A false friend is more dangerous than an open enemy. -FRANCIS BACON (1561-1626), “A LETTER OF
ADVICE…TO THE DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM”
NEARLY A WEEK WENT by before I could make another trip to New York. Not that it mattered so much: the Bear was short-staffed again, and I ended up working extra days to take some of the load, so there was no way that I could have gone down there even if I had wanted to.
I had been trying to contact Jimmy Gallagher for almost a month, leaving messages on the machine at his home, but there had been no reply until that week. I received a letter from him, not a phon
I booked the cheapest flight that I could find, and got into JFK shortly before 9:00 A.M., then took a cab to Bensonhurst. Ever since I was a boy, I had struggled to associate Jimmy Gallagher with Bensonhurst. Of all the places that an Irish cop, and a closeted homosexual to boot, might have called home, Bensonhurst initially seemed about as likely a choice as Salt Lake City, or Kingston, Jamaica. True, there were now Koreans, and Poles, and Arabs, and Russians in the neighborhood, and even African-Americans, but it was the Italians who had always owned Bensonhurst, figuratively if not literally. When Jimmy was growing up, each nationality had its own section, and if you wandered into the wrong one, you were likely to get a beating, but the Italians gave out more beatings than most. Now even their age was passing. Bay Ridge Parkway was still pretty solidly Italian, and there was one mass said each day in Italian at St. Dominic’s at Twentieth Avenue, but the Russians, Chinese, and Arabs were slowly encroaching, taking over the side streets like ants advancing on a millipede. The Jews and the Irish, meanwhile, had been decimated, and the blacks, whose roots in the area dated back to the Underground Railroad, had been reduced to a four-block enclave off Bath Avenue.
I was still two hours early for my meeting with Jimmy. I knew that he went to church every Sunday, but even if he was home he would resent it if I arrived early. That was another thing about Jimmy. He believed in punctuality, and he didn’t care for people who erred on the side of early or late, so while I waited I took a walk along Eighteenth Avenue to get breakfast at Stella’s Diner on Sixty-third, where my father and I had eaten with Jimmy on a couple of occasions because, even though it was nearly twenty blocks from where he lived, Jimmy was close to the owners, and they always made sure that he was taken care of.
While Eighteenth still bore the title of Cristoforo Colombo Boulevard, the Chinese had made their mark, and their restaurants, hair salons, lighting stores, and even aquarium suppliers now stood alongside Italian law firms, Gino’s Focacceria, Queen Ann’s Gourmet Pasta, and the Arcobaleno Italiano music and DVD store, where old men sat on benches with their backs to the avenue, as though signaling their dissatisfaction with the changes that had occurred there. The old Cotillion Terrace was boarded up, twin pink cocktails on either side of the main marquee still bubbling sadly.
When I got to Stella’s, it too was no mo B aoo was nore. The name remained, and I could see some of the stools were still in place in front of the counter, but otherwise the diner had been stripped bare. We had always sat at Stella’s counter when we ate there, Jimmy to the left, my father in the middle, and I at the end. For me, it was as close as I could get to sitting at a bar, and I would watch as the waitresses poured coffee and the plates moved back and forth between the kitchen and the diners, listening to snatches of conversation from all around while my father and Jimmy talked quietly of adult things. I tapped once upon the glass in farewell, then took my New York Times down to the corner of Sixty-fourth and ate a slice at J & V’s pizzeria, which had been in existence for longer than I had. When my watch showed 11:45 A.M., I made my way to Jimmy’s house.
Jimmy lived on Seventy-first, between Sixteenth and Seventeenth, a block that consisted mostly of narrow row houses, in a small, one-family semidetached stucco house with a wrought-iron fence surrounding the garden and a fig tree in the backyard, not far from the area still known as New Utrecht. This had been one of the six original towns of Brooklyn, but then it was annexed to the city in the 1890s and lost its identity. It had been mostly farmland until 1885, when the coming of the Brooklyn, Bath and West End Railroad opened it up to developers, one of whom, James Lynch, built a suburb, Bensonhurst-by-the-Sea, for a thousand families. With the railroad came Jimmy Gallagher’s grandfather, who had been a supervising engineer on the project, and his family. Eventually, after some shuffling around, the Gallaghers returned to Bensonhurst and settled in the house that Jimmy still occupied, not too far from the landmark New Utrecht Reformed Church at Eighteenth and Eighty-third.
In time, the subway came, and with it the middle classes, including Jews and Italians who were abandoning the Lower East Side for the comparatively wide open spaces of Brooklyn. Fred Trump, the Donald’s father, made his name by building the Shore Haven Apartments near the Belt Parkway, at five thousand units the largest private housing development in Brooklyn. Finally, the southern Italian immigrants arrived in force in the 1950s, and Bensonhurst became 80 percent Italian by blood, and 100 percent Italian by reputation.
I had visited Jimmy’s house on only a couple of occasions with my father, one of which was to pay our respects after Jimmy’s father died. All I could recall of that occasion was a wall of cops, some in uniform, some not, with red-eyed women passing around drinks and whispering memories of the departed. Shortly after, his mother had moved out to a place on Gerritsen Beach to be closer to her sister, who was ill and looking after her two grandchildren after their father was killed when his truck overturned somewhere near Nogales, and whose mother struggled with an alcohol addiction. Since then, Jimmy had always lived alone in Bensonhurst.
The exterior of the house was much as I remembered it, the yard tidy, the paintwork recently refreshed. I was reaching for the bell when the door opened, saving me the trouble of ringing, and there was Jimmy Gallagher, older and grayer but still recognizably the same big man who had crushed my hand in his grip so that I might earn the dollar that was on offer. His face was more florid now and, although he had clearly had some sun while he was away, a roseate tinge to his nose suggested that he was hitting the booze more often than was wise. Otherwise, he was in good shape. He wore a freshly pressed white shirt, open at the collar, and gray trousers with a razor pleat. His black shoes were buffed and polished. He looked like a chauffeur who was enjoying his final moments of leisure before ad B are beforeding the finishing touches to his uniform.
“Charlie,” he said. “It’s been a long time.” We shook hands and he grinned warmly, patting me on the shoulder with a meaty left paw. He was still four or five inches taller than me, and I instantly felt as if I was twelve years old again.
“Do I get a dollar now?” I asked as he released his grip.
“You’d only spend it on booze,” he said, inviting me inside. The hallway boasted a huge coatrack, and a grandmother clock that still appeared to be keeping perfect time. Its loud ticking probably echoed through the house. I wondered how Jimmy could sleep with the sound of it, but I supposed that he had been listening to it for so long he hardly noticed it anymore. A flight of carved mahogany stairs led up to the second floor, and to the right was the living room, furnished entirely with antiques. There were photographs on the mantel and on the walls, some of them featuring men in uniform. Among them I saw my father, but I did not ask Jimmy if I might look more closely at them. The wallpaper in the hallway was a red-and-white print that seemed new, but had a turn-of-the-century look that fit in with the rest of the decor.
There were two cups on the kitchen table, along with a plate of pastries, and a fresh pot of coffee was brewing. Jimmy poured the coffee, and we took seats at opposite ends of the small kitchen table.
“Have a pastry,” said Jimmy. “They’re from Villabate. Best in town.”
I broke one apart and tasted it. It was good.
“You know, your old man and I used to laugh about that booze you bought with the money I gave you. He’d never have told you, because your mother thought it was the end of the world when she found that bottle, but he saw that you were growing up, and he got a kick out of it. Mind you, he used to say that I’d put the idea in your head to begin with, but he could never be angry at anyone for long, and especially not you. You were his golden boy. He was a good man, God rest him. God rest them both.”
