Charlie Parker Collection 1

by John Connolly

  ‘Best to keep your nose out of there, Walt,’ I told him, ‘or else you’ll be wearing one of them on the end of it.’

  We get a lot of garters in Maine. They’re tough reptiles, capable of surviving sub zero temperatures for up to one month, or of submerging themselves in water during the winter, aided by stable thermals. Then, usually in mid-March when the sun begins to warm the rocks, they emerge from their hibernation and start searching for mates. By June or July they’re breeding. Mostly, you get ten or twelve young in a nest. Sometimes there are as few as three. The record is eighty-five, which is a lot of garter snakes no matter what way you look at it. These snakes had probably chosen to make their home in the shack because of the comparative sparsity of conifers on this part of my land. Conifers make the soil acidic, which is bad for night crawlers, and night crawlers are a garter’s favorite snack.

  I replaced the boards and stepped back out into the sunlight, Walter at my heels. Garters are unpredictable creatures. Some of them will take food from your hand while others will bite and keep biting until they get tired or bored or killed. Here, in this old shack, they were unlikely to harm anyone, and the local population of skunks, raccoons, foxes, and cats would sniff them out soon enough. I decided to let them be unless circumstances forced me to do otherwise. As for Walter, well, he’d just have to learn to mind his own business.

  Below me and through the trees, the salt marsh gleamed in the morning sun and wild birds moved on the waters, their shapes visible through the swaying grasses and rushes. The Native Americans had named this place Owascoag, the Land of Many Grasses, but they were long gone, and to the people that lived here now it was simply ‘the marsh,’ the place where the Dunstan and Nonesuch Rivers came together as they approached the sea. The mallards, year-round residents, had been joined for the summer by wood ducks, pintails, black ducks, and teal, but the visitors would soon be leaving to escape the harsh Maine winter. Their whistles and cries carried on the breeze, joining with the buzz of the insects in a gentle clamor of feeding and mating, hunting and fleeing. I watched a swallow make an arcing dive toward the mud and alight upon a rotting log. It had been a dry season and the swallows in particular had enjoyed good eating. Those that lived close to the marsh were grateful to them, for they kept down not only the mosquitoes but the far nastier greenheads, with their strong-toothed jaws that tore through the skin with the force of a razor cut.

  Scarborough is an old community, one of the first colonies established on the northern New England coast that was not simply a transient fishing station but a settlement that would become a permanent home for the families who lived within its boundaries. Many were English settlers, my mother’s ancestors among them; others came from Massachusetts and New Hampshire, attracted by the promise of good farmland. The first governor of Maine, William King, was born in Scarborough, although he left there at the age of nineteen when it became clear that it didn’t have too much to offer in the way of wealth and opportunity. Battles have been fought here – like most of the towns on the coastline, Scarborough has been dipped in blood – and the community has been blighted by the ugliness of Route 1, but through it all the Scarborough salt marsh has survived, and its waters glow like molten lava in the setting sun. The marsh was protected, although the continuing development of Scarborough meant that new housing – not all of it pretty, and some of it unquestionably ugly – had grown up close to the marsh’s high-water mark, attracted both by its beauty and by the presence of older, preexisting populations. The big, black-gabled house in which I now lived dated from the 1930s and was mostly sheltered from the road and the marsh by a stand of trees. From my porch, I could look out upon the water and sometimes find a kind of peace that I hadn’t felt in a long, long time.

  But that kind of peace is fleeting, an escape from reality that ends as soon as you tear your eyes away and your attention returns to the matters in hand: to those whom you love and who depend upon you to be there for them; to those who want something from you but for whom you feel little or nothing in return; and to those who would hurt you and those close to you, if given the opportunity. Right now, I had enough to be getting along with in all three categories.

  Rachel and I had moved to this house only four weeks previously, after I had sold my grandfather’s old home and adjoining land on Mussey Road, about two miles away, to the U.S. Postal Service. A huge new mail depot was being built in the Scarborough area and I had been paid a considerable amount of money to vacate my land so that it could be used as a maintenance area for the mail fleet.

  I had felt a twinge of sorrow when the sale was finally agreed. After all, this was the house to which my mother and I had come from New York after my father’s death, the house in which I had spent my teenage years, and the house to which I, in turn, had returned after the death of my own wife and child. Now, two and a half years later, I was starting again. Rachel had only just begun to show, and it seemed somehow apt that we would begin our life as a couple in earnest in a new home, one that we had chosen together, furnished and decorated together, and in which, I hoped, we would live and grow old together. In addition, as my ex-neighbor Sam Evans had pointed out to me as the sale was nearing completion and as he himself was about to depart for his new place in the South, only a crazy person would want to live in close proximity to thousands of postal workers, all of them little ticking time bombs of frustration waiting to explode in an orgy of gun-related violence.

  ‘I’m not sure that they’re really that dangerous,’ I suggested to him.

  He looked skeptical. Sam had been the first to sell when the offers were made, and the last of his possessions were now in a U-Haul truck ready to head for Virginia. My hands were dusty from helping him carry the boxes from the house.

