The Charlie Parker Collection 1

  A young woman of twenty-three or twenty-four stood on the steps of the building, adjusting a stud in her nose. Her hair was dyed a coal black, she wore heavy blue-black makeup around her eyes, and her lipstick was so red it could have stopped traffic. She was very pale and very thin, so she couldn’t have been a regular eater at her own restaurant. She looked at me with a mixture of expectancy and unease as I approached.

  ‘Ali Wynn?’ I asked.

  She nodded. ‘You’re the detective?’

  ‘Charlie Parker.’ She reached out and shook my hand, her back remaining firmly against the brickwork of the building behind her.

  ‘Like the jazz guy?’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘He was pretty cool. You listen to him?’

  ‘No. I prefer country music.’

  She wrinkled her forehead. ‘Guess your mom and dad had to be jazz fans to give you a name like that?’

  ‘They listened to Glenn Miller and Lawrence Welk. I don’t think they even knew who Charlie Parker was.’

  ‘Do people call you Bird?’

  ‘Sometimes. My girlfriend thinks it’s cute. My friends do it to irritate me.’

  ‘Must be kind of a drag for you.’

  ‘I’m used to it.’

  The deconstruction of my family’s naming procedures seemed to make her a little less wary of me, because she detached herself from the wall and fell into step beside me. We walked down to the Au Bon Pain at Harvard Square, where she smoked four cigarettes and drank two espressos in fifteen minutes. Ali Wynn had so much nervous energy she made electrons seem calm.

  ‘Did you know Grace well?’ I asked when she was about halfway through cigarette number two.

  She blew out a stream of smoke. ‘Sure, pretty well. We were friends.’

  ‘Her father told me that she used to live with you and that she stayed with you sometimes even after she moved out.’

  ‘She used to come down at weekends to use the library and I let her crash on my couch. Grace was fun. Well, she used to be fun.’

  ‘When did she stop being fun?’

  Ali finished number two and lit number three with a matchbook from the Grafton Pub. ‘About the time she started her graduate thesis.’

  ‘On the Aroostook Baptists?’

  The cigarette made a lazy arc. ‘Whatever. She was obsessed with them. She had all of these letters and photographs belonging to them. She’d lie on the couch, put some mournful shit on the stereo, and stay like that for hours, just going through them over and over again. Can you get me another coffee?’

  I did as I was asked. I figured that she wasn’t going to run away until she’d finished her cigarette.

  ‘You ever worry about the effects of too much caffeine?’ I asked when I returned.

  She tugged at her nose stud and smiled. ‘Nah, I’m hoping to smoke myself to death first.’

  There was something very likable about Ali Wynn, despite the veneer of Siouxsie and the Banshees-era cool. The sunlight made her eyes sparkle and the right side of her mouth was permanently raised in an amused, faux-cynical grin. She was all front; the cigarette smoke didn’t stay in her mouth long enough to give a gnat a nicotine buzz and her makeup was too carefully applied to be truly scary. I guessed that she probably inspired fear, lust, and irritation in her male classmates, all in roughly equal measure. Ali Wynn could have wrapped the world around her little finger if she’d had the self-confidence to do it. It would come, in time.

  ‘You were telling me about Grace,’ I prompted, as much to get myself back on track as Ali.

  ‘Yeah, sure. There’s not much more to tell. It was like the whole family history thing was draining her, sucking the life from her. It was all “Elizabeth” this and “Lyall” that. She became a real drag. She was obsessed by Elizabeth Jessop. I don’t know, maybe she thought Elizabeth’s spirit had entered into her or something.’

  ‘Did she think Elizabeth was dead?’

  Ali nodded.

  ‘Did she say why?’

  ‘She just had a feeling, that was all. Anyway, like I said, it was all getting too heavy. I told her she couldn’t stay anymore because my roomie was complaining, which was, like, a total lie. That was in February. She stopped coming and we didn’t really talk much between then and . . .’ She let the end of the sentence hang, then stubbed the cigarette out angrily.

  ‘I suppose you think I’m a bitch,’ she said softly when the last trace of smoke had disappeared.

  ‘No, I don’t think you’re a bitch at all.’