He nibbled thoughtfully at his pastry, and we were quiet for a time. Then Jimmy glanced at his watch. It wasn’t a casual gesture. He wanted me to see him do it, and a warning noise went off in my brain. I watched him, and I realized that Jimmy was uneasy. It wasn’t simply that the son of his old friend, a man who had killed two others and then himself, was sitting here in his kitchen clearly seeking to rake over the ashes of long-dead fires. There was more to it than that. Jimmy didn’t want me here at all. He wanted me gone, and the sooner the better.
“I got a thing,” he said, as he saw me take in the movement. “Some old friends getting together. You know how it is.”
“Any names I might recognize?”
“No, none. They’re all after your father’s time.” He leaned back in his seat. “So, this isn’t a casual call, is it, Charlie?”
“I have some questions,” I said. “About my father, and about what happened on the night those kids died.”
“Well, I can’t help you much with the killings. I wasn’t there. I didn’t even see your father that day.”
“No?”
“No, it was my birthday. I wasn’t working. I made a good collar for some grass and got my reward. Your old man was supposed to join me after his tour finished, the way he always did, but he never made it.” He twisted his cup in his hands, watching the patterns that resulted on the surface of the liquid. “I never celebrated my birthday the same way after that. Too many associations, all of them bad.”
I wasn’t letting him off the hook that easily. “But your nephew was the one who came to the house that night.”
“Yeah, Francis. Your father called me at Cal ’s, told me that he was worried. He thought somebody might be trying to hurt you and your mother. He didn’t say why he believed that.”
Cal ’s was the cop bar that used to stand next door to the Ninth’s precinct house. It was gone now, like so much else from my father’s time.
“And you didn’t ask?”
Jimmy puffed out his cheeks. “I might have asked. Yeah, I’m sure I did. It was out of character for Will. He didn’t go jumping at shadows, and he didn’t have any enemies. I mean, there were guys he might have crossed, and he put some bad ones away, but we all did. That was business, not personal. They knew the difference back then. Most of them, anyway.”
“Do you remember what he said?”
“I think he told me just to trust him. He knew that Francis lived in Orangetown. He asked if maybe I could get him to look out for you and your mother, just until he had a chance to get back to the house. Everything happened pretty fast after that.”
“Where did my father call you from?”
“Jeez.” He appeared to be trying to remember. “I don’t know. Not the precinct, that’s for sure. There was noise in the background, so I guess he was using the phone at a bar. It was a long time ago. I don’t recall everything about it.”
I drank some coffee and spoke carefully. “But it wasn’t a typical night, Jimmy. People got killed, and then my father took his own life. Things like that, they’re hard to forget.”
I saw Jimmy tense, and I felt his hostility rise to the surface. He had been good with his fists, I knew; good, and quick to use them. He and my father balanced each other well. My father kept Jimmy in check, and he in turn honed an edge in my father that might otherwise have remained blunted.
“What is this, Charlie? You calling me a liar?”
What is it, Jimmy? What are you hiding?
“No,” I said. “I just don’t want you to keep anything from me because, say, you’re trying to spare my feelings.”
He relaxed a little. “Well, it was hard. I don’t like thinking about that time. He was my friend, the best of them.”
“I know that, Jimmy.”
He nodded. “Your father asked for help, and I made a call in return. Francis stayed with you and your mother. I was in the city, but I thought, you know, I can’t stay here when something bad might be happening. By the time I got to Pearl River, tho B al River, se two kids were dead and your father was already being questioned. They wouldn’t let me talk to him. I tried, but Internal Affairs, they were tight around him. I went to the house and talked to your mother. You were asleep, I think. After that, I only saw him alive one other time. I picked him up after they’d finished the interview. We went for breakfast, but he didn’t talk much. He just wanted to collect himself before he went home.”
“And he didn’t tell you why he’d just killed two people? Come on, Jimmy. You were close. If he was going to talk to anyone, it would have been you.”
“He told me what he told IAD, and whoever else was in the room with him. The kid kept pretending to reach inside his jacket, taunting Will, as if he had a gun there. He’d go so far, then pull back. Will said that, the final time, he went for it. His hand disappeared, and Will fired. The girl screamed and started pulling at the body. Will warned her before he shot her too. He said something snapped inside him when that kid started yanking his chain. Maybe it did. Those were different times, violent times. It never paid to take chances. We’d all known guys who’d taken one on the streets.
“The next time I saw Will, he was under a sheet, and there was a hole in the back of his head that they were going to have to pack before the funeral. Is that what you wanted to know, Charlie? Do you want to hear how I cried over him, about how I felt because I wasn’t there for him, about how I’ve felt all these years? Is that what you’re looking for: someone to blame for what happened that night?”
His voice was raised. I could see the anger in him, but I couldn’t understand its source. It seemed manufactured. No, that wasn’t true. His sadness and rage were genuine, but they were being used to some other end: a smoke screen, a means of hiding something from both me, and himself.
“No, that’s not what I’m looking for, Jimmy.”
There was a weariness, and a kind of desperation, to what he said next.
“Then what do you want?”
“I want to know why.”
“There is no ‘why.’ Can’t you get that into your head? People have been asking ‘why?’ for twenty-five years. I’ve been asking why, and there’s no answer. Whatever the reason was, it died when your father died.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“You’ve got to let it go, Charlie. No good can come of this. Let them rest in peace, both of them, your father and your mother. This is all over.”
“You see, that’s the problem. I can’t let them rest.”
“Why not?”
“Because one, or both, of them was not blood to me.”
It was as if someone had taken a pin and punctured Jimmy Gallagher from behind. His back arched, and some of his bulk seemed to dissipate. He slumped back in the chair.
“What?” he whispered. “What kind of talk is that?”
“It’s the blood types: they don’t match. I’m type B. My father was type B aer was tyA, my mother type O. There’s no way that parents with those two blood types could produce a child with type B blood. It’s just not possible.”
“But who told you this?”
“I spoke to our family doctor. He’s retired now, and old, but he’s kept his records. He had them checked, and sent me copies of two blood tests from my father and my mother. That confirmed it for me. It’s possible that I’m my father’s son, but not my mother’s.”
“This is madness,” said Jimmy.
“You were closer to my father than any of his other friends. If he had told anyone about it, he would have told you.”
“Told me what? That there was a cuckoo in the nest?” He stood up. “I can’t listen to this. I won’t listen to it. You’re mistaken. You must be.”
He picked up the coffee cups and emptied their contents into the sink, then left them there. His back was to me, but I could see that his hands were shaking.
“I’m not,” I said. “It’s the truth.”
Jimmy spun around suddenly and moved toward me. I felt sure that he was going to take a swing at me. I stood and kicked the kitchen chair away, tensing for the blow, waiting to block it if I had time to see it, but it did not come. Instead, Jimmy spoke calmly and deliberately.
“Then it’s a truth that they didn’t want you to know, and one that can’t help you. They loved you, both of them. Whatever this is, whatever you think you’ve discovered, leave it alone. It’s only going to hurt you if you keep searching.”
“You seem very sure of that, Jimmy.”
He swallowed hard.
“Fuck you, Charlie. You need to go now. I have things to do.”
He waved a hand in dismissal and turned his back on me once more.
“I’ll be seeing you, Jimmy,” I said, and I knew that he heard the warning in my voice, but he said nothing. I let myself out and walked back to the subway.
Later I would learn that Jimmy Gallagher waited only until he was certain that I would not return before making the call. It was a number that he had not dialed in many years, not since the day after my father’s death. He was surprised when the man answered the phone himself, almost as surprised as he was to discover that he was still alive.
“It’s Jimmy Gallagher.”
“I remember,” said the voice. “It’s been a long time.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but not long enough.”
He thought he heard something that might have been a laugh. “Well, what can I do for you, Mr. Gallagher?”
“Charlie Parker was just here. He’s asking questions about his parents. He said something about blood types. He knows about his mother.”
There was silence on the other end of the line, th B athe line,en: “It was always going to happen. Eventually, he had to find out.”
“I didn’t tell him anything.”
