Grady tossed his cigarette butt. ‘Sure, why not? You got any weed? I couldn’t listen to Darryl’s shit with my head straight.’
‘Yeah, I got some. I don’t want to bring it to Darryl’s, though. Shit’ll be gone before I got time to find my rolling papers. Let’s go back to mine, pick up some beers, have a smoke. When your head’s in the right place, we can join the party.’
‘Sounds good,’ said Grady.
They finished their beers and left them on the bench, then scooted round the side of the bar so they didn’t have to see Kathleen Cover and her shitbird husband again. They got bitten some more on the way to Teddy’s truck, so back at the house Teddy hunted down a bottle of calamine while Grady put on some music – CSNY, Four Way Street, couldn’t have been more mellow if Buddha himself was on backing vocals – and then Teddy produced the Baggie of weed, and it was very good weed, and they never did make it to Darryl Shiff’s party but instead talked long into the night, and Grady told Teddy things that he had never told anyone before, including the story of the airplane that his father and Paul Scollay had found in the Great North Woods.
‘That’s it,’ said Teddy, through a fug of smoke. ‘That’s how you do it.’
He stumbled to his bedroom, and Grady heard closets being searched, and drawers being emptied on the floor, and when Teddy returned he was holding a business card in his hand, grinning like it was a winning Powerball ticket.
‘The plane, man. You tell them about the plane . . .’
That night, a message was left on the answering service for Darina Flores, the first time any such message had been received in many years.
It had begun.
14
In her dark bedroom, Darina Flores drifted in and out of consciousness. The painkillers disagreed with her, causing tremors in her legs that tore her from sleep. They also provoked peculiar dreams. She couldn’t have called them night terrors, for she was herself virtually without fear, but she experienced sensations of descent, of falling into a great emptiness, and she felt the absence of grace with a pain that was unfamiliar to her. The god she served was a pitiless one, and there was no consolation from him in times of distress. He was the god of mirrors, the god of form without substance, the god of blood and tears. Trapped in her misery, she understood why so many chose to believe in the Other God, to follow Him even though she saw in Him only a being as heedless of suffering as her own. Perhaps the only true difference was that her god took pleasure in agony and grief; at least, one might argue, he had a sense of involvement.
She had always considered herself to have a high tolerance for pain, but she had a fear of burns, and a reaction to them that was disproportionate to the severity of the injury. Even a minor burn – the careless brushing of a candle flame, a match held for too long – caused blistering to her skin, and a fierce throbbing that found an echo deep inside her. A psychiatrist might have speculated on childhood trauma, an accident of youth, but she had never talked with a psychiatrist, and any mental health specialist would have been forced to travel further back than distant memories of her childhood to find the source of her terror of burning.
Because her dreams were real: she had fallen, and she had burned, and somewhere inside she was still burning. The Other God had made it so, and she hated Him for it. Now her inner pain had its most ferocious external manifestation yet, the extent of it hidden from her by dressings and the refusal to allow her a mirror.
Barbara Kelly had surprised her in the end. Who could have guessed that she would prove to be so weak and yet so strong, that she would seek to save herself at the last by turning to the Other God, and in doing so would inflict such damage on the woman sent to punish her? My beauty, she thought, now gone; temporarily blind in one eye, with the possibility of lasting damage to her vision caused by the old grounds in the coffee pot sticking to her pupil. She wanted to shed her body like a snake slews off its skin, or a spider leaves its old carapace to wither. She did not want to be trapped in a disfigured shell. In the darkness of her agonies, she feared that it was because she did not wish to see the corruption of her spirit reflected in her outer form.
Each time she woke the boy was there waiting, his ancient eyes like polluted pools against the pallor of his skin. He still had not uttered a word. As an infant he had rarely cried, and as a boy he had never spoken. The doctors who examined him, chosen for their trustworthiness, their commitment to the cause, could find no physical defect to explain the boy’s silence, and his mental functions were adjudged to be well above average for his age. As for the goiter upon his neck, that troubled them, and there had been discussions about removing it. She had demurred. It was part of him. After all, that was how she had known it was him. She had thought that it was possible when she felt him kicking in her womb. A sense of his presence had suffused her as though she were enveloped in his embrace, as though he were inside her more as a lover than a developing child, and it had grown in intensity throughout her second and third trimesters so that it became almost oppressive to her, like a cancerous growth in her belly. Expelling him from herself had come as a relief. Then she had looked upon him as he was placed in her arms, and her fingers had traced his lips, and his ears, and the delicacy of his hands, and had paused at the swelling upon his throat. She had gazed into his eyes, and from the blackness of them he had looked back at her, an old being resurrected in a new body.
And now he was beside her, stroking her hand as she moaned upon the sweat-dampened sheets. While they were finishing with Barbara Kelly, Darina had summoned help, but their nearest tame physician was in New York and it took time for him to reach her. Strangely, there was not as much pain as she might have anticipated, not at first. She attributed it to her rage at the bitch who had turned upon her, but as Kelly’s life slowly seeped from her beneath blades and fingers, so too the torment in Darina’s face seemed to increase, and when Kelly at last died it screamed into red life with her passing.
