by date. The Roadside was a lot bigger than it looked from the outside and the light died just beyond the limits of the bar and the center of the dance floor. It stretched maybe three hundred feet from the door to the stage at the far end, with the bar on a raised platform at the centre. Tables radiated from it into the dimness at the walls, which were lined in turn by booths. At the edges, the Roadside was so dark that only pale-moon faces were visible, and then only when their owners stepped into a pool of light. Otherwise, they were only vague shapes moving against the walls, like wraiths.

  ‘It’s a Stevie Wonder bar,’ said Angel. ‘The menu’s probably in braille.’

  ‘It’s pretty dark,’ I agreed. ‘Drop a quarter here, it’ll be worth ten cents by the time you find it.’

  ‘Yeah, like Reaganomics in miniature,’ said Angel.

  ‘Don’t say nothing bad about Reagan,’ warned Louis. ‘I have good memories of Ron.’

  ‘Which is probably more than Ron has,’ smirked Angel.

  Louis led the way to a booth over by the right-hand wall, close to one of the emergency doors that stood halfway down each of the Roadside’s walls. There was probably at least one other door at the back, behind the stage. At present, that stage was occupied by what seemed to be Larry Fulcher and the Gamblers. Louis was already tapping his feet and nodding his head in time to the music.

  In fact, Larry Fulcher and his band were pretty good. There were six of them, Fulcher leading on the mandolin, guitar and banjo. They played ‘Bonaparte’s Retreat’ and a couple of Bob Wills songs, ‘Get With It’ and ‘Texas Playboy Rag’. They moved on to the Carter Family with ‘Wabash Cannonball’ and ‘Worried Man Blues’, ‘You’re Learning’ by the Louvin Brothers and then did a neat version of’One Piece at a Time’ by Johnny Cash. It was an eclectic selection, but they played well and with obvious enthusiasm. Even Louis was impressed; the last time I saw him looking that impressed was when Angel opened fire on Joe Bones’s lawn back in New Orleans without hitting either of us while he was doing it.

  We ordered burgers and fries. They came in red plastic baskets with a liner on the bottom to hold in the grease. I felt my arteries hardening as soon as I smelled the food. Angel and Louis drank some Pete’s Wicked. I had bottled water.

  The band took a break and people flooded towards the bar and the bathrooms. I sipped some water and scanned the crowd. There was no sign of Rand Jennings, or his wife, which was probably a good thing.

  ‘We should be out at Meade Payne’s place now,’ said Louis. ‘Billy Purdue arrives, he ain’t gonna do it in a parade float in daylight.’

  ‘If you were out there now, you’d be freezing and you wouldn’t be able to see a thing,’ I said. ‘We do what we can.’ I felt like the whole situation was slipping away from me. Maybe it had always been slipping away, right from the time I took five hundred dollars from Billy Purdue without ever questioning where he might have found it. I still felt certain that Billy would make his way to Dark Hollow, sooner or later. Without Meade Payne’s cooperation there was always the chance that he could slip past us, but my guess was that Billy would hole up with Meade for a time, maybe even try to make for Canada with his help. Billy’s arrival would disturb the routine out at the Payne place, and I had faith in the ability of Angel and Louis to spot any such disturbance.

  But Billy was still a comparatively minor concern next to Ellen Cole, although, in some way that I hadn’t yet figured out, there had to be a connection between them. An old man had guided them up here, perhaps the same old man who had shadowed Rita Ferris in the days before her death, maybe even the same old man who had once been known as Caleb Brewster by the people of a small Texan town. Dark Hollow was just too small a place for those kinds of unconnected occurrences to take place.

  As if on cue, a woman pushed her way through the throng at the bar and ordered a drink. It was Lorna Jennings, her bright red sweater like a beacon in the crowd. Beside her stood two other women, a slim brunette in a green shirt and an older woman with black hair, wearing a white cotton top decorated with pink roses. It seemed to be a girls’ night out. Lorna didn’t see me, or didn’t want to see me.

  There was a burst of applause and Larry Fulcher and his band came back onstage. They burst into ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky’ and the dance-floor instantly became a mass of movement, couples swinging each other across the floor, smiles on their faces, the women spinning on their toes, the men twisting them expertly. There was laughter in the air. Groups of friends and neighbours stood talking, beers in hand, enjoying a night of community and kinship. Above the bar, a banner thanked everyone for supporting the Dark Hollow High School Band. In the shadows, younger couples kissed discreetly while their parents practised foreplay on the dance floor. The music seemed to grow in volume; the crowd began to move faster; the sound of glass breaking came from the bar, accompanied by
a burst of embarrassed laughter. Lorna stood beside a pillar, the two women on either side silent now as they listened to the music. In the shadows at the walls, figures moved, some barely more than indistinct shapes: couples talking, young people joshing, a community relaxing. Here and there, I heard talk of the discovery of Gary Chute’s body but it wasn’t personal and it didn’t interfere with the night’s festivities. I watched a man and woman seated at the bar across from Lorna as they kissed hard, their tongues visible where their mouths met, the woman’s hand snaking down her partner’s side, down, down . . .

  Down to where a child stood before them, lit by a circle of light that seemed to come from nowhere but within himself. While couples moved close by, and groups of men walked through the crowds carrying trays of beer, the child still held a space to itself and no one came close or broke the shell of light surrounding him. It lit his blonde hair, brought up the colour of his purple rompers, made the nails of his tiny hands shine as he raised his left hand and pointed into the shadows.

  ‘Donnie?’ I heard myself whisper.

  And from the darkness at the far side of the bar, a white shape appeared. Stritch’s mouth was open in a smile, the thick, soft lips splitting his face from side to side, and his bald head gleamed in the dim light. He turned in the direction of Lorna Jennings, looked back at me, and drew his right index finger across his neck as he moved through the crowd towards her.

  ‘Stritch,’ I hissed, springing from my seat. Louis scanned the crowd, already rising, his hand reaching for his SIG.

  ‘I don’t see him. You sure?’

  ‘He’s on the other side of the bar. He’s after Lorna.’

  Louis went right, his hand inside his black jacket, his fingers on his gun. I moved left, but the crowd was thick and unyielding. I pushed my way through, people stepping back and yelling as their beer spilled. (‘Buddy, hey buddy, where’s the fire?’) I tried to keep Lorna’s red sweater in view, but I lost it as people passed into my line of vision. To my right, I could just make out Louis moving through the couples at the edge of the dance floor, his progress attracting curious glances. To my left, Angel was making his way around the bar in a wide arc.