“I’m sure that you didn’t, but he’ll come back. He’s too good at what he does not to discover that you’ve lied to him.”
“And then?”
The answer, when it came, gave Jimmy his final surprise on a day already filled with unwanted surprises.
“Then you might want to tell him the truth.”
I SPENT THAT NIGHT at the home of Walter Cole, the man after whom I’d named my dog and my former partner and mentor in the NYPD, and his wife, Lee. We ate dinner together and talked of mutual friends, of books and movies and how Walter was spending his retirement, which seemed to consist of little more than napping a lot and getting under his wife’s feet. At 10 P.M. Lee, who was nobody’s idea of a night owl, kissed me softly on the cheek and went to bed, leaving Walter and me alone. He threw another log on the fire and filled his glass with the last of the wine, then asked me what I was doing in the city.
I told him of the Collector, a raggedy man who believed himself to be an instrument of justice, a foul individual who killed those whom he considered to have forfeited their souls due to their actions. I recalled the nicotine stink of his breath as he spoke of my parents, the satisfaction in his eyes as he spoke of blood types, of things that he could not have known but did, and of how all that I had believed about myself began to fall away at that moment. I told him of the medical records, my meeting earlier that day with Jimmy Gallagher, and of how I was convinced that he had knowledge he was not sharing with me. I also told him one thing that I had not discussed with Jimmy. When my mother died of cancer, the hospital had retained samples of her organs. Through my lawyer, I’d had a DNA test conducted, comparing a swab taken from my cheek with my mother’s tissue. There was no match. I had not been able to carry out a similar test on my father’s DNA. There were no samples available. It would require an exhumation order on his remains for such a test to be carried out, and I was not yet willing to go that far. Perhaps I was frightened of what I might find. After discovering the truth about my mother, I had wept. I was not sure that I was ready to sacrifice my father on the same altar as the woman I had called my mother.
Walter sipped his wine and stared into the fire, not speaking until I was done.
“Why did this man, this ‘Collector,’ tell you all of this, all of the truths and half-truths, to begin with?” he asked. It was a typical cop move: don’t go straight to the main issue, but skirt it. Probe. Buy time in which to start connecting small details to larger ones.
“Because it amused him,” I replied. “Because he’s cruel in ways that we can’t even begin to imagine.”
“He doesn’t sound like the kind of guy who drops hints lightly.”
“No.”
“Which means he was goading you into acting. He knew you couldn’t let this slide.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that, from what you’ve told me, he’s used other people like this before to achieve his own ends. Hell, he’s even used you. Just be careful that he’s not using you again to flush someone out.”
Walter was right. The Collector had used me to establish the identities of the depraved men he was seeking so that he could punish them for their failings. He was cunning, and absolutely without mercy. Now he had hidden himself away again, and I had no desire to find him.
“But if that’s true, then who is he looking for?”
Walter shrugged. “From what you’ve told me, he’s always looking for somebody.”
Then we came to it.
“As for this blood thing, well, I don’t know what to say. What are the options? Either you were adopted by Will and Elaine Parker, and they kept that from you for reasons of their own, or Will Parker fathered you by another woman, and he and Elaine raised you as their own child. That’s it. Those are the choices.”
I couldn’t disagree. The Collector had told me that I was not my father’s son, but the Collector, from my past experience of him, never told the truth, not entirely. It was all a game to him, a means of furthering his own ends, whatever they might be, but always leavened with a little cruelty. But it might also have been the case that he simply did not know the entire truth, only that something in my parentage did not add up. I still did not believe that I had no blood ties to my father. Everything in me rebelled against it. I had seen myself in him. I recalled how he had spoken to me, how he had looked at me. It was different from the woman I had known as my mother. Perhaps I simply did not want to admit the possibility that it was all a lie, but I would not accept such a thing until I had irrefutable proof.
Walter walked to the fire, then squatted to stab at it with the poker before speaking again.
“I’ve been married to Lee for thirty-nine years now. If I’d cheated on her, and the other woman became pregnant, I don’t think Lee would have taken kindly to a suggestion that we raise the child alongside our own daughters.”
“Even if something had happened to the mother?”
Walter thought about it. “Again, I can only speak from experience, but the strain that would put on a marriage would be almost unendurable. You know, to be faced every day with the fruit of your husband’s infidelity, to have to pretend that this child was loved as much as another, to treat it the same way as one’s own child.” He shook his head. “No, it’s too difficult. I’m still inclined toward the first option: adoption.”
But they had no other children, I thought. Would that have changed things?
“But why keep it from me?” I asked, putting that thought aside. “There’s no shame to it.”
“I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t an official adoption, and they were frightened that you might be taken from them. In that case, it would have been better to B qen better keep it quiet until you were an adult.”
“I was a student when my mother died. Enough time had passed by then for her to have told me.”
“Yeah, but look at what she’d gone through. Her husband takes his own life, branded a killer. She leaves the state, takes her son back to Maine with her, then she contracts cancer. It could be that you were all she had left, and she didn’t want to lose you as her son, whatever the truth might have been.”
He rose from the fire and resumed his seat. Walter was older than me by almost twenty years and, in that moment, the relationship between us seemed more like that of a father and a son than two men who had served together.
“Because here’s the thing of it, Charlie: no matter what you discover, they were your mother and your father. They were the ones who raised you, who sheltered you, who loved you. What you’re chasing is some kind of medical definition of a parent, and I understand that. It has meaning for you. In your shoes, I’d probably do the same. But don’t mistake this for the real thing: Will and Elaine Parker were your father and your mother, and don’t let anything that you discover obscure that fact.”
He gripped my arm once, tightly, before releasing me.
“So what now?”
“My lawyer has the papers prepared for an exhumation order,” I said. “I could have my DNA checked against my father’s.”
“You could, but you haven’t. Not ready for that yet, right?”
I nodded.
“When do you go back to Maine?”
“Tomorrow afternoon, after I speak to Eddie Grace.”
“Who?”
“Another of my father’s cop friends. He’s been ill, but his daughter says that he might be up to a few minutes with me now, if I don’t tax him.”
“And if you don’t get anything from him?”
“I put the squeeze on Jimmy.”
“If Jimmy’s hidden something, then he’s hidden it well. Cops gossip. You know that. They’re like fishwives: hard to keep anything quiet once it gets out. Even now, I know who’s screwing around behind his wife’s back, who’s fallen off the wagon, who’s using blow or taking kickbacks from hookers and dealers. It’s the way of things. And after those two kids died, IAD went over your father’s life and career with a magnifying glass and tweezers in an effort to find out why it happened.”
“The official investigation uncovered nothing.”
“Screw the official investigation. You, more than anyone, should know how these things work. There would have been the official inquiry, and the shadow one: one that was recorded and open to examination, and one that was conducted quietly and then buried in a pit.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying I’ll ask around. I still have favors owed. Let’s see if there was a loose thread anywhere that somebody p B qt somebodulled. In the meantime, you do what you have to do.”
He finished his wine.
“Now, let’s call it a night. In the morning, I’ll give you a ride out to Pearl River. I always did like to see how the Micks live. Made me feel better about not being one.”
EDDIE GRACE HAD RECENTLY been released from the hospital into the care of his daughter, Amanda. Eddie had been ailing for a long time, and I’d been told that he wasn’t well enough to talk to anyone and spent most of his time sleeping, but it seemed that he had rallied in recent weeks. He wanted to return home, and the hospital was content to let him leave, as there was nothing more that its staff could do for him. The medication to control his pain could just as easily be given to him in his own bed as in a hospital room, and he would be less anxious and troubled if surrounded by his family. Amanda had left a message on my phone in response to my earlier inquiries, informing me that Eddie was willing and, it appeared, able to meet with me at her home.