Deep second-degree burns: that was how they described them. Any more severe and there would have been serious nerve damage, which would at least have numbed the pain, she thought. There was still the possibility that grafts might be necessary, but the doctor had decided to hold off on that decision until a degree of healing had occurred. Some scarring was inevitable, he said, particularly around her injured eye, and there would be significant contracture of the eyelid as the scarring proceeded. The eye hurt more than anything else: it felt like needles were being pushed through it and into her brain.
The eye was patched, and would remain so even after the other dressings were removed. Already her skin was blistering badly. She had been given lubricant for the eye, as well as antibiotic drops. The boy took care of them all and salved her blistered face, and the physician visited each day and commended him on his efforts, even as he kept his distance from him, his nose wrinkling at the faint odor that seemed to rise from the boy regardless of how many showers he took or how clean his clothes were. His breath was the worst: it stank of decay. Darina had grown used to it from long exposure, but it was still unpleasant, even to her.
But then he was an unusual boy, mostly because he wasn’t really a boy at all.
‘Hurts,’ she said. She still had trouble speaking. If she moved her mouth more than a fraction, her lips bled.
The boy who was more than a boy put some gel on his fingers and gently applied it to her lips. He took a plastic bottle with a fixed straw in its cover, slipped the straw into the undamaged side of her mouth, and squeezed some water through. She nodded when she was done.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
He stroked her hair. A tear rolled from her uninjured eye. Her face felt as though it were aflame.
‘The bitch,’ she said. ‘Look what the bitch did to me.’
And: ‘I’m burned, but she is burning too, and her pain will be greater and longer than mine. The bitch, the burning bitch.’
She was not due another painkiller for a couple of hours, so he turned on the TV as a
distraction. Together they watched some cartoons, and a comedy show, and a dumb action movie upon which she wouldn’t ordinarily have wasted her time but that now acted as a soporific. The night drew on, and the sun rose. She watched the light change through the crack in the drapes. The boy gave her another pill, then changed into his pajamas and curled up on the floor next to her bed as he saw her falling asleep, his head on a pillow and a comforter covering his body only from the waist down. She felt her eyes begin to close, and prepared to exchange real pain for the memory of pain.
From the floor the boy watched her, unfathomable in his strangeness.
Messages accumulated. Most were inconsequential. Still, the boy made a careful note of each one, and handed it to her when she was sufficiently alert to understand what she was being shown. Minor tasks were postponed for a time, major ones diverted elsewhere. She willed herself to recover. There was too much that needed to be done.
But for all of the boy’s solicitude, and all of the care he took with her phone, some contacts went unexamined for a time. The boy did not have access to the old Darina Flores answering service: it had come into existence before he was born, and there had been no reason to acquaint him with it. Anyway, it had been many years since contact had been made through that number.
And so it was that a message inquiring if she was still interested in news of an airplane that might have crashed in the Great North Woods remained unlistened to for days, and a little time was bought.
But only a little.
15
I called Gordon Walsh, a detective who now worked out of the Maine State Police’s Southern Major Crimes Unit in Gray. Walsh was about the closest thing I had to a friend in the MSP, although it would have been stretching the point to call him an actual friend. If Walsh was my friend, then I was lonelier than I thought. Actually, if Walsh was anybody’s friend they were lonelier than they thought.
‘You calling to confess a crime?’ he said.
‘Anything to help you maintain your unblemished arrest record. You have something in particular you’d like me to ’fess up to, or should I just sign a blank form and leave you to fill in the details?’
‘You won’t even have to fill in your name because it’s already there. Just put your “X” on it and we’ll do the rest.’
‘I’ll think about it. Maybe if you helped me out with something it might encourage me to make the right decision. You have any friends in the New Hampshire MCU?’
‘No, but I’ll have minus friends there if I set you on them. You’re a walking formula for negative friendship equity.’
I waited. I was good at waiting. At last, I heard him sigh.
‘Come on, give it to me.’
‘Kenny Chan. Killed in his house in Bennington in 2006.’
‘How did he die?’
‘He was broken up and folded into his own safe.’
‘Yeah, I think I remember that one. It was part of a spate of safe-foldings back in the day. Robbery?’
‘Only of his joie de vivre. Whoever did it left the cash in the safe with him.’
‘I take it you pulled up the names of the investigating detectives?’
‘Nalty and Gulyas.’
‘Yeah, Helen Nalty and Bob Gulyas. Nalty won’t talk to you. She’s straight edge, and in line for promotion to AUC.’ AUC was Assistant Unit Commmander. ‘Gulyas is retired. I know him a little. He might talk, as long as you don’t interrupt. He’s not patient like I am. It’ll be the usual deal. If you find out something useful—’
– ‘then it goes straight to him, and he whispers it in a sympathetic ear,’ I finished. ‘And if I get in trouble I don’t mention his name. I owe you on this one.’
‘You owe me on more than this one, but you can start paying now.’
‘Go on.’
‘Perry Reed.’
‘The auto shop guy. I watch the news. What about him?’