  ‘You ever see that film The Postman?’ he asked.

  ‘No. I heard it kind of sucked.’

  ‘It sucked sperm whales. Kevin Costner should have been stripped naked, soaked in honey, and staked out over an anthill for it, but that’s not the point. What’s The Postman about?’

  ‘A postman?’

  ‘An armed postman,’ he corrected. ‘In fact, lots of armed postmen. Now, I bet you fifty bucks that if you accessed the records of shitty video stores in any city in America, you know what you’d find?’

  ‘Porn?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ he lied. ‘You’d find that the only people who rented The Postman more than once were other postmen. I swear it. Check the records. The Postman is like a call to arms for these guys. I mean, it’s a vision of an America in which postal workers are heroes and still get to blow away anyone who pisses them off. It’s like porno for postals. They probably sit around in circles jerking off at their favorite parts.’

  I discreetly took a step away from him. He wagged a finger at me.

  ‘You mark my words. What Marilyn Manson is to crazy high schoolers, The Postman is to postal workers. You just wait until the killings start, then you’ll say to yourself that old Sam was right all along.’

  That, or old Sam was crazy all along. I still wasn’t sure how serious he was. I had visions of him holed up in a farmhouse in Virginia, waiting for the postal apocalypse to come. He shook my hand and walked to the truck. His wife and children had already gone on ahead of him, and he was looking forward to the peace of the road. He paused at the door of the truck and winked.

  ‘Don’t let the crazy bastards get you, Parker.’

  ‘They haven’t succeeded yet,’ I replied.

  For a moment, the smile departed from his face, and the undercurrent to his comments rippled his surface good humor.

  ‘That don’t mean they’ll stop trying.’

  ‘I know.’

  He nodded.

  ‘If you’re ever in Virginia . . .’

  ‘I’ll keep driving.’

  He gave me a final wave and then he was gone, his middle finger raised in a last farewell to the future home of the U.S. Mail.

  From the porch of the house
, Rachel called my name and waved the cordless phone at me. I raised a hand in acknowledgment and watched Walt tear away from me at full speed to join her. Rachel’s red hair burned in the sunlight, and once again I felt a tightening in my belly at the sight of her. My feelings for her coiled and twisted inside me, so that for a moment I found it hard to isolate any single emotion. There was love – that much I knew for certain – but there was also gratitude, and longing, and fear: fear for us, a fear that I would somehow let her down and force her away from me; fear for our unborn child, for I had lost a child before, had watched again and again in my uneasy sleep as she slipped away from me and disappeared into the darkness, her mother by her side, their passing wreathed in rage and pain; and fear for Rachel, a terror that I might somehow fail to protect her, that some harm might befall her when my back was turned, my attention distracted, and she too would be torn away from me.

  And then I would die, for I would not be able to take such pain again.

  ‘It’s Elliot Norton,’ she said as I reached her, her hand over the mouthpiece. ‘He says he’s an old friend.’

  I nodded, then patted Rachel’s butt as I took the phone. She swatted me playfully on the ear in response. At least, I think it was meant to be playful. I watched her head back into the house to continue her work. She was still traveling down to Boston twice weekly to hold her psychology tutorials, but she now did most of her research work in the small office we had set up for her in one of the spare bedrooms, her left hand resting gently on her belly while she wrote. She looked over her shoulder at me as she headed into the kitchen and wiggled her rump provocatively.

  ‘Hussy,’ I muttered at her. She stuck her tongue out and disappeared.

  ‘Excuse me?’ said Elliot’s voice from the phone. His Southern accent was stronger than I remembered.

  ‘I said “hussy”. It’s not how I usually greet lawyers. For them I use “whore”, or “leech” if I want to get away from the whole sexual arena.’

  ‘Uh-huh. You don’t make any exceptions?’

  ‘Not usually. By the way, I found a nest of your peers at the bottom of my garden this morning.’

  ‘I won’t even ask. How you doing, Charlie?’

  ‘I’m good. It’s been a while, Elliot.’

  Elliot Norton had been an assistant attorney in the homicide bureau of the Brooklyn D.A.’s office when I was a detective. We had managed to get on pretty well together both professionally and personally on those occasions when our paths crossed, until he got married and moved back home to South Carolina, where he was now practicing law in Charleston. I still received a Christmas card from him each year. I’d met him the previous September for dinner in Boston when he was dealing with the sale of some property in the White Mountains, and had stayed in his house some years before when Susan, my late wife, and I were passing through South Carolina during the early months of our marriage. He was in his late thirties now, prematurely gray and divorced from his wife, a woman named Alicia who was pretty enough to stop traffic on rainy days. I didn’t know anything about the circumstances of the breakup, although I figured Elliot for the kind of guy who might have strayed from the marital fold on occasion. When we’d had dinner, at Sonsi on Newbury, the girls in their summer dresses passing by the open doors, his eyes had practically been out on stalks, like those of a character in a Tex Avery cartoon.