Amanda lived up on Summit Street, within praying distance of St. Margaret of Antioch Church and on the other side of the tracks from our old house on Franklin Street. Walter dropped me off at the church and went for coffee. Amanda answered the door seconds after I rang the bell, as though she had been waiting in the hallway for me to arrive. Her hair was long and brown, with a hint of some tone from a bottle that was not so far from her natural color as to be jarring. She was small, a little over five two, with freckled skin and very light brown eyes. Her lipstick looked freshly applied, and she smelled of some citrus fragrance that, like her, managed the trick of being both unassuming yet striking.
I’d had a crush on Amanda Grace while we were at Pearl River High School together. She was a year older than I, and hung with a crowd that favored black nail polish and obscure English groups. She was the kind of girl jocks pretended to abhor but about whom they secretly fantasized when their perky blond girlfriends were performing acts that didn’t require their boyfriends to look them in the eyes. About a year before my father died, she began dating Michael Ryan, whose main aims in life were to fix cars and open a bowling alley, not worthless ends in themselves but not the level of ambition that I ever believed was going to satisfy a girl like Amanda Grace. Mike Ryan wasn’t a bad guy, but his conversational skills were limited, and he wanted to live and die in Pearl River. Amanda used to talk about visiting Europe, and studying at the Sorbonne. It was hard to see where common ground could lie between her and Mike, unless it was somewhere on a rock in the mid-Atlantic.
Now here she was, and although there were lines where there had not been lines before, she was, like the town itself, largely unaltered. She smiled.
“Charlie Parker,” she said. “It’s good to see you.”
I wasn’t sure how to greet her. I reached out a hand, but she slipped by it and hugged me, shaking her head against me as she did so.
“Still the same awkward boy,” she said, not, I thought, without a hint of fondness. She released her hold, and looked at C anô‡ me with amusement.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You visit a good-looking woman, and you offer to shake her hand.”
“Well, it’s been a long time. I don’t like to make assumptions. How’s your husband? Still playing with bowling pins?”
She giggled. “You make it sound kind of gay.”
“Big man, stroking hard phallic objects. Difficult not to draw those conclusions.”
“You can tell him that when you see him. I’m sure he’ll take it under advisement.”
“I’m sure; that, or try to kick my ass from here to Jersey.”
The look on her face changed. Something of the good humor vanished, and what replaced it was speculative.
“No,” she said, “I don’t think he’d try that with you.”
She stepped back into the house and held the door open for me.
“Come in. I’ve made lunch. Well, I bought some cold cuts and salads, and there’s fresh bread. That’ll have to do.”
“It’s more than enough.” I moved into the house, and she closed the door behind me, squeezing past me to lead me to the kitchen, her hands resting for a moment at my waist, her stomach brushing my groin. I let out a deep sigh.
“What?” she said, wide eyed and radiating innocence.
“Nothing.”
“Go on, say it.”
“I think you could still flirt for your country.”
“As long as it’s in a good cause. Anyway, I’m not flirting with you, not much. You had your chance a long time ago.”
“Really?” I tried to remember any chance I’d had with Amanda Grace, but nothing came to me. I followed her into the kitchen and watched her fill a jug from a purified water faucet.
“Yeah, really,” she said, not turning. “You only had to ask me out. It wasn’t complicated.”
I sat down. “Everything seemed complicated back then.”
“Not to Mike.”
“Well, he wasn’t a complicated guy.”
“No, he wasn’t.” She turned off the faucet and placed the jug on the table. “He still isn’t. As time goes on, I’ve come to realize that’s no bad thing.”
“What does he do?”
“He works on cars. He runs an auto shop in Orangetown. Still bowls, but he’ll die before he ever owns an alley of his own.”
“And you?”
“I used to teach elementary school, but I gave it up when my second daughter was born. Now I do some part-time work for a company that publishes schoolbooks. I guess I’m a saleswo Bishuo;man, but I like it.”
“You have kids?” I hadn’t known.
“Two girls. Kate and Annie. They’re at school today. They’re still adjusting to having my dad here, though.”
“How is he?”
She grimaced. “Not good. It’s just a matter of time. The drugs make him sleepy, but he’s usually good for an hour or two in the afternoon. Soon, he’ll have to go to a hospice, but he’s not ready for that, not yet. For now, he’ll stay here with us.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. He’s not. He had a great life, and he’s ending it with his family. He’s looking forward to seeing you, though. He liked your father a lot. Liked you too. I think he’d have been happy if we’d ended up together, once.”
Her face clouded. I think she had made a series of unspoken connections, creating an alternative existence in which she might have been my wife.
But my wife was dead.
“We read about all that happened,” she said. “It was awful, all of it.”
She was silent for a time. She had felt obliged to raise the subject, and now she did not know what to do to dispel the effect it had had.
“I have a daughter too,” I told her.
“Really? That’s great,” she said, with a little too much enthusiasm. “How old is she?”
“Two. Her mother and I, we’re not together anymore.” I paused. “I still see my daughter, though.”
“What’s her name?”
“Samantha. Sam.”
“She’s in Maine?”
“No, Vermont. When she’s old enough, she can vote socialist and start signing petitions to secede from the union.”
She raised a glass of water. “Well, to Sam, then.”
“To Sam.”
We ate and talked about old school friends, and her life in Pearl River. It turned out that she had made it to Europe after all, with Mike. The trip had been a gift for their tenth wedding anniversary. They went to France, and Italy, and England.
“And was it what you’d expected?” I asked.
“Some of it. I’d like to go back and see more, but it was enough, for now.”
I heard movement above us.
“Dad’s awake,” she said. “I just need to go upstairs and help him get organized.”
She left the kitchen and went upstairs. After a moment or two, I could hear voices, and a man coughing. The coughs sounded harsh and dry and painful.
Ten minutes later, Amanda led an old, stooped man into the room, keeping a reassuring arm around his waist. He was so thin that her arm almost encircled him, but even bent over B aridthe was nearly as tall as I was.
Eddie Grace’s hair was gone. Even his facial hair had disappeared. His skin looked clammy and transparent, tinged with yellow at the cheeks and a reddish-purple below the eyes. There was very little blood in his lips, and when he smiled, I could see that he had lost many of his teeth.
“Mr. Grace,” I said. “It’s good to see you.”
“Eddie,” he said. “Call me Eddie.” His voice was a rasp, like a plane moving over rough metal.
He shook my hand. His grip was still strong.
His daughter stayed with him until he had seated himself.
“You want some tea, Dad?”
“Nah, I’m good, thank you.”
“There’s water in the jug. You want me to pour some for you?”
He raised his eyes to heaven.
“She thinks that, because I walk slow and sleep a lot, I can’t pour my own water,” he said.
“I know you can pour your own water. I was just trying to be nice. Jeez, but you’re an ungrateful old man.” She said it with affection, and when she hugged him he patted her hand and grinned.
“And you’re a good girl,” he said. “Better than I deserve.”
“Well, as long as you understand that.” She kissed his bald pate. “I’ll leave you two alone to talk. I’ll be upstairs if you need me.”
She looked at me from behind him, and asked me silently not to tire him out. I nodded slightly, and she left us once he was comfortably seated, but not before touching him gently on the shoulder as she pulled the door half closed behind her.
“How are you doing, Eddie?” I asked.
“So-so,” he said. “Still here, though. I feel the cold. I miss Florida. Stayed as long as I could, but I wasn’t able to look after myself, once I started getting sick. Andrea, my wife, she died a few years back. I couldn’t afford a private nurse. ’Manda brought me up here, said she’d look after me if the hospital agreed. And I still got friends, you know, from the old days. It’s not so bad. It’s just the damn cold that gets me.”
He poured himself some water, the jug shaking only slightly in his hand, then took a sip.
“Why’d you come back here, Charlie? What are you doing, talking to a dying man?”
“It’s about my father.”
“Huh,” he said. Some of the water dribbled from his mouth and ran down his chin. He wiped at it with the sleeve of his gown.