  She didn’t look at me, as if afraid that my expression might give the lie to my words. ‘I was going to go up to the funeral but . . . I didn’t. I hate funerals. Then I was going to send a card to her dad – he was a nice old guy – but I didn’t do that either.’

  At last, she raised her eyes and I was only half surprised to see that they were wet. ‘I prayed for her, Mr. Parker, and I can’t remember the last time I ever prayed. I just prayed that she’d be okay and that whoever was on the other side – God, Buddha, Allah – would look after her. Grace was a good person.’

  ‘I think she probably was,’ I said as she lit a final cigarette. ‘Did she take drugs?’

  Ali shook her head vehemently. ‘No, never.’

  ‘Apart from getting overinvolved with her thesis, did she seem depressed or anxious?’

  ‘No more than any of us.’

  ‘Was she seeing anyone?’

  ‘She’d had a couple of flings, but nothing serious for at least a year. She would have told me.’

  I watched her quietly for a time, but I knew she was telling the truth. Ali Wynn hadn’t been in the car with Grace on the night that she died. More and more, Marcy Becker was looking like the most likely candidate. I sat back and examined the crowds entering and leaving the T, the tourists and locals with bags of wine and candies from Cardullos, Black Forest ham and exotic teas from Jackson’s of Picadilly, bath salts and soaps from Origins. Grace should have been among them, I thought. The world was a poorer place for her passing.

  ‘Has that helped you?’ asked Ali. I could see that she wanted to leave.

  ‘It’s cleared a few things up.’ I handed her my card, after writing my home telephone number on the back. ‘If you think of anything more, or if someone else comes around asking about Grace, maybe you’ll give me a call.’

  ‘Sure.’ She picked up the card and placed it carefully in her purse. She was about to move away when she paused and placed her hand lightly on my arm.

  ‘You think somebody killed her, don’t you?’ Her red lips were pressed tightly together but she couldn’t control the trembling of her chin.

  ‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘I think somebody did.’

  Her grip tightened momentarily and I felt the heat of her penetrating to my skin. ‘Thanks for the coffee,’ she said, and then she was gone.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon buying some clothes for my depleted wardrobe before heading back to Copley and the Starbucks on Newbury to read the newspaper. Reading the New York Times on a near-daily basis was a habit I hadn’t lost, although buying it in Boston made me feel kind of guilty, as if I had just rolled up the newspaper and used it to slap the mayor.

  I didn’t even notice the start of the story on the far right of the front page until I came to its continuation on page seven and saw the photograph accompanying it. A man stared out at me in black-and-white, a black hat on his head, and I recalled the same man nodding to me from a darkened Mercedes as I approached Jack Mercier’s house – and sitting uneasily with three other people in a framed photograph in Mercier’s study. His name was Rabbi Yossi Epstein, and he was dead.

  According to the police report, Rabbi Yossi Epstein left the Eldridge Street shul at 7:30 P.M. on a cool Tuesday evening, the flow of traffic on the Lower East Side changing, altering in pitch, as commuters were replaced by those whose reasons for being in the city had more to do with pleasure than business. Epstein wore a black suit and a white shirt, but he was far from
being the traditionalist that his exterior suggested. There were those in the shul who had long whispered against him; he tolerated homosexuals and adulterers, they said. He was too ready to take his place before the television cameras, they argued, too quick to smile and pander to the national media. He was too concerned with the things of this world and too little concerned with the promise of the next.

  Epstein had made his name in the aftermath of the Crown Heights disaster, pleading for tolerance, arguing that the Jewish and black communities should put aside their differences, that poor blacks and poor Jews had more in common with each other than with the wealthier members of their own tribes. He had been injured in the riots that followed, and a picture of him in the Post, blood streaming from a wound in his head, had brought him his first taste of celebrity due to the photo’s unfortunate, and unintended, similarity to representations of the suffering Christ.

