Nocturnes (2004)

by John Connolly

  “I’m Wayne Grass,” he said. “Chief of police.”

  “Charlie Parker,” I said. “I’m a private investigator.”

  “I know who you are,” he said. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

  I followed Grass into his office. It was tidy, with flowers growing in pots on the windowsill. There was a picture of a woman and two children on his desk. The woman was very pretty and looked a lot younger than Grass. The kids, a boy and a girl, were in their early teens.

  “My family,” he said, spotting the direction of my glance.

  “Recent picture?”

  “Just last year. Why?”

  “No reason,” I said.

  “My wife is a little younger than I am, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Nice work,” I said.

  Grass grinned and reddened. He offered me coffee. I declined, and he settled back into his chair.

  “So what can I do for you, Mr. Parker?”

  “I’ve been hired by a man named Frank Matheson. He’s worried about a photograph that he found in the mailbox of a house that he owns. It’s the photograph of a child. The house is the old Grady house.”

  I waited, watching the smile on Grass’s face melt away.

  “I’m disappointed,” he said at last.

  “Why would you be disappointed?”

  “I told Frank Matheson that I’d take care of it, and I will, but I’m not going to let him scare some little girl and her parents half to death, and maybe start a panic among others, just because he found a picture in a mailbox.”

  “You think that’s what he wants to do?”

  “I don’t know what he wants, but that will be the result. We need to tread softly on this thing. We’ll circulate the picture, see what comes up. Hell, it may not even have been taken in the state. That photograph could have come from anywhere. But if Frank Matheson or anyone else goes to the newspapers and the TV stations and starts telling them that this little girl’s picture was placed in a dead child killer’s mailbox, what do you think is going to happen?”

  “Maybe you’ll find the girl.”

  “Or maybe we’ll be accused of starting a panic over nothing, of overreacting to what’s probably just a sick practical joke. Next thing, I’ve got the media down here showing images of the Grady house, and then the freaks will start to arrive. Maybe the whole shitstorm will give one of them an idea, and then we really will be looking for an endangered child. Like I said, we’re going to work at getting the photograph out to local and state law enforcement, then school boards. We find that little girl, then we can just take her parents quietly to one side and tell them what we know, which is squat.”

  In one way, I knew Grass was right. The whole affair had to be handled delicately, and there was no point in frightening a little girl and her family over what might be nothing. But I realized that Grass was approaching the issue from one perspective, and Matheson was approaching it from another: Grass believed that the child probably wasn’t in any danger, because there was no evidence to suggest otherwise, but, heightened (or, perhaps, tormented) by his own loss, Matheson’s instincts told him that the child was at risk. I was stuck in the middle, wanting to believe Grass, but half persuaded by Matheson’s concerns.

  “Were there any prints on the envelope?”

  “None, apart from Matheson’s, and we don’t suspect him of putting an envelope in his own mailbox and then bringing it to us.”

  I agreed that it didn’t sound likely, mainly in an effort to diffuse what felt like growing tension between us. Small-town cops don’t like people questioning their decisions. Even big-city cops don’t like it very much, but they tend to be less protective of their patch.

  “Have you been out to the Grady house recently?” I asked Grass.

  “We check it pretty regularly. The place is locked down tight. I was back there after Frank Matheson found the photograph. There was nothing out of the ordinary.”

  “When you say ‘we’…?”

  “We have four officers in total, myself included: three male, one female. They’re good people.”

  “So sometimes one of them will go by there and open up the house?”

  “Well, occasionally. Mostly, I do it myself. Easier that way. I don’t have to worry about the keys getting lost, or someone getting spooked.”

  “Spooked?”

  “You know what happened in that house. It’s not a place to visit unless you have to. It’s got a bad feel about it, and always will have. It stinks too. Something in the paints and pastes that Grady used. It just seems to get worse and worse. After twenty years, I’m used to it. It doesn’t get to me so much. Someone else, someone new…”

  He trailed off.

  We sat like that, in silence, until I stood and thanked him for his time.

  “Like I said, it was my pleasure, but I don’t know what more you can do for Mr. Matheson.”

  “I’m not sure either,” I said. “I think I’ll just nose around. If I find out anything, I’ll let you know. I’d appreciate it if you could see your way clear to doing the same.”

  I gave him a card. He placed it carefully in his wallet, then gave me a card of his own in return from a little dispenser on his desk.

  “You going to take a look at the Grady house while you’re up here?” he asked.

  “I think I will, since I’ve come all this way.”

  “You want me to go out there with you?”

  “I believe I’ll be okay.”

  He nodded to himself, like a man who feels secure in the conclusion that he has just reached.

  “I guess this is the point in the conversation where you tell me that you don’t scare easy,” he said.

  “Being scared isn’t the problem,” I replied. “It’s not running away that’s the hard part.”