“I’m sorry,” he said, clearly embarrassed. “It’s only when someone new comes along that I forget how little dignity I have left. You know what I’ve learned from life? Don’t get old. Avoid it for as long as you can. Getting sick don’t help none either.”
He seemed to drift for a moment, and his eyes grew heavy.
“Eddie,” I said gently. “I wanted to talk to you about Will.”
He grunted and turned his attention back to me. “Yeah, Will. One of the good ones.”
“You were his friend. I hoped that you might be able to tell me something about what happened, about why it happened.”
“After all this time?”
“After all this time.”
He tapped his fingers on the table.
“He did things the quiet way, your old man. He could talk people down, you know? That was his thing. Never got real angry. Never had a temper. Even the move for a time from the Ninth to Uptown, that was his decision. Probably didn’t do much for his record, requesting a transfer that early in his career, but he did it for a quiet life. Of all the men who might have done what he did he wasn’t the one I’d have picked, not in a million years.”
“Do you remember why he requested the transfer?”
“Ah, he wasn’t getting on with some of the brass in the Ninth, he and Jimmy both. They were some team, those two. Where one led, the other followed. Between them, I think they managed to spit in the eye of everyone who mattered. That was the flip side of your father. He had a devil in him, but he kept it chained up most of the time. Anyway, there was a sergeant in the Ninth name of Bennett. You ever hear of him?”
“No, never.”
“Didn’t last long. He and your father, they locked horns, and Jimmy backed Will, same as always.”
“You remember why they didn’t get on?”
“Nah. Clash of personalities, I think. Happens. And Bennett was dirty, and your father didn’t care much for dirty cops, didn’t matter how many stripes they carried. Anyway, Bennett found a way to unlock the devil in your father. Punches were thrown one night, and you didn’t do that while in uniform. It looked bad for Will, but they couldn’t afford to lose a good cop. I guess some calls were made on his behalf.”
“By whom?”
Eddie shrugged. “If you do right by others, you build up favors you can call in. Your old man had friends. A deal was cut.”
“And the deal was that my father would request a transfer.”
“That was it. He spent a year in the wilderness, until Bennett took a beating from the Knapp Commission for being a meat eater.”
The Knapp Commission, which investigated police corruption in the early seventies, came up with two definitions of corrupt cops: the “grass eaters,” who were guilty of petty corruption for tens and twenties, and the “meat eaters,” who shook down dealers and pimps for larger amounts.
“And when Bennett was gone, my father returned?”
“Something like that.” Eddie made a movement with his fingers, as of someone dialing a rotary phone.
“I didn’t know my father had those kinds of friends.”
“Maybe he didn’t either, until he needed them.”
I let it go.
“Do you remember the shooting?” I asked.
“I remember hearing about it. I was four-twelve that week. Me and my partner, we met up with two other guys, Kloske and Burke, for coffee. They’d been over at the precinct house when the call came in. Next time I saw your father, he was lying in a box. They did a good job on him. He looked like he’d always done, I suppose, like himself. Sometimes, these embalmers, they make you look like a wax dummy.” He tried to smile. “I got these things on my mind, as you can imagine.”
“They’ll see you right,” I said. “Amanda wouldn’t have it any other way.”
“I’ll look better dead than I ever did alive, she has her way. Better dressed too.”
I brought us back to my father. “You have no idea why my father might have killed those kids?”
“None, but like I said, it took a lot to make Will see red. They must have turned it on real bad.”
He sipped some more water, keeping his left hand beneath his chin to stop it from spilling. When he lowered the glass he was breathing heavily, and I knew that my time with him was growing short.
“What was he like, in the days before it happened? I mean, did he seem unhappy, distracted?”
“No, he was the way he always was. There was nothing. But then, I didn’t see him much that week. He was eight-four, I was four-twelve. We said hello when we passed each other, but that was about it. No, he was with Jimmy Gallagher that week. You should talk to him. He was with your old man on the day of the shooting.”
“What?”
“Jimmy and your old man, they always hooked up for Jimmy’s birthday. Never missed it.”
“He told me that they didn’t see each other that day. Jimmy was off. He’d made a good collar, he said, some drug thing.”
A day off was a reward for a solid arrest. You filled out a “28,” then submitted it to the precinct’s clerical guy, the captain’s man. Most cops would slip him a couple of dollars, or maybe a bottle of Chivas earned from escorting a liquor store owner to the bank, in order to ensure a prime day. It was one of the benefits of handling paperwork for the precinct.
“Maybe,” said Eddie, “but they were together on the day that your father shot those two kids. I remember. Jimmy came in to meet Will when he came off duty.”
“You’re sure?”
“Sure I’m sure. He came down to the precinct to hook up with your old man. I even covered for Will so that he could leave early. They were going to start drinking in Cal’s, I think, then finish up at the Anglers’ Club.”
“The what?”
“The Greenwich Village Anglers’ Club. It was kind of a private members’ place on Horatio Street. A quarter for a can.”
I sat back. Jimm Biv>agey had assured me that he wasn’t with my father on the day of the shooting. Now Eddie Grace was directly contradicting him.
“You saw Jimmy at the precinct house?”
“You deaf? That’s what I said. I saw him meet your old man, saw the two of them leave together. He tell you something different?”
“Yes.”
“Huh,” said Grace again. “Maybe he’s misremembering.”
A thought struck me. “Eddie, do you and Jimmy stay in touch?”
“No, not so much.” His mouth twitched, an expression of distaste. It gave me pause. There was something here, something between Jimmy and Eddie.
“So does he know that you’re back in Pearl River?”
“If someone told him, maybe. He hasn’t been to visit, if that’s what you mean.”
I realized that I was tensed, sitting forward in my chair. Eddie saw it too.
“I’m old and I’m dying,” he said. “I got nothing to hide. I loved your father. He was a good cop. Jimmy was a good cop too. I don’t know what reason he’d have to lie to you about your old man, but you can tell him that you talked to me. Tell him that I said he should tell the truth, if that’s what you want.”
I waited. There was more coming.
“I don’t know what you expect to get out of this,” said Eddie. “Your father did what they accused him of doing. He shot those two young people, and then he shot himself.”
“I want to know why.”
“Maybe there isn’t a why. Can you deal with that?”
“As long as I tried.”
I debated telling him more, but instead asked, “You’d have known if my father was…screwing around, right?”
Eddie reeled slightly, then laughed. It brought on another fit of coughing, and I had to get him some more water.
“Your old man didn’t ‘screw around,’” he said when he’d recovered. “That wasn’t his style.”
He took some deep breaths, and I caught a gleam in his eye. It wasn’t pleasant, as though I’d seen him eyeing a young girl up and down on the street and had watched as the sexual fantasy played out in his eyes.
“But he was human,” he continued. “We all make mistakes. Who knows? Someone say something to you?”
He looked at me closely, and that gleam remained.
“No,” I replied. “Nobody said anything.”
He held my gaze for a while longer, then nodded. “You’re a good son. Help me up, will you? I think I’ll watch some TV. I’ve got an hour in me yet before those damn drugs send me to sleep again.”
I assisted him in getting out of the chair, and helped him into the living room where he settled hi Bd hugsmself on the sofa with the remotes and turned on a game show. The sound drew Amanda from upstairs.
“You two all done?” she asked.
“I believe so,” I said. “I’ll be going now. Thanks for your time, Eddie.”
The old man raised the remote control in farewell, but he didn’t look away from the TV. Amanda was escorting me to the door when Eddie spoke again.
“Charlie!”
I went back to him. His eyes were fixed on the television.
“About Jimmy.”
I waited.
“We were friendly but, you know, we were never really close.” He tapped the remote on the armrest of his chair. “You can’t trust a man who spends his whole life living a lie. That’s all I wanted to say to you.”
He hit a button, changing the channel to an afternoon soap. I returned to where Amanda was waiting.
“Well, was he helpful?”
“Yes,” I said. “You both were.”
