Nocturnes (2004)

by John Connolly

  She pursed her lips and shrugged. “Do you see yourself when you look in a mirror?”

  I had the feeling that I often got with Rachel, that she had somehow moved three steps ahead of me while I was being distracted by a passing cloud.

  “I—”

  I stopped as I tried to consider the question properly.

  “Well,” I said at last. “I see a version of myself.”

  “Your reflection is informed by your own self-image. In effect, you create part of what you see. We are not as we are. We are as we imagine ourselves to be. So what did John Grady see when he looked in the mirror?”

  I saw again the house. I saw its unfinished walls, its filthy sinks, its decaying carpets. I saw the cheap sticks of furniture, the empty bedrooms, the warped boards.

  And I saw the mirrors.

  “He saw his house,” I said. “He saw his house as he wished it to be.”

  “Or as he believed it to be, in another place.”

  “In the world beyond the glass.”

  “And maybe that world was more real to him than this one.”

  “So if the house was more real in that world, then…”

  “Then so was he. Perhaps that’s who he was talking to while he was waiting to kill Denny Maguire. Maybe he was talking to John Grady, or what he perceived to be the real John Grady.”

  “And the children?”

  “What did Denny Maguire say: that he never spoke directly to them?”

  “He said that Grady spoke to their reflections in the glass.”

  Rachel shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never heard anything quite like that before.”

  She moved in closer to me.

  “You will be careful, won’t you?” she asked.

  “He’s dead,” I said. “There’s a limit to the harm dead men can do.”

  In the Grady house, something stirred. Dust was raised in ascending spirals. Papers rustled in empty grates. It was the north wind, whistling through rotting frames and broken boards, that created the sense of movement in the silent rooms. It was the north wind that made doorknobs rattle, and doors creak. It was the north wind that caused coat hangers to jangle against one another in locked closets, and dirty glasses to clink in closed kitchen cupboards.

  And it was the north wind that made the trees move, creating faint shadows that fell through cracks in the boarded windows, their shapes drifting across the old mirror above the fireplace in the dining room, the world reflected in its depths subtly different from our own, the shape moving within it finding no companion in the old house. There should have been photographs on the mantel, for there were photographs in its reflection in the glass. Instead, the mantel within the house itself was empty.

  It was the wind, then, that had carried these black-and-white images of unknown children through the glass and into another world.

  It was the wind, just the wind.

  V

  Surveillance is difficult work. Even the worst doughnut head, the kind of guy who wore a hockey helmet to school in case he fell over, is going to catch someone who’s watching him regularly for any length of time. The cops are lucky. It’s harder for a suspect to spot a handful of people on his tail than just one, and cops can split the job up between them, give one another a break, and generally help the other guy to remain on alert throughout, because surveillance, as well as being difficult, is also tedious, and the mind tends to wander. A good surveillance detail therefore requires a lot of manpower, which is why even the cops tend to sit on their hands some when the subject comes up. Taking two or more cops off regular duties to watch some jerk who may or may not be worthy of the attention has a knock-on effect on morale, overtime, and probably crime in general.

  Private investigators generally don’t have the luxury of surveillance teams, and their clients aren’t always so wealthy that they can afford to hire a whole bunch of operatives to cover a job, so checking up on someone can be difficult work. The Grady house detail was different. The house wasn’t about to go anywhere, or attempt to make a break for freedom through the woods. Nevertheless, watching it continuously was going to be a problem, which meant that someone would have to be found to share the burden. To be done well, even a simple task like monitoring an empty old house required someone with patience, self-discipline, a steady nerve, and an eye for detail, someone who didn’t spook easily and who would know how to handle himself if anything went down.

  In the absence of such an individual, I needed someone with a lot of time on his hands.

  I knew just the person.

  “Surveillance, huh?” said Angel.

  Angel and his partner, Louis, were the closest thing to real friends that I had. Admittedly, they were morally suspect, and Angel had the kind of temperament that might have been helped by a little pharmaceutical intervention, but then I couldn’t claim to be perfect either. Most men end up with the friends that they deserve, but I figured that I could probably get away with a lot during the rest of my life and still have some cause for complaint about the ones that I’d been handed. Most of the time, they lived together in an apartment on the Upper West Side, where Louis’s natural tendency toward order and minimalism fought a valiant but losing battle against his partner’s fascination with clutter and bargain clothing. It was all very yin and yang, but when I offered that theory to Angel he pretended that I was talking about Siamese twins and regaled me with anecdotes of a sexually fascinating, if politically incorrect, nature. When I shared a similar view with Louis, he threatened to send Angel to stay with me, just to see how long Rachel and I would tolerate a little of Angel’s yang. Given that Rachel sometimes made Louis look like a slob, I imagined that wouldn’t be very long.

  I could hear music playing in the background as Angel and I spoke. It sounded terrible.

  “What the hell are you listening to?”

  “A progressive rock compilation. I’m trying to get in touch with my muse by listening to music from my past.”

  I was almost afraid to ask. Almost.

  “You have a muse? What is she, some kind of community service muse? Did the court order her to help you?”

  Angel chose to ignore me.