  The Grady house was much as I remembered it from the news reports of the time: a little more overgrown with ivy, perhaps, its windows now boarded up and a pair of padlocked steel doors preventing access through either the front or back of the house, but these were relatively cosmetic changes. The Grady house was ugly when it was built, even foreboding in its way, although I felt certain that this impression was mostly a consequence of my knowledge of its past. I circled the house, checking the windows and the doors to see if they had been tampered with in any way, then returned to the mailbox and gave it a cursory check. It was empty, apart from some dead insects and a faded flyer offering free soda and fries with every pizza delivery.

  I walked back up to the house and took a set of keys from my pocket. Frank Matheson had given them to me when I agreed to take on the job. I unlocked the outer steel door and pulled it open. The door behind it had a fan of stained glass dominating its upper third, and opened easily to the touch. Inside, the hallway was covered with a coating of dust, and cobwebs draped the chandelier in the center of the ceiling. There were no bulbs in its sockets. To my right, I caught my reflection in the mirror on a battered coatrack, the sole furnishing in the hallway. Footsteps had disturbed the dust relatively recently. I guessed that Grass or Matheson had left them when they came to check on the house.

  To my left was what would once have been a receiving room. It contained no furniture, but an ornamental marble fireplace against the far wall had been left untouched. There was another mirror here, although its reflection was slightly off. I approached it and saw that it was angled toward the covered window. A length of shiny new chain led from the back of the mirror to an old nail driven into the plaster. Maybe the original chain had broken, and someone had seen fit to rehang the mirror. It seemed like an odd thing to do.

  A pair of sliding doors led into what was probably once the dining room, again empty of furnishings apart from a fireplace matching the one in the receiving room, and another mirror, this time angled to the floor and once again with a new chain. There were mirrors too, I discovered, on the back of the kitchen doorway facing into the hallway; in the kitchen itself; on the first and second landings of the upp
er floors; and in every bedroom. There were mirrors on the walls of the upper floors, in the bathroom, and even in the attic when I checked it using a rickety stepladder. Most were old, but some looked like more recent additions, untainted by the decay of the nitrates.

  I went back downstairs and checked the kitchen and the downstairs bathroom. The sink in the kitchen was stained and reeked of stagnant water and rotting matter in the pipes. By contrast, the sink in the bathroom was comparatively clean. Nobody would be drinking from it in a hurry, but compared to the kitchen sink it was a model of good hygiene. Someone had wiped it down in recent months, or had at least allowed the faucets to run. Maybe someone had used it to wash up after checking the house, because my own hands were already black with dust and filth.

  The only door in the entire house that appeared to be locked was the door leading down into the basement where John Grady had made his last stand before shooting himself. I tried all of my keys on the lock, with no result, then made a mental note to ask Frank Matheson about it when next we spoke. A full-length mirror hung on the basement door. I checked my reflection in it. I was going kind of gray, I thought. Old age was going to be a gentle slide for me.

  As I turned, I felt my head swim a little. I had been conscious of a vague chemical scent in the air when I entered the house, but now it seemed to have suddenly grown stronger. This would be a bad place to stay for any length of time, I thought. With the windows boarded up and the doors sealed, there was no fresh air to dispel whatever miasma hung about the house. After only fifteen minutes, I was already experiencing the beginnings of a headache.

  I was about to leave when a noise from the front of the house alerted me. There was a man on the step, his hand on his gun. It took a moment for my eyes to distinguish his brown uniform against the afternoon sun. He was in his forties, and running to seed. His stomach bulged over his belt, and there were sweat stains beneath his armpits.

  “Who are you?” he said.

  Instinctively, I raised my hands.

  “My name’s Charlie Parker. I’ve been employed by Frank Matheson, the owner of this house, to look into some things. I spoke to Chief Grass earlier today. He’ll vouch for me.”

  “Okay, I want you to step outside here.”

  He backed away from me, his hand still poised on the butt of his gun. “You got some ID?”

  I nodded, walking slowly toward him, my hands still raised.

  “It’s in my jacket pocket, outside left.”

  I always kept it there. At the risk of being pickpocketed, it meant that I was never in danger of making a nervy cop or security guard any more nervous than he already was by reaching inside my coat. I got to the doorway, moved on to the porch, then took the three steps down to the yard.

  “Take your ID out,” said the cop. “Slowly.”

  The cop still hadn’t drawn his gun.

  I took out my wallet, flipped through it to my PI’s license, then let him take a good look at it. When he was satisfied he allowed his hand to drift from his weapon for the first time. He introduced himself as Ed O’Donnell, one of the part-timers from Two Mile Lake.

  “Chief Grass told me you’d been asking questions,” he said. “I just didn’t expect to find you in the house so soon. I got the impression the chief would be happier if you didn’t spend too much time nosing around in there either.”

  “Why would that be?”

  “I think he’d prefer it if this house was gone. It’s a reminder of the past.”

  “You go in a lot?”

  “Nah, although I met Frank Matheson here last night when we were both taking a look over the place. I saw your car parked down the road as I was passing. You seen enough?”