She smiled and kissed me on the cheek. “I hope you find what you’re looking for, Charlie.”
“You have my number,” I said. “Let me know how things go with your father.”
“I will,” she said. Then she took a piece of paper from the telephone table and scribbled a number on it. “My cell phone,” she said. “Just in case.”
“If I’d known it was that easy to get your number, I’d have asked a long time ago.”
“You had my number,” she said. “You just never used it.”
With that, she closed the door, and I walked back down the hill to the Muddy Brook Café, where Walter was waiting to take me to the airport.
I WAS FRUSTRATED TO be forced to leave New York with questions unanswered about Jimmy Gallagher’s whereabouts on the day my father became a killer, but I had no choice: I owed Dave Evans, and he had made it clear that he needed me at the Bear for most of the coming week. I also had only Eddie’s word that Jimmy and my father had met that day. It was possible that he could have been mistaken, and I wanted to be sure of the facts before I called Jimmy Gallagher a liar to his face.
I picked up my car at the Portland Jetport, and got back to my house in time to shower and change my clothes. For a moment, I found myself walking in the direction of the Johnson house to pick up Walter, but then I remembered where Walter was and it put me in a black mood that I knew wouldn’t lift for the rest of the night.
I spent most of the evening behind the bar with Gary. Business was steady, but there was still time for me to talk with customers and even get a little paperwork done in the back office. The only moment Che „[1]0%" of excitement came when a steroid jockey, who had stripped down his winter layers to only a wife beater and a pair of stained gym pants, came on to a woman named Hillary Herman who was five two, blond, and looked as if a soft breeze would carry her away like a leaf. When Hillary turned her back on him and his advances, he was dumb enough to lay a hand on her shoulder in an effort to regain her attention, at which point Hillary, who was the Portland PD’s resident judo expert, spun and twisted her would-be suitor’s arm so far behind his back that his forehead and his knees hit the ground simultaneously. She then escorted him to the door, dumped him in the snow, and threw his clothes out after him. His buddies seemed tempted to make their displeasure known, but the intervention of the other Portland cops with whom Hillary was drinking saved her from having to kick their asses as well.
When it was clear that everything had calmed down, and nobody was hurt who didn’t deserve to be, I started bringing cases to the bottle coolers from the walk-in. It was still an hour before closing, but it didn’t look as if we were about to be hit by an unanticipated rush, and it would save me time later. It was as I was bringing out the third case that I saw the man who had taken a seat at the far end of the bar. He was wearing the same tweed jacket, and he had a notebook open beside his right hand. It was Gary ’s end of the bar, but as he moved to serve the new arrival I indicated to him that I wanted to take care of it, and he went back to talking to Jackie Garner, for whom he seemed to have developed a worrying fondness. Even though Jackie was trying to talk to a pretty but shy redhead in her forties, he seemed grateful for Gary ’s company. Jackie didn’t do well with women. In fact, I couldn’t recall Jackie even dating a woman. Usually when a member of the opposite sex spoke to him, he developed a confused expression, like an infant being spoken to in a foreign language. Now he was blushing, and so was the redhead. It looked as if Gary was acting as a go-between in order to keep the conversation flowing. If he hadn’t been helping them along, they might have lapsed into total silence or, if they blushed any more, simply exploded.
“How you doin’?” I said to Notebook Man. “Back for more?”
“Guess so,” he replied. He was shrugging off his jacket. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to his elbows, his tie was loose, and the top button of his white shirt was undone. Despite the casualness of his attire, he gave the impression that he was about to get down to some serious work.
“What can I get you?”
“Just coffee, please.” When I came back with a cup of fresh brew, and some creamer and sweeteners, there was a card beside the notebook, facing me. I placed everything on top of the card without looking at what was written on it.
“Beg your pardon,” said the man. He lifted his cup, then picked up the card and handed it to me. I took it, read it, then put it back on the bar.
“Nice card,” I said, and it was. His name, Michael Wallace, was embossed on it in gold, along with a box number in Boston, two telephone numbers, an email address, and a website. The card named his profession as writer and reporter.
“Hold on to it,” he said.
“No thanks.”
“Seriously.”
There was a set look on his face that I didn’t much B Hip>< like, the kind that cops wore when they were door-stepping a suspect who wasn’t getting the message.
“‘Seriously’?” I didn’t care for his tone.
He reached into his satchel and removed a pair of nonfiction paperback books. I thought that I recognized the first from bookstores: it detailed the case of a man in northern California who had almost managed to get away with killing his wife and two children by claiming that they had drowned when their boat got caught up in a storm. He might have succeeded had a lab technician not spotted tiny chemical traces in the saltwater found in the lungs of the recovered bodies, and matched it to solvent stains found in the sink of the boat’s galley, indicating that the husband had drowned all three victims in the sink before tossing their bodies overboard. His reason for the killings, when he eventually confessed, was that “they were never on time for anything.” The second book seemed to be an older work, a standard serial-killer volume concentrating on sex murderers. Its title was almost as lurid as its subject matter. It was called Blood on the Sheets.
“That’s me,” he said, somewhat unnecessarily. “Michael Wallace. This is what I do. I write true-crime books.” He reached out a hand. “My friends call me Mickey.”
“We’re not about to become friends, Mr. Wallace.”
He shrugged, as if he had expected as much, and nothing more.
“Here’s the thing of it, Mr. Parker. I’ve read a lot about you. You’re a hero. You’ve brought down some real bad people, but until now nobody has written the full history of what you’ve done. I want to write a book about you. I want to tell your story: the deaths of your wife and child, the way you hunted down the man responsible, and the way you’ve hunted down others like him since then. I already have a publisher for it, and a title. It’s going to be called The Avenging Angel. Good, don’t you think?”
I didn’t reply.
“Anyway, the advance isn’t huge-mid-five-figure sum, which still isn’t too shabby for this kind of work-but I’ll split it with you fifty-fifty in return for your cooperation. We can negotiate on the royalties. My name will be on the cover, but it will be your story, as you want to tell it.”
“I don’t want to tell my story, sir. This conversation is over. The coffee is on me, but I wouldn’t advise you to linger over it.”
I turned away, but he kept talking.
“I don’t think you understand, Mr. Parker. I don’t mean to be confrontational, but I’m writing this book whether you choose to help me or not. There’s a lot that’s already public record, and I’ll find out more as the interview process goes on. I’ve already done a degree of background work, and I’ve lined up a couple of people in New York who are willing to talk. Then there’ll be folks from your old neighborhood, and from around here, who can provide insights into your life. I’m giving you the chance to shape the material, to respond to it. All I want is a few hours of your time over the next week or two. I work quickly, and I won’t intrude any more than is absolutely necessary.”
I think he was surprised by how fast I Beadr tmoved, but to his credit he didn’t flinch, even when I was in his face.
“You listen to me,” I said softly. “This isn’t about to happen. You’re going to get up, and you’re going to walk away, and I’m never going to hear from you again. Your book dies here. Am I clear?”
Wallace picked up his notebook and tapped it once on the bar, then slipped it back into his pocket. He put his jacket on, wrapped his scarf around his neck, then put three dollars on the bar.
“For the coffee, and the tip,” he said. “I’ll leave the books with you. Take a look at them. They’re better than you think they are. I’ll call again in a day or two, see if you’ve reconsidered.”
He nodded in farewell, then left. I swept his books into the trash can under the bar. Jackie Garner, who had been listening to the whole exchange, climbed from his stool and walked around to face me.
“You want me to, I can take care of this,” he said. “That asshole’s probably still in the parking lot.”
I shook my head. “Let him go.”
“I ain’t going to talk to him,” said Jackie. “And if he tries to talk to Paulie and Tony, they’ll drop his body in Casco Bay.”
“Thanks, Jackie.”
“Yeah, well…”
A car started up in the Bear’s lot. Jackie walked to the door and watched as Wallace departed.