‘I heard a story that a couple of members of the Saracens motorcycle gang might recently have been relieved of a delivery of narcotics, at gunpoint. That’s a tragedy of course, and they’ve proved strangely unwilling to file a complaint, but the story has it that one of the guys who robbed them might have been black, and the other white, or whiteish. They were very polite. They said “please” and “thank you”. One of them may even have used the words “Would you mind . . .?”, and he complimented one of the Saracens on the quality of his boots. The quantity and description of the narcotics in question is pretty similar to what we took from Perry Reed and his guys.’
‘So Reed ripped off the Saracens? That doesn’t sound wise.’
‘Reed did not rip off the Saracens. I don’t think he burned down his own auto lot and titty bar either, even though we found ethyl alcohol in his garage. I think Perry Reed has been set up, and the kiddy stuff is just the icing on the cake. And the description, however basic, of the two men who stole from the Saracens rings bells that seem to echo in your vicinity.’
‘Is Perry Reed a supplier of narcotics?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is Perry Reed a pimp?’
‘Yes, and a trafficker of women. And a suspected rapist, both statutory and otherwise: it’s said he and his buddies break in the girls before passing them along.’
‘How long has he been doing all this?’
‘Years. Decades.’
‘And now you have him. What’s the problem?’
‘You know what the problem is. I want to see him in jail, but for stuff that he did do, not for stuff that he didn’t.’
‘I can only tell you what I’ve heard.’
‘Which is?’
‘The drugs were on their way to Reed anyway, but he always uses middlemen for receipt of deliveries. I’ve also heard that if you get a court order for the phone records of the numbers found on the cell phones, you’ll find that Perry Reed and Alex Wilder were both in touch with known traffickers of underage girls, most of them Chinese and Vietnamese, although they had room for Thai and Laotian too.’
‘The gun?’
‘Only what I’ve read in the papers. Pearl grips. Classy, as long as you’re not seen in public with them.’
‘The auto lot and titty bar?’
‘Well, that just looks like arson, but I’m no expert.’
‘And the kiddy porn?’
‘It was in his possession, and he has a reputation.’
Walsh said nothing for a time. ‘Still sounds to me like somebody might have had a personal motive for seeing Perry Reed locked up until his hair turns white. Alex Wilder too.’
I gave him a little: not much, but enough. ‘Maybe frightened Asian girls weren’t the only women they were raping.’
There was the sound of the phone shifting, and I knew that Walsh was making a note.
‘So what am I left with here: that it’s not legal, but it’s just?’
‘Would you prefer it the other way around?’
He grunted. It was as close to acquiescence as Walsh was likely to get. ‘I’ll tell Bob Gulyas to expect a call,’ he said.
‘Thank you.’
‘Whatever. Just remember: I wasn’t kidding about that piece of paper with your name on it. If I don’t have it, then somebody else does. It’s only a matter of time. Oh, and you tell your friends that I said hello.’
I left a message for Bob Gulyas, and he returned the call within the hour. In the course of a twenty-minute phone conversation during which it became clear that he knew more about me than I might have been comfortable with, which suggested that he’d been talking to Walsh, Gulyas told me as much as he knew, or was willing to share, about Kenny Chan’s murder.
A gale force wind had set off the alarm in Chan’s home, and his security company had been unable to contact him. His girlfriend was listed as a secondary keyholder: she hadn’t heard from him in five days, and it was she who found the body. Whoever killed him had taken the trouble to leave the combination written in lipstick on the safe, along with Kenny Chan’s name and the years of his bi
rth and death.
‘So you figure a woman was involved?’ I said.
‘His girlfriend had some cosmetics and clothing in a drawer in his bedroom,’ said Gulyas, ‘but the lipstick didn’t match, so unless it was a guy who killed him and just happened to be the kind who carried lipstick in his pocket, then, yeah, we figured a woman.’
‘What about the girlfriend?’
‘Cindy Keller. She was a model. She’d been working on a shoot in Vegas, and only got back the night before the body was found. He’d been in there for a couple of days by then, so she was in the clear.’
‘Sounds like the end of a run of bad luck for Kenny Chan,’ I said. ‘First his wife, then his business partner. All he had to console him in his grief was the money he made from the sale of his company. Still, better than being poor and grieving, I guess.’
Gulyas laughed. ‘Oh, we looked hard at Kenny Chan after Felice was shot, but there was nothing to connect him to the gas station killings beyond circumstantial evidence. Yeah, it seemed his partner was blocking the sale of the company and, yeah, his murder was a lucky break for Chan, but if he planned it then he planned it well. He was so clean even his shit gleamed.’
‘And his wife?’
Gulyas didn’t laugh this time. ‘She was on the One-Oh-One near Milford. Looks like the car skidded, hit some trees, and burst into flames.’
‘Any witnesses?’
‘None. It was late at night on a quiet stretch of road.’
‘How late?’
‘Two thirty a.m.’
‘What was she doing out by Milford at two thirty in the morning?’
‘We never got an answer to that. There was speculation that she might have been having an affair, but that’s all it was. If she was screwing around, then she hid it well.’
‘So it all remains one big mystery with three heads?’
‘I’ll tell you something, Mr Parker. I smelled what you smell, but in the end we were advised to let it lie. The word came from real high up, and that word was “Defense”.’