  Epstein had also been involved with the B’Nai Jeshurun Temple up on Eighty-ninth Street and Broadway, founded by Marshal T. Meyer, whose mentor had been the conservative firebrand Abraham Yoshua Heschel. It was easy to see why someone with Epstein’s views might have been attracted to Meyer, who had fought with the Argentine generals in his efforts to find disappeared Jews. Since Meyer’s death, in 1993, two Argentine rabbis had continued his work in New York, including the provision of a homeless shelter and encouraging the establishment of a gay congregation. B’Nai Jeshurun was even twinned with a congregation in Harlem, the New Canaan Baptist Church, whose preacher sometimes spoke at the synagogue. According to the Times, Epstein had fallen out with B’Nai Jeshurun and had taken to holding twice-monthly services at the old Orensanz Center on the Lower East Side.

  One of the reasons for the split with B’Nai Jeshurun appeared to be Epstein’s growing involvement in anti-Nazi groups, including the Center for Democratic Renewal in Atlanta and Searchlight in Britain. He had established his own organization, the Jewish League for Tolerance, staffed mainly by volunteers and run from out of a small office on Clinton Street, above a disused Jewish bookstore.

  According to the Times, Epstein was believed to have received considerable funding in recent weeks to enable him to commence a series of investigations into organizations suspected of anti-Semitic activities, among them the usual suspects: fanatics with ‘Aryan’ prominent in their names and splinter groups from the Klan who had left because the Klan now frowned on burning down synagogues and chaining blacks to the back axles of pickup trucks.

  Whatever his critics might have said about him, Yossi Epstein was a brave man, a man of conviction, a man who worked tirelessly to improve the lives not only of the city’s Jews but of his other fellow citizens. He was found dead in his apartment at 11 P.M. on Wednesday night, apparently after suffering some kind of seizure. The apartment, in which he lived alone, had been ransacked and his wallet and address book were missing. Foul play was suspected, according to the report, a suspicion increased by another incident earlier that night.

  At 10 P.M., the office of the Jewish League for Tolerance was firebombed. A young volunteer, Sarah Miller, was working there at the time, printing off addresses for a mailing the following day. She was three days short of her nineteenth birthday when the room around her became an inferno. She was still on the critical list, with burns over 90 percent of her body. Epstein was due to be buried at Pine Lawn Cemetery in Long Island that day, following the prompt autopsy.

  There was one more detail that caught my attention. In addition to his work on right-wing organizations, Epstein was reported to be preparing a legal challenge to the religious tax exemption given by the IRS to a number of church groups. Most of the names were unfamiliar to me, except for one: the Fellowship, based in Waterville, Maine. The law firm employed by Epstein to handle the case was Ober, Thayer & Moss of Boston, Massachusetts. It was hardly a coincidence that the firm also took care of Jack Mercier’s legal affairs and that Warren Ober’s son was soon to be married to Mercier’s daughter.

  I read through the piece again, then called Mercier’s home. A maid took the call, but when I gave my name and asked to be put through to Mr. Mercier, another female voice came on the line. It was Deborah Mercier.

  ‘Mr. Parker,’ she said. ‘My husband is not available. Perhaps I can help you?’

  ‘I don’t think so, Mrs. Mercier. I really need to speak to your husband.’

  There was a pause in the conversation long enough to make our feelings about each other clear, and then Deborah Mercier concluded:

  ‘In that case, perhaps you’d be kind enough not to phone the house again. Jack is not available at present, but I’ll make sure he hears that you called.’

  With that she hung up, and I got the feeling that Jack Mercier would never know that I had called him.

  I had never met Rabbi Yossi Epstein and knew nothing more about him than what I had just read, but his activities had awakened something, something that lay curled in its web until Epstein caused one of the strands to twitch and the sleeping thing roused itself and came after him, then tore him apart before it returned to the dark place in which it lived.

  In time, I would find that place.

  Chapter Nine

  I returned to Rachel’s apartment, showered, and in an effort to cheer myself up for the evening ahead, put on some of my sharp new purchases: a black Joseph Abboud coat that made me look like I was auditioning for the second remake of Nosferatu, black gabardine pants, and a black DKNY v-neck. Screaming ‘fashion victim,’ I walked down to the Copley Plaza Hotel and into the Oak Bar.