“Blue Taurus,” he said. “Mass plates. Old, though. Not a rental. Not the kind of car a big-shot writer would drive.” He returned to the bar. “You think you can make him stop?”
“I don’t know. I can try.”
“He looks like the persistent type.”
“Yeah, he does.”
“Well, you remember: that offer still stands. Tony and Paulie and me, we’re good with persistence. We see it as a challenge.”
Jackie hung around after the bar had closed, but it was clear that it wasn’t out of any concern for me. He only had eyes for the woman, whose name, he whispered to me, was Lisa Goodwin. I was tempted to tell her to run and never look back if she was seriously considering dating Jackie, but that didn’t seem fair to either of them. According to Dave, who knew a little about her from previous visits she’d paid to the Bear, she was a nice woman who had made some bad choices in the past when it came to men. By comparison with most of her former lovers, Jackie was practically Cary Grant. He was loyal, and good-hearted, and unlike some of this woman’s exes, he would never resort to violence against her. True, he lived with his mother and had a fondness for homemade munitions, and the munitions were less volatile than his mother, but Lisa could deal with those issues if and when they arose.
I filled a mug with the last of the coffee from the pot and wandered out to the back office. There I turned on the computer and found out all that I could about Michael Wallace. I visited his website, then read some of his newspaper stories, which came to an end after 2005, and reviews of his first two books. After an hour, I had hi B hiI cs home address, his employment history, details of his divorce in 2002, and a DUI that he’d incurred in 2006. I’d have to talk to Aimee Price in the morning. I wasn’t sure what action, if any, I could legally take to prevent Wallace from writing about me, but I just knew that I didn’t want my name on the cover of a book. If Aimee couldn’t help, I’d be forced to lean on Wallace, and something told me that he wouldn’t respond well to that kind of pressure. Reporters rarely did.
Gary entered as I was finishing up.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
“Well, we’re all done out here.”
“Thanks. Go home, get some sleep. I’ll lock up.”
“Good night, then.” He lingered at the door.
“What is it?”
“If that guy comes back, the writer, what should I do?”
“Poison his drink. Be careful where you dump the body, though.”
Gary looked confused, as if uncertain whether or not I was being serious. I recognized the look. Most of the people who worked at the Bear knew something about my past, especially the locals who’d been there for a few years. Who could guess what kind of stories they’d been telling Gary when I wasn’t around?
“Just let me know if you see him,” I said. “Maybe you could spread the word that I’d appreciate it if nobody spoke to him about me.”
“Sure thing,” said Gary, brightening noticeably, then left. I heard him talking to Sergei, one of the line chefs, and then a door closed behind them and all was quiet.
The coffee had gone cold. I poured it down a sink, printed out all that I had learned about Wallace, and went home.
Mickey Wallace sat in his motel room out by the Maine Mall and wrote up the notes on his encounter with Parker. It was a trick he’d learned as a reporter: write everything down while it was still fresh, because even after a couple of hours the memory began to play tricks. You could fool yourself into thinking that you were remembering only the important stuff, but that wasn’t the case. You were just remembering what you hadn’t forgotten, important or not. Mickey was in the habit of recording his material in longhand in a series of notebooks, and then transferring it to his computer, but the notebooks remained the primary record, and it was to them that he always returned during the process of writing a book.
He hadn’t been disappointed or surprised by Parker’s response to his initial overture. In fact, he regarded the man’s possible participation in the venture as something of a long shot to begin with, but it never hurt to ask. What was surprising to him was that someone hadn’t written a book about Parker already, given all that he’d done, and the cases with which he’d been involved, but that was just one of the many strange things about Charlie Parker. Somehow, despite his history and his actions, he had managed to remain just slightly off the radar. Even in the coverage of the most high-profile cases, his name usually appeared buried in the fine print somewhere. It was almost as if ther Be a mae was an element of collusion when it came to him, an unspoken understanding that his part in what had occurred should be played down.
And those were just the ones that had made it into the public arena. Wallace had already done more than a little snooping, and Parker’s name had been mentioned in connection with some business in upstate New York involving Russian mobsters, or so the story went. Mickey had managed to get a local cop in Massena to talk to him over some beers and quickly came to realize that something was being covered up in a big way, but when he tried to talk to the cop again the next day, Mickey was run out of town and warned, in no uncertain terms, never to come back. The trail had died after that, but Mickey’s curiosity had been piqued.
He could smell blood, and blood sold books.
EMILY KINDLER LEFT THE little town in which she had been living for the past year shortly after the funeral for her deceased boyfriend’s parents. An open verdict was delivered as to the cause of their deaths, but it was understood in the town that they had taken their own lives, although Chief Dashut increasingly wondered why they had done so before they’d had a chance to bury their son properly. He couldn’t think of any parents who would not want to do right by their deceased child, no matter how traumatized they were by what had occurred. He questioned the verdict, both publicly and privately, and yoked the deaths of the parents to the murder of their son in both his mind and his own investigation.
There had been no denying that Emily Kindler’s shock at their deaths was genuine. One of the local doctors had been forced to give her a sedative to calm her down, and there were concerns for a time that she might have to be admitted to a psychiatric facility. She told the chief that she had visited the Faradays on the evening before they died, and Daniel Faraday in particular had appeared distressed, but there had been no indication that one or both of the Faradays might have been planning suicide.
The only lead so far in the killing of Bobby Faraday had come from the state police, who had discovered that Bobby had been involved in an altercation in a bar some eight miles from the town line, two weeks before his death. The bar in question was a roadside gin mill popular with bikers, and it seemed that Bobby, while intoxicated, had put the moves on a girl who was peripherally involved with the Crusaders biker gang. The Crusaders’ base was in Southern California, but their reach extended as far as Oklahoma and Georgia. Words had been exchanged, and a couple of punches thrown, before Bobby was dumped in the parking lot and given a kick in the ass to send him home. He was lucky not to have been stomped, but someone at the bar who knew Bobby had intervened on his behalf, arguing that he was just a kid who didn’t know any better, a kid, what’s more, who was hurting over the end of a relationship. Common sense had prevailed; well, common sense and the fortuitous arrival of a state police cruiser just as the Crusaders were debating the wisdom of giving Bobby some serious physical pain to distract him from his emotional distress. The Crusaders were bad, but the chief didn’t see them strangling a boy just because he’d crossed them. Still, the state police detectives seemed to feel that it was worth pursuing, and were now engaged in a game of catch-up with the Crusade Cth ”[1]ef rs, assisted by the FBI. In the meantime, Dashut had pointed out to the state police the symbol carved into the beech tree, and additional photographs had been taken, but he had heard nothing more about it.
Emily Kindler had been home alone at the time her boyfriend was believed to have been killed, which meant that she didn’t have an alibi, but that counted for half of the town too. The gas in the Faraday house had been turned on sometime after midnight and before 2 A.M., at best reckoning. Again, most of the people in town were home in bed at that time.
But the chief didn’t really suspect the Kindler girl of any involvement in Bobby Faraday’s death and, by extension, any suspicions that he had about how Bobby’s parents had met their end did not center on her, even though he considered the possibility of her involvement out of due diligence. When the chief had quietly mentioned Emily as a suspect to Homer Lockwood, the assistant ME, who was a resident in the town and knew both Emily and the Faradays by sight, the old man had just laughed.
“She doesn’t have the strength, not to do what was done to Bobby Faraday,” he told the chief. “Those aren’t arms of steel.”
So when Emily told the chief that she planned to leave town, he could hardly have blamed her. He did request that she notify him when she settled down somewhere, and keep him apprised of her movements for a time, and she agreed to do so, but he had no reason to prevent her from going. She gave the chief a cell phone number at which she could be contacted, and the address of a resort hotel in Miami where she intended to seek work as a waitress, and told him that she would be willing to return at any time if she could be of help in the investigation, but when Dashut eventually tried to contact her, the cell phone number was no longer in use, and the manager of the Miami resort told him that she had never taken up his offer of a job.