  “I’m considering writing my memoirs. I mean, I’m gonna have to change some shit around, maybe alter names to protect the guilty, play with dates and timescales and stuff. I bought a book, one of those ‘How to Write a Bestseller’ guides. There’s some good advice in there. Guy who wrote it is a bestselling writer himself, knows what he’s talking about.”

  “You ever hear of the guy who wrote it?”

  There was a pause.

  “Nope, least not until I bought his book.”

  “So why do you think he’s a bestselling writer if you haven’t heard of him?”

  “There’s a lot of people I haven’t heard of, doesn’t mean to say that they’re not what they say they are. Says on the cover he’s a bestselling writer.”

  “So what’s he written?”

  There came the sound of pages being flipped in a thin, overpriced book.

  “He’s written—”

  “Yep?”

  “Hey, I’m looking. He’s written…Okay, he’s written a bestselling book on how to write bestsellers. That what you wanted to hear? Happy now?”

  I heard the sound of a book being cast to one side with some force. Still, I figured he’d retrieve it as soon as I hung up the phone, but he probably wouldn’t get much further on his memoirs than the first chapter. I certainly hoped that he wouldn’t.

  “This surveillance thing you want me to do, it’s on a house?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “An empty house?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did the house do: spy on its neighbors?”

  “I suspect it of stealing underwear from clotheslines.”

  “Knew a guy who did that once. He’d steal them, clean them, fold them, then deliver them back to the house with a note describing all the work that he’d done, with some care tips for
the owners. He told the judge he was worried about hygiene. Judge advised the prison governor to let him work in the laundry. We had the cleanest overalls in the state. Starchy too.”

  Angel had spent too long in prisons; a lot of hard time. He rarely spoke about them, and it was rarer still that he joked about them. It meant that he was happy in his life, for the moment, and for that I was grateful. He had endured a lot in recent months.

  “That’s a nice story. You about done?”

  “Doesn’t sound like a job looking at an empty house has too many prospects.”

  “If you turn out to be good at it, we’ll promote you to a job watching occupied houses. Look, no offense meant, but you’ve burgled enough properties. You must have some experience of watching them.”

  “Nice. You call me up, ask for my help, and now you insult me. Got any other skeletons from my past you want to throw in my face?”

  “It would be like emptying a crypt. I don’t have that kind of time.”

  “How much does this job pay?”

  “A dollar a day and all the peanuts you can eat.”

  “Salted or roasted?”

  “Salted.”

  “Sounds good. When can I start? And, hey, can I bring a friend?”

  My next call was to Clem Ruddock. Clem retired from the state police a couple of years back and, like some cops do, bought himself a bar in a place where the temperature never dipped below seventy in winter. Unfortunately for Clem, he was living testament to my belief that some people are just born to die in Maine. He never quite settled in Boca so he sold a half share in the bar to an ex-cop from Coral Gables and headed back north. Now he divided his time between Florida and a duplex in Damariscotta, near his daughter and his grandchildren. Clem’s answering machine told me that he wasn’t home, but left me with a cell phone number to try instead.

  “What are you, a surgeon?” I asked him, when I eventually got through to him. “What does a retired guy need a cell phone for anyway?”

  He was driving. I could hear the purr of his engine in the background.

  “I guess you didn’t hear,” said Clem. “I took up pimping to make ends meet. Got me some girls in a trailer off 295. I’m thinking about franchising, you got some money to spare.”

  “I’m sorry, my money’s all tied up in monkey porn. It’s a growing market. You got time to talk?”

  As it turned out, Clem was on his way down to Portland to meet with his lawyer. Sometimes things work out that way. I arranged to meet him for a hamburger lunch in Rosie’s down in the Old Port. He told me I was cheap. I told him that he was paying, so I was even cheaper than that. After all, I wasn’t the one with two homes, and a bar in Florida.

  Rachel was sitting at the kitchen table, flicking through a magazine and nibbling on a bagel. Walter was waiting midway between his basket and Rachel, clearly keen to try his luck at scamming some food from her plate but reluctant to risk being shouted at for his trouble. When I came in, he seemed to decide that the balance had suddenly tipped in his favor, and used sniffing my hand as a pretext to close in on the table.

  “You’ve been feeding him scraps again,” said Rachel, without looking up.

  “What did you do, shine a light on him until he broke down and confessed?”

  “We’re sending out mixed signals. It’s confusing him.”

  “He’s just confused by why you don’t love him as much as I do,” I said.

  “Oooh, that’s low. Is that how you plan to earn the love of your child, with bribery and treats?”

  “Start as you mean to continue. It worked with the dog. And with you.”

  I leaned over and kissed her on the lips.

  “I have to go,” I said. “I’ll be back for dinner, and I’ll keep the cell on.”

  Her eyes drifted toward the inside of my jacket. The butt of the gun was just visible to her, but she made no comment.

  “Just be careful,” she said, and returned to her magazine. As I left the house, I looked back and saw her slip a piece of bagel into Walter’s mouth. He rested his head on her lap in return and she stroked him gently, her eyes no longer on her reading but staring through the kitchen window at the marshes and the trees beyond, as though the glass had turned to water and she could see once again the face of the drowning man beneath its surface.