  Outside, the traffic on Copley melted away, the sound of horns and engines smothered by the red curtains of the Oak. The four big ceiling fans scythed the air and the ice in the raw bar glittered in the dim light. Louis was already sitting at a table by the window, his long frame folded into one of the bar’s comfortable red chairs. He was wearing a black wool suit with a white shirt and black shoes. His dark head was no longer shaven and he had grown a small, vaguely satanic beard, which, if anything, rendered him even more intimidating than before. In the past, when he had been bald and devoid of facial hair, people crossed the street to avoid him. Now they probably felt the urge to book a trip somewhere safe and quiet, like Kosovo or Sierra Leone.

  There was a Presidential Martini on the table before him, and he was smoking a Montecristo No. 2. That was about $55 worth of vices. He blew a stream of blue smoke at me in greeting.

  I ordered a virgin cocktail and shrugged off my coat, ostentatiously showing Louis the label as I did so.

  ‘Yeah, very impressive,’ he said unconvincingly. ‘Not even last season’s. You so cheap, your hourly rate probably got ninety-nine cents at the end.’

  ‘Where’s the insignificant other?’ I asked, ignoring him.

  ‘Buying some clothes. Airline lost his bag.’

  ‘They’re doing him a favor. You pay them to lose it?’

  ‘Didn’t have to. Baggage handlers probably refused to touch it. Piece of shit practically walked to La Guardia by itself. How you doin’?’

  ‘Pretty good.’

  ‘Still huntin’ pen pushers?’ Louis didn’t entirely approve of my move into the area of white-collar criminals. He felt that I was wasting my talents. I decided to let him go on thinking it for a while.

  ‘The money’s okay and they don’t tend to kick up a fuss,’ I replied, ‘although one of them called me a bad name once.’

  Close to the door, heads began to turn and one of the waiters almost dropped a tray of drinks in shock. Angel entered, dressed in a yellow-and-green Hawaiian shirt, a yellow tie, a powder blue jacket, stonewashed jeans, and a pair of red boots so bright they throbbed. Conversations died as he passed by, and a few people tried to shield their eyes.

  ‘Off to see the wizard?’ I asked when the red boots finally reached us.

  Louis looked like someone had just splashed paint on his car. ‘Shit, Angel, the hell you think you are? Mardi Gras?’

  Angel calmly took a seat, ordered a Beck??
?s from a distressed-looking waiter, then stretched out his legs to admire his new boots. He straightened his tie, which did nothing to help in the long term but obscured some of his shirt for a while.

  ‘You have the good taste of a seasoned meths drinker,’ I told him.

  ‘Man, I didn’t even know Filene’s Basement had a basement,’ said Louis. ‘Must be where they keep the real shit.’

  Angel shook his head and smiled. ‘I’m making a statement,’ he said, like a teacher explaining a lesson to a pair of slow children.

  ‘I know the kind of statement you makin’,’ replied Louis as Angel’s beer arrived. ‘You sayin’, “Kill me, I got no taste.”’

  ‘You should carry a sign,’ I advised. ‘“I will work for fashion tips.’”

  It felt good to be here with them. Angel and Louis were just about the closest friends I had. They had stood by me as the confrontation with the Traveling Man drew closer, and had faced down the guns of a Boston scumbag named Tony Celli in order to save the life of a girl they had never met. Their gray morality, tempered by expediency, was closer to goodness than most people’s virtue.

  ‘How’s life in the sticks?’ asked Angel. ‘Still living in the rural slum?’

  ‘My house is not a slum.’

  ‘It don’t even have carpets.’

  ‘It’s got timber floors.’

  ‘It’s got timbers. Just cause they fell on the ground don’t make them a floor.’

  He paused to sip his beer, allowing me to change the subject.

  ‘Anything new in the city?’ I asked.

  ‘Mel Valentine died,’ said Angel.

  ‘Psycho Mel?’ Psycho Mel Valentine had been working his way through the A-to-Z of crime: arson, burglary, counterfeiting, drugs . . . If he hadn’t died, then pretty soon the Bronx Zoo would have been mounting a guard on its zebras.

  Angel nodded. ‘Always thought the “Psycho Mel” thing was kinda unfair. Maybe he’d have been psychotic if they quietened him down some, but “Psycho” seemed like kind of an underestimation of his abilities.’