Emily Kindler, it seemed, had vanished.
Emily headed northeast. She wanted to smell the sea, to clear her senses. She wanted to try to shake whatever was shadowing her. It had found her in that small midwestern town, though, and it had taken the Faradays. It would find her again, she knew, but she wasn’t prepared simply to lie down in a dark corner and wait for it to happen. In the distance, Canada beckoned.
Men looked at her as she sat on the Greyhound bus, watching the monotonous flat landscape gradually transform into gentle hills, snow still thick upon them. A guy in a worn leather jacket who smelled of sweat and pheromones tried to talk to her at one of the rest stops, but she turned away from him and resumed her seat behind the driver, a man in his late fifties who sensed her vulnerability but, unlike others, had no intention of exploiting it. Instead, he had taken her under his wing, and glared balefully at any male below the age of seventy who threatened to take the empty seat beside the girl. When the man in the leather jacket got back on the bus and seemed intent on changing seats to be closer to the object of his interest, the driver told him to sit his ass back down and not to move again until they hit Boston.
Still, the man’s attentions made Emily think of Bobby, and she felt tears well. She had not loved him, but she had liked him. He was funny and sweet and awkward, at least until he started drinking, when some of his anger and frustration at his father, the small town, even her, would bubble to the surface.
Bupond
She had never been entirely sure what she wanted in a man. Sometimes, she thought that she caught some inkling of it, a brief flash of what she sought, like a light briefly glimpsed in the darkness. She would respond to it, and then the man would respond in turn. Sometimes it had been too late for her to retreat, and she had suffered the consequences: verbal abuse, sometimes even physical violence, and, on one occasion, very nearly worse than that.
Like some young men and women her age, she had struggled to find a sense of purpose. The path that she wanted her life to take had not yet become clear to her. She thought that she might become an artist, or a writer, for she loved books and paintings and music. In big cities, she would while away hours in museums and galleries, standing before the great canvases as though she hoped that by doing so she might be absorbed into them, becoming one with their world. When she could afford it, she would buy books. When money was not so freely available, she would go to a library, although the experience of reading a book that she could not call her own was not the same. Still, they gave her a sense of possibility so that she did not feel so lost, so adrift in the world. Others had struggled with some of the same problems that she had, and they had endured.
She did not make it as far as Canada, but stopped off at a town in New Hampshire. She could not have said why, but she had learned to trust her instincts. After a week there, she still had developed no fondness for it, but she stayed despite herself. This was not a community of art or culture. It had one tiny museum, a mishmash of history, most of it local, and art, most of that local too. Any other acquisitions felt like an afterthought, the impulse of those who did not have the funds to match their taste, or, perhaps, the taste to match their funds, in a town that felt a museum was appropriate, even necessary, without fully understanding why. This attitude seemed to have permeated all of its strata, and she could not recall another environment in which creativity was so stifled; or, at least, she could not until she remembered the small town she had once called home. Art and beauty had no place there either, and the house in which she had grown up was barren of all such fripperies. Even magazines had no part to play, unless one counted her father’s stash of porn.
She had not thought of him in so long. Her mother had left when she was still a child, promising to return for her, but she never came back, and in time word came that she had died somewhere in Canada, and had been buried by her new boyfriend’s family. Emily’s father did what was necessary for her education and survival, but little more. She went to school, and always had money for books. They ate adequately, but only at home and never in restaurants. Some money was put aside in a jar for household expenses, and he gave her a little for herself, but she did not know where the rest of his money went. He did not drink to excess, and he did not take drugs. Neither did he ever lay a hand upon her in affection or anger and, as she grew older and her body matured, he was careful never to do or say anything that might be deemed inappropriate or suggestive. For this, she was more grateful than he would ever know. She had heard the tales told by some of the other girls in her school, stories of fathers and stepfathers, of brothers and uncles, of the new boyfriends of tired, lonely mothers. Her father was not such a man. Instead, he merely kept his distance, and his conversations with her to a minimum.
Yet she had never regarded herself as neglected. When she began having trouble at school-acting up in class, crying in the restrooms-as she entered adolescence, her father spoke to the principal and arranged for Bnlys n Emily to see a psychologist, although she chose to share as little with the kindly, soft-spoken man in the rimless glasses as she did with her father. She did not want to speak with a psychologist. She did not want to be perceived as different in any way, and so she did not tell him of the headaches, or the blackouts, or the strange dreams that she had in which something was emerging from a dark pit in the ground, a thing with teeth that gnawed at her soul. She did not speak of her paranoia, or the sense that her identity was a fragile thing that could be lost and broken at any time. After ten sessions, the psychologist concluded that she was what she appeared to be: a normal, if sensitive, girl who would, in time, find her place in the world. There was the possibility that her difficulties presaged something more serious, a form of schizophrenia, perhaps, and he advised both her and, particularly, her father to be aware of any significant changes in her behavior. Her father had looked at her differently after that, and twice in the months that followed she had woken to find him standing in his robe at the door to her room. When she’d asked what was wrong, he told her that she had been shouting in her sleep, and she wondered if he had heard what she might have said.
Her father worked as a driver for a furniture warehouse, Trejo & Sons, Inc., Mexicans who had made good. Her father was the only non-Mexican who worked for the Trejos. She did not know why this should be. When she asked her father about it, he admitted that he did not know either. Maybe it was because he drove his truck well, but she thought it might have been the fact that the Trejos sold many types of furniture, some of it expensive and some of it not, to many different types of people, some of them Mexicans and some of them not. Her father had a sense of authority about him, and he spoke softly and well. For their wealthier customers, he was the acceptable face of the Trejos.
Every piece of furniture in their home had been bought at a discount from his employers, usually because it was damaged, or torn, or so ugly that all hope of ever selling it had been abandoned. Her father had cut and sanded the legs on the kitchen table in an effort to make them even, but the result was only that the table forever after seemed too low, and the chairs could not be pushed under it when they had finished eating. The couches in the living room were comfortable but mismatched, and the rugs and carpets were cheap but hard wearing. Only the succession of TVs that graced one corner of the room were of any quality, and her father regularly upgraded the sets when a better model came on the market. He watched history documentaries and game shows. He rarely watched sports. He wanted to know things, to learn and, in silence, his daughter learned alongside him.
When she finally left, she wondered if he would even notice. She suspected that he might simply be grateful for her absence. Only later did it strike her that, at times, he had seemed almost frightened of her.
She found another waitressing job, this one in the closest thing to a boho coffeehouse that the town could boast. It didn’t pay much, but then her rent wasn’t very much either, and at least they played good music and the rest of the staff weren’t total assholes. She was supplementing her income with weekend bar work, which wasn’t so pleasant, but she had already met a guy who seemed to like her. He had come in with some of his buddies to watch a hockey game, but he was different from them, and he had flirted with her some. He had a nice smile, and he didn’t swear like his buddies, which she admired in a man. He’d returned a couple of times since then, and she could feel him working up the co B shme.urage to ask her out. She wasn’t sure that she was ready yet, though, not after what had happened before, and she still wasn’t certain about him. There was something there, though, something that interested her. If he asked, she would say yes, but she would keep some space between them as she tried to find out more about him. She did not want things to turn out the way they had with Bobby at the end.
On her fourth night in the new town, she woke to a vision of a man and a woman walking up the street toward her rented apartment. It was so vivid that she went to the window and looked out at the world beyond, expecting to see two figures standing beneath the nearest streetlight, but the town was quiet, and the street was empty. In her dream, she had almost been able to see their faces. The dream had been coming to her for many years now, but it was only recently that the features of the man and woman had begun to seem clearer to her, growing sharper with each visitation. She could not yet recognize them, but she knew that the time was coming when she would be able to do so.
There would be a reckoning then. Of that, at least, she was certain.