  The Collector was looking for Ray Czabo. The name had come up in the course of The Collector’s own investigation into the Grady house, and he was anxious to talk to the man in question. He made no moral judgments on Voodoo Ray’s gruesome hobby: in his experience, human beings were capable of far worse than stealing mementos from crime scenes. What interested him was the possibility that Ray had found a way into the house, and that perhaps he had managed to secure a trinket for himself in the process. If it was the right kind of souvenir, then The Collector’s work would be done.

  But Ray Czabo was proving difficult to find, and there was now a stranger in his house. The Collector usually believed in adopting the direct approach, but the young man who appeared to be servicing Mrs. Czabo in her husband’s absence looked troublesome. More to the point, The Collector had discovered that this was a case of “like father, like son,” and that Mrs. Czabo’s lover enjoyed the protection of a small but efficient criminal operation.

  The Collector had been careless, assuming that his old car and his run-down appearance would allow him to pass unnoticed unless he chose otherwise. He was beginning to wonder if Mrs. Czabo might have conspired with her boyfriend to remove her husband from the scene, whether through threats or actual violence. He was thinking this over as he returned to his car, having followed the lover back to his father’s base, when a man emerged from behind a Dumpster and blocked his progress.

  “You want to tell me what you’re doin’?” said the man. He was slightly overweight, and wore a black leather jacket and blue jeans. His face bulged in all the wrong places, as though every bone had been broken and then badly reset. His name was Chris Tierney, and he had a reputation as a hard man, an enforcer. The Collector had no time for this. He tried to slip by but Tierney pushed him back, advancing a step as he did so.

  “I asked you a question,” he said.

  The Collector remained silent.

  “Fuck you,” said the man, finally. “You’re coming with me.”

  He moved in on the slim, greasy-looking individual with the yellowed fingers, this stick figure dressed in rags who had tried to bulldoze his way past him, but instead of backing away, the raggedy man moved forward to meet him. Tierney felt an impact at his chest and his body was raised up until only the tips of his toes remained on the ground. He curled over his attacker’s hand as the shock of the blow began to dissipate, only to be replaced by a sharp pain. Tierney tried to speak, and blood ran from his mouth and flowed over his lips and chin. His fingers clutched at The Collector’s hand and found the hilt of the knife. He tried to say something, although there was nothing to be said.

  The Collector touched his left hand to the dying man’s lips.

  “Shhh,” he said. “Hush. It’s all right. Nearly there, now. Nearly there.”

  The knife thrust hard once more, and the life left Tierney in a rush of air and blood.

  Clem hadn’t changed since last I saw him. His hair had turned white while he was in his thirties, so he appeared not to have aged much apart from the wrinkles around his eyes and mouth. He still had the remnant of a tan from his most recent trip south, and he’d lost a little weight.

  “You look good,” I said.

  “I eat healthy, when I have no other option,” he said, then ordered a cheeseburger with extra fries, hold the mayo. “It’s the mayo that kills you,” he added.

  Clem was one of a network of cops who had remained friends with my grandfather after he left the force and who had extended their goodwill to his grandson. Back in Manhattan, there were cops who would cross the street to avoid me, even if that street was mined. Up here, there were other, older loyalties to be considered.

 
We spoke about nothing in particular until after we had eaten, then sat back in our chairs by the window and watched the cars and people passing by. Nobody seemed in too much of a hurry to get anywhere, and it was still early enough in December for the prospect of Christmas to seem more welcome than stressful.

  “You remember John Grady?” I said at last.

  It struck me that I hated saying his name. It seemed to pollute the very air, seeping out through the window frame to poison the festive atmosphere outside.

  “John Grady,” said Clem.

  He took a mouthful of beer, then held it for a time, as though using it to wash the mention of Grady from his mouth.

  “You have a habit of resurrecting old ghosts,” he said. “I think you have a morbid interest in dead killers.”

  “Well, some of them didn’t turn out to be quite as dead as people believed.”

  “You do seem to enjoy a gift for waking them, that’s for sure. John Grady, though, he’s not coming back. I watched him die.”

  “You were there?”

  I knew Clem had been involved in the investigation, but not that he’d witnessed Grady’s final moments.

  “When the little Matheson girl was taken, we got the first half-decent lead in months. It was a foolish thing for him to have done, pulling her like that, but I guess by then he couldn’t control his appetites anymore. We got to the house, but it was too late for her.”

  He took another sip of beer and looked beyond me to where his own reflection lay suspended in the window.

  “That one stays with me. I can’t remember more than a handful of cases in twenty-five years that make me want to break my fist against a wall, but that’s one of them. Too many ‘if onlys.’ If only we’d been quicker to make the connection with Grady’s car. If only we’d been able to break that door down. If only…

  “Anyway, we got there, and found Grady with the gun already pointed at his head. If it wasn’t so horrible, it might almost have been funny. After all, there we were with our guns pointed at him, threatening to shoot, and there he was with a gun in his hand ready to blow his own head off and save us the trouble. Only one way it was going to end, I guess.