  ‘Well, we Southern folks tend to keep ourselves pretty much to ourselves,’ he drawled. ‘Plus we’re kinda busy, what with keeping the coloreds in check and all.’

  ‘It’s good to have a hobby.’

  ‘That it is. You still private detecting?’

  The small talk had come to a pretty sudden end, I thought.

  ‘Some,’ I confirmed.

  ‘You in the market for work?’

  ‘Depends upon the kind.’

  ‘I have a client due for trial. I could do with some help.’

  ‘Maine is a long way from South Carolina, Elliot.’

  ‘That’s why I’m calling you. This isn’t something that the local snoops are too interested in.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it’s bad.’

  ‘How bad?’

  ‘Nineteen-year-old male accused of raping his girlfriend, then beating her to death. His name is Atys Jones. He’s black. His girlfriend was white, and wealthy.’

  ‘That’s pretty bad.’

  ‘He says he didn’t do it.’

  ‘And you believe him?’

  ‘And I believe him.’

  ‘With respect, Elliot, the jails are full of guys who say they didn’t do it.’

  ‘I know. I helped to put some of them away, and I know they did it. But this one’s different. He’s innocent. I’ve bet the homestead on it. Literally: my house is security on his bail.’

  ‘What do you want from me?’

  ‘I need somebody to help me move him to a safe house then look around, check witness statements; someone who isn’t from around here and isn’t likely to be scared off too easy. It’s a week’s work, maybe a day or two more. Look, Charlie, this kid had a death sentence passed on him before he even set foot in a courtroom. As things stand, he may not live to see his trial.’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘Richland County lock up, but I can’t leave him in there for too much longer. I took over the case from the public defender and now rumor is that some lowlifes from the Skinhead Riviera may try to make a name for themselves by shanking the kid in case I get him off. That’s why I’ve arranged bail. Atys Jones is a sitting duck in Richland.’

  I leaned back against the rail of my porch. Walter came out with a rubber bone in his mouth and pressed it into my hand. He wanted to play. I knew how he felt. It was a bright autumn day, my girlfriend was radiant with the knowledge that our first child was slowly growing inside her, and we were pretty comfortable financially. That kind of situation encourages you to kick back for a time and enjoy it while it lasts. I needed Elliot Norton’s client like I needed scorpions in my shoes.

  ‘I don’t know, Elliot. Every time you open your mouth, you give me another good reason to close my ears.’

  ‘Well, while I have your attention you may as well hear the worst of it. The girl’s name was Marianne Larousse. She was Earl Larousse’s daughter.’

  With the mention of his name, I recalled some details of the case. Earl Larousse was just about the biggest industrialist from the Carolinas to the Mississippi; he owned tobacco plantations, oil wells, mining operations, factories. He even owned most of Grace Falls, the town in which Elliot had grown up, except you didn’t read about Earl Larousse in the society pages or the business sections, or see him standing beside presidential candidates or dullard congressmen. He employed PR companies to keep his name out of the public domain and to stonewall journalists and anybody else who tried to poke around in his affairs. Earl Larousse liked his privacy, and he was prepared to pay a lot of money to protect it, but the death of his daughter had thrust his family unwillingly into the limelight. His wife had died a few years back, and he had a son, Earl Jr., older than Marianne by a couple of years, but none of the surviving members of the Larousse clan had made any public comment on the death of Marianne or the impending trial of her killer.

  Now Elliot Norton was defending the man accused of raping and murdering Earl Larousse’s daughter, and that was a course of action likely to make him the second most unpopular person in the state of South Carolina, after his client. Anybody drawn into the maelstrom surrounding the case was going to suffer; there was no question about it. Even if Earl himself didn’t decide to take the law into his own hands there were plenty of other people who would because Earl was one of their own, because he paid their wages, and because maybe Earl would smile upon whoever did him the favor of punishing the man he believed had killed his little girl.

  ‘I’m sorry, Elliot,’ I said. ‘This isn’t something I want to get involved with right now.’

  There was silence at the other end of the
line.

  ‘I’m desperate, Charlie,’ he said at last, and I could hear it in his voice: the tiredness, the fear, the frustration. ‘My secretary is quitting at the end of the week because she doesn’t approve of my client list and pretty soon I’ll have to drive to Georgia to buy food because nobody around here will sell me jackshit.’ His voice rose. ‘So don’t fucking tell me that this is something you don’t want to get involved with like you’re running for fucking Congress or something, because my house and maybe my life are on the line and . . .’

  He didn’t finish the sentence. After all, what more was there to say?

  I heard him exhale a deep breath.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered. ‘I don’t know why I said that.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ I replied, but it wasn’t, not for him and not for me.

  ‘I hear you’re about to become a father,’ he said. ‘That’s good, after all that’s happened. If I was you, maybe I’d stay up there in Maine too and forget that some asshole called you up out of the blue to join in his crusade. Yeah, I think that would be what I’d do, if I was you. You take care now, Charlie Parker. Look after that little lady.’