  “Pretty much,” I said. “Cellar door is locked, though. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

  “Nothing, except that it’s where they found Grady’s body. The other kid he took, Denny Maguire, was down there too. I suppose it’s something that Grady didn’t kill him as well. It was Chief Grass who took him out of the house, wrapped up in his jacket. He was just a state trooper then. A photographer got a snap of them coming out. It’s kind of a famous picture around here. Since then, the chief has always kept an eye on this place. It’s personal for him, after what he saw.”

  “You have any idea what happened to the Maguire kid?”

  “Denny? Sure, he works down in Moscow at a bar called the Desperate Measure. It’s over on Main. He doesn’t talk much about what happened that day, though.”

  “No, I don’t imagine he would.”

  I looked back at the house. Its boarded-up windows reminded me of closed eyes on the brink of an awakening.

  “You ever see anyone hanging around here?”

  He shrugged. “Kids, mostly, but they tend to stay away from the house itself.”

  “Mostly?”

  “What?”

  “You said ‘kids, mostly.’ Sounds like there might have been others.”

  “Tourists. Thrill seekers.”

  “Ray Czabo?”

  “Couple of times. He’s harmless.”

  “What about a guy taller than me; thin; long dark hair? He probably looked kind of dirty.”

  O’Donnell shook his head.

  “Doesn’t ring any bells.”

  I thanked him for his time. He watched me lock the door, then waited until I was in my car and driving away before he followed me from the property.

  The Desperate Measure was the kind of bar most people wouldn’t set a fire in, never mind a foot. A green shamrock barely stood out from the dirty white of the illuminated sign outside, and the bar’s windows were small beveled panes of blue and orange. It was a place where men went to drink and think about hitting other men, and where women went to drink and think about hitting men as well. Inset into the door was a small square of glass, barred like the entrance to a keep, presumably so those within could check on anyone seeking entry once the door was locked. It wasn’t clear why they felt the need to check. Nobody outside could be any more threatening than the people who were drinking inside.

  Half the seats at the bar were already taken, although it was not yet four in the afternoon. The customers were mainly men between their late thirties and late fifties, seated alone or in pairs. There was no conversation. A TV was bolted to the wall at the far end of the bar, further anchored in place by a pair of steel rods that partially obscured the edges of the screen. It was tuned to a news channel, but the sound was down. Most of the people in the Desperate Measure looked as if they’d heard just about all the bad news they wanted to hear in their lives.

  A sad lineup of domestic beers stood above the register like deserters waiting for the firing squad, with a single dusty bottle of Zima bringing up the rear, as out of place here as one of the patrons might have been on Castro Street during Gay Mardi Gras. There was a pretty good selection of bourbon, a couple of bottles of brandy, and one bottle of Tia Maria that didn’t appear to have been touched since the Cold War.

  I took a seat at the end of the bar nearest the door, two stools away from a man in a lumberjack shirt who kept flicking at the loose fingernail of his middle finger with the end of his thumb. Each time he did so, the nail raised up from the skin, barely held in place at the cuticle. I wondered if it hurt. In another life, I might have been tempted to ask, but I’d learned that a man who doesn’t care much about idly inflicting pain on himself sometimes considers it a pleasant change to inflict pain on somebody else. I figured the nail would come out eventually, and then he could start on another finger. It would never be the same, though. There’s nothing like losing your first nail.

  The barman made his way down the counter.

  “What can I get you?”

  “You got coffee?”

  “We got it, but you don’t want to drink it.”

  He indicated a pot of something stewing away on a hot plate. It looked as though it might have gone on fire at some point in the past, and was currently considering reigniting just to
break the monotony.

  “OJ is fine, then.”

  He poured my juice into a clean glass and placed it before me.

  “I’m looking for Denny Maguire,” I said. “He around?”

  “You found him,” said the barman.

  I tried to keep the surprise from my face. My guess was that Denny Maguire must be in his thirties by now, but the guy behind the bar looked twenty years older than that. In a way, he was the flip side of Chief Grass. If the chief, like Dorian Gray, had a bad portrait of himself hidden in the attic, then Denny Maguire’s appearance gave some indication of what it might look like.

  “My name’s Charlie Parker,” I said, for the third time that day. “I’m a private investigator. You need to see some ID?”

  I asked because when you’re in a place like the Desperate Measure, then producing anything that might lead the customers to mistake you for a cop and showing it to the barman was likely to lead to some awkward questions, or worse, for both of you.

  “I believe you,” he said. “Why would a man lie about something like that?”

  “I could be doing it to gain the esteem and respect of strangers.”

  “It’ll take a little more than a piece of card and some attitude to get that here.”

  “Maybe I should have shot a bear.”

  “Maybe. You want to tell me why a private investigator is asking after me?”

  I could see that Fingernail Man had found something to divert his attention from his own decaying fingers, so I suggested to Maguire that maybe we could talk somewhere away from the bar. He agreed, and summoned a woman who was reading a magazine at one of the deuces over by the men’s room.

  “I got five more minutes,” she said.

  “Bill me,” said Maguire.

  The woman shook her head in disgust, killed her cigarette, and made her way slowly to the bar.